When BMOP (the Boston Modern Orchestra Project), now in its 10th season, says “Project,” that’s exactly what they mean. Everything on their recent (Nov. 3) Jordan Hall concert — some six works by four composers — was slated for commercial recording immediately afterward. This done, the BMOP discography will have rolled up an impressive 20 releases.

They’re strong on the “Orchestra” part too. One reward (or even danger) in a program like this one, where everything was so “for” such an ensemble — BMOP’s personnel positively drips with class — — is that a listener could sit back mindlessly, pull the shades on his mean-spirited analytical tendencies and just let all those instrumental timbres, massed or individual, thrice-familiar or newly minted, wash over him. It was a rough evening for ascetics.

First came was “High Bridge Prelude” (1999), an autonomous instruments-only spinoff from his imposing soloists/chorus/orchestra cycle on texts of Hart Crane, which showed the veteran Charles Fussell hardly ever putting a foot wrong. Surely there was some sort of narrative in there? Correct — the sad short course of the poet’s life, as it turned out. The ear sensed this partly from the sure, canny pacing, but even more so from this composer’s un-ironic working of a tonal idiom that would once have been dismissed as “Hollywoodish.” Instances: the troubling, grayish wind chords over darkly suggestive unison low strings; the mean stalking pizzicato bass line doubled by timpani; and the art of the long-building glowery climax. The overall impression was of a noirish texture (velvety black to gritty pale) on the move, judiciously reined in by a sense of beginning, middle, and end.

About Fussell’s curtain-raiser you knew for sure that it wasn’t going to go on forever or anywhere close to it. Which was not the case at all with Derek Bermel‘s exuberantly sprawling, ethnologically informed, labile, damn-it-all-I’ve-got-the-microphone “Thracian Echoes” piece (2002), the kind of dazzler that in a different age (say, Leopold Stokowski’s lifetime) might have borne a hokey title like “Bulgarian Rhapsody.”

But back then Bermel wouldn’t have gotten away with it. Would symphonic musicians then have been nearly as confident at “bending” notes as BMOP’s wind players were, or for that matter improvising, or barging their way through fierce metrical thickets, or playing out of phase, or abandoning themselves to an esthetic that knows what it is to go much too far and goes right ahead anyway?

“Thracian Echoes” is an exciting piece by a composer with what seems to be — on this single scrap of evidence — an extraordinary ear for translating his ethnological adventures into orchestral music that is itself adventurous and, in the doing, making it quite personal as well. Who else could have made all that up? “Thracian Echoes” was the hit of the concert.
The Fussell and Bermel pieces were sited on opposite ends of a very well-filled program. In between (and frankly threatening to fade from the memory) came a pair by BMOP’s new Composer in Residence Lisa Bielawa — “Unfinish’d, Sent” (2002) and “Roam” (2001) — in which an undoubted love for high-class literary texts sat uneasily at times with a magpie, somewhat naive composing persona. This showed a talent in the making, if nerviness and ambition have anything to do with it. Bielawa’s c.v. mentions Philip Glass, Brian Ferneyhough, Yale, and cabaret. “Keep tuned,” it all seemed to say.

The recurrent problem with the late Establishment heavy Jacob Druckman‘s music — as it was here, with his “Nor Spell Nor Charm” (1999) and “Quickening Pulse” (1988) — was that you couldn’t always be sure that the exquisitely wafting timbres weren’t the be-all and end-all. Or is it that the music isn’t as performance-proof as it has seemed?

As to that and the rest, no doubt time — and the forthcoming BMOP recordings — will tell. All throughout, the orchestral playing under Gil Rose‘s direction, unshowy but energizing, seemed to be speaking volumes. It inspired trust.

RICHARD BUELL may be reached at rbuell@verizon.net

Do:  This sounds interesting. Want to know more?

Re:  Our man Daniel Beliavsky’s playing at the NYPL. Get the details.

Mi:  And here’s a message from the Frolicsome Composer from Hell:

THE WEATHER RIOTS

In his late set of works called The Number Pieces, John Cage used a very original device for coordinating parts, called “flexible time brackets”. In these pieces, there is no score, no conductor, and players use stopwatches. Players are given parts which contain some musical material, and a flexible set of time points within which they can place this musical material. That way, there is a clear composed structure for each of these pieces, but the structure allows for considerable freedoms and almost-improvisational type of flexibility
in performance.

I was completely intrigued by this flexible time bracket technique, and in 2002 I organised a concert in Amsterdam devoted to some of the Number Pieces. We presented a few works by Cage, but I decided that his notations and his ideas would probably be relevant not merely to Cage’s own musical style, but that it could be used by other composers as well, as a more general form – just as fugues can appear in many different styles.

So for that concert, 6 new pieces were written that each were using flexible time brackets in very different ways. Among these works was my piece “The Weather Riots” for at least two and at most a few thousand high instruments (flutes, oboes, violins, clarinets, pianos, harps all can play this piece). At the S21 Concert, it will be a trio of violin (Jeffrey Philips), oboe (Matt Sullivan) and piano (yours truly).

One of the central things I’ve been interested in in the past few years was to fill up some musical space in some way with motion. I sometimes call such textures “panoramas”. Often I like to have different versions of the same motivic material superimposed, so that you get a kind of heterophonic mosaic of personalities. If two instruments play the same sort of motivic material at the same time, but each “colours” it as befits the character of their instrument; or, if they each articulate the same material slightly differently, or do it at slightly different speeds, these differences set up a musical space
within which the instruments find their own niche.

Now in most traditional forms of heterophony, there’s a single melody, unfolding linearly over time, that every player is more or less playing, each with their own nuances. In “The Weather Riots” however I do not give players one line. Instead, in each section, I give them a whole family of motives that they’re free to interpret and put together in their own way. The result is always some kind of mosaic of little motives and gestures that happen at the same time and that gradually shifts in character over the course of the piece’s eleven minutes.

The way these motives are distributed, imitations between any two parts is more or less guaranteed. Basically every performer is playing a personal version of the same basic part. So you always get a ‘cloud’ of motives, of a density that depends on how many players you have, with a lot of imitation going on. So there’s activity all over the place, and it’s full of incidental connections. The similarities in the motivic material help make the complex resultant textures transparent for a listener – you can always sense a relation between what two performers are doing, even if they seem to be playing their
material entirely independently.

To me, these relations between parts that play similar melodies but that bring different shades of playing to that one same thing are themselves a musical resource – something like an extra musical voice, an invisible instrument between the other instruments, that is not played as such but that results from the panorama. Also, I feel such effects give more depth to the sense of time. And I hope that from this, a listener can get an experience of space, movement and possibility.

Fa:  Just felt like adding a halfstep.

This past Sunday 37,936 people ran 26.22 miles through parts of all five boroughs of New York City from Staten Island to Central Park, through parts of all five boroughs.  The marathon has taken place on the first Sunday of November every year since 1970, and this year Jelena Prokopcuka won the women’s division with a time of 2:25:05, M. Gomes dos Santos won the men’s division clocking in at 2:09:58, and the wheelchair divisions male and female winners were Stephen Kiogora (2:10:06) and Paul Tergat (2:10:10).

I don’t really care about marathons very much, but it’s a major event and I’ve been thinking about it, and it occurred to me a couple of days ago that one might very reasonably look at marathons as performance art.

The Marathon is, of course, nominally a race, a competition, but only a handful of participants are actually running to win.  Winning times over the years vary by only a couple of minutes, and in this year’s New York marathon Lance Armstrong, professional athlete, finished 856th with a time of 2:59:36, nearly 50% longer than the winning time in the men’s division.  With winning out of the question, most people run marathons for the experience of having done it — and a 26.22 mile run must be quite an experience.  With so many people running for the sake of the experience, how many of the spectators are watching for the sake of seeing a competition with a winner and how many for the experience of seeing so many people engaged in so extreme a feat of physical endurance?  I would suggest that most are primarily looking for the latter — thus, it’s primarily an aesthetic rather than a competetive experience for most of the participants and most of the spectators. (more…)

Jeff Sackmann has an extra ticket to the Gidon Kremer/ Brahms sonatas concert at Carnegie Hall tonight.  I can’t go but if you send him an e-mail stat,  you probably can.   jeffsackmann@gmail.com.