Hinge’s mainstage manufacturing, “Clockworks,” specializing in “dehumanization via technological development and industrialization,” featured saxophonist Philipp Stäudlin, guitarist Dan VanHassel, percussionist Matt Sharrock, and pianist Keith Kirchoff; they crammed Boston Conservatory’s Ipswich Corridor with intense mechanical precision that retained genuinely human feeling.
Dan VanHassel’s association of Clockworks by Swedish metallic band Meshuggah opened the live performance (opposite to the web program). VanHassel mentioned how he sought to “[arrange] the fabric right into a extra quiet and delicate kind” in comparison with competing with Meshuggah’s intense and aggressive metallic sound. They clearly took the correct strategy, because it gave the piece a considerably minimalistic vibe to it, filtering metallic via Louis Andriessen (extra on him later). Nonetheless as highly effective as its metallic counterpart, VanHassel’s setting allowed exception ensemble enjoying, mixing Stäudlin, Kirchoff, and the arranger into one cohesive unit whereas Sharrock guided the trio with exact and crisp percussion enjoying. Kirchoff acted because the wellspring of concepts that folded into the remainder of the quartet all through as properly. Mockingly, this reviewer wished extra quantity and depth, however what we nonetheless bought one thing distinctive.
Camilles by Katherine Younger adopted, firming down the in-your-face rock model. Specializing in realizing electroacoustic music via actual gamers, nonetheless offered a funhouse of prolonged strategies, with Stäudlin inserting a mute into his saxophone, VanHassel bowing the strings of his electrical guitar, Kirchoff and Sharrock creating suggestions via pairs of walkie-talkies, and Kirchoff putting the piano strings with a mushy twine mallet. As could be very widespread within the new music area proper now, Younger composes a harmonic density curve all through her work, shaping “temporal clumpiness” (quantity and price of particular person occasions in every participant or instrument) with an acute consciousness of the viewers. Younger feedback in her program notes that she wished to current what she thought monarch butterflies would sound like to at least one one other (as latest scientific analysis claims monarch butterflies have an expansive listening to vary, far past our personal), and the outcomes had been efficient, even when the piece may need overstayed its welcome by a minute or two.
Harvard’s personal Chaya Czernowin adopted with Sahaf, a bit that this reviewer/composer would by no means have thought-about writing. Kirchoff talked to the viewers about how Czernowin used the common-or-garden ratchet because the supply, sounds of clicking and whirring that almost all composers use as a layer reasonably than a place to begin. What looks like a wierd thought works on many ranges. With loads of agility, Sharrock managed the ensemble with a set of ratchets small and large, excessive and low in pitch, that expanded out via the quartet. Stäudlin, Kirchoff, and VanHassel added to these timbres with much more prolonged strategies on every of their devices, enjoying with slap tongue, muting piano strings with weights, and palm muting all of the guitar strings respectively. Uncertain beforehand, Czernowin’s experiment surprisingly, and welcomely, proved to be the spotlight of the night.
Jessie Cox’s Black as a Hack for Cyborgification, nonetheless, did characterize a droop, although via no fault of the performers. Stäudlin and VanHassel expertly reacted to at least one one other with deep and loud F-sharp bass notes between the guitar E string and baritone saxophone, matching timbre and throwing the sound within the viewers’s faces whereas Kirchoff and Sharrock performed explosively on their respective devices. Even when the group went via intensely “new music” prolonged strategies, the enjoying stayed at an extremely excessive stage. The open rating, open orchestration idea, nonetheless, felt disjointed—a pitfall of the model.
Louis Andriessen’s Hout is to this quartet mixture as what Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire is to the Pierrot quintet: it invented a style all of its personal. It’s a benchmark by which any new ensemble on this instrumentation is in comparison with. Hinge simply lived as much as it. In a fancy, strict canon offset by 16th notes, Andriessen created a coloration canon, every voice making a collage out of a course of so energetic and vigor, and by which the listener heard snippets of motifs emerge from a texture. Stäudlin shone right here, main the remainder of the gamers within the canon. VanHassel and Kirchoff deserve particular point out, as their elements entered on the second and fourth 16th notes, requiring focus that solely minimalism calls for to not fall into the extra comfy eighth notice or downbeat. Sharrock additionally demonstrated excellent consolation and beauty with the marimba, echoing contributions to Transient Canvas in execution.
Hinge is such a welcome addition to the brand new music scene. Stäudlin, VanHassel, Sharrock, and Kirchoff meld new music with the inspiration and energy of arduous rock and metallic as wanted, turning an up-and-coming new music style right into a hybrid of poise and aggression.
