To express my thoughts and feel­ings about this con­cert, I need to first write about the past, the accu­mu­lated his­tory of ideas and the per­sonal expe­ri­ence of lis­ten­ing, of what sticks in the ears, and, espe­cially, the soul.

It may not be appar­ent, but the most direct ele­ments of the music from this great evening, the dri­ving beats, tune­ful­ness and swag­ger­ing atti­tude that would have been just as at home on a record by Can, the Clash or Radio­head, were cre­ated and exist because of the long past of clas­si­cal music. The ubiq­ui­tous and per­sonal expe­ri­ence of pop music on the post-WWII gen­er­a­tions of com­posers Con­nect their art to the larger pub­lic, but there’s a huge dif­fer­ence between enjoy­ing pop music and mak­ing clearly expres­sive, seri­ous music like Fred Rzewski, Corey Dargel, Jacob TV and Michael Gor­don.

The dif­fer­ence has its roots in phi­los­o­phy and aes­thet­ics, but it man­i­fests itself in the con­crete mate­ri­al­ism of indus­tri­al­ized music, flash-in-the-pan artists and styles that, no mat­ter how accom­plished and enjoy­able, can do noth­ing more than cap­ture one par­tic­u­lar emo­tional expres­sion and cement it in time and mem­ory, with lit­tle nuance and no abil­ity to hold together the con­tra­dic­tions and thoughts and feel­ings that make us human beings. Pop music may be affirm­ing, but it is exceed­ingly rare that it is truly human­ist, that it is sym­pa­thetic towards the things that it is not, and that the world of pop music — musi­cians, crit­ics and fans — is barely aware that any other music exists attests to this.

Embrac­ing human­ist val­ues means embrac­ing human­ity, and that, beyond all abstract tech­ni­cal achieve­ment, is what clas­si­cal music does, and has done, and what pop music has yet to develop as a fun­da­men­tal value. At the core of Prison Life is that set of val­ues, and the musi­cians’ taste and intel­li­gence that not only put together such an extra­or­di­nary pro­gram of music, but sup­ported it with great play­ing, the kind of musi­cian­ship that goes beyond hit­ting the notes and has the play­ers com­mit­ted to say­ing something.

Rzewski’s “Com­ing Together” and “Attica,” here pre­sented as a dip­tych, are an aston­ish­ing pre­lude to action and a grace­fully plan­gent after­math. This per­for­mance was dif­fer­ent than any oth­ers I’ve heard live or on record, and what I heard was an his­tor­i­cally informed clas­si­cal approach. Dargel was a great nar­ra­tor, alter­nately intense and wist­ful, while Ran­som Wil­son gave the play­ing the kind of smoothly ter­raced, dra­matic direc­tion that is a legacy of clas­si­cal music. Instead of just drive, anger, threat, the adren­a­lin of right­eous­ness, that was a sense of beauty and sor­row that was new to my ears. “Attica” is almost invari­ably nar­rated, but Dargel sang the part here, again a first for me, and it entirely trans­formed the work. The piece was more beau­ti­ful for it, with a lyri­cal and pas­toral fla­vor that moved it from the con­text of post-1960s protest music and into that of Beethoven and Schu­bert. It sees far­ther because it stands on the shoul­ders of giants.

“Grab It!” is a piece for solo tenor sax­o­phone accom­pa­nied by an audio track, here on a boom box, assem­bled from the old Scared Straight doc­u­men­tary. The words and phrases are cut up and reassem­bled from the orig­i­nal, but the feel­ing of threat remains. Patrick Posey, dressed as a butch prison guard, strode out onto stage, arro­gantly, and gave the piece of the kind phys­i­cally rol­lick­ing per­for­mance it demands. There were some tit­ters of ner­vous amuse­ment over his out­fit, but the art­ful bru­tal­ity of his play­ing and the music drove home that this was some­thing to be excited about, and noth­ing to laugh at.

Dargel’s new “More Last Words From Texas,” five short songs from the last words of pris­on­ers exe­cuted in that state, was also bru­tal. Dargel’s moral aes­thetic and his skill as a com­poser and per­former turns these dif­fi­cult thoughts and feel­ings into some­thing, again, human. Some of the words reveal the fraught and even repel­lant hard-edged extremes of behav­ior, but there is noth­ing about the worst of us, and the worst of the worst peo­ple amongst us, that is any­thing less than human. The only mon­sters are in the fan­tasies of chil­dren and adults, it’s just that adults have the unfor­tu­nate oppor­tu­nity to shape soci­eties and gov­ern­ments around imag­i­nary fears. As dif­fi­cult as it can be, we need to know that it is peo­ple that do all these things, the good and the bad, and Dargel’s music is an exam­ple of the pro­found human­iza­tion that art can create.

He almost stole the show. But then Le Train Bleu closed with Michael Gordon’s Yo Shake­speare, one of the most impor­tant works of music of the last twenty years, and an extremely dif­fi­cult one to play. It marks a pivot between the final reach of Min­i­mal­ism and what lies beyond, and it’s pretty much all coun­ter­point and polyphony, fun­da­men­tals of music for six hun­dred years. The har­monies are as basic as they come, the piece pushes at the con­fines of time and pulse, the stut­ter­ing rhyth­mic lines and osti­natos lay­ing down dif­fer­ent units and dif­fer­ent pace, like a three– or four-sided push-me-pull-you. Wil­son and the ensem­ble played with pre­ci­sion and the right kind of ten­sion, but there was noth­ing tight about them, no strug­gling to count or hit the right notes. It was, like every­thing else, played with the power of skill and the accu­mu­lated weight of history.

Prison Life can be expe­ri­enced again Sun­day at 7:30pm at Le Pois­son Rouge, and if you have noth­ing to do, go see it.