sen_no_ongaku | New Gallery

Last Thursday,

sigerson and I went to the first of this season's New Gallery concerts, a new music series run by a kickass pianist I know, Sarah Bob, in the Community Music Center of Boston. Something I particularly like about her programs is that I never have any idea what the music is going to sound like.

Up in the concert hall hung artwork by members of the Be Blank Consort, who also performed some spoken-word ensemble poetry that was lots of fun -- canons, sometimes of words, sometimes of phonemes -- though it got a bit homogenous after a while, and some members were significantly louder than others, diminishing the effect. There was one painting in particular I liked, though I can currently remember neither its name nor its creator. Hmm.

Frank Zappa's The Black Page is a piece for drum kit, viola, and bass clarinet -- apparently, Zappa kept trying to write music his drummer couldn't play and failing. It's a wild, energetic piece, and quite entertaining, though the pitched instruments sounded kind of tacked-on after the fact...which they were. I'm never sure how to interpret Zappa, but I liked this piece, though I don't think it'll really stay with me.

Nine Settings of Lorine Niedicker, by high modernist Harrison Birtwhistle, followed. It's a sparse, pointillist, sharply atonal piece for soprano and cello, and it's awful. I was bored out of my skull, and I thought the writing was just plain bad. An ugly, ugly piece.

Sarah usually commissions new pieces that are inspired by the visual artwork to be featured; for this concert, Aaron Trant (himself a badass percussionist, who played drums on The Black Page wrote a piece called UNspoken NOthingness for clarinet, viola, and cello. It's raucous and noisy, with the three instruments jostling and clamoring for attention, shouting over each other, and quite effective. The most creative part is the penultimate section: for a minute hear you hear nothing but the cellist tapping his foot and the occasional clarinet note or two, and it's absolutely riveting, especially after all the headbutting that precedes it.

Unfortunately, the piece I was really looking forward to, Judith Weir's Unlocked for solo cello, was cancelled. I really like pretty much everything I've heard of hers, and was eagerly anticipating more. Hmm.

The last piece was the best, a setting of text from Lady Chatterley's Lover by Jon Deak, called Lady Chatterley's Dream. Scored for string trio, double bass, and piano, it was
tons of fun and quite clever. The text isn't spoken until after about a minute or so of music, and it's rather surprising when the pianist (Sarah) suddenly speaks. What's neat about the whole work is that the text isn't always presented in order or in full, and is passed around the players, who recite it singly and in combination -- the music provides a kind of commentary. Again, this was my favorite piece on the concert, incredibly inventive and playful.