Four concerts in a single day. If you've never done this it can be a bit overwhelming (or underwhelming, depending on the circumstances). After while one begins to experience sensory overload, but that doesn't stop me from pushing on.
The first two concerts were chamber music. The first concert was mostly interesting. There was a really great piece for percussion scored for three small drums and three pieces of metal. Very cool. There was a flute solo by my teacher that went mostly well. There was a great piano solo that was very bluesy and I expected it to break into the third movement of the Gershwin piano concerto at any minute. After the concert I thanked the composer for writing something that had a pulse (take that as you will).
Then came the Wind Quintet.
Very rarely do I feel that I don't give a piece of music the full benefit of the doubt or can't appreciate something for what it is. I even feel that I can separate appreciation of great craft from my own aesthetic and not dislike a work just because it's not my aesthetic. I also think I'm a good enough composer/musician that I can hear "through" a weak performance and get the composer's intention. But this piece was atrocious. It wasn't Serial, or serial or whatever, just dense and intellectually over-rigorous to the point of non-interest.
Concert 2 was also chamber music. There was a terrific set of piano miniatures by a composer who is a member of the education department at Truman State. One of the things I have always admired about Robert's music is that, while his music is enormously difficult, it always has a sense of being whimsical, humorous and slightly mischievous. This is especially true when the piece is entitled Vogons on the Beach after Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide. There was a terrific piece for trombone and percussion that really had to be seen to be believed, especially when some of the "percussion" are squeaky toys that are glued to a wooden board and controled by the player's feet. Awesome..and hilarious. This was the concert on which Carol played Angels and Demons. We've covered that already. The concert ended with a saxophone quartet which largely left me with a feeling of...um...okay.
Concert 3 was the already discussed performance of May Music and a series of choral works. The first two choral works were really interesting. A little too brief for the possibilities they contained but really great. The rest, unfortunately, didn't quite hold up. The remaining three pieces on the concert were nice but ultimately sounded like sketches that Eric Whitacre had been smart enough to throw away.
The last concert of the evening was of the Saint Ambrose University Community Orchestra. As these things go (community orchestras) they were actually decent. They were still better than my undergraduate orchestra. Then again there are some middle school orchestras out there that are better than my college orchestra. Anyway there were two pieces on the program. The first was a piece that was a result of the Continental Harmony Project in 2000. Continental Harmony began as a massive commissioning project that created commissions for composers in all 50 states to ring in the new millenium. It's ongoing and you can read more about it here if you want. I was lucky enough to be involved in the performance of the Missouri commission that year. Anyway, this particular piece was kind of a celebration of rural Iowa. Well you can imagine what that was like. Well maybe not. It was kind of like reheated Copland and Ives whirled together and then uninterestingly orchestrated.
The second piece on the program was a saxophone concerto. It was a really nice piece. Very cinematic. This particular composer has written a lot of film/theatre/dance music for larger ensembles and it certainly shows. Interestingly the orchestra sounded completely different on this piece than they did on the symphony. I'm positive that this is because the composer of the concerto knows how to orchestrate to make players sound not just good, but maybe even better than they are. The only distracting element of the piece was that the first movement sounded an awful lot like much of James Horner's Sneakers score which is also scored for alto saxophone soloist and orchestra. Other than that I liked the piece quite a lot.
So that's it. We didn't stay for the Sunday concerts because Davenport is a six-hour drive and we didn't really feel like getting home late in the evening. It was a good weekend though. It's always good to see this motley gang of composers who appreciate each other's work.
5 comments:
Too long?
I guess so.
"It's always good to see this motley gang of composers who appreciate each other's work."
...kind of like how Praecepta was supposed to be. BURN!
I certainly know just how over/under-whelming a concert marathon can be. I also certainly know how these concerts can contain pieces that are "dense and over-rigorous to the point of non-interest." The bad part is when nearly every piece is that way. It makes you want to go to your car, turn on the radio and tune it to static, and just cry.
As far as sax quartets go, all I can say is that I can't think of a single Goddamn one that I've ever found truly interesting or worthwhile. Nothing against the instrument, just the stock of composers behind it and their conventions which seem to pigeonhole it.
I am unfamiliar with Horner's Sneakers as well. I guess my only contribution to this post is to say "I know exactly what you mean, while I have no idea what you're talking about."
There are interesting sax quartets out there. Most of them are recorded by the Rova Quartet. Mmmmmm....good stuff.
Actually I think that from the fact that your composer/whatever group was called something pretentious and dogmatically prone like Praecepta one can pretty much assume all sorts of things that probably aren't too far off the truth.
At least with a group called Mostly Live you knew what you were getting.
Mostly.
Sort of.
Can of worms... opening... everywhere...
Praecepta wasn't really that dogmatic. They generally were exclusively experimentalist, though. They claimed not to be, they swore up and down that each semester would be more "open" than the previous, and each semester was just as apparently hell-bent on the destruction of music.
But yes, the name. Praecepta. I was in the group for 3 semesters (I think? I mean, if you ask them, I never left it), and I still wasn't able to get a good explanation of the etymology. It was a hybrid of two Latin words, but nobody told me what those words were or what they meant. Whoever named the group had gone, so the members pretended they knew what it meant. So basically it's a made-up word. By combining two Latin words. Yeah, basically the very definition of pretentious.
But Praecepta was really more about "breaking out" and thinking outside the box. They were all about "supporting music in any form" and just getting new stuff performed. Sounds good on paper. But I can't describe the level of skepticism and apathy on the faces of the members when I talked about getting one of my more accessible pieces performed. Seriously, either you are eclectic or you're not. Either you "enthusiastically" welcome "all" genres of music or you don't.
I should start a group. I would know how to manage it.
Word Verification: kickq
That's exactly what I would do.
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