Live Log 2023: Power, Passion, And Pain
Contrasts between - and within - recent concerts by Hotline TNT and Talea Ensemble
While we often distinguish types of music through genres, it’s just as easy to put music on a spectrum, loud to soft, for example, or simple to complex, and group things that way. Emotional impact works, too, with a lighthearted pop song perhaps coexisting nicely with a sprightly piece of baroque chamber music. Two recent concerts had me thinking about contrasts and connections between and within music of widely varying genres. They were close enough together that my ears were still ringing (and not only figuratively!) from one when I went to the other.
Hotline TNT with Protocol and Ordinance
October 26, 2023
TV Eye, Ridgewood, Queens
For the last couple of years, I’ve relied on Jarret Wolfson’s YouTube channel to catch up with live shows by bands I love that I couldn’t get to and to discover new acts. That’s how I found Hotline TNT, immediately connecting with their three-guitar attack, innate tunefulness, and fresh take on the noisy pop of The Replacements and others. Soon my inbox was filling up with press releases about their upcoming second album Cartwheel. The singles sounded great and I also learned from those emails that in the studio, Hotline TNT is pretty much all Will Anderson, who puts together all those guitar layers, etc. himself while also writing the songs and singing them. But I knew it would be killer to see the live show so I made my way to TV Eye, a club I’ve wanted to go to forever, for their record release show, which was about a week before Third Man Records was due to release the album.
The trek to TV Eye from uptown is not as bad as some Queens locations, with the Halsey stop on the L just a couple of blocks away. There’s also a gas station right outside the subway, which could be handy should I ever decide to drive there. The club itself is expansive, with two bars, circular banquettes, an outdoor space with picnic tables, the performance room, and a secret room modeled on Kubrick’s The Shining. TV Eye has also built community, as evidenced by the lively crowd attending a trivia contest, hosted by Kor Skeet from The Rehearsal, when we arrived. Other TV personalities showed up in the forms of Eric Rahill and Jack Bensinger from The Bear, who gave a highly amusing intro to the show. Yes, chef!
When I previewed the opening acts, I was a little surprised to find they were more closely connected to whatever remains of the hardcore scene than Hotline TNT themselves. The first band, Ordinance, I would even call a retro act, with little new added to the basic formula of short, fast songs and exhaustively screamed vocals. They were committed to their sound and the audience seemed to enjoy it, even slam dancing at one point. Can I say that I hate slam dancing? Even in 1980, I hated slam dancing. Anyhoo, in classic hardcore fashion, Ordinance’s set was mercifully short.
Protocol, actually from Tallahassee, FL, were quite a bit more interesting, with an abstraction to their sound that came at the punk tradition from an angle, a speeding truck emerging from an alley to t-bone the expected. We also stood far back for their set, letting the pure chaos of the crowd become a visual effect rather than a physical one.
Fortunately, a lot of the room cleared after Protocol’s set so we were able to get close to the stage again for Hotline TNT. Unfortunately, there was more slam dancing during their set, which seemed a bit extra, but I was able to find a spot to stand. In any case, a few miscreants couldn’t interrupt my pleasure in the immersive sound created by Anderson and co., who often used those three guitars and tooth-rattling bass to build up waves of repetitive noise not unlike Glenn Branca’s famous guitar symphonies, roiling overtures that presaged the emotional maelstrom of the songs.
Along with the chord changes, which elicit uplift, confusion, anger, and sadness, Anderson’s telegraphic lyrics let you find yourself in up-to-the-minute journal entries of the miscommunications and frustrations of trying to live with and connect with other human beings, as in these lines from Son In Law:
Tried to catch your show
Waited in the wrong line
Took it too slow
Could've watched your tone
Heard it right the first time
Dipping your toes
Some of Anderson’s songs, like that one, are chorus-free, leading to an unstoppable cascade of riffs, emotions, and - especially onstage - excitement. Anderson knows what he’s after in the studio but has also assembled one of the great live bands out there right now. I’ve already talked about them on my podcast and here, so I’m really running the risk of letting my enthusiasm making me repeat myself. I’ll just say that now the ball is in your court. They’ve got a lot of tour dates to choose from so make a plan.
Talea Ensemble
That Other Spring
With Ah Young Hong, Soprano
October 29th, 2023
St. Paul & St. Andrew United Methodist Church, NYC
This expertly curated and meticulously performed concert gave me my first opportunity to hear a Michael Hersch piece live, my second chance with Georg Friedrich Haas (whose Solstices, also played by Talea, was a highlight of 2022), and insights into the use of similar forces for differing ends.
The word that continually comes to mind when contemplating Hersch’s work is “unafraid,” and the first piece we heard, Anonymous Beneath the Lemon Trees (2020) did nothing to change that. Scored for soprano, bassoon, piano, two violins, viola, cello, and double bass, it’s essentially a song cycle setting carefully crafted excerpts of poems by a broad, and richly informed array of authors. Ranging from Anja Utler to Thucydides, with the title coming from Marius Kociejowski (“The world’s skin will become a mass of sores...anonymous beneath the lemon trees.”), the fragments assemble into a collective metaphor of a cruel and war-torn planet to confront the horrors of disease and death we all experienced in 2020.
Anonymous… began with a start, no prelude, Ah Young Hong nearly at full throttle. As the first song develops, Hersch’s canny use of the bassoon, here played with precision and lyricism by Adrian Morejon, Talea’s Executive Director, as almost a duet partner, leaning into the woodwind’s most human qualities. As it went on, the scoring continued to reveal the piece’s architecture, with the strings used as an embedded string quintet flanked by the piano and bassoon. Even as spiky and far out as the piece got, the verities of the chamber music repertoire kept things grounded.
The soprano writing was always front and center, but as the instruments alternated between furious churning and suspended tensions, a perfect balance was attained between soloist and ensemble. There were also some striking instrumental effects, often at the end of a song, which not only underscored the emotional landscape but gave Hong a moment to recover from her complete immersion in the text. The third song, for example, ended with a violent rip of the strings, like a mass of bows letting a swarm of deadly arrows fly. This could connect with the history of stringed instruments, which have in their DNA weapons used for hunting and making war. Or, as the notes soared overhead, perhaps they were illustrative of Stephanie Fleischmann’s words in the movement: “seeds floating like a swarm of vanished insects embalmed in a bed of coal.”
When Hersch touched on the conventions of song, as in the movement based on Thucydides, he managed to connect to the ancient evocation of diseased corpses, giving the tunefulness a fetid quality, like a rotting flower that still holds some of its original beauty. Hersch's ability to be flexible within his own conception bore striking fruit in the final movement, with Kociejowski’s words lamenting someone who “has by mistake slipped into time” and the music growing adjacent to a kind of jazz, but woozily, as if played on a dying gramophone.
As Hersch remarks in the notes, “What has been lost will take time to fully assess.” This remarkable work, by not looking away or trying to soften what we’ve just lived through, can be an aid in that assessment and I hope more people can hear it soon.
We also heard the U.S. premiere of Hersch’s One Step To The Next (2022), another song cycle for Hong and scored for flute, oboe, clarinet, chamber organ, violin, and bass. Unlike Anonymous…, however, all the words come from Jan Zwicky, whose poems Hersch calls “fearless texts of a quiet and restrained devastation.”
It began on a violent note, with word-setting that was somehow straighter, as if Hersch was committed to get his message across with a more direct route. Hong was compelled to the lower reaches of her rang, creating a sense of intoning, of ritual. This feeling continued into the third movement - “And the dust. What of the dust?” - with the music growing remarkably fragmented, barely related notes crossing like harried visitors to disparate graves. There was much drama to the vocals, too, starting with the whispered opening words.
There were more stunning moments than I can relate here, such as when bassist Greg Chudzik opened his mouth and emitted a single note for several seconds in the fifth movement, which ended like an amputation. By the time we got to the seventh excerpt - “…And I remembered that other spring: The world was ending then, too…” - the music began to fade, ending on a note of hushed resignation.
After a brief intermission, we were transited to another sonic universe in the music of Haas, whose …wie stille brannte das Lichte (2009) or “the light still burns” was written for soprano and a chamber orchestra consisting of flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, horn, trumpet, trombone, tube, percussion, piano, two violins, viola, cello, and bass. Haas’ approach came across as positively lush as the piece opened with a cavernous unfolding, making full use of the orchestra. At times, with Hong showing another side of her artistry, long vocal notes soared over uneasy stirrings from the musicians, before all came together in majestic consonance.
Richard Strauss came to mind, especially in the moments of true synthesis, staggering acts of orchestration as when the small, tuned (Thai?) gongs blended with the brass. In several movements, Haas used the soprano as another instrument, vocalizing different sounds, and in the rest, he assembled his own folio of poets, including Georg Trakl, Theodor Storm, August Stramm, and Else Lasker-Schüler. When there were words, the near-romanticism of the music was matched by the text, as in Lasker-Schüler’s finale, May Showers: “You have wound your warm soul/Around my disintegrated heart/And all its dark sounds/Have died away like distant thunder.”
The contrast between Haas and Hersch revealed something essential about each composers work, with Hersch cutting further astray from comfort, giving us a valuable opportunity to exist in an unsettled state. Haas’ piece was incredibly powerful, too, taking command of the space, which played its own role in the proceedings, a well-worn cathedral that lent warmth and resonance beyond the sound quality. Talea, as usual, was committed to all three pieces, giving burnished yet unrestrained performances, elegantly conducted by James Baker, that illuminated the passions of the composers from within.
Before the music started, as I scanned through the text fragments from all three works, I thought of Will Anderson’s songs for Hotline TNT and how they depend on the noise and layering of sounds to deepen the impact of the words. With Hersch and Haas, while volume was occasionally used to bring things home, the approach is more like a dissection of the words, carving out little spaces for each and displaying them on your cortex. But all three artists are experts at seeking to limn the state of things in the 21st century and what a privilege it was to hear all this music in public, among others also seeking to connect to something outside themselves.
Note: As a board member of the Talea Ensemble, I couldn’t be more excited about our current season. Please join us for an encore of Solstices, this time performed at PS21 in Chatham, NY on December 21st. 4:26 PM - don’t be late!
From the archives:
Hot Live Summer
Record Roundup: Songcraft
Record Roundup: Vox Humana
Best Of 2019: Classical