Halloween began around 7, with the ensemble Ne(x)tworks performing three wonderful semi-improvisatory works, Joan LaBarbara’s Woolfsongs, based on Virginia Woolf, Christian Wolff’s three-note Duo For Violins, and the entirely-improvisatory Aus Den Seiben Tagen by Stockhausen. This demands that something be said about improvisation in a classical context: it works if and (almost) only if the group listens. Of course, this goes for jazz improvisation as well–think of the jam session where the sax player disregards his rhythm section and blows sixteenth notes for four or five mind-numbing minutes–but the near-total freedom that many improvisational scores give classical players, and the absence of stylistic guidelines that are present in jazz, work to create a chasm that can only be filled by listening.
Ne(x)tworks, as a long-running ensemble of composer-performers, listens well. They brought this same quality to Wolff’s Duo For Violins, which contains all of three adjacent notes (giving a total of two intervals). Yet, instead of sounding prescribed and constrained, the entire performance seemed alive, even improvisatory. Analogous to virtuosic technicians, these musicians are virtuosic listeners, able to perform scores many others would not even be able to touch.
This provided a perfect transition to Dionne Werewolf & the Burt Bacharach Cover Band, playing hits like “Zombies Keep Chompin’ On My Head,” and “Stalk on By.” I’ll include a picture, and that should suffice. Notice The Night of the Living Dead projected on to the back wall.
I should also mention Cat (last name?) the backup singer, whose one-woman-plus-stompboxes sideshow in front of Tristan Perich’s one-bit video installation was unexpected and somewhat engrossing. In the hallway during the set change, she layered voices onto other voices in front of some candles–nearly as spooky as Dionne Werewolf’s “That’s What Fiends Are For.”
Which brings us to Growler, the only band I’ve seen to perform with a trapeze artist. Hard, hard rock, maybe metal, but closer to something from Seattle than from Norway, Growler has been playing for ten years. What is it with metal bands and staying together for long periods of time? Punk can’t do it, indie rock can’t do it, and pop can’t even consider it. Is it the lack of metal-based solo project potential? In a strange way, this fit the venue: loud, assaultive, and theatrical. Not that this is the venue for metal, per se, but some namby-pamby party pop group just wouldn’t have cut it for the spookiest night of the year.
Finally, All Souls Day, the tacked-on holiday that let the Holy Romans sanctify the pagan end of the harvest year. What to do but exercise and go to church? I didn’t quite want to exercise the morning after Halloween, but luckily someone else was doing the exercising for me. Either that or all of New York was fleeing something.
By early evening, some old and pretty music was in order, however, so I went to the Bach Vespers up on the Upper East Side near Lincoln Center. Let’s just say this church was super Lutheran. Like, feel-like-you’re-in-the-seventeenth-century Lutheran, where the guy sings the prayers and everything else in the service. As the first non-Quaker religious meeting I’d been to since maybe June or July, the presence of words was a bit unexpected. It was good, though, with period instruments like the viola da gamba and recorders, and a continuo playing figured bass, which is a semi-improvised accompaniment sort of like jazz chords that a Baroque keyboardist would follow to back up a choir or soloist.
Which brings me back to improvisation as an essential aspect of live performance: it is all about listening. Except, in this case, the listening was clearly, visibly filtered through the cantor, as he made motions to shape the choir and the players. Instead of submitting to one another, the players submit to an imagination as enthroned as it is benevolent (to quote Wallace Stevens). This is where “improvisation” begins to break down, and where one type of improvisation does not necessarily include or bear intrinsic relation to another. It is not just a matter of freedom versus constraint, but a matter of a score which causes the players to bear relation to each other (or themselves) or whether the players each, individually, relate to a single object. The key is for the latter to have some of the former, and for the former to be honestly, sincerely achieved so as to be almost mistaken for the latter.
