Rewind: NZ in Boston
After 40 days away from home, I’m finally back and readjusting to being stationary for longer than two days at a time. (Which is basically another way of saying it’s my excuse for being absent for a few days.) At any rate, time to catch up. As rumored, Non-Zero made its triumphant return to concert life last weekend, giving folks in Boston a double dose of our new music stylings. First up was the debut concert of the ensemble NotaRiotus, the BMS’s house band, in which the members of NZ serve as the percussionist and saxophonist. We performed Bob Hasegawa’s Ajax is all about attack. A complete concert of microtonal music might seem like punishment for the ears to some, but rest assured, with a piece by Bob on your program, you are sure to be relieved any monotony you might expect. That was the great thing about Bob’s piece—it wasn’t about microtones, but rather used them just as part of his compositional language. By not fixating on “microtonalness” of the work, Bob created a work with both expression and intensity and very cool interplay between the instruments.
Next up for NZ, after a feverish Monday of rehearsal, was a noon-time show/lecture/recital at the University of Massachusetts—Dartmouth. (Dig Paul Rudolph’s futuristic architecture, which is still anticipating widespread helicopter travel.) On the show with Bob’s piece were pieces by Curtis Hughes, James Tenney, Per Bloland, and Hillary Zipper. The room was completely full, which was wonderful. We started the program with Curtis’ Two-Faced, a manically virtuosic piece, before introducing Bob’s play on microtones. Up third was Tim’s big drum solo—actually, Tim’s big tam-tam solo in the form on James Tenney’s Having Never Written a Note for Percussion, which T performed as a 15-minute crescendo and descrescendo. I went to the back of the room to listen to the piece and to observe the students’ reactions. Now, the tam-tam is capable of making a variety of interesting sounds and Tim conjured forth just about all them, which was why I was a little disappointed to see many of the students not paying attention, or talking amongst themselves, or text-messaging, etc. Honestly, I was a little upset. But then I thought, well, we are challenging their ears a great deal here this morning and music and sounds they’ve probably never heard (or considered music) before. So instead of getting angry, I decided to take a different approach, which manifested itself in a short speech after Tim’s solo that went something like this:
[To the students] “Now at this point in the program, you’ve probably realized that we’re playing music by American composers. And at this point in the program, you’ve probably realized that the music we’re playing is not traditional, or at least what you might consider traditional in terms of tonality, timbre, and so on. We’re inviting you to hear music differently this morning—to engage with sound in a way you’re probably not familiar with. What do you do when you’re confronted with a 15-minute tam-tam roll? What sounds do you hear? How do you process and make sense of those sounds? What does it call forth in your mind? You have the ability to make it relevant to yourself in some way. But you also have the choice: you can choose to engage with the music, or you can choose not to. We’re inviting you to engage.”
It was pretty neat. After giving them the choice of listening or not, and not being dogmatic and proclaiming that they MUST engage, it seemed like the majority of the room suddenly warmed up to what we were doing. (It could of also been from the fact that the next piece was Hillary’s, which is absolutely arresting and beautiful.) Although after the show when Wayman Chin came up to me and said, “I’m glad you said what you did. It was perfect,” did the reason for some of the students’ reactions become clear: it was a music 101 class. I’m sure there were some who didn’t enjoy what NZ played, but we got some great reactions from the kids after the show.