Throughout the years, the most interesting contemporary music in New York could be heard in the dance theater. In the ‘40s, Martha Graham worked with the music of Hindemith and Copland; in the ‘50s and ‘60s, Merce Cunningham developed a rich collaboration with John Cage. Those of us who started attending dance performances in New York during the ‘70s and ‘80s, during the so-called “dance boom,” saw Laura Dean working with Steve Reich, and Lucinda Childs with John Adams--and we often wondered then why the music we were hearing in the dance theater seemed so much more listenable than the stuff we were getting at most of the new-music concerts in halls around the city. The latter often seemed to offer drier, more academic fare—music we understood and appreciated, but didn’t necessarily want to hear again.

Thankfully, the new music scene in New York now offers, along with the usual academic twaddle, more truly listenable stuff—thanks to the ongoing efforts of the Bang On A Can folks, the new music series of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, and several other series and organizations.  And thankfully, too, the dance theater continues to thrive, newmusicwise. To celebrate his 25th anniversary season at New York's Joyce Theater last week, choreographer Stephen Petronio presented a new work, I Drink the Air Before Me, set to an original score by Nico Muhly, the buzzworthy, not-yet-thirty-year-old composer who wrote the score for the movie The Reader, has collaborated with the likes of Bjork, and created a cantata based on Strunk & White’s classic, The Elements of Style, that the New York Times praised as “finely wrought.”

Muhly’s score for I Drink the Air Before Me sounds as though it, like Petronio’s dance, was inspired by Shakespeare’s Tempest. According to the program notes, the dance "focuses on storms, both atmospheric and emotional.” The hour-long score ranges absorbingly between frothing and raging, and shimmering and scintillating, via the efforts of six musicians and the scores of singers who comprise the Young People’s Chorus of New York City, all right there onstage with the Petronio company’s twelve dancers.

It was a marvelous show. "Groups of bodies swell and dissipate like squalls," wrote Gia Koulas in the Times. "The score... evokes turbulent undercurrents in which the frantic sounds of flute and strings are woven with the more tumultuous notes of a trombone and piano. Without being literal, the music and choreography create a sonic, ephemeral wave." Happily, both dance and score inspire the hope of subsequent viewings/hearings. According to the Petronio Company’s website, I Drink the Air Before Me will tour throughout the US and abroad over the next two years.

Florestan