Friends of Rain floods Evans

Last Saturday, the Friends of Rain—a mixed group of Lewis & Clark faculty and guest performers—filled Evans auditorium with the melodic, percussive, suspenseful and sometimes outright bizarre sounds of modern music.

The earliest composed piece premiered in 1974. In terms of popular music, that doesn’t seem modern at all, but in the realm of ensemble composition, pieces from the last 50 years fall within the category. However, there are instances when the genre of modern music connotes a certain sound rather than a time period.

Saturday night’s concert certainly reinforced that idea. The music, while instrumental arrangements varied from solo violin (Elisa Boynton) to a small wind and string ensemble with percussion and piano, contained frayed, a-rhythmic phrases and non-traditional use of traditional instruments (an upright bass bow drawn across a gong, or paper placed over piano strings). A question arises when witnessing a performance of this type: how much artistic license is given to the musicians when they are required to surgically navigate the composition of a writer who is stepping out of the ordinary? One might imagine it difficult for a performer to interpret music that they have never heard the likes of before.

My brief interview with LC percussion instructor and Music Theory professor Brett Paschal, a featured performer and conductor in this performance, illuminated some of the intricacy of performing modern music. He referred to two different pieces: the first, written by George Crumb (premiered in 1974), he said offered a considerable amount of creative interpretation as a function of the spatial properties of the composition. When a piece is particularly pensive and malleable, with few notes or sounds in a large space, it is easy for a performer to give or take time, modify exits and entrances, slow down, speed up, grow louder or quiet down. Listening to the performance, this was not evident; the precise way in which every inch of the piece was rendered led me to believe that the many subtleties were ingrained by the original composer. However, during rehearsal it is the prerogative of the musician to re-compose the piece.

“You look at a score, it’ll say Makrokosmos III by George Crumb but when I play it it’s Makrokosmos III by Brett Paschal; we don’t play it exactly the way it says to,” said Paschal.

The other piece he mentioned was Sparkle by Chen Yi (premiered in 1992)—while there were times when the music separated and instruments were exposed in solos or duets, the vast majority of the song was filled to the brim with busy woodwind lines, dissonant chords and upright bass trills. The themes of this piece were difficult for an untrained listener to follow, the wash of sonic effects straining the ears and mind. On the part of the players, this makes it more difficult to provide personal amendments to the piece because every moment is filled with an impenetrable integration of sound.

While this concert was certainly not for everyone, modern music being the way it is, it was a good learning experience and an interesting taste of the new generation of musical composition. These performances are held annually and I would recommend the show to anyone who wants to experience some very strange musical ideas. It also provides an excellent opportunity to observe our music faculty in action and to have a psychoactive trip without the aid of chemical substances.