The Brooklyn Rail

The DiMenna Center is one of the better classical music venues in New York City. The barebones performing spaces inside are all about the clarity, detail, and just-right resonance of the sound, and everything is on the large end of chamber-music sized, which is ideal for musical projection and audience focus.

Metaphorically, it physically represents that status of classical music in American society. Perched by the Lincoln Tunnel entrance, sitting in the shadows of the massive, glossy Hudson-Yards-millionaires’ city-within-a-city, surrounded by a chaotic mix of tourists, wannabe-club-kids, hustlers, junkies, and street people that the Disney-fied Times Square has shoved down around Madison Square Garden and Penn Station, DiMenna is as inside New York City and America as anything can be while also completely separated from it. The music that happens there never connects to the outside world.

That is the challenge and opportunity for classical music in general and New Music—the post-WWII contemporary edges of Western classical composition—in particular. Unconstrained by market/commodity forces, because the audience for it is so small and the money involved so inconsequential that it can’t control or even affect what the music is like, there’s the chance to go for broke with every event. And since there’s no such thing as difficult music, only music presented with timorous apologies, New Music events could kick out the jams. There’s nothing to lose and everything to gain.

That is what has made the TIME:SPANS festival increasingly tantalizing and frustrating since 2020. Every program, every piece, is an opportunity to surprise and even fail, constructively. The sense of safety in classical music programming writ large atrophies the music in society, and New Music, especially, is the place to leap off a cliff and see if you can land on your feet. Excite people, in other words.

There was a little of that at TIME:SPANS. It is a strange thing a quarter way through the twenty-first-century for Arnold Schoenberg’s music to sound spikier and more ornery, more opinionated but also more alive, than what composers are making right now. Music that’s one hundred years old is not new, and Schoenberg was a conservative to boot. His language was argumentative about where music had been, where it was going, and his place in it. Chaya Czernowin was the composer this year who most fits that profile, even as her style is far different. There is sonic and aesthetic mystery and surprise in her music because she always sounds like she has the urgent need to say something. Her the divine thawing of the core, written for flutist Claire Chase as the lead voice, accompanied by the Talea Ensemble, had the gripping feeling of someone wrestling with something they don’t quite understand. Czernowin admitted that, perhaps unintentionally, in the program notes, despairing of the changes in her native Israel as it wages war on Palestinians, yet claiming that the piece is not political. But music like this is not about making a political argument, it’s about conveying the intensity of doubt, and so it did.

Steven Kazou Takasugi’s Il Teatro Rosso—played by No Hay Banda as part of a mini-festival within the festival of composers and ensembles from Canada—with its garrulous, whispering, hyperactive and hyper-specific language, was probably the best representative of actual contemporary thinking on the program. Most of the other music from or through Canada was disappointingly conventional. The great Bozzini Quartet played Taylor Brook’s Vinetan Songs, Zosha Di Castri’s Delve, and Cassandra Miller’s Three Songs. Brook argued for creating new musical traditions, but only reworked older material. Delve was half of an extraordinary work, with ghostly, uncanny timbres let down by some self-conscious “new music” awkwardness—Di Castri undermined her own material. Miller followed the most virtuous paths of her peers, getting fragments of remembered music from her friends then spinning those into gorgeous tapestries, music where every sound worked toward sharing a thought or feeling with the listener.

Two nights with Sixtrum Percussion were equally frustrating. With four pieces from three composers, and a fifth that was a collaboration of three others, one concert was a collection of experiments with timbre and the theatrical possibilities of percussion playing, but there was little depth in the structures and forms, nothing vivid. A second night repeating this through bland works from Éric Champagne and Jennifer Higdon. But then came Jordan Nobles’s Still Life, an exercise in the slow unfolding of one idea. This was one of the most avant-garde stretches of the festival, a musically and conceptually lovely and clarifying demonstration that being avant-garde means pushing an idea to the limit.

That made the evening’s finale, a selection from Colin McPhee’s transcription of Balinese ceremonial music, then Steve Reich’s Six Marimbas, equally satisfying. The place of music in Balinese society is something that we should envy, and maybe a key to get things like TIME:SPANS more into the public ear. Reich will never not sound new, because his ideas built an ongoing path forward in music, and the physical joy of his work speaks to a fundamental human experience.

But Reich is part of what is the last generation to be able to make music outside the consensus of academia. Lack of money, coupled with the increased stratification of income and elimination of public school arts programs has meant that those who get to make music are the ones who have the support to get them into music school. Over the past two generations, that has reduced a cultural class to a socio-economic one, and the music has mostly narrowed to a consensus that has the fine-tooled, polished blandness of a luxury sedan and themes to match, i.e. a contemplation of the history of its own design. Like academic musicology, the music that comes from these Ph.D. composers is increasingly not about anything except that music the composers already know.

Successful composers like Hannah Kendall and Matthew Aucoin produce technically masterful work that celebrates its own craft but has little to say. Their language is the musical equivalent of corporate/political buzzwords and euphemisms, striving to be impressive and on examination mostly meaningless. TIME:SPANS is supposed to be different, but seems to be suffering from the same societal decadence.

The biggest disappointment of all was False Division, a collaborative piece between Endlings (Raven Chacon and John Dieterich) and Yarn/Wire. Led by Endlings, this was an evening-length world premiere that alternated prepared music and improvisation. It was not only conventional but derivative and dull. The talk from Endlings in the program had things like “our mysterious impenetrable recorded language” and “embrace of anti-permanence, anti-authorship, anti-logic…finding the hidden chaos-magic.” The walk was a repeatable form that was clearly dictated, and a set of predictable, clichéd gestures. If too much New Music is about composers showing you all the other music they know, this was about music everyone seemed to know but Endlings, who had that special condescension of a TED talk. The mind wandered to decades of Cecil Taylor, Derek Bailey, Keith Jarrett, the Art Ensemble of Chicago records…