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Members of the Sonic Arts Union helped rewire classical music in the 1960s. Literally: The founders of this collective used homemade electronics to power their experiments. And also metaphorically, by organizing festivals and producing albums for Columbia Records’ influential avant-garde series.
Their legacy would already have been formidable had it been limited to these activities and a focused span of touring, between 1966 and 1977. Yet after the union’s four founders stopped playing together regularly, they went on to achieve new individual heights as composers.
Robert Ashley, who died in 2014, wrote his hyper-verbal, profoundly humorous opera “Perfect Lives” between 1978 and 1983 — and made its pioneering use of video a part of the work’s concept and distribution strategy. Gordon Mumma amassed an impressive body of music for piano.
As computing technology progressed, David Behrman continued to refine his electronic setups, resulting in interactive performances, alongside live players, of ever-increasing elegance. In addition to his long tenure at Wesleyan University, Alvin Lucier deepened his investigation of hallucinatory resonances by writing for orchestras and, most recently, electric guitarists.
Last weekend, the cumulative impact of all this work was laid out for inspection during a concert series at Issue Project Room in Brooklyn. Multiple pieces from the group’s 1972 album “Electric Sound” — released on the composer Earle Brown’s series — were revived in the presence of the three living members.
But for me, these works were not the highlights. Instead, these artists’ more recent efforts impressed me more consistently, as did some performances from younger, up-and-coming composers.
The concert on Friday evening began and ended with contributions from the veterans. “Double Helix,” a 2018 composition for four guitarists by Mr. Lucier, draws from some of the pulsing microtonal strategies of his earlier works. But compared to “Criss-Cross” — a recent two-guitar piece that appears on a valuable release on the Black Truffle label — this newer work was harder to pin down.
Instead of setting up slowly moving tones that beat against one another in steadily observable ways, “Double Helix” contained uneasy pauses, and starker shifts of energy. In a sign of Mr. Lucier’s broader relevance to drone-based music, one of the guitarists drafted for this performance was Stephen O’Malley, of the doom-metal group Sunn 0))).
To close on Friday, a quartet led by Mr. Behrman offered its own engagement with rock’s lineage, in a work called “Long Throw.” After sampling some live playing from the violinist Cleek Schrey, Mr. Behrman’s laptop responded with a chordal wash of sustained pitches, some of which seemed to be drawn from Mr. Schrey’s opening motifs.
Next to join the mix were the pianist Joseph Kubera, who contributed some jazzy harmony, and the electric guitarist John King, whose slide playing referenced Delta blues attacks. This sublime layering of folk textures, Minimalism and electroacoustic experimentation made for an exhilarating finish to the evening.
Compared with those performances, Mr. Lucier’s “Vespers” and Mr. Behrman’s “Runthrough” — both heard on a marathon Saturday concert — sounded comparatively thin. Yet those early aleatoric pieces still seemed important to recognize, on a program that also featured plenty of electronic exploration.
Working with a personalized synth setup in his “Sine of Merit III,” the composer and performer James Fei built toward a cluster chord climax that sounded as though it were coming from an orchestra of busted harmonicas. (It’s a sound I didn’t know I needed to hear until it was upon me.) A vigorous duo performance by Paula Matthusen and Philip White — on laptops and sundry electronics — referenced free improvisation, noise rock, as well as the outer planes of dance music.
But packing a vibrant collective’s half century of work into a two-night stand isn’t really possible, especially since Issue Project Room was also trying to illuminate so many contemporary reverberations. In a perfect world, I would have heard a bit more of Mr. Mumma’s music, though what I did experience was memorable.
On Friday, he joined Mr. Kubera in “From the Rendition Series,” from 2006, in which electronics are inserted into the piano and are triggered at surprising intervals. Warmly pointillistic in nature, the miniatures gained additional dimensions — sometimes comic, sometimes gnomic — whenever Mr. Mumma’s digital gear asserted itself over the pianism.
Robert Ashley’s work made a strong impression, too, when it was heard. On Friday, a trio of vocalists took on the task of mounting “Love Is a Good Example” — a literary reflection on identity that is frequently, subtly transformed by the ritual appearance of the word “sure.”
Since all three performers — Gelsey Bell, Aliza Simons and Dave Ruder — were involved with the premiere, at the 2014 Whitney Biennial, of Ashley’s opera “Crash,” they seemed not merely comfortable with his gently motor-mouthed witticisms, but were also in possession of some of his interpretive mastery.
As Ms. Simons turned the “oo” sound of that one-word refrain — “sure” — into a mocking playground taunt, I was reminded of Ashley’s talent for finding the music in American patter, particularly in the throwaway phrases we’re conditioned to tune out. It was a reminder of how the Sonic Arts Union’s style can still refresh the way we think about music — occasionally without the need of any gadgetry at all.
Sonic Arts Union
Performed Friday and Saturday at Issue Project Room, Brooklyn.
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