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REVIEW Rim Shot Fear No Music takes another trip to the Pacific. BY JAMES McQUILLEN jmcquillen@wweek.com
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Fear No Music presents Pacific Rim V Reed College, Kaul Auditorium Friday, Jan. 29 "Pacific Rim" is a convenient catch-all term--two words that give geographic and cultural unity to all the far-flung places that happen to share an ocean, from New Zealand to Korea to the Pacific Northwest. "Classical music," likewise, gathers wildly disparate elements, from Abelard to Alban Berg, into one tidy package. Every year, Fear No Music 20th Century Ensemble performs a concert that forces listeners to scrutinize both. The ensemble draws most of its ever-expanding repertoire from the modern margins of classical music, or "20th-century music in the classical tradition," as it's often called as a way of distinguishing it from the three B's. The Pacific Rim concerts, the latest of which Fear No Music gave at Reed last Friday, illustrate the inadequacy of even that term. Only the faintest echoes of classicism remain in any of the pieces on the program, which included cello and piano works by Hoe-Yeong Kim and Toru Takemitsu; pieces for strings and percussion by Joan Huang and local 19-year-old composer Aaron Immanuel Wright; and several pieces by members of Portland Taiko, the Japanese drum ensemble that appeared as guest artist. In the absence of a common tradition, what unites these varied compositions is not so much a shared geography as a common approach to sound. Just being in the right part of the world doesn't make someone a Pacific Rim composer. As FNM artistic director Jeffrey Payne says, "If [composers] are living on the West Coast but they're writing like Milton Babbitt, that's not what we see putting into these concerts." Whereas the East Coast approach is formalistic, with a focus on structures and systems, West Coast music carries the influence of the Far East. "It's concerned with color, timbre, process--with sound more for its own sake," says Payne, "like finding something in common between a gong and a violin." It also often involves bending and stretching notes rather than aiming at the tonal center. Takemitsu's piece Orion is a good example, with plucked piano strings and bowings that slide over the cello. "Serious music," another common catch-all that attempts to treat the modern and classical traditions inclusively, might have applied to this concert were it not for the participation of Portland Taiko. The drummers are serious musicians--i.e., they're dedicated and talented--but the energy and exuberance with which they play dispels all gravitas. After Kim's searching, haunting duet, written in response to the death of a friend, the Taiko's Pacific Voices took the mood into a sharp turn. It's a work of rampant high spirits that twists "Lion," a traditional shakuhachi melody, into something like a Celtic fiddle tune translated into Japanese. This was the only drawback of the program. Going from works like Deepest Sympathy and Orion, a luminescent depiction of the constellation that itself seems to hover in the night sky, to high-energy Taiko pieces and back again entails rapid and substantial mood shifts. It's like a film festival that alternates Ingmar Bergman with Buster Keaton. It might have been better to present all the Taiko pieces in the second half of the concert; the first half might have become more daunting, but the post-intermission reward would have been all the more keenly felt. What unites the works of any of Fear No Music's concerts, beyond thematic considerations, is a high degree of musicianship. Pianist Payne has a precise touch and a tonal palette as all-embracing as the diverse music he plays. Percussionist Joel Bluestone, who looks like a smaller and more agreeable version of Howard Stern, tackles demonically difficult rhythms with aplomb, even when, as in Huang's The Road of Tao, he has to race around a huge collection of things to hit. Cellist Philip Hansen is technically brilliant and, like violinist Andrew Ehrlich, plays this mostly complex repertoire not only proficiently but musically as well. The ensemble will take a trip to the past this month, playing a concert
held in conjunction with Reed College's Sol Le Witt exhibition. Included
will be music of minimalists John Adams, Steve Reich and Terry Riley
(the seminal In C) as well as pieces by John Cage, who laid the
groundwork for them. In March it will present the wildly popular Piano
Riot, with works by Bartok, Tomás Svoboda (a world premiere)
and up-and-coming composer Kenji Bunch. Check these pages for details.
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