The music of Louis Andriessen

continued

7:30 with Andriessen's Arrival of Willibrord played on the Burton Tower's Baird Carillon and then moves into the Power Center for a musical double bill that opens with a performance of Andriessen's La Passione featuring the original soloists and closes with a showing of M Is for Man, Music, and Mozart, Peter Greenaway's film with a score by Andriessen. The question, of course, is "How many tickets can even a post-postmodernist three-ring musical circus hope to sell in a town that likes to spend its weeknights at home watching satellite TiVo?"

The answer, one can only hope, is "All of them." This is precisely the kind of event the prestigious University Musical Society should present and exactly the kind of event the Ann Arbor audience should celebrate. Andriessen's music is not for listeners who think music stopped with the death of Webern — it's for listeners who can embrace everything that's happened in music since the death of Webern. Some people who know and love Andriessen's music describe it by analogies, talking of Stan Kenton and Igor Stravinsky, of J. S. Bach and the Beatles, of bebop, hip-hop, and pyrotechno. Others speak of his minimalist polyrhythms, lyrical melodic fragments, predominantly consonant harmonies disrupted by explosive blocks of concentrated dissonance, and novel color combinations, including electric guitars, bass guitars, and, in one work, an ice cream bell. As impossible to imagine as it is to forget, Andriessen's music has to be heard to be believed.