Inside Outside

You need a big and robust idea to keep a piece of music on the stage and under the spot light if the composers you are celebrating are some of the most unreliable, skunked, smacked out, obtuse, and willfully obscure. The Outsider Music Ensemble managed this the other month at Café Oto by the simple expedient of recognizing that they themselves (the Ensemble, that is) are anything but Outsiders. They looked quite a lot like fresh faced and wired Music Theory MA students to me. Which meant that their vignettes by Moondog, Cornelius Cardew and Howard Skempton were beautifully digestible and programmed so as to be as independent-spirited as they could be,

seeing as the same people were playing them. There was an installationary air to the thing; a player piano spookily belted out Conlon Nancarrow and a gong solo got an airing from a gloomy corner. They know how to make an entrance too, to a hauntingly repetitive lovelorn chant. Inspirational, in the best way.