In Review: SIC synChromatic

Step out of the library and into Yale’s own musical MOMA.

SIC InC’s latest show goes on tonight at the Off Broadway Theater at 9pm and tomorrow at 8pm—and is truly a work of modern art. The show features works from 9 student composers, and a different student artist paints in response to the music each night on a large canvass to the side of the performers. The works incorporate synthesizer, fretted violin, steel pan, and more conventional instruments set to coloured lighting and video clips, which provide an artistic spectacle while challenging the listener’s mind to work in new ways.

SIC InC, a high-energy, multimedia show series, is the brainchild of Stephen Feigenbaum BR ’11 and Ellis Ludwig-Leone TC ’11 as a new approach to making classical music accessible to a wider audience. Rather than compromise his own musical style, Stephen says he creates a spectacle to keep his audience engaged and uses elements such as lighting to highlight the emotions he tries to evoke with his music—for example, a change in lighting might correspond to a key change, so in principle musical choices will still be experienced if not understood.

Ellis says SIC helped him figure out what kind of music he wanted to write and allowed him to develop as a composer. A bridge between the inaccessible, post-minimalist string quartets he writes for class and his rock band Gets the Girl.

All of the pieces work music in interesting new ways from the fret board length cello slide in Gabriel Zucker’s PC ’12 “snow on the sand,” to Jourdan Urbach’s PC ’13 rocking out on a his signature six-string fretted electric violin in Nathan Prillaman’s JE ’13 hybrid medley “Vivaldi had a Midsummer Nights Dream.”

One of the night’s highlights is “the rAy’s end” a violin and pan piece by steel pan virtuoso Andy Akiho MUS ’11. Armed with 2 mallets in each hand, Andy plays melodies and chords on the pan using circular musical (and often physical) gestures that he highlights with accents from the violins at the moments when his cyclical musical energy from the pan line peaks. Andy also intersperses these circular musical patterns with linear, 18^th century style sequences in the violin line—an interweave and cultural contrast that comes off beautifully. As folk Trinidad and classical Europe merge, the piece builds the dissonance, using 2nds and sharp chords that become painful to the ears in a dramatic finish. It’s like nothing you’ve ever heard before.

Something you will recognize is Stephen’s “Spring Fever,” which diverges from his usual modern skepticism to borrow from popular music. Stephen starts the piece with an original string orchestration that includes 3 rich cellos playing mostly in unison. The keyboard begins to add non-chord tones in rhythm. Every fifteen seconds or so, the listener begins to recognize keyboard patterns—but they do not last long enough to be traced and Stephen’s piece continues incognito. The violins begin to hammer chord tones in rhythm and suddenly SIC is playing Kanye West’s “Runaway.” The orchestration is brilliant, and the performers can’t help smiling as they rock to the rhythm. After lingering on this piece for a few minutes, the violins take the melody line somewhere else—Stephen’s own contribution—but return to Kanye shortly after. After tasting this delightful new flavour, the group then transitions into original music again, and the piece comes to a close. I interpreted this piece as tracing Stephen’s own thoughts one spring afternoon when he is trying to concentrate on his work but keeps humming Kanye.

Ellis’s piece “Believers (Mvt- IV),” a movement from a larger composition featuring voice, is a bit more traditional. The string section and French horn provides a background as Ellis conducts two female singers in very difficult rhythmic harmonies. Ellis uses the voices as an instrument cutting them off sharply with almost electronic precision. One the vocal line became more melodic with words as opposed to sounds, the words, which Ellis says he wrote and borrowed from Biblical passages, were difficult to understand (annunciate please)—but the focus on the voice as an instrument was refreshing even if the piece’s complexity left me feeling as though I didn’t quite yet have a grasp on what Ellis was doing. (That’s what the other movement are for, I guess.)

My MOMA moment of the night was during Nathan’s piece “Let’s Get Real,” which projected a very random smattering of film clips—a child and monkey both learning to wear a hat, a crowd of people turning into rushing grain, random shots of floral patterns, and a pigment-level close-up of a newspaper clip all feature. (Nathan says he wasn’t at all involved in the film and has never even seen it.) The film addition reminded me that I don’t always understand art and might suggest to the audience that it does not fully understand the music either.

Nathan’s piece centers around a synthesizer pounding nonstop 5^ths and adds nice pizzicato accents in the violins and cellos and flute melodies that return quickly to tonic. This synth pattern gets boring but is vital to the piece’s theme—which Nathan says plays with a digital sound that is also a bit analogue (like a clock) to question what is real sound. The piece, which he describes as “happy” is also about friendship, Nathan says, the title a catch phrase of his chipper suitemate Vincent Yu JE ’13.

While electronics make interesting additions to the music, sometimes I feel SIC is too quick to synthesize. For example, in Jourdan’s piece “Perigree” synthesized drums—which use only bass and snare—might be livened if exchanged for an actual drum kit. And the performance would only get better if Nathan, on synth drums, were exchanged for an actual drummer. (Sorry, Nathan.) I applaud SIC’s efforts to keep their performance live when possible instead of playing pre-recorded electronic tracks, and the electronics add to the experience throughout, but often there is no substitute for a real musician. When the synthesizers add new sounds to the pieces SIC should go for it, but when they’re only aimed at imitating an actual musician, SIC should stick to the real deal.

This piece was still convincing. I really liked the stomp stomp. pizzicato cadence in the middle as well as the soaring, cinematic melodies. This is the piece I most wanted to see paired with a film. Maybe next time.

In future shows, I’d like to see closer interaction among the composers and other artists. The painter is left to her own devices to interpret the music, and the film clips don’t clearly correlate with the composers’ vision. Music informing other artists who are left interpretative freedom is a good start, but it might be nice to see some more cohesion in future shows.

Overall really freakin’ cool. My musical mind got its aerobic exercise of the week.

The show starts soon, so you should probably start walking over! Reserve tickets here or just go. Like now.

Z