Gotta Dance! Feldman, others hit the floor at MATA Festival
The great thing about the MATA Festival is that you never know what you’re going to get, which in any kind of festival or concert can also be a drawback.
At MATA it isn’t, because the point of the festival under executive director Pauline Kim Harris’ tenure is to be as wide open as possible. That’s not a slogan, but it came through in how she introduced the fundamental values of the festival at the opening concert Thursday night in the DiMenna Center. Harris pointed out that when MATA announces their call for scores, they get them from all over the world. Significantly, there is no application fee. This may seem minor, but it is a crucial consideration for composers, especially young ones with precarious careers and thriving imaginations.
At its best, a MATA concert is full of wildcards and free of the type of academic consensus that produces exquisitely crafted and aesthetically empty music. Thursday night’s concert, though not flawless, had music and performances that were either special events or utterly, even mind-bogglingly, surprising, the kind of thing one craves at new music concerts but infrequently finds.
The central reason for this was Morton Feldman. MATA is celebrating his centennial by putting his influence at the center of the festival. Thursday night, that meant performances of some notable Feldman works and a series of pieces from composers exploring his legacy. And a series it was, with twelve works on a program that lasted three hours.
First was Feldman’s The King of Denmark, a mysterious solo percussion piece played with flowing concentration by Dennis Sullivan II. Played solely with bare hands, it is intensely quiet, at times hovering at the threshold of audibility, quieter even than a pen point on paper—too quiet to be successfully recorded. This is prototypical Feldman from the first part of his career, sounds that sit in space without melodic or rhythmic shape, no tempo, just events and, above all, sensitivity to the etched beauty of timbres and their decay. This was a marvelous experience.
Next was music parallel to Feldman that also introduced the other main theme of the evening—rhythmic and percussive dancing. David Parker transferred Steve Reich’s Clapping Music into toe-shoe and tap steps for dancers Chelsea Ainsworth and Jeff Kazin. They beat out the patterns with their feet, hands, their hands on each other, with a natural flamenco quality coming out of this physicalization of Reich’s music.
There was more tap with Kaleena Miller’s composition/choreography remembering/knowing, performed by Miller and the Bang Group, followed by Parker’s dance realization of Harris’ Sparkle. Harris’ piece was originally for musicians playing toe and tap shoes, Parker put the shoes on the feet, the dancers knocking out the rhythms with intricate configurations that had abstract drama. Miller’s piece had even more drama, the feeling of deep inner feelings driving individual, then ensemble, movement. Both were engrossing.
There was more music on the first half, a lovely, relatively conventional voice/violin duet, Ode Phénicienne, composed by Sami Seif. Performed by soprano Juliet Schlefer and violinist Miranda Cuckson, this gorgeous, expressive work was a memorial for the composer’s cousin, who died at the age of 29. With text from the composer’s uncle in languages including Canaanite, and incorporating Levantine folk music, this had a delicate emotional balance. The intertwining violin and voice pressed at the edges of emotional stress and came together in comfort, and Schlefer sang with a glistening tone and excellent intonation and articulation.
Cuckson also played one of the highlights of the concert, Zihan Wu’s solo violin piece Echoes of the Blank Verse. This was later echoed by Conrad Harris playing Feldman’s solo violin work, For Aaron Copland. The juxtaposition was intriguing, and one of the most concentrated relationships between Feldman and a young composer. Wu’s idea was to capture the structural qualities of blank verse, using gestures and shifting timbres and articulations, and this sounded like a combination of Feldman’s early indeterminate music and his later work, which moves through expressive refinement of sound.
For Aaron Copland, on the other hand, is an atypical diatonic miniature, the music going up and down through simple intervals, like the slow arpeggiations of major and minor chords. Cuckson and Harris are two of the finest violinists on the scene, her manipulation of the instrument, and Harris’ gorgeous, old-world tone, were superb.
The first half was enough. The second was overstuffed and a bit disorganized at times. The concert finished almost to the moment the DiMenna Center closed up for the night, and there was a notably different effect between the first and second halves. The length certainly had something to do with it, and some of the music after intermission felt like it could have been part of a different concert—it didn’t clearly speak of, or against, Feldman’s influence.
Yifan Guo’s Under II and Liann J Kang’s L’Amour Pur both used electronic processing of acoustic instruments, flute and Kang’s voice, respectively. Guo’s also had a Yamaha Disklavier player piano set in an antiphonal stance to the flute and processed sounds.
Neither piece had a clear direction or even internal purpose. Each composer wrote a poetic program note, but the expression of each through their music was hermetic, not speaking clearly to the listener. Guo’s technical means were impressive, but the flute part (played by Roberta Michel) at the center of the work was underwritten, mostly fragmented gestures. There was more music in Kang’s piece, and the lovely sound of her voice and the shimmering electronic transformations had a pleasing ambient quality, but Kang seemed to be speaking more to herself than the listener.
In between these, Anselm McDonnell’s Genesis Cradle for viola—played by Leah Asher—and prerecorded audio shared some of the qualities of the other two pieces but had a simpler and more extroverted purpose—it was a lullaby. With fragments of Debussy’s Claire de Lune and what sounded like audio of a harmonium, playing in just intonation, it spoke with the gentleness and mystery of For Aaron Copland while extending it harmonically and consolidating it into a more familiar form.
The bookends of the second half were again from Parker. The first was Schlemiezel, for two tap dancers wearing checkerboard pattern velcro suit jackets and trousers. In Parker’s words, a “post-vaudeville tap dance act,” there were some entertaining moments with the dancers sticking and unsticking from themselves like conjoined twins, but it didn’t really belong and wasn’t entertaining enough to support it’s duration. The finale was the remarkable Settling Scores/For John Cage. As unbelievable as it seems, this was an ensemble tap realization of Feldman’s For John Cage, a challenge that Parker took on because he found it “impossible.”
Impossible? Perhaps not. Using the pure percussion of the feet, Parker had the dancers move in both oppositional and combined patterns, coming together to create clear, shifting pulses that in no way sounded like the original quiet, long-duration violin and piano duo, but had a compressed shape that could have been a shadow of the original. It was a fine, rhythmically compelling dance piece, and was imbued with the crazy ambition that MATA is all about.
The MATA Festival continues through May 23. matafestival.org
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