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Jun
Posted by Evan Burke » Add Comment »
Big Farm’s Self-Titled Debut on New Amsterdam Records
The temptation to over-intellectualize Big Farm’s self-titled debut is hard to resist.—which isn’t to say that it’s not an intellectual record. They clearly want you to think, and the album ranges far and wide over some esoteric musical landscapes. But while you’d expect a dense, nigh-impenetrable album from four luminaries of new music, the glory of Big Farm is the sheer exuberance that permeates every complex passage or heady lyrical idea. You’re welcome to dig in, searching for the compositional complexity and hidden meanings, but you’re also welcome to sit back and rock out.
Big Farm
We all know, deep down, that classifying music is a fool’s game, yet we can’t seem to stop ourselves, can we? A friend tells us, “Oh, I love this (band/composer/musical entity)” and the first thing we ask, almost in spite of ourselves, is “What do they sound like?”. We can use cool-sounding adjectives, comparisons, and variations on other descriptions we’ve heard before, but it’s really all for naught until we actually hear the music. In the case of Darcy James Argue, it’s especially easy to get hung up on classification. At first glance, it’s easy: big-band jazz. Sure, he doesn’t sound much like any big band, past or present, but there’s horns and it swings sometimes, right? But listen closer, and it’s clear that the label doesn’t quite fit. There are too many shifting time signatures, too many rock riffs, too many black clouds of atonal darkness. So it’s more like modern classical, right? After all, it’s heavily composed, without much repetition. But that doesn’t work either. Argue sits nicely in the Ellingtonian tradition of writing tunes around key soloists whose style he knows well, allowing them to improvise over his through-composed works. And hey, if you think about it, even Ellington wasn’t so easy to categorize: if you had never heard jazz or the blues before, but then heard Such Sweet Thunder, you’d probably think it sounded like Debussy with a fat backbeat. So there’s improvisation and swing and all the instruments people identify as “jazz” instruments…can’t really call it classical either. So what’s left?
What I find most interesting about the Brooklyn Youth Chorus is the elegance with which the ensemble, led by founder Dianne Berkun, serves two vital purposes at once: they are both an institution dedicated 
to high-quality musical education for young singers (ages 7-18), as well as exciting and progressive performers, capable of tearing through John King’s eerie, experimental, Ligeti-like Muse Cast Aside War one night, then backing Elton John at MSG the next. It makes perfect sense, really: as an educational entity, BYC is dedicated to preparing their students for a professional career, which means they must be necessarily diverse in their repertoire. They must familiarize students with all manner of styles and techniques, and give them opportunities to perform in real-life settings. At the same time, they’re a choir of young, open-minded musicians in one of the music capitals of the planet. Why not collaborate with anyone and everyone in town? And who better to perform new works, written in new styles, than young musicians? Musicians who, while not yet at the technical level of older professionals (although not very far behind them, either), have also yet to develop habits, established patterns, and comfort zones? Isn’t it a boon to a composer to work with musicians who are still discovering their personal style and sound? And even play a role in their development, while also getting an opportunity to have their works performed? The concerts I attended recently, at the BAM Cafe on May 5 and at the Roulette Theater on May 19, featured music by modern composers like Missy Mazzoli, Bryce Dessner, and Shara Worden, whose pieces written expressly for the BYC defied easy categorization, emphasizing the adventurous nature of the ensemble.
One would think that music and spoken word are two of the most complimentary art forms. They seem like they should be a perfect match; next to music, spoken word is the medium most reliant on pitch and rhythm, not to mention abstract concepts like cadence, consonance and dissonance. But the combination is a risky endeavor. One often hears music/spoken word collaborations that serve to diminish both components, with each distracting from the other, interfering with each other as opposed to providing contrast or counterpoint. But if there is a musical entity that could successfully marry the two, it’s Kronos Quartet, whose experience working in unusual musical settings is as wide as anyone’s. Working with authors Rula Jebreal, Marjane Satrapi, and Tony Kushner, they brought their experimental energies to the Metropolitan Museum for an evening-length work titled “Exit Strategies”.