For four years now in New York City, June 21st has meant not just the official start of summer, but a one-day bloom of live music all over the five boroughs under the auspices of Make Music New York. Hundreds of performers across all genres are given license to take their art to the streets in an exuberant display of free concerts lasting all day--and evening--long, from curbside a cappella groups to 20 different "Mass Appeal" events, in which instrumentalists ranging from accordionists to tuba players gather with their like-minded kin in wild reunions of sorts.
In 2010, the centerpiece of the organized concerts was undoubtedly performances of music by the French-Greek avant-garde composer and architect Iannis Xenakis, for whom the interplay of spatial relationships was perhaps just as important as organizing sound. Make Music NY stitched together three separate Xenakis performances during the day, all within Central Park, starting with a lunchtime concert by the Yale Percussion Group of his solo Psappha, the trio Okho, and the drum sextet "Peaux" from Pleiades and continuing with multiple performances of Xenakis' only opera, Oresteia, in a puppetry production directed by Luca Veggetti. (The current opera presentation was a distillation of a live production premiered at Columbia University's Miller Theatre in 2008, with music provided by the ICE Ensemble.)
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The most highly anticipated Xenakis happening, however, was a performance of his Persephassa. Written in 1969 for six percussionists, this work has always been intended to be heard over a big open space: it was originally destined for Iran's Shiraz Festival, which was held at the desert ruins of Persepolis. Here, the musicians--Greg Beyer, Nathan Davis, Robert Esler, Doug Perkins (formerly of So Percussion), Brett Reed, and Steven Schick (a longtime member of the Bang on a Can All-Stars)--moved the action from a more arid Persian landscape to water.
Not content to be stationed around the scenic main lake in Central Park, the artists had a boat-building group, Floating the Apple, build floating stages, so that three of the percussionists were atop the water, with three more stationed around the pond's perimeter. Audience members took rowboats into this watery theater, though many less seafaring souls gathered around the lake's banks as well.
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Sirens, bass drums, tam tams, timpani, metal pipes, thunder sheets, wood blocks, whistles, cymbals, gongs, maracas, and all sorts of other percussive instruments all sounded back and forth across the bucolic stillness of Central Park (though more than once, a buzzing helicopter overhead drowned out the musicians.) As a composer so deeply interested in spatial relationships as well as in sound, Xenakis makes the most of the play of space. At times, sharply beaten motifs and imitative rhythms are passed from one drummer to the next; at others, the composer layers different ideas, each articulated at a different tempo, and rotates them among the players. The cumulative effect was of waves of sound wrapping themselves around the audience before spiraling away across the water.
Though its title evokes the ancient Greek Persephone, the bringer of springtime, Persephassa (a name thought to be an even older, pre-Hellenic name for this goddess), said Xenakis, referred to "the personification of telluric forces and of transmutations of life." Nothing seems more fitting for a music-filled marking of the summer solstice.
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