For the Birds, and Also, the Cicadas: HEARding Cats Harmonizes on "In C"
Home Culture For the Birds, and Also, the Cicadas: HEARding Cats Harmonizes on "In C"
HEARding Cats new music collective welcomes more than 40 local musicians to the postmodern cradle of the Old Post Office Plaza tonight at 6 p.m., as they perform Terry Riley's Minimalist masterpiece.
When the HEARding Cats new-music collective welcomes more than 40 local musicians to the postmodern cradle of the Old Post Office Plaza September 20 at 6 p.m., they will fire up In C, and if you bring a lawn chair, sit down, close your eyes and listen to the first ten minutes of the piece, you will find the rhythm, and, to say the least, transcend the image of the abused goose.
Rich O'Donnell, the former St. Louis Symphony Orchestra Principal Percussionist and one of HEARding Cats' go-to musical tricksters, will conduct the large ensemble.
In C, you see, is almost as much a game as it is a composition. Riley's page of instructions offers 53 melodic patterns -- each in the key of C-Major -- to be played in sequence. But exactly when each musician launches into the next pattern is determined by what they hear around them, and how they think they can best chime in. The piece sounds different with every performance.
Any number of musicians can join to play this fluid piece, but Riley recommends a group of 35 or more. O'Donnell's convocation of just over that number will include current and former SLSO players, jazz musicians, and chorale singers, among others, divided into percussion, strings, brass, woodwinds, keyboards, guitars, vocalists, and even a small group of dancers.
When it works well, "it's very meditative," said O'Donnell. Indeed, it can be one of those real eye-openers that seems to end with a transitory unsealing of the airlock that leads back to (the bane of) everyday civilization.
In the thick of the music today, there will surely be passersby who stop and wonder just what the hell is going on, which is, arguably, not a terrible barometer for gauging music.
HEARding Cats Collective, "St. Louis' presenter and producer of strange and wonderful arts events," presents Summer Kyma:The Plaza In C, at Old Post Office Plaza (Locust at 8th), at 6 p.m. Tuesday, Sept. 20. It's free. Bring a folding chair.