Santa Fe International Electro Acoustic Music Festival
Gordon Mumma (see yesterday for part I)
(hear it)

Gordon Mumma was the superstar of this year's S.F.I.E.A.M.F. A colleague of John Cage who also composed music for the Merce Cunningham dance group, he presented music from 3 decades. He preceded the concert with a talk, ranging in subjects from his use of limitations to get out of compositional jams, to his love of styles so diverse that people assume his compositions are the work of multiple persons, to details about each piece to be performed. I found it ironic that a booster of limitations would also be so unbound by limitations in the variety of his work. I really enjoyed his character.

I have rarely witnessed a concert where the composer was present during the performances. In this case, he also performed one or two works. A cellist, percussionist and pianist came in to perform the acoustic works Mumma lacked the technique to accomplish. The piano pieces in particular were extremely difficult, and the pianist seemed nervous - so would you, to perform in front of the composer such works. They were very dense, full of chromaticism and patterned virtuosity. It rocked. I wish Mumma would do more piano music, as these pieces (and one which he performed himself, using an iPod connected to what seemed to be a disassembled amplifier driving the piano strings, not very audibly) were integral and masterful.

The percussion work, performed first in the evening in the building's atrium, was also terrific. A duet between a live percussionist and a recording of a cheesy early 80's keyboard set on "percussion", it seemed to have been composed at least partly tongue in cheek, but it succeeded entirely on its own merits. It was a complicated "new music" type of rythmic exercise, with lots of tipa-tipa-tapa-BANG and so forth.

Mixed in with the (mostly) acoustic music were two pure "electro-acoustic" works. I found them dilletantish, sorry to say. Olivia Block's soundfield works on Friday dug much deeper into the fabric of sound-space. Perhaps given the proper historical perspective I would understand the importance of Mumma's works. As a fan, even a booster, of Iannis Xenakis's "La Legende d'Eer" (check it out), and having created a few noises myself, I just felt that Mumma hadn't really followed through on this music. I'm probably a horrible blasphemer, damned to an eternity of the keyboard section at Guitar Center. It didn't help that the second such piece, which was on accompanied on a DVD by a slideshow of photos of chemical reactions, was unplayable and stopped halfway through. Oh well.

The last piece was a new Mumma piece written for and played by the College of Santa Fe's Electro-Acoustic Ensemble. My wife really loved it. The composer had described it as a sort of "change-ringing" piece, and I guess I was unable to hear the alternation of parts (in change ringing, each person holds two numbered bells and rings them in turn according to a pattern of numbers, all very rapidly). At times I felt the students were unable to hear one another. The cumulative effect was a bunch of interesting noises, happening not quite all at once. I got some ideas - I can't wait to use an ice-scraper as a drumstrick, for example. One guy (they were all guys...) used an eBow on a bicycle spoke with stutteringly wonderful results - it went "flupaflupaflupflup".

Actually, the division of labor itself was a very interesting compositional choice, made by (I think) the students and teacher as much as by Gordon Mumma. Each fellow had a specific sound-making apparatus. They were: disassembled keyboard, piano and drum, bicycle (bowed, struck, and amplified), amplified electronics of some sort (I couldn't see or hear him well), a saxophone of some kind, a toy microphone and some tubing blown like a trumpet, a balloon (which he popped), and a synthesiser which sometimes ranged into prog-rock territory. Those guys had a good time... The point being, that they each had a kind of complete world of sound in front of them, with exteremely different means of production, that all combined together into one sonic super-world.

bb, 29 Mar 08