Composers of University of Kentucky Concert - Review

$40 an hour to engage in set class shoptalk was too great an offer to pass up – especially since the first two performances of Monday night’s University of Kentucky Composers Concert consisted of selections from a musical and a sonata for saxophone and piano. I do, however, regret that my tutoring schedule caused me to miss Daniel Arnold’s first string quartet, the first genre of the program that I would not greet with pessimistic ears.

As applause from Arnold’s first quartet commenced, I entered the recital hall and found a seat next to a friend and prepared for the fourth piece, Gerald Janecek’s (Professor of Russian) Canon on a Russian Pop Melody – comprised of two violins, a viola, and piano. It’s unambitious and nonconfrontational form, harmony, rhythm, and timbre allowed for my mind and eyes to wander about the audience in search of colleagues and friends.

The next two performances featured works by a MM student in composition, Justin Crenshaw – Fury’s Rampage, and Tuba Island. The composer’s notes for Fury’s Rampage read “…not only my first woodwind quintet but also [sic] my first piece that uses polychords. Seeming how a polychord consists of a minimum of six pitches and a woodwind quintet consists of merely (you guessed it) five monophonic instruments, Crenshaw composed polychords only through prose. Technicalities aside, Fury’s Rampage did nothing of the sort to be gainfully employed by its title. Dissonances were soft, rhythms existed simply, tempos traveled moderately, and the range of each instrument epitomized the constituents of a junior high student’s nocturnal emission. Whereas Fury’s Rampage was presumably written to be taken as a serious composition, Tuba Island, for tuba quartet, piano, and percussion, brought out the lighter side of the composer. This work consisted of samba rhythms in the percussion and piano, and what I assumed to be some sort of melody from the featured quartet. I assume because the sound was muffled, due either to recital hall’s (which sounds more like a basketball gym) lack of clarity when percussion is involved or to the natural futile ontology of the tuba quartet as a genre itself. Near the finale, the quartet danced while the percussion and piano continued. And why not? When else will tuba and baritone players own the spotlight?

The only thing missing from the works of Dave O’Fallon, a DMA composition student, was a rum-filled piña colada. The concert concluded with three of O’Fallon’s Caribbean-style compositions – Sambatown (contrafact), AriA (original), and Panta Rhei (contrafact). The group was lead by the composer on vibes and steel drums, and included trumpet, saxophone, and a rhythm section. O’Fallon’s knowledge and involvement with the style was apparent from the first sound and persisted until the last. Form of each piece was typical of a jazz tune – melodic statement of the head followed by solos and concluding with a restatement of the head – but that did not undersell the proficiency of the composer and performers.

In all, this concert (or at least the 57% I saw of it) was far from what one typically finds at a “new music” festival. No serialism, clusters, electronics, computers, harsh dissonances, polyrhythms, aleatoricism, extended techniques, nor extreme passages of virtuosity were employed by the composers of University of Kentucky. This is due to perhaps geography, an embracement of new simplicity, or the influence of their conservative composition professor, Joseph Baber. Regardless, it is never a bad thing to hear new music, no matter how sober. Composers come to college to flourish and learn their craft; we should wish them nothing but the best as they progress.