A Brief Review of Lost Highway Suite

Michael Savini

This performance took place in EMPAC’s main concert hall at 8 PM on Saturday. Before the performance began, the audience was greeted with an address from The Honorable Shirley Ann Jackson. She described EMPAC as the “North Star” for the Art X program here at RPI, and also detailed the importance of the arts at Rensselaer; this address was around 15 minutes long.

Scattered around the concert hall were 64 loudspeakers arranged to encapsulate the audience in a large dome of sound, giving each seat a unique experience yet truly utilizing EMPAC’s spatial potential. The piece was performed by the International Contemporary Ensemble, with six soloists whose performances would be channeled into a live electronics system. Solos were performed on a saxophone, clarinet, trombone, guitar, accordion, and keyboard. The musician performing with the live electronic effects directly utilized a laptop to control the electronic modulations of soloists, sound effects, and the distribution of all of those sounds to the 64 loudspeakers in the audience. The 27 instrumentalists played a variety of classical and contemporary instruments; Two percussionists were located to the sides of the main ensemble towards the back of the stage, and the live electronic musician was positioned in the back, stage left, adjacent to the keyboard soloist.

With regard to the music, a large portion of Lost Highway Suite developed multiple soundscapes for the listener while other portions were more classically expected melodic performance. The soundscapes that were developed could be characterized as smooth, immersive, and in some places quite atonal. The more classically expected portions of the performance were audibly more “grounded” with a tonal center and melodic purpose. The soloists were not always playing melodic lines, but rather switching back and forth between different musical purposes; they would very frequently switch from decorative musical thoughts and ideas to basic tonal contribution to the soundscape being developed. There were several moments throughout the piece where a jarring and unsettling chord was stabbed by all of the performers in the ensemble which felt like it was intended to disorient the listener and provide contrast to the soundscape. The percussionists, whose synchronized movements attracted the eye during the performance, frequently added decorative elements like suspended cymbal rolls, melodic percussive elements, and powerful bass drum hits. At some points, it was hard to tell if an instrumentalist on stage was performing a part that was being modulated through the use of live electronics or if the part was entirely pre-recorded or electronically developed at the moment. While some soloists like the trumpet performed a very clear melodic line, other soloists like the trombone were frequently holding long tones to mix with the soundscape. Smooth long sounds of similar timbre soon became fairly indistinguishable from the live trombone performance, unless one could see the performer clearly. Lastly, towards the end of the piece, the keyboardist utilizes a microphone to deliver a series of panicked screams that while audibly unsettling still felt very calculated, as if it was meant to blend with the soundscape.

Personally, I enjoyed the piece. I appreciated the contrast between the strongly articulated stabs and the smooth soundscape. I also noticed that at some points, the modulated sounds and soloist performances when combined together sounded not unlike a highway. The pitch bending of the electronics and the actual pitch bending performed by the soloists and ensemble sounded like a series of cars passing the listener; it felt like a surreal interpretation of the Doppler Effect. The piece itself was designed to represent a few underlying questions. In my opinion, the most well-exemplified of these questions, given my previous statements about the Doppler Effect and simulated performances, is the question “How do we know what is real and what is imagined?” With regard to this concept, the performance hits the nail on the head.