Sequenza21/The Contemporary Classical Music Weekly

Five world premieres in West Palm Beach

Palm Beach Atlantic University is a small, young Christian college (2,800 students, founded 1968) in West Palm Beach, Fla., just across the Intracoastal Waterway from the island of Palm Beach. It's not the first school you think of when you're looking for contemporary classical music, but on Monday night the university's School of Music and Fine Arts presented an eight-piece program of this music, including no less than five world premieres. The music ran the gamut from conservative post-Romanticism to free atonality, and constituted in every respect a challenging, rewarding evening, not least because the audience of about 100 was so attentive and enthusiastic.

The special guest was South Korean composer Don Oung-Lee, an associate professor at Seoul National University, and a leading figure in the Korean Society of Composers and the Asian Composers League. Lee's new ALCO XI: The Strand of Palm Beach used natural materials from the Palm Beach area to make sounds that then were fed through a computer (ALCO is his abbreviation for Algorithm Composition). He then added dynamics and altered sound patterns by waving his hands over two sensor strips mounted on either side of the open laptop cover, as well as additional sensors mounted on the board where the laptop sat.

Here's what the audience saw: Lee breathing into a microphone, blowing bubbles through a straw into a cup of water, rubbing rocks together in his hand and then at the bottom of an aquarium; Lee standing, feet apart, arms spread out in front of him like a sorcerer summoning the monsters of the deep as he threw his hands quickly, then slowly, over his assembled equipment. Here's what the audience heard: A long, slowly building naturescape of soft wind and burbling water that built gradually into an all-out hurricane of wind and lightning (plus a couple processed-trumpet bare fifths heard very briefly) that was just this side of terrifying for people like me who rode out the real hurricanes of September 2004. ALCO XI proved to be a composition in sound of deep musicality in that it was the work of a man whose ears are alive to every possibility sound presents.

The concert organizer was PBAU professor Timothy Thompson, who also had a premiere. His Riddle Music No. 2: Split the Lark (The Mystery of Faith) is written for alto saxophone (played by Thompson), soprano (PBAU's Moon Sook-Park, Lee's wife, in a standout performance), and sound files processed live. The Emily Dickinson text ("Split the Lark") is sung, spoken and stuttered, and alternates with free atonality from the sax. In his program note, Thompson said the piece was drawn from a variety of sacred choral works by Bach, Handel, Josquin and Brahms, as well as Billie Holiday's Strange Fruit and Charlie Parker's Bird of Paradise. One sound file failed to play, Thompson said, but I don't know how much it would have added to the piece as is, which is a stark, atmospheric piece that reflects its creator's puzzling over the contradictions of faith. The piece ends in high drama: A long-held high C for the soprano followed by a quiet minor-second exhalation of breath for singer and sax.

Marlene Woodward-Cooper, who teaches piano at PBAU, offered the first hearing of four songs she wrote to texts by Kincie Farrell for an opera called Sweet Betrayal, a melodrama involving infidelity and suicide set in 1950s America. Woodward-Cooper's songs struck me as the best new music of the evening, written in a style somewhere on the Carlisle Floyd-Benjamin Britten axis, with just a hint of Rachmaninoff, of all people. Woodward-Cooper has a strong melodic sense, a gift for scene-setting, and an admirable ability to write gratefully for the human voice; the excellent mezzo-soprano was Brenda Turner, accompanied by the composer at the piano.

Traditional approaches were strongest for Lawrence Swerdlow, a Brooklyn native who has found time to compose in his South Florida retirement ("The performance is just icing on the cake," he told me after the concert). Swerdlow's Piano Trio, heard here for the first time, was well-made and engaging, and had real melodic distinction: I found its melodies and rhythms reminiscent of Vaughan Williams.

The fifth premiere was a student work by Shaquita S.A. Stubbs, a native of the Bahamas who is completing her senior year at PBAU. Stubbs's In Between, for two saxophones (alto and tenor) and piano, is a gritty work in which sections of straightforward contemporary classical writing alternate with sections of something that is nearly trad jazz, with fluid saxophone lines over walking bass patterns in the piano. But Stubbs' harmonic language doesn't soften, which would have turned her piece into pastiche. Instead, it comes off as the work of a composer who knows the separate traditions of classical music and jazz, loves them both, and demonstrates her respect by filtering them through her own distinct sensibility.

Three older works rounded out the program: The Sonata No. 1 for two pianos of William Schirmer, a teacher at Jacksonville University; Polaris, for solo marimba, by Mark Ford, a percussion professor at the University of North Texas; and Kokopeli, a short work for solo flute by Katherine Hoover.

posted by Greg Stepanich 3/17/2005