By Clarke Bustard
Richmond Times-Dispatch

Highbrow Hambone

Three questions come up, more or less simultaneously, when eighth blackbird performs: What's that sound? Where's it coming from? And what's it about?

The answers promised to be more straightforward than usual in "Lucid, Inescapable Rhythms," last night's opener to the contemporary music sextet's second year in residence at the University of Richmond.

It's all about rhythm, and rhythms come from rhythm instruments, right?

Yes, but in this set of seven compositions, also from strings and winds - and in two pieces, from hands.

Mayke Nas' "DiGiT #2" (2002-03) was a kind of highbrow hambone, a rhythmic fantasy growing out of children's hand-patting and clapping games. Percussionist Matthew Duvall shared the Steinway with pianist Lisa Kaplan as they alternated tone clusters with intricately patterned clapping.

"Musique de Tables" (1987) by filmmaker-composer Thierry de Mey was a whimsically choreographed exercise in rhythms produced by rubbing, scratching and knocking on three tabletops. Duvall, Kaplan and Matt Albert (normally the group's violinist) played de Mey's intricate rhythms with precision, flair and humor.

Jennifer Higdon's "Zaka" (2002) was a more conventional and substantive piece of rhythmic music, with fast sections full of slashing accents and curiously woozy tension, surrounding a slower section that seemed to evoke a lazy twilight.

The concert featured two premieres: Ashley Fure's "Inescapable," an almost formless succession of rarified tones that the composer likens to "a brittle eggshell cracked open to reveal its bright, viscous yolk;" and Marcus Maroney's "Rhythms," which sounds like a series of melodic refrains with percussive commentary.

To mark its 10th anniversary as a professional troupe, eighth blackbird reprised two of its "standards."

Fred Lerdahl's "Fantasy Etudes" (1985) was the most "formal" piece of the evening. The musicians visually represented its sectional structure in stylized, symmetrical stage movements.

David Lang's "Cheating, Lying, Stealing" (1993) grows out of an industrial-strength, pounding motif. In its dark heavy-handedness ("ominous funk," the composer terms it), the piece might be a pas de deux for the Terminator and his Terminatrix.

Copyright 2005 Richmond Times-Dispatch