Zorn Fest Honors Legendary New York Composer

As if 12 contemporary musicians in sweatbands wasn't a good enough reason to attend Zorn Fest, then the balloon-popping, guitar-scratching, jibberish-screaming Etudes from The Book of Heads should have been the kicker. Whatever your excuse, if you weren't at the Cat last Tuesday, you missed some of the most innovative - and difficult - pieces performed this year.

Sophomore Emily Manzo and double-degree junior David Reminick organized Zorn Fest, a series of workshops and Tuesday's concert celebrating legendary New York composer John Zorn and his enormous contributions to contemporary music. Oberlin Conservatory welcomed conductor Stephen Drury, an expert on Zorn's music, to facilitate Zorn Fest and conduct at the concert.

New music and sweaty musicians: Contemporary music legend John Zorn was honored on Tuesday. (staff photo)

Tuesday's concert featured two single-performer pieces and three ensemble works, the highlight being "Cobra," Zorn's 1984 "game-piece" featuring the aforementioned sweatbands. The piece's content is improvisational, structured around coloured cards with letters and symbols to indicate direction. Though the audience could only catch a quick glimpse of Drury's cards as he waved them around to his ensemble, it was understood that different letters indicated the piece to take different directions.

The ensemble members' headbands were an additional element of the piece whose meaning wasn't as easy to understand. While the musicians freely removed and replaced their headbands throughout the piece - Drury himself participating in this crowning and de-crowning just as often - it was unclear as to whether this action had more or less influence on the sound of the music than the cards alone. In addition, the musicians took turns waving hand motions and signals to Drury, trying to get his attention and, apparently, influence the direction of the piece.

While the improvisational noise that resulted from the game-piece kept the audience guessing, on-lookers could just have easily been watching some kind of instrumental baseball game. Players wore and removed their sweatbands with vigor, hand-motioning their coach arbitrarily, and then not, looking for direction, and then ignoring it completely, so it seemed. Sophomore Wally Sharold, in particular, appeared to be obsessed with getting Drury's attention throughout Cobra's five separate sets of cards.

For as interesting a piece as "Cobra" was to watch, it seemed just as self-indulgent on the musicians' part. Because no explanation of the piece was given before hand, audience members were ironically deaf to its meaning, aside from the entertainment value of witnessing such an obscure piece in the works. Still, several audience members left Cobra before it was finished, confused if not frustrated.

Thankfully, the other Zorn fest works preceeded, and the Cat held a packed house through the other ensemble and individual performances. Reminick and Sharold, with seniors Brian Chase, Rob Reich and Matthew Mueller, performed four brief pieces from The Naked City Songbook, which nearly stole the show.

With titles like "Demon Sanctuary," "Punk China Doll," "Blood Duster" and "Snagglepuss," these hard-edged pieces showed off Zorn's rougher side, the longest of them just under three minutes. What could have easily passed for prog rock hits of yesteryear proved to be the best audience-pleasers, and the expressions on the musicians' faces was enough to prove just how much fun they were having in the process.

Such was the case for the bulk of Zorn Fest: even if the non-Zorn-oriented members of the audience didn't necessarily understand everything they went to go listen to, at least they went to go listen. Were there program notes for Tuesday's concert, however, they might have listened a little closer, but at least it made for a good show.