In Tuesday’s (7/19) Slate, J. Bryan Lowder writes, “When the American Composers Orchestra took the stage at Carnegie Hall this spring, they found more than just the typical setup of stands, chairs, and conductor’s podium: Stage-left of the double-basses, there was what looked like a roughly dissected Ford Taurus. … Before the final work of the concert, a group of musicians emerged from the wings and began to carefully disassemble the heap, part by part. Wielding a cello bow, one musician caused a dented fender to produce sounds so piercingly lovely that an oboe might have been jealous. Hubcaps, when drawn over with the same implement, released a startling cry. … The piece they were playing, appropriately called Clunker Concerto, was composer Sean Friar’s answer to the question, ‘How can we make the orchestra new?’ The performance was the culmination of a six-month-long series of workshops, rehearsals, and rewrites during which Friar had collaborated with the ACO as part of a project called ‘Playing it UNsafe.’ The goal: reinvent the ways that both composer and listener approach the modern classical orchestra. … What [Friar] really wanted was to show that wildly untraditional instruments can blend meaningfully with the long-established voices of the orchestra.”
Posted July 19, 2011
