And the Beat Goes on… and on, and on…
by Naomi Perley
Works by Beat Furrer, Bernhard Lang, and Steve Reich at Moving Sounds 2009
Last month, the Austrian Cultural Forum, the Argento New Music Project, the Music Information Center Austria (MICA), and Le Poisson Rouge jointly presented Moving Sounds 2009, a festival “devoted to sound and its roles in contemporary music.” The three-day festival, which sought to bring together artists working with sound across different media and genres, featured several concerts of works by “classical” composers as well as by DJs, an art installation at the Austrian Cultural Forum, panel discussions, and parties. In order to get a taste of the festival, I attended concerts on September 12 and 13 and one of the panels on the afternoon of September13.
The curators, Michel Galante and Peter Rantasa, sought to bring together like-minded artists from the United States and Austria. The concerts on September 12 featured works by Austrian composers Beat Furrer and Bernhard Lang, and finished with a performance of Steve Reich’s seminal Music for Eighteen Musicians.
Beat Furrer’s Xenos II, for narrator and a twenty-person chamber ensemble, addressed through the medium of music several of the hot topics of the festival. The basis of the work was Furrer’s own voice: the instrumental parts are a musical transcription of Furrer speaking. At the symposium the next day, the composers spoke at length about the challenges of transcribing non-musical sounds for musical instruments, and the difficulties of notating and conveying to performers the types of sounds they wished to hear. Furrer cited I Am Sitting in a Room, by American composer Alvin Lucier, as an example of what he was aiming for in his own works. In I Am Sitting in a Room, the composer first recorded himself reading a text. He then played it in a room, recording it onto a second tape as it played. He then played the recording of the recording, producing a third recording. With each subsequent recording, the voice becomes less clear and the resonances of the room itself become the dominant sound.
In the first movement of Xenos II, Furrer read a single word, which was then musically refracted by the chamber ensemble, in the form of a soft chord. The sparse, light texture and the static calm of alternating words and chords evoked the restrained, minimal style of Hungarian composer Gyorgy Kurtag. The opening of the second movement immediately jolted the audience out of this Zen-like atmosphere, beginning with a series of alarmingly loud, dissonant chords in the woodwinds and brass. This textless movement was in every way the opposite of the first, with constantly shifting registers, timbres, and dynamics.
In Differenz/Wiederholung 2 (the title is German for Difference/Repetition), Bernhard Lang also explores the human voice, albeit from a different angle. It is written for three vocalists — including a Kurdish singer and a rapper — and a chamber ensemble of approximately ten musicians. Lang used texts by the philosopher Gilles Deleuze (the work is named after his Difference and Repetition) and writers William Burroughs and Christian Loidl. He sought to create a counterpoint between different styles of singing, between improvised and composed music, and between spoken narration and song.
In addition to these dichotomies, the work also explores the possibilities of repetition. Lang, in addition to being a classically-trained composer, has been heavily influenced by turntablism and DJ culture, and the effects of this aesthetic came to the forefront in this work. The vocalists often get “stuck” on a word or syllable, mimicking with their voices the effect of a DJ looping a sound over and over. The aesthetic of repetition carries over into the instrumentalists’ parts as well. Violinist Miranda Cuckson and electric guitarist Oren Fader built some thoroughly enjoyable improvisations out of small, simple motives throughout the piece, which lent the whole work a sense of unity and dramatic force.
While Saturday’s concert focused on the voice, in various forms, Sunday’s looked at quite a different aspect of sound. It featured works for percussion and electronics, performed by TimeTable Percussion Trio and DJ Christopher Just. In addition to works by Bernhard Lang and Beat Furrer, the trio performed works by New York composers Sam Pluta and Elizabeth Hoffman.
First up was a multimedia work by Sam Pluta, a young composer studying at Columbia. In addition to some percussion instruments and electronics, there were two TV screens hooked up to the electronic equipment. As the performers made different sounds with the electronics, stripes would flash across the TV screen with varying intensity. While the work had a completely different texture from those of the other night, dominated by electronic sounds, some of the same compositional ideas were clearly at play, with a focus on repetition and consistent texture.
The oldest work on Sunday evening’s concert was Beat Furrer’s Music for Mallets, composed in 1985. In this work, each of the three percussionists played a different mallet instrument: the xylorimba, the marimba, and the vibraphone. The work was in a way an etude in composing for a limited timbre, and at the same time fit with the general trend in this festival towards an exploration of repetition and minimalism beyond the style of Steve Reich and Philip Glass.
In a fitting twist, Furrer’s work was reinvented later on the program by DJ Christopher Just, who performed a live mix based on Music for Mallets. This performance was one of the highlights of the festival. Just combined many different styles of music, classical and popular, in his mix, with fragments of Music for Mallets weaving in and out above everything else. This work struck at the heart of what the curators were trying to achieve with this festival, by directly synthesising a classical work and a DJ set. If anything, I would say that the festival could have used more of this type of collaboration. Because the different media and genres showcased in the festival often appeared in separate events at separate venues, it was easy to ignore what you were less interested in, and to focus only on the classical music or on the DJ parties or on the symposia. But by putting the two types of music in one concert, and ensuring that the audience listened to both, the curators achieved a fusion of styles and provided the necessary context for fruitful discussion and collaboration across genres.
Just’s remix was sandwiched between two works by Elizabeth Hoffman, an Assistant Professor in composition at New York University. The first work, Ascension, was a tape piece — the only work on either of the programs that didn’t involve any live performers. The second work, Vissera, was for percussion trio and live electronics. Both works showed Hoffman to be a composer preoccupied with questions of timbre, who took the festival’s focus at its most elemental level. She was the only composer who used a wide variety of percussion instruments, instead of limiting herself to a few of one type or another. In this way, her work had more in common with the many American composers who have been exploring expanded percussion timbres throughout the twentieth century.
The final work on the program was Bernhard Lang’s Monadologie IV, for three drum kits. As in Differenz/Wiederholung 2, Lang drew on a philosophical text as his source of inspiration — in this case, Gottfried Leibnitz’s Monadology. Leibnitz sketches in this text a metaphysics based on the idea that everything in the world is derived from simple cells, called monads. The parallels between this idea and Lang’s aesthetic are easy to see: Lang derives his works from simple motivic cells, which he constantly expands, repeats, and varies.
In Monadologie IV, Lang combined his aesthetic of repetition and variation with a desire to return to the basics of percussion — the drum kit. In this way Lang’s work paralleled Furrer’s Music for Mallets. Lang wanted to strip away all the extra sounds and instruments that have entered the percussionist’s arsenal in the last few decades — no chimes, no marimba, just drums. “The drum set is a kind of musical sign or symbol for jazz music, for rock music, and it’s both the sound and the energy which interests me,” says Lang, “and in Monadologie IV, it’s especially the energy of three drummers playing together, one drum set in the middle being the engine for the whole piece.” The end result was a powerful work that had the energy and momentum of Differenz/Wiederholung 2 despite the pared-down timbre. It was a great finale to
the concert.
