Tag: Ossia

The music students here look a little stiff. They are sometimes awkward but most often confident and professional. They are so much fun watch as they scurry about, setting up for the next piece, then tuning and snapping into performance mode. Ossia, the Eastman student-run group dedicated to performing work by contemporary composers, put on their last show of the year, a program called “Colors of the Celestial City” (sounds like a Sun Ra title) and it was an especially good one.

Contemporary can mean almost anything but it is mostly defined by what it is not, European classical. Their previous show integrated programed music played through a sound system into the various performances. I could do without that. The students have access to every instrument imaginable. They are unbelievable performers and their theatre, Kilbourn Hall, guarantees the instruments will sound their best. Computer generated sounds coming through the PA just doesn’t sound as good in this setting.

After the first two pieces, a guy in the small group sitting near us said, “That first piece was avant garde but that second piece, I’ve never heard anything like that.” So the avant guard is now quantifiable, limited. This is contemporary music. Our favorite piece of the night, George Benjamin’s “Octet (1978)”, was something that reminded us of the dreamy soundtrack to Altmans “Three Women.”

We feel as though we have adventurous musical tastes but we are probably just as stuck in our ways as the next guy. I know we are lucky to have the Eastman School of Music in our community and their student run program of modern music, called Ossia, is sensational. Tonight’s performance included five wildly different compositions all expertly performed. And just look at how young these students are. They are seen here performing Gyorgy Ligeti’s “Ten Pieces for Wind Quartet,” my favorite piece of the evening. Peggi’s favorite piece was sung by an operatic, solo soprano.

The most radical piece was Stockhausen’s “Mikrophonie I,” in which two people played a tam tam. Two people played microphones, one on each side of the tam tam, and two people, off stage, ran the filters for the microphones.

They struck and scratched the tam tam with an assortment of things you might find in your kitchen or storage closet and the ever moving, hand-held mics were panned hard left and right. The filtered sound was amplified and sent to the giant speakers that are above the two double door exits. The wide stereo experience was like something off of Led Zeppelin II.