<< Front page Arts Commencement 2004

Drunk flutist plays in Warner
3/5/2004

Seeing a raving drunk in Warner Concert Hall would be unusual in itself, but seeing senior flautist Gregory McMahon stride onto the Warner stage in a green bathrobe, with wine glass and flute in hand, was sensational. He came to perform junior Joseph Kimmel’s new piece Booziplication, the most outrageous of the six compositions in this concert of Oberlin student composers. Or was it?

Yes, Kimmel’s piece did require McMahon to drink eleven shots of Bacardi and White Zinfandel while playing orchestral excerpts (confusingly renotated by Kimmel) from works like Mozart’s die Zauberflöte, Debussy’s Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, and Stravinsky’s Petrushka, and to read aloud from Oberlin flute professor Michel Debost’s book The Simple Flute. And McMahon’s hammy performance, in which he chattered charmingly to the audience, “I couldn’t play this if I were sober!” was quite amusing, though I was a little disappointed, and jealous, that he played most of the excerpts well despite all the alcohol. However, compare it with junior Stephen Lewis’s String Quartet, my second candidate for the concert’s most outrageous work.

Lewis’s piece was an incredibly slow rising chromatic scale, which began pianissimo low in the cello’s lowest range and concluded approximately ten minutes later in the highest register of the violin. Was this intellectual masturbation? Of course it was. It was also an excellent piece for showcasing the bow control of the performers (cellist Shama Cash-Goldwasser demonstrated this impressively in the opening) and for inducing a meditative state (some people looked like they were asleep). Despite my honest enjoyment of these positive attributes, this struck me as the type of piece that turns away potential audiences of contemporary music.

Whichever of these pieces wins the outrageousness contest, we should be reminded by the other works on the concert that composition at Oberlin is not just about who can be the best provocateur. Senior Sage Lewis’s Fanfare for Three Trumpets was an interesting and frequently exciting mix of electroacoustic elements and fine trumpet playing by sophomores Joshua Rzepka and Ian VanderMeulen and freshman Avi Bialo, though more interaction was desired between the live performers and the prerecorded music. Brandon Pettit’s Orchestral Study A/B, an electroacoustic piece created from recorded sounds, also had nice moments, though it seemed a little unbalanced as a whole.

Junior Andrew MacIver sang (with piano accompaniment by Stephen Key) État d’Art, a collection of several songs he had written in an Expressionist vein. Though MacIver is to be commended for his courage in stepping up to sing his own music and in presenting relatively tonal music in a venue accustomed to more modernist fare, many parts of this impressively large work failed to hold interest. It might have been that the way the syllables of the French text had been emphasized made it difficult to understand, that the music did not contain enough moments that were really grabbing or that MacIver’s performance was somewhat jerky.

On the other hand, senior Jeffrey Nelson’s Cadenzas (for viola, alto saxophone, trumpet, piano, bass and Nelson conducting) held my interest throughout. The audience was pulled in by its powerful rhythmic drive and by the variety of the ways in which Nelson layered the instruments; this was a piece that felt balanced and also kept a nice continuity. Kudos as well to sophomore violist Anne Lanzilotti, who navigated the frequently concertante viola part with flair in spite of a few small slips.

Variety, then, was the watchword of the evening. This concert provided an excellent view into the range of which Oberlin’s student composers are capable, as well as a sampling, for better or worse, of their eccentricities.


 
 
   

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