'Modern' music escapes definition

Throughout much of the 1980s, I was the host of a radio program on New York's WNYC-FM that played a lot of contemporary music. One afternoon, however, I devoted an hour to works by the 12th-century composer Perotin — spare, ethereal yet startlingly intense vocal compositions based on the sound (fairly rare in Western music) of stark parallel fourths. The phone rang and I was confronted with a furious gentleman who promised he would never again contribute to public radio until we stopped playing what he called "all that awful new music"!

Eight hundred years on, Perotin still doesn't go down easily. In fact, almost any musical language with which we are unfamiliar will seem "new" to us at first. But the last few decades have been a particularly challenging period for many listeners? The reason? Well, whether we liked it or not, we used to think we "knew" what modern music was, and that is no longer the case. Today — as the novelist and Hollywood screenplay writer William Goldman once observed — "Nobody knows anything."

There is a famous novel by Kurt Vonnegut entitled "Slaughterhouse Five." In it, the principal character, a man named Billy Pilgrim, is said to have come "unstuck in time." For example, he might walk through a doorway in 1945 and find himself in 1966, two decades and a continent away. He changes his age, his location, his circumstances and his point of view as often as most of us change our clothes; he comes to see the world and his life in what he calls "beautiful, random order."

And so with music. Today, a composer not only chooses the intellectual and emotional content to be expressed in a given piece but also the musical language in which that piece will be written. A concert of new music might include works that are electronic, symphonic, consonant, dissonant, tonal, microtonal, atonal, strictly notated or improvised. New music is being written for chamber group and vast chorus, symphony orchestra and rock band, harpsichord and tape machine. No one style holds a monopoly; the trend is toward everything and, like Billy Pilgrim, we have come unstuck in time.

This extended preamble is prompted by John Kennedy's "Music in Time" series at the Simons Center, which offered its last concert of the season Wednesday evening. Kennedy has done valuable service in offering Charleston a sampling of widely different music this spring — from an astonishing piano masterpiece by Michael Harrison ("Revelation") through the more modest but generally beguiling program of works by the Danish composer Per Norgard (b. 1932) and the American Philip Bimstein (b. 1947) we heard Wednesday.

Norgard's "I Ching," for a battery of percussion instruments, was brilliantly played by Eric Shin, who wandered the stage making music with everything he found. There were lots of unusual techniques, there was a lot of noisemaking, but the essential duty of a work of music — to trigger a response from a well-disposed listener — was never forgotten. Sounds melded into other sounds, the playing was both muscular and delicate, and one emerged from the music ever so slightly different than one went into it.

Of the three pieces by Bimstein, I most enjoyed "Garland Hirschi's Cows," a quirkily funny and curiously touching work in three movements that combines animal sounds, an interview with the elderly owner of a Utah farm, and live music for a small ensemble. I was reminded of Gavin Bryars's "Jesus's Blood Never Failed Me Yet," which takes the tape-recorded song of an old tramp, slowly adds instrumental accompaniment, and creates a deeply affecting aural portrait over the course of its duration. By the end of "Garland Hirschi's Cows," I felt as though I knew the farmer and his cows: Bimstein managed to create a vivid and endearing aural biography.

"Half Moon at Checkerboard Mesa," deftly played by Byron Hitchcock, mingled country-blues violin with the howls of coyotes and other nocturnal sounds of the American west. But I was unimpressed by "Cats in the Kitchen," a duet for flute and oboe that trilled and fluttered over recorded purrs and meows. The cats were sometimes amusing, but the music allotted to the duo was surprisingly predictable and resoundingly ordinary.