SEM Ensemble / Composer's Workshop 02.11.10

[billygomberg]

this concert was last week (duh) but I felt it should be given its due so excuse the delay.

SEM Ensemble / Composer's Workshop 02.11.10

Over the last five years I've seen a lot of performances by SEM, in various formats & venues. I'm pretty sure I've been to all of these Workshops since moving to the city. Those of you who know me IRL know why. Last week's concert was easily one of the better of these pretty unique concerts.

a little background - at some point in the fall, SEM puts out a call for student scores, which results in a few days of workshop & rehearsal, ending w/this concert @ Willow Place, the auditorium (or preschool gym) in the same building as the SEM offices in Brooklyn Heights. Petr Kotik is uniquely able to wrangle fine, detailed, and sensitive performance out of his players, with exacting interpretations of the scores in front of him. I tend to bother the pen/paper younger composers I know to participate in this b/c they will get a great performance of their work.

Kotik's curation showed a pretty uncanny sense of the zeitgeist amongst the youth, with all the pieces showing not just an interest, but an understanding of simplicity, dynamic, duration and timbre as handed down from the Wandelweiser gang. This made for an incredibly uniform concert, with the slightest deviation b/w style and materials suggesting potential forks in the road for emerging composers working with similar languages.

The first piece, Jason Brogan's "some breaths" for three or four strings (sorry I didn't take notes, and the program doesn't divulge) was immediately joined by the radiator system at Willow Place, making it an somewhat greater exercise in silence and noise. The players looked a little worried at times about the curtain of white noise they now had to articulate over, but I wasn't. It worked out, the radiator system finishing it's movement well before the end of the piece, imposing a delightful structure.

The following piece, "zzzzz" by Paul Fraser was the least assured of the group, spelling out its path programmatically in the notes, but leaving the players stranded, even under Kotik's hands. Joe Kubera, a great interpreter of modern and contemporary composition, could make little of a series of off-kilter piano runs, set against slow glissandi from viola and cello. To me, the contrast didn't communicate much, and was all we were to hear from Kubera for the evening.

Taylan Susam's "mille regretz" came with greater assurance, the ensemble (strings + clarinet) stepping through a sequence derived from the chanson, just enough raw silence in between small, massed gestures. I was equally impressed w/Ji Sun Yang's "Melody, notes, five" whose just-loosened structure and careful interplay between instruments created a soft, but not too delicate composition, in the reductive vein of the rest of the pieces, but very expressive.

David Kant's "Variations for Functions and Partitions of Time" measured his ensemble with some real-time computer processing, but certainly not the kind I was used to from "interactive music" works. Each member of his ensemble was mic'd, and David had software recording them and playing back snippets of precisely 225ms in length. These snippets were played back, looped, with no windowing, producing an air similar to some of the collaborative work b/w Carsten Nicolai and Ryuichi Sakamoto, but much more dry and spare - I doubt if each ensemble member was assigned more than one pitch - loops and clicks lapping like waves against a barely droning shore.

Sam Sfirri's "the undulating land" capped the first half of the program with brevity and great simplicity. The ensemble was split into two rows, facing each other (six players each?). They played a pitch of their choosing, and when they were finished, the player next to them played a pitch of their choosing, and so on. When each row arrived at the opposite end from where they began, the pattern reversed itself, with the same pitches. Well handled by the ensemble, this piece was a great punctuation to a program of truly minimal approaches to ensemble composition.

After a short break, the ensemble reconvened for a performance of Somei Satoh's new work "The Passion," based, perhaps obviously, on the last act in the story of Jesus Christ. I was very impressed by this work - the clear, spare, and evocative score, and really wonderful performances. Thomas Buckner sang the lead (encompassing the roles of Jesus, Judas, Pilate, and some others), and, as usual, I could not understand a word he said. The two male singers who sang a traditional "Greek Chorus" were truly exceptional.

Speaking later w/Petr Kotik about the works presented, I mentioned that was is so strong in their work, and how it separates them from "young composers" from the recent past, is how much their style and technique is informed by their listening, by their artistic interest and intent, rather than being shaped by evident instruction and demonstration of learned compositional technique. We agreed on this.

EDITS: typos

[mpisaro]

Thanks so much for reporting on this concert, I was really curious about it! This is the kind of event that often comes and goes without anyone discussing it anywhere (except perhaps in the pub afterwards). Excellent review.

[Jason Brogan]

Agreed. Thanks so much for the review!