Timeline: Listening Through History

On Thursday, January 30, Kendal hosted a concert by the Newark-Granville Chamber Symphony. It was a first-time event for Kendal and only the second time that the chamber orchestra, newly-formed for the 2013-14 season, had performed. Well attended by residents and guests, the event provided yet more evidence that the opening of our new Amelia Gathering Room is allowing Kendal to offer an important venue for musical and theatrical groups from Granville, Newark, and Denison University.

The concert was titled "Timeline: Listening Through History." Its purpose was to introduce listeners to the changes in styles and tonal resources that composers experimented with over the most recent half-millennium of Western history. Timothy Weiss, Musical Director of the Newark-Granville Symphony Orchestra and Director of the Oberlin Contemporary Music Ensemble, conducted the performance, which consisted of eight rather brief pieces – often, actually, parts or movements of larger pieces. Opening with a canzone by Gabrieli, it included works by Bach, Mozart, Wagner, Webern, Stravinsky, and Lutoslawski, before concluding with a partita-pastorale by Stucky, drawing on motifs from J. S. Bach. (Timothy Weiss apologized for omitting Beethoven from the all-star roster!) At various points along the way Professor Arnie Cox of Oberlin College spoke to the audience about the music we were hearing, much of which, in the second half, was both unfamiliar and perhaps forbidding to many in attendance.

Arnie Cox asked us to consider why we felt as we did about music. As we puzzled over that question, he proposed that our response to music is somatic – that our body wants to imitate its melodic and and metric movements; physical feeling, in short, is an important aspect of hearing. Once we moved past Wagner, he suggested, we were hearing music that was unpredictable in tone choices and direction. We needed a longer exposure to begin to be able to grapple with its novelties. Newer music challenges us to pay less attention to comforting repetitions, whether melodic or structural, and more attention to the sheer sounds of the instruments and the skills of those who perform on them.

At the end of the concert Timothy Weiss, speaking for himself, told us that he needs both the old and the new – the Mozart and the Lutaslawski. He encouraged us by noting that we all live in a difficult time for listening. But the effort is worth it. "The sandbox," he smiled, "is infinitely large today." He even suggested – and painters might disagree – that music is more personal and invasive than art.

I have heard much talk about the concert in the past few days, some favorable and some unfavorable. Since I was known as a proponent of this experiment, hoping that the event could launch some sort of a partnership between Kendal and the Newark-Granville Symphony Orchestra, I can't pretend to have been exposed to all the comments. Those who got a kick out of the concert were delighted that we could finally bring a larger-scale professional musical organization to Kendal, intrigued by the encounter with new and perhaps uncomfortable sonorities, and pleased with the quality of the performances. Those who were disappointed focused on two aspects of the evening: the inaccessibility of some of the music and/or the time consumed by Professor Cox's commentary.

To me, the concert was a grand success. The musicians were very good, the program was challenging and fun, and the Amelia Gathering Room passed its first acoustical test. And whatever one's views, it certainly seems to have triggered some wide-ranging discussion about the nature of our engagement with music, which is, after all, one of the purposes of good art.