Note: This column was to have appeared October 6, 1998, but somehow got lost in the computer and never appeared.

Between Propeller Blades

By Kyle Gann
Music at the Anthology
September 15
Anthology Film Archives

If America has birthed the best music of the last three decades - as I insist - why can Mexico so haughtily continue to ignore us? Is it because our national musical inferiority complex (at least with regard to non-pop music) is all the more visible from across the border? Mexican composers continue to study in Germany and Spain and draw their inspiration from Xenakis and Berio, just as the Canadians draw theirs from Messiaen and Boulez. What are we, chopped liver? Or just rotten neighbors?

Given that state of affairs, it's reassuring that Mexico has agreed to adopt the important American composer who spent the most time down there, Conlon Nancarrow (actually, he adopted them first, for he took Mexican citizenship in 1955). Mexico City is throwing him a three-day festival as a posthumous birthday party this month, which is more than any American City has ventured to do. Likewise, it's pleasant to find two Mexican composers who have acknowledged the Arkansas-born Nancarrow as an influence. Ernesto Martinez and Eduardo Gonzalez, who constitute the keyboard duo Micro Ritmia, have developed their own Nancarrovian brand of pianism, and unveiled it in New York Tuesday night.

The difficult thing about assimilating Nancarrow's influence is that most of his music, written for player piano as it is, is so damned fast. Astonishingly, Micro Ritmia has largely overcome that difficulty. The term microrhythm hails from Miles Davis, not Nancarrow, but it aptly refers to the miliseconds that separate the lightning attacks between the Micro Ritmia duo's hands. Both Zamponofonia II by Martinez and Gonzales's work - tongue-tyingly entitled Numeric Solutions of the Neutronic Transport Ecuations [sic] in X-Y Geometry Using Discontinued Nodal Methods - drew a jovially hectic energy from an amazing bullets-through-the-propeller-blades synchronization.

In Zamponofonia II the pair started on keyboards, passing chords back and forth with electric speed, then transferred the technique to small marimbas, then to zamponophones, instruments they invented which were like keyboard-operated panpipes. They sometimes even played different instruments with each hand. Such acrobatics might have been of no more lasting interest than someone whistling with peas in his mouth except that the resulting textures, with floating lines of sound given the illusion of continuity and tempo independence by speed, were unlike anything I'd heard before. Numeric Solutions used only synthesizers but was equally compelling, with brief rhythmic motives bouncing back and forth at different tempos. Nancarrow would have liked this tremendously; it echoed his special blend of intricacy and joyous abandon.

While Micro Ritmia were the newest attraction, this concert - curated by composers Lisa Bielawa and Eleanor Sandresky and produced and introduced by Philip Glass - boasted other offerings nearly as spectacular. One was a new two-piano work, Spin 2, by New Yorker Lois V Vierk that required and received tremendous ensemble precision from Phillip Bush and Nelson Padgett. They began by pounding the piano strings rhythmically, then, with that Vierkian gradualness we've come to expect, edged toward interlocking clusters between pianos that were as athletic as Micro Ritmia's if not as fast. Following, Jack Perla's jazz quintet improvised around his piece C Minor Complex in an idiom conventional as to rhythm, spiky as to texture, and nicely ambiguous in its writhing tonal scheme.

Perhaps the most widely talked-about new invader of the Manhattan scene today is Lukas Ligeti, son of the famous Hungarian composer Gyorgy Ligeti. Also harking back to Nancarrow, the younger Ligeti's Groove Magic had a 16-piece orchestra all listening to a computerized clicktrack over headphones to synchronize their tricky tempo changes and simultaneities. Considering the inconvenience of the setup, I was disappointed that the tempo complexities weren't more pervasive. The texture felt something like rock-influenced Gyorgy Ligeti (geez, what must it feel like to have your music compared to dad's?), with patterns articulated in tonal chords rather than chromatic lines. Scintillating passages were frequent, and the finale broke into a wild array of distinct cross-rhythms, all the more exciting for being played in split-second acoustic precision.

However, Groove Magic was a half-hour piece at the end of a three-hour concert in a hot hall, and if Ligeti had edited out the 60 percent that seemed tame and unexceptional, the remaining 40 percent would have made a bigger blast. It was preceded, moreover, by another ensemble work, Falling In by Anna Weesner, commissioned for the occasion. With lots of instrumental unisons between Webernesque gestures, this achieved a kind of consonant pointillism, like tonal Wolpe, but despite its considerable skill remained very technical, very mental, and failed to give us a reason to care about it. No matter, for Music at the Anthology is taking a lot of risks in its second season, and by and large they're paying off beautifully.

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