Ensemble Dal Niente
University of Tulsa
April 4, 2025
One sign of a culturally competent city is that you can find your own weird special interests represented in a given month’s creative offerings, alongside all the stuff that has a broader common denominator. Does the city have a major concert hall … and multiple D&D groups? Can you get that specific Japanese dish you’ve been dying to try? Is there incredible next-level burlesque going on? Film noir? Pedal steel? Whatever?
Tulsa is, to some degree, a city like that—where you’re pretty likely to find people who are doing the thing you love or, if not, where it’s possible to pull together a few like-minded folks and start your own niche-obsessive group. If nothing else, you can get your thing professionally delivered, as long as there are organizations around with the funds and the will to bring it in from out of town.
I’ve got a few super-specific art interests along these lines, and one of them is experimental chamber music. (No idea how this developed; just picture me as a teenager poring over ECM Records catalogs in my bedroom.) If you’re a fan of Caroline Shaw or the JACK Quartet or musique concrete or John Cage, you’re almost there—just a little further and you hit my sweet spot. It’s slim pickings for pro-level, cutting-edge classical music like that here, though Chamber Music Tulsa sometimes brings in performances that range in that direction, and locally-based artists like Dave Broome can regularly be heard probing those domains.
Enter the University of Tulsa—because what is a university if not a hub for the supercharged pursuit of niche interests? As part of its visiting artist residency series, TU’s School of Music brought an ensemble to town last week that had a little pod of local musicians, students, and music-lovers actually jumping up and down with joy at the end of the concert. (Against every indicator, I still hold that we are cool.) Our itch had been scratched, Tulsa’s cultural competency affirmed, and hope restored that we might get this kind of thing a little more often in the future, the way people in Chicago and New York do.
Ensemble Dal Niente (the name is Italian for “from nothing”) is a Chicago-based collective of 27 musicians who specialize not just in experimental chamber music, but in very, very new and difficult experimental chamber music. This is music where, in a given concert, you might catch someone playing a water bottle, making whistling sounds while rubbing a thumb down a string, strapping rubber bands to a giant drum, or warping the sound of a gong by lowering it into a plastic bowl. All of which happened at TU’s luxe and intimate Meinig Hall last week—in addition to some of the most virtuoso harp, flute, and percussion playing I’ve ever heard in Tulsa.
It’s easy for music like this to come off as pretentious: self-indulgent, intentionally obscure, difficult for the sake of being difficult. This did not. It sounded like people playing with each other, in the way that I imagine physicists might play through equations. (All of the musicians and composers on this program have advanced degrees in music and are recognized globally for their expertise.) A decade ago, the New York Times described the ensemble as offering “intense whimsy,” and that absolutely holds.