les moutons christen Fairchild with sound drama

"Juxtaposition." "Yak." "K-Mart." "None." So spoke the voices of les moutons as they meandered through Fairchild Chapel minutes prior to Wednesday evening's program.

By wandering up and down the aisles speaking the common language in an unheard of structure, conservatory composition majors first-year Corey Dargel, sophomores Yvan Greenberg and Jim Altieri, junior Bill Stevens and double-degree sophomore K.T. Shorb set the stage for an evening of sounds deconstructed and morphed together, forms challenged, worshipped, mocked and composed. These strange words once familiar in a linear context proved an effective prologue for the experimental drama that was to follow: a drama not of words but sounds.

les moutons was birthed as a collaboration to further explore unchartered territory introduced in a Conservatory experimental music module course. Though the group has performed informally on a regular basis since its inception (including a guerrilla Severance Hall debut), Wednesday evening marked their first formal public offering. All pieces were original, produced recently, and for all five players. Almost all pieces had no fixed notated score - and thus produced a different mixture of sounds with every performance - and were by the members of les moutons. Fellow Oberlin composers double-degree first-year Margot Bevington and Professor of Composition Randolph Coleman also contributed pieces to Wednesday's program.

From the onset, each piece breathed "ensemble," both in sound and sight. It was impossible to discern the primary instrument of any player, as each removed whatever mask of inhibition to show proficiency in a variety of instruments, including violin, trombone, voice, chimes, piano, and chair seat. Each piece was executed with a symmetry of visual spectacle, be it the five hunched shoulder to shoulder at the piano, situated in a circle with the fifth as the visual center, encircling the audience with flashlights, or sitting on the stage in a "Last Supper" formation to pay a religious homage.

The performers' visual symmetry on stage made for a constant to the palette of sounds ranging from the still, perfect fourth in Greenberg's "Hymn" to the raging cacophony of five simultaneous recordings of the Brandenburg Concertos enmeshed in Dargel's "the study of counterpoint."

The pieces themselves contained elements of not only "music" as we know it, but of oratory, comedy sketch, chaos and manifesto. Several pieces connected sounds of real life to a surreal interpretation thereof, leaving the audience in fits of laughter, shuffles of unrest, or an audible silence that became part of the pieces themselves.

Altieri's contributions employed such conventions as baseball's anthem and the nursery rhyme to present new renditions titled "me out to the" and "little bo beep." In "[The Transgender Paradigm Shift Toward Free Expression]," Dargel's voice intoned that "sex must be challenged as an artificial construct." To his call the ensemble mimiced the contour of his transcend-gendered voice with their instruments. Shorb's "work to progress," purposefully unstagnant, combined wind chimes with various verbal tirades, both soothing and assaulting the senses in pitch darkness.

If the concert had wanted to evoke a so-called prettiest moment, it was in the open intervals and overtone singing of Greenberg's "Hymn." Indeterminate and fluid, five voices and a mediating violin on tonic guided the sound through slow, open vowels and overtone singing.

Stevens's "THE DISEMBOWELED MACHINE," a piano ensemble piece (one piano, ten hands), added to the dialogue of patterns and the break from them, as small patterns of piano notes repeated, then slowly phased into another setting with the change of the pattern note by note.

Repetition was also emphasized in Coleman's "Experimental Piece A," a percussion sequence of infinitely repeated singular rhythms performed on soft chair seats. Just as a traditional drum set produces the sound relative to the stick that strikes it, the timbres of each hand striking a similar chair seat personified the sound. Like a mantram, the patterns spun around and around, a lifeboat in a sea of uncertainty, while the loss for what to expect next almost made the listener trust in the patterns all the more. This was especially shown in the literal mantram performance, "Jesus Jesus Jesus Jesus Jesus..."

Because of the success of Wednesday's concert, one would hope that les moutons will grow to be an staple asset for future collaborations in student composition.