New York

Weill Recital Hall was all but silent. Margaret Leng-Tan -- tall, erect and dedicated -- sat barely moving at the piano. The silence was luminous, lit by her devoted attention, and the audience's.
This was John Cage's "4'33"," a landmark of 20th century art, four minutes and 33 seconds in which the performer makes no sound while somehow dividing the work into three sections, in any way she likes. With perfect judgment, Ms. Leng-Tan chose to be both formal and relaxed. To mark new sections, she'd calmly stretch, then strike a graceful pose, leaning her head in her arms, or resting her chin in her hand. She honored and inhabited the silence, making it come alive for everyone.
Though here I have to say that Carnegie Hall (where Weill is located) honored both Cage and his colleague Morton Feldman, by organizing a three-concert festival wonderfully titled "When Morty Met John . . . " When those two pioneers first met in 1950, not many people knew what silent music was. Carnegie could not quite re-create those days, restoring, brick by brick, the New York tenements where Cage and Feldman lived, or bringing back their parties, where guests included Robert Rauschenberg and other painters. Yet somehow the freshness of that time came back. In programming the festival, Carnegie's devoted artistic advisor, Ara Guzelemian, made ideal choices, asking soprano Joan La Barbara to direct the concerts, and Ms. Leng-Tan to join her and the young and fearless Flux Quartet in performing.
All, very simply, were transcendent. Ms. La Barbara, without the slightest fuss, sang and hummed Cage's vocal music, making me believe I'd always known it. In Feldman's "Structures," Flux -- rapt and unerring -- hung at the edge of silence. And Ms. Leng-Tan found an extra touch of calm and playfulness, especially in pieces from Cage's "Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano." Here nuts and bolts are stuck between the piano's strings, to create a gentle, clinking shimmer that seems to come from fairyland, and yet still sounds homemade. Ms. Leng-Tan played with deft, precise delight, as if it all were new to hear, and she could listen with as much joy as all the rest of us.

But then all the music at this little festival seemed new, even after 50 years. So did works of Karlheinz Stockhausen, performed more recently, with composed exhilaration, by Ensemble 21 at Columbia University's Miller Theater. Thirty years ago, Mr. Stockhausen was a prince among composers, always mentioned side by side with Pierre Boulez. But Mr. Boulez ascended into mainstream fame, while Mr. Stockhausen faded into eccentricity. That made me eager to encounter him again, and in his "Klavierstuck IX" I entered into something like an altered state. After 144 repetitions of a stubborn chord, two timid little tones emerged, and for a heartbeat, Marilyn Nonken let the music hang suspended, while I wondered if those little notes were some kind of footnote to the opening, or just a momentary pause for breath before the music moved ahead.
Throughout this concert, I found that I had multiple expectations, without ever guessing how they'd be fulfilled. In "Tierkreis," a piece about the zodiac, for piano, flute, clarinet and trumpet, nearly everything was high and quiet, but never simple, the instruments combining in a single, four-part line of music, unpredictably embroidered. In "Kontakte," for piano, percussion and electronic sounds, a piano chord would catch the taste of an electronic whirr and somehow also match its shape; sounds folded into one another, again creating many-sided, unpredictable events.

These events -- Cage-Feldman and Mr. Stockhausen -- amazed me. I started making lists of things in them that mainstream composers have yet to really pick up on -- silence, or alterations of familiar instruments, or even something boldly simple, like scoring "Tierkreis" for four musicians, one of whom, the pianist, barely plays.
Which brings me to "Great Day in New York," nine celebratory performances jointly sponsored by Merkin Concert Hall and the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. These succeeded in transcending two familiar problems -- the battles that not too long ago were fought among composers who write in difference styles, and the loneliness of new-music evenings, which only hard-core insiders used to go to. Here, like a festival of reconciliation, we had music by 52 composers, all apparently embracing one another, and people really came, even thronging outside Alice Tully Hall, hoping to buy tickets.
I feel, then, like a churl -- and as if I'm personally betraying Fred Sherry, the joyful cellist who conceived it all -- if now I say that the lack of fighting also meant that nothing very new was going on, that things had reached a comfortable plateau where not much was surprising. It's somehow not a shock that one of the most impressive offerings, a group of songs by Ned Rorem, written in the 1950s, was also the most traditional, since Mr. Rorem did nothing more (but also nothing less) than continue traditions of the even more distant past, with deep feeling and radiant but unpretentious craft.
Besides that, I mostly liked the music that stood apart from the normal concert world, like an excerpt from Peter Shickele's Piano Quartet No. 2, which brought a friendly, folk-based sound to concert instruments, with enormous verve and wit. David Lang's "Cheating, Lying, Stealing" came off as an eruption of exultant, strongly woven noise.
But one work really polarized the audience: David del Tredici's "This Solid Ground," a group of songs-in-progress, which were heart-stoppingly exposed and lush, and sung with an arresting, raw, and nakedly nonclassical voice by John Kelly, a performance artist. A critic sitting next to me gasped and refused to applaud. Here was something new and bold, meticulously wrought and quite surprising -- qualities that excited me in Cage, Feldman and Mr. Stockhausen, but which "Great Day in New York," despite the celebration, mostly didn't have.

Wall Street Journal, March 19, 2001