MIT prof's music takes flight - literally

By T.J. Medrek, The Boston Herald, Friday, May 21, 2004

It's a bird! It's a plane! It's - well, Evan Ziporyn.

The versatile clarinetist-composer and MIT music professor is probably best known locally as a world music guy, the founder of MIT's Gamelan Galak Tika. But on the international circuit, he's famous as a prominent member of the New York-based Bang on a Can group of avant-garde composer-performers, with whom he regularly tours and records.

Those tours have given Ziporyn more than a few chances to sit back in an airplane seat and absorb - and be inspired by - the sometimes soothing, sometimes jarring sounds of flight. Those sounds are the basis for his latest work, "War Chant," which the Boston Modern Orchestra Project premieres tonight at Jordan Hall.

"I started to notice there was this whole symphony of noise that you'd get on an airplane, particularly on ascent and descent, this really interesting combination of various engines going on and off," the 44-year-old Somervillian said.

"Those sounds are also a kind of metaphor for the kind of things you don't want to think about when you're on an airplane. The whole system is set up to calm you down and make you feel like you're in some kind of antiseptic environment and not think of the fact that you're hurtling through the atmosphere in this piece of machinery - or all the other things that go with air travel now. It struck me as a potent metaphor of what living in America is like these days."

Ziporyn started by recording the sounds of one flight on the sly, from takeoff through departure. "I don't think you're actually allowed to do it, but I just decided that a mini-disc player wasn't going to disrupt their navigation," he said.

After transferring the recording to his computer - he's not an MIT guy for nothing - Ziporyn used software to analyze the engine and cabin sounds. "But I mainly used my ear, and at a certain point I started listening in terms of when a certain engine kicks in, what is the sound, the pitch of that engine. I did that until I began writing the music.

"I wanted the shape of the piece to be really like a short airplane ride, starting with the ascent, ending with the descent. Early sketches were just experimenting with literally trying to re-create that in orchestral form. At a certain point those sketches took on their own integrity as music and I put the tape aside. An internal logic of materials just kind of took over and" - he paused a moment, realizing the inevitable pun he was about to make - "I winged it."

Ziporyn's head hasn't just been in the clouds these days, and his versatility - as usual - is showing. The Gamelan Galak Tika just premiered yet another of his pieces, written especially for them. His Balinese-tinged original music for American Repertory Theatre's new production of "Oedipus Rex," running through June 12, debuted just this week at the Loeb Drama Center in Cambridge. And on June 3, Ziporyn will perform Artie Shaw's Clarinet Concerto with Keith Lockhart and the Boston Pops for - appropriately - MIT Night at the Pops.

"In my 20s I supported myself playing a lot of jazz," Ziporyn said. "I turned away away from it because I felt like it was something you had to devote all your attention to. But I still have that phrasing in me. So when this came up, it seemed like it would be a fun way to pay homage to one of my heroes."

And keep him grounded, perhaps?

ZIPORYN ON CD: Looking to explore some of the many moods of Evan Ziporyn? Here are three CDs, all on the innovative Cantaloupe Music label, that'll get you started.

"this is not a clarinet" - Well, OK, it really is a clarinet, and Ziporyn plays it in this disc of his own music and that of Michael Tenzer and David Lang.

"Shadow Bang" - Ziporyn's collaboration with Balinese shadow-puppeteer I Wayan Wija is a multicultural musical feast.

"So Percussion" - The group So Percussion performs Ziporyn's evocative "Melody Competition" and the music of David Lang.