Nexus
8 p.m. Mar. 16
Langford Auditorium, Vanderbilt Univ.
For information, call 322-2471
What classical music is has never been easy to say, even in supercilious circles. As far back as the record reaches—not really all that far—composers followed T.S. Eliot’s advice to poets: Don’t borrow—steal. Sometimes the stolen stuff was as raw and raunchy as heavy metal, until it was transfigured into urbane elegance. (The sarabande is an oft-cited case.) Sometimes what is now considered standard once jangled the ears of its first hearers. Richard Strauss’ dissonances sound pretty tame today, but less than a century ago they helped him cultivate a reputation as a musical enfant terrible. Stravinsky’s Sacre du printemps is quasi-pop these days, but at its 1913 premiere in Paris, its classical audience erupted into riot as critical commentary.
It’s easy to forget that, apart from high liturgical sacred music and music for occasions like coronations and royal weddings, most music we know as ”classical“ was in its day the ”popular“ entertainment of the privileged few. We have that music because it was written down. The music of the unlettered many, played by ear, was not written down and so mostly got lost. Today’s corresponding music is preserved—and disseminated—through recordings. More different kinds of music are heard by more different kinds of people today than ever before. Which means that more people are stealing musical ideas from one another than ever before.
Ezra Pound’s definition of literature—”news that stays news“—works for music too. In both cases, the experience must remain vital. It doesn’t matter whether the music is a classical composition or an Appalachian folk tune, so long as it doesn’t get boring when its novelty wears off.
That means, of course, playing the right notes at the right time. It also means playing those notes musically—crafting them into a whole that stirs and delights the listener. It’s easy to forget what that means because it is so rare to hear music that can be considered genuinely transcendent. The Ryman’s recent concert by the early-music ensemble The English Concert, playing an all-Bach program under Trevor Pinnock’s direction, was a breathtaking reminder. In a place made famous by Bill Monroe and Roy Acuff (themselves classic virtuosi), some dozen performers played slow and elegant and fast and loud with razor-keen accuracy. All the parts were scrupulously precise, and all the wholes far more than the sum of those parts. It was an incandescent demonstration of what music is—and what classic rightly means.
So rare is it to hear such musicianship that you don’t expect it to happen again soon. But it might happen again this Thursday evening, when a five-man percussion group called Nexus appears at Langford Auditorium as part of Vanderbilt’s Great Performances Series. This group embodies the very challenge of defining ”classical“ music, so broad and unusual and accomplished is its work. Since 1971, Bob Becker, Bill Cahn, Robin Engelman, Russell Hartenberger, and John Wyre have built a global repertory and a reputation to match. Their stock-in-trade is rhythm, the essential fundament of all music everywhere.
Nexus enthusiastically demonstrates that rhythm can come from almost anything and from almost anywhere. These five musicians play the standard symphonic percussion instruments—xylophone, tympani, cymbals, triangle, snare drum. They play small hand drums from India called tablas, and they play conch shells. They play lots of other things and play them in uncommon ways: They use a set of pitch-ordered cymbals that are struck with a variety of sticks and mallets—and also bowed with a violin bow to produce an eerie, abstract sound.
Maybe the most noteworthy and praiseworthy traits of this ensemble are its insatiable musical curiosity, and the delight with which it follows that curiosity to logical and aesthetic limits. The group has performed with orchestras like the Chicago Symphony, the Rochester Symphony, and the Austin Symphony; it has appeared in venues from Budapest to Carnegie Hall to Tanglewood to Tokyo. It has produced a long and varied list of recordings. The members have talked about percussion, and demonstrated what they were talking about, in a PBS program hosted by Bill Moyers. They also do a lot of percussion workshops for music festivals and schools and universities. They are scheduled to do one this week at Vanderbilt.
A Nexus performance, in a workshop or a concert, renovates the ears and invigorates the soul. This group makes other good groups sound better; they make less careful groups hard to put up with. Is their music ”classical“ to the supercilious? Hard to say, even if you care to say. But it is classic, for sure.
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