Little Emerges from Motoko Honda’s Recital

Yesterday afternoon’s Old First Concerts recital was a solo piano performance by Motoko Honda. She titled her offering The Emergent Piano, including, in her program book, the Lexico definition of “emergent” referring to “a property arising as an effect of complex causes and not analyzable simply as the sum of their effects.” This was a popular concept in the late Eighties when both Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Santa Fe Institute were hosting research projects in the study of complex systems, which led to “spin-off” studies in the domain of artificial life. Those were fun days when mathematicians could rub shoulders with science fiction writers (not to mention Penn & Teller serving sort of like referees in the process).

As one might guess, none of this context had anything to do with Honda’s recital. Her program consisted entirely of works she had composed between 2014 and earlier this year. The first four works she performed required a prepared piano. After that the innards of the instrument were cleared out for the remaining five compositions. Ironically, however, there was a sense of sameness that pervaded the entire program; and Honda’s sincere efforts to provide verbal accounts of each offering floundered into incoherence.

As a result, over the course of the roughly 90-minute program (performed without an intermission), there was little to engage the attentive listener. Once could see simply by observing her execution that there was a solid foundation of sincerity behind her efforts. However, taken as a whole, the program “emerged” as one of those too-much-of-too-little experiences, a far cry from what the pretensions of the overall title had promised.