Saturday, August 10, 2019
TIME:SPANS
Klaus Lang, bright darkness
Ensemble Nikel
Robert F. Wagner Jr. Park, 7pm
An exceptionally beautiful August night in Manhattan: low humidity, sunny, the temperature only just reaching 80 degrees earlier, then falling with the sun; on the street, everyone seemingly enjoying themselves. I rode a CitiBike west and south from Greenwich Village down the Hudson River Greenway to Robert F. Wagner Jr. Park in Battery Park City, arriving shortly after the performance began.
A small, low temporary stage in the middle of a square lawn enclosed by wide wooden benches. Four players: mallet percussion, electric guitar, keyboards, and saxophones. To the west, the esplanade and the Upper Bay of New York Harbor, with Jersey City in the distance. To the east, Gigino, a white-tablecloth Italian restaurant full of tourists drinking wine and gazing at the Statue of Liberty, the waiters raising the open patio’s sunshades with their long awning wrenches as the sun set. To the north, the Museum of Jewish Heritage and picnickers on its lawn, with the World Trade Center, towering above, in the distance. And to the south, Pier A with its Harbor House—a bar full of well-heeled, young, and almost exclusively white people (finance types?) and some more formal, smaller party on the second-floor balcony (a corporate event, a rehearsal dinner?)—and Governor’s Island in the distance. Out on the water, the usual menagerie of yachts, ferries, sail boats, schooners, jet skis, the Circle Line, the Classic Harbor Line, the Liberty Island cruises, and some grimy tugs and barges running close to the Battery, perhaps headed down to Red Hook or up the East River to the Navy Yard.
The piece, which lasts approximately an hour, is to be performed at sunset, which occurred at 8:01pm. The golden hour: long shadows. (I should be outside in open spaces more often.)
Music that is gracious toward its surroundings, that doesn’t compete for primacy of attention (Cage, Oliveros).
(More than just a conceptual “window” or “frame” as in Cage’s 4’33’’—profound though the concept is—music that appears has all the trappings of convention—fixed form, clear structure, fully notated score, conventional instruments, precise coordination between players—yet feels categorically different.)
Music that’s content to be submerged or engulfed.
(In contrast, John Luther Adams’s Inuksuit, despite being entirely acoustic and having a much larger sonic/spatial footprint, still seems to imply that the listener prioritize performative sound against environmental sound. Blending and heightening of environmental and performative sound occurs, but simply because there are sometimes very loud sounds—drums, sirens, etc.—Inuksuit has a more foregrounded (at times, even dominating) relationship to its surroundings.)
Music that approaches boredom or monotony, then shifts, causing an attentional jolt (Feldman, Grisey).
Music as ambience, noise, stasis; a place you inhabit, operating on a slower, natural time-scale (Pisaro, Frey).
Many lovely coincidences:
A party boat approaching in the Harbor, its deep dance bass dropping at just the right moment, the dark rumble of Lang’s quartet effecting a kind of storm-cloud-over-blazing-sun sonic combination.
The Pier A clock tower chiming on the half hour between 7 and 8pm, complicating the polyrhythm of a just-begun pulsed section. (The clock, a ship’s clock donated by the founder of U.S. Steel, was installed in the pier’s tower in 1919 as a memorial to those who died during World War I.)
A little boy walking a puppy that couldn’t have been more than a few weeks old in circles around the stage, the puppy bounding toward each reclining audience member it passed. Families speaking various languages; kids running laps on the wooden bench, their approaching and receding footfalls vibrating the bench in a slow, spatialized loop. Many people chancing upon the performance, briefly filming it, and continuing on.
A tall, fit man wearing a Brigham Young shirt taking a breather from his run down the Greenway, listening for several minutes while scrolling on his phone, then getting up, turning to us, and saying, “Am I missing something?” As Lang says in his program note: “What we perceive is very often not what our senses are suggesting; in fact it is our notion of something shaped by concepts. We are impeded in realizing our sensory perception by a learned mechanism of our mind.” (A reminder to just take it in, without expectation.) This man clearly brought his concepts about how concerts should be to the experience, and this concert wasn’t gelling with them. It’s far too easy—and ungracious—to disdain the uninitiated; this man simply needed some context—the low volume is intentional, the music is designed to blend with its environment.
The dramatic reveal of a large sightseeing ship emerging from behind the pier—seen, not heard. Lang’s music providing a kind of acoustic mask—like a fountain in a walled garden—that effectively blocked out most of the surrounding ambient noise (traffic on the West Side Highway, boat engines, water splashing against the Battery, etc.). The feeling of a soundtrack, or watching a movie. (I saw things I thought I should be able to hear, but couldn’t. And heard things I didn’t think I’d able to.)
The speaker array (four outward-facing speakers at the stage’s corners, four inward-facing speakers at the lawn’s corners) created an acoustic “cocoon.” Walking outside the electroacoustic perimeter, one was much more aware of ambient sound.
Intriguing spatial disjuncture: often, I could hear only amplified sound, not live sound. Even though I was close to the performers and could see the percussionist’s mallets striking the bars, I could only hear the sound as reproduced and amplified by a nearby speaker (separated, spatially, from its source). A kind of double audition: simultaneously close and distanced.
The music itself lovely: mainly two alternating sections—a rumbling dense texture, full of many notes/runs and occasional saxophone multiphonics (of the quiet, Weiss/Netti category), and a still, descending scalar section, with pleasantly strident microtonal quasi-unisons between guitar, marimba, and keyboards.
Afterward, I wear my bike helmet while walking out of the park; a young man asks me where my bike is. I tell him I’m headed to the CitiBike docking station. He complains they don’t have the electric bikes anymore; I tell him the electric bikes were malfunctioning—the breaks were engaging spontaneously, mid-ride, throwing riders over the handlebars. (This happened to someone in my family, who now has metal throughout their elbows and arms.) I pass several white “ghost bikes” along the Greenway—reminders of the danger of cycling in this city. A friend’s partner was killed in a cycling accident just weeks ago.
Parting advice: don’t eat too much (all) of that quart of ice cream you purchased at Trader Joe’s after your invigorating bike ride home, or your stomach will hurt.