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Idea: Music Can Travel To Unintended Space

by Paul Bass | Jun 15, 2011 12:53 pm

(2) Comments | Commenting has been closed | E-mail the Author

Posted to: Arts

A transportive piece of music meant to be heard only in airports—then meant to be heard under the stars in a courtyard—ended up being performed inside a theater. By musicians who have in fact performed it in airports.

The unanticipated double migration occurred Tuesday night at a performance by the avant-garde Bang on a Can All-Stars at New Haven’s Arts & Ideas Festival.

The piece was scheduled to be performed in a Yale courtyard, outdoors, not indoors.

The rain changed those plans. Organizers moved the performance not to Tweed-New Haven, as the composer might have wished, but to the confines of the Yale Repertory Theater on Chapel Street. (Click on the play arrow above for highlights.)

This being an annual festival devoted to weaving thought with performance, the concert tested and proved an idea: That music intended for one setting can resonate with meaning—sometimes as intended, sometimes in new ways—in an entirely different venue.

That’s not a new idea. Studio-produced radio hits or orchestra-backed Broadway show tunes can find new life in the hands of a solo guitarist on a streetcorner, for instance. Scott Joplin envisioned his stately ragtime compositions being performed in proper concert halls; instead, his work found a jauntier, freewheeling identity in nightclubs.

But airports as the staging grounds for a dedicated form of music?

That’s what Brian Eno had in mind when he composed the four-part piece “Music for Airports” (originally entitled “Ambient I”)  in the 1970s. He got the idea while listening to canned schlock piped through the sound system at Germany’s Cologne Bonn Airport.

He imagined a a form of music that “colored” and fit into the “aura” of airports, Evan Ziporyn explained to the full crowd at the Yale Rep Tuesday night before his Bang on a Can sextet performed the first movement of Eno’s piece.

Eno recognized that an airport can be an “emotional” space for people headed from one location to another, Ziporyn noted—“a place of departures and arrivals, anxiety about death, concern about loved ones,” “an important space that people took for granted.”

Airport managers didn’t jump at the chance to replace their Muzak with Eno’s recording when it came out. But musicians like Bang on a Can, seeking new blends of classical and popular music and drawn to Eno’s ethereal and repetitive minimalism, took notice.

“In honor of Brian Eno’s idea that it shouldn’t be a piece of concert music,” Ziporyn deadpanned Tuesday night, “we turned it into a piece of concert music.”

Eno approved, Ziporyn reported. Bang on a Can has performed the place repeatedly over the years—including, eventually, “a number of airports.”

Arts & Ideas enlisted Bang on a Can, several of whose members’ roots (including Ziporyn’s) extend back to studying at Yale School of Music, to perform that and other pieces at one of the festival’s most successful and intimate venues—Yale Law School’s courtyard, at night.

The last-minute switch to the Yale Rep brought the music indoors, as originally intended, but to a tighter space, without interruptions from public address systems or arrival and departure boards.

“Music for Airports” was the penultimate of six pieces performed by Bang on a Can Tuesday night, and the most moving. At its heart were simple, short, syncopated right-hand melodies played by pianist Vicky Chow and percussionist David Cossin, on chimes. Ziporyn, abandoning his clarinets, added the first ethereal layer on synthesizer. Electric guitarist Mark Stewart, cellist Ashley Bathgate, and bassist Robert Black filled in the unpredictable, sometimes discordant sounds floating and flying by at irregular intervals.

It might not have prompted thoughts of airports if Eno hadn’t chosen that title, or if Ziporyn hadn’t offered the introductory explanation. But they did. And it was easy to make the connection to passing through a terminal as layers of sound and information bombard you. Depending on what you’re doing at the moment, you tune in to some of the layers and not others: The details of what gate to head to, how quickly; the lure of blue skies or potential turbulence that await your physical journey beyond the gate; the chapter of life’s journey that may proceed with this flight. During some of the time spent at the terminal awaiting take-off, the “aura” of sound Eno referenced can prove hypnotic, heady; other moments, startling, jaunty, unsettling.

Inside the Yale Rep Tuesday night, Eno’s beautiful “Airports” did all that.

Most likely, it would have perhaps assumed another dimension under the stars. But sometimes a weather-induced rerouting can lead to an interesting destination of its own.

(Click on the play arrow to read what Brian Eno himself had to say about writing the piece.)

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Comments

posted by: Liz on June 15, 2011  7:09pm

What a thoughtful review. I learned a thing or two. Thanks.

posted by: Bill Saunders on June 16, 2011  10:57am

Eno rules!

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