September 14, 2009: "I didn't know what time it was"

A major challenge in listening to very new (as in less than twenty years old) compositions is that the very strategies that define beginning, middle, and end have become subject to experimentation.  Thus, when each of the seven performers in Luciano Chessa's "Inkless Imagination V, for Emile Norman" are widely separated and performing from under a personal shroud, the only cues that indicate temporal progress must be strictly auditory.  Hearing (and seeing) this work for the first time, it was not easy to acquire a sense of structure.  However, Chessa recognized the comic element in his conception;  and the evident sense of a light touch did much to make the experience more accessible, while the listener was still left to puzzle out just what the "journey" of this composition was.

The members of sfSoundGroup seem to be quite comfortable with this light touch.  The compositions and improvisations they perform always seem to be of an accessible duration.  Their performance of Chessa's composition last night in Studio B of the ODC Dance Commons was but one example of that "audience-friendly" touch.  In another case Harrison Birtwistle's "An Interrupted Endless Melody," an oboe solo (performed by Kyle Bruckmann) was set to two different piano accompaniments (played by Christopher Jones).  We could thus orient to the highly accessible melody line and listen to it in two difference settings.  John Ingle's alto saxophone improvisation began with an exploration of his instrument's capacity to summon non-standard sounds;  but, from that acoustic terra incognita, deconstructed fragments of "I Didn't Know What Time it Was" gradually emerged and advanced the performance, almost as if the performance was gently twitting those of us listening for temporal strategies.

It was also interesting that the evening should conclude with a "classic" by Iannis Xenakis, "Anaktoria," another performance in which the sound itself matters more than the notes.    According to the program notes, this work was custom-made to the individual members of the octet that first performed it, drawing upon their respective capacities for eliciting special acoustic effects.  The 1969 date of this composition makes it practically venerable.  Yet the strategy of fitting a composition to the exploratory capacity of the performer goes back at least as far as the relationship between Louis Krasner and Alban Berg when the latter was composing his violin concerto.  Thus, the acoustic adventures of the evening come from a distinguished history.  Still, to draw upon one of John Cage's puns, it was a celebratory night of happy new ears.