Far too often modern music is regarded as serious fare that intimidates through its intellectual and emotional demands. But, as the experiment-minded local music collective Cube suggested in a chamber concert Sunday afternoon at Smart Museum, a healthy portion of the musical ideas of our time is meant to be provocative fun.
Included in Cube’s all-American grab bag were characteristic works by John Cage and Charles Ives, the West Coast daddy and Yankee granddaddy, respectively, of homegrown avant-gardism. Ives’ Variations on “America” (1891)-used as the title of this lecture/recital sponsored by Mostly Music-puts the familiar hymn through engagingly quirky paces. Itself a veiled (and patriotic) homage to Beethoven’s winsome set on “Britannia,” this piece (originally written for the organ) is all twinkles and winks.
In Cube’s arrangement-rowdily played by its core members Caroline Pittman (flute and piccolo), Janice Misurell-Mitchell (flute), Patricia Morehead (oboe and English horn), Jeffrey Kust (guitar), Dane Richeson (percussion) and Philip Morehead (synthesizer)-the music takes on a slightly delirious and panicky air, as if it were the handiwork of an out-of-kilter band.
Cage’s “Child of Tree” (1975) combines that iconoclast’s love for nature and cooking in an amusing, Zen-like fashion. The “tree” is a cactus. By the toss of I Ching sticks, the soloist (Richeson) randomly concocted an assemblage of beguiling sounds.
He first caressed the cactus thorns, then tapped a wood block, scraped a gourd, rattled a stick then lashed and broke a tree branch.
In keeping with the food motif, he then chomped on a carrot, then switched to celery (with other Cube members also chewing celery on the sideline). Richeson handled the task with aplomb.
Misurell-Mitchell’s “On Thin Ice,” too, has its moments of cliffhanging humor as a willful flute soars and dives with abandon.
The execution by Pittman and Kust was virtuosic in parading unconventional techniques; the duo’s camaraderie was also a delight.
Less ingenious and dashing, however, is Patricia Morehead’s 1987 “Flares and Phasers,” which features two alto flutes (nicely played by Pittman and Misurell-Mitchell) quietly weaving a variety of intriguing textures.
Works by the veteran jazz-vanguard reed player Douglas Ewart were also on the program. His “Red Hills” (1979), energetically presented by a Cube quintet, brought forth a wondrous soundscape, a joyous cacophony that evokes the rain-soaked forest of his native Jamaica.
Ewart’s improv session with Richeson carried on like an enchanting, mysterious tribal rite.
