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Ensemble Sirius plays Stockhausen at Eyedrum
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Concert Review
Ensemble Sirius plays music of Karlheinz Stockhausen.
Monday at Eyedrum. Eyedrum.org.
It used to be trendy to love modern art — in music, painting, architecture, fashion, theater and other manifestations. So fresh. So clean. So new.
Nowadays it’s trendy to hate modern art, to think it’s disposable, that it’s junk.
Thus an international organization with a fun-sounding name, Docomomo, is dedicated to documenting and conserving architecture from the modern movement: Do-co-mo-mo. There’s even a chapter in Atlanta.
Something similar — in spirit, anyway — is practiced by the Ensemble Sirius, a duo that uses percussion, keyboards and electronics to bring classics of musical modernism to life.
Monday at Eyedrum, the duo played “Nachtmusik” (“Nightmusic”) by Karlheinz Stockhausen, a German composer who once led the Euro avant-garde. Stockhausen’s influence, like the movement itself, reached a peak in the late 1960s. (The Beatles dug Stockhausen enough to put him on the crowded cover of its “Sgt. Pepper’s” album.)
The score to “Nachtmusik,” from 1968, is less than you might expect. There’s no traditional notation, just a wavy-gravy set of koan-like instructions that begin, “Play a vibration in the rhythm of the universe. Play a vibration in the rhythm of dreaming.”
It’s entirely up to the performers to decide what this might sound like, which instruments to play and how long it lasts. The Sirius boys have it from the master’s knee Stuart Gerber is on the faculty of Georgia State University and is percussionist for the composer’s teaching sessions in Kuerten, Germany. Michael Fowler is a new-music pianist who lives in Australia. Together they’ve performed for Stockhausen and received the guru’s coaching.
They’ve made a specialty of the improvisatory “Nachtmusik” — and even played it twice at Monday’s concert, with each version, performed differently, lasting about 30 minutes.
First time through, they mixed weird electronic sounds with percussion, static-filled shortwave radio and audio clips of Stockhausen talking. Despite the instructions, it conjured neither dreams nor the universe. It sounded too human made. It didn’t come together organically.
Second run: same recipe, different ingredients. Here it was more aurally enticing, with snippets of old choral music forming the foundation for weird electronics and unusual percussion. But it also started awkwardly.
Then, about 20 minutes into it, they clicked. A sample of John Taverner’s dark chants came on the loop. Fowler added a steady swishing noise to thicken the atmosphere. Gerber picked up a contrabass bow and a Swiss cowbell and, dragging one across the other, made ethereal music — and suddenly this crazy cacophonous quilt was alive.
All at once, you could feel the energy and intensity dramatically rise in the room. Serene, cool, moody, at turns lovely and haunting, the music was indeed dreamily universal, where the modernist art made perfect sense.
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By Tom
January 7, 2005 9:02 AM | Link to this
In what universe is it trendy to think of everything modern as disposable?