Alvin Curran’s Sonic Vine Grows on Listeners at CalArts Festival

In his big pieces, Alvin Curran’s music can seem to operate like a sonic vine that grows over a listener. And that metaphor works for at least a while in thinking about Curran’s “Music Is Not Music,” performed Saturday night in the Walt Disney Modular Theatre, one of the most important events in the CalArts festival Musical Explorations 2000!

Here the leaves of Curran’s vine were chords sung by a small chorus of CalArts students, conducted by Marc Lowenstein. One chord followed another in the plodding rhythm of a vacant never-cadencing chorale, each chord more a sound than a harmony. Instrumentalists from the Institute’s New Millennium Players were mixed in with the chorus. For about the first half hour, a string quartet, saxophone and trumpet blended in and supported the chorus, creating a kind of quiet drone of distant insects (further enhanced by percussion and Curran rubbing a string along the strings of a piano) and by William Roper’s haunting, slow tuba solos.

In a later section, the instrumental buzz was more radical with crunchy, odd, live sounds in the foreground. In between, Curran performed a riveting 10-minute piano solo. As an epilogue, he added electronics.

The vine metaphor, of course, goes only so far. The nature part is useful. Curran is an environmental composer. He is a gatherer of sounds and has produced, over the past three decades, remarkable multimedia pieces that have the effect of placing the listener into what feels like a downright physical environment.

There is another important side to Curran’s music. He is a captivating pianist who can give semi-improvised performances that spin one thing after another--waltzes, blues tunes, Minimalist patterns in complex rhythms, exotic chordal drones--for fascinating hour upon hour. That one is never exactly sure what is worked out and what is not is always an intriguing mystery, since the music is so well-controlled compositionally.

The CalArts piece had both this quality of composed music and the creation of something for the specific players and environment in which Curran found himself. Under the “Music Is Not Music” umbrella, Curran fashioned for his available resources a single, uninterrupted sequence of two choral pieces, the titular “Music Is Not Music” and “When My Feet Felt the Path That My Eyes Could Not See,” separated and concluded by a work in progress, “Endangered Species,” for piano and sampler.

The choral works took their texts from the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures that John Cage gave at Harvard a dozen years ago. Cage had used chance operations to transform into fragmented poetry various texts dawn from newspapers and favorite authors such as Thoreau. Curran picked and chose fragments with monosyllabic words that suited his own style of setting one word to one chord. Not a single word, however, was intelligible as sung. But what Curran did marvelously capture was the monotone of Cage’s reading voice as it hung in the air in his lectures.

As a pianist, Curran is comparable to no other. The first “Endangered Species” solo was all fast, hypnotic tremolo. His torso rigid and hands beating out a mechanical wave in gradually changing chords, he seemed to take the flat chords sung by the chorus and add dimensions--three and even a psychedelic fourth.

For the segue into the second solo, the chorus’ relentless march of chords started to break up, while the instruments began making fluttering noises and Curran began beating out weird patterns on the piano. Suddenly the entertaining electronics came to life blaring the sounds that included opera tenors and elephants and Cage’s voice. Although it only functioned as a wild epilogue, it nevertheless unleashed something so powerfully new and unforgettable that it seemed as if the musical vine had now been planted in the listener’s imagination. And it wasn’t about to stop growing just because the music stopped.