A Tuba Army Ushers In the Bang on a Can Marathon at the World Financial Center
By JON PARELES
Published: June 6, 2006
There were plenty of tubas but no oompah in Anthony Braxton's "Composition No. 19 for 100 Tubas," the biggest spectacle at this year's Bang on a Can Marathon of new music on Sunday at the World Financial Center. Carrying a drum major's baton, Mr. Braxton mustered his "100Tubatet" — playing tubas, sousaphones, Wagner tubas and double-belled euphoniums — on the center's plaza. It played glacially slow, sustained melodies, creating a low growl that was uncannily similar to the tone of airplanes and helicopters flying overhead. So close to ground zero, the sound was unmistakably ominous.
Over the next hour Mr. Braxton and three other conductors led groups of tubas to parts of the plaza, following an inscrutable choreography. Sometimes two groups would be near each other, but there was no way to hear the entire ensemble. The slow melodies continued; every so often, one of the groups would huff a few sharply accented notes or make jokey noises. Yet over all, the piece was somber: an arbitrary ceremony, luxuriating in tuba tone, somewhere between elegy and exorcism.
It was an atypical piece for the rhythm-loving Bang on a Can, the composer-directed organization that started with a marathon concert in 1987 and now produces concerts, commissions music, sustains an ensemble (the Bang on a Can All-Stars) and runs a record label (Cantaloupe Music). While Bang on a Can is determinedly eclectic, it has some obvious preferences: the patterns of Minimalism, the drive of rock (and world music and jazz), zesty instrumental combinations (electronics included), a touch of noise and an underlying urban energy.
That open-ended recipe generally leads to peppy, novel music that can reach beyond the standard classical audience. The free marathon drew a full house to the Winter Garden for much of its nine hours of music indoors.
The familiar Minimalist repetitions and permutations still generate extraordinarily varied music. Michael Nyman's score for a silent film based on the Walt Whitman poem "Manhatta" bustled along with new kinetic motifs for every scene. David Lang's "World to Come," written and performed by the cellist Maya Baiser with recordings of her voice and additional cello parts, unfurled yearning, folk-song-like melodies amid the counterpoint. Amiina, from Iceland, played tinkling, sweetly consonant pieces — for vibraphone, desk bells, musical saw, water glasses and strings — that suggested Minimalism conceived in a dollhouse.
The Dutch composer Mayke Nas's "Belle Chocolatière," played by the Manhattan School of Music's ensemble Tactus, was a piquant, scurrying, almost Impressionist daydream. Anna Clyne's "Rapture" was darkly apocalyptic, with its solo clarinet (played by Eileen Mack) almost swallowed in foreboding electronics.
Glenn Kotche (Wilco's drummer) and the drummer David Cossin paid tribute to the Minimalist patriarch Steve Reich with duo adaptations of early Reich pieces. Mr. Kotche's "Clapping Music Variations" intuited melodies from the handclaps of the original piece, while Mr. Cossin's two-drummer arrangement of "Music for Pieces of Wood" swung as if Mr. Reich had Gene Krupa in mind.
Another pioneering form of Minimalism — La Monte Young's pure-intonation meditations — was represented by Michael Harrison, who has his own Pythagorean piano tuning that spreads an octave more widely across the keys. Playing the finale of his "Revelation: Music for the Harmonically Tuned Piano," Mr. Harrison's perpetual-motion six-note ostinatos could sound like an otherworldly jig, as phantom overtones and resonances seemed to hover around him.
The marathon had a little of a lot of things. Gamelan Galak Tika, an Indonesian-style ensemble from M.I.T. led by Evan Ziporyn, played the gorgeous, shimmering "Pelog Slendro" — a traditionalist-sounding piece that actually melded two disparate scales — by the Balinese composer Dewa Ketut Alit, and then, with Tactus, Mr. Ziporyn's "Ngaben (for Sari Club)." It was a memorial to a club bombed by terrorists, straining to mix elements of a Balinese cremation ceremony with keening strings.
There was hard-riffing, saxophone-topped, odd-meter instrumental rock from the band Gutbucket. The electronica duo Matmos and the percussion quartet So Percussion collaborated using various aluminum items, but the straightforward, 4/4 results could have been a segment of the Off Broadway novelty "Stomp." In what might have been the day's oddest moment, Yat-Kha, from Siberia, applied the guttural bass of Siberian throat-singing to Joy Division's "Love Will Tear Us Apart."
Other new-music groups now embrace the Bang on a Can aesthetic of pattern and propulsion, and two of them were at the marathon. Sentieri Selvaggi ("Wild Paths"), a septet from Italy, played perky, contrapuntal pieces by Paolo Coggiola, Filippo del Corno and its director, Carlo Boccadoro. Alarm Will Sound played its orchestral transcriptions of electronic tracks by Aphex Twin, trading off a big beat for intricate acoustic textures, and an arrangement of John Adams's invigorating "Coast," which folded together Steve Reich strategies with echoes of Americana — even a touch of oompah.
By JON PARELES
Published: June 6, 2006
There were plenty of tubas but no oompah in Anthony Braxton's "Composition No. 19 for 100 Tubas," the biggest spectacle at this year's Bang on a Can Marathon of new music on Sunday at the World Financial Center. Carrying a drum major's baton, Mr. Braxton mustered his "100Tubatet" — playing tubas, sousaphones, Wagner tubas and double-belled euphoniums — on the center's plaza. It played glacially slow, sustained melodies, creating a low growl that was uncannily similar to the tone of airplanes and helicopters flying overhead. So close to ground zero, the sound was unmistakably ominous.
Over the next hour Mr. Braxton and three other conductors led groups of tubas to parts of the plaza, following an inscrutable choreography. Sometimes two groups would be near each other, but there was no way to hear the entire ensemble. The slow melodies continued; every so often, one of the groups would huff a few sharply accented notes or make jokey noises. Yet over all, the piece was somber: an arbitrary ceremony, luxuriating in tuba tone, somewhere between elegy and exorcism.
It was an atypical piece for the rhythm-loving Bang on a Can, the composer-directed organization that started with a marathon concert in 1987 and now produces concerts, commissions music, sustains an ensemble (the Bang on a Can All-Stars) and runs a record label (Cantaloupe Music). While Bang on a Can is determinedly eclectic, it has some obvious preferences: the patterns of Minimalism, the drive of rock (and world music and jazz), zesty instrumental combinations (electronics included), a touch of noise and an underlying urban energy.
That open-ended recipe generally leads to peppy, novel music that can reach beyond the standard classical audience. The free marathon drew a full house to the Winter Garden for much of its nine hours of music indoors.
The familiar Minimalist repetitions and permutations still generate extraordinarily varied music. Michael Nyman's score for a silent film based on the Walt Whitman poem "Manhatta" bustled along with new kinetic motifs for every scene. David Lang's "World to Come," written and performed by the cellist Maya Baiser with recordings of her voice and additional cello parts, unfurled yearning, folk-song-like melodies amid the counterpoint. Amiina, from Iceland, played tinkling, sweetly consonant pieces — for vibraphone, desk bells, musical saw, water glasses and strings — that suggested Minimalism conceived in a dollhouse.
The Dutch composer Mayke Nas's "Belle Chocolatière," played by the Manhattan School of Music's ensemble Tactus, was a piquant, scurrying, almost Impressionist daydream. Anna Clyne's "Rapture" was darkly apocalyptic, with its solo clarinet (played by Eileen Mack) almost swallowed in foreboding electronics.
Glenn Kotche (Wilco's drummer) and the drummer David Cossin paid tribute to the Minimalist patriarch Steve Reich with duo adaptations of early Reich pieces. Mr. Kotche's "Clapping Music Variations" intuited melodies from the handclaps of the original piece, while Mr. Cossin's two-drummer arrangement of "Music for Pieces of Wood" swung as if Mr. Reich had Gene Krupa in mind.
Another pioneering form of Minimalism — La Monte Young's pure-intonation meditations — was represented by Michael Harrison, who has his own Pythagorean piano tuning that spreads an octave more widely across the keys. Playing the finale of his "Revelation: Music for the Harmonically Tuned Piano," Mr. Harrison's perpetual-motion six-note ostinatos could sound like an otherworldly jig, as phantom overtones and resonances seemed to hover around him.
The marathon had a little of a lot of things. Gamelan Galak Tika, an Indonesian-style ensemble from M.I.T. led by Evan Ziporyn, played the gorgeous, shimmering "Pelog Slendro" — a traditionalist-sounding piece that actually melded two disparate scales — by the Balinese composer Dewa Ketut Alit, and then, with Tactus, Mr. Ziporyn's "Ngaben (for Sari Club)." It was a memorial to a club bombed by terrorists, straining to mix elements of a Balinese cremation ceremony with keening strings.
There was hard-riffing, saxophone-topped, odd-meter instrumental rock from the band Gutbucket. The electronica duo Matmos and the percussion quartet So Percussion collaborated using various aluminum items, but the straightforward, 4/4 results could have been a segment of the Off Broadway novelty "Stomp." In what might have been the day's oddest moment, Yat-Kha, from Siberia, applied the guttural bass of Siberian throat-singing to Joy Division's "Love Will Tear Us Apart."
Other new-music groups now embrace the Bang on a Can aesthetic of pattern and propulsion, and two of them were at the marathon. Sentieri Selvaggi ("Wild Paths"), a septet from Italy, played perky, contrapuntal pieces by Paolo Coggiola, Filippo del Corno and its director, Carlo Boccadoro. Alarm Will Sound played its orchestral transcriptions of electronic tracks by Aphex Twin, trading off a big beat for intricate acoustic textures, and an arrangement of John Adams's invigorating "Coast," which folded together Steve Reich strategies with echoes of Americana — even a touch of oompah.
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