Saturday, 25 Sept


Austrian composer Peter Ablinger (who currently resides in Berlin) came to Bushwick's Cafe Orwell for a night featuring a selection of his works, followed by a short interview, presented by new music organization Music =.

The performance began with 6-18 (excerpted from 1-127): 13 short pieces for electric guitar and amplified sound, played in quick succession.  Each piece was characterized by: quiet simplicity, interrupted by highly complex loudness, with a return to simplicity at the end.  The loudness comprised amplified, pre-recorded samples of city noise and lightning fast guitar gestures; the loud sections, as well as the simpler solo guitar sections, differed slightly in length piece to piece.  Thus it was impossible to predict when or how long one's ears were to be barraged with the loud sections; only that they would occur somewhere in the middle.  The guitarist's performance was compelling, as he executed the abrupt virtuosic gestures with apparent ease.
Weiss/Weisslich ("White/White-ish") 17c: A clock radio tuned to white noise, shut off at the entrance of an extended snare drum roll.
Ohne Titel ("Without Title") 1-10: Performed by electric guitar and vibraphone (the instrumentation is up to the performers).  A sparse, quiet, rarely more than monophonic piece.  Here again there were many short pieces in quick succession, though this time creating a string of delicate gestures, performed with tender care by The Silent Book.  A particularly nice moment occurred when the guitar and vibes struck the same high note together, both instruments letting the note ring and fade.

[The following is paraphrased from my notes; I invite Mr. Ablinger to correct me in the comments section if I've misrepresented his answers in any way.]
Q and A session with the audience, hosted by Matthew Hough and Ian Antonio: 
Q: What is the significance of noise in your music? 
A: White noise is the acoustical version of everything, a totality of sounds like white light, like a blank page, to be tweaked perceptually, or not. Consider a monochrome painting---the closest equivalent in music is white noise.  The experience of white noise: we as listeners have no reference point within white noise, which is emptier than silence.
Q: Regarding 6-18 (1-127), were you thinking about the listener when you composed this piece? 
A: Yes.  The perceptual problem with noise is that it creates anxiety about one's inability to extract information; "our brains are damned" by this compulsion to extract information.  In [Ablinger's] pieces for large ensembles, once you get over the "materiality" of the noise, you start to hear figures that aren't in any one instrument, like "illusions" you see when staring for a prolonged time at a white wall.  Likewise, with 6-18 (1-127), behind each short piece and as they go by a new layer starts to emerge, which is the reason for the multiple repetitions of a similar gesture.
Q: Do you have an ideal listener in mind when you compose? 
A: No.  It is impossible to perceive [Ablinger's] pieces in only one way.  Your experience is part of the creation of the piece. "Like a dance between the composer and performer and listener."  Depending on the piece, one or the other does more leading, or it may be equally divided sometimes.
Q: Why allow the performer to choose which succession of numbers to play in 1-127? 
A: The performer should never play all 128 pieces in one performance; flexibility for the performer is part of the reason for letting each decide how many to play.  

Fri, 29 May



Playing a grand piano-shaped toy piano, Asami Tamura opened her concert Friday night with an impassioned and raucous performance of Invention No. 1 by J.S. Bach.  Intriguing about the performance was the disconnect between the extremely precise nature of the piece and the equally imprecise nature of the instrument, inside which the hammers (controlled by the keys) often and easily strike more than one metal bar by accident.
There followed a Suite for Toy Piano by John Cage---"I think you will find them similar" Tamura said of the Cage and Bach pieces---Kreisler's gloomy  Liebesleid ("Feel melancholy about it!"), and a work by Yoshinao Nakata, also on a sad theme, "The Departing Spring." 
After a blazing performance of Mozart's athletic "Rondo all turca," the latter half of which was played from memory when a gust of wind blew down Tamura's music, the audience was asked to leave the Cafe due to a small fire in the basement of the building.  Tamura reportedly finished out her concert later that night after a team of firemen deemed the Cafe safe.


Sun, 31 May


Eric km Clark's exPAT: Deprivation Music No. 4, performed by electric guitar quartet Dither and 8 other electric guitarists, filled the World Financial Center's Winter Garden with a sound like a pipe organ being played at full volume.  The guitarists were each wearing headphones piping out white noise (hence the "deprivation"), such that no player could hear the other.  The result was an impressive, undulating wash of patterns, and the children present at the marathon either danced excitedly, or plugged up their ears as they were rushed from the audience.

Sat, 16 May


Music =’s latest concert, “Talking Tree, Silent Book,” drew a sizable and excitable crowd to Bushwick’s Cafe Orwell on Saturday night.

Ya-Jhu Yang’s Silent Yet Talking had three sopranos singing three undulating, floating lines, at times moving independently of each other and at others lining up to move together.  There were moments when all three voices swirled upwards into an extended climax of surprisingly loud volume, which were followed by quieter, semi-spoken sections.  The piece ended with exhalations followed by all three singing simultaneously to form a chord.

Two cellists took the stage for Inhyun Kim’s the eye between light and heart.  Glissandos work to a climax at the high end of the fingerboard, and one of the cellists begins to yelp unexpectedly.  As the cellists’ fingers are scraping and caressing their cellos, they make similar sounds with their voices, squeaking, screaming, sighing.  Pretty sounds pop out of the turbulence, making the occasional shriek all the more delightfully jarring.

Performed by voice and percussion duo The Silent Book, Matthew Hough’s Apologies combined spoken word with the metallic reverberations of crotales; the result was a mixture of dark humor and gravitas.  The words spoken are parsed and rearranged apologies (for offensive outbursts) made by five public figures, and the two performers take turns speaking lines of these apologies separately, in unison, or simultaneously on different texts.  The crotales interludes are appealing in their delicacy, the vibrations of the discs hypnotizing; the glittering calm of their music serves to underline the error of the apologies.  The crotales are also used to emphasize certain words (fear, hate), and at one point are played with violin bows, creating tremulous waves of sound.  An extended and dramatic moment when both performers repeatedly strike a single note while speaking different texts simultaneously occurs toward the end, followed by free floating, quivering crotale gestures, which dissipate into the silent air.

The Silent Book finished up the program with an arrangement by Matthew Hough of Morton Feldman’s Only.  The crotales begin with a stream of notes, amidst whose reverberations the vox enters, the warmth of his voice creating a nice contrast to the shimmery crotales.  The phrases of the original piece are separated by more shimmers from the metal discs, and occasionally a vox note is picked up and extended by a bowed crotale.  The effect is that of an earnest, lonely voice, intimate within a vast space of star-like reverberations.

The full program:
Carolyn Chen, Pears (2007)
Ya-Jhu Yang, Silent Yet Talking (2009)
Inhyun Kim, the eye between light and heart (2009)
Matthew Hough, Apologies (2009)
Morton Feldman, Only (1947), arr. for voice and percussion by Matthew Hough (2009)