ICE Celebrates Davidovsky’s Birthday with Past Masterworks and a World premiere
ICE Celebrates Davidovsky’s Birthday with Past Masterworks and a World premiere
Americas Society's Music of the Americas concert celebrating Mario Davidovsky's works with a performance by the International Contemporary Ensemble was the perfect balance between acoustic and electric sounds.
The concert by the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) at the Americas Society could not be timed exactly for Mario Davidovksy’s 81st birthday, which fell on March 4. Yet Friday night’s event was a celebration of the composer’s work nonetheless, exclusively featuring the composer’s work. And as a gift to the standing room crown, there was a world premiere.
Davidovksy’s style recalls the title of Kandinsky’s treatise Point and Line to Plane. Not that his music sounds how Kandinsky’s paintings look, but that he emphasizes the horizontal and vertical arrangement of notes through time.
As redundant and tautological as that may seem, it is an important description and distinction. Davidovsky’s roots are in the second generation of atonal composers, like Milton Babbitt—with whom Davidovsky studied—with concerns different than trying to preserve functional harmony. His music carves up space and time with systematized logic.
Yet there’s nothing dry or cold about it—nor is the music strictly atonal, and one hears the classical and romantic soil in which his music grows. Davidovsky has a lyrical sense and an ear for the right moment. He also works with electronic music, and that genre, which is about time and timbre, has enhanced his music....
