This is part of the keyboard of a Marimba Lumina, an electronic instrument I heard in performance last night at Merkin Hall (a venue new to me, just north of Lincoln Center). Played like a marimba, it can be programmed with all manner of found or manipulated acoustic sounds - the keyboard responding not only to the firmness of the foam covered mallets' pressure, but responding differently to different colored mallets; the keys light up too, apparently. The performance I heard mingled sounds of percussion instruments from across Africa and found snatches of melody. Quite dazzling, and much more so than the other performer Coleen, who twiddled a bunch of knobs to generate multi-layered but lugubrious music with viola da gamba, a music box, a clarinet, a guitar and two wind chimes.What was I doing at a performance of electronic music? Reconnecting with an old friend! The marimbist was Lukas Ligeti, my best friend when we were both twelve, thirty years ago, in Vienna. (I contacted him after hearing a performance of a piece by his father at Gert's Salon in Melbourne last April.) Lukas is now a composer and percussionist, based right here in New York; he's done a lot of work in Africa, a commission for the Kronos Quartet, and is currently at work on a setting of Brian Greene's Elegant Universe with Karol Armitage. I imagined I was hearing shards or sparks from some of those experiences in his playing.
30 years is hard to fathom, a quite unreasonable span of years! We were both prepubescent - sopranos! At that stage he had glasses but I didn't, my hair was straight. Vienna's streetscape was black with soot, the BeeGees and Queen were big, and the Cold War was on full tilt. I was really into neutral, high-cultural Austria, especially as celebrated in its stamps, which I bought at a place in the passage beneath the Karlsplatz on my way to a piano lesson. I remember the American International School where I spent 1977-8 but not much that went on there. There was a girl named Cecilia Medlin, I think, who had a crush on me. And a boy named Alan Fernandez traumatized me by calling me "gayboy." I was also in a play - the title character in "Curse you Jack Dalton" - and remember the difficulty of throwing a glass of water in the face of the gold-digging lothario who was seducing my sister (while I, nobly, had been secretly wed to Bertha, the maid); in rehearsal I kept missing, getting the actor's shirt wet. Was Lukas in it, too? Much to (re)discover when we get together in a few days!
