I can't say that I am able to cover this year's 26-hour Bang on a Can marathon with the same fidelity and up-to-the-minute blogging that Darcy is doing (cheers to you!) but I had a great time there last night and am looking forward to returning later today. I'll be doing a longer report for an upcoming issue of Gramophone, but am herein more or less reproducing the notes I hastily scribbled down mid-performances. (Steve Smith has also pledged to stay for the duration, so I'm looking forward to reading his thoughts as well.)
As a preamble: Earlier this week, I was talking to Bang-er David Lang about this year's event, which is the longest that it's ever run. In our conversation, I mentioned that my point of reference for such extended concerts is probably the all night Indian classical concert which tabla master Samir Chatterjee organizes each spring at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. (Of course, the Winter Garden doesn't have concession stands set up to fortify the audience with endless cups of masala chai and excellent samosas--a grave error, I think.)
So maybe it was just me who heard echoes of subcontinental sounds last night--and I wasn't in attendance earlier this morning to hear Milind Raikar actually play a morning raga--but there it was nonetheless. It started with Julia Wolfe's Lad, written for nine bagpipers. Taking advantage of the Winter Garden's shape and size, Wolfe asks the pipers to descend the venue's grand staircase in dramatic fashion. The late, phenomenal shehnai player Ustad Bismillah Khan couldn't have been prouder of the heady, huge buzzing drone his cousin-musicians made, especially in the rising tones that open the piece in the most auspicious and invocatory way.
Evan Ziporyn's Drill for bass clarinet soloist (EZ) with wind ensemble (the Manhattan School of Music's excellent Tactus) was penned, says the composer to "recapture and reclaim" the wind band ensemble repertoire. Well done--but then again, you'd have to have a virtuoso like Ziporyn in front of the band! I love his writing, and this is no exception--I adore the tonal and rhythmic angles of this piece (which you can hear on his album "Frog's Eye," with much better sound balance than what we had at the WG). The percussive elements, especially in their textural play vis-a-vis the rest of the musicians, recall Balinese gamelan: a Ziporyn hallmark.
Christopher Adler's Signals Intelligence (incorrectly marked in the program as Signal Intelligence) gets a very nice performance from red fish blue fish. (Is it just me, or do more and more new music groups have names that actually sound like bands? Maybe Bang on a Can themselves helped usher that in...) It's an algorithm-generated piece whose rhythms form their own kind of kinetic energy. Also, I really like the scoring: the mix of pitched and unpitched percussion give such an off-kilter delicate air to all the hammering.
Evergreen crowd favorites Ethel play favorites of theirs, two selections ("Arrival" and "Memory") from Marcelo Zarvos' Nepomuk's Dances. I've heard them play this (too) many times over the years, but they certainly got the crowd going. Also, I've never heard "Memory" before quite the way I did last night: all that virile foot-stomping strongly reminded me of a specific folk dance, the Greek zeimbekiko, which, if done well--soberly or not-at-all-soberly--is full of hyper-masculine stomps, slaps, and leaps. (Maybe it's not all in my imagination: though Zarvos is Brazilian-born, his heritage is Greek.)
Lois Vierk's Jagged Mesa unfortunately gets almost completely lost in the shuffle: Tactus plays it offstage and amplified, and most of the audience thinks it's a break in the programming. It's impossible to hear over the crowd noise, so I give up in search of some caffeinated sustenance. (I know, it's early yet to need help, but MMFCC and I were up with a teething Z almost all night the previous night.)
Then Burmese drummer--to be more specific, master of the pat waing, the drum-chime circle--Kyaw Kyaw Naing teams up once again with the Bang on a Can All-Stars. I wonder if the incredibly rich and complex Burmese melodies might not be more easily heard by an American audience when they're articulated and iterated by more familiar instruments than the pat waing: e.g. drum kit, electric guitar, keyboard, etc.
While KKN retunes, Evan Ziporyn explains how the Burmese drums are pitched by adding layers of rice powder. He quotes an old ethnomusicology teacher of his: "Drums have to eat, too." So do music critics and their offspring, so we won't be able to stay much longer tonight.
KKN does a solo turn that , in MMFCC's immortal words, is very "PAC 101" (insert trademark symbol here--it's a phrase he coined after a Soweto Gospel Choir show a while back). It's a nice exhibition of the instrument and performer's capabilities, done in the most easily showy way possible for the benefit of a not necessarily sophisticated (in this given genre, at least) audience, one often found at various Performing Arts Centers around the country. I'm expecting Zakir Hussain and his silly horsies and choo-choo train to show up at any second. Then more KKN & BoaCAS: nice but not at all memorable compositions.
Then The Books, with and without recent North Adams transplant Todd Reynolds. Very clever video montages, mesmerizing music. I know I'm behind the times, but this is the first opportunity I've had to see The Books. I particularly like the images that go with 8 Frame, a composition in which eight frames of video equal one sixteenth note: many of the activities are of the most repetitive and unthinking--yet miraculous--activities/actions of the world: a blinking eye, bread being made, a cow being milked, the sun traversing the sky.
Last for us tonight: eighth blackbird performing Franco Donatoni's Arpege. To be perfectly honest, my mind is starting to wander right now (Is Z driving our wonderful babysitter batty by now? How long will it take us to get home?--you know, all the things that a responsible listener, never mind critic, should not be allowing in to shatter one's attention and consciousness), and it's not fair of me to say much of anything, since this is my first time hearing this piece live. I will say, however, that it takes a very different avenue than what came before: a note of uptown coming downtown, to this all-night musical outpost by the southernmost tip of Manhattan.
Get down to the World Financial Center this afternoon and tonight if you're not there already. We'll see you there.
