First Fridays with Robert Black - December 4, 2020

2020’s final “First Fridays with Robert Black” featured composers David Lang and Tyson Davis. The program opened with David Lang’s i feel pretty, a 9-minute, intense, relentless, in-your-face, distortion-heavy explosion. It’s a punk-hot tour-de-force. Tyson Davis’ miniature Tableau No. 5 followed with the more controlled heat of modernism’s angular rhythms, crunchy dissonances, and dark melodies. The temperature comes down even further with the swank and suave grooves of David Lang’s snow falls i, ii, iii – music which is both cool and ‘cool.’