This afternoon I decided to give the TUES@7 concert series presented by the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) a second try (having been rather disappointed with the first). Today’s program, entitled Home, actually involved a pairing within a pairing. Brittany J. Green shared performances of her “open” composition (a reflection on what Umberto Eco called “open work”) with a duo “open” performance by flutist Lepanto Gleicher and harpist Nuiko Wadden. The title of the program was supposed to indicate that the offerings would reflect on the different meanings of “home.” However, the reflections provided by both composer Green and the instrumental duo turned out to be a hodgepodge of soundscape samples, improvised pieces, and segments of recorded interviews.
The result amounted to 50 minutes of little more than superficial playing with auditory and visual devices. Once again, the performance itself and the background for that performance, shared between spoken introduction and jargon-laden program notes, emerged as little more than a tedious slog. Even more disconcerting was that pretty much none of what was presented could count as “contemporary.” Just about everything presented had a mind-provoking heyday back in the Sixties; and those of my generation got be justifiably nostalgic about those days. However, the dogs from those days (if they are still alive) are too old to be hashing out the same tricks again.
Back in my Silicon Valley days, I had a friend that had ascended to a reasonably high level of management at Apple. He would lead brainstorming sessions, during which ideas would often be introduced with the phrase “Wouldn’t it be cool if ….” The presenter would then describe something that my friend had implemented in another laboratory setting 20 or 30 years earlier! So it is with the “creativity” that seems to emerge from ICE, products of a new generation of young pups that seem to think that the study of history is a waste of time.
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