Beat It

As the dog days of summer wear on, it bears mentioning that Austin's music scene encompasses much, much more than the blues, country, punk and indie rock that so regularly lends it mentions in the music press. Don't get me wrong, I'm a certified PBR-drinkin', Converse wearin', The Believer readin', NPR-listenin', Emo's-visitin' type, but I know there's more to my fair city than mere cliches. That's why I, along with hundreds of other poetry afficiandos, hit up the University of Texas' Harry Ransom Center last night to see renowned local string quartet Tosca perform an arrangement of classic Beat poem "Howl," by Allan Ginsberg.

Indie music fans will best know Tosca for their work playing strings on the debut LP from Austin's own Voxtrot, as well as contributing to Spoon's damn-near-perfect 2007 album Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga... or, perhaps, for their score for Richard Linklater's rotoscoped, curiously eccentric film Waking Life. At any rate, the four lovely ladies of Tosca are among the city's best and most accomplished musicians, and Thursday night saw them perform Boston composer Lee Hyla's arrangment of Allan Ginsberg's "Howl," accompanied by voice artist Robert Kraft. The event was part of an ongoing exhibit focused on the Beat Generation - the clever, counter-cultural, road-trippin' writers from the 50s and 60s like Ginsberg himself, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs and Carl Solomon.

The performance had an unsurprising atmosphere of the swanky, with plenty of (over?) educated students and professors enjoying the show in formal attire, but - this being Austin - plenty of the crowd went for the flip-flops and T-shirt approach. I don't know if Kerouac ever passed through Austin, being more of a San Francisco/New York kind of guy, but I like to think he'd have approved.

Anyhow, Tosca knocked the 20-minute-long-or-so performance out of the park. The intensity of Hyla's string arrangment - combined with Kraft's impassioned, strong, baritone delivery - made Ginsberg's already visceral poem into a powerful paean to the brilliantly mad. In a comfortable seat in a Texan city with searing, triple-digit heat, I could still feel the cold autumn winds of New York City streets. I'd read the poem before, but felt that I was really only truly processing it for the first time.

"We were asked to do it, and we said yes even though we hadn’t seen the score or the music, so we didn’t realize what we were getting into," Tosca member Leigh Mahoney told me after the show. "It was overwhelming when we finally got the music. We worked on it for the past two months. We’d have normally given it 6-8 months, but we had agreed and we did not back out."

"I think that the the poem has a rhythm to it, it’s not just meter and rhyme, it has a definite rhythm, and there’s avant-garde jazz elements to it too," said Mahoney on why "Howl" made particular sense with a string quarter. "There’s these elements of jazz in the poetry that the music just brings to another level."

Although cameras and recorders were strictly banned from this performance, keep your eyes on this space for a video of the show - Mahoney's been nice enough to send me a private version via old-school snail mail. So in the meantime, check out this excellent version of "Howl," read by its author. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go drink some Lone Star and listen to some garage rock. Can't get too classy.