There Stands the Glass

Dmitri Atapine encouraged an audience of 200 to renounce the term “new music” during his introduction of Garibaldi Trio’s recital at the 1900 Building on Thursday, January 30. The co-Artistic Director of The Friends of Chamber Music noted that all music was once new. Besides, he said, what’s new today inevitably grows old.

Musical semantics don’t interest me as much as experiencing fresh sounds. The evening reminded me that institutional suppression of progressive music is just as pervasive in the classical realm as it is in jazz.

I was both ashamed and angry as I experienced works by Stephen Chatman, Lowell Liebermann and Dobrinka Tabakove for the first time. Thanks to my fixation with ECM Records, I’d previously encountered Jörg Widmann’s outlandish Fünf Bruchstücke for clarinet and piano.

Rendered by the charismatic trio of clarinetist José Franch-Ballester, pianist David Fung and violist Marina Thibeault, all four pieces resounded like indispensable components of the classical repertoire. The discounted ticket I purchased on a whim for $10 two months ago revealed previously concealed universes.

My desire to continue exploring new sounds seems to intensify every day. I want to hear it all. I occasionally fear my compulsion for music discovery will eventually hit a dead end. What if I exhaust every possibility?

As the old saw has it, I don’t know what I don’t know. An initial encounter with Ferruccio Busoni a couple days ago indicates I’ll die long before there’s nothing left for me to uncover.

Lowell Liebermann’s rendering of Busoni’s “Fantasia contrappuntistica”on his new album Personal Demons transfixed me. I soon learned Busoni was a celebrated pianist as well as an inventive composer. There’s something spellbinding about the compromised sonic quality of Busoni’s 1922 recordings. A vast trove of recorded Busoni works awaits me.

Perhaps I should be grateful rather than ashamed for having learned most everything I know about music aside from outlaw country through independent study. As an increasingly committed autodidact, I recognize my education is just beginning.

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I rank all but one of Pat Metheny’s 46 albums at Plastic Sax.