Rhythm and Death

I just got back from the second and final New Music Ensemble concert. I am glad to be done with that. Before tonight, I've never actually felt embarrassed to be a part of an ensemble.

The theme of the concert was "Rhythm and Death." Most of the pieces revolved around rhythm or some theme related to death, but I think the point was more that after so much rhythm, the audience will beg for death.

The first piece didn't even set the tone for anything. The bunch of us got up and sang an otherwise very pretty Brahms song in front of the piano. Which is fine, except... um... none of us know German diction. And we're not singers. It was painful, but I doubt everyone in the audience understood that was the point.

There were a few pieces that I had nothing to do with, so I won't go into those. No wait, yes I will. One, in particular. Back in the day, Ligeti "composed" a piece for 100 metronomes. Well, we didn't have 100 metronomes to line up, so one of the guys wrote a program that would simulate it (electroacoustic music is big here, so that wasn't a problem to put together). They put a flashlight on the one metronome on stage, and five speakers spatialized the other 99. This was best described by one of my colleagues as "torturous."

Apart from the Brahms, there were two other ensemble pieces. Both of them were maddening. Both were interesting concepts, but tedious compositions. I'm just glad I wasn't in the audience! At least I stayed awake by playing the piano. The final piece, Andriessen's Worker's Union, was an assault on the audience's senses. Basically it's a unison rhythm for 10+ minutes. The instrumentation was for anything that would be industrial and offensive. We had an electric guitar, baritone saxophone, piccolo, hubcap, oil barrel...

Aside: Procuring the oil barrel was actually a fun misadventure with Scott over break. Wandering through a salvage yard, climbing through clutter in search of that perfect metal sound... beneath the gloomy sky... I felt like I was in Chrono Trigger, trying to make my way across the Dome 16 Ruins in 2399 A.D.

Anyway, that last piece was brutal. It was the same thing (with slight variation throughout) for too long. This is the kind of hippie experimentalist crap I'm sick of. It's considered "art" somehow, yet I'm not allowed to herald film music?

I understand these pieces. I understand experimentalism. I understand broadening our perception of what is music. Just because I am sick of this crap doesn't mean I don't "get it." If I may quote the same anonymous person as before, "Just because an idea is interesting doesn't make it an interesting piece."

Thankfully, NME is over for the semester. That means I have my Tuesday evenings open again. I can get back to my regimen. There's nothing I hate more than sacrificing a karate training session for experimental music.

This concert was the worst idea since Kingdom Hearts.