Category: Articles

Getting close with Saariaho and L’amour de loin

Posted on December 2, 2016 by Ronit Seter - Articles

The arrival of Kaija Saariaho’s L’Amour de loin in New York is a big deal. As Zachary Woolfe informed us last Saturday in his New York Times guide to the opera’s staging at the Metropolitan Opera this December, it’s “one of the most important events of the fall season.” This is certainly true for the Met, for New York City’s cultural denizens, and for audiences in about 2,000 movie theaters around the world who will attend the HD live broadcast on December 10. But many of us—composers, performers, musicians, and academics—already knew this to be the case, given the growing interest in Saariaho’s work, including in the United States. In 1999, the New York Philharmonic commissioned from Saariaho her Oltra Mar: Seven Preludes for the New Millennium. Last fall, the University of Berkeley invited her for a semester to deliver the prestigious Bloch Lectures, accompanied by performances of her works. She was also featured at the 2015 Louisville New Music Festival. This fall, she is in residence at the Mannes School of Music and, last month, the New York Philharmonic celebrated her 64th birthday on October 14 with two all-Saariaho programs conducted by her favorite conductor, colleague, and compatriot, Esa Pekka Salonen. This year will culminate with the performance of her opera at the Met throughout the month of December.

L’Amour de loin was chosen to be the first opera composed by a woman to be presented at the Met in more than a century.

But in the 1980s, it was not clear—not even to her—that she could compose a compelling opera. It took her almost a decade, throughout the 1990s, to conceive what would become her first opera. She then composed L’Amour de loin over eighteen months in 1999 and 2000. The premiere took place in 2000, in Salzburg—before the productions that took place in her native Helsinki, or in her adoptive city of Paris, where she has lived most of the last three decades. After more than ten productions in Europe and America, L’Amour de loin was chosen to be the first opera composed by a woman to be presented at the Met in more than a century, following Ethel Smyth’s 1903 Der Wald.

Saariaho’s professional beginnings were not easy. Born in Helsinki in 1952, she had to struggle with her education in a male-dominated culture, like most female composers of her generation. Two professors refused to teach her composition because she was, in her own words, a “pretty girl, getting soon married, and, you know, they have more important things to do”—an attitude that, at least during the initial stages of her career, compelled her to disavow any label or commentary about her as a “female composer.” Her meetings with spectralist composers Gérard Grisey and Tristan Murail in the early-1980s in Darmstadt seem to have released her from the new complexity of the avant-garde at the time (and perhaps her teacher, Brian Ferneyhough), and she soon settled in Paris, the only woman composer to work with electronic music at IRCAM. Motherhood—and not only the revelation of listening to two heartbeats within her own body that she later incorporated in her music—led her to the themes in her music of the last two decades, especially her other theatrical-vocal works, Adriana Mater (2005), La Passion de Simone (2006), and Emilie (2008).

Given this evolution and after years of composing what might have been construed as “masculine music,” Saariaho has become more inclined to talk about the feminine sides of her profession and in her music. In my interview with her during the 2015 Louisville New Music Festival, she candidly disclosed her struggles as a young woman and her new openness with her femininity. Her initial interaction with performers was not much different than what she experienced with her first teachers. When she approached her favorite cellist to perform her Im Traume, the response was far from what she had expected:

I called him and asked if he would like to make the recording for the Finnish radio, and he found it so funny—that a girl would call him up and ask him to play her music—that he was just laughing. He was just laughing. He was so surprised that so finally he never played my music. So I already then realized that it was not completely their fault. It’s the cultural situation, and that has evolved a lot, and yet, of course, we all know that there is no equality.

Perhaps this formative experience taught her to lead her career with more deliberation regarding contact with performers, even much later in her career when “compliments” about her music—which did not sound as if it were “written by a woman”—had become an old memory. In order to prepare methodically to compose L’Amour de loin and to secure its success, Saariaho preceded it with three works—Château de l’âme (1995), Lonh (1996), and Oltra mar (1998-99)—and she concluded her work on the opera’s themes with a symphonic poem with soloists and choir, consisting of five lieder/chansons encapsulating the whole opera: Cinq reflects de L’Amour de loin (2001). These were not merely experiments with moods and concepts for the opera, but also a way to initiate contact with her ideal partners through relatively smaller projects. The first was soprano Dawn Upshaw, for whom Saariaho composed her Château de l’âme (The Castle of Soul, also dedicated to the composer’s daughter, Aliisa) for soprano, eight female voices, and orchestra, setting texts from the Hindu and ancient Egyptian traditions. Since she had previously composed almost exclusively for instruments and stayed away from melody as a core element in her music (during the 1980s, she had focused on timbre and structure), Château de l’âme was a milestone in her music, now re-embracing vocal melody, which had inspired her very early works. In Lonh (Afar, also dedicated to Upshaw), her experiment focused on the vocal lines against the electronic background, initially planned for the prologue of the opera.

Tamara Mumford as the Pilgrim and Eric Owens as Jaufré Rudel in Kaija Saariaho’s L’Amour de Loin. Photo by Ken Howard/Metropolitan Opera.

The profound skill and beauty of Saariaho’s work resonated in her third work, which was later used in the opera, mostly in the fourth act: Oltra Mar: Seven Preludes for the New Millennium for large orchestra and mixed choir. Here, expressions of spectralist techniques are clearly audible not only through her seas of shimmering noises-turning-into-songs but also in their melodic ornamentations and the heterophonically consonant (listen; this is not an oxymoron in Oltra Mar) waves, clearly following the harmonics with the fundamental perfect fifths repeating as a natural ostinato, more like ocean waves crashing on the shore than metronome-mechanic pulsating musical ostinati. The sixth prelude of Oltra Mar, “Mort: in memory of Gérard Grisey”—he passed away during its composition—evokes death through the stillness of the texture, repeating almost the same cluster about fifteen times and then turning chillingly to an arresting climax. Its stasis, however, is imbued with the richness she extracted from Grisey’s style, which inspired her to transform her own two decades earlier.

L’Amour de loin (literally “love from afar”) is inspired by the poem “Lanquan li jorn lonc en mai” by the 12^th-century troubadour Jaufré Rudel. Lebanese writer Amin Maalouf worked on the libretto with Saariaho, creating a captivating, highly poetic text which materialized into an opera that conveys beauty, first and foremost. It is a work about an emotional and spiritual journey—about the eternal themes of love and death embodied in a medieval troubadour. He is a character tired of the life of a Lothario and longing for a real love, but who dies at the moment he finally attains his desire. As such, it could well be tagged (dangerously, of course) as anti-masculine: it lacks the common “action” that we might expect from some operas. No wars, no fights, no murder or mayhem, no violence. Indeed, L’Amour de loin has been described as an opera with no drama—a misnomer. The opera’s dramatic elements are almost entirely internal, occurring within the minds of its three protagonists: Jaufré, who yearns for his real love, Clémence, his love from afar, from Tripoli, and the mediating Pilgrim between them, all supported by their respective quasi-Greek choruses. The chorus of the Tripolese women, Clémence’s friends, tries to ground her while she gradually falls in love with Jaufré; his chorus of companions does the same, balancing his unrealistic yearning. Both choruses seem to give voice to the inner dialog of the lovers’ minds. Often, there is only the one character on stage—and audiences are mesmerized throughout.

Beauty in contemporary opera might be seen as rather rare. Saariaho’s sweet dissonances dissolve into simple, pure sounds again and again, creating the desired sense of tension and release—leaning on minimalist techniques for temporal stasis and spectralist idioms for the beauty of her sound. She does cite (her interpretation of the original notation of) Rudel’s original medieval songs. Her syntheses of the medieval style, minimalism, and spectralism—with touches of Debussy’s vocal style from his Pelléas et Mélisende and echoes of Wagner’s Tristan (the latter, clear at the end of the opera)—are just that, compelling syntheses; the seams are unseen, making us blind to yet transfixed by the stylistic transitions, a Saariaho hallmark. All that said, it is not this, or the stirring beauty of Maalouf’s poetry or of the troubadour singing, that gives L’Amour de loin its unique sound. It is the charm of Saariaho’s orchestral music, the musical echo of the inner drama that has captivated audiences and critics. At the foundation of her skillful, rich timbres lies a thin but iridescent fabric woven out of a handful of harmonic threads which span the entire opera. She might also mean to take us back to classical concepts of harmony, where three main functions are sufficient for creating powerful harmonic drive and structural coherence—both of which also characterize L’Amour de loin. In his search for his real love, Jaufré is yearning for a woman who is “beautiful without the arrogance of beauty, noble without the arrogance of nobility, pious without the arrogance of piety”—characteristics it would not be far-fetched to attribute to L’Amour de loin as well.

Ronit Seter studies 20th-century music and specializes in Israeli art music. She served on the faculties of the Peabody Conservatory, the George Washington University, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and American University (DC). A contributor to the Grove Music Online, she has published in Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, Jewish Women Encyclopedia, Encyclopedia Judaica, Tempo, Notes, Min-Ad, Journal of the American Musicological Society, and Musical Quarterly. Her book in progress on Israeli composers is under contract with Oxford University Press.

Who Is In the Club?

Posted on November 23, 2016 by Jeffrey Mumford - Articles, Commentary

Ed. Note: The essay below was presented, in a slightly different form, during the BBC Radio 3’s Diversity and Inclusion in Composition conference at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester, U.K.—FJO

In addressing the many challenges that confront African Americans in the world of “Western art music” or—for lack of a better term—classical music, I feel there is an obvious starting point, which is the issue of presupposition.

In a conversation under most circumstances, when a White person describes themselves as a composer it can be safely assumed that, in the minds of those present, the images of Mozart, Beethoven, Bach or—perhaps for those more progressive in their tastes—Bartók or Stravinsky (all men) come to mind. A useful and wise supposition?

Conversely, when a Black person so identifies him or herself, I would venture to guess that the images of the Chevalier de Saint-Georges (an 18th-century composer/violinist), R. Nathaniel Dett (born in Canada and educated at the Oberlin Conservatory, among other institutions), Florence Price (the first Black woman to have a symphonic work performed by a major orchestra), William Grant Still (the first Black person, male or female, to have a work performed by a major symphony orchestra), or—of a more recent vintage—Olly Wilson (distinguished composer and emeritus professor at U.C. Berkeley) or George Walker (again, mostly men, the latter having won the Pulitzer Prize in 1996) would not come to mind. Rather, it has been my experience on more than a few occasions that there is a strong supposition that, as a Black person, you write either jazz, R & B, or gospel music.

It has been my experience on more than a few occasions that there is a strong supposition that, as a Black person, you write either jazz, R & B, or gospel music.

As a first lesson in a class I teach on the subject of Black classical composers, I played six works without identifying either the name of the composer or their race and asked if anyone in the class could identify which were written by a Black composer and why, noting that three of the examples were in fact written by Black composers. Sprinkled throughout these pieces were works with “grooves” (identifiable regular beat patterns) as well as more complex music, both tonal and atonal, including jazz and jazz-influenced works. Each time I have done this, the answers were quite revelatory. Mostly no one got it right. Upon further discussion of a work (later identified as having been written by T.J. Anderson, a noted Black classical composer who writes music with a fair degree of complexity both rhythmically and harmonically) one student said, “This music is much too complex to have been written by a Black composer.” A useful and valid supposition? The heartbreaking aspect of this last observation for me was that it was made by a Black student.

The spectrum of what we as Black composers create is vast, and I love the variety (and it is truly breathtaking). What I am dismayed by is the mistaken notion in much of the public mind (both Black and White) that the scope of what we do is as limited as it appears to be, by virtue of what is presented to us by both the popular media and what appears on concert programs. Regarding popular media, where is the curiosity? It can appear to be a somewhat cynical (as my wife would put it) attempt at image definition by manipulative means. Why do so many people across the spectrum put up with it? I look forward to the day when a course like the one I have just described is unnecessary, when the music of African Americans and other minorities is regularly taught to instrumentalists, singers, and ensembles, when the music of these composers is represented in any given symphony orchestra’s season—both composers of the past and composers who are presently creating vital new works.

We have a lot of work to do.

For instance, is there an even subconscious assumption that we as musicians who happen to be Black might not be able, as performers, to render as evocative and communicative (not to mention historically accurate) a performance of Haydn or Beethoven as a White performer, even if we love that music as much as they do? Food for thought? Clearly the remedy for this doubt is a steady stream of wonderful performers and composers with a strong, informed, and intelligent point of view.

I am encouraged that more and more Blacks are owning all of the music they want to and expressing themselves accordingly. I note with pride the accomplishments of Naumburg Award-winning pianist Awadagin Pratt, Cleveland Orchestra violist Eliesha Nelson, bassist Chi-chi Nwanoku, and earlier performers such as Leontyne Price, Marian Anderson, and Paul Robeson (all singers) whose efforts against great odds made it possible for Awadagin and many others to be taken seriously in a world mostly defined by White people. I, however, do feel the future is in good hands as more and more younger players and composers are establishing themselves as forces to be reckoned with, on their own terms.

Jeffrey Mumford standing next to Chi-chi Nwanoku

Jeffrey Mumford at the BBC Conference with Chi-chi Nwanoku, the founder of Chineke, an orchestra completely comprised of musicians of color.

I believe the artist has a responsibility to speak with a direct and passionate voice, and that the act of artistic creation is a powerful political and societal act. But there must also be perpetual vigilance, so we are not pigeonholed and predominantly programmed only during certain months of the year and often, in the case of orchestras, led in performance by guest conductors who have no real investment in the piece. Why should this be? As the great composer Hale Smith once exclaimed, “Do not call me in January or February!”

The great composer Hale Smith once exclaimed, “Do not call me in January or February!”

The African-American community also needs to push itself to fully embrace the wide range of our creative efforts.

Why can’t we embrace Brahms as well? A curious question perhaps, but one that I think bears expanding upon. It seems that in certain parts of our culture we have not been “given permission” to embrace what touches us despite it not coinciding with that which others may define as “Black enough.” What is that actually? What causes this disconnect?

Certainly, seeing an ensemble comprised of people who look like you (thank you Chi-chi & Chineke!) goes a long way toward providing a more inviting atmosphere. Additionally, and of course, having ensembles comprised of whomever, perform music by composers who look like you is terrifically empowering.

This said, even though I saw no Black musicians on stage during my elementary school trips to hear the National Symphony as a sixth grader in the ‘60s in Washington, D.C., I felt the music they played (one concert consisting of the 1812 Overture, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, and New World Symphony) to be as much mine as anyone’s. I grew up in a house where Count Basie regularly resounded throughout, often alternating with Ray Charles’s covers of Hank Williams’s songs, but also performances from the rich tapestry of American musical theater and Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto, not to mention the gargantuan collaboration between the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, performing Handel’s Messiah—a far cry from my later and revelatory discovery of Christopher Hogwood!

It is quite possible that my love of lush string writing was inspired by the jazz ballads sung by the likes of Johnny Mathis and Gloria Lynne that I heard on the car radio and in my house, as well as the rich harmonies of ‘70s disco, all recorded in studios that kept many musicians solidly employed. I also credit music teachers during my childhood such as Ms. Miller in elementary school, for playing works on the record player (yes, record player!) in class, such as Grieg’s Peer Gynt Suite and Leontyne Price singing Carmen. These classes put me on a path. I could not know where it would lead, but I knew I had to take it nonetheless. Without putting too fine a point on this, I truly feel that classical music saved my life, that’s how much it has touched my soul, and it continues to do so to this day.

Having ensembles perform music by composers who look like you is terrifically empowering.

I’ve found within its ever expanding repertoire, a wealth of invention, sonic exploration, wisdom, and simple groundedness—a kind of peace that I so deeply needed, and continue to need. Whole worlds opened up to me. Accessing these worlds is not a luxury, rather it is vital to my existence.

With regard to the “tradition/canon,” I delight in the evolution of various aesthetics over time and how composers built upon, responded to, or reacted against one another, and I do feel strongly that this canon is indeed ever expanding.

One key moment in this necessary expansion was the Columbia Black Composers’ Series, issued in the 1970s, which introduced many listeners (including myself, then in college) to the likes of George Walker, David Baker (recently deceased), Olly Wilson, and Ulysses Kay, among others. There it was, on a major label no less, a catalogue of works by people who looked like me, complex works revealing a profound depth of expression in large forms.

Again, whole worlds opened up to me. I want this for anyone who is open to it. The concept of “otherness” is one with which many struggle. Other than what? White? Other than (fill in the blank). What is the point of departure? Who defines what is the “baseline” and what is the “other”? Each of us, no matter what color, is unique in our experience and what inspires us.

Who defines what is the “baseline” and what is the “other”?

Who defines the “canon”? Who is assumed without question to be “part of the club” and who is “other”? Given that the Chevalier de Saint-Georges was called the “Black Mozart,” why do we not hear his work more often? Even the most conservative of radio stations could program his work alongside a seemingly endless supply of lesser-known masters of the Italian, German, and Czech Baroque and Classical eras.

A simple step toward addressing the issue of at least acknowledging our legacy in this field would be for these stations to include works from this period, as well as some repertoire from the 19th century—such as the work of José White (1836-1918)—and the early 20th century, such as William Grant Still’s 1936 Summerland for violin and piano, which has been stunningly recorded by African-American violinist Kelly Hall-Tompkins, who is currently concertmaster of the orchestra for the Broadway production of Fiddler on the Roof.

I regularly tell my students to notice who is not included on a concert program as much as who is, and then to ask themselves why. Our work in this field is an ever-evolving odyssey which celebrates the best in us as a culture but sadly, if you were to peruse any given season’s offerings by major symphony orchestras or chamber music series, the voices of our artists in this business—particularly composers—are, if not absent, unjustifiably quiet.

I regularly tell my students to notice who is not included on a concert program as much as who is, and then to ask themselves why.

But despite the challenges faced by African-American composers and performers in the USA, there are some hopeful signs as well.

The United States Library of Congress has Carla Hayden as its new Librarian of Congress, a woman who is the child of two Black classical musicians. She oversees a vast array of programs—including the celebrated Music Division, home of a prized collection of Stradivarius instruments and a distinguished concert series, which has long had the legendary Juilliard Quartet in residence. In fact, the new cellist of the Juilliard Quartet, Astrid Schween, is of African descent herself, something I certainly never saw coming when I was young and listening to the quartet’s amazing Ravel and Bartók recordings, or their later recordings of my former teacher, Elliott Carter!

The Cleveland Orchestra now has an African American, Mark Williams, as its artistic administrator. He will hopefully help to give greater voice to our work at one of the premiere orchestras in the world. Upper level administrative positions are also held by African Americans in, among other arts organizations, the orchestras of Detroit and Akron, Ohio, and the Michigan Opera Theatre (Wayne Brown, who was formerly director of music and opera for the National Endowment for the Arts).

Of course, the Sphinx Organization (for which its founder, Aaron Dworkin, received a prestigious MacArthur Award) continues its important work giving opportunities to young African-American and Latino string players. African-American composer George Lewis was also recently awarded this distinction from the MacArthur Foundation.

Young and hungry ensembles are being formed to play the ever-expanding range of music written in our time, including the Boston-based string trio Sound Energy, founded by the outstanding African-American violist Ashleigh Gordon. Among the missions of this ensemble is to play some of the most challenging repertoire written for this configuration by African Americans and others. Soloists such as cellist Seth Parker Woods, Sphinx Laureate cellist Christine Lamprea and sopranos Julia Bullock and Nicole Cabell are also carving out their own distinctive careers, embracing a repertoire that is broad and refreshingly diverse.

The brand new (as of September 24) Smithsonian Museum of African-American History and Culture on the National Mall has within in it a concert hall named for Oprah Winfrey, which will present the work of African-American composers and performers. I am personally thrilled to have been offered the opportunity to curate a concert there this coming spring. Stay tuned!

There is much to applaud, but there is still much more to do. We must remain vigilant and undeterred. Our voices must be heard and added to the greater conversation to make the mix richer and deeper in resonance. As an African-American composer, I take my position and responsibility seriously. When I teach, I encourage all of my students to speak with their own voice and not succumb to the limitations others may try to give them. I believe that for too long, African Americans (and many others) have been pigeonholed (both by their own constituency and by others) by limited assumptions of the scope of their creative activity. I want to explode this. I believe that the artist must be a citizen aware of the context in which he/she lives, both politically and culturally. Then he or she must define his or her own world with frames of reference unique to him or herself and invite people into that world at appropriate times.

In my own work I try to create an alternate reality, my own heaven, as so much of the world we live in is not enough. The opportunity to share my work with the larger community is one that I cherish.

Jeffrey Mumford during his speech at the BBC Radio 3’s Diversity and Inclusion in Composition Conference. Photograph © by Guy Levy, courtesy BBC.

Composer Jeffrey Mumford has received numerous fellowships, grants, awards, and commissions including the American Academy of Arts and Letters “Academy Award in Music,” a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, and an ASCAP Aaron Copland Scholarship. He was also the winner of the inaugural National Black Arts Festival/Atlanta Symphony Orchestra Composition Competition. Current projects include: verdant cycles of deepening spring, a violin concerto for Caroline Chin; a new string quartet for an international consortium (including ensembles from London, Berlin, Stuttgart, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Glasgow, Boston, and New York); of radiances blossoming in expanding air, for cello and chamber orchestra, for Deborah Pae; unfolding waves, a concerto for Italian pianist Pina Napolitano; and the ongoing set of rhapsodies for cello and strings. He is currently Distinguished Professor and curator of the “Signature Series” of concerts at Lorain County Community College in Northern Ohio.

Decolonizing Our Music

Posted on November 16, 2016 by Gary Ingle - Articles, Commentary

During one of the breaks at the COMTA conference at the Conservatorio de Música de Puerto Rico in San Juan, a group performed Andean traditional music on double bass, harp, guitars, panpipes, and percussion.

Ed. Note: The essay below was presented, in a slightly different form, as the final keynote address at the “Decolonizing Music” conference presented by the Music Council of the Three Americas (Consejo de la música de las Tres Americas – COMTA) at the Conservatorio de Música de Puerto Rico in San Juan.—FJO

Colonization rears its ugly head whenever there is “globalization.” In the 1500s, several European nations were aggressively globalizing, especially Spain, and especially in the Americas. At the time of Christopher Columbus’s westward wanderings, the Americas already had strong indigenous cultures. There was a great fondness for music and dancing, especially for rituals and celebrations.

Alongside the arrival of the Spanish conquistadors came the arrival of Catholic missionaries. The militaries with their governments and the churches with their faith began the process of colonization and, with it, they brought Western music and culture. While indigenous music and Western music have coexisted for sure, Western music became preeminent as the government and the church often imposed a rigid adoption of Western ways, much to the detriment of indigenous music.

Companies with the financial resources and the political clout often impose a uniformity on the consumption of the music they believe is popular and therefore profitable.

The same is true today with digital colonization. The companies with the financial resources and the political clout often impose a uniformity on the consumption of the music they believe is popular and therefore profitable. Given the ubiquity of their total command of the internet, the “world” becomes their colony and the “popular” tastes rule, again to the detriment of the indigenous music, but also to art music and to any other music with a limited audience and appeal.

This scenario has forced indigenous music and even our beloved “classical” music into competing with everything—sports, popular music, even each other. Unfortunately, indigenous music and classical music were never intended to compete. In an April 4, 2003 London Financial Times article entitled “Out of Tune,” music critic Andrew Clark postulated that, throughout most of its history, classical music had been able to flourish through a mixture of patronage (government, corporations, private philanthropy) and paternal influence on public policy (e.g. “classical music is good for you”). Now, neither patronage nor paternalism is certain or sufficient. Today, corporate, private, and governmental philanthropy continues to decline. And no one can stand before a Board of Education and use the argument that music must be in the curriculum because it’s good for us. So now we as supporters of indigenous and classical music are trying to compete where we were never intended to compete in the first place—in the sphere of popular culture. Add to that mix what Clark describes as “the overwhelming evidence that classical music spent most of the past century in creative implosion, and there seem justifiable grounds for panic.” We face quite a challenge. But back to decolonization.

The common thread of colonization, whether it’s the old kind of colonization or the new, is an “either/or” mentality. One music reigns supreme, while the other is neglected at best or dies away at worst. The either/or colonial approach is not healthy or even desirable for a flourishing culture. Thus, the necessity to “decolonize” our music.

Decolonizing music involves a conscious decision to move away from an “either/or” “colonial” mentality to a “both/and” “decolonized” mentality.

Decolonizing music involves a conscious decision to move away from an “either/or” “colonial” mentality to a “both/and” “decolonized” mentality. Decolonizing music, however, is not about replacing one style or genre with another. Replacing colonial music with indigenous music only perpetuates the either/or mentality that has always been destructive to music, just with a different style becoming preeminent. We must be open and accepting of new music as well as old, of classical music as well as popular, improvised as well as notated, and on it goes.

The great music historian Donald J. Grout, in his magnum opus A History of Western Music, framed this concept in very vivid terms. He observed that “reconciliation of the new with the traditional is the task that confronts every artist in his own generation, and one that can be avoided only at the price of artistic suicide.” Grout’s comments are directed at purely musical issues during the transition between the late Renaissance and the early Baroque. However, the parallels to the issue of “decolonization” are unmistakable.

In order to adequately and effectively “decolonize” music, we must become “reconcilers” or, to use a musical term, “harmonizers.” We must reconcile the new with the traditional, affirming the “both/and” and dismissing the “either/or.” We should not let our traditions swallow up the new, but we should not allow the new to swallow up our traditions. Both the new and the traditional are vital to a healthy state of musical and cultural affairs. We must maintain a creative tension between our traditions on the one hand, and the new on the other.

Our greatest and most immediate challenge will be how we deal with technology. As we all know, the digital age is upon us, utterly transforming all of society with a new cyber-reality.

One of the gurus of contemporary thought is Nicholas Negroponte, a professor and founder of the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Negroponte describes the technological revolution in terms of a shift from atoms to bits; that is, a shift from the importance of material objects to the supremacy of digital information. All of life, music included, is in the process of digital transformation. Hence, the description by Swedish composer and acting CEO of the Swedish performing rights society Alfons Karabuda of the newest form of conquering “space.” Not the kind of “space” associated with Star Trek and its motto “To boldly go where no man has gone before,” but the infinite space of the internet and, as Alfons described it, “digital colonization.” The conquering of digital space has shifted colonization from countries to companies. In the past, it was countries like Britain, France, and Spain who amassed land colonies across the world. Today it is companies like Apple, Google, and YouTube (which is owned by Google) who are the great colonizers of digital space, especially in music.

In the past, it was countries like Britain, France, and Spain who amassed land colonies across the world. Today it is companies like Apple, Google, and YouTube (which is owned by Google) who are the great colonizers of digital space, especially in music.

Yes, technology is the driving force today. Technological innovations have changed the way we work and live and think. We cannot imagine our lives without computers or the internet. But neither can we imagine life, especially musical life, without personal interactions, human conversation, or, for that matter and very important for me, music studios without a living, breathing teacher.

Prominent technology essayist and literary critic Sven Birkerts warns, “I would urge that we not fall all over ourselves in our haste to filter all of our experiences through circuitry.” Otherwise, he says, the end result of cyber-reality may well be loss of meaning under a tide of endless information and computer bytes.

I know this was a long diversion into technology. But I believe it is central to our ability to be reconcilers. Technology and the internet open up all sorts of possibilities for “decolonized” indigenous music to be heard, experienced, and enjoyed by more people than ever thought possible. But at the same time, it presents a potent tool for “digital colonization” by the companies who control who and what gets heard and whose only motive is profit from the popular.

So, what is the point of all of this talk of decolonization and reconciliation? The point is that it is up to each of us individually and all of us collectively to ensure that both indigenous music as well as popular music flourishes. As individuals, we must adopt the decolonized reconciler mindset. More importantly, we must unify our message through the music organizations that represent us in each of our own countries, as well as around the world.

The central reason for all of our associations, societies, and councils is empowerment. As members of groups like these, we are able to exert an influence on these companies that control who and what gets heard in the media. This is not possible by individuals acting alone. To use a musical metaphor, organizations like the Music Council of the Three Americas and the International Music Council represent a unified voice, rather than several voices singing their own tunes. Individuals who act independently can become just noise that can be dismissed or played against each other by the companies and policy makers. A unified voice gets heard. And good things happen when groups of people are empowered to speak with one voice.

We must use the empowerment and collective strength of all of us who are committed to “decolonizing” music, to reconciling the new with the traditional, to changing the paradigm from “either/or” to “both/and,” and to ensuring the viability and availability of all music to all people.

Gary Ingle. (Photo courtesy of MTNA)

Gary Ingle is the executive director and CEO of Music Teachers National Association in the United States, as well as the president of the National Music Council of the U.S. and a vice president of COMTA.

Reclaiming the Missing Middle

Posted on November 4, 2016 by Nathan Currier - Articles, Commentary

Six bagels on a tray in the process of being baked

Ed. Note: Orchard Circle’s first concert will take place at the DiMenna Center’s Cary Hall in New York City on Tuesday, November 8, 2016 at 8:00pm. Further details are available on the Orchard Circle website.—FJO

Orchard Circle began as a simple conversation among friends. Essentially it’s a new music series that will focus on what could be called the “middle”—the center of the aesthetic spectrum. Saying he loved this idea, John Corigliano noted how “the middle has been neglected far too long.” I tried to explain it earlier in terms of something Anthony Tommasini wrote, which began with his describing the wide range, quick cuts, and “irreverent mixing” of an ACJW concert presented like a rock band’s release party, which had excited him. Frank J. Oteri recently published a piece in these pages describing the whole new music world in similar terms, expressing the same exhilaration at today’s freedoms, which he saw encapsulated in something written about Henry Threadgill: “Asked about what’s caught his ear of late, he identifies some recent Elliott Carter music for piano, as well as a Beyoncé song that his daughter brought into his life.” Tommasini’s article went on, however, to discuss how there was, nevertheless, one thing missing from ACJW’s “mix tape” approach. Namely, it had no middle: that is, the concert included similar “Carter to Beyoncé”-like contrasts, but explicitly eschewed any composers one might call the “middle ground” between them, and this set Tommasini to thinking, and to describing this middle ground and his fears for it.

This missing middle is precisely what Orchard Circle is all about. I don’t think that anyone could deny the simple facts of the matter. Tommasini’s article was not written yesterday; it was published six years ago, and there’s little question that, by all meaningful measures (media attention, share of commission funding, space in programming, etc.), things have only gotten worse. After having noted his worry that “pieces of more traditional excellence, like Mr. Harbison’s string quartets,” could disappear, Tommasini concluded, “For now this is just a passing worry.” Yet Harbison wrote to me recently:

I have been able to reach a conclusion that it is best for me to accept that my music, and my values in general, hold little relevance for the present moment, and I am able to be most useful and productive by letting go. … My music and that of most of my contemporaries has ceased to have meaning for the world of the presenters, press, and high-powered performers.

I’ve also found some younger composers, coming out of a similar aesthetic, who seem to feel almost as despondent and “finished,” yet they had just finished grad school! Why is no one discussing this? Whatever your own aesthetics, much like the idea that biodiversity equals ecosystem resilience, you should not want to see this branch of creative activity, from composers young and old, squeezed out of existence the way it has seemed to be lately.

What is the accepted intellectual justification for this current state of affairs? Why aren’t at least the internal institutions of the composition community politely bidden to make a thorough reexamination of their priorities, and an overhaul wherever these are seen to have gone awry? In trying to get Orchard Circle going, I noted the depth and extent of feelings that so many of the composers I talked to, both young and old, hold about all of this. I also noticed how among many there is a good deal of reticence to talk about any of it openly. I hope that readers can appreciate my own trepidation in making myself pretty vulnerable discussing all of this quite directly. An open question remains whether these same composers—frequently quite individualistic and proud, and so by consequence forming a fractious, balkanized, lonely bunch, hardly a union—can ever really be coaxed into coalescing.

Orchard Circle’s first concert, at the DiMenna Center, will soon provide the first test, with players from the Berlin Philharmonic giving an election-night bash that explores the notion of a “Weimar America.” Given our theme, it might be fitting to mention a musical thinker who liked to ponder stylistic shifts, a native Berliner who was forced to leave Berlin soon after the Weimar Republic fell (he was Jewish) and who then came to New York City and taught for a long time at NYU—Curt Sachs. “However we seek to define it, there is always something tragic about aesthetics,” Sachs once wrote, noting that a good half of what is created ends up rejected by our doctrines, today as in millennia past, and that we need to think more holistically, where different styles could be seen as “different but necessary parts of a meaningful and well-organized whole.”

Tommasini’s article didn’t fully explore why the aesthetic middle ground was now eroding so completely, but I’d like to throw out a few thoughts. One of the most salient features, it seems to me, of this missing middle is that it is the part of the aesthetic spectrum that has the closest ties to Western classical music’s past. Perhaps the ability to flip instantly through a vast global bonanza gradually desensitizes listeners to the subtle inflections, quasi-linguistic narrative processes, the totality of what I might call the “metabolism”—the complex guts—of classical music?

I might also suggest that the gravitating of so many toward musical languages of greater stasis—pop, minimal, non-Western—and away from the developmental, directional language of Western classical music, might partly stem from the deeper recesses of fear and uncertainty that plague us: who might not crave a bit more stasis, when, for the most basic aspects of our world, stasis has become so fragile and threatened a commodity, while a veritable black hole of looming global change stares us in the face? Yet by that same token, one could therefore cogently argue that there never had been a time in which this wordless language of development, change, and resolution could be deemed so valuable and necessary an asset to the mind, if the intention were really to rationally confront and resolve the outsized risks we now all run.

Sachs liked to study the periodic oscillations of style, sometimes comparing them to a swinging pendulum, but other times to the more chaotic yet still periodic motions of weather, calling them “hot” and “cold” style shifts, yet with subtleties akin to cool summer spells and warm spells in winter. (A few years after he died, one of the first things the earliest researchers reconstructing past climate from ice cores discovered was that such excursions were surprisingly common and important at the time scale of climate, too, and these are now named Dansgaard-Oeschger events after those researchers.)

Aesthetic shifts don’t relate only to periodic oscillation, however, and can track events that suddenly come crashing in like an asteroid, creating cultural “punctuated equilibria”: for example, when 9/11 came crashing in, it played havoc with every aspect of life, and I suspect played a role in the shifts I am talking about, abetting the move towards those musical “languages of stasis.” Harbison mentioned the role of the press in the middle’s decline, and Howell Raines, recounting his time at the helm of the New York Times after 9/11, described in particular a sudden imposed shift at Arts & Leisure just after 9/11, which he likened to having “a new sheriff in town,” and which he said began by suddenly placing an article about a rock band on its front page. Even the language Raines uses creates a striking parallel to Naomi Klein’s notion of a “Shock Doctrine.”

That is hardly a statement of “rock versus classical,” however. I still remember giving Keith Emerson my first composition, copied in the hand of my older brother Sebastian who hadn’t yet begun composing, around the time the childhood photos accompanying this article were taken My mother being a classical composer, I rejoiced as a boy in Emerson’s virtuosic way of bridging the different musical worlds I knew, morphing Ginastera, for example, into rock, and I tried to do this kind of thing myself. Of the older composers who first expressed enthusiasm for Orchard Circle, John Corigliano just had a premiere this fall of a new piece based on bluegrass and Harbison has taught jazz at MIT. In short, I don’t think that anyone affiliated with Orchard Circle seems alienated from American popular culture.

But there’s a big difference between the inclusion of elements into a style, and the exclusion of things from it, which a sheriff or two might like to see enforced. It can be hard after a while even to notice unnamed injunctions: how long would it have taken you to notice that there were no doubled leading tones, over centuries of musical literature and through multiple revolutions, if you hadn’t been told about this in your theory class? I’m sure I would never have noticed. So I think that some might not even have noticed the quiet, but clear and growing, exclusionary injunctions I am pointing to or that Harbison describes, filled up as they have been by the nearly infinite cornucopia of “music products” available today.

We were forced into having Orchard Circle’s first concert on election night (it was the only date our musicians, members of the Berlin Philharmonic who are here on tour, could do it), but one friend said that, given what Orchard Circle was all about, happenstance had forced it into what was perfect for it. So the program we have put together is built around the election, and we will all watch the returns together on the DiMenna Center’s large screen and high-definition projector, with good food and drink. It should be vastly more interesting than sitting in front of a television at home and being a statistic for some network’s rating!

Of course, some have been so worried that they can’t even envision listening to music that night, and John Corigliano wrote to me recently that he might even be among those himself. But for all of us there in that hall, The Fall of the House: Waltzing through Weimar America will be our rain dance, where the musical thoughts of sixteen different American composers must combine symbiotically as one—from Harbison and Corigliano to Babbitt to Glass, ranging from works of the 1970s to premieres—coalesced (at least there in music, if not personally) into a collective prayer that we find our way back to sanity.

Vinyl Fever

Posted on October 19, 2016 by James Matheson - Articles, Commentary

If experience is the primary generator of wisdom, it’s unfortunate that wisdom often comes at a high and sometimes painful price.

All told, I can recall moving 22 times since I was an undergraduate, with at least another half dozen moves before then. Usually I would throw everything I owned in a car and drive. Eventually I started renting U-Hauls. The last couple of moves I hired movers, like grown-ups do.

Everywhere I went I took my crates of LPs. AC/DC, Zeppelin, Psychedelic Furs, Solti’s complete Ring Cycle with Birgit Nilsson, Dorati’s complete Haydn Symphonies, most of Zappa’s records – and many more. In one of the later moves, my Denon turntable broke. And I now had crates of CDs to drag around, too.

Perhaps, dear Reader, you can feel where this tale of too-late wisdom is heading…

In 2012 came move number 19. I was consolidating, downsizing, rushing to pack, and thought – what if I just… you know… found my records a good home? I called my landlord and asked if he knew anyone who was into vinyl. He said yes. I left the records when I left the apartment.

He called a few days later to tell me how thrilled his friend was to inherit such a great collection, and that is when my sense of having made an impulsive yet life-altering decision – a very bad decision – began haunting me. On occasion it still keeps me awake at night.

When Bob Attiyeh, who founded and runs Yarlung Records, and I decided to start raising money for a new CD project that would feature three works that I am particularly proud of, including my Violin Concerto played by Baird Dodge and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra led by living-legend Esa-Pekka Salonen, my String Quartet played by Color Field, and my song cycle Times Alone with Laura Strickling and Thomas Sauer, I was already thrilled. I knew that Yarlung also sometimes released vinyl versions of products after the CDs had come out, but we hadn’t discussed a vinyl release and I thought maybe someday.

But it became clear during the recording sessions at the Segerstrom Center that Bob was thinking big. Very big. There were engineers setting up mikes for an ultra-high quality DSD (Direct Stream Digital) recording, a surround sound recording, the first-ever commercial SonoruS Holographic Imaging recording (which renders an incredible 3D listening environment from a pair of properly configured speakers), and we were also recording to tape. As in analog tape. Because Bob was scheming to release the entire project on vinyl also.

Quick vinyl primer, for those who have forgotten or grew up after its heyday: tape is the best source for vinyl. Tape is expensive. Tape is hard to edit. Vinyl, even at 33 rpm, doesn’t hold anywhere near as much music as a CD. 45 rpm vinyl offers higher quality (it is the speed for which the microgroove standard was originally designed), but at the cost of even shorter playable length. 180 gram vinyl is the audiophile standard at this point, because its squishing time and cooling time yield more accurate records than 150 or 200 gram vinyl. But Bob is a big thinker and devoted audiophile—and 180 gram, 45 rpm vinyl is what people expect of him and of Yarlung. And there was a solution to the capacity problem—just release the whole project on three LPs. Simple!

The recording session is one I and everyone involved will long remember. Recording a project for so many different formats—CD, vinyl, DSD, DSD surround, and Holographic Imaging—would mean an incredible amount of editing across incompatible platforms. A single four-minute track often contains hundreds of edits. Again the solution was deceptively simple: no edits allowed. NONE. Every movement had to be recorded as a single take. Even the extremely difficult, 18-minute-long first movement of my String Quartet.

16 minutes in, and someone misses a beat?

Stop.

Pause.

Start over.

This just isn’t how things are done. Recording this way takes more time, and escalates production costs. Releasing on three 12-inch 45s as opposed to, say, two 33s, also raises manufacturing, storage and transportation costs, and significantly raises the price point for purchasing the complete project on vinyl.

It was incredibly stressful and for the musicians an Everest-like challenge. There were moments when morale was tested, when it looked like this just might not happen—and then the next take was perfect. Literally flawless.

I remember when Thomas Sauer finished the final take of “Clouds ripped open,” the third song of the cycle Times Alone. As far as I was concerned, he and Laura had nailed the song a couple of times at least. But Tom would not stop until it was perfect. Every damn note. And it was Laura’s best take as well. When Tom leaped from the piano and rushed over to me for a high ten, it was clear just how exciting this goal of edit-free perfection had become to everyone. It was frightening, but it was amazing.

The CD and the three records came out a few weeks ago. Early reviews have been extremely positive. People are buying them. But those recording sessions were magical.

Are you, like me, someone who along the road gave up your vinyl? My kernel of wisdom is this:

Stop.

Pause.

Start over.

Because vinyl is still awesome. And my collection is growing again. Yours?

Chicago: What Makes It Great?

Posted on October 7, 2016 by NewMusicBox Staff - Articles

To further showcase the spirit of the community Ear Taxi is organized to celebrate, we asked a diverse roster of local creators to highlight stand out (but quite possibly under-the-radar) aspects of the scene—to pull back the curtain on Chicago for those in the know about new music but maybe a stranger to the city. Add your favorites in the comments or share with us on social media!

Insider Tip: Mana Contemporary—a large, repurposed industrial space in the booming art-loving neighborhood of Pilsen. Mana hosts studios for tons of incredible artists who regularly open their work to the public, as well as experimental dance and music performances.

What Makes Chicago Great: Chicago is a city of welcome. Artists from all over the US (and the world) come here because of the vibrant scene and myriad visible institutions that have long flourished here. Alongside the established arts in Chicago, emerging artists can find a place to explore and test their practice. There is visible activity here at every conceivable level of career development, and at the intersection of most every genre and discipline.

The new music community of Chicago is discursive rather than judgemental. Who you know and what you are affiliated with is less important here than it might be in some other big cities. Young artists have opportunities to show their work and get genuine feedback from older peers, mid-career artists can try out their ideas with an open-minded cohort of ensembles and independent artists.

Part of the reason for this openness is that the midwest is a friendly place. Another reason is that Chicago plays host to a cluster of academic institutions with their doors, students, and faculty open to participating in the wider community. The relative affordability of the city is a not insignificant factor as well. Artists can survive here on less then they can in comparably large US cities, making it easier to find time and space for in-depth, exploratory work. Upon arriving in the Chicago scene (as I did a bit over a year ago) one discovers a community willing to try out ideas and enter into spontaneous, non-strategic collaborations and conversant, musical friendships. Like a real community, which is a wonderful thing.

*Australian vocalist, researcher, and curator Jessica Aszodi has been praised for her “…virtuosic whimsy” (New York Times) & “…upmost security and power…” (Chicago Tribune), while performing with ensembles, orchestras, opera companies and festivals across the US, Australia, and internationally, in notated conventional, new, experimental, and improvised music contexts.

Smart Museum

Insider Tip: There are many art, architecture, film and literary spaces that regularly include new or experimental music in their programming—places like the Arts Club of Chicago, Black Cinema House, Conversations at the Edge at the Siskel Film Center, the Graham Foundation, Renaissance Society, Smart Museum, Stony Island Arts Bank, and Poetry Foundation.

What Makes Chicago Great: Audiences here are terrific. Very supportive, enthusiastic, diverse. They’re not just, or even primarily “music people,” but people from design, video, visual arts and a range of creative fields who want to hear something different, even if they’re not particularly schooled in a tradition. I’m sure that’s partly due to the varied places that include this music in their schedules. Our visiting artists consistently talk about how they’re blown away by the numbers who attend and how they feel the crowd is really focused on what’s going on. I see the same thing at all kinds of shows.

*Andrew Fenchel is the director of Lampo, which organizes experimental music and intermedia projects.

Chicago is a painfully segregated place, and the new music scene is no exception. With so many national news stories focusing on the violence that plagues the city, visitors can be nervous to tread off the beaten path and away from the shiny, gentrified Loop. But as a recent Chicago-to-D.C. transplant, one of my biggest regrets is that I didn’t spend more time soaking up the incredible programming happening around Theaster Gates’s South Side arts empire. (Sure, I was a far-North-sider without a car, but that’s no excuse.) Check out places like the renovated Stony Island Arts Bank (where they do free tours most Saturdays at 1 p.m.), Black Cinema House, and BING Art Books, where they’ve been hosting musical evenings each Wednesday and will probably have some new stuff going in October. Gates is an inspiring figure in creative placemaking and artist-led, community-focused development.

You should also make a point to see what’s up at INTUIT Gallery for Intuitive & Outsider Art, where composer, guitarist and visual artist Shawn Lucas has been curating an interesting performance series called FLAK. This cozy, transit-accessible gallery venue is one of my favorite places to hear (and perform) new work in Chicago, and FLAK is an exciting example of a functional partnership between a musical curator and a “non-musical” space.

For creative, grassroots coverage of Chicago new music events, check out Cacophony magazine, which is run by Chicago musicians Bethany Younge and Lia Kohl. I’m especially excited about the geomancy fortune-telling column they’ve just launched.

*After eight years in Chicago, Ellen McSweeney now lives with her wife in Washington, D.C., where she’s working the singing violinist angle and writing a book on musicians, trauma, and loss. Her duo, Handful of Smoke, will release their first album next year.

Insider tip: The Frequency Series at Constellation, curated by Peter Margasak, has been a crucial part of the burgeoning contemporary music scene in Chicago. Peter’s series includes a wide array of styles and presentations of music and sound, which contributes to a more inclusive and nuanced idea of contemporary music.

I love that I can hear wonderful presentations of piano pieces by Feldman one week, then electronic music or a multi-speaker presentation the following week.

*Olivia Block is a media artist and composer based in Chicago. She creates studio-based compositions, performances for concerts, site-specific sound installations, scores for orchestra and chamber groups, and cinematic sound designs.

Insider tip: Experimental Sound Studio, including its off-site programs like Florasonic and its Creative Audio Archive. Thirty years of programming, production assistance, professional services, and advocacy for exploratory sound art and music. The website says it all, including program descriptions, info on production services, links to media, and access to the Creative Audio Archive.

*Lou Mallozzi is an interdisciplinary artist, cultural organizer, and educator whose work often deploys sound in performances, installations, improvised music, fixed media works, and others forms of cultural exploration. He co-founded Experimental Sound Studio in 1986 and recently left his position there as executive director. He is on the faculty of the sound department of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Mary B. Galvin Recital Hall. Photo by Tom Rossiter

Insider tip: Mary B. Galvin Hall is one of three new performance spaces at Northwestern University, in their recently opened Ryan Center for the Arts complex in Evanston, Illinois. It is an acoustically wonderful hall with a beautiful wooden interior, comfortable seats that hold four hundred people, a large projection screen, and recording capabilities. Better yet, Northwestern has an on-site parking lot that’s free on weekdays after 4 p.m. and all day on weekends, which is a luxury in comparison to parking rates in downtown Chicago. For me, however, the feature that tops the rest is its onstage floor-to-ceiling glass windows with spectacular views of Lake Michigan and the Chicago skyline. Depending on the weather and the time of day, audience members can witness nature’s own performances: seagulls flying, clouds drifting across the sky, the undulations of the water, the changes of color in the sky as dusk approaches, and even fantastic lightning storms (which adds great drama to a concert!). For Northwestern’s talented students, faculty, and guest performance artists, and particularly for concertgoers who live north of Chicago, Galvin Hall is a wonderful addition to Chicagoland’s concert venues.

*After teaching composition full-time at Roosevelt University for sixteen years, Stacy Garrop stepped down from her position this past spring to begin a freelance career. Her works range from orchestral and choral to a wide array of chamber groups.

Great Moments (for me) in Chicago New Music History

Posted on October 6, 2016 by Patricia Morehead - Articles, Commentary

When I arrived in Chicago in the fall of 1984, I registered as a returning scholar in composition at The University of Chicago. At that time, the first incarnation of New Music Chicago published a monthly newsletter mailed to its more than 300 members about activities in the Chicago area. By 1985 I found myself elected president of American Women Composers-Midwest and vice-president of New Music Chicago. While I was president of AWC-Midwest, we produced 18 events in one year, with the two most important events being concerts at Kennedy King College featuring six African American women composers—including a full orchestra performing Florence Price’s Symphony in E minor—and a concert of AWC-Midwest composers presented in Washington, D.C.

I have experienced score selections where the guys would throw out any score submitted by a female and I would sneak them back in.

During my New Music Chicago days, I remember having 600 scores in my living room submitted for their annual new music festival, out of which we had to choose some 30 scores to be performed over three days. One of my fondest memories of NMC days was having Ralph Shapey take charge of the selection committee. He was so full of energy and ran the fairest way of judging scores I have ever experienced. With other committees I have experienced score selections where the guys would throw out any score submitted by a female and I would sneak them back in again. Also with Shapey, we never conversed about the scores with each other as we listened. We each wrote down our own honest opinions and then compared notes after a group of several scores had been evaluated. We were almost always in agreement.

Another wonderful moment was the three-year existence of NEMO (New European Music Overseas) in the ’90s motivated by a young composer from Belgium while he and his wife lived in Chicago. Pierre Boulez became our honorary president. Peter Gena was artistic director; he is a composer from the Art Institute of Chicago and was organizer of New Music America on Navy Pier before I arrived in Chicago. I was the chair/work horse, so to speak. We had the financial support of the Goethe Institute as well as the French and Italian Consulates. Goethe Institute brought in some wonderful groups of musicians and composers, as did the Italian Cultural Institute and the French Consulate. We presented Chicago composers along side our European colleagues. It was a very exciting time and attracted much critical and audience attention for newly composed music on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.

CUBE Contemporary Chamber Ensemble through the years

As founder of CUBE Contemporary Chamber Ensemble in the fall of 1987 with my husband Philip Morehead (and not affiliated with a university), I performed/organized more than 250 concerts. Janice Misurell-Mitchell and I were co-artistic directors of CUBE for the next 20 years. Christie Miller, a clarinetist, continued to run CUBE for the following five years. Our main focus was to feature the music of living Chicago composers, but we also included important composers from the United States, Europe, and beyond. John von Rhein, music critic for the Chicago Tribune, named Janice and me as Chicagoans of the Year for our creative/innovative programming, a wonderful and unexpected honor. Under Christie Miller’s leadership, we honored Gunther Schuller with a portrait concert at the Jazz Institute of Chicago, M. William Karlins at Pianoforte Chicago, and important opera composers Thea Musgrave at the Merit School of Music and William Bolcom at the Elizabeth Stein Gallery in the Chicago Fine Arts Building. We were very fortunate to have many performances on WFMT Live from Studio One and wonderful critical coverage from John von Rhein of the Tribune, Wynne Delacoma of the Sun-Times, and many reviews from Ted Shen in the Tribune and the Reader.

The AACM may be the most important musical development in Chicago.

The Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians has existed for longer than all of us and I believe may be the most important musical development in Chicago of all, in my personal opinion. Fifty years ago, a group of South Side jazz musicians found themselves backed against a wall. Clubs were closing, radio stations were going pop, America’s musical interests were shifting elsewhere. If these Chicago jazz artists had given in to inevitably changing musical tastes, jazz might have devolved into a nostalgia bath or succumbed to the commercial excesses of the fusion era that followed. Instead, the Chicago musicians created the AACM, invented original musical languages, created intriguing new instruments, crafted novel ways of penning scores, and otherwise defied long-standing presumptions about how music was supposed to be made. And though they didn’t necessarily intend it, their breakthroughs opened the door to new ways of creating, staging, and perceiving music. Chicago and the rest of the musical planet will celebrate the AACM’s 50th throughout this year, a fitting response considering this organization’s global profile and impact.

I am so proud of Chicago and the many new music groups that have since come into being and are flourishing today. Ear Taxi is a wonderful festival event bringing together the many groups that make Chicago an amazing creative place to be.

Patricia Morehead

Patricia Morehead, composer, and oboist, is the founder and former artistic director of CUBE Contemporary Chamber Ensemble. She is past president of the International Alliance of Women in Music and American Women Composers Midwest. She made her Carnegie Recital Hall debut in 1977 and has concertized actively in Brazil, Canada, Europe, China and the USA. She recently retired from her positions on the adjunct faculty of Columbia College, Chicago, and Dominican University, River Forest, and she was for 17 years leader of the Composers Forum at the Merit School of Music.

Uniquely Together: The Chicago Paradox

Posted on October 5, 2016 by Seth Boustead - Analysis, Articles

The Ear Taxi Festival coincides almost exactly with the 100th anniversary of the publication of Carl Sandburg’s seminal collection Chicago Poems, which—while wholly unintentional—is still a neat coincidence. Sandburg did as much as anyone to cement Chicago’s reputation as a city of rough-hewn individuals who created a great metropolis through physical labor and are justifiably proud of it, and I see Ear Taxi in a way as the musical manifestation of this: a celebration of the individual composers and performers who have created a bustling contemporary music scene and who are, if you missed the posts on social media, also proud of it.

Five years after Sandburg’s poems were published, Ben Hecht would paint the city with similar strokes in his great collection of stories, which was later published as 1,001 Afternoons in Chicago. In Hecht though, the rugged individualism of Sandburg is combined with a search for a common thread—or motif, in his words—that connects everyone he wrote about. To me, this is an impulse also present in Ear Taxi, as the festival is an attempt to bring all of the disparate styles and the whole tangled mass of creative musical energy in the city under one metaphorical roof. This uniquely Chicago paradox has always fascinated me. It’s a city of individuals with an entrepreneurial streak and a DIY mentality who work hard to build from the ground up, but who are also very interested in finding their shared identity.

Over the years, I’ve seen numerous attempts to codify Chicago’s various arts scenes. Whether it’s film or music summits, the Architecture Biennial, the Sonic Impact Festival, Chicago Improv Fest, Lake FX, the Chicago International Music and Movies Festival, or one of many others, the intention is to show off the entire range of any given art form happening in the city and put it in one place. As another example, a few years ago Boeing donated a large sum of money to the Elastic Arts Foundation to create chicagomusic.org, which was meant to be a one-stop shop for all live music in the city. But, though their efforts to include every performance in Chicago were nothing less than heroic, the task proved impossible as there is simply too much happening. The quixotic attempt, however, is uniquely Chicago. One thinks immediately of architect and urban planner Daniel Burnham’s famous maxim to make no small plans.

There is something innate that causes Chicago to celebrate the individual while searching restlessly for shared identity, and I believe this has led to an unusually tolerant arts scene.

This constant search to find a shared identity among disparate individuals reminds me of a story in Plato’s Symposium. In the work, Socrates, Aristophanes, and the boys are up late drinking and, as boys will do, they start talking about the origins of love. Aristophanes says that in the beginning humans were not individual entities but two separate people fused together which, according to him, was actually a happy arrangement. Unfortunately though, as in so many other mythological tales, we somehow offended the gods and Zeus promptly sent one of his ever-ready thunderbolts to cleave us in half. Now we spend our lives searching to be made whole again.

I believe the metaphor transcends geographic and cultural boundaries. Chicago is a famously divided city yet there is something innate that causes it to celebrate the individual while searching restlessly for shared identity, and I believe this has led to an unusually tolerant arts scene.

The style wars did not hit Chicago as hard as in other places. Composers in Chicago didn’t always approve of other composers, and they didn’t always believe certain directions were fruitful or had artistic merit. But when the call to unity came, it was generally heeded. Sure, for the most part we’re still very much clumped along academic lines: if you are a composer who went to Northwestern, for example, most likely it’s Northwestern groups who play your music. But that’s natural. What’s unique about Chicago is that there is always a basic assumption that everyone, regardless of affiliation, is adding to a collective scene and that their contribution to that scene is important.

I’ve seen this tolerance firsthand numerous times, but I really put it to the test in 2004 when I created an organization called Accessible Contemporary Music. “Accessible” isn’t exactly a hip word now, but it was practically obscene back then. I got a decent amount of crap for it, naturally, but when leaders of Chicago’s new music community got together to decide how we could all best cooperate to mutual benefit, there was a seat for me at the table. I’m not entirely certain that this would have happened in another city. It’s not that Chicago is more enlightened than other places, it’s just that all voices are welcome as it continues this interesting search for a collective identity.

It’s not that Chicago is more enlightened than other places, it’s just that all voices are welcome as it continues this interesting search for a collective identity.

When we sat down in the basement of Symphony Center in 2005 to formulate what would eventually become New Music Chicago, interestingly enough most of us at that time did not know there had been a previous organization with the same name that flourished in the 1980s under the leadership of Patricia Morehead (who was also the artistic director of CUBE, Chicago’s second contemporary music ensemble) and George Flynn (whose Chicago Soundings series started at the Green Mill jazz club in the 1970s and continues today). Ours was not a conscious attempt to resurrect the former organization, but an example of the city’s latent urge toward unity manifesting itself through us. To paraphrase Voltaire, if New Music Chicago didn’t exist it would be necessary to invent it.

Chicago in many ways is a kind of self-contained universe, a place for artists to thrive by turning inward. I believe that in many ways this is because of the vitality of the ubiquitous storefront theater scene. If you live anywhere in the city, it’s unlikely you live more than a few blocks from a small theater. But the small theaters get big reviews every bit as often as the Goodman or Steppenwolf do, and the small storefronts are widely considered to be the place for innovative, edgy productions. The goal isn’t to send a production to New York or London, the focus is instead on the work itself.

You can see this in the visual arts as well. Chicago’s most important art movement may be the Chicago Imagists, which includes several interestingly named sub movements like the Hairy Who, the Non-Plussed Some, and the Monster Roster. Most of these artists never left Chicago and, as such, they created unique local styles and are kind of the epitome of a bonded group of distinct individuals. They represent the proud Chicago tradition of loudly not caring about the goings-on in other cities, and they cite staying in Chicago as having given them the freedom to develop according to their innermost desires rather than larger trends.

So it’s not all that surprising that, as the contemporary music scene in Chicago has begun to really thrive, it has grown up along similar lines. Though the downtown Loop was once the go-to concert destination, performances now frequently happen throughout the city, mirroring the storefront theater trend. Over the years, as new ensembles have sprung up like musical weeds, I’ve seen shows in former mansions, furniture stores, cabaret clubs, jazz clubs, empty storefronts—even an empty restaurant that had gone out of business.

Chicago may never find the unity that it’s searching for, but the search has created a unique arts scene where its individuals can flourish and be truly creative.

When Ralph Shapey moved to Chicago in 1964 his colleagues widely assumed he was moving to a contemporary music desert but, even assuming that were true at the time, it’s certainly not the case anymore. Composers and performers are moving to the city every bit as much to be part of the scene as to go to school, and those who move to the city for their studies are increasingly sticking around after they finish. In just the last five years, the number of emails I get about new music performances has increased three-fold and it shows no sign of stopping. The range of music being performed is dizzying.

Ear Taxi is the most ambitious attempt yet to bring all of this disparate activity and unruly DIY individualism under one roof, and the audacity is something at which Sandburg, Hecht, and Burnham would have nodded approvingly—probably through a thick haze of cigar smoke. Chicago may never find the unity that it’s searching for, but the search has created a unique arts scene where its individuals can flourish and be truly creative.

Seth Boustead is a composer, radio host, arts manager and writer, concert producer, in-demand speaker and visionary with the goal of revolutionizing how and where classical music is performed and how it is perceived by the general public.

Chicago New Music as assemblage; or, why are we doing this?

Posted on October 4, 2016 by Michael Lewanski - Analysis, Articles

I realize that there is an imbedded irony in a person who lives and works in Chicago new music making this observation, but I’ll do it anyway: it seems like people outside of Chicago talk a lot about new music in Chicago. Why is this?

From my vantage point—the lives-here, works-here one—I want to guess at an answer by saying tentative things, stutter while I do so, and use the shrugging shoulders emoji at the end of what I say. I want to make a weak claim, not a strong one; I don’t want to assert that what is happening in Chicago is truly unique or mystically special or importantly revolutionary. I don’t have the expertise to be able to make such a claim (and, actually, a suspicion of expertise is a strain in a mode of artistic production here). What I want to hypothesize is that Chicago is a particularly concentrated expression of confluences in current culture, and that the evidence of this is both the explosive energy of the city’s new music community in recent years and also how hard its characteristics are to pin down. This essay (in both senses: “a piece of writing,” but also “try” or “effort”) is one of a number of attempts I’ve made to theorize Chicago new music, and inherent in these attempts is—as an axiomatic presupposition surely, an ever-present anxiety maybe—an awareness that I could be wrong. Going a bit further: my tendency to theorize, my hypothesizing impulse, my weak-claim-making, is a very Chicago-new-music-esque characteristic.

What comes to mind when I describe the character of Chicago new music are words like “provisional” and “transient”and “conditional” and “contingent” and “fragmented.”

What I want to hypothesize is that Chicago is a particularly concentrated expression of confluences in current culture.

A quintessential work of Chicago new music is something like George Lewis’s Assemblage, which he wrote for Ensemble Dal Niente (which I conduct) in 2013. It’s quintessential to Chicago new music because it was written for the Bowling Green New Music Festival by a Chicago-born improviser/scholar/composer/computer musician living in New York for a new music ensemble started ten years ago by a bunch of mostly students without jobs, composed in a style that references many other musics, and cast in a form that encourages the listener to “catch the bus and go along for the ride.” Thus, the city of Chicago is essential to the work’s creation, but its presence cannot be readily pointed to. The essence of its Chicago-ness, if one may say so, is the not-exactly-there-ness of Chicago. George was born in Chicago, cut his teeth as an experimental musician in the AACM, left to go elsewhere (Yale and Paris and San Diego and New York), has turned to notated composition only in relatively recent years. Ensemble Dal Niente (literally, “from nothing”) was initially a bunch of musicians—mostly from Michigan or Indiana or Texas or Georgia or Canada or Kentucky, and not too many of whom were actually born in Chicago—just trying to make stuff work because existing things didn’t satisfy. The Bowling Green New Music Festival is sort of close to Chicago I guess, kind of. “Both the title and the content of Assemblage refer to a type of visual artmaking that recombines and recontextualizes collections of natural and human-made objects,” writes George. Everything about the piece—its composer, the musicians for whom it was written, the form, its external references, the listener’s experience, the circumstances of its production—is provisional. It is the instantiation of the contingent, if such a thing isn’t a contradiction in terms.

To be less slippery, I buy a basic Marxian approach to culture (articulated and developed by, for instance, Adorno and other Frankfurt School theorists) that “means grasping[…] forms, styles and meanings as the products of a particular history” (to quote Terry Eagleton), as the results of a set of socio-economic conditions. It’s not merely that works tend to be about their place and time, or that composers consciously engage with political issues (say, the Eroica symphony or Shostakovich’s wartime works or John Adams’s On the Transmigration of Souls); it’s that every facet of culture creates the conditions for a piece of music, and this happens on many levels, including (and especially importantly) unconscious ones. We have a particular and peculiar situation in Chicago: it’s a very large city—the largest in a large region—that attracts intelligent, talented young people from this region and beyond. It has famous performing and visual arts institutions with histories of being famous. But these same institutions suffer from a certain second city-ism that makes them anxious about their own prestige and causes them to look to more famous arts institutions (in other cities) for art, and thus, they have only recently started paying close attention to the local new music scene. It doesn’t have many presenters, so the venue situation is often difficult. (Sure, there are a few staple places where you might go to sample various flavors of experimental music, and plenty of it: Experimental Sounds Studio or Elastic Arts or the Hideout, say; or famously, Constellation, for instance; this is mostly due to the hard work of an amazingly dedicated staff led by the inexhaustible Peter Margasak.) It’s hard to find funding. And while it’s not hard to make a living (it’s not as expensive as many East or West Coast metropolises), it’s hard making a living in music in Chicago. There are only a few universities and full-time orchestras, and there are a lot of people.

Chicago is simultaneously highly cosmopolitan and deeply provincial; this can be, depending on how you parse it, a painful contradiction to live in or a fruitful tension with which to engage.

Chicago is simultaneously highly cosmopolitan and deeply provincial; this can be, depending on how you parse it, a painful contradiction to live in or a fruitful tension with which to engage. Either way, these oppositions prompt the asking of a basic question: why are we doing this? Put another way, or perhaps to offer a provisional answer: if we have an intelligent community of musicians, audience members, and composers, yet the possibility of creating a sustainable, full-time career seems remote, we’d better do something that is really meaningful to us rather than exhaust ourselves chasing a phantasmagoric notion of “accessibility.” The financial stakes are often low. This is neither to promote a romanticized starving-artist mythos updated for the 21st-century US nor to suggest that well-funded art here can’t be authentic; it is to say that the fact that people here mostly aren’t either a) stringently competing for a place in a saturated PR/marketing landscape or b) doing all they can to scrounge up the most minimal, indifferent, bewildered of audiences, has a defining impact on the character, structure, and style of the art that’s made. The drive to specialize in order to compete, to niche-ify, is less urgent; people seem free to develop authentically.

This pushes a group like, say, Mocrep to play their instruments less and pursue performance art more. It pushes a group like Dal Niente in all kinds of different directions (a collaboration with Deerhoof, a portrait album of George Lewis, the performance of work by as many local composers as we can manage, plus lots of recent European music). Third Coast Percussion has begun writing pieces collaboratively, somehow finding time to do so amid a nomadic touring schedule. Spektral Quartet has made an art of the low-culture/high-culture juxtaposition with its Sampler Pack series. The Chicago Arts Initiative is a group of high school students who perform and compose collectively, founded by Dal Niente guitarist Jesse Langen. I read the work of local tape label/performance collective(?) Parlour Tapes+ as partially a non-high-culture re-imagining of the historical avant-garde (meant in Peter Burger’s sense). Chicago composers explore stylistic ideas of dizzying dissimilarity; the Northwestern doctoral composition recitals from November 2015 to May 2016 alone are a worthy dissertation topic. (If you don’t believe me, do check out the head-spinningly diverse aesthetics of David Reminick, Jenna Lyle, LJ White, Alex Temple, Chris Fisher-Lochhead, and Katie Young.) Do you find the prospect of exploring this series of links daunting? If so, welcome to my world.

[I have an impulse to put here some sort of “full disclosure” statement about who of the above are personal friends about whom I cannot be objective, but the truth is I know all of these people. This is not just okay, but actually great; I do not feign a non-existent objectivity or an impossible and undesirable disinterest.]

Eliza Brown wrote Prospect and Refuge (video here) for Quince Contemporary Vocal Ensemble in 2015. Here we go again: Eliza is a Chicago composer in the sense that she is from Philadelphia, teaches at DePauw in Indiana, but attended Northwestern and worked in Chicago for many years. Quince is a Chicago(ish?) group in the sense that only one of its members actually lived in Chicago at the time of this work’s writing but many of them are in Chicago often. “The result is an experimental music-theater piece, primarily intended for re-purposed or non-traditional performance venues, that depicts four private individuals meeting in a public space. The dramaturgy of the work—how it is interpreted and staged by the performers—is to be adapted according to the social history and/or function of each performance space,” says Eliza. This is a Chicago piece in multiple senses: it is written by and for Chicago musicians (“Chicago” as just described), and it has at its structural core a provisionality (can a core be provisional?). But paradoxically, it’s also just deeply structurally concerned with the place and time of its staging. This is not a work that is reproducible and commodifiable: you can’t find it in a Starbucks in Houston; rather, you might, but it would be a different piece. That Zach Moore wrote a similar piece for my DePaul School of Music group, Ensemble 20+, just months before, is telling. About the piece, “???” (Zach says, “I’m bad at titles”; I’m not sure I agree), he says:

I got into it for the obvious reason that a piece takes places at a specific time and place, and that is obviously a huge part of the piece (what the venue is like, who is there, what exterior sounds and movements are happening) yet they are somewhat uncontrollable, so to do it again would be a “different” piece. […] I don’t see reproducibility as any part of my practice. So, when I do a piece that’s performed once, I feel like it acts as a community event, more so than the premiere of “my” piece.

In March 2015, my friends Seth Brodsky and Philipp Blume held an enormous festival of the music of mathias spahlinger (spahlinger writes in militant lower-case letters) for his 70th birthday, in which I participated with my DePaul orchestra and Ensemble Dal Niente. It was a typical Chicago effort, mixing the DIY with the institutional. The Goethe Institute and the University of Chicago and DePaul University were among the kind, supportive sponsors, but we made every dollar count. The festival included an ambitious string of performances, a thoughtful symposium, and an elegant program book. This was an event that was simpatico with the experimental, make-it-work character of our new music scene; perhaps a proposed resistance to a commodified concert-going and -making, a different way of doing things expressed in the work of a composer with many years experiencing thinking about precisely that question. Says spahlinger about his doppelt bejaht (“doubly affirmed”): etudes for orchestra without conductor:

artworks too are manufactured and distributed according to the conditions of the market, and more to the point: their innermost constitution is itself dependent on the means of production, inculcated in power relations and their corresponding patterns of thinking. […]
playing instructions for doppelt bejaht were devised with the aim of focusing the musician’s attention and responsibility on the whole—a whole which, since it involves new music, can only be contradictory, open whole, changeable in itself and actually changing itself.

spahlinger is an exciting figure to me not because he’s a Famous German Composer^TM, but because he’s a person who has simply been granted the time and means to work on these various issues in depth. What drew me to him is that his life’s work does a more thorough and complete job of approaching cultural problems in our world and recent past than my own analysis does. His critiques of commodification are penetrating and moving as musical experiences.

The festival was roundly criticized in the Chicago Tribune for not having been well-enough advertised.

so, why are we doing this? music (not: is, but) can be a way to communicate (and to understand by ourselves), what we are, want to be, and will be by finding out, what is our way.

spahlinger wrote to me after the festival, in response to certain of my soul-searching queries:

you ask some first and last questions and i take this very seriously by saying: try to give yourself preliminary answers[…]
so, why are we doing this? music (not: is, but) can be a way to communicate (and to understand by ourselves), what we are, want to be, and will be by finding out, what is our way. [Author’s note: read this sentence a few more times; it’s worth your while.]
sorry, this is not very specific.

Here I feel that I have reached a satisfying conclusion; I have sketched the essence, or the rather, the process, of Chicago new music’s transient state. Yet I must say more. On the one hand, everything I write above is consonant with my experience and so deeply felt that I’ve restlessly redefined my career trajectory because I feel inspired by the exciting work I see on a daily basis. I feel that I have theorized in a nuanced, sympathetic, friendly manner the work of my colleagues. On the other hand, it’s painfully clear that there’s an awful lot I’m leaving out. I’m aware that I haven’t mentioned a number of Chicago new music organizations: Chicago Composers Orchestra, Fulcrum Point New Music Project, Eighth Blackbird, Contempo, CSO’s MusicNOW. I recognize that, even in the list of organizations I’m leaving out, still more remain left out. What I initially called “a weak claim, not a strong one,” is shown to be all the weaker. There are vast numbers of complicating factors, and only the embrace of these will give us a fleeting glimpse of the reality of the situation: that there is not a unified whole to be grasped.

Chicago new(?) music is no longer emerging, it is emerged.

I said earlier in this piece that “[famous arts] institutions […] have only recently started paying close attention to the local new music scene.” This is true. Ensemble Dal Niente, Third Coast Percussion, New Music Chicago have just entered their second decade. Those groups are no longer new; Chicago new(?) music is no longer emerging, it is emerged. Famous arts institutions are beginning to pay attention to local new music (for instance: CSO’s MusicNow, led by Samuel Adams and Elizabeth Ogonek, has commissioned Katie Young, Kyle Vegter of Manual Cinema, Marcos Balter, Sam Pluta—all current or former Chicago residents). Thus, my analysis here can also be described by all of the adjectives I initially used to describe Chicago new music: Provisional. Transient. Conditional. Contingent. Fragmented. This is a scene entering a new phase of existence, and the socio-economic circumstances will—unavoidably—alter its style, forms, media, and contents. I don’t know whether it will be for better or for worse, and I don’t know if the categories of “better” and “worse” will make sense as analytical tools. Honestly, I just have no idea what’s going to happen.

Michael Lewanski

Chicago-based conductor, educator, and writer Michael Lewanski is conductor of Ensemble Dal Niente and assistant professor of Instrumental Ensembles at the DePaul University School of Music. He wishes to thank Deidre Huckabay for her help refining ideas in this essay.

Why the 21st Century is the Most Exciting Time for Music

Posted on October 3, 2016 by Frank J. Oteri - Articles, Commentary

This essay will appear in the program book for the Ear Taxi Festival (October 5-10, 2016) in Chicago.

At only 16 years in, it’s still a bit presumptuous to make sweeping statements about the 21st century, but I’d like to posit a grand claim: our new century is the most exciting time to be making and listening to music. And unless all our channels of communication suddenly get destroyed, either through an unforeseen force of nature or some man-made catastrophe, the sheer number of possibilities and opportunities for access that have been steadily growing for decades will continue and most likely increase in the coming years. Our current state of ubiquity should remain “the new normal” for the foreseeable and forehearable future.

For listeners, there’s more music to hear than ever before–and it’s happening all over the world. Of course, it always has, but nowadays, it’s not limited to “national” “styles.” Also, global travel has become much more convenient, relatively speaking, and so with enough time, money, and overzealousness, a fanatical fan could actually trek the globe to hear extremely exciting music every day of the year. Much easier, we now can also experience a great deal of music happening in all these places without leaving our homes. And when we do, we can keep listening on our smartphones! Since music from literally any place and time can now be equally with us in the here and now, the once seemingly impenetrable dichotomies of domestic vs. foreign, new vs. old, and us vs. them have become completely porous and ultimately meaningless. It is all equally ours to enjoy, as well as to be the source of inspiration for our own creative impulses.

As interpreters and creators, we can literally do anything we want. In such an environment, it is no longer possible to be out of step with the zeitgeist. We no longer should feel stifled by so many of the other binaries that used to divide us aesthetically–e.g. old-fashioned vs. out-in-left-field, traditional vs. avant-garde, non-commercial vs. popular. There are few anecdotes that encapsulate today’s omnivorous catholicism more effectively than something Seth Colter Walls wrote about 2016 Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Henry Threadgill back in 2012:

Asked about what’s caught his ear of late, he identifies some recent Elliott Carter music for piano, as well as a Beyoncé song that his daughter brought into his life.

While exciting music is now being made everywhere, some places have been transformational loci for decades. It’s no small coincidence that Threadgill was born and raised in Chicago and that his career began there as one of the original members of the AACM (Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians), who were pioneers of 21st-century music as early as the 1960s. AACM’s founder, composer Muhal Richard Abrams, epitomized the AACM philosophy when I spoke with him for NewMusicBox earlier this year:

If we say music, it could be anywhere. It’s just music. The next question, what type of music? Okay. No type of music. Just sound.

Though both of these two maverick elder statesmen moved to New York City decades ago, and therefore neither will participate in the Ear Taxi Festival in Chicago, their all-embracing spirit pervades this unprecedented week-long musical immersion. Over the course of six days, the music of 88 different composers will be presented. More than half of them (56 to be exact) are emerging composers. The only common ground they share is that they all transmit their ideas through music notation. Among the works being performed, 53 will be world premieres. All in all, it comes to more than 8 hours of totally brand new music.

Over the short span of time that we call the 21st century, a new breed of interpreter has arisen—polyglots who can speak and be understood in any musical language. It’s no surprise that given Chicago’s legacy as a hotbed for open-minded creativity, it is now one of the epicenters for such interpreters and more than 300 of them (soloists as well as 25 ensembles) will be involved in these performances. It is why of all the places in the world I can be, this week I am here!

Frank J. Oteri

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