Peerless Periodicity

The titular phenomena of "In Waves," a new work by my brother-in-law Tyler Higgins that premiered at the American Composers Forum's Sonic Circuits Festival on Tuesday, are not waves of the ocean but rather of sound: waves that stir our heart but can only be observed with instruments. With a poly-rhythmicon and the precise layering possible with modern music-manipulation software, observing waves with instruments is exactly what Higgins does.

True, the drones that dominate "In Waves," swell and contract with a grave deliberateness, and enough of them are sounding at any given time that the texture always feels full. But the drones all come from the highest register of the violin, far from the murky depts of your typical classical evocation of bodies of water, and the pulse of their appearance and disappearance recalls sines more than seas.

Notes played as high as these must be played soft as a whisper to achieve any tonal beauty at all on the unamplified violin, but Higgins uses technology to expand the tone until you're submerged into the whisper, to the point where any increase in the volume of the drones resounds throughout your body. David Higgins' accompanying video images capture the feeling another way: it's like watching a dizzyingly huge close-up of just a few leaves shimmering in sunlight and swaying in a breeze. The sensation estranges and enraptures at once.

That's not to say "In Waves" just finds a few notes and milks them for all they're worth. Consonance and dissonance, concepts estranged from so much modern music, actually mean something here; the fine astringency of close intervals sometimes becomes overwhelming, but that only makes the eventual entrance of a descending major triad that much more inspiring. In the opening section, the drones share space with a tiny trickle of a rhythm; elsewhere, unexpected pizzicato accents break up the texture. You can follow the argument through the piece, or you can simply disappear in the novel noise and hypnotic texture. Either way, despite its origins, I have to say that "In Waves" is an immersive experience.

Preceding "In Waves" on the program were Enoch 212, who spoiled thumping hip-hop beats with third-grade protest rhymes, and Dissident Diznee, which used clips from Disney films, breakbeats and sample collages to show that it has at least passed on to graduate-level irony. Closing the evening was Evan Lipson, whose "Breaking the Glass" featured a live marimba performance of a driving, melodic work refracted through a laptop into furtive blips; a few final notes on the marimba, evoking the previous distortion, were unsettlingly real.

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