Review: Bent Frequency opens Emory’s ‘CompFest’ with mostly melody

Modernist chamber ensemble stalwarts Bent Frequency appeared Friday February 7 at Emory University’s Performing Arts Studio for the opening night of CompFest 2025: In Our Own House. The festival, an annual production at Emory, seeks works by composers who “expand traditional compositional frameworks” and  “offer exciting and meaningful exchanges with the community.” 

That’s a noble endeavor but one that belies a harsh reality: The line between expanding “traditional compositional frameworks” and just creating abstract sound is often wafer thin. But I’m pleased to report that the Friday concert expanded things into some interesting and enjoyable areas.

Works by composer Alvin Singleton — who was in attendance — formed the structure for the festival as a whole. The titular ensemble work In Our Own House opened the night, and his vibraphone solo Argoru VII (played by Bent Frequency Co-director Stuart Gerber) followed later. Singleton is a composer who understands the necessary balance in effective modernist composition; his works are equal parts melodically engaging and sonically atmospheric. Phrases reminiscent of Ornette Coleman or Sun Ra share space with instruments used like Foley devices to create ambient sound effects. 

A pleasant surprise was Adam Mirza’s sound collage piece Paresthesia. The work was pre-recorded and thus played on a darkened and unpopulated stage. It might not have been a “performance,” but it was nevertheless an effective and consistently enjoyable foray into ambient surrealism in the vein of artists like Merzbow or Nurse With Wound.

Less effective were the Emory student compositions, which Gerber and Bent Frequency Co-director Jan Berry Baker on saxophone played as a single suite. In almost every instance, the short pieces established engaging melodic ideas before exploding into frantic and often atonal madness. This is somewhat forgivable considering that these were the works of young composers testing the waters of modernist writing, but the stilted feeling was apparent throughout. Metallurgies by Koan Roy-Meighoo and Pragression by Katherine Mao were notable standouts.

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Jordan Owen began writing about music professionally at the age of 16 in Oxford, Mississippi. A 2006 graduate of the Berklee College of Music, he is a professional guitarist, bandleader and composer. He is currently the lead guitarist for the jazz group Other Strangers, the power metal band Axis of Empires and the melodic death/thrash metal band Century Spawn.