New music audience gets schooled in Cole Porter
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New music always benefits from repeated listening, it just doesn't usually come in the same concert. Friday night at the City Theatre, the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble helped to introduce a new work in an innovative way.
At the end of the program, artistic director Kevin Noe presented a newer work, "Re: Porter," by the composer Aaron Grad. Inspired by Cole Porter, Mr. Grad had written the lyrics and the music, some of them loosely in the style of Porter's tongue-and-cheek songs.
Getting the audience to understand the text was hugely important. Mr. Noe could have opted to projecting the text on a screen, but that would have taken crucial attention away from the theatricalities of the singer, baritone Timothy Jones. But this wasn't opera, where a line in an aria might translate into minutes of music. Mr. Grad's text was fast-paced and witty (or trying to be), and so Mr. Noe decided a better solution would be to recite the poems earlier in the concert, in between other pieces, which he and others did.
What a stroke of genius this was! I am sure it's been done before, but it worked so well. By the time we got to the actual songs of "Re: Porter," the audience already felt acquainted with them, rather than hearing them as a splash of cold water on the face that is the experience with most contemporary music. That preparation doesn't guarantee one will like them, of course, but it gives the music a fighting chance.
"Re: Porter" consists of four songs for the complete ensemble of piano, violin, cello, flute, clarinet, percussion and baritone, but only two stood out for me. "Digits" was a wild romp, a truncated blues riff (and a wry quote of a Bach fugue) underneath goofy lyrics of two thumbs serving as a metaphor for a couples' fighting and making love, much in the way that Porter slyly used double entendre.
The final song, "First Act Love Ballad" was a pseudo tango that played off song structure like Porter occasionally did. Mr. Jones eats songs like this up. He is a master of maintaining pitch and projection in his voice while the rest of him is hovering histrionically. But the other two songs were botched attempts at channeling Porter, including "Astronomy" a heavy-handed poem trying to twist cosmology into a metaphor for love ("singularity" just doesn't inspire romance) and was combined with ultra-serious music just at a point when Porter might have been poking fun at such lyrics.
First Published July 19, 2010 12:00 am
