thirteen ways

We received a tip tonight from Indy’s Ensemble Music Society that there were two printed reviews of our eventful concert at the beautiful Historical Society on November 28.

The Indy Star printed a review by Whitney Smith on November 30; and Tom Aldridge wrote a review for Nuvo (“Indy’s Alternative Voice”, a weekly tabloid).

Both reviewers were clearly unprepared for what we dished up.

“Well, this ain’t Home on the Range was my first thought”, wrote Aldridge, who was enticed by the lack of capital letters in our name, and thought our offering came from the “outer fringes of the galaxy“. But he was impressed:

These 30ish six delivered [the four works] with peerless performer polish, pizzazz, a pittance of parody and prime-rated playing.

“Prime-rated”? I feel like a piece of meat!

Both writers mentioned The Mac’s improvised clarinet-slide during his Rzewski Pocket Symphony cadenza. Here is Smith’s take:

Truly weird performance techniques (such as dragging a clarinet bell across the stage floor), plus strolling across the stage, peering into a video camera and interweaving instrumentals with poetry added up to an offbeat musical experience. But it eventually made sense, if you considered that the 12-year-old group took its name from a poem exploring various ways to look at blackbirds.

Smith also had an interesting description of the effect of Tamar Muskal’s work, Mirrors:

[T]he players resembled a modern-day Degas painting, or maybe even a psychedelic marching band.

Strange, though, that neither mentioned a rather obvious hiccup in the evening’s proceedings….