Composer David Behrman and friends at the Timucua White HouseThe amazing Atlantic Center for the Arts once again graciously offered to present one of their resident master composers at Orlando's beloved Timucua White House this last Monday night, Feb 28th. The composer for this Outreach was David Behrman, a gentle, softvoiced man with crazy white curly hair and a vastly receded hairline, bold blue eyes and wearing a comfortable purple paisley shirt.
An excellent showing of music lovers and wines warmed the concert space, along with bassist Doug Matthews, and banjo and electric guitar (I don't know their names - no program). Mr. Behrman sat infront of a small table with a mac laptop, mixer and wearing a face mounted microphone. The first piece set a past work by his father, writer S.N. Behrman that told a childhood rite of passage story. Told in the 1st person, Mr. Behrman read a tale of a young man's striving to be understood and respected by his father, whom he feared and admired; and his mistakes made trying to do so; of how he stole printed low class sensational pictures from cigarette packages in the family store to sell to peers to pay for a broken lens in his eyeglasses. During the story, the instruments painted tiny, growing responses within prescribed bounds over a preprepared electronic track controlled by the composer, the electric guitar moving with the most freedom, and the banjo the least. A handful of breaks in the story allowed the audience to consider the story, and listen to the instruments and prepared track alone.
The first work allowed me to explore my listening consciousness by simultaneously offering the multiple dimensions of language/speech, gesture repetition and interruption (recorded track), acoustic spaciousness (the loudspeakers, voice, and 3 live instruments spaced in the room) and instrumental characters. Each live musician's music developed a character kernel fragment through improvised expansion.
The other work for the evening revolved around a prepared piano with prepared track, electric guitar and double bass. Like the first, this work explored spaciousness and gesture, but did so in a more musically focused manner. Two directions were presented to me: one musical, one spatial. Musically, the piano presented a kernel that grew over repetitions like seed to vine into a juicy blues riff. As it grew, more prepared strings would join the music, which provided richness of rhythmic and sonic playfulness within the zone of the piano. The electric guitar, and to a lesser degree the bass, would directly respond to each gesture, usually repeating many of the exact pitches in the beginning of the statement but ending somewhere else. The spatial direction of the work only came to me later, as I struggled to stay with the lengthy dialogue. Recognizing my dissatisfaction with the work as a shenpa, I moved into a meditative state, which rebooted my listening with openness, revealing a world of acoustic shape in the room. Instead of listening to the normal musical dimensions of phrase, pitch, harmony, rhythm and gesture I instead listened to the sonic physical shapes living and dying in the room, like transparent blossoms and shifting clouds. Much of this was presented by the prepared track, which produced a deep stereo texture/image to the space - like a grid - upon which the interacting characters spatial presences appeared and moved.
Thank you David Behrman, Doug Matthews and others, Nick Conroy (ACA) and Benoit Glazier (Timucua) for the lovely evening!
