BROOKLYN — What does the music of Kali Malone have in common with the music of Florent Ghys? Both composers premiered new electroacoustic works at Bang on a Can’s fifth annual Long Play Festival on April 29-May 3, but Ghys’ catchy, witty scores bear little resemblance to Malone’s dark, throbbing durational studies.
“Minimalism” is not a single genre but a family tree of musics descended from mid-20th-century encounters among America’s classical composers, jazz musicians, and improvisers in the classical traditions of India. Bang on a Can, as a composing collective that was founded after the first wave of so-called minimalists, sought to re-energize these aesthetics with influences both from the noisy new post-punk vernacular and from the complexity and dissonance of the modernist avant-garde.
Through this lens, the relation between Ghys (with his bopping, cycling syncopations) and Malone (with her meditative, microtonal drones) is closer than it might at first appear.
Malone, a Stockholm-based American composer, gave the U.S. premiere of Does Spring Hide Its Joy at Red Hook venue Pioneer Works on May 1, and it quickly became clear that she descends from the early minimalist composers who used drones to explore the physical and psycho-acoustical properties of sound.
Malone’s musical language is based on the principle of just intonation, which tunes intervals not according to the equal-tempered scale of the modern piano keyboard but according to the overtone series. She has built the language of Does Spring Hide Its Joy, however, not on the harmonics that might generate perfect major or minor triads but on the seventh harmonic — the harmonic that, coincidentally, creates the interval of a lowered minor 7th in the Western scale. The result is a sound that seems, to ears acclimated to European harmony, at once alien and yet oddly right.
Against the drones produced by an amplified cello and electric guitar, Malone adds, fine-tunes, and subtracts pitches from her sine-wave generator, creating washes of sound where interference patterns create audible — and, at the high volumes produced by the venue’s outstanding PA system — physically tangible effects. At one point, the listener might hear a cool, pure sonority, and at another, the sound might take on a serrated edge inside the listener’s skull, or the quality of a mild, sustained, and oddly pleasant electric shock.
On a structural level, the music should seem as cold and impenetrable as a marble monolith, yet somehow the experience of listening to it feels deeply human and personal. Both the individual sections and the entire hour-long piece are shaped by Malone’s own strong, elegant, discreet sense of aesthetic style, and the interactions between the warm sonorities of the live instruments and the implacable electronic drones grant a breathy intimacy to the texture as a whole.
It helps that her patient, precise collaborators are so obviously in tune — figuratively as well as literally — with her musical project. Both cellist Lucy Railton and guitarist Stephen O’Malley — of the drone-metal band Sunn O))), who happens to be Malone’s partner in life as well as in this work — are intriguing composer–performers in their own rights.
Ghys was represented at the festival by a two-part program of recent works at BRIC on May 3. Ghys’ best-known works mine the “speech-melody” technique, notating fragments of found sound and then developing that material into a cohesive, multimedia musical form.
These newer pieces, while built on video samples, take Ghys’ rhythmic and harmonic language in different directions. Same Face!, for percussionist Owen Weaver with synchronized video, is a study in doubles, the live percussionist playing funk/rock-inspired beats or glockenspiel melodies in rhythmic unison with digitally sliced-up footage onscreen.
For the finale, each stroke on the performer’s drum kit is synchronized with a visual edit that alternates rapidly between images of Weaver and Ghys singing wordless tones, so that the montage creates a melody in time with the beat. As the title of the piece suggests, the resemblance between the faces of the two blue-eyed, brown-haired, white guys onscreen is indeed uncanny.
At various points in the piece, the montage spirals out of control, turning the video into a blur and the audio into noise. At the climax of the last movement, the digital distortion became so intense that members of the audience could be seen plugging their ears — but apparently not because they didn’t enjoy the witty piece and its gallery-worthy video component, which were received with cheers and applause.
While the world premiere on the program, Zemblanity and other Serendipities, called for a full ensemble of percussionists (Mantra Percussion), it seemed even more intimate than the solo work, thanks to the diaristic quality of its images. There is something lonely about Ghys’ smartphone footage of flying birds, falling raindrops, and passing cars and trains. The music’s propulsive rhythms are determined not only by the audio track of the film, but by its silent visuals, so that, for instance, against footage of an American highway, chimes sound in time with the taillights and headlights appearing and disappearing at the bottom of the frame.
The title is explained by a pair of videos sampled from TikTok, each presenting a “word of the day”: serendipity, as defined by a heavily accented Ghanaian schoolgirl, and its antonym, zemblanity, an unfortunate discovery or coincidence, which is awkwardly misdefined as “getting bad news” by a merch-hawking American vlogger. The piece is delightful, even moving, in its conceptual, visual, and sonic dimensions. But when a work of art strays out of the concert hall into the outside world, it enters one more dimension — the political — and here the piece falters.
Zemblanity only uses two pieces of truly “found footage,” those two TikTokkers, and both of those borrowed videos were by African or African-American creators. In the context of this performance, by a majority-white ensemble, the largely white crowd’s hearty chuckle at the apparent naïveté of a pair of uncredited Black interlocutors felt deeply awkward.
Although it left a sour aftertaste, Zemblanity’s bittersweetness also lingered. Mantra Percussion realized the piece with flair, not just playing an extensive battery of instruments but singing and whistling as demanded by the score. In this work, as in Same Face!, the reliance on exact synchronization meant that there was no room for error. Fortunately, Mantra’s execution, like Weaver’s, was nearly flawless.
The Long Play Festival presented literally too much music for one person to take in, with overlapping concerts across genres and across the borough. But even a tiny sampling offered up a feast of artistry in our post-minimalist moment, setting places for the audience to savor compositions as distinct, and yet as strangely harmonious, as these fascinating new works.
