Many times people have asked me, shaking their heads: “How can anyone like that [dissonant, earsplitting, academic, boring, pointless, random — pick your adjective] modern music?” But the fact is, incredible as it may seem to some traditional classical music fans, many people do, as evidenced by the crowd filling the risers to near capacity in the Yerba Center for the Arts Forum Monday evening.
The draw was a milestone of Modernism, Pierre Boulez' Le Marteau sans maître (The hammer without a master, 1955), which took up the second half of the program. According to Music Director David Milnes, the difficulty of the score absorbed up to 50 hours of preparation time for members of the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players. “It just pulls something out of you — an edge,” declared percussionist Christopher Froh during the preconcert discussion.
That the effort was a labor of love was evident in the care with which Milnes conducted the work, and in the concentrated enthusiasm that the instrumentalists (flute, xylophone, vibraphone, percussion, guitar, and viola) put into the performance. Mezzo-soprano Janna Baty, who contributed her lusciously calibrated voice to the effort and has sung the work many times elsewhere, informed the audience: “It’s really cool; it’s so groovy and funky … it’s cool beyond belief.”
The difficulty of the score lies in the serialized, constant shifts of meter and pitch duration, as well as the absence of repetition, more a requirement for ultra-diligent score reading than virtuoso muscular technique. When performed as well as the Contemporary Music Players handled the challenge, a unique world of kaleidoscopic clarity emerges, with sounds as off kilter and juxtaposed as the occasional words by surrealist poet René Char (as in, “Pure eyes in the woods/ Weeping seek the habitable head").
Jeff Dunn is a freelance critic with a B.A. in music and a Ph.D. in geologic education. A composer of piano and vocal music, he is a member of the National Association of Composers, USA, a former president of Composers, Inc., and has served on the Board of New Music Bay Area.