High culture and low class at Juilliard

The thing about concert halls is they are designed to get sound from the front of the hall to the back. The thing about human beings is some of them don’t get this fact. The thing about free concerts is there is no barrier to entry.

I took in a free concert by Juilliard Ensemble of a tribute to contemporary composer Luciano Berio (1927-2003) at the Peter Jay Sharp Theater on Tuesday night. It’s a pretty big house and it wasn’t packed, so I found a nice spot with five seats between me and my nearest neighbor, settled in and was prepared to be enthralled. About five minutes before the show started a gentleman sat down in the row in front of me two seats to my right. He was followed by another gentleman who sat in the row in front of me two seats to my left.

As the lights dimmed and Emi Ferguson, a young flautist, took the stage for a solo work created in 1958, the gentleman to my right decided to have an emphysema attack of Biblical proportions. He wheezed and coughed and snuffed and snorted and shifted and flapped his program for the next two hours.

A couple of minutes into Ferguson’s piece, “Sequenza I”, a frantic piece of music in which Ferguson held a musical conversation with herself, the gentleman to my left – apparently no fan of contemporary composers – decided it was time to balance his check book. He took out all his bills for the month … still in their crinkly envelopes … and went to work.

The second piece, “Corale”, written in 1981 for a dozen highly trained musicians, became “Piece for musicians and two assholes in the audience”, written in 2008.

They were a team (in fact, I asked them as I took to my feet, "Are you guys a team?") They drove me from my seat and deeper into the back of the theater. I found a spot in the second to last row of the Muppet Theater, right in front of two older gentlemen talking to each other between pieces.

“I don’t like this.”
“It’s not for you to like.”
“Oh, it’s for the younger generation then?”
“The kids like it.”
“I don’t. It’s for the younger folks.”
“Well, look at the audience.”
“I see a lot of white hairs, but I don’t like it.”

So, they left.

And I finally did get a chance to like it. Berio seemed hell-bent on making his musicians suffer over the ugly tones he forced them to create from their beautiful instruments. There was a 1969 solo piece for oboe, “Sequenza VII”, played by Jeffery Reinhardt, in which Berio forced Reinhardt, who he’d probably never even met, to make sounds like blowing your nose into an already-full snotrag. This is not something I imagine comes naturally to a young man studying at Juilliard, but even the uninitiated such as myself could tell the kid was playing his ass off.

The came a piece of interesting – again, played brilliantly by a quartet including vocalist Carin Gilfry, harpist Jane Yoon and percussionists Molly Yeh and Sam Budish – in which Gilfry sang three e.e. cumings poems (two of the poems twice) while Yoon played counterpoint on the harp and Yeh and Budish banged the shit out of everything but the tag-team assholes in the audience.

It was great, a 16-minute theater piece akin to Blue Man Troupe in evening wear.

And then, David Huckabee came on to play the 1980 solo piece “Sequenza XIV” for cello. It was like watching Buster Keaton. The piece sounded like the cello would escape, running around insanely and crashing into itself and every note in the musical realm, and Huckabee was right there in the middle of it, stone faced.

I’m not a fan of contemporary concert music, but the thing about making a point of seeing New York City on the free is you never know what you are going to get, so you need to be prepared to enjoy yourself. And, for the love of God, leave your checkbook at home.