NYNME brings 49 years of imagination, excitement to season finale
There are plenty of top-flight musicians and ensembles who play new music in New York City, and life and culture being what it is here, too few chances to perform. So it’s astonishing in and of itself that the New York New Music Ensemble has been able to steadily present concerts of—and sometimes record—cutting edge musical compositions for 49 years.
Smaller than peer ensembles like Talea and the International Contemporary Ensemble, the group distinguishes itself with a long view of post-WWII music. (NYNME is flutist Emi Ferguson, clarinetist Bixby Kennedy, violinist Karen Kim, cellist Chris Finckel, pianist Stephen Gosling, and percussionists Daniel Druckman and Eduardo Leandro who also conducts.)
Their season finale Monday night at the Milton Rensick and Pat Passiof Foundation was an exceptional example of the group’s thinking, artistic values, and musical skill. With special guests soprano Jamie Jordan and pianist Blair McMillen—who switched with Gosling midway through—NYNME played modernist classics by Luciano Berio, Georges Aperghis, and Fred Rzewski, Gabriella Smith’s recent work Anthozoa, and the world premiere of Tattoo on Porcelain by young composer B.K. Zervigón. With the title of “Resistance” for the whole, NYNME fit excellent choices and superb playing inside two powerful political statements.
This began with Berio’s O King, his devastating, compact elegy made in response to the assassination of Martin Luther King—he later added an orchestrated version to his Sinfonia. Berio broke apart King’s name into individual sounds, which the soprano lays out and gradually rebuilds through less than a handful of pitches. The ensemble plays along with each sung sound, adding percussive attacks and sustained backgrounds.
This was all about focus, clarity and beauty of sound, and subtle variations in articulation. Precise playing brought everyone in the ensemble together with the accumulating intensity of shared purpose. Jordan sculpted each phoneme, completely in tune with both the instruments and the spirit and expressive purpose of the piece. A strong sense of purpose was the key, and that laid out the direction of the evening.
While thematically the music that followed, Tattoo on Porcelain and Anthozoa, were unrelated to O King, there were similar musical virtues. Both pieces made important use of instrumental colors and timbres and also shared complex polyrhythms, though in very different ways.
The first was a remarkable work, composed with great judgement and a sense of mystery, played with sharpness. There seemed not just multiple rhythms but the effect of multiple tempos at the beginning, then the pace slowed and individual lines spread out into a moody narrative of inner landscapes. The music had no predictable direction but the assured shape of a form that comes into view through time. NYNME was not just in command of the notes but seemed themselves ready to be as surprised by, and trust in, the composer as was the listener. This is music that uses spare means and careful, deliberate organization of events to create an abstract surface with communicative depths.
Anthozoa was more specifically pictorial, inspired by the sounds of the sea and marine life in French Polynesia. With polyrhythms from percussion and McMillen damping the piano strings, pizzicato cello, and the violin played with a stick tapping the strings, this had a strong Indonesian flavor. One heard dance music for shadow plays, with diatonic, pentatonic material, quick glissando gestures, and a sense of physical poise, as if the musicians were moving in space. While Tattoo on Porcelain separated into component parts that followed a winding path, Smith’s music came together in lovely, lyrical and horizontal fashion.
There was a coda with an elegiac feel that was supposed to represent the threat this environment faces from climate change and overfishing, but the context of the music made it into something else, a sweet and settling addendum to something that had the straightforward appeal of a song.
After a brief pause, NYNME finished with Leandro playing Graffitis, a solo percussion piece by Aperghis, and Rzewski’s Coming Together.
Graffitis is an incredible work, and Leandro gave it a fantastic performance. The percussionist has a variety of instruments they play with bare hands, while reciting an excerpt, in German, from Goethe’s Faust, Part II, and also scat-singing nonsense syllables. All of this goes together, the voice and hands in unison, even to the point of harmonizing with a cow call and making a vocal sound punctuated by grabbing wooden chimes and simultaneously tapping a gong with the forehead.
There’s constant activity that is wildly entertaining, and this is both a musical and theater piece. Leandro performed with skill and spirit, adding to it by starting with an impromptu speech about communication that segued into the piece in the manner of Tom Johnson’s Failing: A Very Difficult Piece for Solo String Bass, and with vibrant Dada attitude and a sense of humor throughout. This is a piece that is meant to be seen for its own brilliance and how it brings out the brilliance in a performer, and proved an unforgettable experience.
As is, the finale, which had spectacular force. Coming Together is one of the great performing works. It has a vocalist recite an excerpt from a letter leftist bomb maker Sam Melville wrote from Attica, before the 1971 uprising in which he was killed, over a gradually intensifying bed of music anchored by a propulsive, continuous ostinato in the piano and washes of sustained pitches and accented interjection from the other instruments.
Rzewski’s piece is one that can rouse a listener to social action as profoundly as Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and that speaks with such vernacular—and intelligent—language that it has been performed not only by singers but actors and even activist-scholar Angela Davis and hip hop artist Mos Def.
With McMillen’s indefatigable playing underneath, Jordan delivered her part with careful adherence to where Rzewski placed the text. Close to speech-song, there was a rounded lilt to every word, and her clear articulation that gave full meaning to the words and also made space for subtle and effecting emphases, like an edge on the word “excellent.” When she reached the part with the complex, ominous “feeling for the inevitable direction of my life,” the feeling was multilayered and uncanny.
Like O King and Tattoo on Porcelain, and with Ferguson and Kennedy bringing a quasi-pastoral feeling to the playing, this had the feeling of a burgeoning mass as details accumulated. With a slower pace than one usual hears in this piece, it was less like a fuse burning toward an explosive device but the far greater, geological force of a volcano that reaches the bursting point the moment after the music, at its height, stops. A thrilling performance of one of the great musical works since the dawn of the recording era.
