Other Minds Concert 1

Last night in the Taube Atrium Theatre in the Veterans Building, Other Minds presented the first of the four concert programs prepared for Festival 27. As has been the case for as long as I can remember, the concert, which began at 8 p.m., was preceded by a panel discussion at 7 p.m. The program was devoted to two composers, Ellen Arkbro before the intermission and Craig Taborn for the second half. They were the two participants in the panel discussion, which was led by Other Minds Executive and Artistic Director Charles Amirkhanian.

The discussion was both informative and engaging. I was particularly impressed at how little the “vertical pronoun” (“I”) was used by any of the participants. Sadly, the content of the discussion fertilized any number of expectations among the attentive audience; but, from my own point of view, those expectations were thwarted by the performances themselves more than I could have anticipated.

The critical problem was that, while in conversation, both composers had the presence of mind to know when they had said enough. Sadly, this capacity for terse focus was not the reflected in the music being performed. In Taborn’s case that involved an extended set of improvisations at the piano. “Extended” means that the overall duration was fraught with the results of taking a short phrase and repeating it to excess, making a deep impression that his was a set that went on forever.

Arkbro’s set consisted of two compositions. The first was her recently completed “Chords for Trumpet,” in which she played the trumpet and her laptop software provided the chords. While this was significantly shorter than Taborn’s improvisation set, it was one of those compositions in which the listener “gets it” without too much cerebral effort and then has to sit there waiting to see if anything else will happen. (Spoiler alert: Nothing further happens.) The second composition was “Clouds for Three Tubas,” performed on tubas of three different sizes by Mattie Barbier, Mason Moy, and Luke Stern. The initial impression of the low sonorities was certainly appealing; but this was another instance of duration being a problem. Once mind grasped the uniqueness of the sonorities, the listener experience quickly devolved into the auditory version of water torture.

Hopefully, tonight’s two sets will take a turn for the better.