Concert Review: Another Musical Challenge from New College Lands in Sarasota

During the 15 years since it began, New Music New College has stuck assiduously to its mission: To bring the best and most challenging contemporary music to local audiences. Under the direction of its founder-director, Stephen Miles, the series has been impressive, challenging and, sometimes, irritating.

The final concert of the 2014-2015 season was mind-bending, to say the least, bringing the impressive talents of eight young singers based in New York to the stage of the Sainer Pavilion for a program of music written since 1958 in which the human voice is displayed as an immensely complex musical instrument.

Their ensemble, Ekmeles, takes its name from an ancient Greek music theory in which unusual tones were disallowed. Turning this edict on its head, the highly skilled vocalists employed both clashing tonalities and sound effects generated by their vocal skills. As Miles explained in his impressive and genial introduction, the composers responsible for this music often prepared detailed descriptions of the technical requirements involved, including precise instructions on the shape of the mouth and other aspects of their works. The results do not often sound like any vocals we may have heard in other examples of contemporary music.

Beginning with Italian composer Giacinto Scelsi’s setting of three sacred texts from the traditional mass, including an Angelus, as well as an excerpt from the Requiem and a Gloria, we found ourselves in a new and challenging musical universe, one in which vocal lines were often discordant, the result of microtonal pitches and percussive sounds. Somewhat over-amplified, these passages may have been even more unsettling than the composer had planned.

However, Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf’s discourse on the horrifying murder of Italian film director and poet Pier Paolo Pasolini was startling and touching in its visionary use of Italian words from some of Pasolini’s under-appreciated poetry, both spoken and sung by these versatile musicians. The piece touched the heart in ways much modern music does not.

Ben Johnston’s settings of four late sonnets by the great British poet Gerard Manley Hopkins define spiritual crisis in both verbal and musical terms, communicating tragedy with a slightly more conventional tonal vocabulary. The result, despite what seemed to be a few discrepancies in the unison sections, was immediately effective, especially in the fourth poem, which tackles the comfort of the Resurrection with moving lyricism.

The program ended with Aaron Cassidy’s vocal impressions of the visual art of Francis Bacon, utilizing his distorted depictions of mouths to create a flurry of sound effects, but not much music.

No matter – we were lucky to hear these talented and hard-working musicians (Jane Sheldon, Mary Elizabeth MacKenzie, Rachel Calloway, Patrick Fennig, Tomas Cruz, Eric Dudley, Jeffrey Gavett and Steven Hrycelak) in a concert that one might ordinarily expect to attend in New York City, but not in Sarasota.