Feast of Music

Mantra Percussion Re-mix Timber at Roulette

by Aristea Mellos

It is widely believed that a great work of art should be able to withstand reappropriation and reinterpretation, and, if possible, grow from the experience. This philosophy is often applied to plays, operas, and films, but rarely to instrumental music. On April 30, Ear Heart Music did just that, by presenting a re-mix of Michael Gordon’s monumental work for six percussionists, Timber. Mantra Percussion was joined at Roulette with a slew of guest artists, who responded to the original work, overlaying it with their music to create something wholly different.

Gordon’s Timber was co-commissioned and premiered by Mantra in 2011. The work in its original form calls for the ensemble of percussionists to play “simantras” (wooden 2 x 4s of varied lengths) arranged in a circle, for 75 minutes, with all members playing from memory. In this performance, the members of Mantra were arranged in the middle of the audience space, whilst the guest artists took to the stage.

An announcement before the concert explained that the audience should feel free to move about, so as to soak in the sights and sounds of this unusual cross collaboration. Interestingly, Gordon, who was in attendance, remained in his balcony seat throughout the evening, however many audience members freely roamed throughout the space.

Throughout the concert, avant-garde rocker Ian Williams, electro composer Ikue Mori, multi-instrumentalist Brandon Seabrook, and clarinetist/composer Jeremiah Cyerman, each took turns at responding to Gordon’s music, whilst Mantra pummeled away, creating a continuous wall of sound. Mesmerizing visuals from media artist and designer Joshua Ott added another element of heady stimulation to the concert. The projected graphics seamlessly shape shifted and pulsed along with the rhythms of the simantras.

American Composers Orchestra This Friday at Zankel Hall

A pair of  quality video promos for this Friday's ACO concert at Zankel, courtesy of composers Troy Herion and Ray Lustig. Tickets and info on the Carnegie website.

Stockhausen's OKTOPHONIE at the Park Avenue Armory

"My music is a fast spaceship to the divine." – Karlheinz Stockhausen

In May 2007, I happened to find myself in Rome for a concert of electronic music by the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, one of the most influential—if polarizing—musical figures of the 20th century. Stockhausen himself sat at a soundboard in the center of Sinopoli Hall, fiddling with knobs while synthesized sounds bounced around the interior, projected from all directions. Included on the program that day was the world premiere of Cosmic Pulses, an hour-long torrent of sound that finally had its NYC premiere at Issue Project Room in 2011 (and would have been performed last October at Alice Tully Hall, were it not for Superstorm Sandy).

The Rome concert turned out to be the last one that Stockhausen ever gave: he died unexpectedly of a heart attack six months later at his home in Kürten, Germany. Fortunately, Stockhausen's longtime collaborators, Suzanne Stephens and Kathinka Pasveer, have carried on, offering authoritative performances of Stockhausen's iconoclastic works while scrupulously maintaining and protecting his musical legacy. 

But, since Stockhausen's passing over five years ago, Suzanne and Kathinka haven't been seen on our shores—until this week, that is, where they both arrived to present the NY premiere of OKTOPHONIE at the Park Avenue Armory's Wade Thompson Drill Hall. Completed in 1991, OKTOPHONIE was originally the musical accompaniment to Dienstag (Tuesday), part of Stockhausen's massive seven-opera cycle, Licht. But, it also stands on its own, "like a surviving capital from a cathedral ruin," as Joe Drew states in the program notes.

Bodyparts, Thrillington, Marcos Napa & Jonathan Pfeffer at Secret Project Robot

by Craig Brinker

Last night's show at Bushwick's Secret Project Robot was a typical Brooklyn lineup of atypical bands, featuring Afro-punk headliners Bodyparts celebrating the release of their newest LP, Sell by 2012, as well as indie-prog outfit Thrillington, Marcos Napa—an Afro-Peruvian percussionist—and Jonathan Pfeffer. 

Bodyparts perform short, spastic songs that display a child-like enthusiasm for making noise: play the guitar riffs of Paul Simon's Graceland at twice the original speed, add some synth bass, mix in the unbridled ferocity of punk music, and you have a close approximation of what Bodyparts sound like. Aimed at the audience of ADD-riddled tweeters, their songs are about the banalaties of life, encompassing knee-joint problems, credit-card statements, and spleens. Bodyparts is notoriously loud, hyperactive, and not for the faint of heart, but what they lack in subtlety, they make up for in consistent enthusiasm.

Thrillington successfully walks the tightrope between experimentation and old-fashioned pop sensibility. Performing their six-part suite, The 1000 Pointing Fingers, as well as a new piece, IKO IKO, the band displayed their love for rythmically complex and contrapuntal music that hints at both Steve Reich and Gentle Giant. The lyrics were witty, politically tinged, and featured some interesting wordplay (one of the movements is called "Sotomayor!" after all). Primary songwriter Andrei Pohorelsky was particularly convincing when singing the anthemic middle movement of the suite, "The Birds," showing off the band's ability to distill a variety of musical influences into a complex and compelling whole.