11th Annual Great Harlem Community Garden Tour
Rite of Summer Music Festival
My first thought upon waking up Saturday morning was that another peak rose season had come and gone without me visiting the Harlem Rose Garden. I even have a post card on display at work and I still forgot! My next thought was that if it was the last Saturday in August, that probably meant that the Harlem Community Garden Tour was happening. A quick look online proved me right. So I got my rear in gear, ran a few errands and made it up to 122nd Street, which was the kickoff point for the tour. One of the cool things about this tour is that they feed you. I had my annual taste of gumbo, along with a little bit of breakfast casserole and half a bagel. (They feed you at the end of the tour, too, but I wasn’t there for that part—more about that later.)
This was the eleventh iteration of the tour, but I’ve only been going for three or four years. Some of the gardens were repeats of former tours, while some were new or so vastly different from last year that they seemed new. There were also more people attending this year—they had two school buses for those who didn’t want to walk, as opposed to only one last year. I was one of the walkers, and there was also a small contingent of cyclists. A note on community gardens in NYC—they are undeveloped land that groups of citizens take over, clean up, and put to use as gardens. Some are just for fun while others are sometimes set up with individual plots where people grow flowers and/or veggies. It’s always a treat for me to see people’s creativity on view.
So, after I realized that it was garden tour day, I had to make up my mind when to ditch the tour, since the third concert in the Rite of Summer series was that afternoon. Rite of Summer usually does two performances, one at 1:00pm and a repeat at 3:00pm. And I have always opted for the early performance in the past, but made an exception because of the garden tour. After skedaddling down to the Governors Island ferry terminal, I took the two o’clock ferry, thinking that I had plenty of time to make the three o’clock performance. Oopsie! Because of the nature of the piece being performed, there was only one concert that afternoon, and it began at two o’clock. Phooey. (And I wasn’t the only one caught off guard, but it was totally my fault for not checking their website.)
The piece I ended up hearing most of was John Luther Adams’s Inuksuit, featuring 70+ percussionists, led by music director Amy Garapic. This was one strange piece of music. The full complement of performers gather together and then begin collective controlled breathing. As individuals separate from the group, they begin making percussive sounds. Some had rattles (maracas, shells, etc.) while others had cones of paper, sort of like megaphones, that they breathed sounds through. The most interesting sound maker that I saw was a guy rubbing the tops of two terra cotta flowerpots together. One part I found a little strange (and off-putting) was that as the musicians broke away from the group, they walked in a very specific controlled way, gazing straight ahead. Not quite Stepford wife–like, but close. Oh, there were also large seashells to blow through and those skinny tubes you can whirl around to make various pitches.
So the deal was that we, the audience, were encouraged to also leave the gathering place and make our way to the pre-set percussion areas set up around the Hills section of the island. I found the whole thing rather silly. At one point, I saw an unattended music stand blow over. An audience member set it back up. I said, “Maybe that’s part of the performance.” He chuckled. Here’s the thing—the piece will never be performed the same way twice, since it was designed to be performed by nine to ninety-nine players. Well, this one was certainly going to be different, because at one point I saw a couple of kids playing some of the as-yet-unattended drums. So they actually contributed to the overall performance.
The piece eventually went from soft to loud to soft. That’s about it, except that I should probably mention that the soft/loud/soft structure was stretched out over seventy minutes! I stayed to the bitter end (I think) as the playing dwindled down to a few triangles and wind chimes. Of course, there was no way to acknowledge the players because at the end of the piece they were still dispersed all around the Hills area. I viewed the performance as successful, in that they brought it off, and unsuccessful, in that it had no real positive impact on me. This is one I will never, ever, ever seek out again. My horizons were broadened, but that’s about it. I almost wish that I’d stayed with the garden tour and attended the cookout at the end of it. Oh, well, there’s always the twelfth iteration next year. And maybe I’ll even remember to have gone to the Harlem Rose Garden during peak rose blossom time next year, as well.
ConcertMeister
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