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.

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.