As more new music wilderness gets charted, the Sick Puppy Iditarod gets longer. The annual student-performance (plus guests) finale to the Summer Institute for Contemporary Performance Practice (SICPP) has always been casually epic, the sort of concert that can program a musical monument almost in passing. (This year it was Steve Reichs Music for 18 Musicians, 60 minutes of aggressive percolation that commenced around 9:15.) But this Iditarod pushed past midnight into Sunday, a 10-hour course.
The expanded landscape, perhaps, reflected the presence of French composer Tristan Murail, in residence at SICPP this summer, with five works on Saturdays bill. Murail likes to get inside musical sound, dismantling it and unhurriedly regarding the components. But he does so with sensual precision, amply evident from 1974s Transsahara Express, dark, soft daubs given smooth varnish by bassoonist Christopher Watford and pianist Ingrid Lee, to Lachrymae, a six-player, slow-motion ululation premiered earlier in the week, and reprised under the direction of SICPP director Stephen Drury.
That sort of mobile-like aesthetic, more atmosphere than arc, was prominent, especially in 10 works by fellows in SICPPs New Works Program. The best went beyond influence with either energy cellist Elizabeth Lee and saxophonist Zach Herchens vehement bow-pressure-and-multiphonic distortions in Ryo Nakayamas Xxxx xxx or efficiency with Davide Iannis Trasparenze dAccenti, a nicely paced key-clicks-and-air musical X-ray for flute (Sarah Brady), trombone (McMillan Gaither), and percussion (Sayun Chang), or Eliza Browns aptly-titled Barely, a just-audible aria of hesitance for solo flute (Jennifer Ingertila).
Lee Weiserts New England Drift, a premiere, combined seven players worth of whispers, clicks, and fleeting triads into a charmingly eerie forest of parlor-song ghosts. Memorials were memorable: Christian Wolffs For Morty (a tribute to Morton Feldman), realized with off-kilter gentleness by pianist Sid Samberg and percussionists Gary Donald and Jeffrey Kolega; the furious bells of Philippe Hurels Tombeau in memoriam Grard Grisey, pianist Jack Dettling and percussionist Cory Bracken rhythmic and ringing; and Gyrgy Kurtags explosive, gnomic Hommage R. Sch., finely etched by violist Ethan Wood, clarinetist Benjamin Irwin, and pianist Christopher Owen.
Old-guard repertoire dated to 1948 (Elliott Carters Cello Sonata, performed by Lee and pianist Christina Wright, and sounding almost nostalgic in this context); classics from the 1950s and 60s offered provocations both clement and severe. In Feldmans Two Pieces for Three Pianos, a SICPP favorite, Maribel Hernndez Tagle, Todd Moellenberg, and Asher Severini puffed muted, dissonant clouds. Karlheinz Stockhausen was represented by the atom-smashed jazz of Kreuzspiel (conducted by Jeffrey Means) and the dispersed metallic shimmer of Refrain (Wright joined by Jo Zhou on celesta and Christian Smith on percussion) the latter foreshadowing much of the concerts sound-world. And Lukas Fosss Paradigm turned the line between avant-garde music and performance art into a trip-wire for increasingly absurd booby-traps.
Like much of the music, Paradigm was amplified as with the Reich, to facilitate balance. Others molded the signal; music by fellows in SICPPs Electronic Workshop used live performance as source material for computer-controlled transmutations. (Simon Haness Regiomontanus was particularly fine, Franziska Huhns harp triggering a glittering hall of mirrors.) Here, too, Murail was an exemplar; his Winter Fragments, conducted by Julia Tai, electronically opened out a sextet into gorgeous, deep-focus, prismatic topography.
True to SICPPs penchant for invitation, as the hours passed, the music seemed to become more ruminative, more beguiling. The marathon closed with a meditation: John Cages Ryoanji, implacably sparse tolling drums (Kolega), an oboist (Anne Goldberg) trading bent-note aphorisms with her own prerecorded shadow, the Iditarod drifting off into the predawn.
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