_______________________
The
Fickle Judge
By
Daniel J. Kushner
June
in Buffalo is a festival for the new music cognoscenti—a welcome destination
for some, an alienating locale for others. But new music sprawls itself out over a vast landscape, and
great variety can coexist even with pieces of comparable aesthetic value. The festival’s June 9 concert,
featuring the New York-based chamber ensemble Signal led by conductor Brad
Lubman, exemplified this truth.
The
program began with David Felder’s 1990 work Journal for chamber orchestra. Signal communicated with vibrant poignancy the sonorous,
cataclysmic evidence of fear made audible, of some unspoken yet inescapable
conflict. Within the composition,
melodies are not shaped and sheltered by phrases, but are rather splintered
into three and four-note shards, and then dispelled into the ether. If Felder’s Shamayim—a 2009 collaboration with filmmaker Elliot Caplan
performed earlier in the week at the festival—felt cold and clinical, Journal
exudes an emotional, reverberating
warmth that doesn’t circumvent Felder’s arresting harmonic sensibility, but
instead speaks through it. The
work is at times lush and lyrical, even while possessing a thin, fragile
texture capable of some impending devolution—hinted at toward the outset—that
never comes.
Featuring
a smaller configuration of Signal aided by solo violinist Irvine Arditti, Brice
Pauset’s highly gestural and expressionistic Vita Nova (2006) evinced
the atonal priorities so readily embraced in many compositional circles of
academia. While certainly
intriguing, the piece seemed destined to retreat from my recollection into
oblivion. But why? Clearly the composition was well
constructed, with a keen spatial sense of orchestration and containing proven
techniques of modern articulation, including the ingenuous effect of strumming
the string instruments with guitar picks.
Its lack of readily discernible melodies is not in and of itself grounds
for dismissal.
But
if melody does not implant itself in the ear, some other compositional (component(s)
may need to take its place—an alluring succession of harmonies, or a novel
polyrhythmic device—to bridge the chasm between performance and memory (I took
with issue with Hilda Paredes’s Ah Paaxo’ob of 2001, which closed the concert, for similar
reason). One doesn’t even
necessarily need to remember a single note of the composition, but rather the
response it elicited from within.
Ultimately, the hard reality is that it comes down to the decision of a
manifestly fickle, yet unerring judge—emotional resonance.
Fortunately,
György Ligeti’s Chamber Concerto (1969-1970)
exemplified the atonal aesthetic at its most vibrant and engaging—from the
bleary, circular phrases in the woodwinds to the crystalline dizziness of the
harpsichord, to the ominous trills in the violins. Each sonic occurrence seemed to impart some mystical coded
meaning. In the moment, Chamber
Concerto struck me as more focused,
less visceral yet more palpable, more ethereal yet less distant than the works
I had heard earlier in the evening.
Was
my response the effect of a placebo?
Does a piece by the venerated Ligeti immediately deserve more
respect? Perhaps vain pride would
have me answer, “Yes.” But, in the
interest of being as much of a new-music-hipster as possible, the answer could
just as easily be “No.” In the
end, I was drawn in by Ligeti’s use of technical proficiency through such
musically volatile means, to achieve such emotionally immediate ends.
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