Miller Theatre listens to Lou Reed’s experimental soundtrack

Ever since Lou Reed released his four-part experimental guitar feedback noise music album “Metal Machine Music” in 1975, the typical reaction has been one of confusion and revulsion.

Musician and composer Ulrich Krieger had an atypical reaction. “When I heard the piece for the first time, I thought it sounded incredibly orchestral,” he said. And so he embarked on a mission thought by many to be nearly impossible: transcribing Reed’s piece for performance by a classical music ensemble.

Krieger’s transcription was performed by the Fireworks Ensemble at Miller Theatre on Friday, Feb. 5 to an audience that included both Reed himself and Viggo Mortensen. A sign outside the door warned audiences of the 120-plus decibel performance, a volume typically unheard of at Miller Theatre.

“It’s fantastic,” Reed said of the transcription. “The thing is, you need a really good sound system.”

And indeed, the piece did not disappoint. True to the warning at the door, the Fireworks Ensemble hit the audience with an unfaltering wall of jarring sound except for four abrupt and perfectly timed stops marking the different sections. The sheer volume forced listeners to focus on the subtle texture beneath the piece: a bass line so deep it literally moved the audience, a briefly repeated ascending riff, and a targeted unhinging of the rhythm propelling the sound machine toward the end of the third section.

From the transcription emerged richness and humanness that departed from the original “Metal Machine Music.” The pitch and the timing remained the same, but the orchestral version brought a certain amount of contour to each musical movement that the experimental recording was unable to capture.

The audience sat captivated as it was barraged by the sound until the end when Krieger enthusiastically, and Reed reluctantly, came on stage and accepted applause. If not graceful, the transition from Reed’s industrial precursor to wind and string instruments was certainly powerful.

The piece commanded the audience’s attention. However, some hard-core Reed fans doubted the approach. “I kind of wish they did a few things differently, paid more attention to the pitch content,” music major Daniel Malinsky, CC ’11, said after the performance.

Though Krieger originally conceived of transcribing the piece for a classical ensemble in the late ’70s, it remained a floating idea until he met zeitkratzer—a 10-person chamber group open to playing everything from contemporary classical music to rock—in the early ’90s. “After that I thought, wow, this group could actually play ‘Metal Machine Music,’” Krieger said. He began working on a script, using a modernist composition system called space-time notation rather than a traditional score. “I tried to be as precise as possible ... the original is incredibly dense that of course you never can be exact,” he said.

Krieger’s transcription may give Reed’s classic a second life. Long thought of as either a parody or Reed’s “fuck you” to RCA Records’s binding contract due to its radical departure from his previous work, “Metal Machine Music” has made an appearance on Q Magazine’s “Ten Terrible Records by Great Artists” and was ranked number two in “The Worst Rock ’n’ Roll Records of All Time” by Jimmy Guterman and Owen O’Donnell.

Krieger suggested that the piece may be misunderstood. “For him [Lou Reed], I think it was combining the freedom and density with a rock aesthetic. The way he talks about the piece and the way he knows the piece, he was really disappointed by the poor reaction of the audience. If you look at his work, it took him decades until he recorded something like this again,” he said.

“Who knows? Everything, synergy,” Reed said of the inspiration behind “Metal Machine Music.”

Krieger’s interpretation of the album has been performed five times, including Friday night at Miller Theatre, with mixed reviews. “The more traditional contemporary classical press didn’t like it, or outright hated it. I think because it’s too loud and too noisy,” Krieger said. “[In a typical classical piece,] every little note the composer can tell you philosophically why he used it. This piece is not like that—it doesn’t have an architecture where everything relates to everything else.”

Krieger has found a few fans, though. “Young audiences reacted very well to it,” he said.

Despite bad critical reception, the synergy that inspired Reed’s original album may also contribute to its lasting power. For Krieger, the piece represents a bridge between classical and rock worlds. “It has the density and the sonic refinement of classical works and the sound and the approach of rock music,” he said.

Tags: Arts & Entertainment, Devin Briski