Ben Goldberg at the Contemporary Jewish Museum

From the CJM event page for last night’s performance (courtesy of Ben Goldberg)

Last night the Contemporary Jewish Museum (CJM) presented the latest (and penultimate) monthly installment in the Experiments in Sonic Potential concert series developed in partnership with the Center for New Music. Clarinetist Ben Goldberg gave a solo performance in the gallery for the exhibition of Annabeth Rosen: Fired, Broken, Gathered, Heaped, the first major survey of Rosen’s ceramic sculptures. This was a spacious setting with a high ceiling that afforded generous possibilities for reverberation.

Goldberg improvised for about 45 minutes without interruption. It would be fair to say that most, if not all, of his performance was structured around engaging in dialog with the space itself. This is not a particularly novel approach. There are many that espouse the hypothesis that, some time around the eleventh century, the reverberations of such spaces in cathedrals provided the initial trigger for a transition from monodic plainchant to the earliest forms of polyphony.

One could detect some of that hypothesized history last night. Goldberg would let loose a single sustained tone with forte dynamics and then unfold softer tones to “accompany” the echoes of that first tone. Indeed, most of the “experiments in sonic potential” behind Goldberg’s improvisations involved different ways to establish the sense of polyphony that could emerge from solo clarinet performance.

Another technique involved an approach to clarinet scoring that dates all the way back to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. One of the most interesting properties of the clarinet is that different registers have different sonorous qualities. In other words a low G has a sound that differs significantly from the one an octave higher, not only because of the pitch but also due to changes in the frequency spectrum that the ear can easily recognize. Go up another G and there is another change in the spectrum. After that the performer heads into the stratosphere where some of the harmonics themselves begin to warp.

That last stage leads to ventures into multiphonics. When a spectrum consists of tones that are integer multiples of the fundamental, all those tones tend to merge into a single sound. However, there are approaches to vibrating a clarinet reed that “deconstruct” the spectrum, meaning that the listener can hear what amounts of a “chord” of different pitches. Multiphonic technique is highly challenging and often involves compromises between getting what you want and wanting what you get. Goldberg used the technique sparingly last night, but always with striking rhetorical impact.

As to the duration, Goldberg proceeded through different phases of his “experiments” with a keen sense of when a particular pursuit had gone on long enough. Those familiar with the solo piano performances of Cecil Taylor and Keith Jarrett probably accept that 45 uninterrupted minutes is no big deal. The pace of the evening was launched with simple explorations of reverberation and, after an elaborate and absorbing journey, the music returned to its “origins” with a welcome simplicity of resolution. Who needed to worry about what time it was?