The New York Times: Man, Can You Hear That Crazy Forest Green?

By CORINNA da FONSECA-WOLLHEIM JUNE 14, 2016

Two years ago, an English high-tech company drew a flurry of media attention when it invented Vantablack, the “blackest black” ever created, made of a light-guzzling material so dark it looked like a void. New colors are mixed all the time, of course, though they rarely get the sort of fanfare that greeted the French artist Yves Klein’s deep shade of ultramarine, IKB, in 1960, or the accidental invention of mauve by the Victorian chemist William Perkin.

In music, too, composers and players are continually working to come up with new tone colors. In two concerts last week at Roulette in Brooklyn, the Prism Quartet, a saxophone ensemble, produced an intriguing palette of sounds that included tone colors never heard before.

The concerts, presented under the title “Color Theory,” were fashioned as a sort of laboratory in which to explore the notion of color in music. The program included three commissioned works by different composers illustrating the complex, and subjective, nature of color in music.

For each concert, Prism teamed up with one other group: on Tuesday, So Percussion, and on Sunday, Partch, a Los Angeles-based ensemble that performs on the instruments invented by the composer Harry Partch to produce a wider palette of microtonally spaced pitches. Among those instruments are outlandish cloud-chamber bowls that look like hanging glass sculptures. Those bowls and a baritone saxophone, for example, created a blend, never tried before, that resulted in a delicate sandy-edged golden hum.

Introducing his “Skiagrafies (Shadow Etchings)” from the stage, the composer Stratis Minakakis said he had been inspired by Beethoven’s exploration of tiny gradations at the ultraquiet end of the volume spectrum at the end of his career. During that time, Beethoven is known to have read Goethe’s treatise on color theory, which includes detailed observations of colored shadows.

The shadow world of “Skiagrafies” proved to be an alluring haze, grown out of that opening whisper-blend of a soft baritone saxophone note; it splintered into multiphonics that seemed to be enveloped, as in a translucent bubble, in the sustained warmth of a cloud-chamber bowl that was bowed across the rim with a double bass bow. This chord set the color scheme for the ensuing music with its soft, mournful saxophone ululations.

According to the concert’s organizers, this was the first time the Partch instruments had been combined with a quartet of saxophones. After Sunday’s performances, the symbiosis seemed promising.

The composer Ken Ueno said he had decided to pay homage to Partch in his own response to the color commission by further adapting his instruments. For his “Future Lilacs,” he explained from the stage, he introduced “hacked” instruments of his own invention to the ensemble. One was a juiced-up electric version of Partch’s guitar, tuned to G on all strings, and a tenor sax turned into a “hookah sax” through the insertion of a seven-foot rubber tube between the instrument’s neck and body.

The rubbery sputter that this exotic-looking instrument now emitted added to the dynamic contrast between organic and inorganic sounds in “Future Lilacs.” The work opens with a dynamic rock-charged section in which the electric guitar worries away at a single note with microtonally altered impulses, then settles into a languid postlude that again makes beautiful use of the ethereal cloud-chamber bowls.

Meanwhile, on Tuesday, Prism and So Percussion presented Steven Mackey’s “Blue Notes and Other Clashes.” In introductory remarks from the stage, Mr. Mackey, an electric guitarist with a strong background in blues and rock, said he had been inspired by the “blue note” in jazz, “the right wrong note that hurts so good.”

In eight short movements, Mr. Mackey brewed up heady concoctions, with needling dissonances sometimes subtly, sometimes sharply roughing up the musical textures. “Deep Hymn” grew out of the hum of a prayer bowl with quiet, sustained saxophone chords warmed by metallic percussion sounds. The marimba and steel drums injected a tropical note into “Rustic Ballad”; “Off Waltz” combined a sultry Scheherazade-like riff with a deep groove.

But Mr. Mackey’s evocative titles, combining a word from the visual arts with one from music, showed how subjective the perception of tone color remains. One movement dominated by a blend of saxophones with vibraphone and steel drums seemed to me a beautiful study in growing density and brilliance, its golden shimmer brightening with the addition of high notes in the soprano saxophone. The title of this gleaming gem? “Pale Lament.”

A version of this review appears in print on June 15, 2016, on page C7 of the New York edition with the headline: Can You Hear That Crazy Forest Green, Man?