Why aren’t you smiling, Pierluigi?

Bold, beautiful, bro, Ross Chapman usually plays a brass instrument, but on Wednesday night he opted to sit back and listen. Heres what he got.  

At our weekly meeting on Sunday, Bwog’s Arts Editor (through proxy) pitched a pair of concerts. I could either go to a performance of Bach on Tuesday or a recital of Pierluigi Billone on Wednesday. I chose the latter, in part because of my schedule and also because I had no idea who Billone was, nor had I heard of the Talea Ensemble that would be performing his works. If I were given the choice again right now, I would immediately sign up and show up thirty minutes early for a front-row ticket to hear Billone’s music. This interesting, confusing, but profoundly engaging composer put on a show along with the Talea Ensemble in the Italian Academy last night.

Billone was born in 1960, and all of the compositions played by the Talea musicians are from the new millennium. But this was not an exercise in minimalism as you may have experienced it in Music Hum. In all of his works, he plays with the sounds which instruments can create, not just those which are normally played. As Billone describes in his program notes for Legno.Edre, “…it becomes possible to achieve the special “freedom” that is born when a complete familiarity with the instrument is oriented by attention and the ability to listen. The traditional sound here is no longer at the centre.” While some other notes by guest writers get a bit more spiritual, the point remains that Billone wants to extract every byte of sound hiding in the instruments which he uses.

The first piece, Mani Matta, plays heavily with hands (Mani) and broken perspectives (like those of Gordon Matta-Clark, an American artist). It was written for a solo percussionist, and the Ensemble’s Alex Lipowski was up for the task. He practically skipped in front of the stage, smiling in all-black casual wear with a 12-inch China gong worn around his neck like Flavor Flav’s clock. Already set up for him were a marimba, 2 log rectangular wooden drums, and a high woodblock. It was immediately evident that this was not easy music to learn or read. It aggressively defies meter and notation through its erratic patterns and clustered chords. The piece alternated between calm sections, in which Lipowski would run his mallets or fingers over the marimba, and intense rhythmic sections in which Lipowski used Billone’s techniques to rob and restore tone from and to the previously pitched instruments. He brought out bass drum mallets at one point to play the marimba, and the piece featured a beautiful buzzing resonance within the banquet room at Casa Italiana. This isn’t a piece I would recommend listening to on an audio-only recording – watching Lipowski maneuver around his instruments and hearing the room vibrate really made the piece.

Another solo piece came next in the form of Legno-Edre III. Ini. This is the third movement from the longer piece of Legno-Edre, an 80-minute soundfest which would have been way too exhausting to fully include in this event. Adrian Morejon took on bassoon duties for this one, and he spent a lot of time playing around with the technical quirks of the instrument. Playing with half-pressed buttons or overblown air, Morejon created harsh, sawing sounds that dismantled the usual overtone series and general voice of the instrument. It sounded at times like an electric motor, or an AOL startup engine. He also created percussive and bending noises through his instrument. This piece, however, was a bit less engaging than the first, as it didn’t have quite the same amount of form or variety. Regardless, it was once again a display of virtuosity in an unusual manner. And that’s part of what made Billone so fun to listen to – he allows the musicians to achieve far more than most audience members could expect.

The final piece of the night was for a much larger group. Seven Talea musicians, including Lipowski but not Morejon, combined to give the American premiere of Ebe und anders. The piece was arranged for a trumpet, a trombone, two percussionists, an electric guitar, a cello, and a piano, which should give you the proper idea about how weird it was. Solo pieces like Billone’s are impressive in their own right, but you sometimes get the suspicion that these musicians could really be playing anything they felt like and you wouldn’t know they were diverging from the script. With seven performers and a conductor together, it was clear (for the most part) that everybody had to be on the same page. The percussionists used mostly, instead of mallets, small metal bowls, like the kind you might see used in a shell game. And yes, they still had gongs strapped to their chests. The trumpet and trombone constantly used mutes to mess with their timbre, and the pianist seemed to be using some sort of glass blade on the piano wires. The piece was, once again, exhausting, and ranged from single high squeals on the cello to huge, bleak walls of sound like those in the Inception soundtrack. The music got increasingly hard to understand as the piece ran on. About fifteen minutes in, I was feeling that these sounds were definitely fitting for the apocalypse. Or, at least, it would make conspiracy theory background music. When it finally ended, nobody in the audience was sure, and we needed a bit of time to recover from the realm of sonic impossibility back to reality.

The entire night was a simultaneously refreshing and exhausting musical experience. The Talea Ensemble is known for their outside-the-Bachs repertoire, and I would highly recommend catching them whenever available (and free/cheap). And Billone’s music is worth looking up, but don’t use it as studying music – it’s a bit too engaging. In short, when you have the opportunity to listen to music, take it.

Photo of Pierluigi via his website