John Zorn's birthday pick was an interesting one. While he's playing a month of concerts to celebrate his 50th birthday, the 2nd was the actual date, celebrated with plenty of cake for the modest audience and performances of two of his most enigmatic compositions.
Duras and Étant Donnés - 69 paroxyms for Marcel Duchamp, are a pair of works written for a pair of French artists from the early 20th century. The compositions are subtly beautiful, yet contain in an understated way much of the narrative devices that he used in flashier works such as Spillaine.
The piece for writer Marguerite Duras - who died in 1996, the year the work was composed - had a slightly different arrangement than on the 1997 Tzadik recording. It opened with percussionists Christine Bard and Jim Pugliese setting a texture with bass drum and small objects rolled in a mixing bowl. Strings quietly came in, simple piano statements emerged and Zorn added sound elements while conducting. Scratching a music stand, sharpening knives, pouring whiskey into a glass, all done on mike from his conductor's chair, created a vague sense of storyline to the elegiac piece. The work moves from moments of sheer beauty to classical elegance to sections of low, quiet noise. It was beautifully played by an ensemble of pairs of like instruments (a structure Zorn favors in composed works and game pieces), and performed by Mark Feldman and Jennifer Choi (violins), Anthony Coleman and Jamie Saft (keyboards) and the percussionists, most of whom also appeared on the recording.
The piece for artists and conceptualist Marcel Duchamp is very different than the work for Duras, but the two work together well (as Zorn obviously recognizes). It is described as a "noise trio," although it was played by a quintet of Coleman, Feldman, Bard, Pugliese and cellist Erik Friedlander. Like Duras, it is largely driven by the percussion, but is a more chaotic work.The percussionists spent the roughly 15-minute performance on the floor, rattling chains, gargling into bowls of water, Bard hammering a nail into a board and sawing a piece of wood. The strings were called upon to play in less orthodox ways, playing the bodies of their instruments with fingers and bows and rubbing pieces of cloth along the strings. While it's a strikingly musical piece, it also seems appropriate as a dedication to an artist who maintained that anything was fine art if he applied his (or in some cases a fictitious) signature to it. Why is dropping a chain into a bucket music? Because John Zorn signed it.
In a sense it's demystifying to see these works performed live. It's interesting to see that what might come off as overdubbed sound effects on record are a part of the performance proper, but it also becomes less introspective. Zorn did a remarkable job at creating imaginary soundscapes for the inner workings of the minds of two great thinkers. It's strange to revisit these works and discover you're not the only person inside that brain.
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