MUSIC
SATURDAY - SUNDAY, JUNE 2 & 3
8:00 PM SATURDAY
4:00 PM SUNDAY

Cantata Profana:  Voi(Rex)
National Sawdust
80 North 6th Street, Williamsburg, Brooklyn

$29; $34 door
https://nationalsawdust.org/event/cantata-profana-2/
https://nationalsawdust.org/event/cantata-profana/

The instrumental and vocal chamber company Cantata Profana can almost always be counted on to come up with interesting and appealing programs, and this is no exception.  The program is named for a vocal and instrumental piece by the Spectralist Philippe Leroux.  Let's talk for a minute about Spectralism,* a style of composition that arose in France in the '70s and '80s.  It focuses almost solely on timbre (the way notes sound), to the exclusion of such usual musical concerns as harmony and rhythm -- and uses computer analyses of such as a basis of composition, isolating timbre from the other elements and permitting its independent manipulation.  But the main thing, for this listener, isn't the science or the theory, but how good the music sounds.  Moreover, for all its supposedly objective bases in computer analyses of sonic phenomena, this pungent plangent music sounds characteristically French -- suggesting that in music, at least, culture wins out.  For Leroux's Voi(Rex), the ensemble will be joined by guest vocalist Lucy Dhegrae, one of the essential musicians in New York right now.  But that's not all!  The program also contains pieces by a bunch of genre-bending composers you like to hear, but aren't performed that much in New York:  the well-known but too infrequently played (for this fan, at least) Mauricio Kagel (who often managed even to befunny), Jukka Tiensuu (who manages to be funny even though he's from Finland), and Simon Steen-Andersen, of whom it can honestly be said you can never know what to expect (so you can't really tell if he means to be funny or not).  And if that's not enough, some Guillaume de Machaut from 14th Century France, to send you out bathed in sublimity.

MAKE A NIGHT OF IT:  OK, Philippe Leroux lives in Montreal, and the delightful Chez Ma Tante is named after a Montreal eatery, and some people mistakenly think its food is Quebecois (really it isn't).  So, after this show, Chez Ma Tante it is.