KCMETROPOLIS.org
Kansas City's Online Journal of the Performing Arts

Electronic Music Midwest continued its tradition of excellence, in this, its eleventh annual festival hosted by Kansas City Kansas Community College. As one of the premiere electroacoustic conferences in the world, EMM is responsible for having performed over 500 works. That is quite the feat. This essential festival is remarkably approachable for anyone willing to take the first leap. If your impression of electronic music is a random collection of bleeps and blorps, the variety of music at EMM will astound you if you’re willing to delve into outwardly atypical aural spaces.

Concert 8 was the penultimate concert of the festival and I attended for one masochistic reason in particular: to hear a live performance of Stockhausen. We’ll get to that at the end of this article however, as it was the last piece on the concert. Chin Ting (Patrick) Chan’s Katachi II for violin and live processing opened the concert. Chan’s work employed lush use of canonic delays and violinist Sally Williams played the piece with conviction. While the flanger and ending would have greatly benefitted from more subtly of shape, the layers of luxuriant violin playing created a sonically rich tapestry. The brief section that required Williams to play with a rag on a secondary bow could have easily been cut without detriment to the entire work.

Andrew Martin Smith’s Echoes in the Darkness, used bat sounds as source materials for the brief etude. His piece was groove-oriented after a short introduction. The established groove seemed more copy-paste than composed, and the piece was over so quickly that it did not have time to fully explore the possibilities of a single sound source.

Continuing the darkness theme was Andrew Walters’ Moth to Flame for amplified flute and 2-channel tape. The term “tape,” referring to a fixed audio recording, is still used though actual audio-tape has long been relegated to the dustbin museum. Flutist Rebecca Ashe was so captivating and strong in her performance of the equally great flute part that the electronics seemed superfluous. As a programmatic piece, the flute part conveyed all the narrative; the electronics did add a level of discordance unachievable by a single performer, but again, they were unnecessary to the “plot.”

Mike McFerron’s Shape Study: Music for “Metamorphoses” was part composition, part sound design and full parts amazing. Recalling the Kansas City Repertory Theatre’s production of the Mary Zimmerman’s 2002 Drama Desk-multiple-award winner, only made the piece that much more effective. Form and spatialization seemed to be paramount to the work. Opening with a clap of thunder that eased into a gentle downpour accompanied by bongos and ululating voices, the piece morphed into particulate granulizations. The climax echoed back to the opening thunder clap in that it was a monstrous sound mass, rendered even more effective because McFerron eliminated an entire spectrum of frequencies before reintroducing them through a quick fade-in—the electroacoustic version of a deceptive cadence. Ending with a deliberately paced diminuendo, the piece faded out through one of the speakers in the rear of the hall—the storm had passed, metamorphosed itself and the listener, leaving a wake of sonic bliss and awe.

Robert Voisey’s suite of six movements, Constellations, was for fixed media and dancers. Each miniature—a genre in which Voisey excels as he is the creator of 60x60, a concert series devoted to music lasting sixty seconds—was vocally based. I caught spinets of raga and Middle Eastern influence with the embellishments. Though in six movements with an ever-so-slight pause in between each, the sounds remained similar throughout. At first I was nonplussed, but by the end was won over by the steadfastness and singularity of purpose and idea. The choreography was clever; white clad dancers used various light sources (hand-held light strands, single-bulb palm flashlights, and a Christmas light-wrapped dancer) to manipulate the darkness of the stage and hall according to each constellation’s implied persona.

Now. Karlheinz Stockhausen. His work EDENTIA was so… stereotypically… German. Think the Saturday Night Live skit “Sprockets.” This is Dieter’s music und er liebt es! Stockhausen is a force of musical oddities. The cult surrounding his personality is equality gregarious, outspoken, and esoteric. So how was EDENTIA? If there ever was a piece that is difficult to critique it would be this one. As much of Stockhausen’s oeuvre is opaquely linked through spider webs of interconnectivity, I feel many of the references and being able to place the piece “correctly” was lost on me. It was unlike anything I’ve ever heard in live performance. The typically ebulient saxophonist Elizabeth Bunt took on the role of what I can only imagine to be MÜRRISCHEN MÄDCHEN [dour girl]. Part theatre, part dance, part playing, Bunt displayed considerable talent and memorization throughout the elided twenty-five movements. Whether playing three notes and creating a triangle with her soprano saxophone to highlight that she was in fact playing “EDENTIA Dreiecke” to deftly fingered microtonal scales in “SERAPHIM” to astounding double-tongue work in “Die himmlischen Musiker morsen morsen morsen” [The celestial musicians Morse Morse Morse], she never once dropped character or lost focus. The tape part, rendered in stereo from the eight channel original for this performance, was a series of 24 repeating layers. Though the tape part was serialized through the layers, accelerandi, ritardandi, and glissandi added to the swirling breadth of the piece. Now I can say I heard Stockhausen performed live and it was…

REVIEW:
Electronic Music Midwest 11th Annual Festival
Concert 8
Festival runs September 29–October 1, 2011
Kansas City Kansas Community College Performing Arts Center
7250 State Ave, Kansas City, KS
For more information, visit http://emmfestival.org.

By Lee Hartman

Editor-in-Chief; Traditional and New Classical Contributor

Lee Hartman holds degrees from the University of Missouri-Kansas City (D.M.A., M.M.) and the University of Delaware (B.M.). At the University of Delaware, he received a Dean's Scholar position enabling him to pursue an individually designed academic program combining music education and composition. At the University of Missouri-Kansas City he served for three years as the Assistant Director to Musica Nova, the conservatory's new music ensemble, while teaching a variety of composition classes.

In 2007 he was invited to both the Iceland Academy of the Arts in Reykjavík, Iceland and the Sichuan Conservatory in Chengdu, China to give lectures and master classes in composition. In the summer of 2009, Hartman served as an orchestra manager for the Aspen Contemporary Ensemble and Aspen Opera Theater Center for various performances. He serves on the National Executive Committee of the Society of Composers, Inc. as Submissions Coordinator. His primary composition instructors include James Mobberley, Chen Yi, Zhou Long, Paul Rudy, John Beall, and Jennifer Margaret Barker. He currently teaches music theory at the University of Central Missouri and general music classes at Park University having previously taught at UD (2007–08) and UMKC (2006–07).

His compositions can be found at http://www.leehartmanmusic.com

More Featured Articles