“Pop-whoosh-ding-snap-whaw-boing-shhh-brrr-glug-bloop-walla-walla-bing-bang..... ”
Just an old-fashioned love song,
to people of a certain age, despite the conspicuous absence of the
once-requisite “bong” and its vaporous manifestations.
Most of the works on the UTSA New Music Series fall concert, given on Nov. 1 in the Fine Arts Building recital hall, dated from the past six years. Their roots, however, were in the heady electronic experimentation of the 1950s and its flowering, sometimes accompanied by “psychedelic” visuals, in the 1960s. Ah, nostalgia.
Maybe not quite. The stunningly beautiful 3D digital animation in Dennis H. Miller’s “Cross Contours” (2005) would not have been possible to execute just a few years ago, let alone in the 1960s.
The abstract, writhing, metamorphosing, clustering and scattering forms sometimes suggested a galactic armada mobilizing for battle, sometimes electromicrograms of viruses, sometimes an exquisite transparent amoeba. The visuals were almost too rich — one viewing was not enough to take them all in. The music, alas, was fairly generic electronic-sound atmospherics.
Composer Allan Schindler and filmmaker Stephanie Maxwell were represented by three collaborations.
Schindler’s electronic music for all three was witty, rhythmically vibrant
and coloristic, in the tradition of Morton Subotnik, though “Second Sight” (2005) seemed to include an
allusion to Edgard Varese’s
“Poeme electronique,” a
pioneering film-and-music work composed for the 1958 World’s Fair in
Maxwell’s abstract animation in the earliest piece, “Somewhere” (1999), was a fairly simple choreography of circles, bars and other shapes, jerky motion and layers of crud that alluded to old 8mm film.
“Passe-partout” (2003) was more sophisticated — abstract “paintings” danced and twirled on a black field — and “Second Sight,” animated jointly by Maxwell and Peter Bynne, attained delicious complexity in shape and action.
The electrophobic were served two purely acoustic pieces from ancient times.
Nigel Westlake’s “Omphala Centric Lecture” (1984), was an infectious, deftly crafted minimalist work for four marimbas, with seasoning from a a few small percussion instruments. It was energetically played by student members of the UTSA Percussion Ensemble.
William Ferris’ “Lux Aeterna”
(1997) for flute and viola —