<>                        IS DIGITAL TRANSFORMING OUR INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC?
                       Disjoint Exercises and Punctuation Dominate in New Music   
                                              By Paul Hertelendy 
        artssf.com, the independent observer of San Francisco Bay Area music and dance 
                                                                 Week of Jan. 26-Feb. 3, 2010
                                                                  Vol. 12, No. 56
            In music, we usually look for continuity, and a flow forward.
            However, in a great deal of today’s serious music by living composers, we get separation and punctuation instead---the digital-electronics after-effect.
            Such was the emphasis in the S.F. Contemporary Music Players’ concert of Jan. 25, where sound textures, pointillism and percussion played the major roles. It’s as valid an approach as any to creating music, and it draws a core group of devotees, typically over 200. But it won’t appeal to the wider audience that lives and eats in an analog way, even while trying to survive in an increasingly digital world.
            I make it a point to go, as it’s the best place to hear music from living foreign composers, especially the less familiar midcareer or early-career ones. Three of them featured were in the age group 34-51. This group  represented Britain, France, Germany and Italy.
            Not surprisingly, percussion played a big role. Christopher Froh took on the virtuoso solo piece “nemeton” (2007) by Mattias Pintscher. When Froh struck the keyboard with four mallets and simultaneously played the bass drum with his foot, it was clear that only an octopus could handle the opus better. Froh’s arsenal lent itself to violent assaults of high intensity, alternating with the ringing-resonance lightness of  crotales (miniature cymbals). It’s a work of high passion and impact. When Froh took to the melodic instrument, he tapped the marimba with his fingers, gaining delicate sound textures. In addition, he had the sense of theater to dramatize his tour de force.
            Equally challenged was Willie Winant in Helmut Lachenmann’s “Trio fluido,” which had him clutching drumsticks between his teeth while manipulating other percussion. And then his having to decide which end of a drumstick to apply. In his scurrying of tiny sound packets, Lachenmann produces some handsome sonorities, whether on Carey Bell’s ever so soft clarinet or Winant’s genteel vibraphone glissandi.
            The best-known of this group was Brian Ferneyhough, 66, formerly of the UCSD faculty and currently at Stanford.  I found his “Flurries” quirky and capricious, a disjoint exercise for sextet, opening with a long close-harmony duo by strings.
            Oscar Bianchi’s “Zaffiro” recalled the late Morton Feldman with its slow, soft manner, punctuated by trills and tremolos. Its succession of starts and stops eventually proved whimsical, offering contrasts that invite a second hearing in the future.
            The concert began with the Swiss Michael Jarrell’s “…more leaves…” a piece handicapped by the amplification producing a “canned” sound quite different from the original instruments. It had sound explosions, stuttering brass, and many abrasive clangors.
             The SFCMP appears to have abandoned the concept of a music director; the conductor of the day was Brad Lubman, from  the faculty of the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, N.Y.
            Only three of the 17 musicians involved were women---a very low percentage, especially since it was a woman (harpist Marcella McCray) who was director of this elite group through most of its first 15 years.
                S.F. Contemporary Music Players, at the Herbst Theatre, San Francisco. Next: Season finale April 25. For info: (415) 278-9566, or go online.
        ©Paul Hertelendy 2010

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           Paul Hertelendy 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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