Classical Score: Musical Worlds Collide—and It's Exciting

Genre intermingling has become a red-hot topic in the classical world. Is this growing trend of juxtaposing styles within a single album or program a radical (or calculated) move meant to draw in new listeners, or is it an organic—perhaps even inevitable—form of artistic evolution?

A new recording and two recent concerts within the John Adams-curated In Your Ear festival at Carnegie's Zankel Hall suggest that this confluence comes quite naturally. The first Zankel performance was by Paul Dresher & His Electro-Acoustic Band; the other featured Evan Ziporyn & the Gamelan Galak Tika, a Balinese gamelan ensemble founded and directed by Ziporyn that is based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Dresher, who studied with artists ranging from Lou Harrison to Indian sitar virtuoso Nikhil Banerjee and West African master drummers, says that drawing upon non-European and non-American sources is logical for composers of his age. "One of the things that certainly influenced many composers of my generation," the 54-year-old Dresher says, "was an efflorescence of availability of music from all over the world and from all periods of time."

Dresher's music stoutly refuses easy categorization, as his album "Cage Machine" (Oct. 19, New Albion) demonstrates. His scope ranges from the dazzling kinetics of the "Racer" movement from "Elapsed Time," a 1998 duo for violin and piano performed by David Abel and Julie Steinberg, to the astonishing sounds of "In the Name(less)," a 2002 piece written for two brand-new instruments, the quadrachord and the marimba lumina.

"The quadrachord is a 15-foot-long instrument with four strings that stretch about 160 inches," Dresher notes. "While it's acoustic in its origin, it is amplified via electric bass pickups, and the sound is altered by several signal processing devices and layered in loops." While the instrument is powerful as heard on CD, watching Dresher play it—exploring the quadrachord's tonal potential live onstage by bowing and plucking its strings or running a cloth over the length of an entire string to produce otherworldly, eerie overtones—is an even greater delight.

"The marimba lumina," Dresher continues, "was designed by Don Buchla. It's a percussion controller that looks a little bit like a marimba, but it is nothing like a marimba in terms of what it is capable of. Tonally, it's a MIDI controller, but its remarkable quality is that it's extremely expressive of performance gestures."

Ziporyn, who records for Cantaloupe Records, agrees with Dresher about the excitement of musical worlds colliding and says that much of his music also explores this phenomenon.

" 'Tire Fire,' which we performed at Zankel," the composer notes, "is for full gamelan with basically a rock band: two guitars, a bass player and a keyboardist. I felt that these ensembles were kind of the two extremes of Western and Balinese music. On the one hand, you have a village-oriented, traditional ensemble playing handmade instruments. On the other hand, you have a plugged-in, machine-manufactured group. These are my two worlds. It's a deliberately uncomfortable fit. There are tuning problems, there are balance problems, but that's the world we live in."



NEW KAPELL RECORDINGS? More than three hours of newly unearthed performances by iconic pianist William Kapell, who died at age 31 in a 1953 plane crash, are creating an enormous stir.

The recordings, made on three acetates, were done by a devoted music fan named Roy Preston in Melbourne, Australia. Working in his home, Preston recorded Kapell's concerts as they were transmitted by the Australian Broadcasting Corp.

As his health declined later in life, Preston gave his treasure trove to his friend Maurice Austin, who last month turned over the recordings to Kapell's widow, Dr. Anna Lou Kapell-Dehavenon.

Kapell recorded for RCA, and in 1998 BMG Classics released "William Kapell Edition," a nine-CD set of his complete commercial recordings as well as various live and home performances.

Daniel Guss, director of the classical catalog for BMG Classics who also executive-produced "William Kapell Edition," says his label is interested in issuing these newly rediscovered recordings. "However," he notes, "we first need to resolve certain issues, such as questions of ownership rights and investigating the quality of the acetates."