Composition as Explanation, David Lang says, is “super chamber music”. In the hour-long piece, first performed in 2016 but subsequently developed and much expanded, the members of Eighth Blackbird have to deliver lectures as well as playing their instruments – piano, violin, cello, flute, clarinet and percussion. Lang suggests the work may be staged too, and in any case insists that a theatre director should be involved in any live performance, blurring the boundaries between concert work and music-theatre still further.
The spoken texts are taken from a lecture that Gertrude Stein gave in 1926, in which she explained, with her typical repetitions and circumlocutions, what she was setting out to achieve in her writings. As well as playing and delivering their speeches in suitably arch ways, the instrumentalists also play “surfaces” that imitate the sounds and actions of writing. The result is a brilliant showcase for the multitalents of Eighth Blackbird which is ultimately unclassifiable, though there are parallels with some of Heiner Goebbels’ theatre pieces, particularly Black on White, which was written for Ensemble Modern. But the wonderfully compelling musical journey that Lang has created is uniquely his own, as it takes the listener through moments of chiming, crystalline beauty, stomping free-for-alls, vertiginous instrumental solos and insistent minimalist repetitions. You never know what’s going to turn up next.
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