Alice Tully Hall was never built to be a rock venue, but served that purpose well Monday night with a Tully Scope concert that featured multiple guitars, drum kits, and electronics - not to mention a host of acoustic musicians. With the stage doors opened and black baffles unfurled along the hall's perimeter, the sound was as crisp and loud as any Bowery venue. Maybe louder. 

But before the plugged-in stuff, the concert kicked off with John Adams' Road Movies: a 16 minute violin sonata that's unlike anything Brahms or Beethoven ever dreamed of. With its swingy, bluesy vibe and minimal pitch range, this was chamber music for people who don't listen to chamber music. 

Next was Caleb Burhans' In a Distant Place: a brief, heavy lament for pulsing piano, gliding strings and recorder. Caleb, who was billed as the evening's conductor, chose to remain backstage for the performance, emerging only briefly at the end for a reluctant bow.

I last heard Louis Andriessen's minimalist classic Workers Union on another one of Ronen's shows back in 2007; it's since become much more ubiquitous, performed as recently as a couple of weeks ago at the Tune In Music Festival. This time, the performance - with Caleb still refusing to take the podium - was super-tight, not to mention ear-splittingly loud (at least from my seat in the fifth row center.)

Finally, Caleb came out from the wings to conduct the Wordless Music Orchestra in selections from Tyondai Braxton's 2008 solo effort Central Market: a series of looped guitar tracks run through distortion pedals till they sounded like piccolos and trombones. Braxton, the former Battles singer-guitarist, sat in with his recognizably high-pitched guitar along with five other axe men (including Dither's Taylor Levine and Knights on Earth's Grey McMurray) The music shifted freely between math-rock rhythms and Rite of Spring motiifs, with kazoos and whistles thrown in to keep things un-serious. All-in-all, it was a near-perfect a blend of rock and classical, in a "non-Liverpool Oratiorio kind of way," as Ronen wryly put it in the post-concert discussion.

Between events like this and Dan Deacon's jam up in Kitchener a few weeks ago, things are starting to get loud in the concert hall. And, I don't just mean the volume.

More pics on Flickr.