Of Dreaming of Other Nights

Dan Albertson

[May 2026.]

[For you, the assembled Schlosbergs of the midwest, in admiration: Suzy, and Zelene and Daniel, and Lily and Wally.]

Katherine BALCH: waggle dance (2026). Matthew RICKETTS: Into Air (2026). Gity RAZAZ: The Angel of All Mortal Things (2026). Shawn E. OKPEBHOLO: City of Big Shoulders (2026). Grossman Ensemble, Luke Poeppel (cond.). Logan Center Performance Hall, Chicago, May 22, 2026. (cccc.uchicago.edu).

Concerts of new works work like proverbial moths and flames to some and lethal poison to others. Gone, perhaps irretrievably, are the days when a concert of four or five pieces tentatively entitled TBD or new work would stir the imagination, not merely due to ennui having taken over but more to practical experience having instilled enough curbs on expectation to last three lifetimes over.

No matter, the point of the new music concert, if one must be honest, is to roll the dice, to set oneself up at the bar of creativity and order whatever is on tap for an hour. Now or never. The odds of an afterlife are not stacked in the music’s favor, and the sense of futility that so much effort has poured into a one-off extravaganza rivals the feeling of an impossible love – one’s core knows what the heart refuses to believe. Thus, the game goes on, and the Grossman Ensemble means that one never doubts an optimal level of musical engagement on the side of the performers. Even Hans Thomalla deigned to show up, taking a break from writing his sub-Broadway schlock.

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The overture, waggle dance, embodies the identity crisis of post-minimalism in American academia. A basically tonal language, based on a certain punchiness, metrical regularity and stripped-down harmonic vocabulary, is used as the backdrop for a series of unpitched interventions filched from Helmut Lachenmann. Without an equal seriousness of purpose – or talent – the results are likely to seem inconsequential, a hit parade of recent musical obsessions across and between the continents of style concocted in more potent brews elsewhere. Nothing is inherently off in the music on offer, as though there ever is, and it has its pleasantries. One would hope to aspire higher than musique d’ameublement, for Katherine Balch herself as much as for the musicians and listeners.

Into Air acts as an isle of repose, perhaps to excess, though in an era of extreme de-humanization its sentimentality, weaving as it does allusions to a melody the composer and his grandmother played in his childhood, at least gives a pulse to a world edging ever nearer an interpersonal freezing-over. If the axiom about a composer taking an ensemble of 13 players and making it seem larger is a stereotype of the classic variety, it could be argued that the inverse is a rarity, and Matthew Ricketts compresses the sinfonietta into an entity small enough to squeeze into the narrowest nook of the bygone salon, as little as a voice here, a voice there, a section here, a soloist there, by the end a lone vibraphone to bring home the palliatives. Perhaps more relevant than the writer’s opinion of the music itself is the acknowledgment that a critic goes into any piece with a bevy of biases, based on the composer’s previous work, or projections of what bearing this familiarity with the past has on the future. How these prejudices color the ability to adapt to what one hears in the moment is a lesson not to be taken lightly.

Rainer Maria Rilke died a century ago, and thus did not need to testify to the countless embarrassments the impact of a significant artist can have on the lesser endowed over time. Referring here not only to the piece by Gity Razaz, thoughts wander far and wide, gravitating more and more toward the difference between primacy and replication in any given art form. The enormous expansion of the compositional profession has consequences far beyond who gets what commission and why. On a more fundamental level, the impetus to be original gets smaller and smaller each year, since funders seek demonstrables, not theoreticals, and the ubiquity of everything, or most of everything, from ages past and present, taken alongside the current skepticism of canons, widens the amnesia and ignorance of the art form’s varied twists toward its contemporary impasse. Oh, and the music in question is bland, repetitive, bloated, unnecessarily teleological, often bombastic (including the dreaded trope “being loud as a substitute for having nothing to say”), and entirely uncertain of its own reasons for being.

No such philosophical quagmires awaited the finale by Shawn E. Okpebholo, which was more sincere in its directness and perhaps more naïve as well. How to situate the music, were pigeonholes necessary, would prove a challenge: somewhere west of slower mid-century jazz, somewhere shy of Third Stream (fortunately so) and nowhere of its own classification. A saxophone solo never takes off, though it at least tries. One senses that the composer, effusive in his personality, writes exactly what he means, and who he is, an honesty that others in the profession would be wise to emulate.

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Oracles do not attend new music concerts. Neither do the observers of a perilous age, ours or any other. The true observers are the shadows of evenings long ago buried, embers carried forward from one generation to the next, dimly indicating the path and causing more than a modest turmoil on the way.

[The photo above is from https://www.logancenter.uchicago.edu/thecenter: The Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts at the University of Chicago on August 5, 2012. Photo by Jason Smith.]