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Sonic Generator Makes Its Debut
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
CONCERT REVIEW Sonic Generator, a new-music ensemble. Tuesday at Georgia Tech’s Alumni House. www.sonicgenerator.gatech.edu.
Back in the days when a computer filled a room and information was sorted on IBM punch cards, composers who were interested in new worlds had to hook up with academia to get logon time. Under these conditions, electronica became its own reward, with a key feature being the contrast between human musicians and computers.
That landscape has shifted, of course; just a few months ago composer Osvaldo Golijov declared laptops “a folk instrument, a revolution,” a common means to an end for people with or without training.
In the book “Modern Music and After,” the best available survey of the avant-garde, Paul Griffiths surmises, “as electronic equipment becomes normal and sophisticated, so the existence of electronic music as a category seems to be disappearing.”
But the debut concert by Sonic Generator, a fabulous new-music ensemble based at Georgia Tech, reveled in the era when music technology was an organizing principal, a centripetal force for art.
The show proved unexpectedly popular, too, with every seat taken and a crowd standing in back. Scattered in the audience were some of Atlanta’s most recognized composers and performers. (One absent Atlanta composer had good reason: Alvin Singleton’s music was being performed across town by the DeKalb Symphony Orchestra. It was a good night for contemporary music.)
Most of Sonic Generator’s music was atonal, aggressively “modern” sounding and thus retro — an aesthetic choice made by the organizers, since electronic music is used in a spectrum of styles. Clearly, Sonic Generator was harking back to the glory days, when cool opinion resided in the computer lab.
The beginning, middle and end of their debut held big pieces for a quintet of instrumentalists, plus a conductor (ASO assistant Laura Jackson) and an electronics technician seated at a Mac powerbook. On the whole, the big pieces were weaker than the small-scale pieces played in between.
It started with Rand Steiger’s “13 Loops” (1988). First the flute (played by Jessica Peek Sherwood) trills and twitters and gets an elaborate electronic reply, then each instrument introduces itself in turn — violin (Louise Higgins), bass clarinet (Ted Gurch), cello (Brad Ritchie) and percussion (Tom Sherwood). The acoustic instruments don’t interact much initially, but the distant sonic wash of their overlapping echoes provides the unnerving sensation of sound bouncing around a closed yet immense space, like they were playing in the Grand Canyon.
It spiraled down from there. In the middle was an unabashedly ugly work, Joshua Fineberg’s “Paradigms” (1993, here given its U.S. premiere). A Harvard professor who studied in Paris, Feinberg uses timbre (acoustic and electronic) as an element of harmony but with none of the sensuousness of the French spectralists. “Paradigms” had all the appeal of a water-stained concrete Soviet apartment block.
The sourest note came at concert’s end. If only David Felder had invested less creativity in his title and more in his music, “partial [dist]res[s]toration” might have gotten somewhere. There’s a complicated reason why he spells it that way, but since the music is weak, who cares? Pretty or abrasive at turns, after a few minutes it glazed the mind and sucked the spirit from the listener. A lot of work, not much payoff.
Fineberg and Felder made an important point that colored the entire evening. Technology for its own sake — or rather, when technology outpaces artistry — is akin as virtuosity for its own sake. There’s a parallel. In the late 19th century, as conservatories were established and teaching became standardized, the emphasis landed on extreme virtuosity, and many a noodle-headed violin concerto was composed with no substance whatsoever but an endless flow of dazzlingly rapid passagework. Is technology classical music’s new virtuosity?
Luckily, there was just as much good stuff, in smaller packages. Mario Davidovsky’s “Synchronisms No. 6” for piano and tape (1970) is a fascinating seven-minute document. The piano part, played by Lisa Leong, is stiff and dry while, ironically, the Pong-era electronics convey personality, humor and vitality. It’s a period piece, music of dated charm, like watching the special effects in an old Godzilla film.
“Jam’aa” by Georgia Tech prof Gil Weinberg and his student, Scott Driscoll, seemed more like a demonstration piece than a composition ready for an audience, but it was great fun to watch and hear their two-armed robotic drummer, Haile, jam with two humans, Sherwood and Driscoll. Each had a drum. Each listened, reacted, improvised. Here the electronics were inside Haile’s brain and her drumming was made in acoustic space.
Jonathan Kramer’s “Renascence” for clarinet and electronics (1974) stole the show. The clarinet starts in a jaunty mood over a drone. A delayed echo gains prominence, first one added voice, then several, then too many to keep track of, coming from loudspeakers in the four corners of the room. Off in one corner, several clustered echoes were heard softly, sounding like sea gulls squawking, with the drone a stand-in for the eternal surf — a pleasantly evocative sound for the moment it lasted. Every now and again Gurch stopped playing, his echoes carrying on without him till they collided and created their own internal rhythms, like ripples in a pool stretching outward and crashing into ripples that had rebounded from hitting the wall. Kramer’s music, using technology three decades old, sounded much more fresh than some of the pieces composed with the latest gadgetry.
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By Peter Stelling
November 17, 2006 2:48 PM | Link to this
There seems to be no place to “click” to post a comment on the review of the November 15 ASO concert. Surely this is an oversight? If someone will fix that so others can have their say, I will refrain from commenting this week.