Download Where Bows Tap and the Cello Travels

From left, Conrad Harris, Tom Chiu, Felix Fan and Max Mandel playing as part of Bargemusic.
Where Bows Tap and the Cello Travels
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When "Thoughts on Marvin
Gaye," a restless work for string
quartet by the adventurous jazz
composer Don Byron, is the most
conventional piece on the program, you know
are attending a
ANTHONY you
no-fooling modern
TOMMASINI music event. And
so it was on Friday
MUSIC
night at BargeREVIEW
music, the popular
venture atop a floating barge
docked at Fulton Ferry Landing
near the Brooklyn Bridge, a wonderfully intimate place to hear
chamber music.
The dynamic Flux Quartet performed a program as part of Here
and Now, Bargemusic's American contemporary music series.
Three of the works played grew
from the quartet's association
with Wesleyan University, said
Tom Chiu, the founding first violinist of the ensemble. For several
years the quartet has participated in Wesleyan's graduate seminar for composers, playing new
pieces by students.
Along with a boldly experimental work by the eminent American composer Alvin Lucier, who
has been on the Wesleyan faculty
for nearly 40 years, there were
recent scores by two of his students: Ivan Naranjo and KatherineYoung.
In works like "Group Tapper,"
a lO-minute score, Mr. Lucier has
Flux Quartet
Bargemusic
explored the physical properties
of sound and spatial relationships
of instruments. As Max Mandel,
the Flux violist, explained, all of
the sounds in the piece are produced by the musicians tapping
on their instruments with their
bows, mostly using the blunt
edge of the handle (the frog).
And tap they did. They tapped
on the fingerboard, the bridge,
the tailpiece and, especially, the
gleaming wood body of their instruments. There are five parameters of the piece that the musicians execute: volume, speed,
placement of the taps, dampening of the sound, and movement.
During the performance the four
players wandered individually
across the platform stage, as if in
a collective trance. The piece
evolved with quiet, sometimes
agitated volleys of tapping
sounds, like a tapping fugue. Conrad Harris, the second violinist,
was the most aggressive tapper,
and Felix Fan, a cellist, the most
active mover.
Ms. Young's piece, "Inside
UFO 53-32," gave the players leeway in determining its shape and
content. The score alternates
written passages with places for
improvisation and other bits by
the composer that can be fit in
wherever. Surprisingly, in this
performance the most compelling element of this raw, wailing,
coloristic piece was its organic
sweep. Mr. Naranjo's "Vibrating
Soundless Hum" has the right title: the piece unfolds, mostly, as a
series of fragments produced by
an arsenal of unconventional,
nearly inaudible scraping and
bowing effects.
The Flux Quartet gave an engrossing and volatile account of
the Italian modernist composer
Giacinto Scelsi's String Quartet
NO.2 (1961), which employs copper mutes (the composer's innovation) that press certain strings
to lend a rattling intensity to the
sound. Each of the five movements is like an essay in exploring, and exploding, the dimensions of a single pitch. In the first
movement, for example, a sustained G, played by all four musicians, soon splattered, broke into
oscillating waves, turned into
hard-driving riffs and more.
In the context of these experimental works it was a pleasure to
hear David Lang's strangely
tender, harmonically diffuse
"Wed," from 1996, written as incidental music for a production of
Shakespeare's "Tempest," music
meant as a bittersweet, fantastical evocation of a wedding
masque.
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