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April 27, 2013
Unruly Music Opener: Percussion refined
UPCOMING EVENTS
April 5th, 2013 | By Tom Strini
Saturday, 27 April, 2013
talktalktalk, Tobias Madison & Kaspar Müller
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Percussion is music’s big bang, but it has an indoor voice,
too. We heard it often at Thursday evening’s Unruly Music
Festival opener, as percussionist Greg Beyer joined cellist
Chris Wild and pianist Mabel Kwan in an evening of
chamber works involving things you hit. Or scrape. Or
lightly tap.
Cinnabar Heart (2009) and Spiral 1 (1987), both by
Cambodian-born Chinary Ung, opened and closed the
concert. Beyer, solo in Cinnabar, now and then sang
dreamily in free-floating syllables as his soft mallets
coaxed from his marimba gestures and harmonies as
ephemeral and perfumed as incense smoke.
Chinary Ung. Photo courtesy of the University Spiral, at about 14 minutes the longest work on this
relatively brief program, required all three performers.
Nothing repeats in this piece and it doesn’t exactly
develop, but it does have regions of distinct activity: atom-smashing, for example, when all three
players hit their notes hard, to fuse a new sonic element. Other episodes feature Impressionistic
chords beneath and lyric cello melodies; inflected pentatonic tunes suggesting Cambodian tradition;
stretches of suspenseful, herky-jerky rhythm; quiet, low glissandi, suggesting the doppler effect of a
truck fading into the distance; bits of chaotic tumult; and stretches of driving momentum. Subtle
transitions connect these bits, which we hear as charms on a bracelet. The episodes recur, not
verbatim but in spirit.
of California-San Diego.
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The Quasimondo Milwaukee Physical Theatre:
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Over the course of the program, Kwan’s piano and Wild’s cello produced unconventional sounds akin
http://thirdcoastdaily.com/2013/04/unruly-music-opener-percussion-refined/
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Unruly Music Opener: Percussion refined | Third Coast Daily
4/27/13 3:44 PM
Over the course of the program, Kwan’s piano and Wild’s cello produced unconventional sounds akin
to percussion. In Claude Vivier’s 1975 Piece for Cello and Piano, the two exchanged and overlapped
tremolos over wide intervals in various ranges. These distant earth tremors gave way to groans and
scrapings emanating from the cello and the innards of the piano. These noises somehow congealed
into a suave little melody, which tumbled into a thicket of amorphous gestures. It was all very willful,
arbitrary and enchanting.
Osvaldo Golijov’s elegiac Mariel, a cello solo from 1999, was the most melodious and tonal music on
the program — it even has a V-I cadence at a crucial point. Strings of rising figures in dotted rhythms,
long-short first and then short-long, ratcheted up the energy at the start. They blossom into beautiful
lyric melodies that Wild played with effortless dignity.
Kwan’s piano became very much a percussion instrument in Alexandre Lunsqui’s Glaes, composed for
Beyer in 2007. Beyer manned an unconventional battery including, first and foremost, a Brazilian
bermibao, and wine bottles, sandpaper, pie tins, a mixing bowl and more. With these implements and
the prepared piano, the two created and sustained Lunsqui’s complicated but propulsive beat as they
played some wickedly irregular rhythms against that beat. Kwan spent most of her time reaching into
the piano, to produce all manner of exotic sounds. When Beyer wasn’t busy with his own toys, he
reached into the piano, too.
Glaes (that is, Glass) skittered by lightly in their hands, as they teased out the wit in the music. The
rhythm charmed but not so much as the oddball timbres. Lunsqui made a sonic curio shop of funny
little gizmos that buzz and pop in your ear like so many funny little wind-up toys on a table. Or better
yet, like an Alexander Calder circus.
The Unruly Music Spring Festival, a UWM Music Department project directed by Chris Burns,
continues at the Marcus Center’s Vogel Hall through this weekend.
7:30 p.m. Friday, April 5: A Milwaukee large-ensemble improvisation summit, featuring the
Milwaukee Laptop Orchestra (MiLO), the TC-11 Orchestra (TORCH), and the Great Lakes
Improvising Orchestra, led by Hal Rammel.
Saturday, April 6: The Spektral Quartet returns to perform Elliot Carter’s pivotal Second String
Quartet and a host of new works composed for the group by UWM faculty and students.
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