Friday, 6 Nov


Blindfolded and sitting onstage in total darkness, the composer of the last piece on the program started out the evening by playing a soprano saxophone (handed to him by an "anonymous helper") for the first time in his life, in John Cage's 1969 "Sound Anonymously Received."  Watching the performer blindly grope the instrument was suspenseful, almost painful, as he repeatedly heaved great breaths, blowing air through the instrument, which turned to discordant wailing sounds after a few seconds.  A few people in the audience laughed to see him struggling with the sax, while others waited tensely to see what he would produce from the instrument next.  His flush improvisation felt almost like a composed out piece, and served as a kind of foreshadowing for what was to be heard in his own composition later in the program.

Reiko Fueting's  2006 "red wall" for solo guitar followed.  Dan Lippel's expressive performance captured well the cold but lively atmosphere of the piece, and its unpredictable gestures and phrases seemed to be telling a story: though the language the music was speaking sounded unfamiliar, a narrative could be clearly felt. 

Carmel Raz took the stage next for Inhyun Kim's intense, perilous sounding "Seeds disperse in the air to come."  A violin solo at breakneck speed, the piece had a fiddle feel (if the barn were on fire), and brief were the breath-catching moments when the rhythm screamed to a halt for double stopped chords, before the quick pace resumed. 

The night finished with Matthew Hough's viscerally engaging "Irreverant Overtones," for solo bassoon.  Wailing, then grinding overtones preceded silent ghost notes, air being blown into the bassoon and its keys being pressed without any tones coming out.  The piece was a variable alternation between volatile overtones and ghost music sections, all the while so severely sparse as to make the audience self-conscious of their own noise.  Particularly unnerving to watch were bassoonist Annie Lyle's fingers moving rapidly through the toneless ghost sections, the clicking of her bassoon's keys creating sounds like water droplets.  The longest piece on the program, "Irreverant Overtones" hit the audience with all the physical drama of the Cage piece, times ten.


for more info on Music Equals, visit them at musicequals.org.

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)