In
Honor of Andy Warhol, Pop Go the Composers
By PETER DOBRIN
INQUIRER MUSIC CRITIC
Will
any composer ever do for music what Andy Warhol did for art - that is,
legitimize the commercial or pop or other non-classical material by
importing it into a high-art context?
Actually,
classical composer engaged in cross-cultural travel long before Warhol
rescued a soup-can label from its merely quotidian existence, giving
new context to country dances (Beethoven), jazz (Gershwin) and eavesdropped
sounds of life (Cage).
And the five
composer who premiered their Warhol-inspired works Wednesday night at
the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts dabbled a bit with the idea
of new context, but they wisely avoided the obvious.
The new works
were a response to a contest administered by the Pennsylvania Academy
of the Fine Arts, to compliment its current Warhol exhibition up through
Thursday, and the Philadelphia Classical Symphony. Composers were asked
to write works inspired by one of four Warhol works. Philadelphia composers
Jan Krzywicki and James Primosch judged 16 scores, narrowing them to
the five. Karl Middleman led ensembles ranging from three to seven players
in the five winning works.
Robert McCauly's
witty SilkScream (inspired by Warhol's 1986 Self Portrait)sent
guitarist Allen Krantz on a solo adventure that could have been an alternate
theme song to Johnny Carson's Tonight Show - except for the fact
that it was surrounded by a small ensemble generating a fair amount
of dissonance.
Joyce Solomon
Moorman used Warhol's Race Riot (1964) as the jumping off point
for her work of the same name. Thinking of the composer as the "High
Priest of Camp Art," Moorman infused her work with the diabolic
tritone, and acknowledge the now-campy status of the William Tell
Overture theme played by trumpet to represent the police, a tenor
sax to depict the rioters, and a drum set to portray chaos.
Ron Herrema
took seriously the monotony of Sixteen Jackies, producing sixteen
miniatures in many moods.
tw!TcH
by Nicholas Frances Chase was also inspired by Sixteen
Jackies, and its dissonant vocabulary of sounds and special effects
came off as sounding disjointed.
The contest's stunner, which
won first place, was Geoffrey Gordon's Cool RED Cool for flute,
alto sax, trumpet, bass, piano and percussion, which doled out its jazz
mostly in brilliant little flashes deftly bursting and dissolving amid
a light fog of dissonance. Its inspiration was the 1986 Self Portrait,
though one long stretch of jazz was lifted straight out of a 1950s Village
bebop club - sophisticated, chromatic, and self-consciously cool.
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