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By John von Rhein
Chicago Tribune
Breaking sound
barriers: Hip eighth blackbird unleashes its energy
Eighth blackbird may spell its name lowercase, but it is without a doubt
an uppercase ensemble.
Both Northwestern University and the University of Chicago have acknowledged
as much by naming the contemporary music sextet to multiyear residencies.
Named after Wallace Stevens' poem, "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,"
the group embraces the eclectic range of today's new music with a hip,
engaging energy and a sterling musicianship that have earned comparisons
with the Kronos Quartet. No wonder so many younger composers are eager
to write works for them.
Saturday night in Mandel Hall, University of Chicago, eighth blackbird
launched the Contemporary Chamber Players' 38th season with a diverse
program that proved how far the series has moved beyond the academic-modernist
confines CCP adhered to as recently as a decade ago.
Saturday's concert, which included the Chicago premieres of works by
Randolph Coleman, Frederic Rzewski and others, reflected eighth blackbird's
deep involvement in today's barrier-leaping new music, where elements
borrowed from rock, jazz and world music combine with classical forms
in a multistylistic stew. All four of the pieces were either commissioned
by or for the ensemble and showed the high degree of collaborative interchange
that exists between eighth blackbird and its chosen composers.
Indeed, with such a piece as "Minimum Security Trailer" (2000) it was
hard to tell precisely where the creative impulse left off and the re-creative
impulse began. A sampling of a larger work by the Minimum Security Composers
Collective (Dennis DeSantis, Roshanne Etezady, Adam Silverman and Ken
Ueno), the three pieces ranged from funky post-minimalist twitches, to
a kind of easy-listening deconstruction of the Beatles' "Blackbird," to
angry flurries of 16th-notes. The ensemble, as is its wont, played them
from memory and made one eager to hear the entire 16-movement piece when
it's ready next season.
The blackbird idea also figured prominently in the "Thirteen Ways" suite
(1997) by Thomas Albert, whose son Matthew is the group's violinist and
violist. What a shame the entire work wasn't performed, because each section
proved a highly evocative vignette, alive with ear-catching colors, subtly
and beautifully crafted.
There's an element of music theater in everything eighth blackbird does,
with the young performers reciting program notes in relay and moving about
the stage in choreographed patterns while they play. So it was with Coleman's
"Portals…where birds fly still" (2001), a quasi-improvised freakout
for live musicians and computer-generated and manipulated sounds. The
piece, again excerpted from a much larger piece, works by accumulating
layers of sung, spoken, played and synthesized sound, complete with a
pounding rhythm section and ear-splitting amplification apparently inspired
by techno-rock. Unlike the previous works, it did not make one eager to
hear more.
Rzewski's "Pocket Symphony" (2000), however, proved a quirky, inventively
scored (the percussion included trash can, rain-stick and Jew's harp)
delight, its six movements neatly tailored to the musical personalities
of the players, each of whom let loose with his or her own cadenza. Bravos
to them all— Molly Alicia Barth, flutes; Michael Maccaferri, clarinets;
Nicholas Photinos, cello; Matthew Duvall, percussion; Lisa Kaplan, keyboards;
and Albert, violin and viola.
Copyright © 2002, Chicago
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