Every Friday, a different musician climbs the stairs to the Cantor Center balcony to play Mark Applebaum's experimental work "The Metaphysics of Notation." I had previously written about flutist Jane Rigler playing a rippling, percussive version of the piece; last Friday I went to see Sam Adams on electronic keyboard and laptop. (Scroll down for my video.)How do you play a musical score that replaces standard notes with flowers, wavy lines, human figures and rising lines of dots? Any way your muse takes you. If you're lucky, the composer will come by.
Applebaum was there last Friday, watching while Adams focused on one piece of the score, creating music that used silence and long moments of thought, then intensified. Adams wove in recorded words: "make real sense," "notation," "symbolic structures." A drone created urgency and interest. By the end, the music echoed through the balcony like a plane taking off in a storm. I felt in the center.
Adams' father, the composer John Adams, also dropped by. In my photo above, he's listening so hard to his son playing (at left) that he's barely moving. Applebaum is standing in the pale-green T-shirt. After the performance, he praised Sam Adams for his "studied, ascetic approach" to the music that also allowed in such warmth.
Applebaum's score is on display in panels hung around the balcony; you can view it all week, but it's only on Fridays at noon that it takes on audible life. (My video shows glimpses of a few different panels, not just the one Adams played from.) The free weekly concerts are set to continue through February 2010.
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