New Music Ensemble builds on piano 'tour de force'
Sometimes Kevin Noe composes more than the concerts of the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble. Since becoming artistic director five years ago, he's refined his "theater of music" approach to programming that shapes the evening's experience by paying extra attention to contrasts and continuities between the pieces on the program.
Unlike his predecessor, David Stock, who founded the ensemble in 1976, Noe isn't really a composer. But he's enjoying branching out from conducting to staging the dramatic elements of the music he presents, and to creating transitional works where he knows no music that will fill the bill.
The ensemble's concerts this weekend will begin with "Alternating Current" by Kevin Puts, "a real tour de force for piano," Noe says. "It's definitely a piece that seems like what it is. The pianist should sit down and play, take a bow and then leave. In a way, it feels like an overture."
Noe likes the Puts piece so much he's willing to have a formal break for the applause, even though he hates dead time at concerts -- including after applause and while musicians are taking their seats for the next piece. For a transition after "Alternating Current," Noe felt "something quirky needs to happen, because that's the energy I feel the audience will need. The Puts is a journey and ends triumphantly, so you can't jump right into something serious."
He says "The New Maths" by Dutch composer Louis Andriessen that he'd programmed would have been perfect, but the publisher's rental fee for the music struck Noe as way out of line. He was back to the drawing board.
When Noe couldn't think of any good music that would fit, he decided to create something "that would reflect on the nature of our 30th anniversary, and how proud I feel to be associated with an ensemble that helps advance music."
Knowing he didn't want to give a speech, the conductor created "Two Times Only," which uses copies of some of the first films ever shown in public. For him, the films "say something both harrowing and right" about the passage of time for the people on the films and those who saw them on Dec. 28, 1895, in Paris -- when August and Louis Lumiere gave the first public demonstration of their cinematograph.
With the film as the visual context, Noe was ready to write a text using "different kinds of concepts, such as 24 frames per second of still images for the feeling of a moving present -- which is itself a metaphor for many things such as music moving forward and being in step with our own time.
"I even quote Stravinsky's famous comment that 'Music is the sole domain in which man realizes the present,'" says the conductor, who sees his job as much more than beating time.
Additional Information:
Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble
Featuring: Kevin Noe, artistic director and conductor
When: 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday
Admission: $20; $10 for senior citizens; $10 suggested for students
Where: City Theatre, Downtown
Details: 412-889-7231
