Dallas ars nova

It made me start thinking, though: what do we mean by saying that music is difficult or easy to listen to? Think smooth jazz, soft rock, and cheesy massage CDs with fake fountains splashing. Yes, sometimes we want to listen to music that is relaxing, that can soothe or entertain. But music can be beautiful, graceful and pleasing without being soporific. And it can create many kinds of experiences, not all of them relaxing.

Sometimes it can be more like a fast train, or a steep climb, or a bracing sea breeze. It might be a demented puzzle, or a cathartic wail, or a deep meditation, or a moment of flying. As a musician, and as a listener, I want music to be all these things and more. The festival's directors invited me to do some blog posts from a performer's perspective, and I want to share a few thoughts here on various ways of listening as related to the process of practicing and rehearsing for the festival concerts.

Carter's music is notated in very clear and specific detail, and requires much individual attention by the players before and throughout the rehearsal process. Working on a piece alone in the practice room might be likened to a laboratory. Is it calm, sterile, a controlled environment: just you, the music, and the metronome. Bringing it into rehearsal, the first step out into the real world, you hear it all differently.

It's not the same as studying the score and listening to the recording. Suddenly, other people are involved, and like most human endeavors, this makes the musical experience both richer and more complicated. Several members of the ensemble mentioned this in rehearsal: the way it sounds and feels so different to put it all together, the way that hearing the other parts changes your perception of your own.

I spent most of Saturday rehearsing the Carter, and the evening at a Bach Festival concert in which a friend was playing. Listening to Bach, I thought again about this idea of easy versus difficult listening. In fact, I was also struck by the way that both Bach and Carter, though working with different materials, have a similarity in their deeply structured music and use of overlapping layers. However, Bach is more familiar to many listeners and many performers as well , and therefore is often perceived as easier to listen to.

Music that is less familiar challenges us to release our conditioned responses and expectations. Each pair is closely connected, often interlocking, and uses the same primary rhythmic subdivision the winds have groups of three and six, the strings two and four, the percussion five. Since , with Terry Riley's In C , another reaction revolted against the established order. This time, in lieu of the exclusivity of abstract serial methods, composers began experimenting with new space-time tonal perspectives and rhythmic structures.

Music is a language and a new language requires time to absorb into the social fabric. This passage of time has elapsed and the update is now in progress.

Artistic Director, Ryan Ross. Monday, Nov 9, evening's performance displayed full competence to deliver the rigors of this most varied and strenuous program. The theme of Pierrot dominated the program. Written for ice skaters, hence Petroush-skates, this inventive composition is an original rework of Igor Stravinsky's 3 act ballet Petrouchka.

Tower followed the 3 act musical form as if she put Stravinsky's score into a grinder and then reassemble selected bits and scraps into her own condensed 12 minute version.

The ensemble was conducted convincingly by Ryan Ross. Ross brought to life the carnival spirit of the beginning and ending, set between a brief middle section that alluded to Petrouchka's deep melancholy and disturbed behavior. Ross handled these tempi and dynamic contrasts with subtle control. Next Mr. White has written many pieces with titles from Haiku and Chinese Proverbs. The meaning refers to sorry and grief: " Loss is guaranteed in life, yet so hard to see the beauty".

Ross says that the piece is modeled on the sound of the Japanese shakuhashi flute. There are two sections: an opening section of loud attack and motion followed by several minutes of ever quieting and disperse decay into nothingness. Ross's beat was always clear and steady through the empty spaces.

With a small ensemble, economy of gesture is appropriate. Ross conveyed an austere and abstract atmosphere. Artistic Director, Jordan Smith. Schoenberg expanded late German Romantic Chromaticism into "free tonality" and later into a realm of rigorously structured atonality - 12 Tone Technique. These were the early years of German Expressionism when artists sought to express life through a subjective distortion of reality for an emotional angst effect.

Pierrot Lunaire indeed does achieve an angst. During the 21 poem cycle, Pierrot starts on an unstable foot that leads down a path to deranged dissolution. At the end Pierrot somehow walks away from madness in a fog of resolve about his fate. To achieve this artistic state of being we heard Jessica Abel "sprechstimme" the role of Pierrot. Able, from the Peabody Conservatory, has been coached by an authority of sprechstimme, Phyllis Bryn-Julson.

After the pitch is sung the voice deviates to speech quality creating an eerie unsettling feeling. Affiliated no longer with the Dallas Festival of Modern Music. Facebook Twitter YouTube. Ars Nova Dallas.