Pitchfork

Photos by Kathryn Yu, words by Daphne Carr

Nostalgia for modernism + urban planning + indie rock + Brooklyn reference + orchestra = Sufjan Stevens' "The BQE"

Constructed between 1937-1964 as part of infamous city planner Robert Moses's master vision for New York City's social reality, the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway rose as 11.6 miles of neighborhood-severing, money-eating, limited-access overhead highway grimness. The book about Moses's modernist cruelty and obsession with cars over human needs is called The Power Broker, a relentless, detailed portrait of one man's egomania in urban planning.

Which is part of the reason why, when Sufjan Stevens said he had written a symphony about the BQE, people got so excited. Maybe Stevens would, through the power of art, convey this bleak inter-borough piece of citywide dismay as something majestic, the way he had transformed Detroit or Decatur.

Known for his chamber-pop miniatures about humble white working-poor life, Stevens has become indie's populist orchestrator. But he's also enough of a fool to try his hand at large-scale composition, having boasted of writing 50 albums extolling the dignity of local culture. Fans who celebrate his outsider ("indie") ambitions to excel in academic forms clap for his being at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Next Wave festival regardless. Given classical's lust for young flesh and filled seats, the crossover of Stevens' rapt fan base into three nights of sold-out crowds already deems the event a success.

So how to judge such a thing?

Let's start with the music. The music was not a symphony in either the Classical or Romantic version-- let's call it a suite, an ordered set of instrumental pieces meant to be played together. Like Stevens' arrangements for his smaller tunes, these seven pieces were built with modular movements of melody and rhythm connected by fanciful scalar runs, mostly in the woodwinds. They were like minimalism, but not as subtle (not even as "subtle" as Philip Glass, his nearest comparison). Stevens has not yet learned that classical musicians cannot follow the energy of the piece to their own ends, but instead need expressive markings-- louds and softs, keys to accent, and phrasing that shapes each line in the texture of the piece. Because of this, the ensemble was static, unnuanced, and, in full-on mode, painfully loud.

Stevens has a gift for interlocking compound rhythms that sound joyously simple, and the movement from these grooves into other sections was full of playful writing that showed promise. Unfortunately, his sprightly rhythms were often articulated by an over-mic'ed trap kit, and thus rendered "rock musical," helped by occasional wails of guitar that reminded me of the scene in The Crow where Brandon Lee solos his Fender on the roof.

Stevens introduced tenderness through the sonic and visual metaphor of the circle. (See his musings on the hula hoop here.) Feminine, repeating, mystical-- the musical circle in "The BQE" also implied melody's constant return and rhythm's constant motion, at the sacrifice of Stevens's other gift: moments of free-flowing tenderness.

The orchestra's t-shirt logo was a stylized hubcap, a circle of unrepentant modernist motion fetish and part of a growing Matthew Barney-esque homemade masculine mythology system. Stevens did look pretty buff in his extremely tight white pants and matching black hubcap shirt. He sat at the grand piano, turned to the childlike celesta for color, and nodded to the conductor occasionally. He looked stressed out.

But we weren't supposed to be looking at him. A three-channel video screen split the stage in two, showing 8mm movies of the BQE and surrounding neighborhoods. Like minimalist artists, Stevens played with repetition. Deceptively close shots of windows and highways panned out to reveal their places, long glances at skyline and bridges messed into one of two central visual systems in play: kaleidoscope point repetition or mirrored symmetry. People were scarce and cameras lingered on "ugly" intersections, vernacular street elements, and the occasionally half-hearted whimsy of a giant inflatable gorilla.

The visuals were interwoven with still and film shots of hula hooping women-- those feminine circles again, mixed with mid-50s nostalgia-- in body-hugging raver costumes. They came out several times, accompanied by two male hula hoopers, to dance, hoop and toss in time to the music, first in slow, ballet-like daylight scenes, and then later in glowing nightclub abandon. The several minute-long uses of strobe on their lithe forms went from poetic to circus-like pretty quickly. Très "new music" spectacle.

When it was all over, Stevens got a standing ovation. He came out hula hooping and made a joke about the audience's civic pride in looking at the grand project of the expressway. It revealed either discomfort in the reach of his metaphor, his choice of subject, or his attempt in general. Yes, yes, yes, he did fail to find something more human, redeeming, or majestic in that pile of overhead concrete that socially divides his home place. Insteady, he visually fetishized its nude ugliness and the noble poverty of its surroundings, and sonically rendered its nearly unquestioned modernist motion metaphor.

The only moments of discord were mere traffic woe, not the larger psychic wounds of the road's construction or the crush of oil-dependent vehicles on it. It was as if Stevens had not attended to many of the messes his sounds and visions were making, their ignorances and inconsistencies. It's a lot to ask of a newcomer, but not too much. He joked that it took him "the length of a pregnancy" to put "The BQE" together-- it took Moses longer and it wasn't all right either.

For the second half of the performance, the orchestra stayed, Stevens' band kicked in, and he played songs from his albums. Starting with "Seven Swans", the set juxtaposed Stevens and his instrument (banjo, piano) against the full force of all the instruments. It was crashing, banging, big-budget cinematic Romanticism, like gut-wrenchingly melodramatic John Williams or frivolously busy Danny Elfman. The intimate moments were best, when My Brightest Diamond's Shara Worden harmonized with Stevens' falsetto while a sax scrunched or when, on "John Wayne Gacy, Jr.," the ensemble sat out and he played piano with spare acoustic guitar accompaniment.

Pathos was lacking almost everywhere else. When, in the final cadences of the show, Stevens kicked back his piano stool while banging out two hands of block chords, I felt like I was watching indie's own Franz Liszt-- a Romantic virtuous showboater treating formerly human-scale vernacular melodies with egregious pompousness. When Stevens-- called "boy wonder" or "wunderkind" by the press in spite of his man age of 32-- came out to speak, he did his best return to sheepish "gee whiz" indie guy by thanking "my friends, my band," and then with that Mephisto smile, "... my orchestra."