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Sonic Generator’s High Tech Brilliance
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
CONCERT REVIEW Sonic Generator. Monday at Georgia Tech’s Alumni House. www.sonicgenerator.gatech.edu
Amid the ghostly images of “Light is Calling,” cellist Brad Ritchie played simple phrases on top of throbbing, pre-recorded ambient sounds — adding a touch of humanity to what could have been a compelling and ghostly (if emotionally remote) piece of techno-art.
“Light is Calling” is a 2004 collaboration between video artist Bill Morrison, who doctored a scene from the 1926 film “The Bells,” and composer Michael Gordon, a self-styled New York hipster.
The seven-minute work embodied key elements of Sonic Generator’s mission: exploring the intersections of music and technology, in all its forms of purity, funkiness, techno beauty and Big Brother scariness.
And by far, Sonic Generator has been the most stimulating addition to Atlanta’s musical life this season. Artists-in-residence at Georgia Tech, the group closed its inaugural season Monday in the ballroom of Tech’s Alumni House. Like its previous concerts, this one drew a packed house.
“New music” is the catch phrase for these sorts of concerts, but only in classical music could anything 65-years-old count as contemporary. John Cage’s “Credo In Us,” from 1942, opened Monday’s concert and it still sounds modern and disorienting.
Cage’s anarchist philosophies have been adopted whole into our culture — art is everything, art is nothing, “art” is whatever you call it — although his music is rarely heard live. Here two percussionists bang jazzy rhythms on kitchen pans, a pianist thumps and twangs a prepared piano, while a radio and LP record player interrupt with frumpy voices from yesteryear, like Mozart’s. In many ways, talking about Cage’s ideas is as interesting as listening to his music — a notion of which the composer himself might have approved.
Like each of the Sonic Generator shows, curated by composer and Tech professor Jason Freeman, we heard a range of musical styles and attitudes toward technology. And with musicians from the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra’s orbit, each piece gets a crack performance.
Gordon Fitzell’s 10-minute “evanescence” opens with spooky sounds: harmonics from the violin (here played by Helen Hwaya Kim), rattled shells (percussionist Tom Sherwood), glissandi (cellist Ritchie) and live interactive electronic enhancements, with Alex Rae at the laptop. Creepy or eerie sounds is a stock artifact of electronic music, and Fitzell’s work could have been subtitled “The Friendly Haunted House.”
Steve Reich’s “Vermont Counterpoint,” rigorous and epic music from 1982, was easily the highlight of the evening. Jessica Peek Sherwood pre-recorded the repeated minimalist phrases (called “cells”) and she also played one of the dozen tracks live on three types of flutes, including alto flute and piccolo.
Matt Gilbert’s computer-created video accompanied this glorious riot of sound, where bouncing balls traced squiggly shapes and provided a sort of play-by-play to the music.
In planning these concerts, Freeman often includes one work that shows the pitfalls of technology, where art, misguidedly, is subservient to the gizmos that help create it.
That describes Joshua Fried’s “Headset Sextet,” where six musicians, standing at microphones, tried to speak aloud the words pumped into their ears. The audience didn’t hear the audio tracks, just the musicians struggling to replicate, in cartoonish voices, what they alone could hear.
Initially amusing, like playing charades, the effect soon felt a bit sadistic and, ultimately, banal.
Fried, a New York composer who introduced his sextet and sat at the electronic controls, framed the spoken words with a wash of industrial sounds. The total effect was of workers chattering on the factory floor.
Throughout, Fried beamed at the performers and giggled aloud, perhaps the only person who was in on his inside joke.
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By Joshua Fried
March 29, 2007 12:12 PM | Link to this
In the last line of his review, Pierre Ruhe wonders if I alone appreciate what he characterizes as a mere joke. Judging from the responses of audience members, who laughed appropriately during the piece, and whooped and applauded loudly at its end, I’d say not so. I observed faces too, and found some smiling, some not, all seemingly rapt. Several local musicians spoke positively to me after the concert, mentioning the canons and other structures underpinning the work. This kind of reaction has been typical of the work in its presentations at Lincoln Center and elsewhere. Mr. Ruhe evidently disagrees too with Josef Woodard of the Los Angeles Times, Ann Powers of the New York Times and the author of Schirmer Books’ American Music in the 20th Century, Kyle Gann, who wrote on the same composition: “Some composers astonish musicians by brilliantly defining new compositional problems. Others zap the audience with displays of raw emotion. For a composer to do both at the same time is a rare epiphany, a sign that he or she has received gifts from two of the gods at once.” I admire this critic’s willingness to break with critical and public consensus, but it’s disingenuous to imply that the audience was left as cold as Mr. Ruhe.
By Bill Simpson
April 4, 2007 10:53 AM | Link to this
It is disconcerting to see Mr. Fried using modern technology in such a dehumanizing and demeaning fashion- bullying performers with dictatorial performance conditions, not even granting the customary benevolence of auditory self review, bullying the audience with extremely loud and aggressive sound levels, and finally using painfully loud low frequencies to close out his composition. Mr. Ruhe’s comments matched my thoughts exactly, with the noting of the element of sadism, factory like electronics and the overall banal nature of the piece. Removing the possibility for expression or thoughtful input from the performers, the composer is left with mechanical formulae for canons, density levels, and other standard techniques. Having reduced amazingly gifted and dedicated performers to the level of pathetically absurd automatons who utter disturbing and grotesque sounds, Mr. Fried then provides his own laugh track of mocking and derisive laughter, which makes up for the lack of live interest in the performance. What comes next, subjecting “performers” or the audience to electric shock, dumping boiling water on the audience, setting fire to part of the music hall? Vaudeville and Howard Stern certainly have quite a tradition of mocking stuttering, but it is surprising to see this entering the world of “art” music. What laughter I heard was a rather uneasy reaction to the grotesque nature of the piece and I felt that the final applause was an acknowledgment of the great effort of the performers. It would seem that technology has an interesting place in the modern art world, and brutal authoritarianism is certainly one of its uses.
Having bullied the performers and the audience, Mr. Fried finally tries to intimidate the reviewer by noting good reviews from other sources. Living in very larger urban centers may make one more attuned to technological oppression, or maybe using professional singers trained in diction and vocal production at other performances could have made quite a difference, but at any rate each reviewer and audience member should be an individual free to have a unique reaction, and this reaction should not be so upsetting or surprising to a composer.