Recital at Italian Academy brings New Music to new ears

“The first question I ask myself when something doesn’t seem to be beautiful is why do I think it’s not beautiful. And very shortly you discover that there is no reason,” contemporary music composer John Cage once said. This was exactly what I found myself thinking at Emanuele Torquati’s recital at the Italian Academy Wednesday night.

Italian pianist Torquati’s recital was the first of three free Wednesday evening concerts hosted by Columbia’s Italian Academy. The concert series will feature eminent musicians Miranda Cuckson and Alex Lipowski performing a wide-ranging selection of contemporary classical music.

To those unfamiliar with New Music, the first few minutes of Torquati’s recital could have been an out-of-body experience. The dissonance and the instability of sound in his first few chords might shock an audience more used to the classical worlds of Mozart and Beethoven.

This conglomeration of sounds builds up tension, leaving the audience out of breath. But as suddenly as they start, the sounds disappear. Silence. A refreshing moment of respite before it starts all over again.

That’s the whole point of experimental music: it never goes where you expect. The music swings between extremes. One moment it’s piercingly loud, the next moment it’s softer than a whisper. This unpredictability was irritating, even frustrating, at first. But half an hour into the concert, my ears started to pick up subtleties: an extra note here, a nice sounding combination of notes there, an effective insertion of silence. These little touches made all the difference.

The job of the New Music performer is to accentuate these subtleties. Torquati did a marvelous job exaggerating the musical surprises. Every time he finished with a piece of sheet music, he threw it on the ground. By the end of the performance, pages of discarded sheet music were strewn across the stage.

Leaving the concert, I overheard someone say, “I find this stuff to be really interesting, but not the kind I could enjoy.” And I thought, at least she gave it a shot.

If I took one thing away from last night’s performance, it is this: you really can’t know what it’s like until you give New Music a chance.