Davidovsky, Feldman, Reich

[nec]shivaree, the NEC Avant-Garde Ensemble directed by Stephen Drury, is the attack wing of NEC's new music program, performing both at NEC and at such venues as New York's The Stone.

The three works on this program, all masterworks of minimalism, are united by a common concern with synchronisation—or its absence.

Composer Eric Chasalow '76 has said of Mario Davidovsky's Synchronisms series, begun in 1962: "Here is music in which live and electronic forces reinvigorate one another in surprising ways." After a 15-year hiatus from electronic music, Davidovsky came back to this series. Synchronism X from 1992 pairs guitarist Maarten Stragier with prerecorded electronic sounds that originate with a guitar recording. Davidovsky flirts with guitar cliché, opening with something he describes as "almost a flamenco gesture."

Morton Feldman's Why Patterns? is one of a series of works inspired by oriental rug designs. Each of the three soloists—Aaron Likness, Anita Chandavarkar, and David Tarantino on piano, flute, and glockenspiel—is given a distinct pattern to execute, and only near the end of the half-hour work do the sounds finally weave together into synchronised forms.

Steve Reich's Piano Phase is one of the composer's "greatest hits" for not-quite-synchronised instruments, in this case, duo pianists Eva Xia and Amie Ching Hsuan Chen.