We filled Roulette to capacity for last Saturday’s IGIGI concert. Repre­sen­ta­tives of three gener­a­tions of my family were there! The gener­a­tion gap was defi­nitely in atten­dance, too; Lainie’s Tongue of Thorns, a raucous four-axe homage to the Velvet Under­ground, provoked some ear-plugging by the over-50 crowd, while the 20-some­things grooved content­edly in their seats. It made me wonder how many composers’ parents listen to their progeny’s music on a regular basis; how many could even stand to? I loaded up some of my music on my Mom’s new iPod, so I’ll have to sneak a look at her play counts.

I think part of the reason for this new-music gener­a­tion gap is that people my age have no real concept of what “New Music” is, or how to approach it. We’ve grown up exposed to a much wider variety of sounds than our parents, which both desen­si­tizes our ears but also makes them open-minded. Our parents, on the other hand, were the last children to have been brought up with the ideal of the concert hall as Sacred Space, and its conflu­ent Modernist notions of “pure music”. They expect music to operate at several differ­ent levels of activity, all at once, all the time: intel­lec­tual, narra­tive, and performative.

From this stand­point, a piece like Jen Stock’s Grainary doesn’t make sense as a concert work, because it creates an atmos­phere with spare, repet­i­tive sounds and video rather than a rigor­ously devel­oped progres­sion of musical “material”. For me, though, it evoked some­thing my old teacher John Halle said in regard to Alvin Lucier’s music: “some­thing that should be boring, but isn’t”. Large-scale mechanical/industrial processes are one of those things, and I think Jen hinted at this poten­tial fasci­na­tion in Grainary. I always love those terrible segments on the Food Network or the History Channel where they show the mesmer­iz­ing insides of a camera-lens factory, or the candy assembly line. Here’s a great photo essay of how Legos are made. I think why I love watching these and why I love listen­ing to repet­i­tive music stem from the same part of my brain.

Lainie’s music contin­ues to enchant me in this regard. Her two new pieces, Tongue of Thorns and Do You? revealed an even stricter mini­mal­ist bent than her earlier music. I thought the melodica-clarinet-voice trio in Do You? was partic­u­larly cool, and I’m always a sucker for those insanely catchy frac­tured rhythms, though I think it could have been even better if the instru­ments were ampli­fied and mixed to ensure proper balance (and boost the volume).

Alex’s new pieces mix his incred­i­bly catholic tastes in surpris­ing, intrigu­ing, often quite funny ways. I actually LOLed during Slightly Less Awkward People, which I don’t do nearly enough of at concerts in general. I played The Last Resort Party Band with my Yale friends and composer-saxo­phon­ist Emilia Tamburri, which we recorded the next day— I’m eager to hear it— and then Alex performed his melodica/piano piece Inland himself. I’m really inter­ested in the possi­bil­i­ties of this combi­na­tion; the toy-like melodica holds up remark­ably well.

I’m looking forward to more collab­o­ra­tions with these wonder­ful composers in the near future… stay tuned. I have lots more updates that might have to wait until next week.