By Allan Kozinn
The New York Times original link

Many Styles, All of Them Contemporary

Most new-music ensembles support a prevailing philosophy of contemporary composition, with some leaning toward the world of post-tonal complexity and others toward more consonant styles. Eighth Blackbird, a new-music sextet based in Chicago, has not declared a stylistic allegiance, and its program on Saturday evening at Washington Irving High School in Manhattan showed that there was no reason it should, given the deftness with which its young players moved through a broad range of modern styles.

Frederic Rzewski's "Moutons des Panurge" (1969) and George Perle's "Critical Moments 2" (2001), for example, come from different musical universes. Mr. Perle's materials are dense, but are presented as a series of nine compact, attractively spiky movements. Mr. Rzewski's materials are spare (a single, 65-note line), but he presents them expansively, drawing on competing currents of early Minimalism: Philip Glass's additive process, in which melodies are expanded by adding notes to repeating figures, and Steve Reich's phase technique, in which intricate patterns are created when unison lines are displaced by a beat.

Jennifer Higdon's "Zaka" (2003), which opened the program, grabs the ear with a pounded, rhythmically vital bass figure on the piano. The focus shifts quickly and frequently - to lyrical violin and cello lines and bright bursts of flute and clarinet tone, to the peculiar timbre of bowed cymbals, to all manner of sliding figures and to windlike howling sounds from various quarters - but the opening piano figure returns regularly enough to impose a rondolike structure on this kaleidoscopic fantasy.

Gordon Fitzell's "Violence" (2001) is more philosophical and gentler than its title suggests: most of it unfolds in various shades of pianissimo, the violence having mainly to do with interruptions of musical ideas by one instrument imposing on themes started by another. As in Ms. Higdon's piece, the timbral range is broad, ranging from strummed string figures to such quaint avant-gardisms as running a wet finger over the edge of a drinking glass to produce an eerie ringing sound.

The attraction of Derek Bermel's lively, harmonically alluring "Tied Shifts" (2004) was its rhythmic irregularity, inspired by the composer's study of Bulgarian folk music, in which ties across bar lines give the impression of irregular meters (hence the title).

No challenge, stylistic or technical, seems too great for this ensemble, which played all but the Higdon and Bermel scores by memory, with the energy and suppleness of a great jazz band.

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