Alarm Will Sound @ Zankel Hall

Above: concert photo by Fadi Kheir

~  Author: Shoshana Klein

Tuesday March 26th, 2024 – Though this concert started with slight technical difficulties, after  about 3 minutes, the whole rest of the show went on without a hitch. The pieces were played with minimal breaks and the show could have gone on with no applause, except that everyone was so excited about the pieces that there was a lot of excitement in between.

There were audio introductions from each composer, and sometimes they even overlapped with the beginnings of the pieces. This created a really good flow that made the concert seem a little more connected and seamless than a normal program. This was actually my first official Alarm Will Sound concert despite being a fan of them for years. I’ve seen them in other contexts but not a fully programmed concert – it was a real treat! 

The concert started with a piece by Tania León, who curated the concert in her capacity as the Richard and Barbara Debs Composer’s Chair of Carnegie Hall. Her piece was cool, groovy and fun, scored for small ensemble. 

The second piece, by Chris P. Thompson, had some basis in drum corps, as explained by his introduction. It was really cool to hear about marching band in the context of “classical music”. I think it often gets ignored as an art form or a rigorous type of music when it’s actually pretty difficult in a way that was contextualized really well by the introduction to this piece, which was also really fun. The piece had a lot of rhythmic complexity and was really upbeat. One effect that was used was these tubes that are swung around by various musicians to create a pitch (and the pitch changes based on how quickly you swing the tube). I’ve been seeing this used in new music spaces more often recently and in this particular instance it did evoke the marching band – the coordination and visual aspects, or maybe more specifically the color guard spinning flags around on the field.

The next piece was by Christian Quiñones (who I worked with a couple of years ago but we’d never met in person!) His piece was really cool and also had lighting effects attached to the electronic sounds, which was an interesting though slightly jarring experience. The sounds were a little glitchy but rhythmic in a way that sounded really cool. The piece was based on the sound of hearing loss – sounds becoming obscured and distorted throughout. 

The last piece on the first half, in my opinion, was definitely the show stealer. It was an excerpt of an opera by Damon Davis and he called it in his introduction a “black rap space opera”. I had moments of feeling like some of the music was familiar to the point where I wondered if I’d heard it before – but I think it was just that type of music, kind of magical in its familiarity as well as its novelty. It was well orchestrated, interesting in the way it used members of the ensemble as characters or kind of as set pieces. The songs were beautiful but also definitely post-genre, almost more similar to musical theater than anything. The music and the story were optimistic in a mythological way, almost like Disney or Miyazaki. Everybody seemed to want to hear the whole thing. This was a fragment of a larger work that will hopefully be performed soon!

The second half started with a piece by Elijah Daniel Smith which had a different tone – more subdued and introspective than the first half. It had a lot of really interesting sound worlds accompanying a narration that was interesting and impactful.

Next was a piece by Texu Kim that was rhythmic and upbeat and ended a frenzy of rhythm that was perhaps intentionally impossible to keep completely together, which was a nicely unconventional end to the piece.