The Justice

A performance entitled "Covalence//Concertino for timpani and percussion quartet with electronic miscellany," by composer Peter McMurray MFA '08, was promising in both title and set-up: Four percussionists were to share a number of drums and xylophone-type instruments and, I assumed, "electronic miscellany." Instead, the conductor of this work set a boom box on a chair, turned it on, and he and the percussionists proceeded to spend about ten minutes (another ridiculously long set-up time) arranging the vibraphone, marimba, xylophone and many timpani on the stage. This was the first performance to use any instruments besides voice. I'm not sure why the timpani couldn't have been arranged to perfection before the middle of the concert. Regardless, once the instruments were arranged, the conductor turned off the boombox and the performers played a decidedly acoustic work. At one point, one of the musicians began to play jacks on the surface of one of the timpani. These are the kind of theatrics I came to see at such a concert. It was certainly very interesting to see the musicians interact onstage, but I wondered: Where were the "electronic miscellany"? At the beginning of the third movement of the concertino, I got my answer. The four musicians moved to the center of the stage, just behind the four or five timpani, and bent their bodies so their faces were almost touching the timpani. Some opera-type music began playing over the auditorium's sound system. At this point I stopped taking notes. How various audience members slept through this, I have no idea.

Another performance looked very exciting on the program: according to the program notes, Shawn Greenlee's "Augur" used "drawing as a performance gesture in conjunction with the methods for generating digital sound from graphic patterns scanned via a live camera or stored within the computer…The effect is a situation where singularities and chance occurrences manifest through the exploration of how an image can sound." Greenlee was going to draw and have the computer interpret the shapes of his lines into sounds, and sure enough, this is what he did. Unfortunately, the computer's idea of what a gently curved pencil line should sound like was kind of ear-splitting. We left during this performance with two works remaining in the program.

Continued...

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