CITY OF MUSIC (6/21/2011)

           New York attracts the most people in the world in the arts and   
           professions. It also attracts them in other fields. Even the bums
           are talented.

           Edmund Love


Right on the heels of the Bang on a Can Marathon, New York City put on its most massive and inclusive celebration of music, Make Music New York.  Over 1,000 free concerts took place in public spaces ranging from parks, to closed-off blocks, to playgrounds, to plazas, to underpasses, and elsewhere.  Performers ranged from teenage garage bands to established artists in a vast range of styles and genres.  There were even many events where anyone could bring their cello, horn, guitar, voice, etc. and join in.

With such a huge number of events taking place in all five boroughs, an individual could only take in so much.  Rather than run all over New York City I decided to stay in lower Manhattan and experience a few select events.

 My day began at the New York Stock Exchange where the performing group Yarn/Wire presented Louis Andriessen's Hoketus. Part of the ensemble was situated in balconies of the Stock Exchange and part was on the sidewalk across the street.  I planted myself smack in the middle of everything in what proved to be an extremely fortuitous place (see future blog).

 

There were many things in the performance of Hoketus that not only held my attention but also pulled me into the work.  Obviously, from the title, the work contains lots of examples of "hocketing" where interplay between the balcony instruments and street-level instruments created the effect of braided sounds.  I am not sure whether there is a specific instrumentation intended for the work but the particular tone colors used, such as the sounds of the panpipes and congas, certainly added a multicultural dimension to the work.  Written in minimalist style, the work begins quite elementally melodically and rhythmically.  However, the simple motive used at the beginning expands and contracts and new motives are introduced that grow from the initial motive. It's all quite organic.  As the work reaches a climactic point one is reminded of the frenetic, nonsymmetrical rhythms of Stravinsky.  The spirit of dance becomes more and more prominent.  At one point the music becomes quite jazz as in the spirit of bebop.   Motives and tone colors move back and forth from foreground to background giving depth to the texture.  This is the kind of work that probably changes quite dramatically depending on the venue.   I thought that for this particular location it was a great choice.

I then moved to City Hall Park where I experienced delightful performances of Erik Satie's Sports et Divertissements and two of William Bolcom's Cabaret Songs with pianist Yegor Shevtov playing one of the 88 "pop up" pianos placed throughout the city and baritone Mischa Bouvier enthusiastically reciting the Ogden Nash verses for the Satie and being equally as convincing in his rendition of the Bolcom.

 

                                                Fountain at City Hall Park

 

A performance of Mauricio Kagel's 111 Bicycles in the street in front of the Cornelia St. Cafe in Greenwich Village fell flat.  However, the solitary trumpeter serenading the street from a fire escape evoked a past in the life of the village

 

I made may over to the Lower East Side where the string quartet Ethel would be performing in the plaza in front of the Abrons Art Center. Arriving late, I entered the venue in the middle of John Cage's 4'33".  Of the works I go to hear the high point for me was Terry Riley's Sunrise of the Planetary Dream Collector.  Like so much of Riley's work, he created little melodic modules that performers can choose from and play at any tempo and any manner.  The quartet had obviously done its homework in the form of pre-performance planning as their rendition was absolutely gripping.

Both the Riley work and the work that followed, The Flag Project by Huang Ruo, are works I would expect an unconventional quartet such as Ethel to perform.  Invoking aspects of Tibetan Buddhism, this work calls for performers to bow Tibetan prayer bells as a symbol of releasing positive energy into the world. 

Although there were many more performances I could have attended, I mostly made good choices and also made an amazing reconnection, to be written about in another blog entry.