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April 19, 2007 Music Review | Ne(x)tworks Continuing a Celebration of a Composer (and Godfather) By STEVE SMITH

Erin Baiano for The New York Times Kenji Bunch, left, and Yves Dharamraj of the ensemble Ne(x)tworks.

The innovative American composer Earle Brown, who died in 2002, would have celebrated his 80th birthday last year. The new-music ensemble Ne(x)tworks observed the occasion by recording a number of his chamber works for Mode Records, a New York label widely admired for its devotion to modern music. The recording was released on Tuesday, and the group celebrated with a retrospective of Mr. Brown’s music at the Chelsea Art Museum. Ne(x)tworks, whose members also compose and improvise, has especially close links to Mr. Brown. The ensemble’s director, the violinist Cornelius Dufallo, is the son of the conductor Richard Dufallo, a champion of new music who appointed Mr. Brown his son’s godfather. And one of the earliest public appearances by the members of Ne(x)tworks was a 2002 performance of Mr. Brown’s music in the singer Joan La Barbara’s Carnegie Hall series When Morty Met John. Those connections have made Ne(x)tworks a compelling advocate for Mr. Brown’s music. “Music for Violin, Cello and Piano,” a serialist miniature from 1952, was played twice on Tuesday by Mr. Dufallo, the cellist Yves Dharamraj and the pianist Stephen Gosling. In sharp contrast to that work’s chiseled exactitude, the "String Quartet" (1965) represented the composer’s later style of open-score notation, in which a formal structure offered leeway for improvisational flexibility. Opening the work at a whisper, Mr. Dufallo, Mr. Dharamraj, the violinist Ariana Kim and the violist Kenji Bunch proceeded through passages of chirps and pops, robust solo lines, assertive chords and agitated scribbles. The rest of the program was devoted to “Folio and Four Systems,” a collection of inventive graphic scores created between 1952 and 1954. Ms. La Barbara offered whoops, ululations and gargles in a lively account of “December 1952,” the score of which resembles a Mondrian painting. The trombonist Chris McIntyre employed growling multiphonics and recorded urban noise in “November 1952,” and Mr. Gosling applied fingers, a percussion mallet and a drum brush to piano strings in “1953.” In a mesmerizing rendition of “Four Systems,” the harpist Shelley Burgon collaborated with Miguel Frasconi, who rubbed sonorous goblets and produced chiming tones on shards of glass. The concert ended with a reprise of “December 1952” featuring the entire ensemble. That the second version was similar in detail and duration to Ms. La Barbara’s earlier solo account, despite the volition of eight additional performers, neatly illustrated Mr. Brown’s uncanny knack for focusing the energies of freewheeling performers. [from NY Times]