Sonic Force

Posted on Sun, May. 11, 2003

CONCERT REVIEW: newEar show Saturday a rousing success

By Mickey Coalwell

Special to The Star

Five works (three of them world premieres) helped newEar celebrate its 10th year of bringing cutting-edge contemporary music to Kansas City.

Saturday's concert in newEar's home venue, St. Mary's Episcopal Church downtown, was a rousing success and a tribute to this professional ensemble's dedication to novelty, virtuosity, adventurousnessand quality.

Featured was the concert-version premiere of Dwight Frizzell and Michael Henry's "Sonic Force," which includes live instruments with the recorded sounds of the A-10 Warthog fighter jet and digitally manipulated voices presented in 6.1 channel surround sound.

"Sonic Force" is a collaboration among Frizzell, Henry, and the 442nd Fighter Squadron at Whiteman Air Force Base in Knob Noster.

The distinctive sounds of the A-10 aircraft were recorded by Frizzell, including sounds of the aircraft starting up, idling, taking off, performing maneuvers and landing.

A choir of human voices "improvised" around these sounds, and the results were integrated with the aircraft's sounds to create a new sound palette.

Henry's instrumental score for flutes, clarinets, trumpet, horn, trombone and percussion interact with the recorded sounds to create a multilevel aural experience.

The work proved to be a fascinating experiment. As the concert's concluding work, it was well-placed to delight the audience with its audacious inventiveness.

But all that came before was equally rewarding, beginning with Tina Davidson's \Cel"e*brate\, a work commissioned especially for newEar's 10th anniversary. Scored for alto saxophone, bass clarinet, piano and percussion, the genial work was richly melodic and smoothly constructed, with more than a passing nod to the modern French wind writing of Poulenc and Francaix.

Patrick Alonzo Conway contributed another brand new work,"Rompus," a work that extolled the art of lovemaking with gentle good humor and wit. A septet of trumpet, winds and percussion called to mind another French model, Saint-Saens. The performance appeared to have a few rough spots, but overall the effect was pleasing.

"Drum Dances" (1993) by John Psathas, a tour-de-force for drum set and piano, was brilliantly performed by newEar stalwarts Mark Lowry and Robert Pherigo. Combining the jazz-rock fusion style of '70s jazz with the intensity of classical chamber music, the piece brought down the house.

The oldest work on the program, "Coming Together"(1972) for Narrator and Variable Ensemble by heart-on-sleeve American socialist Frederic Rzewski, remained a strangely poignant and powerful tribute to the 1971 Attica prison uprising. Its persistent, repeated ostinatos and spoken text were hypnotically effective.