Founded five years ago by Conservatory students as a showcase for homegrown music, the Hot Air Music Festival continues to wear its populism on its sleeve. Works by eminences like Phillip Glass, Elliot Carter and Witold Lutosławski get equal play with music that's still very green, much of it by student and faculty composers. As New Music branches out, Hot Air hews at the trunk and lays bare the rings.
Glancing back at the evolution of the genre, this year's festival begins with the sounds of the Conservatory's own New Music Ensemble -- circa 1976. MaryClare Brzytwa, assistant dean for professional development and academic technology, herself a composer of electronic/acoustic music, is curating a "listening session" of tapes that demonstrate the uniquely funky flavor of experimental music from forty years ago.
"Stuff written in the 70s still sounds 'out there,'" says Hot Air co-producer Nicholas Pavkovic '11. "We're getting music now that is more tonal than in the 70s." Pavkovic suggests the New Music movement experienced a sea change in 1976 thanks to one single composition, Einstein on the Beach. Phillip Glass' Gesamtkunstwerk rendered the concept of "the next big thing" in contemporary music obsolete. "After that we got into this area of pluralism where everybody is doing their own thing," says Pavkovic. As a result, the avant garde experiments of the 1970s heard on Conservatory tapes can now seem "quaint and naïve and idealistic."
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Mobius Trio, founded in 2010, is among the alumni ensembles featured this year.
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In fact, the current crop of Hot Air headliners
breaks new ground by borrowing freely from other genres. The newly-formed Ignition Duo, guitarists David Gonzales '11 and Ramon Fermin '11, are self-described explorers of the "confluence between contemporary classical and extreme rock music." Kriika, the duo of guitarist Justin Houchin '11 and violinist Matthias McIntire '12, are as comfortable playing standards on stage at Yoshi's jazz club as they are digging into edgy fare like Five Two Tango by former faculty member Jon Russell '03. The trio Areon Flutes, including alumnae Jill Heinke '06 and Sasha Launer '11, mixes virtuosic arpeggios with electronic beats.
 | | The new alumni/student group Phonochrome will perform Digital Bird Suite by Takashi Yoshimatsu. |
But embracing elements of pop doesn't mean the new New Music has left idealism -- or formalism -- behind. Friction Quartet has been touring with a work by Ian Dicke '04 for strings and live electronics that trains its sights on the ethical quandaries of drone warfare. Classical forms persist in Trumpet Sonata by composition faculty David Garner '79 and Marimba Concerto by student Stephanie Webster, the festival finale, featuring Percussion Department Chair Jack Van Geem as soloist. Hot Air even cross-pollinates with dance for the first time with Silence: music for dance written by Webster and choreographed by Dana Lawton.
If New Music today has a guiding tenet, Pavkovic says it's that people are free to pursue their own voices outside the strictures of academic pressure or conventions. After five years, Hot Air continues to lift those voices to the skies.
Take Note: Conservatory News and Events, February 19, 2014
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