The second of our four visits to DePauw University this season was timed to coincide with cello professor Eric Edberg’s Post-Classical Symposium, a two-day event featuring student and professional performances, panel discussions and lectures. Featured guest speakers included: 8bb; prolific writer-about-music (“I always have to be working on my next book”) and orchestra consultant Joseph Horowitz, who delivered the keynote address; composer, critic, orchestra consultant and professional troublemaker Greg Sandow; composer and New Dynamic Records director Erich Stem; and the Bang on a Can All-Stars (who played the opening night concert in DePauw’s newly refurbished Kresge Auditorium).
“Post-classical”? Eric Edberg had a go at defining this very-easy-to-use but almost impossible to pin down term. I paraphrase:
“classical”: sees itself as superior; centered on the past; acoustic, traditional performance; true to the “work”, true to the “text”.
“post-classical”: embracing non-Western and popular traditions; centered on the present; amplification, non-traditional venues; open to improvisation and free interpretations.
There was a strong educational component to the overall design of the symposium, as stated in the event’s summary:
The purpose of the symposium is to facilitate discussion and exchange ideas about the challenges facing college and university music departments, schools of music, and conservatories and look with fresh eyes at the music curriculum.
The Bang on a Can All-Stars (BoaC) presented a typically funky, rockin’, minimalist program to open the symposium on Thursday night. In the first half, two pieces by BoaC composers Julia Wolfe (the apolcalyptic, 9/11-inspired Big, Beautiful, Dark and Scary) and David Lang (an entertainingly chaotic piece, Sunray) complemented an enjoyable if not mind-blowingly original selection from BoaC clarinetist Evan Ziporyn’s music for a Balinese shadow puppet play, ShadowBang.
Ziporyn was also responsible for an arrangement of four of Conlon Nancarrow’s complex, inventive, endlessly absorbing player-piano studies. I didn’t find these particularly effective: the arrangements were heavily drum kit-driven, which blunted the complex interplay of other layers. The highlight for me was a predictably pedal-to-the-metal performance of a BoaC “standard”, Louis Andriessen’s pulsating, dissonant, wall-of-sound protest piece, Workers’ Union. I found the amplification unsatisfactory for much of the concert: cello, piano and occasionally clarinet were buried under percussion sound, and the whole sound picture had a dull, muffled character.
In an interesting post-concert talkback session, the BoaC folks touched on a number of very interesting points that I hope to deal with in future blog entries, including: repertoire choice within the BoaC family; how the hell the players make a living; and the curious idea of “semi-popular music” (“Produced for lots of people, but just not heard by many”).
The concert was quite poorly attended; there were perhaps 100 people in the hall. The symposium’s other events attracted around 20 people per session. I suppose that this is to be expected for a new venture in its first year of operation at a small liberal arts college in small-town Indiana.
Nursing a bad cold, I missed all of Friday morning’s events. 8bb’s first commitment was an open rehearsal of Stephen Hartke’s Meanwhile. Open rehearsals tend to be more focused than regular rehearsals: members don’t chew gum, don’t tell dirty jokes, tend not to swear quite as much (“bloody” isn’t really a swear word in this country, right?), don’t answer phone calls or check email, don’t air their petty grievances quite so freely. Instead, we address musical problems in a timely and professional fashion. At one point I suggested that we try to tune a certain section of the first movement; Matt thought we should touch on it for a little while, to “show you guys that we do actually care about intonation.” A well-behaved 8bb can be a lean and mean thing.
The rehearsal ended with a rather awkward final run-through of the whole work. All of the students and other symposium participants had left by this stage, leaving us in the room with three rather high-profile auditors: Greg Sandow, Joe Horowitz and Erich Stem. Each followed an individual score of the work, and each listened to the performance with an expression of great concentration. Rather than the casual, fun, educational experience we imagined, this felt like a high-profile audition. So it was not entirely unexpected when, after we finished, someone in the group asked in a sheepish voice, “Um, did we pass?”
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