Hot Air at the Conservatory: the Conservatory hosted on Sunday its second Hot Air festival, dedicated to the music of the last 50 years. The whole thing lasted from 2pm to 10pm, and had multiple concurrent performances, so we did not catch it all. Also: Superbowl, for which a live streaming was projected on a big screen in a basement room. The conservatory must have forgotten to pay its cable bill, the game was broadcast from bootlegged internet streams that kept being terminated for copyright violations. That is, until they found a stable and oddly appropriate German broadcast. But what glimpses we got of the performances in between quarters and during time-outs was darn impressive.

If there was a main point for the festival, it's to illustrate the wonderful vitality of composing since 1961: no two pieces were alike, each one pushing boundaries into new directions of inventiveness and creativity. We heard new structures for music, new textures, new sounds, new ensembles, there is much excitement to go around. For instance Louis Andriessen's Worker's Union, a piece for pretty much any loud instrument (here two out-of-tune violins, two pianos, a cello, two trombones, an electric bass, an accordion and we apologize for those we forget), where the scores does not spell out all the notes, but only the rhythm and the relative position to play on the staff: going up or down from the previous note. It's supposed to be cacophonous, but surprising harmonies emerged. Steve Reich's Six Pianos puts together six clavinovas (Reich used six grand pianos but he created the piece in a piano sales room). One, the beat keeper, plays the same bar, oh, about a thousand times. Literally. The others insert their own motives, keeping each motive going for six to ten repeats, before moving on to the next one. Since each motive differs by some epsilon from the previous one, the piece evolves slowly, in a hypnotic and haunting manner. We could not stay for Adams' Dharma at Big Sur, that concluded the evening.