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Sometimes it happens like this: You encounter an image—verbal, aural, doesn’t matter—and find yourself seduced by your own improvisations on the world it suggests. When the notice came for a production of a new chamber opera by Elizabeth Brown, it announced not only the chance to hear her intriguing music live—opportunities that are strangely rare—but also reeled out an example of such an attracting image. It came packaged in the guise of a quote from Franklin D. Roosevelt, of all things:

When rural Americans finally got electricity in the 1930s and 40s, decades after the cities, many went outside just to look back at their illuminated houses—it was wonderful, just like going from darkness to daylight. Corners of rooms, or a loved one’s face, were magically lit. As one Rural Electrical Administration worker said, I’ve seen this happen, the lights come on, hundreds of places, and it’s an emotional situation you can’t describe—something happens, lightning strikes them, and they all at once are different.

It is this moment that Brown has taken up as her starting point to create Rural Electrification, a 55-minute piece for voice, theremin, and recorded sound. Lit only by the deep glow of an oil lamp and the projections flickering against the back wall, the vocalist (a role sung here by Stephanie Skaff) makes her entrance—a young farm girl, Dorothy Gale on a fair weather evening. The scene is set by Brown’s recorded soundtrack of hums, whistles, and the delicate whir of mechanical language. The composer herself takes up residence in the corner as the soloist at the theremin, an instrument she selected specifically for its marriage of the human and the electrical. The sound she coaxes from it carries none of the usual horror-show implications, but rather colors in a solid, soulful line, more similar in character to the cello.

Composer Elizabeth Brown Rural Electrification has two remaining performances, May 26 and 27, 8 p.m. at the Old American Can Factory. For details, visit XO Projects. Inc.

The minimal scoring evolves over the course of the piece, but its tenor is largely laid out in the first 15 minutes. The vocalist pens a series of letters to her sister that chronicle the family’s adjustment to the electrical age, and though the underlying emotion will alter, the basic musical themes and form are carried throughout. It’s a journey that begins with plenty of wide-eyed excitement—young Mary Alice hopes to win an essay contest for a Frigidaire—and the ad man in the speaker delivers the golden promise that the hook up to the grid will allow her to “live a life of leisure in your spotless home.” Her letters are a vocal duet with the theremin, no small feat of intonation (though Brown’s characteristic propensity for sliding between pitches in her chamber music generally aides the strategy’s success in practice here). Snatches of familiar tunes—an “E-I-E-I-O” meditation on progress and a twist on “You Are My Sunshine” addressed to the light bulb—deepen the piece’s “Is it really better living?” question, though the work refrains from getting too caught up in any sort of moral message. Lothar Osterburg’s accompanying video carries a Monty Python-esque animated whimsy, and musically things are kept rather shear and echo-y—offering buoyancy even to the darker lament that the family must work harder and stay up late because now there’s an electric bill to pay.

As one might logically expect when considering the day-to-day life of a young farm girl, no large surprises appear over the course of Rural Electrification—neither in the plot, nor musically—and therein lies its significant charm. The venue it was presented in—the Old American Can Factory near the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn—is an 1880s complex that only heightened this sense of nostalgic romance for a time none of the modern-day, city-dwelling audience members would have been around to personally experience. They likely left the production, however, feeling that they had been able to glimpse it.

Brown herself boasts a bit more firm a connection, having grown up on an agricultural research station in Alabama (though presumably the lights had already been on for decades at that point). Still, it was difficult not to suppose that her writing in this work was drawn at least tangentially from her own history. Really, though, anyone who has ever driven down a rural highway at night carries at least the defining image of this piece in their memory—the shock of light cast out from the windows of a distant house. What is forgotten is the total cloaking blackness that came before. Mary Alice, her excitement replaced by exhaustion, shoulders this task and remembers for us. “It used to be so dark,” she recalls. “I miss it…”

Amy D. Rubin

High art or lowbrow, serious, entertaining—fit for a concert hall or suitable for a club? Many of Seattle’s music makers are stepping over these archaic lines of divisive thinking. This month I attended premieres of two high profile Seattle composer/performers, Wayne Horvitz and Tom Baker. Both curate innovative concert series, lead their own ensembles, and express their creative energies in string quartets and oratorios.

Horvitz has been experimenting with string quartets for a few years. An earlier quartet—Whispers, Hymns, and a Murmur—laid down a series of interesting vamps for the soloist to play over. A recent premiere—These Hills of Glory: Composition No. 2 for String Quartet and Improviser—goes a lot further to explore a seriously exciting concept: the creation of a piece for string quartet (fully notated) with six performances, six venues, and six different improvising soloists, one for each performance. The soloists included Eric Barber, saxophone; Eyvind Kang, viola; Peggy Lee, cello; Ron Miles, trumpet; Tom Swafford violin; and Gust Burns, piano. I was lucky to catch the last two performances of this series, one at Gallery 1412 and the other at City Hall.

The Odeon Quartet proved an excellent match for the project. Their playing, which was at different times gritty, warm, sensuous, delicate, and driving, gave shape to the music as they took real ownership of this set of premiere performances. Most often the improvised entrances come mid-movement. Horvitz indicates to the soloist where to play but never what to play. First violinist Gennady Filimonov thinks the string parts can stand on their own. I do too. When I asked the composer, he answered, “Definitely not!” Interesting.

To my mind, violinist Tom Swafford’s performance was about blending and extending, as his gestures spun organically from the quartet’s lines. Pianist Gust Burns had a greater challenge at the piano, and he seemed to search for his role throughout the performance. Horvitz writes from many musical influences but does not fall into the frequent trap of creating little more than pastiche. He is capable of honestly understanding, ingesting, and integrating a number of dialects, which results in a decidedly Horvitz sound. He frequently uses dense textures and seemingly unstoppable motion. Sometimes I wondered where there was space for the additional improvisatory voice to be heard. If the quartet was rich chocolate cake, I wondered what the soloist could add other than whipped cream? Well, that’s up to the composer and the performers. Maybe they like super rich deserts.

The four vocal soloists, the Puritan choir, and the six musicians gave a compelling, intense, and polished performance to a very enthusiastic crowd. The venue was Seattle’s literary home, Hugo House, and its modest stage provided a feeling of intimacy. However the set, which included the execution area and inquisitor Cotton Mather’s podium, overpowered the performers just a bit given the limited space.

Composer Tom Baker is eclectic and inventive in his use of pitch sets, instrumentation, and atmospheric textures. He joined the ensemble on fretless guitar for which he is known and, not surprisingly, my favorite “aria” was his riveting duet with Mary Webster. For me, this was the most memorable music of the evening. I also enjoyed his harmonic twists given to the hymn-like pieces where cadences took us to unexpected places in astonishing ways.

Using improvisation in both the vocal and instrumental parts, Baker has designed the piece to be different at each performance. The orchestra follows guided improv structures in the “Prelude” and “Interlude #1”; short improvised solos are performed by the trombone, clarinet, and violin in various songs; all of the songs for the tenor (Cotton Mather) are notated as to pitch and given precise starting places for phrases, but the actual rhythms of the speech/song are left to the performer.The drums in the piece “Grace” are improvised over graphic notational structures.

One issue I would like to raise is the lack of action in the story. A woman is accused, she is hung, she survives the experience. The drama lies in her inner turmoil when facing death. What is visual in this material? Perhaps it would be better to do away with the attempt to create motion on stage and instead let the emotion of the music stand naked, strong, and unencumbered. Of course, this is not the only piece to raise such an issue. Philip Glass’s 1984 opera, Akhnaten, performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, featured little action—just the soloists singing from their chairs. The music spoke for itself.

Julia Werntz Photo by Michele Macrakis

During a conversation with a graduate music student in Cambridge a while ago, I asked him his impression of the Boston jazz scene. There was silence, and I noticed a confused expression on the student’s face. Genuinely puzzled, he responded, “What jazz scene?” As someone who has been observing local jazz musicians for many years, I was initially as perplexed by his question as he was by mine. Our city, in fact, has acquired a reputation in faraway places as a kind of “hotbed” of jazz talent, due no doubt to the large number of excellent recordings local musicians have released on important jazz labels. Just the other day I read a statement by jazz critic Stuart Broomer (Toronto Life, Musicworks, Signal to Noise) that Boston “seems like the most creative place in American jazz right now,” and I’ve heard and read similar things several times. Given a little thought, of course, the student’s question makes sense—and not because he is classically oriented and simply unacquainted with the numerous professional jazz musicians in the area. He would need to search carefully to learn about the sparse and scattered jazz performances that occur, due to the nearly complete lack of solid, viable jazz venues in the area. No matter how many brilliant musicians may be living, rehearsing, and recording here, without a physical location where audiences can regularly listen to their work, how can there be anything the public perceives of as a “scene”?

Of course, equally important to one’s sense of “jazz scene” is a city’s ability to host visiting jazz artists from other places. Twenty years ago, the Boston area was still a stopping point with a number of venue options for musicians on tour. Here is a sample of what my husband, jazz pianist Pandelis Karayorgis, and I collectively remember hearing in the mid-to-late 1980s: Abbey Lincoln, Lester Bowie, David Murray, and Don Cherry with Ed Blackwell at Charlie’s Tap in Central Square, Cambridge; Cecil Taylor, Randy Weston, Steve Lacy, and Sun Ra at the Nightstage on the opposite end of Central Square; Mal Waldron, and Geri Allen with Joseph Jarman and Reggie Workman at the Willow Jazz Club in Ball Square, Somerville; Archie Shepp, Jacki Byard, and Henry Threadgill with Andrew Cyrille and Fred Hopkins at the 1369 Jazz Club in Inman Square, Cambridge. (Notice that none of these places, oddly, were actually in Boston itself.) These same venues, of course, were also the places one regularly heard local talent—older and “emerging”—such as the Fringe, the Joe Maneri Quartet, Jimmy Giuffre, Ran Blake, Joe Morris, and too many others to mention.

It’s stunning to think about what we’ve lost. All of the above venues are gone today (at least one was a drug front, another was evicted…), and no other jazz clubs have opened to replace them. Today musicians and their audiences here struggle desperately to find places to meet. Here is what their options are (or aren’t), arranged by category:

• Posh and/or cocktail-style venues that are inaccessible to many important musicians because…
  a) The music is intended as background for patron conversation.
  b) The music is intended for listening, but the message is clearly “We’re not looking for something ‘interesting,’ thank you.”
  c) You need to be famous enough to completely fill the house.

  Not exactly scene-promoting. Well-known examples would be Bob’s Southern Bistro on Columbus Avenue in Boston (a and b), Ryles in Inman Square, Cambridge (a and b), Scullers (a, b, and c) and the Regattabar (c)—the latter two are situated on either side of the Charles River outside of Harvard Square, and offer sporty, collegiate rowing motifs, a cold, touristy vibe, and $8 beers. The likes of Paul Bley, McCoy Tyner, and Randy Weston can be heard at the Regattabar, but on the other hand, phone calls from Matthew Shipp go unreturned, apparently.

• Places that feature popular jazz jam sessions, such as the historic Wally’s Café on Mass. Ave. near Symphony Hall, where amateurs and students can blow on Sundays. Thank goodness for Wally’s, but beyond this it doesn’t contribute to the scene as a vital jazz club.
• Alternative venues. I recently read a series of essays from 1989 on the subject of Boston jazz venues by Stu Vandermark, who writes about the Boston jazz scene for Cadence Magazine. He had already noticed then a shift to “places not identified as jazz clubs”—for example: salsa and reggae venues in Cambridge, the Cambridge Public Library, and the Coolidge Corner Theater in Brookline. The Middle East restaurant, a famous, multi-roomed pop and Arabic music place in Cambridge’s Central Square, occasionally had jazz artists in their “main space,” downstairs. I saw Don Byron there, as well as Sun Ra, and the Either/Orchestra. Of these places, only The Middle East still programs jazz on very rare occasions, in the piano-less “corner space.” One other, newer, pop music club, the Lizard Lounge in Cambridge, occasionally features groove-based jam bands, but also has no piano.

  Of the remaining alternative venues, only two currently possess pianos, and these both require a rental fee from the musicians: the Lily Pad in Inman Square, Cambridge (which I have written about here previously), and Rutman’s Violin Shop, on Westland Avenue in Boston, diagonally across the street from Symphony Hall. Rutman’s is attractive, friendly, and well situated, and hosts other, “legit” chamber music recitals as well.

• Concert series. The Boston Creative Music Alliance series is an important, but sparse, four-concerts-per-season affair run by Boston Phoenix and Jazziz critic Ed Hazell, and is held at the Institute for Contemporary Art in Boston. (This season featured Ernest Hawkins and the New Horizons Ensemble, Tim Berne and the Big Satan, Misha Mengelberg and the ICP Orchestra, and one local group—the Makanda Ken McIntyre Project with guest Oliver Lake.) Groups with no acoustic pianist appear on the new Friday Night Series at Brookline Tai Chi, an attractive, roomy space on Beacon Street in Brookline, thanks to the initiative of members of the Fully Celebrated Orchestra who work there. (FCO drummer Django Carraza told me they are searching for a piano.)

  Another excellent, musician-headed concert series is Modern Improvised Music (mim), originally run by bassist Nate McBride at a gallery called Artists-at-Large. AaL was situated on the main drag of Hyde Park—a far, far off, deserted corner of Boston, miles away from the last subway stop—and later moved around the corner to a church basement. Location, location, location… And yet mim’s reputation spread fast, and concerts were frequently full. Considering the difficulty of trekking out to Hyde Park, this success indicates the local audience’s appetite for interesting music. In addition to presenting locals, mim drew musicians from out of town, such as New York saxophonist Tony Malaby, Chicago saxophonist Ken Vandermark, and saxophonist Peter Brötzmann from Germany. When McBride finally gave up on Boston and moved to Chicago in 2004, pianist Steve Lantner took over the directorship. This spring, AaL was evicted from the church, and mim is currently on hiatus as it looks for a new home. Lantner plans to resume this valuable series somewhere in the fall of this year.

  There also is a series at the Cambridge Multicultural Arts Center called the Real Deal Jazz Club and Cafe. Tables and a bar are brought into the elegant concert hall, which is thus transformed into a “cabaret” setting. The Real Deal is run by Fenton Hollander, who formerly booked for the Regattabar. Ditto here for everything I described about that place, minus the rowing equipment on the walls.

  The local festivals scarcely warrant mentioning. The famous Boston Globe Jazz and Blues Festival, begun in 1966, has been inactive since 2003 and shows no signs of returning, and the Beantown Jazz Festival, founded by Bob’s Southern Bistro owner Darryl Settles, seems to feature at least as much R&B and gospel as jazz, so one wonders about its title.

I contacted musicians from three different cities, including Boston, to get their point of view. All three are well-known, risk-taking musicians who have gained devoted followings over the years, and they are almost guaranteed to bring out a good-sized audience here whenever they play. I asked them, most importantly, where they play when here, and why. I also asked them to compare the situation here with other U.S. cities.

Saxophonist Charlie Kohlhase has been based in the Boston area for more than twenty years and leads several groups, including the Charlie Kohlhase Quintet, the Explorer’s Club, and the Saxophone Support Group (whose name demonstrates the sense of humor required to survive here). Kohlhase used to appear occasionally at the Regattabar, but he told me now that since the previous booking agent (Hollander) left, he no longer does. He was playing at Artists-at-Large until it closed this spring, and now only plays at Brookline Tai Chi. (About both places he wrote: “the people are decent and trying to keep a scene going.”) He eschews places like the Lily Pad that “charge the artist to play—kind of a disturbing trend.”

Saxophonist and clarinetist Ken Vandermark of Chicago, leader and co-leader of numerous groups (e.g. the Vandermark Five and the Free Music Ensemble), also cites the former Artists-at-Large and Zeitgeist galleries as his stomping grounds when here. Now that one is closed and the other has morphed, we’ll see if Vandermark will opt for the Lily Pad, Rutman’s, or something else—or stop coming all together. Vandermark also balks at the rental fee arrangement, and he notices a decline in Boston “since the period in the early 1980s when challenging music was presented on a regular basis at the Willow, Charlie’s Tap, and the 1369 club.” By contrast, he says, Chicago is a place where “not counting the mainstream jazz clubs, there is a place to perform cutting-edge music every night of the week.” He partially blames Boston’s much higher real estate costs for its problem, and points out that while New York has similar problems, “the musicians in the New York area have somehow been able to coordinate with presenters to keep music happening, in Manhattan and Brooklyn.”

New York-based pianist Matthew Shipp, who performs and records as a soloist and in numerous other formations, said that New York really isn’t much better than Boston in this regard—it was a “don’t get me started!” moment in the conversation. He pointed out that the scene shifts from city to city, often depending on the existence of even one competent individual promoting jazz performances at any given time in a given city. (In Boston that individual was, for some years, a young man named Billy Ruane.) Currently, Shipp said, he has found the climate more favorable in places like Nashville and Austin. As for Boston, while Shipp used to play occasionally at The Middle East, he almost never plays here now unless he is featured in one of the four seasonal Boston Creative Music Alliance concerts—i.e. once a year, if we’re lucky. Keep in mind the piano issue here, add to it the inhospitality of the Regattabar et al., and the unpopular rental situation at the remaining two Boston-area venues that have pianos, and it’s clear that Boston has practically closed its doors to Shipp and countless other pianists, and their fans.

Vandermark ended his email to me with these thoughts: “The lack of performance opportunities in a city like Boston is crippling for the scene. More than any other kind of music, jazz needs a live environment for it to truly develop—it is a process art form. The fewer chances that there are to deal with the process, the fewer chances there are to find new ground on which to build.” Someday somebody here will decide he or she knows how to properly sell live, evolving jazz to its audience. Meanwhile, with schools like Berklee College of Music and the New England Conservatory, Boston will continue to draw large numbers of improvising musicians, and therefore there always will be a scene, whether or not it is seen or heard.

PLOrk could be the name of a new planet, a sitcom, or the newest catch phrase of America’s youth. Instead, it’s actually shorthand for the Princeton Laptop Orchestra, an ensemble of 15 laptops making music together in real time at Princeton University. The group is only in its infancy, this being the first year of the experiment, but they’ve made innovative strides. Last September, they began as a freshman seminar in computer music; in May, they took the stage as a performing ensemble. You can judge this book by its cover—PLOrk is just as cool as the name, as proven by their final concert at Princeton early this month.

They set up camp for the concert in Princeton’s Chancellor Green Rotunda, an octagon-shaped library with a circular upstairs deck. The laptops were situated upstairs while the audience sat below looking up or lounging on the floor with provided Pilates mats. Was this a concert or nap time? The pre-concert music featured the kind of sounds you’d hear at a planetarium, the light shimmering of stars and planets. Scott Smallwood, composer and the-guy-running-around-with-equipment, was the captain of this ship, pulling the audience out of their daily routine and preparing them to experience what might be thought of as other-worldly sounds.

Only partially coming down to Earth, the first piece, Orbits, allowed the laptops to connect to a remote server offering the chillingly urgent speech of air traffic controllers. The laptops controlled the amount of static and the loudness of the sounds, with other atmospheric noise in the background. As the sounds progressed, two of the five laptop players began making sounds by bowing an electric cymbal. Further on, more sounds were added as other players took mallets to metal bowls. It all faded away to the lonely sound of one air traffic controller in empty space.

CliX, by doctoral candidate and TA for the computer music seminar Ge Wang, followed. Each key on the laptop keyboard was programmed to make a clicking-type sound and the players typed away at racing speeds. Wang conducted the piece, asking for high and low pitched clicks by the level of his hand, and divided up the group at times to have multiple grooves going at once. He pointed all across the ensemble for a wave effect, the musical equivalent of cheering baseball fans. The clicks were like raindrops on a windshield during a downpour and the piece was just as energetic as a windy storm.

With young adults as composers, one would expect to hear a bit of the electronic generation rub off on the music. Chris Douthitt’s music, Piece for Plucked Strings and Bells (sort of) for Three Laptops and One Performer, made good use of electronica’s dense percussion beats and chill chords. It surprised me to find out after the concert that the plucked string sound was not a live performer, but a computer-made sound created with the help of the distinguished composer and computer music faculty member, Paul Lansky. It sounded like an acoustic instrument with the whimsical quality of a live musician. Mumble, by one-time NewMusicBox associate editor Nathan Michel, seemed also inspired by modern popular music with beautiful chords and clouds of twinkling stars.

Faculty member and electronic music queen Pauline Oliveros also “intended” to write a piece for the group, a piece called Murphy Mixup: Murphy Intends. With composer Zevin Polzin, she made a musical version of the Murphy Device from the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research lab. The device itself is a conveyor belt carrying 9000 black balls over the top of a wall, the balls falling into a Gaussian distribution, a bell-curve. However, it’s been proven with the Murphy Device that people mentally intending to influence the curve actually could alter it without any physical connection—only intention. Oliveros’s musical version is mostly pre-programmed in the software so the ensemble doesn’t actually have to do much during the piece except give mental attention to the sounds coming out of their specific computer. A bunch of fun sounds are mathematically happening in a Gaussian curve, but if a performer or audience member hears a sound they like, and intends to hear it again, they just might be able to influence that sound to pop up more often. The piece required minimal work from PLOrk but was interesting in both philosophy and sound.

Dan Trueman decided to take matters into his own hands by conducting his piece, not leaving anything to chance. His was one of the few chord-based pieces on the program, and it included live elements such as mouth clicks and heavy breathing by the performers in addition to a seemingly involved and fun process on the laptops.

Shifting the concert into a more interactive and entertaining experience for the laptop musicians, Scott Smallwood and Ge Wang developed a piece with an interface that resembles a video game. Little mice run around a checkered board on the screen, and the players place shapes in their path that create sound as the mice run over them. The mice go from computer to computer, so the players have to sit in anticipation for when the mice will come onto their screen. New mice are made by the conductor on a MIDI keyboard, and after a while, there are a ton of mice running around with the players trying to keep up. This piece was only in demo mode for this concert and Wang said that more planning and organization still need to happen before it’s complete, but it was intriguing to watch and listen to what they had come up with so far.

Staying with the theme of games, Smallwood took inspiration from his childhood memories of the local arcade. This piece was a crazy arrangement of fragments from all your favorite video games—Pac Man, Super Mario Brothers, and much more—with all the bells and whistles of an arcade. It was a lively and entertaining way to end the concert.

This ensemble is original because opens up the possibilities for computer music to be a more human and interactive process, instead of a lonely, isolated one. Cutting-edge equipment helps. The speakers are special-order, spaceship-looking creations that have six separate channels. The sound coming out eminates in all directions, simulating an acoustic instrument with depth rather than the thin sound of one speaker. Also, tiny Mac laptops allow this group to be portable, whereas in the past, it would have been a pain to carry around a desktop computer. Plus, technology has advanced in a way that computers can process sound in real time and servers can handle processing large amounts of information without much of a delay.

All these factors added up in PLOrk founders Dan Trueman and Perry Cook’s minds, and they decided to try out a laptop ensemble and see if it would sink or swim. In this case, it swam. PLOrk holds many possibilities and I look forward to seeing and hearing what the future will bring. If this past concert is any indication, there will be a plenitude of cool, fantastic sounds to be discovered.

Roddy Schrock Photo by Hideki Kubota

Communication through movement is a mysterious proposition. Dance always seems so fragile. Theater, with its grand excess of spoken dialogue, is an exercise in obtuse explication compared to the ascetic limitations of movement. One piece in particular drew me to the Paul Taylor Dance Company performance on March 31: Banquet of Vultures, a new work choreographed by Taylor receiving its West Coast premiere.

Taylor’s decision to use Morton Feldman’s Oboe and Orchestra to accompany the piece was part of the attraction. I wanted to find out how this work could be tied to his style of choreography or if the music would even be audible over the noisy patter of the dancers moving around the stage. In answer to the last question, it was, but barely. As to the first question, it was a success as well. Feldman’s music weaved its way around the dancers, maintaining its own presence as much as the performers on stage. Taylor’s interplay between physical and musical gesture was subtle, evocative, and convincing.

At first I took issue with Taylor seeming to have superficially chosen this piece only for its ability to evoke a sense of dread, but finally decided to just go with it, accepting his proposition. I’ve never found Feldman’s music disquieting at all, and frequently tire of hearing commentary linking contemporary composition to horror film soundtracks, but in this case, for whatever reason, it worked. Maybe Taylor is lucky, or maybe he is of that rare branch of choreography that is able to successfully marry pre-composed music with new dance. The Feldman piece, while not remotely dark on its own, is malleable, able to bend into a shape that compliments the stark commentary of Taylor’s piece. But why music so often has to be the compromised part in dance is another issue altogether.

In the piece, a frightening young man dressed in a black suit with a red tie, the kind worn only by politicians or real estate moguls, plays the role of some kind of American Psycho/Dear Leader character commanding a panoply of tightly synchronized soldiers, dressed in full military drag. The oboe with its long, sharp, subtly shifting lines provides a focal point to a dark stage with slithering characters holding candles. As time passes, the soldiers die, the Dear Leader jumps for joy in turn, and toward the end, vividly stabs a candle-bearing lone survivor of his indiscriminate war, eventually carrying her offstage.

Throughout the piece, while dramatic in its imagery, I couldn’t help but wish that there were more depth to the commentary, taking us somewhere other than the mindset of how horrible war is and how horrified we should be at the current wars happening around us. And there is one moment when the red tie-wearing presidential character dances solo, in convulsive movements, pummeling himself on the floor, forcing the audience to question whether politicians are capable of guilt or self-loathing when faced with the responsibility of their actions. This moment, this question offered to the audience, took the piece beyond the realm of cliché and into the refreshing area of direct cultural commentary. But I still wish that this approach were more the norm in the work of such populist-leaning artists as Paul Taylor. Banquet of Vultures is ultimately the V for Vendetta for the NPR-listening, Volvo driving, “supporters of the arts” crowd.

What’s more important: the movie or the music? Movies are visual creations, where flashing lights and tightly edited sequences capture our attention and transport us into the world of the director and screenwriter. But it’s the music, often forgotten about in the background, that targets an emotion, tells a story, and sets an atmosphere long before the visual components of a movie, and it can often drastically change how we interpret the story. For the third annual Syracuse International Film and Video Festival, the Syracuse Society for New Music brought the music of the movies to the foreground with live performances played to background film clips. This unusual reversal of roles was both an enticing and unique way of bringing attention to music that often goes unappreciated.

The concert opened with Laura Karpman’s five-movement composition, Rounds (2001), for viola and piano. Karpman is a four-time Emmy award winning composer who has worked with Steven Spielberg on a mini-series, Taken. A believer that video game music holds creative potential, she is the current composer-in-residence for Sony Online Entertainment. For those video game addicts out there, Karpman’s music can be heard on Sony’s Everquest II. Though Rounds was not accompanied with film clips or visuals, the music was so visual that a film could have been made as accompaniment to the score.

The piece began with hardly audible figurations on the viola, rising in volume as if something in the distance were approaching. The piano pushed along the rhythm with clear accents, both instruments rising in volume until a driving rhythm took over. The second movement was calmer, imitating rippled water with a reflective character. The third movement took off in a hurry, but the fourth movement returned to the rippled water, with more pensive and exotic melodies. And, in a full circle, the fifth movement returned to distant figurations, rising in tension and activity. However, the ending was so anticlimactic that it was almost lost. There were some ensemble issues, the two performers not exactly lining up, but the over-all impression was effective because it brought scenes and action into my mind as I listened, the way any good film composer knows how to do.

Featured next was a trailer of alma mater, one of the films from the festival, by Uruguayan director Alvaro Buela with music by Sylvia Meyer. The film traces a girl through religious and mystical experiences which ultimately give her a deeper understanding of her own motives in life. However, the trailer turned the girl’s depression into an artistic statement. The music helped with the artistic, pensive spin by illuminating the silent film editing with a cute Spanish vocal song with raw harmony in the piano. Composer Sylvia Meyer, who was also performing, sang not as an opera singer but as a Spanish folk singer, which gave the film added character and inspired me to want to see the full-length version.

In between set-ups, clips from the one of the Festival’s documentary films, Bright Circle, was shown. The film tracks American Indians in sports with music by Brent Michael Davids. The music wandered around with unresolved dissonances, but was very much a background event so as to not drown out the narration. The film proved to be an interesting account of the cultural cleansing that forced the American Indians to adapt to the social-rites of a Europeanized America, all while American Indians dominated the sports scene in the early 1900s.

Davids, of American Indian decent, also rescored the 1920 silent film, Last of the Mohicans in 2003 for full-orchestra and quartz flute. It’s a captivating score that perfectly lines up with the action in the movie, from the tension between the white man and the Indians, to the love between Cora and Uncas, and even the brutal fight scenes. For the Society for New Music concert, Davids pared down the score for a large chamber ensemble and he joined the action, playing the quartz flute and singing. The piece was held together with the film by using a somewhat audible click track. It was slightly annoying, but when the wood flute being played on the silent screen sounded loud and clear in exact time, it was chilling and worthwhile. Rumor has it that discussions are taking place with Daniel Hege, the music director of the Syracuse Symphony, to program the full orchestral score.

Kazuhiko Koyama gets the award for traveling the furthest distance to be at the concert. Express from Japan, lavished in bright blue silks with white socks and flip-flops, he came to share the sounds of his shamisen, a traditional Japanese instrument. For those who have not seen one up close, it looks like a cross between a bass guitar and banjo. The sound box looked and sounded as if it were made from solid clay. Koyama used a metal handle that could grab the string, plucking it upwards with a tingy sound, but could also hit the strings against the clay, making a loud clank. He played tracks from the movie Adan, which was also screened at the film festival. A score made up of Koyama’s playing makes me think that the movie must incorporate both traditional and modern elements.

The concert came to a dramatic finish with a clip of Episode 110 from the Spielberg’s Taken, with the second piece of Laura Karpman’s to be featured on the program, a score arranged for two violins, two violas, cello, and double bass. It was a huge contrast compared to Rounds. This piece was romantic in style, but never gave into clichéd dominant to tonic cadences, keeping the dissonance prevailing throughout. The tension created by the clashing of those compositional techniques was carried throughout the entire episode. Taking in Spielberg’s overly-dramatic Hollywood directorial style combined with the sci-fi edge of the series, Karpman’s sounds melded well and helped hold the dramatic tension through the long scene where the daughter of a young couple was lured away by spaceships hovering above the Midwestern plains. Because of the live accompaniment, the spoken words from the episode were turned off, so it was difficult to understand the action on screen, but the music gave enough information to hold the audience in suspense as the scene played out.

Listening to new music with International Film Festival reels attached was as magical as a new music concert can get and opened a new chapter for the Syracuse Society for New Music. Despite the unique nature of this concert, it seemed to be a technical beast to put on logistically. Except for the click track for Last of the Mohicans, the performers had to wing it, often times leaving the music lagging behind the end of the clip which resulted sharp cuts of film instead of nicely timed, edited endings. For a group such as the Syracuse Society for New Music, this was a humongous project, much larger than their usual fare, and perhaps it didn’t get quite enough preparation. The Society will do all it can to put on new music, even if it means short rehearsal times. Perhaps they’ll gain more recognition, and funding, through their relationship with the film festival, affording them more rehearsal time in the future. If music sets the tone, the Society sets the tone of a growing community with artistic potential.