La musique moderne

A few days ago, I took myself to the Conservatory to hear the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players perform works by composers whom I did not know: David Lang ('death speaks'), Lee Hyla ('We speak Etruscan') and Gerard Grisey ('Quatre chants pour franchir le seuil'). There was an improvisation as well, before the Grisey work. The Lang pieces were lullaby-like and static, a mix of piano, electric guitar, violin, soprano, and bass drum.. An agreeable sound, settings of poems about death, as were the Grisey pieces. The ensemble wasn't quite in synch, and the soprano had the odd task of striking the drum behind her, while she sang. But the overall effect was not uninteresting. The Hyla piece comprised bass clarinet and baritone sax, an ungainly pair. But the piece was structured, coherent, and well played. The improvisation included a megaphone and an English horn. They began in the back of the hall and progressed slowly to the stage. The sounds were rather like recordings of the solar wind, and radio transmissions of stars and galaxies and gas giant planets. By the end of it, the megaphonist looked like he was about to suffer a stroke. A young woman told him, during the interval, that his performance was "strangely beautiful!" The Grisey pieces were typically would-be modernist: episodic, fragmentary, non-developmental, full of tone colors made up of lots of percussion, brass and reeds, including things like muted tubas, and one each of the string instruments. And a harp. The soprano frequently held a tuning fork to her ear. Lots of changes of time signature and dynamics. The work struck me as a collection of quasi-modernist clichés and retro "avant-garde" gestures. A challenging evening.

At the box office, I inquired whether there were tickets "at old peoples' prices!" "No," replied the young man. "We assume that with age come wisdom and wealth!" "I have news for you!" I said.

Beside me in the hall were an old man and his "lovely Irish bride of fifty-seven years," as he put it. During the improvisation, he pronounced it "a disgrace," and stumbled out of the hall, taking his lovely bride with him.