The Marine Band continues its Fall 2024 Chamber Music Series on Oct. 17 at 7:00 p.m. with a program titled “Electric Counterpoint.” Coordinated by Oboist Gunnery Sgt. Trevor Mowry, the concert will take place at Lang Recital Hall at Levine Music. The concert is free, no tickets are required. However, attendees are encouraged to RSVP for the performance on Levine Music’s website.

Program

Directions

Here’s what Mowry had to say:

For this program I was deeply inspired by the title of Steve Reich’s incredible piece Electric Counterpoint. Those two words embody so much of what makes playing chamber music rewarding, both as a listener and as a performer. The tight knit interactions of a small ensemble in an intimate space give music a visceral immediacy that is utterly unique. When performing chamber music, I feel a powerful connection with my colleagues and with audience members alike, as though I’m engaged in a one-on-one conversation with everyone in the room simultaneously. My hope is that all three pieces on the program engender this kind of energy and interconnectedness, despite the vastly different periods of time they represent.

Jan Dismas Zelenka’s Trio Sonata in B-flat, ZWV 181 No. 3, shows us the very best of chamber music from the golden age of counterpoint, the Baroque era. Johann Sebastian Bach was a contemporary of Zelenka, and the two had a strong mutual respect for each other’s music. Despite recently turning 300 years old, the technical virtuosity and deliciously chromatic harmonies for the three principal voices in this piece keep the music sounding fresh and lively to our modern ears. A lot of pieces from this period showcase the oboe and/or bassoon, but Zelenka’s demands on the double reeds players’ fingers and lungs have few equals. The oboists and bassoonists at the Dresden court in the 1720’s must have been some real hotshots!

Steve Reich’s Electric Counterpoint takes the ideals of the Baroque era and uses modern technology to reframe them in a totally new way. Instead of playing in concert with other musicians, Marine Band percussionist Jeff Grant will use pre-recorded audio tracks to perform in tandem with himself across time and space. What I love about this type of music is that it provokes all sorts of interesting questions about chamber music in the present day. Pieces like this blur the lines between live and recorded performance, and possibly force us to come up with new definitions of chamber music altogether. I can’t wait to hear how all the elements of this piece, both digital and analog, come together in this accessible yet thoroughly modern work.

With all due respect to Reich, I can’t think of another piece that encapsulates “Electric Counterpoint” better than Ludwig van Beethoven’s masterful Grosse Fuge op. 133 for string quartet. Despite being 199 years old, this piece still has shock value! I remember so clearly the first time I heard this incredible piece as a teenager-in not unprecedented teenager fashion, I was pretty sure I had “been there, heard that” when it came to Beethoven’s music. My jaw hit the floor when I first listened to this incredibly energetic piece that still sounds avant-garde to modern ears. The music’s freshness has no expiration date, despite employing the compositional technique of fugue, perhaps the most academic of all contrapuntal processes. With any luck, concert attendees will have their own powerful moment with Beethoven’s music during this performance, just like I did when I was a young musician.