Groggy, but not as much as some

Saturday night, Sunday morning and Sunday afternoon I caught a good-sized chunk of the Bang on a Can marathon, but Darcy James Argue live-blogged the entire twenty-six hours.  More comments here and here from Pete Matthews.  (Update: and photos!)  And if I'm not mistaken Steve Smith was also there the whole time, unless (as he suggested) he had to be airlifted out.  I look forward to his coffee-fueled comments.  (Update: and here they are.  Darcy also added some fantastic photos: the first 13 hours here, and the last 14 here.  I particularly like the ones of Mark Stewart and Matt Pass, in their guise as Music for Plumbers.)

Some early-in-the-evening high points: Lad, Julia Wolfe's world premiere for bagpipes played by the Saffron United Pipe Band, and eighth blackbird in Franco Donatoni's exquisite Arpège (1986), a remarkable match for the ensemble's virtuosity.  And then Patti Monson and TACTUS all but demolished the room with Gotham, Michael Gordon's hair-raising score from 2004 with film by Bill Morrison.

At about 2:30 a.m. Sunday morning, after the heroic Bang on a Can All-Stars finished Brian Eno's Music for Airports, the Hartt Brass Band made an indelible mark on the proceedings in Galina Ustvolskaya's Composition No. 2.  Her vision is stark (even more so in the middle of the night).  Eight double-basses start with fierce stabs, as the piano jumps in, followed by a percussionist (here, Bill Solomon) sitting in front of a block of wood struck with two hard plastic mallets.  Solomon's initial taps were fairly gentle, but soon escalated to terrifying cracks that sounded like rifle shots, echoing in the cavernous space of the World Financial Center.

Fired up by the Hartts, I had to stick around just a little longer for red fish blue fish, the percussion ensemble at University of California, San Diego, who were impressive earlier in Signal Intelligence (2004) by Christopher Adler.  The group's nocturnal offering was Edgard Varèse's Ionisation (1931).  Ensemble director Steve Schick introduced it as "the greatest percussion piece ever written," and he might be right, especially after this precise, glittering reading.  Scored for thirteen players, here it was done with six, who seemed completely unfazed negotiating the composer's revolutionary (at the time) line-up of instruments.

Comments

[DJA]

Hey Bruce,

Thanks for the link. Great to finally meet you in person!