As a music student and music enthusiast, I am always excited to attend any performance that I possibly can. In fact, my favorite thing about Ithaca College life so far has probably been the free live entertainment all the time. Pretty much every single night there's at least one recital or concert happening in Whalen, and all I have to do is walk over from my dorm (or, more frequently, walk upstairs from the practice rooms), grab a seat in one of the performance halls, and enjoy. I am very rarely disappointed by whatever performance I happen to be attending, and even on the rare occasions when the quality of the music is subpar, there is still something to be learned from the experience. All of that being said, I did not want to go to this percussion concert tonight. I attended a percussion concert earlier this semester, and I did not particularly enjoy it; I found the group to be rather bland and unenthusiastic about their music-making. And today our seminar class attended the pre-concert talk with the conductor Gordon Stout, and it was awfully boring. Stout did not have much to say about the pieces, and he ended up just playing excerpts of most of them for us, leaving us with very little to look forward to. So, needless to say, I only attended tonight's concert to fulfill the requirements for my seminar (although, as a bonus, I did get the final punch on my Fall 2014 recital attendance card...and there was much rejoicing)!
The first act of the concert was exactly as I feared it would be: monotonous, long, filled with music that simply did not move me. I made a valiant effort to connect with the music and to allow it to tell me a story, but it all just sounded like noise to me, and my thoughts wandered aimlessly. Especially the first piece, "Lost in Time," reminded me of children banging on pots and pans on the kitchen floor, which is a great thing for kids to do to discover the wonder of sound, but it's not something that I want to listen to for twenty minutes straight. Intermission came and I found myself (uncharacteristically) lamenting the fact that the concert was only half over.
The second half opened with a piece in three movements entitled "Love Triangles." I thought it was a clever title and decided to try and pick out as many 3s as I possibly could as I listened to the piece, and, much to my delight, there were plenty of them. Beyond the fact that there were 3 movements, there were also just 3 performers on the stage, most of the music was in triple meter, and the main theme in the first movement was written for 3 triangles. I was surprised to find myself really getting into the first movement, "Down at Nookies Bar"; it was lively and colorful, and it made me think of a rowdy party with lots of dancing and drinking.
When the first movement ended, I looked down at my program and saw that the second movement was called "Next Morning," and suddenly I got excited because that title fit with the story I had been forming in my head during the first movement. I imagined that the three members of the "love triangle" had made some bad decisions "down at nookies bar" and were going to suffer from some terrible hangovers the "next morning." The second movement was SO COOL. It began with quiet interwoven rhythms that sounded like the ticking and chiming of many different clocks, creating the feeling of waking up. As the movement grew, the morning progressed, and the rhythms became more intricate; the people in my story were beginning to go about their day. My favorite touch: Every so often you could hear the main theme with the 3 triangles come back for a few moments, all part of the noise. It was all making sense, and then the end of the movement totally blew my mind. Amidst the cacophony of clicks and dings, you could hear cell phones ringing rather loudly. Assuming the phones belonged to audience members, people began to glance around the auditorium, irritated, trying to figure out where the sounds were coming from. Then, all of a sudden, the three percussionists on the stage put down their instruments and revealed that their phones were the ones ringing. They let the ringing continue for a few seconds before silencing them, and that was the end of the second movement. AWESOME! The movement started off by convincing us that we were awake and that this was real life, and in the end the whole movement turned out to be a dream, and we were awakened by the ringing of the cell phones. That's what happens in real life: At first, your alarm sounds like a distant noise in the background of the dream your having, and then the sound of the dream stops all at once and there is nothing but the sound of the alarm. I was transported back to this morning, lying in bed and gradually letting my alarm pry my eyes and ears open. I thought "Next Morning" was BRILLIANT.
At this point, the third movement, "What Were We Thinking???", sounded just the way I had expected the second movement to sound: the musical embodiment of a hangover. The percussionists created a feeling of tipsiness by dipping the triangles in water while they were still vibrating, which created a sort of droopy, drowsy sound. Throughout the third movement, all of the dynamics were exaggerated, as if to annoy the person experiencing the hangover. The piece ended with a recapitulation of the main theme for the 3 triangles from the first movement. "Love Triangles" was a pleasant surprise; I loved it. And I don't even know if the story I came up with is anywhere near what the composer had in mind, but that's where my mind went as I was listening, and, right or wrong, I enjoyed the music!
And then, of course, the final piece of the evening was a letdown. It was very well done, it just didn't really speak to me. But the whole concert was worth it for "Love Triangles"!
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