Robert Spring - Speak of the Devil!
It’s the churning gut of classical music. Assorted ideas and notions brought to fruition not out of mastery but just from action. The academies of music have their own basic research, just like those of biology or literature. There are some hundreds of papers written every year which present marginally new ideas about Shakespeare or painstakingly reaffirm results already demonstrated by previous experiments. These are of course vital to the construction both of solid bodies of knowledge and of dependable academicians, who may go on to create the piercing insights the world depends on for the furtherance of ourselves.
Piercing insights into music were not to be found, although I peered into new depths of the performance of music, when Robert Spring and Arizona State University wind and percussion colleagues brilliantly played pieces of music written by assorted other academics. The choice to perform no great works is interesting in and of itself. Typically a concert like this mixes a Brahms or something into the mix, and this is often seen as an attempt to get people to stay through intermission. Here I understood that it has a more profound effect in juxtaposing profundity with the modern stabs in the dark.
This music often sounded like Garth & Kat, the unrehearsed Saturday Night Live music duo which tries to make up songs on the spot. At other times, like a jazz trio so well-rehearsed they can no longer surprise each other.
My favorite impression was that the music was a block of cheese cut from an even larger block of cheese. It doesn’t really matter where you cut, just decide how hungry you are and grab some crackers. It was just “music”, perhaps dropped out of an algorithm.
It strikes me that a good deal of modern composed (“classical”) music is written on a computer, using software to play back the composition, rather than at the piano or harpsichord, as was true for a few centuries (before that - on the lute? in a choir?). You can see Edgar Meyer’s composition played back on computer in his tour video with Bela Fleck. Pop music has clearly been deeply affected by relying on computers, even when it is not specifically intentionally droidful. The click-and-hear power of a computer must be changing some of the underlying assumptions of ‘classical’ music too… for one thing it’s so easy to make patterny minimalism.
The performers were incredible. My love for the bassoon was rekindled. The clarinetters were stunning. One or two pieces was really exciting (I would like to hear more by Roshanne Etezady and Theresa Martin), but mostly the compositions were just there for the players to play.
1 year ago
