Annie Gosfield - Music - Review

Annie Gosfield writes music that ranges from improvisatory and serendipitous to carefully notated. But running through much of her work is a fascination with noise. Her pieces are often about the ways that noise can be manipulated and put to musical use. Sometimes they are about the reverse: the way purely musical sounds can be made into noise, and then turned to expressive use.

Ms. Gosfield offered an overview of her work in an installment of Merkin Concert Hall’s “Zoom: Composers Close Up” series on Thursday evening. The first half was devoted mainly to acoustic chamber works, the exception being “Lost Signals and Drifting Satellites” (2003) for electric violin and recordings of satellite transmissions. The transmissions are largely static and bleeping, but Ms. Gosfield is a close listener, and the melodies she hears within this space noise have become the seeds of a lyrical violin line, complete with arching themes and graceful trills.

Erin Baiano for The New York Times

Annie Gosfield performing in a varied program in Merkin Concert Hall’s “Zoom: Composers Close Up” series on Thursday night.

George Kentros gave the work a shapely, persuasive performance and was also heard as a member of the Pearls Before Swine Experience, the Swedish chamber group for which Ms. Gosfield wrote “Cranks and Cactus Needles” (2000). The title refers to parts of an antique record player, and the work, scored for flute, violin, cello and piano, is a modernist’s fantasy of an old 78-r.p.m. disc — one etched with chunky, acerbic, rhythmically complex music — grinding along.

Here Ms. Gosfield uses noise descriptively: sections of dry sawing in the violin and cello lines are meant to evoke the distortions of the worn old disc.

The concert began with a solo piano work, “The Wanton Brutality of a Tender Touch” (2006), inspired by a brawl at a baseball game, and given a forceful, virtuosic reading by Blair McMillen. Mr. McMillen’s sharp-edged, cluster-driven pianism was also a driving force in “Almost-Truths and Open Deceptions” (2007), a fresh, vigorous chamber work for strings, percussion and piano in which shifting (and sometimes pounding) rhythms and intricate interplay create the feeling of a rock-influenced dance suite.

After the intermission, Ms. Gosfield and her rock trio played “EWA7” (1999), a work based on visits to factories in Nuremberg, Germany. Ms Gosfield’s sampling keyboard was loaded with industrial noise — machinery, buzz saws and industrial atmosphere, at various pitches — from which she wove an inventive, surprisingly musical line into a texture dominated by Ches Smith’s muscular percussion and filled out with patches of distorted color from Roger Kleier’s electric guitar.

Out of Static and Bleeps Can Come, Yes, Melodies