thirteen ways

It has been a while since our last blog post. The group has been on semi-hiatus, as we have no imminent concerts and our clarinetist was playing with the Hong Kong Phil. This Friday we will give a sneak preview of our Spring tour rep in a concert at the eighth blackbird rehearsal studio in Ravenswood.

We will try out some challenging new rep, including a fabulous piece by Franco Donatoni, Arpege. Matt and Mike heard a broadcast performance of the work by ICE (a New York-based ensemble run by fabulous flutist Claire Chase, a real force-of-nature), which was love at first hearing.

After pursuing several experimental dead-ends in the 50s and 60s, Donatoni, prone to depression, suffered several major artistic and personal crises in the 1970s. He stopped composing and destroyed many early works. After this break, Donatoni’s music changed fundamentally. He turned away from the large orchestral works that were his early trademark, and concentrated on virtuoso pieces for soloists and small chamber ensembles.

In Arpege the composer displays his love of theatrical interplay between instruments, exploiting the coloristic potential of different instrumental combinations. Piano and vibraphone meld into a single bell-like creature; the whole ensemble spills rushing short-note arpeggios at the threshold of audibility; a vibraphone gives a delicate, soft halo to pounding double stops hammered out by violin and cello. And that is just the first minute. The composer really does seem to be having great fun, and there is always a sense of play in the wildly contrasting materials.

Donatoni demands a very high level of ensemble virtuosity, and the work is clearly designed to be played with conductor, making rehearsals particularly arduous. Arpege is a series of linked vignettes, and each has a subtly different tempo, with no time to change or cue a new tempo. This means the music needs to be completely in the ensemble’s blood, so that when the group arrives at a new section, we all just instinctively ‘know’ what the speed should be. So: hours with a metronome; hours without a metronome; hours peering, perplexed, at the poorly notated score (a textbook case of ‘how to make your music look cool and confuse performers’); hours in discussion over how to make the smallest detail work (’A triumph! We got through 11 bars today!’).

As the newbie, it has been tremendous fun preparing challenging new music for performance without a conductor. It requires extensive time away from the flute, writing in one, two and sometimes even three extra instrumental parts over the part. In rehearsal, especially for a piece like Donatoni’s, a network of cues and awkward gestures has to be worked out, and practiced extensively. And then lots and lots and lots of metronome work.

What I have learnt so far, however, is that as the group gets the music ‘into its blood’, they stop gesturing, stop counting, and just FEEL it. Making chamber music with contemporary music? You’ve gotta be kidding! This does make it pretty bloody difficult to ‘catch up’ in eighth blackbird repertoire pieces that are totally new to me, causing some serious rehearsal frustration for me. It goes a little like this: ‘Lisa, who gives cues through this section?’; ‘Um, we pretty much feel it’; ‘Ummmm, but it is 4 against 3 against 5, with wacky groupings in every part’; ‘Yeah. We kinda feel it.’