A Little Night Music
Over the last week, I’ve been getting over an otitis media, or ear infection. That has meant a quieter, more muffled world for me (about this, I’m not complaining). That is, except for the tinnitus (which I could do without).
But I was feeling well enough — on Tuesday, Feb. 27 — to see Contemporaneous perform “Songs at Night” at Roulette. As it turns out, I couldn’t have picked a noisier concert to attend. Not exactly gentle on the ears.
Still, I have no regrets. Under the baton of David Bloom, Contemporaneous sounded wide-awake at 8 p.m. The conductor’s youthful vigor evident in the sway of his high ponytail.
First on the program was Shelley Washington’s “A Kind of Lung,” which emulates the sound of “breathing together” (did I mention, I am so congested?).
It begins with the bass (Tristan Kasten-Krause) and cello (JY Lee) rubbing their bows against the strings, then whipping them through the air. A “whoosh” like a whiffle ball bat.
They are joined by fluttering flute and bassoon (Yoshi Weinberg and Dávid Nagy), and a hoedown in the violins and viola (Sabrina Tabby, Josh Henderson, and Sarah Haines). A sound like cicadas, crickets, and owls (rest in peace Flaco). The piece ends with a ringing triangle note.
Next was Dylan Mattingly’s “the History of Life in Reverse, part of a larger work about Homer’s Odyssey and oral traditions. In it, Mattingly, who is Contemporaneous’ co-artistic director, asks listeners to “imagine the unimaginable.” That is, try to understand just how long the earth has existed.
It’s a mind-blowing task in the best of times (and I already had a headache). Beginning with grand piano (Mikael Darmanie) and harp (Violetta Norrie), a pulse. Pulse, pulse. In unison, and ever-so-gradually accelerating.
To this was added mandolin (Henderson), electric guitar (Colin Davn and Trevor Babb), marimba (Amy Garapic), and electric keyboard for four hands (Paul Kerekes and Daniel Schreiner). Not to mention a toy piano (played cross-legged by Finnegan Shanahan) with a surprisingly loud action.
Over the 20-something minutes, the slightly different tuning systems started rubbing together. I couldn’t tell whether the ringing was real or in my head.
I was reminded of Julius Eastman’s cacophonous “Femenine,” which I saw performed by Wild Up last April. At the end, I couldn’t help but feel some relief.
But the star of show — the world premiere of Lila Meretzky’s “Songs at Night” — followed the restorative intermission.
Meretzky was born in 1998. (Washington and Mattingly were born in 1991). But her musical language defies her age, with hints of (both tonal and atonal) Schoenberg.
Challenging and ambitious, the 50-minute-long “Songs at Night” sets nine mysterious Yiddish poems by Anna Margolin.
These poems — with lines like “the blue dream of violins,” “time plays now on the quietest of flutes,” and “I became the fiddle and you the bow” — cry out for musical setting.
Meretzky’s was most compelling where it resisted simple word painting. Especially delightful were the asthmatic melodica “interludes.”
Likewise, the projections — by Camilla Tassi, based on the composer’s own collages — were strongest at their most abstract.
With mezzos Lucy Dhegrae and Milena Gligić taking turns, the vocal lines incorporated such techniques as vocal fry and Sprechstimme.
“I lay tense and miserable,” sang Dhegrae, in Yiddish, in “Night came into my house” (a song, seemingly, about insomnia). “Trees came into my house,” she continued, “looming gigantic with roots and trunks.”
In “Dusk in the park,” Weinberg began scraping the folded pages of their sheet music together. A sound quiet on its own, but thunderous in a group. The other musicians followed suit. A kind of butterfly effect.
In “All mute things speak today,” the musicians walked, still playing, one by one offstage, leaving just Gligić and Kasten-Krause.
The bassist had detuned his lowest string, so that it flapped when plucked or bowed. “And you, my dear, my dear,” sang Gligić, almost a whisper, “are silent.”
I went home and took some NyQuil.