More Amazement from Present Music
Serious music organizations, as a rule, do not bank on Crazy Ideas that Just Might Work. Kevin Stalheim, Present Music‘s artistic director, did it and came up a winner Saturday night at Turner Hall.
Stalheim knew that as John Adams composed his 1992 Chamber Symphony, he was studying Schoenberg’s Opus 9. He also knew that Adams had become engaged with the wacky music that seeped through the door from the next room, where his kid was watching cartoons on TV. So Stalheim looked up Raymond Scott, whose novelty music from the 1930s and 1940s was hijacked, cut and pasted to serve as underscoring for Warner Brothers cartoons.
Raymond Scott in his electronics studio.
Saturday, Stalheim interspersed excerpts from the terribly serious Opus 9 with such Raymond Scott specials as Square Dance for Eight Egyptian Mummies and Snake Woman, to pleasantly disorienting effect.
When Stalheim and his 22-piece ensemble finally got around to Adams’ substantial Chamber Symphony, it validated Stalheim’s thesis. In Adams, you could hear Schoenberg and Scott crashing and clanging as if engaged in one of those cartoon fights expressed as a mini-tornado that flings bricks and anvils. This is wild, raucous, hilarious music, expertly assembled and beautifully structured. Stalheim’s group played it with ferocious glee.
Scott was also at the forefront of electronic music and invented all sorts of new instruments, such as the electronium and the clavivox. Stalheim played several recorded selections, some in their original context as music/sound effects for vintage television commercials. These things amused the big audience no end. They also connected Raymond Scott to Mason Bates just as the novelty numbers for live band had connected Scott to Adams.
Bates stands among a cohort of young composers who grew up knob-twiddling and DJ-ing even as they learned traditional music theory and orchestration. Stalheim led the big ensemble through Bates’ Omnivorous Furniture, which features a variety of electronically generated beats. The live and electronic elements blended seamlessly.
Adams’ Chamber Symphony is hot and riotous; Omnivorous Furniture, cool and suave, contrasted with and complemented Adams’ piece.
Bates’ central idea is that unassuming backdrop ideas (you know, furniture) sneak up and take over the whole texture. I don’t doubt that this happens, but I found the transitions so subtle that I couldn’t really track them. My interest focused on the deep, satisfying rhythmic groove, much of it couched in brawny low brass. It gives way in the middle to an intoxicating glow of harmony reminiscent of Ravel and then to a hypnotic, high ringing, a shimmering standing wave of sound. The funk groove returns near the end, but changed — more complex, higher, more ethereal.
Stalheim also showed a brief film by Tomah Mackie and Elisabeth Albeck, with music by J Flash and Albeck. Images of rugged urban landscapes flashed by as non-sequiturs in abrupt jump cuts . At first, I wondered: Why bother with film? They’re just cool, unrelated pictures; shouldn’t they be in a photo show?
But then images began to recur, sometimes literally, sometimes slightly changed. Reiteration created a sense of jumpy rhythm, motif and theme. The piece couldn’t be a photo show because it wasn’t just about the images, striking as they were. The piece takes on its true meaning only when it unfolds in time. This film is like music.
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