First, two corrections:
- MaiMai and Olaf Hochherz are not in fact connected. MaiMai turns out to be a guitarist here in Shanghai, but he was not present on Wednesday. Olaf's solo presentation was a substitution.
- Ben Houge's contribution Wednesday was in fact two pieces, not just one. They were: Lukou (Intersection) and Kaleidoscope Music. The one I took good notes on was Lukou, which is a sound installation that features manipulated recorded material (pretty much the traffic sounds that I thought I heard). But now that I think back, there was something distinctly different that I heard in the latter portion of his presentation, but that I didn't note down on my pad. That was the Kaleidoscope work, which takes a captured live audio signal and filters it various ways, with the filtering methods varying over time, as an aural analogue to what a kaleidoscope does with bits of "captured" visual data. This apparently exists in alternative versions where either a live person or software makes the decisions that determine the aleatoric destiny of the piece. You can read in Ben's blog about Lukou here and about Kaleidoscope here and here. (Thanks for the references, Ben!)
Next, a brief report about Bang on a Can's gig at the Shanghai Oriental Art Center.
This was in the Performance Hall, a much smaller and more intimate setting than the Concert Hall. They did some of the same material I heard on Wednesday (the Nancarrow, the Reich, and Ziporyn's Shadowbang), but there were four works that were not repeats:
- Tan Dun's Concerto for Six
- Julia Wolfe's Believing
- David Lang's Cheating, Lying, Stealing
- Michael Gordon's I Buried Paul
Wolfe's Believing was also written for the ensemble. It had a remarkably beautiful and passionate moment for the cellist to vocalize to her own tremolo accompaniment.
Lang's piece was the only one for which nobody gave any live description at the microphone, so I had to look it up on the web. It was written as a kind of response to how classical music seems only to be written to capture something positive. In the composers words: "in a comic way, I am trying to look at something dark. There is a swagger, but it is not trustworthy. In fact, the instruction in the score for how to play it says: Ominous funk." (More here.)
Gordon's I Buried Paul is a very effective (and affecting) work that takes as its inspiration, and point of departure, the strange ending to The Beatles' Strawberry Fields Forever from the Magical Mystery Tour album from 1967. (Yours truly at age 10 played his own LP so many times, the needle practically wore through the vinyl). The "real song" fades out, but not away, and when it comes back, you are kind of on "the other side of the looking glass" musically speaking. At some point near the true end of the track, John Lennon says "I buried Paul." America heard this and went a bit loopy thinking Paul was dead! People played the record fast, slow, and backward, and claimed to find all manner of revealed material. Gordon's version, eerily, brought me right back to 1967.
I end this post by reporting minor temblorettes from the category of cultural shocks.
When you attend an event at the Shanghai Oriental Art Center, you enter the hall with a ticket which is torn in two pieces. The attendant takes the stub. You keep the other part of the ticket. At the interval, if you wish to leave the hall, an attendant hands you one of the many stubs taken on the way in, but of course, not your own stub. On the way back in, you are to surrender the surrogate stub. If you happen to leave the hall by one door and re-enter by another (as is actually quite likely to happen with the Performance Hall, as the post-modernly conceived "center aisle" actually cuts across the hall on a diagonal) all hell breaks loose — this literally rends the social fabric, apparently. The attendant then points to some calligraphed character scrawled on the stub that indicates your crime of mixe-door-ation. Why they don't just rely on audience members showing the half of their ticket they retain is a mystery.
As you exit from the hall after the performance, you do so to some piped-in music whose meaninglessly happy (if intrusive) character is hard to describe, and whose purpose is even harder to ascertain. From our small sampling of concerts (just two), it may be unfair to infer that this piped in music will always be disturbingly jarring, juxtaposed to whatever one last heard on the program — but the score is definitely 2 for 2.
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