Network for New Music presents Songs Without Words – Without Borders

This season, NNM has commissioned forty new works to celebrate the landmark. On May 18, the final concert of the season (performed at the American Philosophical Society’s Benjamin Franklin Hall) completed the tally with seven new works. Appropriately, the program featured NNM’s signature non-ideological mix of musical styles, designed to both challenge and engage the listeners’ imaginations, and, as always, delivered with a consistently high level of performance standards. NNM has reliably attracted top notch musicians eager to explore material outside of the standard repertoire, including a number of Philadelphia Orchestra members.

No words, no borders

At the center of the program was a suite of five short works grouped together under the umbrella Songs Without Words – Without Borders, which was also the title for the whole concert. As that suggests, the music celebrated both the disparate nationalities of the composers as well universal artistic bonds. Whether it was intentional or not, the five compositions seemed to mesh in a kind of symphonic way, with George Tsontakis’s Highpoint Mountain serving as a lyrical opening movement, followed by a kind of zany scherzo, PmuD III, by Yoshiaki Onishi, which sounded like a buzzing hive of alien insects. The tuneful, Gaelic melancholy of Jennifer Margaret Barker’s An Linne Ghlas was the slow movement, followed by a lively dance section provided by Kinan Abou-afach’s Kaleidoscope Dream. The rollicking, propulsive finale came from Sepehr Pirasteh’s Fracture, concluding the set with a grand flourish.

The program was book-ended by very diverse music, which is a hallmark of NNM’s catholic musical philosophies. Snowmelt, by Nathan Lincoln-DeCusatis, mimics a familiar sound pattern from nature, the irregular sonic rhythms that emerge as winter turns to spring, as expressed by the duo of flute and guitar, with the plops of melting snow on a windowsill picking up the tempo as the music heats up. The closer was a completely delightful jazz-inspired work by Courtney Bryan for piano and string quintet, performed with the composer at the keyboard. Bryan has an especially fine sense for structure and pacing, partnered with an irresistable affection for old-timey jazz, with some Cuban dance motifs thrown in as well. The work, House of Pianos, might well have been subtitled “a celebration of the blue note.”

Enjoying previous NNM premieres

In addition to the seven newly commissioned works, the concert included music that was premiered at previous NNM concerts. Arson Fahim’s arrangement of folk-based music from his home country, Medley of Afghan Songs, for violin, cello and piano, was soulful, sad and not a little sentimental. The other redux performance was especially significant for this anniversary event, as it featured three artists who are fundamental to the NNM story: pianist Charles Abramovic, violinist Hirono Oka, and composer Jan Krzywicki. The superb musicians have been with the ensemble for nearly all of its existence, and between them have participated in the introduction of perhaps hundreds of new works, including many by Krzywicki himself, who calls them “my ideal performers.” His Scherzi for Violin and Piano is a superb example of his remarkable ability to write in a complex, dissonant language and yet express it with elegance and beauty.