Clockwise from bottom left: Jeffrey Stadelman, William Rhoads, Paula Matthusen, Kevin Ernste and Andrew Rindfleisch.
Music — live music — is always performance art. That’s why we go to concerts, after all. The performers’ movements, their manners —in many ways they satisfy as much as the music. When we go to concerts, we bring our eyes as well as our ears.
More than that, we bring our minds, ready for attentive and challenging listening. So this weekend, the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Music offers a rare treat: a homecoming of celebrated alumni composers. They’re presenting exciting work, some of it postmodern, some of it emphasizing novel, symbolic staging and motion — along with a few world premieres.
The composers are Kevin Ernste, professor of composition at Cornell University; Paula Matthusen, assistant professor of music at Wesleyan University; Jeffrey Stadelman, associate professor of music composition at the State University of New York at Buffalo; William Rhoads, on staff of the Orchestra of St. Luke’s in New York City; and Andrew Rindfleisch, professor of composition at Cleveland State University.
Two Madison concerts celebrate their works. On Thursday, Nov. 5, the event featured chamber music performed by the Wisconsin Brass Quintet, members of the Wingra Woodwind Quintet and a number of others, notably outstanding harpist Lauren Finn.
The concert opened with Rindfleisch’s “In the Zone,” a bright, entertaining and clever take on Renaissance musical form, very suggestive of Charles Ives.
The premieres were Rhoads’ “Nothing Personal” and Stadelman’s “Enticements.” The first was a rich exploration of tonality and timbre, a salute to his teachers. The second was a canon based on a Schoenberg motif, very nearly producing music as sculpture.
For sheer wonder, Matthusen’s “of whole movements and migrations” easily stood out, combining the natural resonance and reverberation of two gongs with electronic playback. Ernste’s “Numina” made an explicit altar of Finn’s harp, and featured specific and changing placement of the musicians in symbolic damnation of what the composer considers Vatican abuses.
The homecoming continues on Friday, Nov. 6, 7:30 p.m. in Mills Hall, where the second free concert features the composers’ works for wind ensemble.
The UW’s professor Stephen Dembski should be congratulated for helping to organize the composers’ visits. Hopefully, we can look forward to similar events in the future.
