Music NOW(?)(!)(?)

Last night I attended the second music NOW concert, which is part of a contemporary series put on by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Much like the first concert in the fall, the evening was a splendid surprise. I never did get to post about the first concert, but I was quite surprised by the young audience as well as the prominence of young composers in the program (including one of my favorite wunderkinds of new music, Nico Muhly [go out and rent the recently released film Joshua now to witness his incredibly effective and exciting forays into film scoring...ooh oooh oooh!]). Anyway, expecting the Music NOW scene (oh god that name...) to be stuffy, stagnant, and (frankly) not very "now", I was pleasantly surprised by the programming and the patronage- young skinny-jeaned whippersnappers listening to chamber music...Quel suprise! Oh, and this was all followed by something of a high school for grown ups/so Chicago post concert reception fueled by free pizza and beer.
Yes, free beer...

FREE BEER!

And we all know everybody's favorite founding father, Mr. Benny Franklin once said...

"Beer is proof that god loves us and wants us to be happy." -Benners







Take that beer free and mix it up with some lovely contemporary music and attractive young gentlemen in tight pants and you, Chicago Symphony, have achieved something close to godliness- or my idea of a damn fine 20 bucks spent on a Monday night.

So, why shall we toast to the music NOW series beyond the gut growing freebies? The music! That's why you go to the damn concert anyway, after all. Like the first concert I left with some stellar pieces still bouncing around in my memory.

The program began with a collaboration between Norwegian composer Rolf Wallin and another Nordic treasure, vocalist Sidsel Endreissen. Before the music began a funny little interview between Wallin and Esa-Pekka Salonen (another composer/coducter on the program) took place. The moment was pure comedy as Salonen took over the conversation, not looking Wallin in the face and insisting that he use a microphone halway across the stage, because sharing one was a bit too akward. Physical comedy by way of composer fussiness is quite an odd way to kick off an evening of music, but it helped make the night feel a little less stuffy- almost a foreshadowing of the pizza... It's actually one thing that's so charming about the Music NOW concerts- the first performance was hosted by CSO composer in residence, Osvaldo Golijov, who came off like the wacky uncle of the evening spewing in a thick accent in an overlong dissection of Muhly's piece that went something like (in my fractured memory)...





Osvaldo: Zees piece ees like Matisse moving into zee body...like...eh....uh...a dancer in zee space...like Matisse to Picasso...a movement from one to eenother...you can see zee movement...like a zooooming een....ramble ramble ramble....

Nico: Hah hah hah...yes...uh....I'm a wunderkind.

Dennis: Yes you are Nico! You boy genius, you!

Anyway...

After the brief hilarity Wallin's piece began. It was a prerecorded electronic score, which rhythmically cycled through pre-recorded snippets of Endreissen's voice, various sound effects (a closing door was the big feature), and a Norwegian writer reciting some prose that next to nobody in the audience probably understood. Sidsel was the only body on the stage moving from a rather comfy looking leather chair to a microphone when it was her time to sing. There was also a completely unecessary video piece that accompanied the music that was created for the work years after it was written. The music was comissioned by Norwegian radio as a part of a series of broadcast operas, and relied on Sidsel's live improvised vocalises over the prerecorded score to be the main storytelling element of the piece. The sounds Endreissen produced, however, were wordless dexterous cyclings of nonsense language that resembled a vocal track that had been reversed through a computer program. The vocal lines seemed to be in line with Meredith Monk's wordless vocal pieces, using pitch and rhythm to convey ideas and emotion in a very "pure" musical language. What was remarkable about Sidsel's performance, however, was that she hardly sang at all and managed to replicate the electronic modifications of her voice in the score live with an added narrative power. I was taken aback, because I am a huge fan of hers and was expecting something along the line of her work on albums, which is in the vein of a jazzy more experimental Joni Mitchell (it's not as big of a yawnfest as it sounds). After expecting the Sidsel I knew, at first the piece felt like a letdown, but her otherworldly production ability held me captive.
The derivitive video art did not...
It was a bit of a mini endurance exercise, but a welcome challenge nonetheless. Remember, when you attend a contemporary music concert you're listening with the ears of....



In the next installment of BOSCH ON PUBLIC TRANSIT I will further divulge the wonders of the spectacular and confounding concert. Alas, there is a new episode of Project Runway on and I'm a slave to televised fashion competitions....Aren't we all?