[Dixielandjazz] Does a band sound different in the dark?

[Stephen G Barbone]

Not OKOM, however it could adapted for the genre by an adventurous  
band. <grin>

Cheers,
Steve Barbone
www.myspace.com/barbonestreetjazzband

A Musical Question: Does a Quartet Sound Different in the Dark?

NY Times by Allan Kozinn - September 7, 2010

Michel Galante, the director of the Argento Chamber Ensemble, has had  
a longtime fascination with the music of Georg Friedrich Haas and has  
included his works in his group’s programs for the last several years.  
And as the musical force behind the Moving Sounds Festival, which  
opened on Thursday, he unleashed a torrent of Mr. Haas’s work in New  
York last weekend.

The festival’s finale, on Sunday evening at the Austrian Cultural  
Forum, was devoted to the JACK Quartet’s performance of a single work,  
Mr. Haas’s String Quartet No. 3 (“In iij. Noct.,” 2001). The piece is  
meant to be performed in an entirely dark hall, with the members of  
the quartet — Christopher Otto and Ari Streisfeld, violinists; John  
Pickford Richards, violist; and Kevin McFarland, cellist — seated in  
four corners of the space so that the audience is surrounded by the  
music.

When the JACK players performed the score in Pasadena, Calif., in  
April, specialists in room darkening saw to it that no light entered  
the space. Listeners were asked to sign waivers and provide emergency  
telephone numbers in case they reacted badly to being closed in a  
pitch-black room, and ushers wore night-vision goggles.

At the Austrian Cultural Forum the arrangements were less strict.  
Looking forward, you could see nothing at all, but toward the back of  
the small theater, a faint glow was visible on the ceiling. Waivers  
were not required, but as in Pasadena the performance was prefaced by  
a brief test to allow listeners to determine whether the darkness  
would be a problem for them. (No one seemed to be bothered by it  
enough to leave the hall.)

You may be wondering, why would a composer insist on darkness? The  
idea is actually not so unusual: think of all the Renaissance and  
Baroque composers who wrote settings of Tenebrae services, to be sung  
in gradually darkened churches during the three days leading to  
Easter. Mr. Haas alludes to this tradition by quoting briefly from a  
Tenebrae setting by the Italian Renaissance composer Gesualdo — a  
startling moment in the context of this work’s experimental language.

But there is more to it than that. Mr. Haas has used light and  
darkness in several of his scores, forcing an association, or the  
perception of one, between sight and sound. Here he severs that  
connection completely.

Much as the silence of Cage’s “4’33” forces listeners to focus on  
ambient sound, Mr. Haas’s score removes every possible visual  
distraction. The audience cannot see the musicians and the techniques  
they use to produce the sometimes outlandish sounds he demands, nor  
can they see other audience members and their responses. The musicians  
must memorize the work, which allows for considerable leeway in detail  
and duration. The score includes a series of cues that each player can  
throw into the performance, to be expanded upon or ignored by the  
others in a performance that should last at least 35 minutes. (The  
JACK Quartet played for about 70 minutes.)

Mr. Haas uses just about every sound and combination of sounds a  
violin, viola and cello can make. At the start the players gently  
tapped on their instruments and, eventually, scraped on their strings,  
creating a soundscape like that of a forest at night. That effect  
returned several times during the piece, and along the way the players  
produced flutelike harmonics, brash explosions of angular writing, the  
briefest touches of conventional quartet sound — a lugubrious cello  
line that drew a like-minded response from the other instruments — and  
the hymn like scrap of Gesualdo.

The gesture that returned most frequently was simply a sustained  
chord, within which timbres gently oscillated, and balances between  
the instruments gradually shifted. In a lighted room some of the score  
might have seemed commonplace, and much of it might have registered as  
a curious stream of timbral events. But in the darkness, with sounds  
coming from every direction, you focused fully on every tone and  
texture, and your imagination forced the episodic piece to coalesce  
into a singular, visceral statement. It would be hard to think of a  
more involving way to hear a new work.