Mark Gresham | 17 MAR 2019
Contemporary music ensemble Bent Frequency presented a handful of mostly 21st century works this past Friday at Kopleff Recital Hall in downtown Atlanta. Entitled “Threads that Stay on It.” The interesting, diverse program included a world premiere and a reconstructed 20th century work, plus a trio of guest performers from nearby Athens, Georgia in addition to Bent Frequency’s hometown crew of musicians.
The concert kicked off with a sensitive number for the laydeez by Irish composer Jennifer Walshe. The stage was bathed in a dim, deep blue light, which made it annoyingly difficult to see most of what was taking place. Saxophonist Jan Berry Baker and violist Tania Maxwell Clements played their parts in near darkness, while percussionist Stuart Gerber and pianist Erika Tazawa were downstage center, seated at a table and facing each other, playing toy keyboards and various other objects. They were better illuminated by a pair of small music stand lamps.
Written in 2004, there is also a video available as part of the performance set for a sensitive number for the laydeez, but it was not used in this concert. With the dim illumination, including that video might have been a good idea, but may have been impractical in this instance.
Walshe tends to avoid traditional sonorities of Western classical music, preferring instead to engage with sounds which she deems more “organic” which include those that are environmental, the product of found objects, and sounds from traditional instruments not typically regarded as “beautiful.” That was certainly the case with a sensitive number for the laydeez, for which the title may well be loaded irony. In that context, it made for a good listen, but not a particularly powerful opener.
Osnat Netzer composed Olive Cotton during a year she spent living in Berlin in 2009 and 2010. Cellist Brad Ritchie performed the unaccompanied solo work convincingly, in which echoes of bluegrass music are the basis of its motives. The music zigzagged between these as it progressed, developing in ways that attempted to obscure memory of their preceding forms, but offering up a few emotional high points in its course.
Closing the concert’s first half were Bent Frequency’s special guests from nearby Athens, Georgia – saxophonist Connie Frigo, spoken word artist Knowa D. Johnson and percussionist Timothy Adams Jr., who also composed the piece they performed, entitled Charlottesville.
Johnson, Frigo and Adams perform “Charlottesville” (photo: Mark Gresham)
Adams wrote Charlottesville, “as a response to seeing the alt-right protest in Charlottesville, VA on August 14, 2017 on [National Public Radio’s] website.” It reminded him of a childhood road trip to Atlanta one July Fourth to celebrate his father’s birthday at Pascal Brother’s Restaurant, an historic eatery frequented by important civil rights figures during he civil rights movement. Adams describes in his program notes how he could see, from a distance, a Ku Klux Klan cross burning atop Stone Mountain as this family drove along I-20. (Adams was born in 1961.)
The work’s three sections portray the march, the killing of Heather Heyer and a time for healing. His believe that love is natural and hate is learned led Adams to hope that people can “reverse the process through music.” That assertion may be hard to evaluate in a measurable way, but the idea that “music hath charms to soothe the savage breast” – as William Congreve poetically wrote in 1697 – runs empirically deep in our culture.
In the case of Charlottesville, some may find the texts more polarizing than healing, depending on the listener’s personal, social and political inclinations. The words really don’t need music behind them; likewise the music could as effectively be presented without the words. Combined, they recalled the manner of performances by Beat Generation writers like Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, and Allen Ginsberg, reading their words against a musical backdrop. In the end, the question remains as to whether the music will influence anyone to better absorb and remember the verbal message.
After intermission and the world premiere of Dorothy Hindman’s What’s It Worth To You?, composed for Bent Frequency just last year. Hindman writes that the inspiration for the work “was an orange $1.05 price tag, calculated by the March for Our Lives movement following the Parkland Shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.” The price tag was intended to symbolize the value of each student’s life, derived by dividing the National Rifle Association’s direct donations to Florida Senator Marco Rubio’s election campaign by the total number of public and private school students in Florida. Similar tags were created for all 50 states. The tags were worn by students as part of the March 24, 2018 March for Our Lives protests in Washington D.C.
While working on it on 2018, Hindman used the number in her composing process, assigning these prices to frequencies, generating all of the pitches used in the music. Much like Adams and Charlottesville, Hindman’s hopehas been that the remapping of the price tag numbers into music would drive the extra-musical message home more powerfully. The shortcoming is that you have to know that message in advance, and know it by more than the title alone. Frankly, the music stands on its own without it, with elegantly angular lines and engaging rhythms shared and passed between the instruments of the septet – Baker, Gerber, Ritchie and Tazawa, who had all played in the concert’s first half, plus flutist Matthieu Clavé, clarinetist Lauren Murphy and violinist Adelaide Federici.
It was pioneering avant-gardist John Cage who warned composers against attempting to imbue music with what he called “loaded imagery.” But younger generations of composers, often bent on socio-political statement, seems to have thrown that advice to the wind, somehow believing that a title or a story might be more than just a marker for a social, political or ideological idea; that music, absent words, might actually intrinsically contain those ideas in ways that communicate the directly. Cage would say not as an expression of those ideas, which is the trend, but only as a actual working model of them. I incline toward Cage’s perspective. Otherwise, the music only serves as an unfortunate beast of burden for those extra-musical things.
Julius Eastman (source: Wikipedia; photo: unknown)
The final work on the program, Stay on It, by Julius Eastman, also had a connection outside of the music, to the composer’s own poem of the same name. His overall life gives some clues, but beyond that, extra-musical motives are harder to pinpoint, because in the course of Eastman’s rather messy life and death in 1990 at age 49, the score and performance materials, like much of his music, was lost or thrown away.
The current score and parts are the result of a remarkable attempt at forensic reconstruction by trombonist Cornelius Dufallo and violinist Chris McIntyre of the collaborative ensemble Ne(x)tworks, based upon a December 1973 live recording by Eastman and the University of Buffalo’s Creative Associates ensemble (New World Records 80638-2, Unjust Malaise) and the recollections of musicians involved in that recording about the music and the performance practices involved.
Among Eastman’s works, Stay on It can credibly be called a masterpiece. Bold, head-first cellular motives, played repeatedly and occasionally varied, often played a tutti by the octet (the same players as in Hindman’s piece plus violist Clements), which devolve and wander away from that unified kind of statement, both formally and materially, only to somehow get back on track again. It left the listener with the impression of a very effective back-and-forth movement between control and freedom, yet retaining sense of momentum that hangs with you, even as sections become seemingly chaotic. It was a most effective conclusion to a program that got more engaging with each piece. ■
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