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Rating: This music, full of right and acute angles, vibrant colors filled in by saxophones, and sudden changes of direction signaled by cymbal crashes, would have delighted Pythagoras. It is a joyful noise rising from the stage of the Aula Magna at the University of Rome, celebrating the spring equinox, the beginning of a new season on this planet that will not see many more. Ah, the Earth. And if the universal law of cause and effect also applied to Earth? What if the planet were, let’s say, signaling that its patience was running thin?
Listen: let's pretend we don't understand and let's celebrate the arrival of spring, okay? Nature is reborn: who better than Martland to energize us? Let's invite Martland and his group of about ten disciplined performers, that handful of men with a lion's heart capable of venturing, piece by piece, into unexplored musical territories. Pop music it is not, never mind that a piece is based on a popular English melody from the 18th century. Not even avant-garde music: everything is highly structured, and if any research is being done, it only concerns the sound combinations. Classical music? Yes, there's a piano, a violin, there are wind instruments, but there is also a bass and an electric guitar, a drum set and a marimba. The latter is even granted a solo, indeed, two. It is a hybrid, the music of Martland, male in gender.
Organized, incisive, structured, complex, punctuated by staccatos, by continuous bursts of self-assertion. And, as with all males, beyond the bravado (Martland conducts with martial arm movements and unconscious, irrepressible little jumps), the vulnerable side is always exposed: the winds weave a vivid tapestry of requests, express pressing demands, give the order to be listened to, recognized, considered.
Martland has worked for theater, cinema, and ballet, but the style and pulse of his music have not bowed to the idiosyncrasies of any form of show.
This music is a hybrid, of so many musical forms we know that, all together, have decided to obey only the imperative of rhythm, in remarkable harmony. Even the pauses are integrated into this new set theory. Here, let’s pretend this circle is Steve Reich and this other one Joy Division. The area where they overlap is Steve Martland. Or... let's take Philip Glass and inflict on him the wind section of a soul record: the result is Steve Martland. And also... imagine the soundtrack of a cartoon where the cat takes care of the canary, the dog takes care of the cat, the owner takes care of the dog and a flower pot from the top floor takes care of the owner, all simultaneously.
The Steve Martland Band is the most united military band in the world, advancing while, struck by its intellectual bolts, the enemy ships of musical tastes, judgments, prejudices, classifications, and established ideas sink one by one. And not just mine: witness the long applause from the audience, animated by the energy and contagious conviction of this band of musical terrorists.
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