TIMARA program skillful

Audience-friendly concert ends the year on a good note

Oberlin's student composers brought their creativity, skill and sense of humor to Warner Concert Hall Thursday night for the final new music concert of the year.

Keeping the audience satisfied was not a problem. Although billed as a program of "New Student Works," it was essentially a TIMARA concert, and like most ended up being more 'audience-friendly' than concerts of new instrumental works. This was by no means a recital of club music in the concert hall. Happily, there was enough variety among the twelve pieces on the program to suit all types of listeners.

On the more traditionally serious side of the spectrum were pieces like Katherine Miller's The Particles at Ground Zero and Jacob Hughes's Before our time. Miller's piece utilized what she called an "abbreviated version of the Expanded Instrument System from the Deep Listening Band." This system, created for live performance, inputs sounds from microphones and processes them.

The piece was quiet and hypnotic, relying on shimmering cymbal sounds whose pitches and speeds were altered by the electronics. Hughes's piece, for tape, was composed in response to the death of a friend. The computer-synthesized voices in the piece at first seemed humorous, and a few audience members could be heard giggling, but they soon took on deeper meaning. The words they spoke dealt with real pain, and the voices became a distorted, disturbing mirror of human emotions. An especially effective element was the lamenting music sung by a chorus, which contrasted with the electronic sounds around it.

Other pieces drew from pop music to varying degrees. Rajarshi Das's Dialectic Disorder Syndrome used swelling digitally-synthesized tones as well as a distorted dance beat. Joel Corelitz's Duck Crossing, although somewhat limited in its musical material, was polished and well-crafted. A smooth electric piano vamp was set against frenetic drum machine beats. Jeffrey Allen, in The Days of High Adventure, drew on pop culture beyond the realm of music, creating a sound collage of movie quotes.

Peter Blasser contributed two pieces for videotape, Sucka and AV Dog. Both were short, absurdist gems that were well received by the audience.

Finally, many of the pieces were unabashedly humorous. In Jim Altieri's Rhapsody on a Theme of Stravinsky, the only piece without electronics, Altieri gave Stravinsky's famous Rite of Spring theme the Billy Joel treatment. The most entertaining piece of the night was Paul Davis and Evan Malsbury's The Atari vs. Commodore Duel. The piece was a combination of computer music and game show, as the two composers invited five members of the audience up to the stage to vote on the pieces they had composed on Atari and Commodore machines. The audience enjoyed the pieces' Nintendo-like timbres, and Atari was crowned the king of the 8-bit home computer systems.