Saturday night I went with my friend Inge to an amazing , riveting performance, a concert of totally improvised contemporary music in its best form. The main performer was Lee Pui Ming, formerly from Hong Kong, now from Toronto. She played the piano with childlike abandonment, her fingers flowing over the keys. She also used the instrument like a total percussive instrument, tapping it, strumming it, rolling metal balls over the strings, playing with the overtones. Her energetic dancing body was a major part of the music. A joy to watch. She sang too, using her voice as yet another percussive instrument.
She was joined by the beautiful playing of Norman Adams on the cello and Erin Donovan on various percussions, such as stepping on a squeaky toy mouse while blowing on whistles or playing a child’s keyboard. There was wildness and dissonance, yet the melodic reverie was a thread that sewed one’s ear to very eerie sounds.
Just last week, Tom Allen on the morning music program had dissonance as his weekly musical word. He was saying how dissonance needs consonance to be dissonance, the contrast is what makes it be dissonance. And also that each generation finds the music that came before it easier than the one it is in. Schoenberg said at some future point after the ear becomes accustomed to the sound it will no longer be considered dissonance. People walked out of new music concerts (as they did with his Rites of Spring) by many composers who are now considered mainstream.
(I know people who are so accustomed to dissonance in their lives that they consider it concord, natural, don’t notice it. A couple of years ago a friend came to visit with her mother. As they sat there on my couch talking, I noticed how her mother expressed frequent little critical comments towards her daughter. And I know that the daughter expresses similar little comments to her partner. They get so used to the barbs that it becomes natural.)
In this case, the music was improvisation where anything goes! And the communication between the players was seamless. When we went up to him after the performance, Norman Adams showed us the score which looked like a drawing for dance steps across the stage. That was all. The rest was in their intuitive, skillful talking to each other in the language of music.
Listening to the CD I purchased of Lee Pui Ming playing the piano in her unorthodox and passionate way, I miss the visual component but can easily recall the experience. That feeling of sitting in a concert hall with a big grin on my face and an eagerness to hear and see what would happen next.
Posted by leya at October 25, 2004 06:03 PM