New Music Ensemble Concert

Last Monday I performed in the New Music Ensemble concert. It was a challenging class for me. For a long time I had a hard time accepting "new music" as Music. Although I was excited to explore the vast range of extended technique on the flute, for a while I felt I was doing little more than making a bunch of cool sounds. I had to find ways to make music out of this new sound vocabulary. I interacted with the other musicians as in a dialogue, I tried to make a beginning, middle, and end to my phrases and long-term improvisations. It was very difficult to see this as Music, though, since it didn't resemble any Music I'm used to listening to. I think if I spend more time listening to and performing new music I will understand the musicianship involved. Just like any type of Music, one will appreciate it most when one is a part of that music-making for an extended period of time. Over time one will learn the nuances of that Music that make it Music. In the meantime, though, I am glad for the experience and how it stretched my musical horizons.

There are a few aspects of the show I want to discuss. First of all, it was very theatrical. Prior to this concert, the only time I've seen lighting and video used at a musical performance is for a musical theater production. In the NME concert a few pieces used video, and most of them included lighting effects. A few of the videos were fixed media, like the audio tapes, and one was designed to react to the sounds we made on stage. However, we didn't interact with the video like we did with the tapes. Of course they were projected behind us, so we couldn't see them. But I wonder if we would have had a more cohesive performance if there had been musical responses to the fixed videos.

Another thing that interested me was the correlation I noticed between the improvised dancing and the improvised playing. The dancers seemed to use different parts of their bodies in as many ways as they could think of, and emphasized different movements at different times. Really, this is exactly what we were doing with our instruments. We used our knowledge of the sound repertoire to create an improvisation, and used as much of the instruments' capabilities as possible. We were instructed to respond to what we heard in the tapes, down to the smallest pitch or squeak. I could tell the dancers were responding to the general mood of the music, but I don't know if they were instructed to physically respond to every individual sound from the tapes. (Additionally, dancer-musician interactions could have made a more cohesive performance, but we didn't have enough rehearsal time together to work on dancer-musician improvisation.)

Because the dance moves were so exploratory like the musical elements, I think new music is a very difficult genre to bring to high school musicians. The dance could be seen as very silly if one doesn't expect those movements. And although I see the importance of introducing young students to all genres of music, especially through live performance, I think a large group of high schoolers would not be able to handle that performance. I think the mixed media would be appealing to them, but I'd be worried that they would not be able to take the whole performance seriously. I would love to find a way to introduce students to new music; it may be a genre they really like, and maybe they would someday contribute to the field! But I would definitely not make a field trip of the NME concert without some serious preparation beforehand.