By STEVE SMITH
Published: January 18, 2011
For the dozens of artists who participated in the opening marathon concert of the Ecstatic Music Festival at Merkin Concert Hall on Monday, the event was less a defining breakthrough moment than the establishment — temporary or not — of an uptown beachhead for a flourishing alliance normally encountered in downtown and Brooklyn spaces like Le Poisson Rouge, Galapagos Art Space, Issue Project Room and Joe’s Pub.
Enlarge This Image
Richard Termine for The New York Times
Arone Dyer, left, and Aron Sanchez of Buke & Gass leading an audience stretch in the opening marathon concert of the Ecstatic Music Festival at Merkin Concert Hall on Monday.
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The notion of a mission seemed too heavy for the feel of this sprawling showcase, which was meant to run for seven hours and consumed nearly eight. If there was a core statement, it could have been — to twist slightly the title of a song by Sarah Kirkland Snider, a gifted composer to be featured in a later festival event — “This is what we’re like.”
To elaborate, some of the artists engaged by the composer Judd Greenstein, the festival’s curator, are fellow composers whose music partakes of sounds and styles derived from Minimalism and popular-music idioms. Others are creators who operate chiefly within indie-pop, drawing on techniques and complexities pioneered by avant-garde rock innovators like Brian Eno and Captain Beefheart.
Most of the artists involved move freely between those spheres. Border-flouting participants in the marathon included So Percussion, nominally a classical quartet but active in electronica circles; Julianna Barwick, an ethereal vocalist who employs digital effects not unlike the composer Terry Riley’s early tape-loop delays; and Corey Dargel and Gabriel Kahane, distinctive and dissimilar songwriters whose work fuses Classical sophistication with pop directness.
The event had its precedents, most obviously the marathon concerts that Bang on a Can has presented for more than two decades, which have offered similar artistic profusions and aesthetic collisions. (Eclipsing that forebear was not on the agenda here; Bang on a Can associates played in this marathon and will be featured in subsequent programs.)
John Matthias, Adrian Corker and Andrew Prior — English artists whose folk songs for voice, violin, piano and laptop computer fuse rusticity and technology — declared common cause with Nonclassical, a similarly bold English concert series and record label. And in their sheer range, the marathon and festival also recall Big Ears, a two-year-old series in Knoxville, Tenn., in which disparate artists — and, as important, disparate audiences — meet and mingle.
Something of the same effect was produced at Merkin, a staid but comfortable 450-seat Kaufman Center space continually in search of identity, as performers trooped across the stage in more or less efficient succession. Die-hards went the distance, but audience turnover was steady; according to a Merkin spokesman, 1,100 people came and went during the course of the concert.
Early in the afternoon the audience was liberally sprinkled with very young children, as well as curious concertgoers considerably older than the crowd usually encountered at nightclub dates by these artists. By the end of the evening, the audience more closely resembled the kind that assembles for showcases regularly presented by New Amsterdam, the vital record label Mr. Greenstein operates with Ms. Snider and another composer, William Brittelle.
Still, it seemed fitting somehow that the first artists featured during the marathon were outliers. Ne(x)tworks, a new-music collaborative with ties to the New York School of experimentalist composers of the 1950s, performed “Stay on It,” a 1973 work by Julius Eastman, a New York composer who died in 1990. Restored to circulation via a 2005 anthology on the New World label, Mr. Eastman’s once marginalized music has started to find an appreciative new audience.
Here “Stay on It” sounded like a prescient precursor to a sound that has flourished among New Amsterdam-associated composers like Mr. Greenstein and Nico Muhly. Initially bright, affirmative and unanimous in its Minimalist pulsations, the piece grew unruly, with individual musicians breaking away from the dominant ensemble theme for passages of free expression.
As those players rejoined, the sound became increasingly heterodox: distinct voices not fused seamlessly, as in a classical ensemble, but loosely united in joyous common cause. It would be hard to find a more potent metaphor to represent this festival’s intent to celebrate cross-pollination and collaboration.
Timothy Andres, professorial in rumpled tweed and bow tie, performed his own fidgety, ticklish piano work “Everything Is an Onion,” alongside a movement from Ives’s “Concord” Sonata. So Percussion, with a fifth player, Ian Rosenbaum, evoked a pixie gamelan engaged in a Burundi drum troupe’s call-and-response patterns.
Face the Music, a Kaufman Center new-music group whose members are teenage students, was poised and exuberant in works by Missy Mazzoli and Christine Southworth. NOW Ensemble presented “City Boy,” an effusive new piece by Mr. Greenstein, and ably abetted Mr. Dargel’s deadpan sentimentalities.
Two final sets showed both the challenges and the benefits of collaboration among artists of divergent styles. The closing performance offered an eager but inconclusive alliance between Victoire, Ms. Mazzoli’s quintet, and Buke & Gass, the art-rock duo of Arone Dyer and Aron Sanchez. Each group was outstanding in its individual offerings. But when Buke & Gass joined Victoire, Ms. Mazzoli’s cool, moody pieces gave the duo little room to operate; when roles were reversed, Victoire functioned as elegant window dressing for Buke & Gass’s gangly romps.
Immediately before, the violist Nadia Sirota, a linchpin of this artistic movement, had played Mr. Muhly’s “Keep in Touch.” As Ms. Sirota soared and scraped, Mr. Muhly plucked bass notes on a piano; the Icelandic producer and arranger Valgeir Sigurdsson added electronic textures with a laptop, including samples of the singer Antony Hegarty’s cooing voice. Trenchant and aching from its inception in 2005, Mr. Muhly’s piece sounded anthemic here: a sublime example of precisely the kind of collaborative vision the Ecstatic Music Festival was formed to celebrate.
The Ecstatic Music Festival continues through March 28 at Merkin Concert Hall, 129 West 67th Street, Manhattan; (212) 501-3300, ecstaticmusicfestival.com.
Published: January 18, 2011
For the dozens of artists who participated in the opening marathon concert of the Ecstatic Music Festival at Merkin Concert Hall on Monday, the event was less a defining breakthrough moment than the establishment — temporary or not — of an uptown beachhead for a flourishing alliance normally encountered in downtown and Brooklyn spaces like Le Poisson Rouge, Galapagos Art Space, Issue Project Room and Joe’s Pub.
Enlarge This Image
Richard Termine for The New York Times
Arone Dyer, left, and Aron Sanchez of Buke & Gass leading an audience stretch in the opening marathon concert of the Ecstatic Music Festival at Merkin Concert Hall on Monday.
Blog
ArtsBeat
The latest on the arts, coverage of live events, critical reviews, multimedia extravaganzas and much more. Join the discussion.
The notion of a mission seemed too heavy for the feel of this sprawling showcase, which was meant to run for seven hours and consumed nearly eight. If there was a core statement, it could have been — to twist slightly the title of a song by Sarah Kirkland Snider, a gifted composer to be featured in a later festival event — “This is what we’re like.”
To elaborate, some of the artists engaged by the composer Judd Greenstein, the festival’s curator, are fellow composers whose music partakes of sounds and styles derived from Minimalism and popular-music idioms. Others are creators who operate chiefly within indie-pop, drawing on techniques and complexities pioneered by avant-garde rock innovators like Brian Eno and Captain Beefheart.
Most of the artists involved move freely between those spheres. Border-flouting participants in the marathon included So Percussion, nominally a classical quartet but active in electronica circles; Julianna Barwick, an ethereal vocalist who employs digital effects not unlike the composer Terry Riley’s early tape-loop delays; and Corey Dargel and Gabriel Kahane, distinctive and dissimilar songwriters whose work fuses Classical sophistication with pop directness.
The event had its precedents, most obviously the marathon concerts that Bang on a Can has presented for more than two decades, which have offered similar artistic profusions and aesthetic collisions. (Eclipsing that forebear was not on the agenda here; Bang on a Can associates played in this marathon and will be featured in subsequent programs.)
John Matthias, Adrian Corker and Andrew Prior — English artists whose folk songs for voice, violin, piano and laptop computer fuse rusticity and technology — declared common cause with Nonclassical, a similarly bold English concert series and record label. And in their sheer range, the marathon and festival also recall Big Ears, a two-year-old series in Knoxville, Tenn., in which disparate artists — and, as important, disparate audiences — meet and mingle.
Something of the same effect was produced at Merkin, a staid but comfortable 450-seat Kaufman Center space continually in search of identity, as performers trooped across the stage in more or less efficient succession. Die-hards went the distance, but audience turnover was steady; according to a Merkin spokesman, 1,100 people came and went during the course of the concert.
Early in the afternoon the audience was liberally sprinkled with very young children, as well as curious concertgoers considerably older than the crowd usually encountered at nightclub dates by these artists. By the end of the evening, the audience more closely resembled the kind that assembles for showcases regularly presented by New Amsterdam, the vital record label Mr. Greenstein operates with Ms. Snider and another composer, William Brittelle.
Still, it seemed fitting somehow that the first artists featured during the marathon were outliers. Ne(x)tworks, a new-music collaborative with ties to the New York School of experimentalist composers of the 1950s, performed “Stay on It,” a 1973 work by Julius Eastman, a New York composer who died in 1990. Restored to circulation via a 2005 anthology on the New World label, Mr. Eastman’s once marginalized music has started to find an appreciative new audience.
Here “Stay on It” sounded like a prescient precursor to a sound that has flourished among New Amsterdam-associated composers like Mr. Greenstein and Nico Muhly. Initially bright, affirmative and unanimous in its Minimalist pulsations, the piece grew unruly, with individual musicians breaking away from the dominant ensemble theme for passages of free expression.
As those players rejoined, the sound became increasingly heterodox: distinct voices not fused seamlessly, as in a classical ensemble, but loosely united in joyous common cause. It would be hard to find a more potent metaphor to represent this festival’s intent to celebrate cross-pollination and collaboration.
Timothy Andres, professorial in rumpled tweed and bow tie, performed his own fidgety, ticklish piano work “Everything Is an Onion,” alongside a movement from Ives’s “Concord” Sonata. So Percussion, with a fifth player, Ian Rosenbaum, evoked a pixie gamelan engaged in a Burundi drum troupe’s call-and-response patterns.
Face the Music, a Kaufman Center new-music group whose members are teenage students, was poised and exuberant in works by Missy Mazzoli and Christine Southworth. NOW Ensemble presented “City Boy,” an effusive new piece by Mr. Greenstein, and ably abetted Mr. Dargel’s deadpan sentimentalities.
Two final sets showed both the challenges and the benefits of collaboration among artists of divergent styles. The closing performance offered an eager but inconclusive alliance between Victoire, Ms. Mazzoli’s quintet, and Buke & Gass, the art-rock duo of Arone Dyer and Aron Sanchez. Each group was outstanding in its individual offerings. But when Buke & Gass joined Victoire, Ms. Mazzoli’s cool, moody pieces gave the duo little room to operate; when roles were reversed, Victoire functioned as elegant window dressing for Buke & Gass’s gangly romps.
Immediately before, the violist Nadia Sirota, a linchpin of this artistic movement, had played Mr. Muhly’s “Keep in Touch.” As Ms. Sirota soared and scraped, Mr. Muhly plucked bass notes on a piano; the Icelandic producer and arranger Valgeir Sigurdsson added electronic textures with a laptop, including samples of the singer Antony Hegarty’s cooing voice. Trenchant and aching from its inception in 2005, Mr. Muhly’s piece sounded anthemic here: a sublime example of precisely the kind of collaborative vision the Ecstatic Music Festival was formed to celebrate.
The Ecstatic Music Festival continues through March 28 at Merkin Concert Hall, 129 West 67th Street, Manhattan; (212) 501-3300, ecstaticmusicfestival.com.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/19/arts/music/19ecstatic.html?nl=nyregion&emc=urb3
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