By Helen Cronin

As the last notes of Randall Woolf’s Motor City Requiem faded away, one couldn’t help but admire his clever, effective use of electronics with piano and string quartet. The samples from Motown songs and beats evoked the dynamics of a bustling city, and as they faded away, leaving only a mournful violin melody over a droning string background, one could see the city fading. Of course, for Mr. Woolf, the use of electronics and influences from other genres to shape the landscape of his pieces is nothing new. However, each of the four pieces members of the Brooklyn Philharmonic performed January 24th as part of the Music Off the Walls series at the Brooklyn Museum showed what diverse results can arise from similar methods. As Mr. Woolf explained in later conversation, he rarely does the same thing twice. This has led to projects like composing a ballet based on Where the Wild Things Are in 1997 and premiering a concerto for rappers and orchestra in Chicago later this year. It has also lead to Mr. Woolf’s position as composer mentor to the Brooklyn Philharmonic’s unorthodox composer fellows- hiphop DJ Evan Vytal and jazz bassist Ryan Brown.

January 24th’s offering was the first in a series curated by these three composers based around a particular gallery at the Brooklyn Museum. Mr. Woolf took Patricia Cronin’s realization of unfinished works of artist Harriet Hosmer as his inspiration to create a concert entitled “Distant Partners, Distant Portraits.” Each work on the program was a collaboration between Mr. Woolf and artists he had never met.

Motor City Requiem was composed for Woolf’s hometown of Detroit, a Motown-inspired piece that mourned the city that once was. Woolf listened to lots of Motown both to find samples and to become familiar with the style so that he could compose a piece based around it. He went back and forth between many different samples, before the right ones fell into place and were orchestrated (back to back, the samples only occupy 20 seconds!) What is interesting in this piece is that the relationship between the live musicians and the electronic sounds is constantly shifting. At the beginning of the piece it seems as if the musicians are accompanying single words (“and”, “please”, “away”), while later there is a call and answer, or the sounds are just part of the background. The quintet part changes between fast dance parts and slow ballads, all strongly in the style of Motown. Woolf, who used to play rock and jazz, considers “classical” a way to prescribe everything that is usually improvised in other genres. While he admits that something is lost in this approach, the cohesion of one person’s vision makes for strong pieces. Although he approaches every piece from a classical perspective, he aims to blur genres instead of forcing one into the box of another. The effect, in this piece, is a fusion of the best of both worlds.

The second piece on the program was Franz Schubert, for string quartet. The piece was inspired by Franz Schubert’s sonatas that successfully integrated songs into strict classical form. Feeling that melody is largely lacking from most modern music, Woolf decided to create a piece that had a minimalist texture but strong melodies. He played around with several different melodies before finding a seamless structure that combined singable melodies with a dense, minimal background. The piece was something of a departure for Woolf in that it involves no electronics. It surprised him that this is becoming one of his most frequently performed pieces though it involves no electronics, proving that it can be difficult to gauge what audiences appreciate. Woolf tries to consider the audience when he composes while staying true to his own aesthetic, though he would not write music that no one likes. Franz Schubert proved successful at achieving Woolf’s vision while also being likable and refreshing.

Played between these pieces was a performance of Debussy’s Hommage a Rameau, itself an interaction between artists, which was then remixed live by pianist Kathleen Supove, bassist Ryan Brown and DJ Evan Vytal. The performance, Woolf’s brainchild, took influences from jazz, hiphop, and modern music, mixing them together to create otherworldly and occasionally sublime reworkings. While jazz and classical music have a history of crossover, it was quite interesting to see a DJ in the mix. Woolf described himself as “rabid” about the turntable and lamented the lack of DJs in classical music. Many DJs he knows are interested in classical music, and Woolf is working on a system of notation so that DJ’s might be better incorporated into the classical music world.

The final piece on the program, Revenge! was a live film score accompaniment to the first stop-animation film created in 1912 by Ladislav Starevich, entitled The Cameraman’s Revenge. After watching the film several times, Woolf decided to compose a tragic and dramatic score, as opposed to the cartoonish Klezmer-style music other composers had used. Writing a score to an already established film as opposed to creating film for a piece was a challenge for Woolf, though the already established contours did cut down on the number of decisions that needed to be made. Unfortunately, the performance was slightly marred by technical problems, but for Woolf that is part of the struggle to integrate electronics into classical music. While electronics are easy to use with the right setup, that set up almost never exists and Woolf has struggled with everything from finding extension cords to malfunctioning click tracks. As he philosophically stated, “anything you don’t do over and over has problems.” However, the expansion of sonorities that occurs when electronics are added as well as joy of experiencing something new and unexplored make the technical difficulties worth the pain.

Mr. Woolf’s compositions have the unique quality of being both stimulating and accessible for those who shy away from modern music. Check out www.randallwoolf.com.