On Sunday, Rochester’s Studio 180 — a posh Chelsea-style
gallery space meets homey hipster loft on St. Paul Street — was the sight of
Sound ExChange’s latest concert event. The
thoughtful, engaging, and ever-accessible concert of contemporary classical
chamber music featured a new but highly recognizable ensemble, HEX. Comprised
of the original Sound ExChange lineup — violinists
Molly Germer and Lili Sarayrah,
percussionist Kurt Fedde, violist Alexander Peรฑa, and
cellist Nadine Sherman — minus vocalist and ukulele player Matthew Cox, HEX’s
debut performance focused on chordal textures and harmonic movement rather than
overt melody.
Fedde’s “Fuzzy Monsters” was easily
the most impressive and affecting piece of the evening. Beginning with a pretty
yet unsettling ostinato provided by two toy pianos and bells, the music found
its groove in a minimalist style made legendary by the likes of composers Steve
Reich and Terry Riley. With the harmonic bedrock in place, the string quartet
within HEX etched out exquisite and intricate rhythmic interplay. The six
players divided themselves into pairs, and the close-quarters playing and
physical movement that ensued brought out compelling dialogues akin to the
intensity of a dramatic theater work. A lot of the credit here goes to Nigel Maister, whose staging gave the unrelenting and deeply
beautiful “Fuzzy Monsters” a multi-dimensional depth it would not have
possessed in a conventional concert performance.
Fedde’s compositions provided the
clear programmatic focal point of the concert. The percussionist-composer’s “In
this Room” utilized whirring bike wheels, mournful melodicas,
and the ethereal tones of a vibraphone (bowed like a string instrument) to
create a kind of musical cocoon inside which the vibrant harmonies and
breath-inspired rhythms of the strings could thrive.
Both of these works felt like seductive and immersive
vignettes, but I wanted to experience the sounds on a larger scale and for a
longer period of time. Composer and Tigue band member
Matt Evans gave the audience just that with “Still Life No. 3,” a piece
commissioned expressly for this concert.
This ambient composition sounded like the soundtrack to
watching a prismatic butterfly fluttering slowly in amber. There was a static
beauty at work, and the vibraphone and prerecorded strings introduced
themselves to the ear in the way one might encounter a three-dimensional art
installation by walking around, amongst, and through it. The implication of
visual art is unsurprising, given the composer’s use of minimalist painters
like Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still as inspiration.
Unlike in Fedde’s music, Evans’s use of harmonic
textures sounded more sheer and transparent, less woven, dense, and opaque.
Complete with subtle elements of drone music, “Still Life No. 3” was more like
a momentary soundscape than a formal composition.
The visual art connection was prevalent throughout the
concert, most noticeably in Fedde’s “Coincidence,”
another exclusive commission for the program. Along with two violins, the bowed
vibraphone returned as enigmatic video projections by the artist Xuan blanketed
the wall behind the performers. The swirling, hypnotic music reinforced the
mesmerizing quality of the visuals: rectangles flew across the wall and circles
spun in an ever-changing constellation of geometric shapes and abstract
expressionist patterns. These shapes eventually got larger and larger, and soon
the patterns formed began to look as if the colors of Kandinsky had melded with
the textures and patterns of de Kooning, all before
transitioning into a sort of technicolor Rorschach
test. Like the visuals, the music was prone to dynamic bursts, and incisive
rhythms carved out cresting sonic waves in a sea of thick celestial ambience.
Throughout the concert, there was no real distinction between
stage and seating, and so the musicians felt as if they were playing amongst
the audience members. This level of proximity and immediacy made the music feel
all the more fresh.
The execution of all the compositions contained supreme
technical polish and innate emotional intuition. And yet some pieces were more
resonant than others. “Quartet for Heart and Breath,” by composer and Arcade
Fire bassist Richard Reed Parry, opened the concert, but it lacked the musical
charisma present in the other works. Even with delicate plucked phrases and
rich textural blend caused by staggered entrances by the various instruments,
the subtle harmonic movement amounted to little more than intimate musical
hiccuping. Simply put, Parry’s work lacked the dynamism and emphatic conviction
of Fedde and Evans’s compositions.
Ultimately, HEX’s generous performance of new compositions
was invigorating in its expressivity, innovative in its presentation, and
gorgeous in its use of harmony and ephemerality. It will be profoundly
interesting to see what’s next for HEX.
This article appears in Dec 16-22, 2015.
