To kick off the Darmstadt festival (and to fundraise for it), Nick & Zach put together this performance of Terry Riley’s In C, for any number of musicians (I mean, around 35 ideally), and with any duration. As a general rule, the more musicians you have the longer it will take, and with a stage plus a drinks booth completely full it took a solid 1 1/2 hours. This was solid, key-of-C pounding for 90 minutes that really went places, by the sheer fact that all that many musicians playing together have to eventually get bored of playing loudly and start to play quietly, then even more eventually start to get loud again and start to do weird things with time.

Time seems to stretch and contract again; this isn’t really based on the speed of the playing (all steady 8th notes circa qn = 144, for the most part) but more to do with the duration. Duration does weird things, and these are weird physical things. It drains your body of energy, so that you start shifting your weight; there is no payoff for audiences that are used to clapping every 15 minutes or maybe, maybe waiting a full 40 minutes to clap if it’s something wretchedly long like a Beethoven symphony. So, people left and people wandered around.

The best part was that with all of the huge celebrities on stage (that is, celebrities in certain circles) no one person could be heard, almost ever. It was a total mass of sound. Here’s the weirdest part: it was written in 1964. Is this weird to anyone else? It would be like a “new progressive-math-garage-indie rock” band playing some Beatles covers or something. But no, that’s not what it’s like: it would be like a dozen new-progressive-math-garage-indie-rock bands playing Beatles covers, all together, because it’s the one thing they could agree on to play: Eleanor Rigby or Rocky Raccoon or something. Really, for such a factional, divisive crowd as contemporary musicians are, this performance says something about not just the piece but about the similarities between people. It’s notable, as well, that the piece has no conductor, relies mainly on improvisation, and creates a community rather than a “message.”

As Harry Partch said (in The Dreamer That Remains) “No message. Too many messages.”