Jessica Balik

Eighth blackbird's concert on Saturday defied elementary arithmetic. For example, the program featured two pieces, but four composers, which might seem twice as many composers as was required.

In his poem "The Soup," U.S. Poet Laureate Charles Simic concocted a mordant, macabre "soup of the world." Cockroaches, dirty feet, Stalin's moustache, Hiroshima, and bloody sausages number among the incendiary images in the poem. Can you even dare imagine musical analogs for them? The Bay Area composer Alden Jenks attempted to do precisely that.

Perhaps it's just me, but I possess a stereotypical image of a brass quintet. It is an image of gray-haired men who chiefly play Renaissance and Baroque music, with the occasional Christmas album thrown into the mix to shake things up a bit. Regardless of whether my image might ring true for others, the Meridian Arts Ensemble certainly does not fit that stereotype.

What would happen if you took the “postmodern” project to its logical conclusion and eradicated the theoretical, conceptual, and practical boundaries between large genres of music like, say, classical, jazz, popular, sound experiments, and electronic composition?

Is it possible to move in two directions simultaneously? Generally, you move either forward or backward.

Strangely enough, listening to achingly poignant music can be pleasantly addictive at times. Rather than making you disheartened, sometimes such music seems to uplift. Pieces with wide emotional contrasts can heighten the boost, as moments of blitheness offer easy respite from the solemnity.

Concerts full of 20th-century music are not always appealing to audiences. And when concerts are unappealing, they risk being unappreciated, if not avoided. Similarly, if recital spaces as modest as local churches seem unappealing to world-class performers, then such performers might shun performing in them. Such recoiling is dangerous.

Nineteenth-century composers were not generous contributors to the flute’s solo repertory. Granted, many French composers wrote morceaux de concours, or contest pieces to be performed by students during competitive examinations at the Paris Conservatory. Aside from those, though, there are surprisingly few Romantic solo pieces for flute. German composers were particularly stingy.