A lot of “new music” is novel mainly in what it brings to the concert hall from venues of entertainment. Monday night’s MusicNOW program at the Harris Theater for Music and Dance provided a vivid illustration.
Joining guest conductor Andre de Ridder and a dozen members of the MusicNOW Ensemble was Mouse on Mars, the German band made up of Andi Toma and Jan St. Werner. Mouse gained its reputation at consoles in dance clubs. A program note identified the duo as having “taken electronica to new heights with a unique blend of sound annihilation, fragmented melodies, and an impassioned hatred of conformity.”
Like it or not, artistic heights are measured differently in different places. The excerpts heard from Mouse’s 2011 “skik field”, a MusicNOW commission, may have risen above dance music but achieved a level of imagination and craft below most of the scores presented at these concerts.
Three selections from “skik field” – parts 1, 2 and 11 – received premiere performances lasting about 45 minutes. Presumably there is an even larger whole, though what it might be remained unclear from the written program, a spoken introduction and the structure of the individual pieces.
Instead of discernible structure there were short phrases from the players that started and stopped without development. The fragments, often with strong rhythmic bounce, were repeated, electronically altered by Mouse and piled one atop the other. A few had the character of street noises such as automobile horns and train crossing gates. More came across as echoes of John Adams, Giacinto Scelsi, Salvatore Sciarrino and others.
Processing and amplification gave strings, winds and horns similarly hard tone and gray coloration. One exceptional sound, caused by string players whipping their bows through the air, counted for little beyond visual entertainment. The gesture (repeated) joined changing colors on a screen (unnecessary) that was flanked by smoke machines (ridiculous).
The program opened with Martin Matalon’s “A Cat’s Seven Lives” (1996). Eight musicians played it, as intended, to the Luis Bunuel-Salvador Dali silent film “An Andalusian Dog” (1929). Bunuel fitted excerpts of recordings of Richard Wagner’s music and a tango to his film. Matalon’s score did not heighten the dream images, registering more like a Latin-inflected Paul Hindemith from the 1920s zipping through a Krazy Kat cartoon.
