1989 AND AFTER

BEGINNINGS

It begins with a string quartet: two violins, a viola, and a cello pumping notes up and down like pistons. An image of the American machine age, hallucinated through the sound of the European Enlightenment. The image is strengthened as a voice — mature, female, American — intones an itinerary: "From Chicago ... to New York." The sound is prerecorded, digitally sampled and amplified through speakers beside the ensemble. More samples are added: more voices; the whistles and bells of trains; one, two, three, or even more string quartets. Rapidly the musical space far exceeds what we see on stage. This is a string quartet for the media age, as much recordings and amplification as it is the four musicians in front of us. Yet everything extends from it and back into it, whether the quartet of quartets, which mirror and echo each other; the voices, which seem to blend seamlessly with the instrumental rhythms and melodies; or the whistles, which mesh so clearly with the harmonic changes that it seems certain they come from an unseen wind instrument and not a concrete recording.

* * *

It begins with thumping and hammering, small clusters struck on the piano keyboard with the side of the palm or with three fingers pressed together, jabbing like a beak. The sound recalls a malevolent dinosaur or perhaps a furious child, but it isn't random; a melody of sorts, or an identifiable series of pitches at least, hangs over the tumult. After twenty seconds or so the thunder halts abruptly for a two-note rising motif played by the right hand, which is then imitated (slightly altered) by the left. It is a simple gesture, refusing, with that delicate variation on the repeat, to do as expected, and expressed with the utmost clarity and efficiency. We have jumped from breezeblocks to water, but the expressive force remains. At every turn the music — on paper just a short sonata for piano — seems about to burst its own edges. Distortion is applied in every dimension, from the blurring of the melodic line with those cluster chords, to the extremities of force and volume required from instrument and performer (for the majority of the piece, every note is marked to be played very loud, except those marked even louder), to the extremes of range, from the very highest to the very lowest notes of the piano that stretch any sense of sonic unity or middle ground to its limit. Even at just seven minutes long, it is a shattering experience for both performer and listener, only heightened by the few moments of quiet contemplation that occur toward the end of the piece.

* * *

It begins with water, gently lapping, close miked. In the distance, the hum of a city. The occasional calls of a gull suggest we are on the coast. A woman's voice enters, softly describing the location and where she is standing, where we are listening: "It's a calm morning. I'm on Kits Beach in Vancouver. It's slightly overcast — and very mild for January." She is very close, almost inside our ears, but the place she describes and what we can hear is far away. An aircraft passes overhead. A car sounds its horn in the distance, and it echoes against buildings and around the bay. This is Kitsilano Beach, on the south shore of Vancouver's English Bay, a popular spot in summer for sunbathing and beach sports. The narration is straightforward at first, but it soon moves from describing the sounds to reflecting on their acoustic properties: "The tiny clicking sounds that you hear are the meeting of the water and the barnacles. It trickles and clicks and sucks and ... The city is roaring around these tiny sounds. But it's not masking them." Just as we start to internalize those sounds, hearing them in the same abstract headspace as the narrator's voice, the recording levels are suddenly turned up: "I could shock you or fool you by saying that the soundscape is this loud." And then: "The view is beautiful — in fact it is spectacular. So the sound level seems more like this." The levels drop again, now quieter than they were before, and our perceptions of what is real and what is artificial, out in the world and inside the recording, are completely subverted. "It doesn't seem that loud."

* * *

It is loud, and it begins instantly. We hear what is probably feedback, controlled in some way to create different pitches. Blank, artificial, but somehow also animal (fleshy at least) — overdriven and very distorted. After a few seconds it is intercut with something like the sound of tape spooling backward — high-pitched, an almost glistening sound. Then sudden, violent splices of what sound like fragments of orchestral music. Again, lots of distortion, electric screams. Sounds continue to snap in and out of the frame. Passing connections can be made as some noises return, but really the only constant is change. There is something concrete, something like material underneath it all, but it is crushed by layer upon layer of distortion, warping, splicing, and reconstitution. It's not that this isn't music, it's that it seems opposed to form itself, as anything resembling the sort of patterning and resemblance that creates meaning is smashed into oblivion.

* * *

It begins with a percussive crash. For an instant it is unnamable, then a brief flurry of woodwind and a dissonant string chord set us firmly in the sound of the twentieth-century orchestra. The winds cut short, accelerating slashes over the strings, before xylophone and double basses strike a menacing three-note motif. The strings shiver in response. As fragments from the rest of the orchestra coalesce into larger and larger stabs, the strings swell dissonantly and cinematically. Decades of Hollywood film scores have imbued the language of midcentury modernism with unmistakable meaning, and now that is being projected back into the concert hall with clear and forceful intent.

DIVERSITY

These five pieces are Different Trains, by Steve Reich (b. 1936); Piano Sonata No. 6, by Galina Ustvolskaya (1919–2006); Kits Beach Soundwalk, by Hildegard Westerkamp (b. 1946); "Brain Forest — For Acoustic Metal Concrete" from the album Cloud Cock OO Grand, by Merzbow (Masami Akita, b. 1956); and H'un (Lacerations), by Bright Sheng (b. 1955). With the possible exception of "Brain Forest," they were all created within what we might (for now) call the contemporary Western art music tradition. That is, they are all pieces that were composed or preplanned reflectively, fixed in some sort of notation for a performer or creator to interpret or execute, and intended to be listened to by an attentive, informed, and critical...