Last Tuesday night’s Student Composers Concert drew a respectable crowd. The program, as always, was as colorful and varied as the personalities of Oberlin’s student composers.

Tom Hoberg’s piece for soprano, tenor sax, electric guitar, piano and two dancers — Pop Culture — presented as many differing ideas as there were performers. Each of these ideas was presented separately and distinctly, with only a single performer on stage at a time. After each idea had its exposition, all the performers shared the stage and melded their individual identities into one composite whole. An interview with Hoberg following the concert revealed that immediately before the performance each performer drew a card at random with the name of a famous performer from “popular culture.” The performer then attempted to in some way personify that character on stage. (This seems to me a very problematic idea, but I’m not going to get into that here.) Hoberg was mostly happy with the performance, but wished for a better balance between the individual ideas as they were in the process of becoming a composite whole.

In In Memoriam Maria Callas the members of the audience are the performers. Composer Victor Giraldo handed out instructions telling the audience to start applauding and to stop after approximately five minutes. Audience members could also shout “bravo” or “brava.” Giraldo recalled remembering a particularly long and boisterous period of applause following a concert he had attended. He found the sounds around him particularly interesting and he wanted to recreate this experience in a manner in which everyone could attend to it. Everyone sitting near me seemed to have a lot of fun with this piece. I was reminded of games I used to play with applause when I was a youngster — seeing who can be the last one clapping, seeing who can clap the loudest, etc.

Drops in Oil, by Tim McCormack, was a very static piece. Primarily consisting of held notes, it occasionally tried to break out into moving figures or staccato notes, but these efforts were always futile. The piece ended as if in the middle of a thought. McCormack revealed that the primary aim of this piece was intervallic development, which was certainly apparent. I felt sad for the undeveloped material, however.

nktr, by Josiah Oberholtzer, dealt with very, very quiet sounds. It used as its palette twinkling upper piano strings, plucked from inside the piano, the cello tailpiece bowed, plucked harmonics inside the piano, slammed piano lids, ricochet col legno bow strokes on the violin, etc. There was something immediate and visceral about these super-timbral sounds. We were listening simply to the noise, we didn’t have to worry about pitch content, about how notes related to each other. It was only about what would happen next, how it would happen and when it would happen. The sounds, I should mention, also were really cool. Laurel Talley needs to be commended for her excellent performance, filling in for violinist Amanda Grimm at the last minute.

tiny surgeries, little deaths, a group consisting of Colin Frey, Michael Geraci and “Timothigh” McCormack performed an improvised piece, These Horse, on organ, electric guitar and piano. The piece dealt with large blocks of very loud sound, in extreme contrast to Oberholtzer’s piece. The three instruments reacted to each other at the end of each section, but within a sound block they remained obstinately separate. According to McCormack, tiny surgeries, little deaths’ chief goal “lies mostly in exploring noise, the ‘wall of sound’ and sonic textures.” I feel that they succeeded admirably in These Horse.

Daniel Tacke’s Timeshadow, written for percussionist Matthew Jenkins, consisted of entirely metal percussion instruments. Small tropes were gradually introduced and remained, creating an increasingly dense and beautiful texture. The variety of instruments and mallets needed made this piece a difficult one for Jenkins, but he pulled it off extremely well.

The Great Blue Heron by Josh Morris was a very enigmatic piece. It was scored for bassoon, contrabassoon, horn and viola, a very unconventional combination. The sound that emerged was striking and remained engaging for quite some time, but one wonders if Morris could have experimented more — the contrabassoon always remained in its low register, the horn and viola always played conventionally when playing as part of the ensemble. What if the horn played flutter tongue, the contrabassoon played as high as it could, the bassoon as low as it could, and the viola played scratch tones? If one is going to play with unconventionality, why not go all out? Perhaps I am missing the point, and the identity of every part remained intentionally static, which is certainly possible.

The piece also consisted of snippets of materials that never seemed to coalesce into a composite whole. This technique reached its apex when the viola began playing a solo nearly soundlessly — Sarah Carsman placed her fingers down without bowing the strings. I can think of numerous sociopolitical implications of this behavior, but one cannot deny that this piece was extremely fragmented and elusive in both its aims and inherent meaning. Perhaps this was its goal. I should also mention that I would much rather hear a piece of music such as Morris’, one that is bold and unusual, than one in which I can readily understand everything that is going on. The fact that I have so much to say about this piece is a good thing, I think.The next Student Composers Concert will be next semester, Tuesday, March 1, 2005.