Sufjan Stevens's Hoops and Gears
"Rock and roll is dead," art-folk revivalist Sufjan Stevens declared to New York magazine recently, adding for good measure: "There are great rock bands today, but you're watching the History Channel when you go to these clubs. They're just reenacting an old sentiment." This weekend at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), Stevens offered some bracing new sentiments in "The BQE," a new work commissioned as part of BAM's annual Next Wave festival.
Raised in Michigan and living in Brooklyn, Stevens is known best for his semi-serious long-term goal to memorialize each of the fifty states on an album, with richly detailed tributes to Michigan and Illinois already released. Following Thursday evening's performance, Stevens described his latest geographically specific work as a "bizarre and beautiful ode to one of the world's ugliest expressways" (the BQE, or Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, is 11 and a half miles of bad roadway connecting two boroughs). Stevens functioned as both director and composer for the work, which combined a cinematic triptych projected above a 36-piece ensemble with a quintet of both off- and on-screen hula hoopers, whose spinning tubes offered a childlike visual parallel to the barreling vehicles onscreen. "The BQE" began with the sounds of electronic shrieks and ended with a triumphant explosion of fireworks over Coney Island. Inbetween, the work's several sections explored arrangements that evoked classical music, musical theater, and even rock music. You could hear echoes of "Over the Rainbow" early on and, later, the small-town hurly-burly of Charles Ives's marching bands. Among his many talents, Sufjan Stevens makes you feel at least a little proud to be an American.
For the even more entertaining second half of the evening, Stevens performed some of his more popular earlier works. Songs such as the yearning "Seven Swans," "Oh Detroit, Lift Up Your Weary Head," "Chicago," and the shockingly sensitive "John Wayne Gacy, Jr." sounded majestic in their orchestral arrangements. Anyone not yet convinced that Sufjan Stevens was on to something that justified his anti-rockist sentiments would have had a hard time remaining a nonbeliever.