Bonk pushes boundaries of music

ST. PETERSBURG -- The Bonk Festival of New Music got off to a whirlwind start Tuesday at the Salvador Dali Museum. The five-day festival of experimental composition, now in its 12th year, garners international attention as well as visits from composers and performers from the Tampa Bay area and around the world.

This year's events kicked off with Recipe for the Common Man, a composition by Canadian composer Paul Steenhuisen, performed on amplified oboe by Martin Hebert. The piece is actually Hebert playing over a taped cacophony of sounds. The sonic pastiche includes Tarzan yelps, various squishy noises, chimes, static, beeps, you name it. All the while Hebert's oboe flutters above, below and inside the chaos. Hebert's playing sounded wise and avuncular, almost as if it were trying to instruct the unruly children around it.

Lights are dimmed at Bonk shows, which inspires many in the audience to close their eyes. The cartoony nature of Recipe must have had many in the crowd visualizing all sorts of silliness.

Not so with Solstice, a piece by Bonk board member David Rogers. Rogers' composition, performed by fellow board member Corey Jane Holt on piano and Richard Sparrow on the french horn, was ominous and eerie.

Comic relief came in the form of Bauldelaire's Uncle, the only piece performed by its own composer, 62-year-old Francis Schwartz. Schwartz's piece, which premiered in Paris in 1980, is a music-theatre work in which the performer -- in this case Schwartz at the piano -- solicits the audience to play along in an unorthodox call-and-response of noises. If the nonstop titters were an indication, the crowd relished being able to participate.

Holt returned to the piano to perform the chilly 5 Winter Sketches, a composition by Nami Hong about a winter she spent in Russia. That was followed by Jens Hedman's frightening Recoil, a recorded piece of sonic tapestry that included the organic sounds of glass shards, struck wood, the rivets of machinery, metal objects scraped on asphalt, all of it creating an odd percussive quality. By the end, however, all that scraping on asphalt hinted at the sounds of a shovel, indeed, of a mess being cleaned up, or -- gulp -- a grave being dug.

The night ended with another composition of Rogers', Poser, which found several musicians collaborating on various horns.

More Bonk events

Today: 8 p.m., University of South Florida School of Music, Music Recital Hall, 4202 E Fowler Ave., Tampa, (813) 974-2323.

Thursday: 8 p.m., USF School of Music, Theater II.

Friday: 8 p.m., the Harbor Club, 915 Grant St., Tampa, (813) 546-2607.

Saturday: 8 p.m., Salvador Dali Museum, 1000 Third St. S, St. Petersburg, (727) 823-3736.

Admission $8, $10. Get more information at the festival's Web site, www.bonkfest.org.

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