Here’s something I hope to do more of in the coming days. Juggling my Millennium job with comprehensive Spoleto music coverage is often overwhelming — and I’m grateful to folks like Robert & Fernando for helping me stay on track and catch as much of the good stuff as we can. Allow me to introduce you to Sam Sfirri: a fine young jazz pianist and composition major at the College of Charleston, whose musical judgement I trust. Just for the love of it (and the spare tickets I slip him), he’s agreed to help me out with an occasional guest blog post. I offer you his first:
I’m sure that if you were to ask each member of the audience attending Saturday’s Music in Time concert, you’d get varying answers. For instance, the women sitting in front of me were making faces as if someone had placed a plate of moldering cheese before them (though they would have enjoyed that much more). They certainly would’ve bent your ear big-time as to how it’s not real music. They left before the end of the first piece (I’m surprised they lasted that long). With that said, if you’d asked the avid fans of Germany’s long-time musical bad boy Karlheinz Stockhausen (”Stockheads,” I like to call ‘em) that sat in the center of the Simons Center Recital Hall what they thought, you’d get accolades like you’ve never heard before.
As with most of John Kennedy’s Music in Time series, this kind of material is, as Mr. Kennedy put it, “not everyone’s cup of tea.” But I find that if you go into a situation like this with open ears, you’re going to learn something, and maybe even like it.
Otherwise, the reactions were interesting – and the performances were some of the most breathtaking and virtuosic of any I’ve seen. Stockhausen’s most recent work, Himmels-Tur (Heaven’s Gate), is a solo percussion piece performed by Stuart Gerber of Ensemble Sirius. The piece consisted of Gerber banging, sliding, rolling, and stabbing a large wooden door made up of ten wooden slats with two sets of large wooden mallets. As he performed the piece with surgical accuracy, he would stomp his feet, and even drop his body to the floor in order to reach the bottoms slats. In the finale, Dr. Gerber gained access to what we were to believe was heaven, and he walked through the door, to be greeted by a plethora of gongs and cymbals – until little girl Jasmine Kennedy sneaked through the gate after him. Not only was the lengthy piece a test of the mind: it was very physical, too – incorporating some theatrics as well.
The other piece, “Kontakte” or “Contacts,” written in 1959/1960, involved the other member of the Ensemble Sirius: pianist and percussionist Michael Fowler, as well as Bryan Wolf projecting elecronic sounds through speakers set up throughout the space. The piece demands incredible effort and memory work from its players. Even those unfamiliar with this kind of music could recognize the incredible skill and talent of these musicians, as well as their devotion to the music.
Once it was all over, the “Stockheads” leaped from their seats to show their love. But I also noticed that many in the crowd were fingering their ears to get them to stop ringing as they filed out. For me – and so many others – this concert was a true eargasm.
