LOS ANGELES — The Los Angeles Philharmonic’s extraordinary Noon to Midnight festival of new music has turned out to be a durable idea, surviving a pandemic, the subsequent downturn in general concert attendance, recent upheavals in the Phil’s front office, and the ever-increasing electronic alternatives of home and mobile-device entertainment.
After the first NTM in 2016 was such a hit, attracting mostly young audiences you don’t see at regular subscription concerts, there were second and third editions in 2017 and 2019. Following the Covid pause, Noon to Midnight was revived in 2022, but the scheduled 2023 edition was quietly canceled for some unrevealed reason, leaving just its centerpiece, an all-Steve Reich concert by Brad Lubman and the LA Phil New Music Group, in place. Fortunately, the 2024 edition went on as planned — literally from noon to midnight on Nov. 16 in and around Walt Disney Concert Hall.
Several of the elements that made past festivals pop remained in place. Again, the price was right: $12 got you in the door for everything except the designated main concert inside the big room, which was ticketed separately. The turnout, while again mostly young, also contained a greater number of older folks than before, and even a dog or two. The usual food trucks were parked outside the hall on Grand Avenue, fronted by the usual long lines, and a beer garden on the roof served up samples. Art and music installations were placed inside and outside Disney Hall, some of them user-interactive like Chris Kallmyer’s Threshold Music (bass wind chimes hanging from trees in the Blue Ribbon Garden undergirded by a constantly droning D minor 6 + 9 chord emanating from a Yamaha DX7 synthesizer).
This time, composer Ellen Reid was the curator, and she had a theme in mind: field recordings. By that, she meant recordings of environmental sounds that are fed into musical compositions or improvisations. That concept comes directly from Reid’s own experiences like SOUNDWALK, in which she created compositions meant to be heard blending with the environments while walking through Griffith Park, the UCLA campus, and spots throughout the U.S. (see https://classicalvoiceamerica.org/2021/12/20/__trashed-2/).
I could not determine whether the “field recordings” idea was being followed consistently throughout the day and night since, as in previous NTMs, there was no way that one person could see and hear it all, what with several events going on at the same time as starting and finishing times overlapped with one another. All you could do was pick your spots or follow your bliss and hope that you hit on something amazing.
Upon entering Disney Hall, I first took in a few installations; one of them, Alexey Seliverstov’s The Cloud Orchestra projection, hits you as you ride the escalator from the parking garage up to the ground floor lobby. Then, into the main hall, where Raven Chacon’s Three Songs film triptych was being shown.
These were real field recordings that folklorist Alan Lomax would have related to, with lone American Indian women tapping snare drums and singing movingly about the history of their landscape and the savage injustices perpetuated upon them. Members of the LA Phil New Music Group then surveyed Chacon’s Horse Notations for flute, string quartet, and hand drums, the instruments scratching, speeding up, rustling quietly through a piece that wore out its welcome before its 20 minutes were up. Odeya Nini’s Come Close and Sea incorporated the swishing of waves from the Pacific Ocean, a loud, sometimes passionate vocalese by the composer, and sustained drones from a sextet.
Skipping over to BP Hall, which is usually used as a lecture hall and is open to the ambient noises and communal hubbub from the lobbies, the Calder Quartet was already well into a program that emphasized desert landscapes. I was only able to catch John Luther Adams’ Canticles of the Sky — more drones typical of this incorrigibly environmental composer, with the strings sometimes oscillating between two notes — and Reich’s new-music classic Different Trains. The amplification in the BP was grotesque, yet the power of Reich’s transcontinental and World War II train rides still came through.
Back on the main stage, another configuration of the New Music Group, this time with a conductor (Molly Turner) directing traffic, opened with another new-music classic, Ingram Marshall’s Fog Tropes (1981). The amplified combination of distant, taped fog horns and live brass instruments sounded almost Wagnerian in its enveloping grandeur. Then came a really interesting new piece, the world premiere of Derrick Skye’s Alluvion, a striking blend of East and West containing a tanpura drone, luminous harp solos and obbligatos, undercurrents from a string decet, recordings of birdsong (shades of Einojuhani Rautavaara’s Cantus Arcticus), and a grand climactic jam on a single chord near the close. Great stuff.
BP Hall’s next act was a full hour with Laraaji (né Edward Larry Gordon), one of the pioneers of ambient music, now 81, creator of a huge discography spanning 46 years. With the recorded sounds of a creek and insects burbling quietly in the background, Laraaji opened with a contemplative piano solo, recited a relaxation exercise, and let fly with a sparkling, run-on improvisation on his trademark amplified prepared zither/autoharp (played with mallets and brushes), electric kalimba, electronic effects boxes, wind chimes, and even a couple of vocal choruses of the folk song “Shenandoah.” I found his set transporting and not a minute too long — and this time the sound in BP was quite tolerable.
On to the “main event” in the main hall, Doug Aitken’s Lightscape, an elaborate, ambitious “artwork” that is supposed to be a portrait of the American West that “challenges us to reconsider our perceptions of progress as we hurtle into an unknown technological future.” That’s quite a mouthful of purpose, and it turned out to be quite a disappointingly disjointed mouthful spanning nearly 69 minutes.
Central to the artwork is a full-length directionless, fragmented film that surveys Death Valley landscapes and follows a number of individuals through urban Los Angeles spaces. The score, likewise, is a mosaic of fragments from pieces by Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Michael Gordon, Terry Riley, Meredith Monk, Gabriella Smith, John Adams, Zoë Keating, Rodaidh McDonald, Beck, and ambient music from Aitken himself — some played live by Grant Gershon and the New Music Group and sung by the Los Angeles Master Chorale, and some pre-recorded by Gustavo Dudamel and the LA Phil.
Occasionally, some of the scraps popped into focus — the hammering of Gordon’s Timber on illuminated planks of wood as a kind of opening fanfare, Adams’ vibrating Shaker Loops, Reich’s wonderful Music for 18 Musicians. Yet most just blended into the equivalent of an anodyne mix tape with the volume turned up all the way. The piece seems determined to make a sincere statement about the unnatural madness of American life, but the Godfrey Reggio film Koyaanisqatsi, with its Glass score, makes the point better.
From here, the theme of field recordings seemed to take a back seat as exploratory jazz took over the spotlight. Alto saxophonist Josh Johnson put on a one-man show in BP Hall with harmonizing electronics that made him sound like a cool sax choir allied to cooking electronic rhythm tracks. To me, it was as if Ornette Coleman had adopted Eddie Harris’ bag of electronic tricks. On the main stage, the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra (PAPA), disciples of the late Horace Tapscott, who founded the ensemble in 1961, lumbered its way through the 7/8-meter Goat and the Ram Jam by Jesse Sharps and Tapscott’s Isle of Celia.
There was more to be had before the stroke of midnight, but my ears had reached the point of saturation. Time to split the scene.
