New music: Three concerts

How should we approach new music? Should we compare everything we hear to the masterpieces that have survived the centuries? Or should we listen to it the same way we read new novels or take in new plays or movies?

I prefer the second approach. The new music I listen to may or may not make it into the permanent repertoire. The future will decide that. But I can include it, without reservations, in a schedule that exposes me to the best work produced in the last 600 years. It enriches my life in the same way a contemporary novel or play can give me rewards I won't find in Vanity Fair or War and Peace.

The most powerful new composition I heard recently came from the mind of Aaron Jay Kernis, Astral Artists' composer in residence. Colored Field is a direct response to a vision of blood-soaked, seething ground that assailed Kernis when he visited Auschwitz and Birkenau.

Art that deals with emotionally charged subjects like the Holocaust always raises a question: Are we responding to the work or to the event itself?

A true work of art satisfies two criteria. It expresses the artist's personal feelings— the emotions the artist really feels, not the emotions people are told they should feel— and it manipulates the materials of the art with imagination and craftsmanship.

You're not creating a work of art when you simply state that you're for or against something. Eloquence is an indispensable virtue.

Colored Field is a deeply emotional response to a terrible and profoundly significant event. Kernis speaks in his own voice, but his frenzied scherzos and moving elegies remind me of Shostakovich, another composer who created personal, imaginative responses to public events.

The solo cello ties the whole thing together with a single human voice and brings it to a quiet ending that hangs in the air with no sense that the composer is trying to offer resolution or comfort.

Stark Holocaust images

The Network for New Music "Silent Partners" concert included another work related to the Holocaust. The program featured new instrumental works inspired by poetry, and Michael Hersch built his entry around texts by Bruno Schulz, a poet and graphic artist who was confined to a ghetto during World War II and died when he was shot on the street.

The texts for the nine sections have no direct relationship to the Holocaust, but they mostly present stark images like There in those charred, many-raftered forests of attics darkness began to degenerate and ferment wildly. Hersch's effective pallet adds the somber fullness of the bass clarinet to an ensemble that includes clarinet, horn, string quartet, double bass, and all the colors and effects that a modern percussionist can provide.

A section devoted to a starry night, for example, begins with the kind of string music we associate with the night sky, then shifts to drums, horns, and pulsing rhythms that communicate a unique view of Hersch's subject.

Busy piece, light touch

Stephen Jaffe's Light Dances takes its theme from a phrase by artist and essayist Brian Peterson: "My whole creative life is a dance around the light." Jaffe worked with an ensemble similar to Hersch's, and he, too, took full advantage of the bass clarinet, which added a big voice to the finale.

Light Dances is a busy piece, with plenty of things going on, but it's all done with a light touch, with effects like a passage in which bare-stick percussion snakes through music for winds and string quartet.

Kermis, Hersch and Jaffe created tremendous effects with ensembles that could flesh out their musical ideas with colorful, highly varied orchestration. Ronald Caltabiano's 1992 work, Lines from Poetry, pulls off the same trick with a single instrument: an unaccompanied violin.

In the comments printed in the Network for New Music program, Catalbiano said he wanted to "highlight both the virtuosic and the lyrical aspects of the violin." He produced a piece that satisfied both aims, and Hirono Oka turned in a masterly performance that maximized both sides of its personality. It was worth listening to the third section just to watch her working all over the violin.

Two gutsy composers at St. Mark's

The other new music event I attended recently was an example of enterprise in the service of art. Composers Jeremy Gill and Benjamin C.S. Boyle organized a program on their own and showcased two song cycles at St. Mark's church, with each composer providing the piano accompaniment for his work. They even had the guts to include four lied by Schumann, just to show they aren't afraid to go toe-to-toe with a master.

Gill creates accompaniments that are primarily designed to evoke moods and unaffected vocal parts that always suit the words. Boyle's accompaniments are more ornate but just as suggestive. At times, though, Boyle the pianist threatened to drown out the vocal line created by Boyle the composer.

Overall, the two composers impressarioed an entertaining evening that attracted a good crowd and seemed to leave most of their listeners feeling they'd had a good time. The people I see at new music events these days are the same people I see at the other musical events on my schedule, and they're all there because they want to be. I'm not the only person who keeps coming back for more.♦


To read another review of the Network For New Music concert by Peter Burwasser, click here.
To read responses, click here.