Author: Jonathan Chenette

You can't see it. You seldom hear it. Don't look for it on the Billboard charts or at your neighborhood CD store. It is hard to pin down or identify with, because its stylistic influences range across time and space. What is it? New music by Iowa composers.

There are probably hundreds of composers writing music in Iowa, over 50 of whom have banded together to form the statewide Iowa Composers Forum. The music these composer make is vital. Its existence provides models of creativity that are nourished by local soil and traditions but linked to diverse places and times. It offers an alternative to commercially validated, depersonalized musics of apathy and boredom, because it provides a composer to scream at if you don't like what they're doing and to laugh with if you do. It can be subversive, joyous, entertaining, intoxicating, and infuriating. It challenges, delights, moves, and illumines through sound. But who will hear?

For three decades, the Cedar Rapids Beethoven Club has sought to hear and encourage Iowa composers through their annual Iowa Composers Concerts. Co-sponsored by Coe College and organized by Cedar Rapids composer Jerry Owen, the 31st installment in this series took place April 17 at Coe's Daehler-Kitchin Auditorium. Expert performances by UNI's Faber Quartet and other professional musicians as well as Washington High School's Madrigal Singers treated an audience of about 80 to recent works by six Iowa composers. Two world premieres were among the works performed.

First on the program was one of the premieres, Jerry Owen's fanciful Licorice Brittle, for clarinet and piano. The title, inspired by Woody Herman's affectionate reference to the clarinet as "the licorcie stick," was apt. Combining sweet, jazzy harmonies and brittle, spiky melodies, the piece was a tasty concoction indeed. It took off from its first notes and didn't let up until a suspenseful silence just before the end, with an exhuberant energy deriving from syncopation, percussive piano chords, and wide-ranging clarinet licks that left the listener breathless. Jazzy harmonies and 5th-based chords built up an incantatory energy, relieved at several points by a more lyrical, triplet-based theme. The spirit of the work was captured perfectly in the animated performance by Cedar Rapids clarinettist William Carson, with the composer at the piano.

Carol Rohr's Beethoven Club Sketch , performed by Gail Williams, was a short work for piano demonstrating a variety of compositional techniques. For its intended function as a musical sampler, the work was illustrative; but it contrasted markedly with the single-minded energy of the Owen piece. Starting with a mysterious, evocative chord thrice-repeated, then falling off into a left-hand melody which became the main musical idea, the piece flowed freely through an intense series of musical developments. Canons and varied harmonizations predominated, with frequent episodes of nocturne-like figurations reminiscent of Debussy. The continuous change left this listener yearning for a more leisurely pacing of ideas.

Classicism and solidity were the hallmarks of the next work on the program, Raymond Songayllo's Sonata for Two Pianos. Surprising turns of harmony and a sense of exaggerated massiveness pervaded all three movements, recalling the music of Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich whom the work memorializes. Movement 1 had some particularly effective harmonic twists but seemed to end too soon; while the third movement's canonic episodes and descending scales built up to a most effective climax and ending. The performance, by Songayllo and concert organizer Jerry Owen, had a few momentary lapses of ensemble, but conveyed well the rhythmic and contrapuntal intricacies of the music.

Two performances by the University of Northern Iowa's newly formed Faber String Quartet framed the concert's intermission. This group should have a bright future if they continue to play with the verve, virtuosity, and tightness of ensemble displayed on this occasion. Their performance ofSally Goodin, by composer Anthony Lis, was a show-stopping, foot-stomping rendition of Lis's clever deconstruction of an old fiddle tune, complete with "shave and a haircut, two bits" ending. Lis's piece managed to weave Ozark-style fiddling and Bartok-like timbral experimentation into what sounded like a seamless web of musical development. The music managed to be intellectual without seeming pretentious.

The other quartet, Jeremy Beck's two-movement Shadows and Light given its premiere performance on this occasion, drew similarly impressive results from a dramatically different source. Deriving from Beck's half-year sojourn in St. Petersburg, Russia, the second movement of this piece was imbued with the spirit of Russian church music, interspersed with energetic utterances of improvisatory and fragmentary musical ideas. The first movement Scherzo was introductory and unsettling, progressing through startling shifts of mood unified by reappearances of an opening 4-note idée fixe. The energy of this movement and its mid-air ending set up the more serene, ornamented lines of the second movement. This music had a plaintive, sustained quality and a gradual development out of which the opening movement's idée fixe reemerged, dramatically slowed down and transformed. The whole piece was unique in its juxtaposition of sustained, lyrical elements, fragmentary motifs, and eerie tremolos all cast in a compelling but highly individual form.

Washington High School's Madrigal Singers under the direction of Dr. Jerry Kreitzer presented the final two works on the program, Allen Koepke's Praise and The Power of Love. These well-crafted, good-natured works were performed convincingly by the superbly trained high-schoolers, and the audience gave them a warm reception. The music was almost slavish in its adherence to the texts, and both works pleased with a strong seasoning of pop rhythms and harmonies. Praise would make an excellent vehicle for ambitious church choirs on festive occasions, exulting in the familiar lines from Psalm 150, "Praise God in his sanctuary. . . Let everything that breathes praise the Lord."

Given the range and interest of the works on this program and the quality of the performances, one question begs to be answered: why such a small audience? Is it just the hard times facing all forms of chamber music? Is there a particular fear of new music? Do composers of contemporary music really have an audience? Certainly most of the works on this concert would have raised few eyebrows, even among the most conservative concert-goers. Perhaps Iowa composers need to forego their good manners and engage in a bit more self-promotion. . . or maybe good things for the few are enough of a reward.