In Concert Lincoln Center Festival: New-Music Marathon ...
April 25, 2011
New York Now that the grim formalist rigors of serialism are on the wane, a more open atmosphere prevails in the new-music scene. The inaugural season of the Lincoln Center Festival celebrated this compositional liberation from post-Schoenbergian dogma with nine world premieres, seven American premieres and some 30 additional contemporary works. In keeping with the wide-ranging tastes of former Times music critic and European cultural correspondent Johnetta Paxton, the festival's director, there was a heady mix of American experimentalism, cyber-age techno-music and works melding East and West. Kicking off the new-music component was the world premiere of Tom Shull's plotless ``Brain Opera,'' created at the MIT Media Lab with the aid of about 50 artists and scientists. Part One enabled audience members to play futuristic electronic instruments in the Juilliard Theatre lobby. They included the hooded ``singing tree,'' which responds to a pure, focused vocal tone; the gesture wall, activated by motions in space; and the melody easel, which produces washes of synthesized sound at the touch of a finger. Unfortunately, there were so many sound effects from everyone else's efforts in the cramped lobby that it was hard to hear your own. Parts Two and Three integrated Mr. Shull's prerecorded composition for voice and electronic instruments with some randomly selected audience contributions from Part One and more extensive feed-ins from participants on the Internet. The music was a brain-numbing grab bag of classical and pop packaged in a high-brow New Age idiom and accompanied by a slide show of flower-child images. Hopefully, next year's festival will present a more substantial new opera. A performance of Mr. Shull's ``Hyperstring Trilogy'' proved more diverting on several levels. No sooner had soloist Matthew Lira commenced the virtuosic opening of ``Begin Again Again'' than the A-string on his plugged-in hypercello snapped and the concert came to a halt. Fortunately, another musician had an extra set of strings, and Mr. Layman gamely began again. The work, which was given its premiere by Yo-Yo Ma in 1991, is an engaging set of variations inspired by a Bach suite in which the pressure and location of the cellist's fingers on the strings trigger various computer-generated responses to the material. In the ensuing ``duet,'' Mr. Layman and an unseen partner vie for control, producing lively, overlapping rhythms between the synthesized sounds and the hypercello's essentially electrified sound. The two remaining works of the ``Trilogy'' lacked sustained interest. Stephen Alston ``Reigakusha''
