Quick reviews of recent events
Submit your own review or commentary to Events@CoolCleveland.com

Alarm Will Sound's 1969 @ Cleveland Museum of Art 3/21 Here's a project for you students of history. Pick a watershed year (say 1969, for instance) and choose videos, still photos, readings and musical excerpts to characterize that year. That was pretty much the premise of 1969, the program that the 20-member musical group Alarm Will Sound brought to Cleveland last Saturday. They built 1969 around a meeting between head Beatle John Lennon and innovative composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, a meeting that almost but never quite took place.

Actors John Walker and Christopher Evan Welch staked out either side of the stage and recreated the back-and-forth between Lennon and Stockhausen, cueing live performances of their music and reciting from correspondence both real and imagined…

Walker kicked things off with a satisfying cover of A Day in the Life, giving the musicians and vocalists of Alarm Will Sound an early opportunity to show their chops as a Beatles cover band. It was exactly as Artistic Director Alan Pierson said in his group’s demonstration video; these musicians “can not only play their instruments really well, they can also improvise, compose, play jazz.” And they can sing catchy pop backup vocals, we’d add.

We were unfamiliar with Stockhausen’s music and biography before 1969, but Alarm Will Sound provided an excellent short introduction. Through Welch’s characterization we saw Stockhausen as – on the one hand – a musical visionary whose influence pervades both serious music and pop to this day and as – on the other hand – a joker who, like Sun Ra, claimed extraterrestrial origins. Again, the musicians demonstrated their versatility, performing the difficult overtone singing that’s part of ‘Stimmung’ as well as the electronic and (need we explain, unconventional) orchestral music that Stockhausen’s compositions require.

A lot happened in 1969. In “serious music” alone, that year saw important premieres or breakout concerts by Dimitri Shostakovitch, Gyorgy Ligeti, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, and Meredith Monk. Wisely, 1969 limits itself to excerpts from 8 pieces by Lennon / McCartney or Lennon / Ono, six by Stockhausen, and four excerpts from Leonard Bernstein's Mass.

A lot was happening in American politics and culture as well and again we felt that 1969 was wise to focus on a few of the many important events. Act I demonstrated a particularly clear progression from near-universal mourning over the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy to the far more contentious struggle to end the war in Vietnam. One particularly effective visual image early in Act I showed Kennedy speaking to his supporters, announcing King’s death. Later in Act I, Stockhausen’s Hymnen and Bernstein’s Mass (“We wait for the Word of the Lord,” sang the musicians.) accompanied an old film clip of the Catonsville 9 burning draft files with homemade napalm, a highly appropriate juxtaposition in that Bernstein was very supportive of the Berrigan brothers.

Act I ended on an even more contentious note, with more of Bernstein’s Mass juxtaposed with films of anti-war activists clashing with Chicago police at the 1968 Democratic convention. We could almost smell the tear gas. Baby Boomers the both of us and reasonably politically aware and anti-war in the year 1969, we found ourselves strongly engaged and taken back to those times by a bunch of musicians who could hardly have been out of diapers in 1969.

Act II began like many a drama, setting up conflict, quoting Nixon’s inaugural speech and Bernstein’s dismissal of Nixon as "political plastic." The players recited from newspapers and magazines of the time to roundly mock Bernstein’s music and his political activism both. Repeatedly, Pierson turned from his conducting duties to face the audience and say, “We all know that music can not stop wars” and an anonymous voice from the back of the house intoned, “Fuck your war.”

How is a program like this to end? The Living Theater ended Paradise Now! by leading the audience into the streets and Bernstein himself imagined ‘Mass’ ending with a wave of loving embraces that carried beyond the theater and into the world. But, in the end, 1969 simply lost the tension as it wound down. Like the meeting between Lennon and Stockhausen, it seems to imply that the changes envisioned by so many never happened.

An ambitious and largely successful undertaking, Alarm Will Sound’s 1969 simultaneously presented and contextualized music both familiar and unfamiliar in a way that, for us, stimulated further research, listening, and thought. And for musicians and historians who have a different take on the year 1969, there’s plenty more music and history left.

Some of the best is yet to come for CMA’s Viva series: fado singer Mariza, Basil Twist’s Japanese puppets, and Goran Bregovic’s Wedding and Funeral Orchestra. Watch for previews of these events. Performances in Playhouse Square and Cleveland Playhouse are good news for those who make plans at the last minute, since these larger venues are less likely to sell out. Early birds will benefit from something called 50/20, which gives the first 50 people who call for tickets a 20% discount. Phone the CMA Box Office for details at 888-CMA-0033.

Alarm Will Sound performed on Saturday, March 21, 2009 at the Murch Auditorium of Cleveland Museum of Natural History as part of Cleveland Museum of Art’s Viva! & Gala Around Town cultural arts series. http://www.ClevelandArt.org/.

From Cool Cleveland contributors Elsa Johnson and Victor Lucas vicnelsaATearthlink.net
(:divend:)