BIELAWA'S LIGHTER TOUCH: CUT FROM ANOTHER CLOTH
            At Age 80, Composer Still Comes up with Premieres  
                                              By D. Rane Danubian
        artssf.com, the independent observer of San Francisco Bay Area music and dance 
                                                                 Week of Feb.  6-13, 2010
                                                                  Vol. 12, No. 63
          BERKELEY---Herbert Bielawa, whose 80th birthday is being celebrated, was one of a triumvirate of roughly contemporary composers, born 1921-30, serving simultaneously on the San Francisco State University faculty, along with the late Roger Nixon and Pulitzer Prize winner Wayne Peterson---each distinctive, each known primarily for instrumental music.
            Bielawa is cut from a different cloth, given to intimate forms, a neoclassical texture, aphoristic concepts, and some servings of humor---trending toward Erik Satie, though without the outrageousness. For his birthday concert Feb. 7 he came up with a novel world premiere for chamber ensemble entitled “Double Think.” The instrumental quintet (“Sounds New”) started to play in orderly fashion when a minute later soprano Anna Carol Dudley walked in with score in hand, as if in afterthought, and began to sing droll poetry of Jeannie Pool. This deviation from concert convention is typical of Bielawa thinking, refreshing our tired  clichés of ritual. And the harpsichord, which we last encountered with Handel and Bach,  added ironic cadences punctuating the Pooled “I think/you think” lines creating garbled humor out of repetition and convoluted syntax, all done with a deft touch. The composer used the format (but not harmony) of a solo Bach cantata.
            None of this music will compete with Berlioz, Liszt, Mahler and other masters of massive forms. But on a whimsical track, Bielawa has his own voice, his own lightening and enlightening philosophy, without hang-ups about whether he can still be considered contemporary.
            It was ambitious, with four ensembles and various soloists involved, some of them working on very limited rehearsal time. The elite 16 a cappella singers of S.F. Choral Artists worked “Sojourner Songs” (1985-2004) tentatively, with little dynamic shading, rendering brief poems of John Gracen Brown.
            More whimsical was a recitation of an Ogden Nash  poem called “Sitting on the Beach” by  pianist Monique Cooper, a wispy, low-key monologue with chords and turns here and there.
            Bielawa, a Berkeley resident, had done studies with big names like Ingolf Dahl, Halsey Stevens, Darius Milhaud, Lukas Foss, Roger Sessions and Elliott Carter. He  seemed quite content emerging sounding like none of the above.
           Herbert Bielawa 80th Birthday Concert, Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley, Feb. 7. For info on UUCB concerts: (519) 525-0302.

        ©D. Rane Danubian 2010
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        D. Rane Danubian has been covering the dance and modern-music scene in the San Francisco Bay Area with relish -- and a certain amount of salsa -- for years.
    These critiques appearing weekly (or sometimes semi-weekly, but never weakly) will focus on dance and new musical creativity in performance, with forays into books (by authors of the region), theater and recordings by local artists as well.
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