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Twenty-five years ago as a staunch, know-it-all classicist, I foolishly dismissed new forms of classical music as "weird" - as I considered it at the time - and much to my detriment. During a composition lesson, I once complained to my professor that I didn't want to write something that sounded "like two cats fighting on tin foil". To this he responded, in a very matter-of-fact tone: "What would be wrong with a piece that sounded like two cats fighting on tin foil?"

Fresh out of cats and tin foil, I didn't have a good answer.

It was with these prior shortcomings in mind that my 16-year-old daughter and I went with eager anticipation to newEar Contemporary Chamber Ensemble's second of two "Music and Minimalism" concerts, performed September 12^th at the Bell Cultural Arts Center on the campus of MidAmerica Nazarene University.

Tom Johnson's Twelve for solo piano opened the evening. Pianist Robert Pherigo deftly navigated the non-tonal landscape, punctuated by more traditional minimalist architecture such as long periods of "composed" silence. I purposely avoid the word "atonal" because Twelve's overall gestalt manages to evade an atonal aural experience, and I am always mindful, historically, that Schoenberg despised this mislabeling of his early 20^th century departure from tonality. With a gracious nod to the twelve-tone technique (the term much preferred by Schoenberg), Johnson created this work using mathematical tonal groupings over a series of 12 short pieces intended to be performed in 12 minutes.

Phill Niblock's Tow by Tom for fixed media was left out of this performance.

Barbara Benary's Sun on Snow, for soprano and mixed ensemble, presented an open-format, five-movement score, giving performers improvisational freedom within a loosely-structured melody that accompanied soprano Sylvia Stoner's interpretation of a "word cube" (five rows of five words) to be read in either of two directions. With creative pausing, logical poetic sense could be preserved. With its sparseness, the poetic effect was reminiscent of Japanese haiku. The repetitive nature of minimalist music often leads the listener to focus on only a small part of the musical interplay that happens to capture their unique frame of mind at that moment. In the fourth movement the saxophonist joined Stoner, and the randomizing word-play found me transfixed by the rhythms that were the result of vocal fricatives emerging from the words "sun," "snow," "shine,", "frost," "tears,"  "roads," "earth," "makes," "us," "seek," and "path." Of the five movements, the 1^st was most interesting with its curious combination (at least to my ear) of Medieval and Asian tonalities, and the 4^th equally interesting for reasons already cited above. The middle movements did not strike me in any favorable way and I found my mind wandering away from the music rather than to it. The 5^th movement, described in the program as being "a calm denouement", seemed anti-climactic, leaving me musically unfulfilled. 

The hyperbolic ARIOS for cello (Lawrence Figg) and piano (Robert Pherigo) by Valdimir Tosic opened with a cello theme consisting of a few harmonic-series notes, while the piano created a sonic "canvas" upon which it projected itself. With the introduction of more harmonic tones the complexity gradually increased and began to intersperse non-harmonic tones which jumped out as a refreshing tonal oasis, propelling the piece towards its more energetic mid-section where the piano interacted vigorously with the expanding thematic elements. The piece devolved as it had built up, with harmonic and thematic diminution and the piano's return to its baseline "canvas." ARIOS was a relaxing journey.

Terry Riley's Autumn Leaves for ensemble felt hollow, but still left me with interesting territory to explore. I began to challenge myself to find subtle "familiarities." In doing so, I heard interesting, albeit fleeting, similarities to Philip Glass, Stravinsky, and even film and TV composer Lalo Schifrin. As the piece evolved I also became aware of a faint, inexplicable, hint of a loosely classical (little "c") structure (I chuckled to myself as I imagined this as "Glass-ical" music). To its credit, Autumn Leaves provided a minimalist landscape with something for everyone.

Next came avant pop composer Jacob Ter Veldhuis' ("Jacob TV") The Body of Your Dreams, for piano (Robert Pherigo) and boombox. Admittedly skeptical as I watched the stage preparation with the placement of the piano followed by a boombox and microphone, all reticence vanished within the first handful of notes after which I was thoroughly mesmerized amidst a blazing interplay between recorded medium and piano counterpoint; it turned out to be my and my daughter's favorite piece on the program. Throughout the performance, a solitary analytic thought emerged that provides a fitting conclusion to this paragraph:  visionary.

Narayana's Cows, another Tom Johnson work, closed the program with its arrangement of narrator and ensemble. I try to avoid painting any experience with too broad a brush, but have to admit that I just did not like this piece. The music is constructed to interpret the narrator's recitation of the 14^th century mathematician's brainteaser that asks how many cows will be produced after 17 years based on a prescribed formula. For the listener yet to be indoctrinated to any form of minimalism, this piece represents the genre as cliché:  repetition, repetition, repetition. In summarizing the experience, I cannot do any better myself than to quote my daughter, being that she was adventurous enough to accompany me to this concert in the first place:  "I wanted music, not a math problem!"

Minimalism, at its core, is meant to transcend the norms that most people would cite in describing music, forcing them to approach the experience in ways that challenge the ear, the mind, the psyche and - in some very rare instances - time and space. I was eager to observe my daughter's reactions to her first exposure to "weird" music. In your own exploration of minimalism I would encourage you to consider taking someone you love and helping them break from that sonic prison that held me back so many years ago. You may never again think of cats and tin foil the same way.

REVIEW:
newEar Contemporary Chamber Ensemble
Music and Minimalism
Saturday, September 12, 2009
Bell Cultural Events Center
MidAmerica Nazarene University
2030 East College Way, Olathe, KS
For information on upcoming performances visit www.newear.org

By Christopher Guerin

Traditional and New Classical music, and Theatre Contributor (Past writer)
Christopher Guerin holds degrees in Music Education, Music Business, and Music Theory & Composition, the latter from the University of Massachusetts (Lowell) College of Music where he co-founded the college's Composers' Guild, and, in 1985, won the Artin Arslanian Composition Award. During college, he also obtained some musical theatre experience as a member of pit orchestras for Threepenny Opera and My Fair Lady. Since 1989, Christopher has been in the very non-artistic corporate sector, where his creative energies have been put to more mundane endeavors 

Christopher credits his musical motivations to his late father, who was concertmaster of the Springfield (MA) Community (pre-cursor to the city's current Symphony) Orchestra and performed popular music on radio in the 1930s. Christopher began his classical training in 1972 at age 10, began teaching at 16 (continuing to take private students throughout college), and traveled extensively with a youth orchestra - including to New Zealand in 1980. After college, and until 1989, Christopher focused on the business end of music as a successful sales manager for one of New England's largest music chains.

Over the past 20 years, Christopher's expertise has focused on medicine as a life risk underwriting officer for a large Midwest insurance group. His past duties included responsibility for risk underwriting in Pacific Rim markets where he traveled extensively to Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Thailand and Burma. Time permitting, he has continued to compose intermittently throughout this period. Christopher is married to Paula, a fellow musician he met during college, and together they have "composed" their magnum opera in three very creative children - an architecture student (go K-State!), an aspiring classical pianist, and a budding writer/journalist. He and his wife relocated from Massachusetts to the Kansas City area in 1997.