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Can you hum a few bars? Odds are, probably not
BY JUSTIN DAVIDSON
Newsday Staff Writer
December 8, 2006
The electro-acoustic new music band Bang on a Can All-Stars thrives on hybrids and impurities. Its Zankel Hall concert on Wednesday skipped from the music of a Yale professor to pieces by Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth and the jazz clarinetist Don Byron. Improvisation, electronica, rock and roll, cerebral modernism, klezmer and a whole range of ethnic traditions - the Bang on a Can aesthetic throws all these elements together and grinds them into a hyperactive minimalism.
The concert was a tour de force of noisemaking, and the hall was filled with people who like their music new, loud and crackling. There was less diversity in the program than met the eye. Moore's trancelike "Stroking Piece No. 1," grew steadily in volume, drifting through iridescent clouds of electric guitar.
Julia Wolfe's "Big Beautiful, Dark, and Scary" covers the same territory. Long crescendos reach their quadruple-forte destination slowly, like the rider moving from the horizon into a close-up in "Lawrence of Arabia." The arrival is deafening and little happens along the way to justify cranking the volume or to give it the feeling of a climax rather than just the turning of a knob.
The godfather of the group is Martin Bresnick, a Yale professor who had the good fortune of teaching three students - Wolfe, her husband Michael Gordon and David Lang - who turned into acolytes, then proselytes, then establishment figures themselves.
Bresnick turns 70 this year, a good number for a sage, and the All-Stars celebrated by playing two of his etudes in economy from a series called "Opere della Musica Povera," or "Works of a Poor Music."
Each piece erects itself out of humble stuff. "The Bucket Rider," based on a Franz Kafka story, is a slow processional of whispery creaks and flutters. "BE JUST!" rests on a hard-edged rhythm laid down by dropping chains on the skin of a kettledrum. The pieces are not long but you can't rush them: They exude the we've-got-all-night feeling of music that is happy to stay wherever it happens to begin.
If Bresnick is the group's gray eminence, Conlon Nancarrow is its ancestral spirit. Being weird was a weirder choice in the 1940s than it is today, and Nancarrow defined his life by a series of unconventional rejections. He was an American who chose exile in Mexico. He was a composer who kept his music away from musicians, entrusting it instead to the impartial mechanisms of the player piano, which doesn't make mistakes. He was a recluse who began to influence young composers around the time he turned 80.
The All-Stars' clarinetist, Evan Ziporyn, reached back to the radical piano studies that Nancarrow wrote in the 1940s and arranged them for his ensemble, producing four miniatures of bracing strangeness. Simultaneous but different rhythms go their own implacable way, generating intricate arrangements of simple patterns.
But it's the combination of impishness and rigor that captivates Ziporyn, the way a languorous, swinging clarinet line drapes itself over the rhythmic armature. The arrangements are brilliantly clear and brutal, and the ensemble plays them with the taut ferocity of a great rock band.
BANG ON A CAN ALL-STARS. Zankel Hall, at Carnegie Hall. Tuesday night.