thirteen ways

“We didn’t organize this in advance, but we think the composer might be here. Martin, if you are here, can you…ah, raise your hand?”

Playing a new work for a composer can be a nerve-jangling experience. But playing a ten-year-old work, which has been played many, many times all over the world, for a composer who has been present at some fabulous, all-star performances (including at a concert in Oz featuring the country’s best instrumentalists), is something else entirely.

Martin Bresnick, it turns out, did raise his hand and make his presence known to us nervous 8bb folks before our Wesleyan University performance of My 20th Century on Saturday night.

Back in October of last year, after we sent him a DVD of our staged performance of the work, Martin sent us an email with detailed notes. His musical comments (apart from a justifiable complaint about wrong notes) were few, simply noting that we were playing the work too fast. In fact, the composer seemed much more worried about the theatrical element that we had added (using video camera and on-stage screen), which seemed to Martin to detract from the

friendly, informal, relaxed intimacy that would reveal something personal and human about the character and personality of each musician who performed it in a democratic, “Ivesian town meeting” way. In the original stage directions it’s like a square-dance, each dancer changing partners as it progresses. The informality obviously does not prevent the text from moving gradually to a thoughtful, generalized, ambiguously sorrowful conclusion. But it is one that sneaks up quietly through the always unpretentious language and the sequence of ideas.

This is a beautifully written description of a subtle, moving work. But friendly informality is one of the hardest things to naturally depict on stage. 8bb is made up of six very intense musicians, and when we try to do “relaxed and informal” we tend to paste rigid, tight smiles on our faces, and try to affect a loose physicality by essentially “hamming it up.” This is a struggle we’ve been dealing with in preparations for our current touring project singing in the dead of night.

At Wesleyan we presented My 20th Century exactly as written, with no added theatricality. It surprised us how nervous we were with Martin a surprise presence in the audience. Here’s Matthew:

“I freaked out. Totally. I started playing wrong notes, then realized I was playing wrong notes, so I played some more.”

We all talked to the composer afterwards (on the Wesleyan hall’s putting green-colored carpet: “the green room is red and the hall, usually red, is green; weird!”) and he did genuinely appear to have enjoyed the performance. Martin is basically an honorary Aussie (he and his Australian wife, the pianist Lisa Moore, spend several months each year in Oz), and while talking to me peppered his speech with lots of Ocker-isms like “all right, mate” and “bloody ripper.” Also, after reading about my misadventures during a performance of his piece in this blog entry, he mused briefly on the dangers of playing new music…