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World Premieres from NeoPhonia
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
CONCERT REVIEW
NeoPhonia new-music ensemble. Tuesday at Georgia State University’s Florence Kopleff Recital Hall.
Three world premieres linked Tuesday evening’s NeoPhonia concert titled “Red Clay Connections” — new music from the Atlanta soil.
NeoPhonia’s artistic director (and GSU faculty) Nickitas Demos opened the hour-long show with a brief Q&A to the evening’s composers: Zack Browning, Anne Richardson and Adam Scott Neal. The questions weren’t designed to produce deep answers, but it’s always nice to meet the people behind the music, even if it’s up on stage. To that end, Browning, on the University of Illinois music faculty (and raised in Atlanta), had the best quip: “A composer is a person who writes the kind of music that makes himself necessary.”
With a growing national reputation, Browning was heard locally a year ago, when New York’s Bang on a Can ensemble, on tour, played some of his speed-demon music at Emory. Tuesday’s 9-minute premiere, “Secret Pulse” starts with taped sounds of blurry, stroboscopic electronica, augmented by live flute, violin and cello, played here by Sara Booker, Kennneth Oberholtzer and James Burch, respectively. Balancing pre-recorded tape with amplified instruments is at best tricky; here it might have muddied textures the composer meant to keep clear.
Still, the piece is way-cool in attitude, racing at top velocity, pausing only occasionally for a lyrical cello melody or pointillistic violin fragment. There’s anxiety in its fast-faster-faster sensory overload. This stirred feelings of helplessness in at least one listener. I had been in a cheerful mood before the music started, but after a few minutes it felt like Browning’s bleak commentary on our depersonalized, electro-computer society, where an individual’s ideas are swept aside by the information-age tsunami. And yet it was kinda fun.
Demos’ “Tonoi V,” for solo pipe organ (performed by Mark Street), is fifth in a series, each exploring a different instrument. An oscillating, 2-note figure provided a thread throughout the 11-minute work, punctuated by quick jabs or dark pedal notes. A gossamer, high-wire act, it recalled the music of young John Adams — without wrapping up to a satisfying conclusion.
An Atlanta native, born in 1981, Neal described his 6-minute “Nympholepsy” as a musical depiction of the frenzied pursuit of an ideal, as well as the ideal itself. Written for solo flutist (Booker again), the work purred and whirled around, attractive (and slight) in its meanderings.
The only music that was not a world premiere — Richardson’s 10-minute “Wide Open Spaces” — dates from 2000. A local music teacher and performer, Richardson uses familiar-sounding harmonies and gestures to capture a meditative, lonesome sense of the outdoors, of broad skies and majestic views. Violist Tania Maxwell-Clements and pianist Street played it serenely, like they were going no place in no hurry, The contrast with Browning’s panic-inducing “Secret Pulse,” on a short program, was almost cartoon-comical, of Road Runner’s antics amid the breath-taking vistas.
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