Hoketus - Bang on a Can 2016 Summer Marathon (Memory)

Day of 4 of my Bang on a Can Summer Marathon 2016 memories (straight from canland.org) focuses on larger ensemble work called Hoketus by Louis Andriessen.

Composer’s Notes (taken from his publisher’s website):

Hoketus is the result of the minimal art project I started in January 1977 at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague. This project’s purpose was to study the history of the American avant-garde movement both theoretically and practically, and I intended to finish the project by performing a composition that, making use of certain stylistic devices of minimal art, would at the same time criticise this style. The principal quality of minimal art compositions is the consistent limitation of musical material: the advantage is that all possibilities of one single musical aspect (usually rhythm) can wholly be explored and worked out. It is true that this is at the expense of other musical aspects.

Hoketus, too, has only one musical subject: the hoketus. The hoketus is a stylistic device of the Ars Nova (14th century, Machaut and others): the melodic tones are divided between two or more descants.

The ensemble Hoketus consists of two identical quintets: panflute, piano, Fender-piano, bass-guitar and percussion. The pitch material of both groups is (nearly) identical. This applies to the rhythm as well. It is, however, complementary: in Hoketus the groups never play simultaneously. What makes the piece Hoketus differ from most minimal art compositions is that the harmonic material is not diatonic but chromatic, and that it radically abandons the tonal continuous sound-masses characteristic of most minimal art, with the inclusion of all accompanying cosmic nonsense. - Louis Andriessen

Preparation:
This piece was organized in a way that I had I seen before, mainly in terms of notated cells that are meant to be repeated a certain number of times alongside regular, moving notated phrases. I’ll admit, I didn’t spend enough time prior to the group rehearsals running this piece all the way through, which I should have done to get used to the 25 minute endurance test that this piece provides. Sure, I ran chord clusters and the melody portion with a metronome, but I ran both parts to make sure that I was prepared for either group A or B. I definitely didn’t practice dynamics accurately either, which would have helped with the stamina conditioning. All things aside, I felt I at least had a grasp on the piece to understand what to look out for in group rehearsals.

Rehearsal
Right away, I knew this piece was going to be a wonderful mixture of challenging and rewarding! The group got together with Ken Thomson at the helm, dictating when we’d shift cells in the first chunk of the piece. I was in group B, but both groups shifted from leading the beginnings of phrases to playing the off beats. It was at this point that I realized I hadn’t learned the chord clusters correctly and had to work those out to match up with the other pianist, Sonya Belaya. The concept of alternating parts of phrases between two groups of 6 all trying to sound like 2 entities was hard to execute, but when things started lining up it felt really good. It’s like actively placing pieces in a puzzle and having those little bursts of satisfaction when you start to see the full picture. Ken’s direction helped a ton too, as he would often jump to emphasize the transitions, and his personal strength in leading his group motivated our side of the stage to really dig in!

Performance
This was probably my favorite piece to perform on the marathon. There’s something so satisfying of putting in a lot of work into this difficult concept, performing with so much energy, and feeling the energy from the crowd. As the piece progressed, a dance party broke out in the crowd, with people cheering at peaks in the build and bodies shifting their dance moves to try and feel the beat among the meter shifts in the melodic section. There was that palpable excite that comes from a difficult piece, knowing we can make it work but also expecting to have to solve problems. The hocket effect felt great to keep rolling, and the parts where it was lost for a second still added to the journey of performing this track. Once we ended, the crowd cheered and we all felt like we won the battle against this tune!

Check out the piece below or at this canland.org link: https://canland.org/hoketus/

Ensemble:
Nave Graham, Gina Izzo - pan flute
Sonya Belaya, Dutcher Snedeker - piano
Ashley Bathgate, Karl Larson - keyboard
Cody Takács, Gregg August - electric bass
Dylan Greene, Abby Fisher - congas
Ken Thomson, Tom Sanderman - alto saxophone