Above: artist Sophie (Knox) Peters
~ Author: Lili Tobias
Saturday June 8th, 2024 - I walked into the Holy Trinity Lutheran Church for Noise Catalogue’s June 8th concert and was met with an impressive banquet of instruments. At the front of the church lay a wide selection of percussion instruments, various bows and mallets, a piano, a violin hooked up to something electronic, a few glass bottles, and an array of broken flower pot shards. I was instantly looking forward to the music I was about to hear!
The concert began with a “rolling start” as the sound of an organ began from overhead, soon bringing the gathering audience to a hush. This was Reiko Füting’s 2023 piece, Three Meditations on Music from Luigi Rossi’s Collection. Featuring quiet pedal tones, airy pitch bends, and brief wisps of classical-style music, this piece felt extraordinarily vast (and kind of reminded me of whale sounds emanating from the depths of the ocean).
Then, with hardly a break in between, the next piece, Molly Herron’s Compare the way we move (2023), began. This was the flowerpot piece! Percussionist Dániel Matei created all the sounds by wobbling or scraping the shards of flower pot (plus a metal ruler and a doorstop). As I listened, I felt myself literally “comparing the way they moved” in an almost scientific manner: The smaller shards wobbled at a faster frequency, they emitted a higher pitch, and the sound had a shorter decay. In contrast, the larger shards wobbled at a slower frequency, they emitted a lower pitch, and the sound had a much longer decay. It was fascinating to observe this novel way of creating sound!
The next piece, In our own house, by Alvin Singleton, was the only one that had been written over two years ago. Noise Catalogue adapted it for their own ensemble for this concert, swapping the original saxophone and trumpet for violin and flute. This was the most energetic music of the night so far—the piano and percussion traded off loud and acute strikes, which were then softened by the smoother sounds of violin and flute, but the piece maintained a bright and engaging tone throughout.
Next was the world premiere of A chopped tree still splinters, for two violins, composed and performed by Madeline Hocking and Knox Peters. The piece began with a reading of a text by Peters, which was a striking commentary on society’s treatment of women. Peters then took over the amplified violin and started playing alongside Hocking, who had switched to another violin. This piece combined acoustic and amplified violin sounds as well as standard and extended violin techniques in a lively and slightly chaotic texture.
A “ping!” from up in the organ loft began the next piece on the program, Madeline Hocking’s I look forward to hearing from you (2023). As I turned my head to see who had made the sound, I spotted not only the percussionist up by the organ, but a double bassist in the aisle to my right, and a flutist back near the door. Hocking had composed this piece specifically for performance at the Holy Trinity Lutheran Church, and the set-up certainly utilized the entire space. The music began with delicate, ethereal sounds, occasionally blooming into something more substantial with the addition of the bass and piano’s low registers. But with a shocking hit of the drums, the music transformed into a frenzy of sound from all directions! This change stirred everything up as the performers began to intermingle and change spots. The piece ended with a sort of “call and response” between the percussionist in the organ loft and the two up in the front of the church, with powerful drum rolls oscillating in volume and panning between the two locations.
The last piece before intermission was Dániel Matei’s There are two ways to escape suffering it… the second is risky, and demands constant vigilance and apprehension (2023), for four percussionists. Each performer had a huge variety of potential sounds right at their fingertips, but I really liked how all four of them typically played similar instruments at the same time. This amplified the differences between different sections of the piece as the sounds morphed as one. My personal favorite sound was the surprisingly resonant clink of a mallet on a green wine bottle!
Above, from artist Sophie (Knox) Peters
The final two pieces on the program were both large feats of coordination and required the entire 15-minute intermission to set up for. First was Bahar Royaee’s 2023 piece, Zakhme, which is Royaee’s “personal response to the recent Iranian movement known as ‘Woman, Life, Freedom.’” Like Hocking’s piece from earlier, this one also featured the musicians stationed in multiple places around the church. The music was paired with a projection of original paintings by Knox Peters, which slowly floated upwards (or was the audience sinking downwards?) as the music progressed.
To end the concert, Noise Catalogue premiered Employee Training (2024), by Thomas Palmer. Combining cassette tape recordings and instrumental music with visual projections, Palmer created a surreal portrayal of American corporate culture. The two percussionists and violinist cycled between upbeat muzak-like motifs and more dissonant, sometimes almost eerie, sounds—a patchwork that I felt really exemplified workweek fatigue and anxiety.
And the visuals, created by Knox Peters, added a whole other dimension to this piece! The images and video clips that were projected on the screen included panning shots of a beautiful river, a spreadsheet with the to do item “girl boss,” recursive computer windows, and a wall of smiley face emojis. These clips cycled at different rates—sometimes with less than a second per shot—perfectly matching the energy of the music at the given moment. The constant and ceaseless looping of both the visual and the musical elements really felt to me like the cycle of office life—day after day, week after week, year after year, until you can no longer work anymore.
I got a chance to chat with Palmer after the concert, and he told me that while he and Peters collaborated closely on the connection between music and visuals for the first draft of this piece, they worked on the current version separately. In fact, last night’s performance was the very first time everything had fully come together! It was a huge success though, and the effect was something almost uncanny but also instantly relatable to anyone who has been exposed to the culture of an American workplace. Employee Training was a stunning end to a wonderful and exceptionally creative night of music!
~ Lili Tobias