Every autumn since 1980, Bowling Green State University has transformed into an international hub of new music for the annual Bowling Green New Music Festival. Renowned performers and composers converge upon this college town in northwest Ohio for a marathon of contemporary music concerts in diverse genres and styles. Prior festivals have presented a hall-of-fame of new music artists, including composers John Cage, Philip Glass, Pauline Oliveros, and George Crumb and ensembles such as the Jack Quartet, Philip Glass Ensemble, and International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE). George E. Lewis, Professor of American Music at Columbia University, was this year’s featured guest composer and Chicago-based Ensemble Dal Niente served as featured performers. The four day festival, produced by Kurt Doles, Director of the Midamerican Center for Contemporary Music at BGSU, was jam-packed with events.
Composer George Lewis at Bowling Green New Music Festival (photo courtesy BGSU Marketing & Communications, all rights reserved)
Wednesday, October 16
San Francisco-based artist Pamela Z opened the festival with a performance within her multimedia installation at the Dorothy Uber Bryan Gallery, Baggage Allowance, a collaboration with Terry Adkins. She sang and recited poetry, expressively manipulating her voice by moving her hands in front of her custom controller’s sensors. The gallery space also featured Lewis’ interactive multimedia installation Hidden Flows.
Thursday, October 17
The day opened with a lecture by Lewis in which he discussed intertextuality in his music and played works from his catalog that showcased his omnivorous interests. Memorable pieces from the first concert, which immediately followed, included Mario Lavista’s Marsias. As crystalline chords evolved from the choir of six singing glasses behind her, BGSU faculty oboist Nermis Meisis delicately shaped the piece’s short melodies. Closing the concert was Richard Carrick’s Harmonixity, which the student saxophone quartet pulled off with aplomb. Precarious chorales gave way to slow and disjointed melodic lines comprised of repeated notes, mimicked in unison between the instruments in a very close delay. The effect was bewildering and novel.
Christopher Dietz’s Thicket opened that evening’s concert, a bassoon quintet originally commissioned by Dark in the Song. The ensemble, conducted by Dietz, played dense clusters that moved from the upper range of the instruments to a final woody and impossibly rich chord that evoked the piece’s namesake. The BGSU New Music Ensemble ended the concert with Lewis’ Anthem. Sounding much like a notated free jazz combo bolstered by extra percussion and electronics. Mezzo-soprano Elizabeth Pearse powerfully belted the text, a frightening and fragmented meditation on power.
Composer Johannes Kreidler (photo credit: kreidler-net.de)
Featured guests Ensemble Dal Niente played their first appearance on the festival at the Clazel Theater in downtown Bowling Green alongside BGSU graduate student ensembles. The informal club atmosphere was a good setting for more experimental works like Alvin Lucier’s Silver Streetcar for the Orchestra, which percussionist Mark Cook played with metronomic accuracy on a single amplified triangle. Stefan Prins’ Piano Hero No. 1 featured Dal Niente pianist Mabel Kwan triggering video and audio samples with each sampler key press, manipulating footage of someone abusing the inside of a piano. Provocateur Johannes Kreidler, who was in attendance, presented his Chart Music and Fremdarbeit (“Outsourcing”), both irreverently cheerful pieces on the grim economic realities of the modern world. Dal Niente closed with Marcos Balter’s Growth, a slow-burning timbral exploration. Like its title suggested, the piece continually expanded in register and volume.
