Category: Columns

Polyphony and Storytelling: A Conversation with Nate Wooley on Solo Improvisation

Posted on August 20, 2018 by Josh Modney - Columns, NewMusicBox

As a listener, I’ve long found myself seeking musical experiences that generate a kind of sustained ecstatic energy from a foundation of rigorous thought and technique. Gaining access to that plane as a solo improviser is a particularly challenging task. It takes a special type of artist who engages deeply with the details of sound, upending instrumental conventions while setting boundaries and reference points (as if to say, “Here is a trumpet, unadorned—let’s see what I can do with it.”) and who is able to transfer an emotional experience through the instrument to the listener. Part of what makes trumpeter/composer/writer Nate Wooley such an extraordinary musician is his ability to achieve all of those things in performance. He is a true sonic explorer who has redefined the capabilities of his instrument while making profound spiritual connections with his listeners.

Nate Wooley’s music and relationship to his instrument has been a huge inspiration to me as a violinist.

Nate’s music and relationship to his instrument has been a huge inspiration to me as a violinist. Nate wrote an eloquent introduction to the liner notes of my debut solo violin album, Engage (New Focus Recordings – August 3, 2018), and graciously agreed to have a conversation with me about solo improvisation for NewMusicBox. I’m very grateful to Nate for taking the time to offer his take on some thoughts I’ve had since recording the solo improvised material on Engage, and to share a veritable masterclass on improvisation as part of my series of posts.

Nate Wooley playing a trumpet (photo by Ziga Koritnik)

Nate Wooley (photo by Ziga Koritnik)

Josh Modney: Polyphony is something I think about a lot in solo playing. The violin is not really built to realize densely polyphonic textures, so there’s a natural curiosity to want to do more with it. I’ve also in a very broad sense always been more interested in harmony than melody. So those are two factors pulling me away from the traditional role of violin as a singing, melodic instrument. The traditional role of trumpet is quite similar, so I’m wondering if you could share some thoughts about your relationship to polyphony in your solo work.

Nate Wooley: That’s consistently been an area of my playing that has provided the particular kind of frustration that can generate new directions—kind of a positive within a negative. I have also always loved harmony, but my sense of how (and when) dissonance should resolve has never fallen within a certain tradition of counterpoint or polyphony. Even when I was concentrating on the linear playing that is expected of a jazz player, I liked to stretch the tension as far as I could, or find a place to resolve that was awkward or uncomfortable. That always felt so much more human to me than pounding a chord tone on the strong beats; nothing in life is that foursquare, so why would music—which is inherently supposed to be an expression of life—be so rigid in the way it ebbed and flowed?

“Nothing in life is that foursquare, so why would music be so rigid…”

When I started playing solo, of course, the whole conception of harmony and polyphony had to change, as I didn’t have a rhythm section or other line to play against. It took me a long time to come to grips with that. It takes an incredible mind to captivate an audience with the brilliance of their harmonic mind through monophonic playing…and my mind ain’t one of those. I grappled with it in a lot of different ways: through electronics/feedback, extreme extended technique, use of the voice or other parts of my body. But, a certain breakthrough came during a tour with percussionist Paul Lytton. Someone told me after the show that they appreciated the way I could unfold a single sound and present the micro-events within that single note. I hadn’t thought about the way a note on the trumpet wavers in its timbral quality or overtone production, but after that comment (and certainly playing music by Eliane Radigue and Annea Lockwood in recent years) I started paying attention to a certain harmonic motion contained in those micro-movements. The motion, density, and velocity of those small details produce their own tension and release, and that became the center of how I think—not only in solo playing, but in every situation. Of course, the playing becomes broader than just that, and solo playing encompasses all the techniques I listed above (feedback, et al.) but everything now is really filtered through an attempt to give the inner workings of every sound, no matter how short or long it may be, the attention it deserves.

Nate Wooley solo at Something Else! Festival of Creative Music 2017

JM: The idea of harmonic motion contained in micro-movements totally resonates with me, and I love the way that you work with those kinds of textures. I remember in particular being inspired by the way you are able to make an extraordinarily long and continuous drone by circular breathing and using a harmon mute with a metal plate. The sound is modified unpredictably by the circular breathing while you make specific modifications with the metal plate. It sets up a feedback loop between things that you are controlling and things that can’t be controlled, generating a wealth of musical possibilities.

Hearing you do that was one of the musical experiences that sent me down a path looking for ways to translate or “map” brass and wind sounds onto the violin. The violin is such an old and thoroughly researched instrument, it can be a challenge to find means of expression that aren’t tied to the lineage of Western classical music from Bach to Lachenmann and beyond. That lineage is really important to me and forms the backbone of my practice, but I also want to fold in new possibilities for musical expression. By mapping things like the micro-variation of a trumpeter’s circular breathing and the intensity of a saxophonist’s multiphonics onto the violin, what started as an attempt to make a copy of something develops into something different and, hopefully, fresh on the instrument.

The violin is such an old and thoroughly researched instrument.

I keep on coming back to this thought about the ways that attempts at polyphony dating back to Bach may have informed my own improvisation practice, like a “spiral” of influences being mapped onto one another. This idea was spurred by a conversation with an improviser from a jazz background who told me that Bach’s solo cello suites were his inspiration for cultivating the technique to make chorale textures on the saxophone using multiphonics. Bach’s solo string music is itself a mapping of contrapuntal keyboard textures onto violin and cello. The evolution of polyphonic writing for the violin can be traced directly through the lineage of classical repertoire from Bach through Paganini, Bartók, etc. But as an improviser on the violin, I find it interesting to look at this alternate trajectory or “spiral”—Bach maps keyboard polyphony onto strings, which is in turn mapped onto winds by adventurous players, and finally mapped back onto violin after many layers of translation.

I’m not sure if there is an analog to this “spiral” idea in your experience as a trumpeter, but would love to hear your thoughts. I’m also curious to what extent, if at all, you might consider the genesis of your own highly detailed sounds to represent a “mapping” of polyphony onto your monophonic instrument?

“My grandmother could make me feel more loved by tunelessly humming just under her breath than when she would use the words ‘I love you.’”

NW: Part of that answer probably lies in my above comments about the polyphony inherent in micro-events but, in my history, there has been a different approach to mapping. I had a period when I worked at mapping piano (which I played for years before playing trumpet) or other polyphonic instruments onto the trumpet, but the real moments of change happened for me when I stopped trying to think of music at all and, instead, started mapping the soundworld that had the most physical impact on me onto the horn instead. It’s very rare for me to be moved by musical means alone. I have a deeper relationship to the sound of the human voice. And, by that, I mean the complete human voice inclusive of all that is not the stylized singing voice within any genre (as beautiful as that can be). I am most touched by the way people express ideas through speech, and the ideas they express through vocal sounds when the words escape them, and the sounds they make when they are experiencing those magnificent emotions that humans can only articulate through their individual taxonomy of hums, screams, small sighs, snorts, clicks, pops…anything like that. It has amazed me since I was small, that my grandmother could make me feel more loved by tunelessly humming just under her breath than when she would use the words “I love you.” It’s that phenomenon that I’m interested in mapping onto the instrument. I want to make it express in that way.

So, in a way, there is a “spiraling” in the way you describe it above, but it takes place a little differently in the way I articulate it to myself. In a very bastardized version of a Marcuse idea, I try to look outside the dialectic to see what may be of interest. I try to look at the process from outside and see if there’s a way to sidestep the whole cycle. And, in hindsight, that’s what I did with taking the vocal sounds as a model as opposed to the tradition of music on the trumpet. Granted, it just sets up its own dialectic, but I work within that until I become bored and then—hopefully I’ll get there before I die—I start to look outside of that cycle or “spiral.”

Josh Modney: Range (excerpt), from Engage (New Focus)

JM: The way you describe using vocal sounds as a model is beautiful. It makes total sense knowing your music, but I hadn’t thought of it in that way. I’d like to ask you a bit more about elements of trumpet tradition, since you hail primarily from a jazz background. For example, some traditions and practices on the violin related to classical lineage include straight-ahead “romantic” playing, noise-based music, post-Lachenmann timbral studies, and Just Intonation/drone music. What are the elements of creative improvisation that are within a shared space, regardless of background and training?

“The real moments of change happened for me when I stopped trying to think of music at all.”

NW: I have a lot of the same influences you do, I guess. I got as much from listening to Lachenmann or Bernhard Lang as I did from Clifford Brown or Booker Little. It’s just where that information presents itself that may be different from you to me. The jazz stuff is way deeper in my psyche at this point and has a lot of relationships to nostalgia and family, which means it has a different context for me and is generative in a base way, which I may manipulate or filter through more recent interests like hard noise, contemporary classical, David Tudor, or Ba-Benzele pygmy recordings. It’s like a rough artistic version of base and superstructure. I will always have a desire to build phrases and performances from the eighth-note grid of swing music, but everything I have in my mind that comes from outside that (the superstructure) distorts that base information in a way that makes me an individual. Just like what makes you Josh Modney (musically) is the base of the classical training and the superstructure of noise, Just Intonation, and timbral study.

JM: I’m curious about the ways that you engage with material in your solo playing, or the ways that you think about/categorize the material that forms, as you put it, the superstructure of your musical aesthetic. Do you see the various techniques that you employ coming from families of sound, or different reservoirs of musical practice?

NW: I did think that way for a certain time, but then I started feeling like I was trapped inside the technique. One of my greatest fears about the way I play is that it will be perceived as a set of parlor tricks. I always cringe when someone tells me they were impressed by all the “crazy sounds” after a solo show. To me, that means I did a poor job of putting the technique in the service of some sort of human expression. At a certain point, I felt like my approach to solo playing was too rooted in the architecture of the sound at the risk of losing the human component, so I abandoned that kind of taxonomic approach.

“One of my greatest fears about the way I play is that it will be perceived as a set of parlor tricks.”

Now, I think of each solo concert as storytelling. I come from a place where people still hold forth over beers and tell long and, mostly false, stories of their past or the history of where they are from. It’s a grand tradition that takes many forms and is something I have always loved. My process of solo playing, at its best, takes its cue from that tradition, from sitting in the chair and wanting to have the audience close, to the recent use of the singing and speaking voice unfiltered by the trumpet, to flat out telling a story as I change to the amplifier. Every choice I make now has to do with a kind of storytelling now that’s not strictly narrative or meant to paint a picture, but tries to get at the core of what a great storyteller does, which is slowly pry open their chest and show you everything that’s inside them, if only for a brief second. The hope being that, at the end, I’ve given a small, actually living, piece of myself and the audience feels like they know me a little better. I can’t do that if I think of any taxonomy or groups of sounds, if that makes sense. And, I don’t mean this as a diatribe for what solo playing should be. It’s just what communicates for me.

JM: Love the storytelling analogy! And I totally agree that the perception of “crazy sounds” is sometimes counterproductive to musical ideals. Could you talk a bit about your expressive goals in your solo music? Are there particular elements of your music that you feel act as a gateway to personal expression?

NW: It’s perhaps a little contemporary and I don’t intend to deal in politics (for my own reasons) but this has been on my mind lately and this seems like an apt place to put it in print. I think that we are in a moment of immense, prolonged trauma. There was a time when I believe people could feel intertwined with their fellow human beings in a way that—not discounting humanity’s ability to treat others with coldness and extreme evil—felt safe. That has been chipped away, and I see people everywhere I go that are just trying to figure out how to handle it—some in better and healthier ways than others. My way is to attempt to live. That sounds stupid, but how many people are trying to do that in any conscious way. Not survive, but LIVE. Breathe air, notice the world, bathe in a piece of music, freak out on an amazing turn of phrase in a piece of literature, recognize beauty, recognize ugliness, be glad that they’re both there. Say hello to people, appreciate when they say hello back, be empathetic when they tell you to fuck off. Just sit in your family, your culture, your world, and be a part of it. To that end, when I play solo, I want to be a part of an experience with the people in the room. They actually made an attempt to come out and do something, so I want to live in that room with them for 30 minutes or an hour or whatever. I want us all to feel like something happened, so that we have a renewed faith in the ability to intertwine on any level with our humanity again and fight the trauma. It’s small and, I admit, it’s not a grand political gesture, but I’m not a grandly political person. I just want to give that one period of time to the people in the room as a moment when someone shows themselves and is, maybe uncomfortably, human.

JM: Yeah, I feel from both sides of the stage, as performer and audience member, that the most affecting and memorable experiences are when people are close, usually in a small room, and you can feel the energy of everybody together. Those have always been my favorite musical experiences, but I share your sense that it all has more urgency and immediacy now.

What you describe is also a beautifully non-hierarchical way of thinking about what makes a successful musical performance, which brings me to my final question. I’ve been noticing that, at least within the relatively small community of new music in NYC, we’re moving toward a hybridized scene that operates on a continuum between composition, improvisation, and interpretation. I’m not sure if this represents an overall shift in American contemporary music culture, but there does seem to be good momentum in this direction. I can at least say that the work that comes out of this hybridized model is the music that I’m most interested in listening to and making! I’d love to hear your perspective on this. Do you think we’re experiencing a significant shift away from the “top down” hierarchy of musicmaking from the last century?

“We’re seeing a shift toward the holistic mixture of composition, improvisation, collaboration, and interpretation.”

NW: On the street level, definitely! I am not sure it’s leaked to the organizational or funding branches necessary for our world yet, but that’s completely understandable given their inherently decisive task. And, even within those institutional bodies, I think we’re seeing a shift toward the holistic mixture of composition, improvisation, collaboration, and interpretation. I’m a bit of a cynic, so I hope that it isn’t just the pendulum’s apex before it swings back but, as you say, there’s so much in that way of making music that one can invest themselves in, that I do have a little hope that it’s just the beginning of a new model of how to make music.

Morocco, Iceland, Finland, and Cyprus: To Change and Be Changed

Posted on August 16, 2018 by Passepartout Duo - Articles, Columns, NewMusicBox

Before getting into the details of how we discover and apply to artist residency opportunities, we wanted to share our thoughts on some of the benefits to performers and composers of continual travel for music. The main takeaway is that every artist residency is different in its financial burden, its scope, and its circumstance; we’d like to encourage people to take on engagements of every kind, not just those which offer stipends and plentiful resources.

Marrakech, Morocco // Flexibility

In April 2017, we were in residence at Dar Slimane, in a remote location outside of Marrakech, Morocco. Part of the institution’s mission is to revitalize desertified land altered by years of unsustainable agriculture, while also supporting artists in an interesting cultural environment. There are residencies of all sizes out there, and Dar Slimane represents those of the smallest size, where just a local couple is essentially hosting artists in their home. It has a completely different dynamic from those like Avaloch Farm or Banff that musicians often turn to, but one we’ve come to cherish in its own right. Small residencies are normally run by artists themselves, and they can connect you with the local community and environment in ways that huge institutions cannot. The key lesson we learned through our experience, and the one that made participating in this residency possible, was to be flexible artistically.

For the first time, we had a circumstance that necessitated leaving our instrument comfort-zone. We knew there wouldn’t be a piano on the premises, and that we would only be in residence for two weeks. Our solution was to learn and record a piece by Christopher Adler that is scored only for instruments that could all easily fit in a carry-on suitcase. The piece was great for this situation but, better yet, it was a choice that set us on a path to seek out increasingly more portable solutions. Here’s our current traveling instrumentation, as it existed in Åland a couple months ago:

Our stay in Morocco represented the first time we wondered, “Should pianists only apply to residencies that provide a grand piano? Do we need to find a five-octave marimba?” Prefaced by saying that we believe there are an incredible set of residencies all offering beautiful pianos, of course our answer to these questions is no. A recurring theme in the classical music world is to “bring classical music outside of the concert hall,” but that’s not a proposition we can pursue without changing our perception of what is needed for a performance.

Our desire to continue working within situations as culturally vibrant and influential as ours in Morocco has played an important role in how we’re approaching music now. We had a bug—not having a proper instrumentation—that has now been transformed into a feature of our ensemble: being able to travel and perform anywhere. We’d encourage anyone to extend the perimeter of their comfort zone when it comes to artist residencies. Whether it’s about being away from home, having limited resources, or stretching what is financially possible, usually the good will outweigh the bad in the end and you’ll come out with inspiring experiences that would’ve otherwise never happened.

Iceland // Think big (and then make it work)

We were in northern Iceland for a residency at Listhús art space that coincided with their Skammdegi Festival. During our nine-week stay we: recorded an EP, filmed three music videos, played on the Dark Music Days Festival, were on the Radio and TV in Icelandic, had a small house concert tour, and met a dozen other inspiring artists (from the town and abroad). We were even extras on a Netflix show. By our standards, that’s a lot for nine weeks in a completely new location. It wasn’t like we were stretched to our limits either; in the dark and cold North, we had the time to be introspective, to catch up on typical admin work, and still had plenty of energy for fun and discovery within this unique place in the world.

It did come at a price, though. Not all residencies are free, and this was the most expensive one we’ve participated in. The fee and expenses of living in Iceland can sound a bit difficult to swing for most people, but an eagerness to take on this opportunity helped us to find a way to make it work.

One of the hidden benefits of distant travel as an artist is the ability to accrue funding from grants not only from your home city/country, but also abroad. Our residency proposition in Iceland opened us up to many different funding bodies in the Nordic countries that helped us to build a project across many locations and disciplines. We were able to couple the opportunity with an advantageous festival appearance that also helped offset the cost.

Grants and funding aside, we think that giving a fee per month to an arts organization that needs it, is so much more satisfying than giving that money to a landlord. Our project in the Nordic countries quickly expanded to include festival appearances, composer commissions, and residencies in Finland, Norway, Sweden, the Faroe Islands, and Denmark. Although it took a leap of faith and a small initial investment, this larger project that accumulated support on the way would have never happened without the Listhús residency as a catalyst.

Fiskars, Finland // City Living and Quality of Life

Fiskars, a small town outside Helsinki that is owned by the Fiskars company, is a true “artists’ village.” Funds from the company helped facilitate an influx of Helsinki-based artists to live and work in the vacant factory buildings. Though a town of just 600 or so permanent inhabitants, it is somehow an epicenter of arts and culture. Couple that with Finland’s incredible public education and social programs, and it’s hard to imagine a place with a higher quality of life for musicians.

It’s easy to think that media center cities like Los Angeles and Paris are the only places it’s possible to be a contemporary musician in touch with the vanguard, but traveling has shown us something different. Going to an artist residency somewhere halfway across the world will give you an outsider’s perspective on your own life and the current circumstances in which you live. It will also give you a window into another kind of lifestyle you may not have yet encountered.

The lesson we’ve learned this time is that the best place for you to choose to settle down may not be the city you grew up near and it doesn’t have to be automatically the city you went to school in; it’s possibly even somewhere you haven’t heard of yet.

Treis Elies, Cyprus // Local and global communities

We stayed in the small town of Treis Elies, Cyprus this past July as part of the Kammari Residency. Kammari was very recently started by a small group of Finnish/Cypriot artists and philosophers. With just 20 permanent residents, the town of Treis Elies represents a shift in Europe where small rural villages are losing residents and becoming uninhabited. With several young couples moving to Treis Elies from abroad, the village’s make-up is now a mix of an older Cypriot generation and a new very international one, not without clashes of lifestyles. The introduction of the artist residency has created a foundation for these two different cultures to interact on and this has drastically changed the sense of community within the village. In Treis Elies, meals and drinks are shared on a daily basis regardless of age, language, or background. In a place with a history such as Cyprus’s we felt this message was very powerful: that artist residencies propose the ability to change a cultural landscape.

La Casa del Herrero in Torralba de Ribota, Spain (population 188) is doing the very same thing: it represents one of three artist residencies in the same small village, and it contributes to building a vibrant and inclusive community there. Our experiences at these residencies were not only defined by the art we encountered, but also defined by memories of conversations shared over lunchtime backgammon and late-night barbecues in many languages. We learn about different cultures and communities in this way and often can draw parallels between them.

The people we know, and have met on the way, are what have made our experiences meaningful, more than the places we’ve been. It’s both for us and for these communities we encounter that we hope to start new discussions about art and create shared memories during our travels.

Morocco, Iceland, Finland, and Cyprus: it was a general openness toward going anywhere and an eagerness to share our music with anyone who will listen that brought us to these places. We’ve learned a lot along the way, and hope that by seeing these four examples you’re encouraged to travel somewhere not only because you want to go there, but also because you think it might expand your world, practice, or ideology in some way. Traveling somewhere new provides us with a thought-provoking invitation, applicable in both life and in new music: to change and be changed.

A Holistic Approach to Sound

Posted on August 13, 2018 by Josh Modney - Articles, Columns, NewMusicBox

Depending on who you talk to, “extended techniques” can be a loaded term. To one person, the presence of extended techniques makes a piece of music weird and unlistenable, while to another, their absence would indicate music that is regressive and uninteresting. In either case, ears are closed, and a blanket judgment is being made about the quality of the art using a term that should really only be a quantifier. So, first of all, I’d like to clear away some of the subjective baggage that has built up around extended techniques. The most objective way I can think of to define it is this: an extended technique is any action that produces a result outside the fundamental parameters of sound that an instrument was designed to make. This still leaves some ambiguity as to the designers’ intentions, especially when it comes to an instrument as old as mine, the violin. But it’s clear that on the violin, an execution that causes the string to vibrate with maximum consistency and overtone-rich resonance is the primary function of the instrument, which luthiers have worked very hard to cultivate over the centuries. On the other hand, playing very close to the bridge to create a broken, inconsistent sound that reinforces high overtones, while just as beautiful aesthetically, is one example of the great many techniques that fall outside the instrument’s intended function. This distinction is very important for students, since getting the string to resonate consistently is the most difficult thing to master, and is the foundation of most other physical movements on the instrument.

An extended technique is any action that produces a result outside the fundamental parameters of sound that an instrument was designed to make.

As useful as I’ve found this definition as a player and a teacher, it still sets up a dualism that I find troubling. For one thing, it would seem to support the idea that all sounds outside of the core practice of Western classical music represent an extension of that practice, and not a separate identity. To an extent I agree with this – it is very difficult to understand how to play Lachenmann if you haven’t studied Beethoven, as they are strongly connected along the lineage of German music – but this way of thinking excludes artists who have arrived at novel ways of creating sound along a different trajectory. Furthermore, by lumping an incredibly broad array of musical tools into the single category of extended techniques, the implication is that any given sound outside “normal” playing is a shallow, one-dimensional artifact, rather than a component of one of any number of deep reservoirs of practice that have just as much potential for nuanced human expression as the standard technique of the instrument’s original design.

IMAGE: Alexander Perrelli and Emma Van Deun

As my own practice on the violin has evolved to a point where the majority of the sounds I make on the instrument could be defined as extended techniques, I wonder if there is a better way to frame instrumental performance practice for the 21st century that, while respecting and continuing traditions, makes room for a deeper engagement with other avenues of expression. I’ve begun to think of this as a holistic approach to sound.

The idea of a holistic approach to sound started to coalesce when I was preparing to record Violin Solos, a series of improvised solo violin pieces for my debut album, Engage (New Focus Recordings, August 3, 2018). I had been working this way for a long time in various contexts, from interpreter to collaborator to improviser, but didn’t have the words for it yet. Planning and practicing for that recording session, and then working to break it all down afterward to write the liner notes for the album, gave me the impetus to look under the hood of my practice and really examine what was happening.

In thinking about my approach to sound, I kept on coming back to the idea of reservoirs. The standard, “romantic” style of violin playing that has been dominant since at least the mid-20th century and that every violin student learns is one reservoir. It utilizes the sounds that the modern violin, paired with the modern bow, were designed to produce – rich and luminous, causing the string to vibrate in a manner that is consistent and sustained. Another, equally deep reservoir encompasses the highly specific timbral study that has been so thoroughly researched by composers like Helmut Lachenmann, Mathias Spahlinger, and many others since (though on a musical level the compositions of Lachenmann and Spahlinger remain deeply connected to the same Germanic tradition that begat “romantic” string playing, on a technical level the sounds represent a radically different engagement with the instrument, requiring an entirely different skill set as a player). Another reservoir is Just Intonation, a practice that has made its way into just about everything that I do. Another might broadly be described as noise-based music. Another that is specific to my individual path would be the sounds and techniques that grew out of collaborative work with my composer colleagues in the Wet Ink Ensemble (Alex Mincek, Kate Soper, Eric Wubbels, and Sam Pluta). Far from a comprehensive list, those are just a few examples of reservoirs that have spoken strongly to me and that I have incorporated into my playing, colored by my unique experiences as a musician. Another violinist would no doubt have some similarities and some differences.

One can dive deeply into any single reservoir and find more than a complete set of tools for musical expression. I think that a piece based completely in scratch tones and pitchless noise has just as much potential to be beautiful as a piece based in fully voiced notes. It’s only a matter of whether it is done well. For me, a mode of personal expression on the violin that feels rich and fulfilling involves drawing from many of these reservoirs and then quickly cutting between them. By engaging with material in this way, the relationship to sound feels less like the ornamentation of a monolithic practice, and more like personal conversations with distinct musical entities.

A mode of personal expression on the violin that feels rich and fulfilling involves drawing from many of these reservoirs and then quickly cutting between them.

All of this reminds me of a quote from Sam Pluta’s writing about his own work, in which he proposes a type of musicmaking where “anything and everything is possible and acceptable at any moment.” It’s an attitude that embraces adventure and innovative modes of expression without demanding an outright rejection of established practices. And it represents a kind of openness to the universe that makes the music of composers like Sam and Anthony Braxton so compelling and inspiring. This isn’t to say “everything is good” – curation and self-criticism must be valued for art to be successful – but that a nondogmatic engagement with sound can yield beautiful results. Never mind whether an artist hails predominantly from one aesthetic camp or another. If there is a sound or gesture that is right for the music, do it.

The music that resonates with me tends to be aesthetically adventurous and open-minded, yet tightly curated. I’ll use a few works that were written for me by some of the Wet Ink composers as examples. Sam Pluta’s Jem Altieri with a Ring Modulator Circuit, for violin and electronics, lives mostly in a world of carefully sculpted noise, but in rare and special moments, when the music needs it, calls on the violin to produce fully resonant pitched sonorities. Kate Soper’s Cipher, for soprano and violin, winds up traversing an incredibly diverse array of musical terrain, from timbral study to art song to psycho-acoustic phenomena, all in the service of a thoroughly logical exploration of language and meaning. Eric Wubbels’s “the children of fire come looking for fire,” for violin and prepared piano, begins with an extremely long overpressure sound on the violin, setting up expectations in the listener about the style and form of the work, which are then subverted as it is revealed that the scratch tone functions as a metaphorical well of sound from which the rest of the highly articulate and virtuosic materials for the piece are drawn. In the case of each of these works, when you pull back and take in the big picture, musical choices that are unexpected or surprising in the moment work together beautifully in the larger context.

Sam Pluta: Portraits/Self-Portraits, performed by Josh Modney and the Wet Ink Large Ensemble. This work begins with a version of Jem Altieri with a Ring Modulator Circuit scored for violin and ensemble.

A successful performance of multifaceted music like this demands a fluency of movement between strongly defined sonic identities. Another way of expressing that is that the music demands versatility. The idea of versatility loomed large as the ultimate goal of my classical training, the key to unlocking a successful career as a concert violinist. I agree with that in spirit, except that the traditional conservatory approach defines versatility very narrowly as the ability to play in the styles of Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, and Debussy. The idea is that if you can master the techniques required to play those composers, you can play anything. As a teacher, I still think those things are important. The study of classical music is an excellent way to gain fluency in the sounds that the instrument was designed to make, and fluency in the instrument’s primary functions are critical to artistry. But those sounds represent only a small fraction of the tools necessary to thrive as a 21st-century musician.

The music that resonates with me tends to be aesthetically adventurous and open-minded, yet tightly curated.

As a classically trained violinist, I’d like to propose that we expand our concept of versatility on the instrument. What if a new versatility included improvisation, adventurous reinterpretations of antique music, deep engagement with more recent traditions on the instrument, and collaborations with artists on new compositions, sounds, and techniques? Rather than regarding all sounds as extensions of a single dominant practice, let’s treat the established norms of Western classical music as just one of many reservoirs of musical thought in a holistic approach that values many kinds of expression.

Passepartout Duo: Music on the Move

Posted on August 9, 2018 by Passepartout Duo - Articles, Columns, NewMusicBox

Post update 8/14/2018: After criticism highlighting our use of the word “homeless” in this post emerged, we recognized that a revision was necessary in the original article and wanted to offer an apology. We had no intention of equating our situation with that of those living in extreme poverty nor in romanticizing the idea of the struggling artist. Instead, we only meant to indicate that we currently do not have a home base and are hoping to show others a possible way to live and work as artists in a positive environment through residencies and travel. —The Passepartout Duo

A remote permaculture homestead in the Sahara Desert, a northern-Icelandic fishing community half-a-degree south of the Arctic Circle, a family home within the bustling streets of Havana, or a wooden house-building factory in the Swiss Alps: our home moves from month to month, and along the way we meet new people, discover new ways of life, and are continually inspired by the shifting circumstances in which we make music.

At this point, we’ve completely given up location-dependent life. Artistically, it has profoundly changed our practice.

At this point, we’ve completely given up location-dependent life. We have four small bags: one backpack and one instrument case each. We each have one pair of shoes and we use them for everything, until they fall apart; then, we pick up a new pair and keep going.

But it’s not just an eagerness to travel that’s encouraged us to pursue this lifestyle. Artistically, it has profoundly changed our practice and created a sustainable model in which our ensemble can operate, concertize, and continually make work that interests us and leaves us creatively engaged.

Passepartout Duo on the road less traveled

We still don’t know how to respond when a fellow artist asks, “Where are you based?” but we always manage to spark some intrigue and curiosity with our response. This series of articles is an attempt to codify the kind of lifestyle we’re currently living, while also providing pointers to anyone interested in pursuing similar opportunities.

Artist residencies have been practically and artistically indispensable to us; we created the piano/percussion Passepartout Duo in 2015 as a “long-distance music collaboration” while residing across continents, and it was only through an opportunity at the Banff Centre that our work together was able to begin. Since then, residencies have been both mile markers along the way that helped our projects take shape, and the primary way we’re able to continually travel from month to month.

The Banff Centre was a complete dream world. When we arrived, it hit us immediately how the ensemble that first only existed within this one residency application we had sent in, was now a real thing, and there was at least someone out there supporting it. Those six weeks left a huge impression on us. After we left, on the days when we felt the most behind on our work we’d daydream thinking: “What could I get done with just one more day at the Banff Centre?” At that time, it didn’t occur to us that there are hundreds of other Banff-Centre-like places out there, hosting artists and creating communities of their own.

Passepartout Duo at Banff

Soon after, we completed the small concert tour of Europe that was the motivation for our residency, stopping in four cities and sharing what we had worked on. In some ways, this model of oscillating between small concert tours and residencies has continued unchanged in our years together as an ensemble. It has been very fruitful to reflect upon the ties between a geographical situation and the work of an artist. Everywhere we go we now wonder: “How is our work going to make a difference in this place? How is this place going to mold our work?”

The bridge between that first Banff Centre residency and this life we live now didn’t happen all of a sudden. We slowly accumulated opportunities with the original intention of being based in a city and traveling frequently, but not indefinitely. There was a point when we realized that it didn’t make sense anymore to sign a multi-year lease on an apartment, because two months after moving in, we would be traveling for nine months straight. If we’re honest, we also became skeptical about the idea of living in a major city: to take on private teaching, day jobs, unfavorable gigs, unaffordable rent, all for what amounts to probably less than a month per year of meaningful and important artistic work that truly requires your presence in that specific place. There’s also a contagious effect within the Londons and New Yorks of the world, a feedback loop that tells people “this is the greatest city on earth, and it’s the only place I can be an artist.” We were skeptical about subscribing to these ideas—and paying for them, too. We loved the time we had spent so far at artist residencies, and thought, “How can we do this more, and that less?”

And that’s where we are now. We’re booked two years out with travels and engagements all over the world. This introduction is just the first of four parts about our relationship with artist residencies, and how others can dive into these opportunities for themselves. We’ll pick it up next week by describing a few of the places we’ve been, and what we’ve learned and discovered from each.

Collaboration as Performance Practice

Posted on August 6, 2018 by Josh Modney - Columns, NewMusicBox

There’s a moment in Kate Soper’s duo for soprano and violin, Cipher, that tends to stick in people’s minds. The soprano, delivering spoken text, moves toward the violinist and places a mute on the instrument, filtering the tone color. As the violinist continues to play, the soprano moves closer still and places several fingers on the strings, activating specific pitches along the fingerboard. With intricately choreographed movements, the two musicians play the instrument together, creating harmonies that would be otherwise inaccessible to a solo violinist. Simultaneously, the violinist begins to speak. The roles of voice and instrument, which up to this point have been vying for primacy, have become equal and intertwined.

The physicality of it all is striking. It brings the violin into sharp focus. The expressive and sonic capabilities of the instrument have been tested throughout the first half of the piece, and now, in a radical extension of instrumental technique, the violin sings in an entirely new way. It’s also personal, drawing attention to the relationship between two performers and embodying the spirit of openness essential to adventurous musicmaking.

By crossing over into the visual realm, that moment illuminates an intensely personal, non-hierarchical creative process that is embedded throughout the sonic fabric of Cipher, a process that is a galvanizing force behind the extraordinary invention and experimentation in the piece. As the musicians converge on the violin, it is apparent that open dialogue must have been integral to developing the mechanics of the playing technique, and that the process must have involved a great deal of time and trust.

I’d like to take the opportunity here on NewMusicBox to talk about the genesis of Cipher and another work that is based on this kind of open process—Eric Wubbels’s “the children of fire come looking for fire”—and the profound impact both of these works have had on my relationship to creativity as a classically trained violinist. Both of these artists have turned away from the hierarchical paradigm of classical music, where the composer works in isolation on a piece before handing the final product to one or more interchangeable performers, in favor of a holistic approach that allows for creativity and learning from both sides of the composer/performer relationship.

Kate originally wrote Cipher for the two of us over an extended period of workshop in 2011. We premiered it in December of that year, and then started to perform it extensively in 2012 after a significant revision. The workshop process started at the very first stages of material generation. These early sessions drew on Kate’s sketches, initial ideas about how to share roles and subvert the traditional hierarchy of soprano with accompaniment (in part, building on ideas from Kate’s soprano and flute duo with Erin Lesser, Only The Words Themselves Mean What They Say), our burgeoning interest in Just Intonation (JI), Renaissance choral tuning exercises, and more. Our workshops were about posing questions and musical puzzles and seeing what we could do with them. For instance, is there a precise JI alternate tuning of the violin that can yield both a complex, “colored” unison across all four strings as well as pure intervals? How palpable are psycho-acoustic difference tones between soprano and violin, and how precisely can they be controlled? Can the instrument be readjusted to standard tuning in the middle of a piece without a pause in the action? (Through a team effort, yes!) Can novel sonorities on the violin be conjured if both performers play the instrument simultaneously? Historically, there is a great deal of overlap between the performance practice of violin and voice (the violin’s vocal qualities are widely celebrated, as in Rachmaninoff’s Vocalise), however the extended techniques of each diverge from one another dramatically. The long workshop process of Cipher allowed us to discover an extended soundworld with fields of sameness and difference, enabling the material in Cipher to morph into myriad extremes and then realign in uncanny unison.

Kate Soper and Josh Modney performing on a violin with four-hands

Kate Soper and Josh Modney navigating a passage for “violin four-hands” (Photo by Spencer McCormick, courtesy New Music USA)

A key element in all of this musical experimentation is trust. Trust encourages adventurous musical choices while laying groundwork for the performance practice of the final work. Every great chamber musician knows the critical importance of trust. For a great performance to happen, the musicians must inhabit a higher plane, a communal version of Robert Pirsig’s “high country of the mind,” interdependent and tethered together in Alpine-style ascent. An open creative process rooted in long-term collaboration allows that bond of trust to be forged right from the beginning, reinforcing every step of the piece’s development from premiere to revision, reinterpretation, touring, memorization, and recording.

A high level of trust opened up the potential for Kate and me to develop the technique for “violin 4-hands,” which involves a sharing of the extremely personal space of the violin’s physical surface and immediate aura. That trust eventually led to the refinement of a performance practice that is as much an integral part of the piece as the notes on the page, and ultimately, I think, bridges a gap that has been artificially opened in our musical culture. The gap between the paradigm of contemporary music composition and performance, which allows for experimentation but too often stops dead after the premiere, and of classical music, which demands refinement and deep engagement with individual works but all too easily falls into entrenched ways of thinking, at the expense of novel and creative approaches.

In classical music practice, the extremely high standards of refinement allow virtuosity to coalesce into a conduit for the expression of the spirit. I think that an important reason many listeners prefer classical music over contemporary music is that a great deal of energy has been put in over a great deal of time such that classical performers are able to transcend the technical demands of the music and communicate with audiences from the “high country.” A desire to bridge the gap and bring this level of refinement and detail to the creative space of a contemporary work is one of the things that drove the process behind Eric Wubbels’s “the children of fire come looking for fire” for violin and prepared piano.

Eric wrote “the children of fire…” for the two of us over the course of several months in early 2012. We met weekly, experimenting with sounds and, as the material began to solidify, learned the piece in chunks, building it up gradually from week to week. It was extremely rewarding to learn the piece in small sections in this super detailed and developmental way. By the time the week of the premiere arrived, each section of the piece felt innately familiar.

A recurring feature in Eric’s music is the idea of “translation”—that is, translating a sound that is idiomatic to one instrument into the language of another instrument, and then fusing the two sounds together. Blending the timbres of the modern violin and the modern piano is a particularly challenging task. Much of the famous repertoire for violin and piano duo was written for very different instruments – softer and warmer, built for intimate spaces, the characters of different keys brought to life by the piano’s meantone tuning, a system to which the violinist can easily adapt.

The situation these days is much different. The equipment of violins and pianos has been adapted for projection over an orchestra, such that it is difficult for the percussive attack of the piano and the tenacious sustain of the violin to blend. And the tuning system of equal temperament is a challenging fit for the violin. (For an informative and entertaining read on this, check out How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony: And Why You Should Care, by Ross W. Duffin.)

All of this is to say that the timbre of the instruments (i.e., the instrumental technology) that forms the basis of a piece matters. A lot. The fresh ways that Eric has written for the peculiarities of the modern violin and the modern piano are a big part of what makes “the children of fire…” such a special and extraordinary piece. In “the children of fire…”, there are many instances where Eric uses the idea of translation to bring the instruments together. The piece begins with a sustained noise wall produced by overdriving the top string of the violin. Far from a generic scratch tone, it is a sound so complex and layered that it gives a sense of “everythingness,” a singularity from which the material for the rest of the piece is generated. This functions both metaphorically in the structure of the piece and as a practical generator of material – Eric made a spectral analysis of the sound and used that to find chords on the piano that would blend seamlessly.

Another example of translation sources a sound so idiomatic to the violin that it has become cliché: descending left hand pizzicato a la Paganini. It’s a sound associated with a certain brand of corny violinistic showmanship that Eric beautifully repurposes by combining it with a unison pizzicato gesture inside the piano (an evolution of the “pizz fail” section of Eric’s earlier work for Wet Ink, katachi).

Eric Wubbels: katachi – “pizz fail” section (as performed by Wet Ink Ensemble on Relay, Carrier Records)

There is a passage at the heart of “the children of fire…” that is effectively a double translation, reconciling the violin’s inability to play sustained chords with the piano’s inability to play in Just Intonation. It employs difference tones, which I learned how to precisely control on the violin through the process of collaboration with Eric. Difference tones are a psycho-acoustic phenomenon. When we hear two or more pitches simultaneously, our brains fill in the fundamental of those pitches. When the pitches are tuned in a manner that corresponds exactly to ratios of the harmonic series, we perceive the fundamental strongly. If you play a series of intervals formed from different strata of the harmonic series, a ghostly psycho-acoustic “bassline” emerges. In “the children of fire…”, Eric realizes this virtual bassline on the piano. It is a passage of striking beauty that solves the problem of violin/piano blend without using any extended techniques. The violin reinforces the upper partials inherent to the piano pitches, while the piano undergirds the fundamental that is psycho-acoustically implied by the violin dyads. The instruments blend perfectly, a meta-instrument, and akin to the far ranging terrain of Cipher, the possibility is opened up for the players to shape sounds that are starkly differentiated and then return to a place of absolute unity.

Eric Wubbels: the children of fire come looking for fire [excerpt] (performed by Josh Modney and Eric Wubbels on Engage, New Focus Recordings)

Making music this way, from the ground up, is incredibly rewarding and empowering, especially from the perspective of the relative confines of classical performance training. Being a participant and partner from the early stages of the development of a work, with generous collaborators who are willing to share their creative agency, has been liberating for me and has fundamentally changed my relationship to music. It has allowed me to connect the dots and see the potential for my own mobility along a continuum that ranges from interpretation, through collaboration and creative partnership, to being the primary creator myself as an improviser/composer. And, in the case of these duos by Kate and Eric, we have found a path that has no end date, and grows richer with each performance.

Aside from the great musical and spiritual rewards of such a process, it is also—perhaps counterintuitively—an incredibly efficient way to bring a new piece from the early stages of composition to the ultra-refined performance standard that is expected of classical music. Again, it has to do with an innate familiarity with each timbre and gesture (built on the process of elimination that happens when honing a sound in workshop, habitualizing your brain to the details of production, “not this, or this, but THIS”), and with the trust that is forged between collaborators which can then be brought onto the concert stage. Classical music performance, while fraught with its own challenges, benefits from pre-established practices cultivated over centuries and the framework of the common practice period. As new music performers, we must create our own performance practice before we may hope to transcend technical execution and strive toward that high country where the real, sustained ecstatic communication between performers and listeners can take place.

The Importance of Exchange

Posted on July 30, 2018 by Rachel C. Walker - Columns, NewMusicBox

As China enters a new era of modernization and globalization, musical exchange becomes an increasingly pressing matter. While a news outlet may express certain views or statistics on trade, there is very little effort made to bridge the gap in cultural understanding. This is where the intersection of Chinese traditional music and new music has the potential to play an important role.

Composers’ Approaches to Musical Exchange

After a dinner at Gao Weijie’s house in September 2017 with Gao Weijie, Gao Ping (photographer), Dutch ethnomusicologist Frank Kouwenhoven, and lawyer Wang Teng.

One Chinese composer who has centered his life around the concept of exchange is my mentor, Gao Weijie 高为杰. Having turned eighty this year, Gao Weijie is of a slightly older generation than many of the composers who had the chance to go abroad to study following the Cultural Revolution. Yet, he emerged from this period with a mission to learn as much about the music of the world as possible.

While a news outlet may express certain views or statistics on trade, there is very little effort made to bridge the gap in cultural understanding.

A principle vehicle for this was a composer collective he founded in Chengdu called 作曲家创作探索会 Zuoqujia chuangzuo tansuo hui (Composers’ Association for the Exploration of Compositional Creations), whose earliest activities date from 1983.

In the words of Gao Weijie:

The group had two main objectives:
1. To study and write about music from outside of China, of which we knew next to nothing. As this was the period in which China was just opening up, it was necessary to learn as much as possible and to commit ourselves to the study of technique.
Our resources were in newly-arrived analysis texts—from Allen Forte, Schenker, and others—as well as what we could obtain from the large publishing houses. Composers who traveled abroad would bring home scores from overseas. Additionally, Western composers began to come to China around this time. The first of these was the English composer Alexander Goehr, who in 1982 came to Beijing, bringing with him many scores from Schoenberg and thereafter.
2. The second motivation of the Zuoqujia chuangzuo tansuo hui was composer exchange. The concerts were few and far in between—often, we did not have the money—but through sharing scores and discussing the pieces, we learnt from one another. When someone’s piece was performed and there was a recording, we would all listen. These activities and research took place not as students, but in our free time as amateurs driven by passion.

Gao Weijie’s knowledge of both Chinese and Western traditional and contemporary music is parallel to few. He has spent his life writing both music and theoretical articles while teaching composition in order to share what he has amassed. His apartment is full of scores, recordings, and posters from concerts past; in fact, he has had to compile a handwritten library catalogue just to keep track of everything.

Gao Weijie’s library catalogue. Photo by the author.

Gao Weijie’s drive to learn has not slowed with time. His most recent work, Flying Apsara 飞天 (2018), is scored for Chinese folk orchestra and takes its inspiration from the Qiuci (Kizil Cave) Frescoes in China’s Xinjiang Province. It will be premiered this coming October in a tour across China.

A representative example of Gao Laoshi’s work can be heard in his Origin of Dream I for dizi and Western flute:

Many exciting composers and performers across the world are engaged in related intercultural spheres.

Gao Weijie’s son, composer and pianist Gao Ping 高平 is one of the most important Chinese composers of the younger generation and likewise been active in creating musical exchange. Having previously lived in the United States and New Zealand, where he taught at the University of Canterbury, he is now the Chair of the Music Department at Capital Normal University in Beijing. Gao Ping’s wife Wang Wei splits her time between Beijing and Chengdu and runs an organization which arranges concerts and art exhibitions across the country. Through their joint efforts, they have built a musical bridge between performers in New Zealand, China, and the U.S. In October of this year, they brought over the New Zealand String Quartet for several concerts; the program included Gao Ping’s work Bright Light and Cloud Shadows 天光云影 (2007) alongside pieces by other Chinese and New Zealand composers.

Another interpretation of exchange can be found in the purely compositional construction of a piece. Composer Wenhui Xie’s 谢文辉 work as slow as… 时间片 (2014) for guzheng, piano, and dizi/xun uses elements of improvisation and indeterminacy to build performer-composer dialogue. This conversational approach is strengthened through Wenhui’s inclusion of herself as a pianist. This piece of Wenhui’s was one of the earliest compositions I heard for Chinese instruments and the one that made the greatest impression upon me at the time.

In addition to the aforementioned Chinese composers based in Mainland China, I have had the chance to interact with many exciting composers and performers across the world who are engaged in related intercultural spheres. Australian composers Corrina Bonshek and Bruce Crossman both take inspiration from Asian musical traditions and work with traditional Chinese instruments; American composers Joel Hoffman and Rob McClure have worked in China and engaged with Chinese music; Chinese and Taiwanese composers now living in the United States, including Huijuan Ling and Chen-hui Jen, are creating exchange through their varied artistic practices.

Logistical Challenges and Potential

Simple matters such as differences in internet usage and promotion render it difficult to know what is happening in the U.S. or in China.

While the compositional activity in China today is vital, there are several challenges facing the exchange of contemporary music. Simple matters such as differences in internet usage and promotion—Youku versus YouTube, Douyin versus Instagram, WeChat versus Facebook—render it difficult to know what is happening in the U.S. or in China if one is not already aware of it. Language presents a related barrier, as there is insufficient translation of the texts and articles on contemporary music which are published in China. Once one speaks Chinese and lives in that world, it is accessible, but that requires a not-insignificant time investment. There are further differences in the logic behind presenting organizations and musical taste at large. Chinese audiences are, in my experience, quite conservative. After the premiere of my orchestral work Haumea with the Tianjin Symphony Orchestra in 2015, a woman approached me and reprimanded me for using such “extreme and unbearable” harmony—in what was, in my opinion, a moderately tame piece compared to much modern music.

This conservatism perhaps stems from differing prioritization in educational models. While Gao Weijie acknowledges the merits of focusing so much on traditional musical elements, he also admits that many students have insufficient exposure to contemporary works. (I remember my shock at the beginning upon discovering that most of my adoptive sisters and classmates at China Conservatory had not heard of even the most famous living composers.)

This year’s joint presentation of the Beijing Modern Music Festival and ISCM perhaps opened a new chapter for dialogue with China. While the understanding of Chinese music and exchange is still relatively small, there is steady progress being made.

Gao Weijie’s thoughts on this matter are as follows:

Today, the outside understanding of China still has many limitations. At the same time, more and more Chinese are interested in the outside world and living abroad.
Ultimately, culture across the world requires more exchange. Chinese contemporary music must continue to innovate and develop, connecting back to Chinese tradition while still being in touch with the rest of humanity. I hope that more and more Western composers can engage in exchange: research, performance, and composition. It is in this way that we can come to integrate ourselves with the world.

Opinions from the Dux Femina Facti: Women Leaders at the Grassroots of New Music

Posted on July 26, 2018 by Carrie Leigh Page - Columns, NewMusicBox

What opportunities do you see on the horizon for women in leadership roles in music?
“Anything that we create for ourselves. Nobody taught me to start a festival, to start a vocal quartet. I see some legacy roles going to women, but the biggest opportunity is for women to remake the industry from the ground up.”
— Amanda DeBoer Bartlett, Omaha Under the Radar

Over the past month, NewMusicBox has hosted a series of articles from the International Alliance for Women talking about various issue facing women in music today: awards and fellowships, education, and reception.

Our post today focuses on the idea of women as leaders in music, especially in new music. Through interviews with women leaders from grassroots music organizations from all over the country, we explore topics related to managing ensembles and festivals, commissioning, curating, and creating collegial workspaces where women’s voices can be heard.

Each of the organizations chosen is a relatively young festival, conference, or ensemble working to bring new music to audiences. The oldest of those interviewed, Rhymes With Opera, just celebrated its 10th season with all performances of their May mainstage production playing to sold-out audiences in New York City. Oh My Ears held its first marathon concert in 2014 and celebrated its fifth iteration as a four-day new music festival in downtown Phoenix in January. New Music Gathering issued its first call for proposals in 2014 and held its fourth conference in May. Two festivals begin in the next few days: Omaha Under the Radar has its fifth summer festival July 25-28; The Uncommon Music Festival begins its third season July 28-August 5 in Sitka, Alaska.

When It’s Lonely at the Top

Sometimes the woman at the top of the organization is a solo director, such as Amanda DeBoer Bartlett of Omaha Under the Radar and Elizabeth Kennedy Bayer of Oh My Ears. Bayer and DeBoer both acknowledged a sense of loneliness as the head of a festival.

: Elizabeth Kennedy Bayer

: Amanda DeBoer Bartlett

As Bayer said, “We live in such a weird world where we see other people’s successes constantly on social media. Sometimes I felt like I wasn’t getting enough stuff done on my own.”

During the course of the conversation, Bayer added several points of epiphany and self-transformation:

“The doors that opened happened because I was poor enough and desperate enough to knock on them!”

“I had to give myself permission to lead…”

“I had to stop downplaying my role…”

“I had to figure out how to delegate…”

DeBoer expressed similar issues. “Asking people to help is hard,” she admits. “But also getting out of the way and letting them do it is hard. For the first three years of the festival, I wouldn’t delegate anything. My team had to sit me down and tell me that I had to delegate more. I’m still having to teach and train people so that I can delegate, because I wouldn’t let them do it before.” Though she is the director, she co-organizes with Aubrey Byerly (Development and Grant Manager) and Stacey Barelos (Education Director), and credits them with doing “a massive amount of work and decision-making all year long.”

The possibility of a gendered experience as a “quiet leader”…

DeBoer also talked about her own style of leadership, discussing the possibility of a gendered experience as a “quiet leader.”

“[It] works in some situations, but I definitely feel the need to push back, especially in saying ‘no,’” she acknowledges.

DeBoer and Bayer both described the role of leader as emotionally draining, but also seemed very pleased with the freedom it afforded them. Oddly, as solo leaders, they also both described the feeling of community as an important factor in their leadership and planning decisions. Organizing festivals, to them, was a way of both seeking and creating community.

When Control is Shared

In the case of Uncommon Music Festival, Ariadne Lih is an equal co-director with Nate Barnett. Ruby Fulton, Elisabeth Halliday, and Bonnie Lander of Rhymes With Opera work with George Lam and Robert Maril. Lainie Fefferman works with a mixed group of men and women founders including Mary Kouyoumdjian, Jascha Narveson, Daniel Felsenfeld, and the late Matt Marks at New Music Gathering.

One woman with whom I spoke stated, “It’s up to the women to say: Don’t forget we need to try to hire a woman. There’s a heightened awareness of equity.” She noted that sometimes support from male colleagues might feel “lukewarm.” However, in these organizations where control is shared with a partner of the opposite sex or a small mixed company of partners, women report that they generally feel supported and that their voices are heard.

Fefferman spoke of feeling lucky in her partners at New Music Gathering: “We’ve talked really deeply about biases we want to fight in our curation, and it made me feel like I didn’t have to self-censor. I have felt supported and appreciated by my colleagues, and that’s not always a given. There are maybe views I have or preferences that are informed by my gender, but I felt free to express that to the group, and they respected my opinion.”

Dealing with those outside the organization, though, can be a frustrating experience in sexism. DeBoer and Bayer both spoke of being ignored by people who failed to recognize the person in charge of the event was a woman. The women from Rhymes With Opera also shared some stories about being discounted as a leader.

Lander complained, “Last December, I organized a series, and there was some disbelief that I was the organizer.”

“People will assume that if there’s a man there, that’s the person in charge.”

Fulton chimed in, “One thing I definitely notice is that people will assume that if there’s a man there, that’s the person in charge. Because I’m a woman, and short, and look younger than I am, people don’t think I’m the person to talk to.”

Ariadne Lih

Lih shared that it was actually her male co-director Barnett who suggested that they flip the names on their email signature from “Nate and Ariadne” to “Ariadne and Nate,” so that her name was first. Barnett underlined that “explaining that we are co-directors has been a challenge. We’ve had to undo the assumptions about who is ‘really in charge.’”

Barnett also pointed out the value of sharing leadership with a woman. “It’s a very charged time… I can actually take a step back and say, ‘That’s a question best answered by… Ariadne.’”

Canon, Inclusivity, and Relevance in Curation

Even though all of these groups are oriented in some measure towards new music, I asked everyone specifically if they ever felt pressure to program works from a canon, or if they felt free to choose. The response was overwhelmingly one-sided.

“What’s a canon?” Fulton chuckled.

“No! Boy, do I have the freedom to choose!” exclaimed Fefferman.

The Uncommon Music Festival, which showcases a combination of new music and early music, delights in presenting works by underrepresented composers, even in their selections from early music, though Lih does tend to include more canonical works for educational programming.

The pressure to program certain works usually whittles down to the occasional suggestion “to program more accessible pieces.”

When Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians was programmed for the Omaha Under the Radar festival, it was, and remains to this day, their most-attended event, but Bartlett hasn’t tried to repeat that attendance level through programming piece from the growing new music “canon” – those pieces that have attained a certain recognition in textbooks and anthologies. She said that the pressure to program certain works usually whittles down to the occasional suggestion “to program more accessible pieces. Like, my mom would always wish that I would sing more contemporary Christian music. That advice to be more accessible, I usually outright ignore it.”

As Bayer quipped, a shoestring budget often isn’t compatible with playing works from the new music canon, anyway. “Money is definitely a factor in not playing canonical works – we can’t afford the rental fees!”

In every case, the programmers were looking to showcase works outside a canon, and sometimes were looking for ways to showcase their own compositions or a particular set of talents. DeBoer concurred, “If there is an ensemble with a non-diverse program, it’s not an interesting application.”

All of the organizations felt a responsibility to program female artists and composers, as well as other underrepresented groups.

For Rhymes With Opera, the unusual setup has built-in safeguards for gender parity. Founding members George Lam and Ruby Fulton share composition responsibilities for many of the ensemble’s pieces. Bonnie Lander is also a composer. Fulton added, “A few years ago, we did a set of one-minute pieces—“signatures”—and we got an equal split of men and women. It’s a little more challenging when we’re picking one person for a commission, but we keep it about 50/50.”

Ruby Fulton

However, most organizers felt that inclusivity required planning and deliberate action. Omaha Under the Radar said that it’s not a challenge to find female composers, but occasionally things hit a snag. “I realized last year that we had not programmed a large ensemble piece by a woman,” DeBoer confessed. “My jaw hit the floor. How could we have missed that? We have to be super vigilant. It’s a conversation we’re constantly having. It’s a constant reminder that things like that don’t happen naturally.” She uses spreadsheets to track demographics of participating ensembles and their programs.

“If we’re interested in an ensemble, and they don’t have a diverse program, we will contact them and ask if they would be willing to change. They always are.”

Bayer also said that she keeps a careful eye on her metrics to help her plan for and meet programming goals at OME. “Since Year One to now, we’ve gone from 20% female composers to 40-50% female composers. If we’re interested in an ensemble, and they don’t have a diverse program, we will contact them and ask if they would be willing to change. They always are.” She went on to add, “It’s about telling people’s stories, and we’re always seeking to improve our range of storytelling. When we present art from a more diverse group of people, I feel like we’re making the world a better place.”

The Uncommon Music Festival states specific goals on its website of “presenting inclusive, exciting music that is unlikely to have been heard by our audiences” and “to perform the work of underrepresented composers, especially women and composers of color.” Though this was a stated mission, directors Lih and Barnett realized that they needed measurable goals and quotas going into their third season. They decided that at least one-third of the works played needed to be by people of color, and the programs needed to show true 50/50 gender parity. It was a satisfying moment when they locked down their program for this year and realized they had met their goals.

“It seemed cold and calculating,” Barnett admitted, “but we realized it was the only way we could ensure that we would achieve what we set out to do.”

Lih clarified, “I feel that I really want to be an advocate for women and for racial diversity, but it’s also really joyful to discover these things I didn’t know. It feels less like a responsibility and more like an exciting artistic endeavor.”

“Gender parity is a lot easier than race or class.”

For New Music Gathering, Fefferman took a slightly different view, saying she felt that the responsibility for many curation concerns—styles, tools, gender, race, geographic location, and ethnic backgrounds—all figured into the decision-making process. “In my circle now, gender parity is a lot easier than race or class. I am still worried about bringing opportunities to different gender-identifying people, but more so these days about bringing voices from different races and socioeconomic classes.”

Plans for upcoming seasons show that all of the organizers interviewed are not just responding or reacting to political and social foci such as the #MeToo movement; by keeping their focus on new music and inclusiveness, they are already programming works and commissioning composers with pieces that are speaking to a wide range of issues confronting the contemporary audience.

Elisabeth Halliday

Glimpsing into the commissioning process of Rhymes With Opera, Halliday explained, “Our process is quite extended, but we’re interested in composers that are working topically, relevantly. Next year we’ve got a piece about Eleanor Roosevelt. That was planned two years out, but it feels really relevant right now. Our Rumpelstiltskin piece on its face is a fairy tale, but Ruby and George imagined it as a piece about gender and loneliness.”

Challenges and Mentorship

I asked everyone with whom I spoke to specifically describe their challenges and successes, as well as to muse a bit on whether they felt those challenges and definitions of success differed from those of men. Together, we questioned the idea of stereotypical gender roles and how that might play into ideas of success and perceived differences.

The women I interviewed felt, for the most part, that their challenges and successes were the same as anyone’s in their position, regardless of gender. The universal answer to the question, “What is your biggest challenge?” was “Fundraising!” (The eye rolls were audible over Skype and phone.) “We have no budget” was a theme repeated as often as death knocking in Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, with stories of self-financing through credit cards, Kickstarter, grant writing, donor-chasing, and family support all thrown into the mix.

“Even in entrepreneurship courses I took, we talked about budget, but not about gathering capital,” said Bayer. She learned how to ask for money and barter for spaces, occasionally receiving the polite “no” or non-response. “But what I remember most are the ‘yeses’ I received,” she added.

Interviewees also discussed challenges of time management and the overwhelming breadth of decision-making, though it was always in regards to balancing their roles as organizers and leaders with various other jobs, leadership roles, and projects. While some women felt that their challenges were not inherently gendered, the ways they had to learn to handle it might have been different from men in the same position.

“I often felt I was undeserving and felt hesitant about asking for support,” one woman recalled. “I feel like my upbringing as a ‘Southern woman’ pushed me into a subservient role.”

“Sometimes I question, ‘Is this a gendered experience, or is it a common experience for organizers?’”

“Learning to ask for money was really, really hard. I think that’s a gendered feeling,” another opined, but added, “Sometimes I question, ‘Is this a gendered experience, or is it a common experience for organizers?’”

After discussing some specific challenges from her life, Fefferman added, “Plus the usual skeezy challenges from a handful of awkward situations that I imagine males haven’t gotten.” The remark was heartbreaking because it was given so matter-of-factly and off-the-cuff, as an expected part of a woman’s experience.

When asked about mentorship, many said that it was challenging to find mentors. Lih noted, “I’ve been in situations where there are no visible women in leadership. That, I think, can be … not as easy a task … to imagine yourself in a leadership position.”

One woman interviewed said, “I 100% feel the need for role models. I have distant role models, but I don’t have an arts mentor. I feel that absence pretty keenly. Just in the past few months, I’ve decided that it’s something I can recognize that I need, but I also can’t dwell on its absence. I have to move forward on my own.”

Lainie Fefferman

Fefferman spoke highly of her experiences with Pauline Oliveros, and Fulton mentioned her wonderful time with Elinor Armer. Fefferman and Fulton both cited Bang on a Can co-founder Julia Wolfe as an influential role model. Fulton explained, “I also had a number of really cool male mentors, but it’s different and important to have female mentors, and I hope that I can be that for other females coming up, composing. I think it’s important to see how they work and present themselves and their work in the world.”

The Lens of Success

The views on success, interestingly, often came back to ideas of community.

“Success could be communal.”

Fefferman responded, “I saw early on, especially with Julia Wolfe and Pauline Oliveros, that success could be communal. I enjoy developing lasting relationships and collaborations with performers. Maybe that’s associated with a stereotypical gender role, but – it’s more fun!”

Bayer found that her experience as an intern at the Ojai Music Festival was a great influence on her feelings about what music festivals should be: “The entire town showed up for the festival.” For her, creating a festival was about seeking community in new music. She described the transition of Oh My Ears from marathon concert to a multi-day festival as a “leap of faith.” Expense and accessibility concerns made it necessary to go into downtown Phoenix where she had very few connections and form new bonds. The response, she said, was “amazing,” and the community she found in the move will aid in the longevity and growth of the event.

DeBoer described her role of festival organizer as a journey, explaining that her earlier efforts to create festivals in Omaha and Madison as an out-of-town organizer were disappointing. Living in and understanding her community was the key to the success of Omaha Under the Radar. “It’s about relationships,” she said. “For me, there is such a focus on creating an atmosphere of community, of communal effort. I want to nurture artists, and nurture Omaha. I like to hear about when artists meet in Omaha and then go on to collaborate outside this space. The most heartwarming success, and the number one goal of the whole event, is seeing people in the community, who otherwise wouldn’t seek out experimental music, getting to experience it here in Omaha.”

Lih and Barnett were excited about being able to serve as a resource for other organizations interested in achieving gender parity: “I think we’re at a moment where more organizations and people want to do this work, but there’s not a lot of precedent. We’re now in a position to help other organizations and be a resource for others. People are starting to be interested in change, and we’re excited to help them.”

On a personal note…

Over several days, I collected some 30 pages of notes from interviews. This article is only a brief summation of some of the common themes I discovered among this group of leaders. Some of the stories were entirely unique. Some of the experiences were commonplace. All were utterly personal. I want to say how deeply grateful I am for the time each person took in these interviews and the trust they placed in me.

“Find your community.”

The idea of mentorship was one that resonated deep within me, and I realized that I was being mentored through the process of writing this article. Each 45- to 90-minute window of time in the interview was a frank, honest, and yet overall positive outlook on the direction of new music and the growing acceptance of women’s roles in it. In a time when it is easy to be frustrated by numbers and disheartened by the recurring anecdotes, we can still find a community of people forging paths and blazing trails to positive change.

I asked interviewees, “What would be your advice for women pursuing leadership roles in music?” The women of Rhymes With Opera dovetailed their responses deftly in a chorus of encouragement.

“Do it!” Lander exclaimed.

Adding to Lander’s response, Fulton pointed out, “Just do it with fearless confidence. If there are enough people doing this, it will feel commonplace.”

Halliday added, “Find your community. Because you can do this, but it’s more fun with friends.”

Poetry and Community in Guangzhou

Posted on July 23, 2018 by Rachel C. Walker - Columns, NewMusicBox

Poetry

While I have been pursuing compositional projects and researching Chinese instruments, so much of the learning that has taken place for me in China has come from extra-musical sources: the environment, the language, and the conversations and interactions with people whose life experiences do not match my own.

Upon returning from my first stay in China in 2016, I began to seek out works by living Chinese writers in order to help enrich my understanding of the country beyond the music I had studied. Librettist Kendall A. suggested the poetry of Zheng Xiaoqiong’s (郑小琼), and I was struck by both the power of her words and the evocations of a side of China I had only seen hints of. Zheng was a former migrant factory worker in Southern China; her poetry captures not only the daily life of workers and their conditions, but transforms it into a sort of music which dances on one’s tongue. (The Chinese noun for poetry is shi ge 诗歌, consisting of the characters for both poetry and song).

I was struck by both the power of Zheng Xiaoqiong’s words and the evocations of a side of China I had only seen hints of.

At the start, my Chinese was too weak to grasp the full breadth of her imagery in its original form. There were a few assorted poems available in translation online, and from there I began corresponding with her translators, who graciously sent along several others which they had finished but not yet published. I asked one if he might be able to connect me to Zheng Xiaoqiong; a few weeks later, we became WeChat contacts. From that time, her poetry was always on my mind. I returned to her work in Chinese last year, and began copying, memorizing, and reciting it to myself. After falling in love with one specific poem, Zheng Xiaoqiong gave me permission to set fragments of it, and invited me to come visit if I had a chance. In late April of this year, I arrived in Guangzhou to spend a weekend with her.

Zheng Xiaoqiong is full of life. She phoned just after I landed, the words spilling out of her mouth at a pace I could just keep up with. We had dinner that night before heading to her building, where she works as an editor for a publication about modern Chinese literature containing poetry, critiques on poetic theory, short stories, and essays. The beauty of the situation is that everyone employed by the publication lives and works in the same complex. This allows them some flexibility with time to pursue artistic endeavors, while maintaining the practicality of a consistent day job. (She was leaving for Germany for a week as a guest on a poetry exchange on the same day I left.) The proximity to one another allows the writers to have salons and readings to share their work each week. As Zheng Xiaoqiong said, one of the most important things to her as a writer was the access to consistent jiao liu (交流): exchange.

In fact, it was exchange which led Xiaoqiong to first become a poet. Because she was from a rural village in Sichuan Province, she had no chance to attend university; the sole option for leaving her hometown was through entering the factories. There she took solace in books which were passed around covertly after hours, and, at 22, she began to write poems which drew upon her experiences in spite of opposition from the factory managers.

When she asked about my plans for setting her poem the next day, I shared my ideas. As a composer and a non-native speaker of Mandarin, I knew that my readings would not match her own. Yet, to learn that she often reads her work in her native Sichuan dialect gave me a freedom to present her words in a way which would not be so strictly tied to one interpretation of the text. I then asked the obvious question: what does a factory sound like? Her eyes grew wide, and she said that it varies immensely depending on what it was the factory produced. Then she began to recall… disorderly crashes… electronics humming… drones…

She thought for another moment, and asked if I would like to go.

Later that day, we arrived in Dongguan, a city an hour and a half outside of Guangzhou. We first went to their library and museum, where we met two of Zheng Xiaoqiong’s close friends. One, Sai Ren (塞壬), was a novelist and the librarian in Dongguan; the other, Zhan You Bing (占有兵), was a photographer and documentarian who had been studying Chinese factories for the past decade. We first sipped tea and looked over his books before entering the section of the museum used as storage for his collection. There were clothes, tickets, rolls of film, work schedules, and books and books of photos with covers hand-sewn from denim jeans.

At dinner we were joined by a poet based in Shenzhen, Xue Fang (雪芳). She explained to me one-on-one that what set Zheng Xiaoqiong’s poetry apart was not its subject matter (“actually, there are many migrant worker poets… ”), but her use of language and her unstoppable vision. “Of all the workers in Chinese factories, how many are able to leave? And then to create artistic work of that depth…”.

We visited five factories… It was a sonically overwhelming experience, accompanied by an emptiness.

We visited five factories as a group the next day: a hardware factory, an electronics factory, a factory which produces the plastic wrapping material for children’s toys, a chemical factory, and a shoe factory. It was a sonically overwhelming experience, accompanied by an emptiness. I remembered a hollow feeling I had encountered once before when I exited the subway in Beijing at the wrong station, walking out into a wasteland of construction sites. At one point we sat drinking tea and eating cherries with a factory boss (lao ban 老板) while he watched CCTV displays of the workers in the sweatshop behind him sorting plastic in the dark.

A worker sorting through silicon molds at an electronics factory in Dongguan, China. Photo by the author.

Community

Zheng Xiaoqiong is no longer a migrant worker, but she is connected to a community of writers who share those experiences, as well as a larger community of writers and editors across China and a community of poets and translators abroad. Her poems are sourced in the lives of real people, but not in some tangential way: she returns on the weekends to talk to the workers and then amplifies their experiences through her writing. This connection is the lifeblood of her work.

Zheng Xiaoqiong and the author in an electronics factory in Dongguan, China.
Photo by Zhan You Bing 占有兵.

Community is created through exchange. Zheng Xiaoqiong finds this not only at her publication, but in her friends who accompanied us to the factories. She explained that while they only have the chance to meet in person a few times a year, they stay in touch through phone calls and WeChat, encouraging one another in their writing pursuits. The conversations I shared with everyone in the group that weekend were passionate and covered both the situations of factory workers and the shared challenges we face as writers of words and of music.

Community is created through exchange.

My weekend with Zheng Xiaoqiong informed my understanding of her work, and built a connection between us past words on a page into friendship. Exchange with China is not simply reading a poem from the Tang Dynasty and setting it. Rather, it is based in personal connections and requires a coming to terms with the complexities of modern life in China today.

An excerpt of 辜月 Gu Yue (2017), another work from the same set of voice and percussion works containing Zheng Xiaoqiong’s poem. Composed by the author for percussionist Yongyun Zhang 张永韵.

Playing Like a Girl: The Problems with Reception of Women in Music

Posted on July 19, 2018 by Carrie Leigh Page - Columns, NewMusicBox

By Carrie Leigh Page with Dana Reason

The year was 1942. In the USA, all-girl orchestras toured extensively, rather like a jazz version of A League of Their Own. Audiences were surprised to find that these girls played “just like men!” As in A League of Their Own, though, when the men returned, women were expected to go back to homemaking or other acceptably female professions. Those women who were leaders found themselves in the background once more. Glenn Miller, Benny Goodman, Fletcher Henderson, and Duke Ellington play large in the bylines of the Swing Era, but women’s bands such as the Sweethearts, the Melodears, and Lil Hardin Armstrong’s “All-Girl Orchestra” disappeared. According to Sherrie Tucker, author of Swing Shift: “All-Girl” Bands of the 1940s, the story lived on in a small way, not in music schools, but in oral histories from women’s jazz festivals and in women’s studies programs, as a sociological phenomenon. One such group that crossed both gender and racial boundaries was the integrated International Sweethearts of Rhythm from Piney Woods, Mississippi, sometimes referred to as the precursors to the Freedom Riders.

How do such important contributors to 20th-century music get lost so easily? This is a question of reception.

Leaving out receptions related to touchdowns and weddings, Merriam-Webster associates the word reception with three synonyms: receipt, response, and admission. Working from that definition, we can perhaps refine the distinct meanings of reception into three musical steps:

Receipt – Getting the music to an audience, which involves access.

Response – Having an audience react to the music and form judgments about its worth.

Admission – Allowing the work to be part of a collective group, canon, or curriculum.

Any new music or new message has problems with reception.

Any new music or new message has problems with reception. Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven all had problems with reception. Even Jesus had problems with reception in his own hometown. Women in particular, though, have problems with reception in music. Lucy Green, music education philosopher and author of Music, Gender, Education, posits that there is a spectrum for acceptance of women in music. A woman singer is accepted because using her body to make music is an extension of her femininity. Put an instrument in her hands or in front of her face, and it interrupts the impression of a woman as either “sexually available or maternally occupied.” The role of composer (and, I would add, producer), the dux femina facti, is the greatest challenge of all according to Green, because it places the woman in control and invites the audience to gaze upon the inner workings of her mind, disembodying the woman entirely.

Photo by Alex via Unsplash

The struggle to actually get our performances and compositions to an audience is particularly cumbersome and well-documented. Critical reviews of works by women can be a mixed bag that is not always based on the work itself. Actually acknowledging the worth of work by women seems painful for some in the establishment. This is true for women across all genres of contemporary music making.

Receipt: Accessing the Audience

The International Alliance for Women in Music (IAWM) exists because women found difficulties with reception, and the problem begins with access. In our last IAWM article, we raised a gruesome specter in the “Editor’s Choice” list of concert and contest band works on the J.W. Pepper website. Just 16 works by women out of more than 1600 made the cut. (For those of you who asked, yes, I counted.) Even when works by women are available, many performing organizations seem to be sticking with men. A Baltimore Symphony Orchestra report by Ricky O’Bannon showed the representation of women composers in major concert halls around the USA to be around 1.3% during the 2016-2017 season, and only 10% of the works by living composers were by women. According to Women’s Philharmonic Advocacy, only about 4% of the time scheduled for this year’s BBC Proms includes music by women composers.

Instrumental performance interrupts the expected roles of women: mother or sex object.

We’ve established the problems for women composers. What about the performers and conductors? Green’s work shows that instrumental performance interrupts the expected roles of women: mother or sex object. Case in point: Most Miss Americas win while competing as dancers or singers. A few exceptions to that include piano, flute, harp, or violin. A notable outlier is Debbye Turner, who won in 1990 with a marimba medley. There is not a winning trumpeter or saxophonist in sight. What about the wildly successful Pietà ensembles of Vivaldi’s time? According to Rosie Dilnot, “They generally performed in the galleries, or cantorie, of the church, by candle light and stationed behind gauze curtains and a metal grille.” That “mystique” of femininity was preserved.

This is why blind auditions are so important to the rise of women in our orchestras. The story of Abbie Conant and her struggle to keep the orchestra job she had already won in Munich was a flashpoint issue in orchestras of the 1990s, and a 2000 Harvard study determined that the screen between jurors and the musicians they are evaluating increased the number of women hired by 30%. A 2014 article from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch highlights that the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra now enjoys a higher proportion of women than men in its ranks, and even the Vienna Philharmonic, which did not admit women until 1997, is likely to equalize its gender imbalance by the next generation. (Pay differences between men and women are a concurrent question to be addressed in these institutions.)

A blind audition is probably impossible for conductors.

However, a blind audition is probably impossible for conductors, and we still see an enormously thick glass ceiling, or as some sources term it, the “glass podium.” There are a few women making headway, but the number of women conductors remains embarrassingly small. The same BSO report mentioned earlier shows female orchestra musicianship to be around 47% percent in the 85 American Symphony orchestras surveyed, but they are overwhelmingly led by men, with only 8.8% of concerts being conducted by women (5.2% for major orchestras). Linda Hartley shows that the same problem exists in the band world, with similar numbers observed at that Mecca of “brass ceilings”: Midwest Clinic.

Photo by Jānis Skribāns via Unsplash

Though most of the discussion above centers on classical genres, jazz and experimental music programming is similarly restrictive. Biddy Healey commented on the gendering of instruments and the exclusion of women in the “social art” of jazz culture in her essay, “Be a Good Girl or Play Like a Man.” Even the title emphasizes the uncomfortable binary of expectations placed on women.

Women are most often hired as part of someone else’s group rather than as a leader of a large group.

IAWM board member and musicologist Dana Reason has conducted extensive research in this field. Reason’s 2002 dissertation on experimental women improvisers and jazz programming examined five major jazz festivals and concluded that the festival planners at times seemed locked into gender stereotypes: women pianists and singers were hired for “emotionality or sensuality”; women were most often hired as part of someone else’s group rather than as a leader of a large group, and the same small pool of women was rehired each year, seeming to fulfill an implicit “quota” of gender diversity without more extensive research into or appreciation for the breadth and depth of music making in the larger pool of women jazz artists. Such programming creates “silos within silos”—a small experimental jazz pool, and an even smaller pool of women practicing in that genre, and an infinitely smaller pool of the same female artists getting hired year after year.

In pop music as well, grave differences need redress. The USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative published a study this year that notes that women make up only 22.4% of artists, 12.3% of songwriters, and 2% of producers. A recent article in Billboard (“Where Are All the Female Music Producers?”) , the response from Ebonie Smith (“Why Are Female Producers Everywhere, Yet So Invisible?), and countless other sources highlight the invisible role of the woman producer. Smith seems to agree with Tricia Rose’s position that the primary factor that hinders growth is the cold reception of female apprentices in the tech-heavy, male-dominated studio culture.

In short, many audiences do not get access to works created by women, whether notated, improvised, or produced.

Response: Recognition and Value

Over 90% of Grammy nominations for popular songs go to men.

In the Annenberg report, we see that just over 90% of Grammy nominations for popular songs go to men. This lack of critical recognition in the pop industry, combined with the paucity of women awarded prizes and fellowships, emphasizes the invisibility of women across multiple genres.

As Reason points out, we feel the absence of women twofold: they are inadequately programmed and inadequately covered by media:

When coverage of women does occur in magazines or online, the tendency to foreground physical descriptions, make overtly gendered remarks, or advance theories as to the exceptionality of the woman in question. . . can distract readers from the quality of the work and the artistic achievements of experimental women.

In 1903, musicologist Arthur Elson (1873-1940) published a book entitled Woman’s Work in Music, a surprisingly comprehensive and relatively sympathetic tome for its time, detailing the historical roles of women in Western music as performers, patronesses, teachers, researchers, and composers, with a special focus on contemporary women composers at the end of the book. However, despite his own evidence to the contrary (literally over a thousand years of evidence on women making music), Elson still asked if women were “handicapped by the constitution of their sex” and believed that “woman’s work in music will always show more of delicate grace and refinement that man’s, and will be to some extent lacking in the broader effects of strong feeling.”

Elson seemed to claim the ability to distinguish a woman’s compositional product from a man’s, but Ethel Smyth, a contemporary composer about which he writes, was often accused of writing music that was overly masculine, according to researcher Elizabeth Kertesz. In her analysis of critical reception of Smyth’s works, Kertesz explains:

In Smyth’s case, she was accused of being too masculine for demonstrating excessive ambition in her attempts to compose using major forms which employed substantial resources and advanced techniques. Even loud, bold writing, hardly a rarity in Smyth’s style, was seen as masculine, as was technical and formal mastery. The charge of insufficient femininity was levelled at her because some critics considered her expressive range to be too limited at the tender, feminine end of the spectrum. Femininity itself was less clearly defined, including vaguer attributes such as charm, simplicity and grace. (p. 168)

Kertesz organizes the gendered critical reception of Ethel Smyth into three main categories (p. 136):

1. It’s good – for a woman.

2. Comparisons of “feminine” music and “masculine” music.

3. Reflections on the composer herself or the issues of the women’s movement.

Unfortunately, these categories are still applicable to some critical responses to women’s music today, from Vasily Petrenko’s comments about Marin Alsop to that totally weird, “there’s a good reason why there are no great female composers” article from The Spectator . (Don’t miss Emily Hogstad’s snort-laughingly funny response to it!)

Admission: The Musical Canon(s)

[The canon] can imply ideals of unity, consensus, and order. To adherents such ideals serve moral ends as they forge a common vision for the future. To opponents, however, they paper over the realities of social diversity and political dissent.—Martha Citron, Gender and the Musical Canon

It is a question of perspective, a question of emphasis. Just as we can and must cite a black text within the larger American tradition, we can and must cite it within its own tradition, a tradition not defined by a pseudoscience of racial biology or a mystically shared essence called blackness but by the repetition and revision of shared themes, topoi and tropes, the call and response of voice, their music and cacophony.—Henry Louis Gates, Jr. “Whose Canon is it Anyhow?”

Martha Citron’s work, quoted above, is one of several winners of the IAWM’s Pauline Alderman Award. This award specifically honors researchers in the field of women in music with prizes for books, articles, and reference works. The Alderman awards are one of the ways the IAWM is working to encourage the study of women’s music and to help women music makers find responsive and sympathetic critics.

Change is intimidating to some, and glacially slow to others.

As we can glean from Henry Gates’s quote, whether discussing the musical canon or the literary canon, the idea of change is intimidating to some, and glacially slow to others. The furor over Kendrick Lamar’s Pulitzer-winning DAMN. demonstrates that our musical world is still woefully reluctant to admit newcomers.

The fact is, women have been working in these musical canons alongside men all along. Studying Suor Leonora D’Este’s madrigals and Francesca Caccini’s Ruggiero does not detract from the accomplishments of the Gesualdo or Monteverdi; it enriches our understanding of early Baroque. Playing records of the multitalented Clora Bryant and Ginger Smock does not take anything from Dizzy or Bird. Julia Amanda Perry’s Stabat Mater more than holds up to those by Vivaldi, Poulenc, and Szymanowski and deserves a place in sacred concerts.

In one indicative pop culture canon, the Songwriters Hall of Fame, we find very few female songwriters honored. The first class of more than 118 stylistically divergent inductees included Irving Berlin and Cole Porter alongside John Philip Sousa and William Billings, but only four women: Katherine Lee Bates, Anne Caldwell, Julia Ward Howe, and Carrie Jacobs-Bond. Since then, only 20 women have been added, and, as Lashonda Katrice Bennet points out, only two black female songwriters.

Reason offers the following comments about the process of changing the canon:

Discovering the many voices of contemporary music making by women and allocating space for them is an important step to bridging the discursive gaps in emergent practices involving women. A research and arts presentation model that from the outset, encourages different authenticities, aesthetic practices, and musical languages to co-exist without hierarchical agendas, could emphasize the importance of individual and collective identities and voices of innovative and creative women working with music and sound.

Women do not exist in a vacuum unto themselves, and neither do the men.

Publishers, concert curators, record labels, and textbook authors—in short, those who in our time define the “canon”—need to take note that women do not exist in a vacuum unto themselves, and neither do the men. We can acknowledge the plurality of experiences of women musicians, AND we can place them within the larger framework of the musical canon.

To lift another quote from Dr. Gates’s article—perhaps a bit out of context, but apropos to the moment—it’s time for the gatekeepers of the canon to “say ‘yes’ to the female within.”

A woman playing a saxophone in a room with a drum set. Photo by Christian Chen (https://unsplash.com/@christianchen)

Photo by Christian Chen via Unsplash

Receiving Women in Music: How receptive are you, really?

How receptive are you to women in music? Answer these 10 questions.

If you’ve gotten to the end of this article, thank you and congratulations. The International Alliance for Women in Music serves as a platform for many types of music-making women from all over the world and encourages active performance and study of women in music. It is our job to bring up questions that allow all musicians to examine their day-to-day work closely and critically to see if they are truly aligning with ideals of inclusion. Are you giving women access to audiences? Are you giving women adequate coverage and thoughtful criticism? Are you creating space for women in your canon? This list is by no means exhaustive, but it’s a starting place for individuals and organizations to evaluate how receptive they are being to women in music.

1. Take up the #5x5Challenge: Can I name at least five women composers in at least five different eras of music history? Can I name at least five living women composers on five different continents? Can I name five women music producers, or music editors, in five different genres? Once you start working on this, it will be a challenge to stop.

2. Do I program works written by women every year? What is the percentage of time that I actually devote to women composers? Do I segregate these works into a “works by women” concert, or do I give my audience opportunities to hear works by women throughout the year?

3. When I choose teaching materials, do I seek works written or performed by women, including women NOT singing or playing piano?

4. Do I seek out a diverse pool of women of different ethnic and cultural backgrounds practicing in different fields, genres, and subgenres, or do I choose the same performers, lecturers, and composers that are typically on my circuit?

5. When I program women, do I ensure that they are getting adequate and equitable media coverage in our printed and online materials and in press releases?

6. When I talk or write about music created by women, am I gendering my language or focusing on issues tangential or unrelated to the work itself?

7. Do I invite women to join chamber ensembles or to collaborate on projects? Do I only think to invite a woman because I collaborate with her (male) significant other? Do I require a woman to modulate, deny, or sexualize her femininity to be part of a creative space, whether blatantly or subtly?

8. Do I consult with female colleagues regularly about the mission, trajectory, and management of musical organizations with which I am involved? If so, do I enact any of their suggestions?

9. Do I actively create and support opportunities for women to assume leadership roles?

10. Do I work to ensure that women’s compensation is equal to men’s compensation, and distribute opportunities equally among my colleagues and people I may supervise?

An Introduction to the Chinese Bamboo Flute Orchestra

Posted on July 16, 2018 by Rachel C. Walker - Columns, NewMusicBox

One of the most representative ensembles of Chinese traditional music engaged in cultural exchange today is the Chinese Bamboo Flute Orchestra (中国竹笛乐团). The group was founded by one of the leading performers on the bamboo flutes dizi (笛子) and xiao (箫), Zhang Weiliang (张维良). In its five years of existence, the orchestra’s work has been substantial. It has commissioned and promoted the music of living composers. It has used modern technology to innovate the design and subsequent construction of new dizi. It has also increased competency of Chinese musicians in playing in non-traditional ensemble settings. And, finally, in addition to protecting and innovating Chinese traditional music, the orchestra has raised the profile of Chinese music internationally.

The Creation of a Dizi Orchestra

To form an orchestra of dizi is a remarkable idea given that Chinese instruments are soloistic by nature. Traditional mixed chamber ensembles are largely homophonic, or feature only one of each instrument to a part. Even in more modern groupings such as the Chinese folk orchestra, one would only find a handful of dizi at most. Hu Biao (胡彪), the ensemble’s conductor, and members Wang Meng (王猛) and Lee Juncheng (李浚诚) all affirmed that in creating this new vessel for dizi, the goals at the Orchestra’s founding in 2013 were educational as well as to build a new body of a repertoire showcasing the instrument.

The Chinese Bamboo Flute Orchestra (Photo by Wang Yougang 张有刚)

The members of the Chinese Bamboo Flute Orchestra (中国竹笛乐团). Photo by Wang Yougang (张有刚).

Zhang Weiliang is an expert on the history and development of the dizi as an ensemble instrument, and I had the opportunity to speak with him at length about the subject this past April. According to him, the instrument was primarily used for Chinese opera, xiqu (戏曲), accompaniment and for accompanying solo performances prior to the 1950. He recounted that:

Starting in the 1950’s, with the joint efforts of the senior bamboo flute experts and the musicologists represented by Feng Zi Cun (冯子存), Liu Guan Le (刘管乐), Zhao Song Ting (赵松庭), and Lu Chun Ling (陆春龄), the bamboo flute began to develop rapidly as a solo instrument. At the same time, the rise of the solo bamboo flute led to the start of the development of the bamboo flute ensemble music.

While performer-composers at this time began to arrange and write more works for dizi, including dizi ensemble, this repertoire faced several problems:

Firstly, most of these bamboo flute repertoires are mainly based on studies, and so are not suitable for use as concert pieces. Secondly, these ensemble types are mostly dominated by duos and trios, and the number of pieces involving ensembles of quartet or more are extraordinarily few. In addition, from the perspective of the size of the repertoire, dizi music from these settings plays a less important role for the instrument than solo work.
These [early ensemble] pieces were regarded as simple and had one part, always giving priority to bamboo flutes as a monophonic melody instrument. Furthermore, in the pedagogy for many years, bamboo flute performers have over-relied on solos as the primary teaching content. There are only a handful of educational pieces involving duo, trio, or quartet in the profession. Through investigation, it was found that there had hardly ever been a special concert focused on the form of a bamboo flute ensemble before the establishment of the China Bamboo Flute Orchestra. By comparison, everywhere one looks, there are countless forms of concerts for Western string music and wind music both domestically and abroad. When there have been Chinese bamboo flute ensembles, it has been only as a part of the concert, rather than as a feature in and of itself. On the whole, the development of the bamboo flute ensemble now lags behind that of the solo repertoire. Therefore, the goal [of the Chinese Bamboo Flute Orchestra] is to use the bamboo flute as a medium to integrate and connect Chinese music with contemporary world music, thereby forging contemporary Chinese music that can adapt to the development of world music, culture, and art. This goal is the same and has not changed!

Recently, other performers of Chinese traditional instruments have begun to create multi-instrument ensembles of this sort. Composer Wenhui Xie (谢文辉), a collaborator of the group, gives credit to Zhang Weiliang’s initial vision for beginning this trend and also for his unique approach, noting in a May 2018 email exchange:

Soon after, there followed the emergence of a Huqin Orchestra (胡琴乐团), a Pipa Orchestra (琵琶乐团), a Sheng Orchestra (笙乐团), a Yangqin Orchestra (扬琴乐团), and others… They all have similar problems and are constantly exploring. However, I feel that in the creation of new works, Professor Zhang’s artistic taste is very refined, and thus encourages composers to boldly innovate, not at all stopping them from constantly trying out all categories and styles of musical expression. In the past five years, he has been original in the selection of the repertoire for each concert, including both down-to-earth arrangements (refreshed versions of music from the traditional repertoire), and also very experimental work. He assembles an array of bamboo flutes and other instruments and voices, and combines these together with multimedia elements or electronic music.

Challenges and Innovation

Tuning was a major issue for the orchestra at the beginning, as traditional Chinese music does not focus on harmony and does not necessarily require strict adherence to pitch.

To change the performance setting of an instrument — whose techniques and characteristics have been shaped to such a large degree by it — has accordingly required adjustments to the instrument itself. For instance, the dizi’s characteristic timbre is provided by a thin reed membrane, di mo (笛膜); when assembling twenty or thirty dizi at once, it was found to be too overwhelming for all instruments in the orchestra to use it. Additionally, as there were previously no bass bamboo flutes, Zhang Weiliang began to commission lower models which could provide registral balance. Tuning was a major issue for the orchestra at the beginning, as traditional Chinese music does not focus on harmony and does not necessarily require strict adherence to pitch. Intonation has been improved by having performers play one-to-a-part, and through the performers’ increased exposure to and familiarity with contemporary works. The results of these changes have meant that the members of the ensemble are also more prepared in their engagements as solo musicians.

The various pieces of a lower-ranged Chinese bamboo flute, including its curved mouthpiece joint, in a flute case.

A lower-ranged Chinese bamboo flute (photo by the author)

Bringing Dizi to the World Stage

Zhang Weiliang and other core members of the group share a common goal: they want dizi not to be seen as some sort of “minority music” relegated to the world music CD shelf at the back of the library, but to be taken just as seriously as any of the instruments in a Western orchestra.

Five years into the group’s journey, the steps being taken to ensure this are impressive. They have made commissioning and performing new works and arrangements a cornerstone of their activities due to their unique instrumentation. Zhang Weiliang is himself an accomplished composer and so understands the importance—and the excitement—of presenting new music. To this end, the orchestra has performed and commissioned works from many Chinese and international composers, including Cui Quan (崔权), Zhang Jian (张建), Yang Qing (杨青), Guo Wenjing (郭文景), Wenhui Xie (谢文辉), Gao Ping (高平), Joel Hoffman, and Kohei Nishikawa (西川浩平).

Perhaps Zhang’s greatest example of exchange can be seen in his relationship with American composer Joel Hoffman.

Perhaps Zhang’s greatest example of exchange can be seen in his relationship with American composer Joel Hoffman, whom he has commissioned to write several works for dizi orchestra and for smaller chamber groupings featuring dizi and xiao. The most recent performance of one of these works, Xiang He Ge (相和歌), took place this fall at the National Centre for the Performing Arts (国家大剧院, NCPA) in Beijing by Zhang Weiliang and guitarist Yang Xuefei (楊雪霏):

A further video, from the premiere of Hoffman’s work sizzle at NCPA in November 2015, can be heard here in a performance by the Chinese Bamboo Flute Orchestra, conductor Hu Biao, violinist Benjamin Hoffman, and cellist Natania Hoffman:

In addition to bringing forth new music for dizi, the question of audience engagement is a central concern for Zhang Weiliang. Even within China, many people do not seek out Chinese traditional music; if they do, they might be more inclined to hear guqin or guzheng before dizi due to its forthright timbre. In the orchestra’s push to reach new audiences, they have toured extensively within Mainland China as well as in Hong Kong, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Japan. In August 2018, they will commence on a tour of five Eastern European countries.

Even within China, many people do not seek out Chinese traditional music.

Details of the concert experience have also been considered from early on. Two large-scale multimedia events have integrated lights, electronic music, and video imagery alongside dance to create immersive experiences which introduce Chinese instruments to new audiences. The following image, like the one at the top of this article, was taken from the orchestra’s most recent multimedia concert in January of 2017, Call of the Ancient Past (远古的呼唤).

A large group of musicians playing Chinese bamboo flutes onstage with a conductor with a very colorful cloud-like image in the background.

From the Chinese Bamboo Flute Orchestra (中国竹笛乐团) performance Call of the Ancient Past (远古的呼唤). (Photo provided by Zhang Weiliang)

Looking Ahead

Ultimately, Zhang Weiliang’s goal is to forge more international collaboration.

Sitting with Zhang Weiliang in his office a week ago, he was brimming with ideas for the future of the group. At this time, he shared with me several scores being premiered on the ensemble’s upcoming concert at NCPA this December. Scored for dizi in combination with other Chinese and Western instruments (pipa, guzheng, erhu, and vibraphone), these pieces represent a new direction for the orchestra. Due to the overwhelming multiplicity of genres which may be called “Chinese music,” there can be little or no crossover historically between certain instruments (e.g., xiao and suona). By experimenting with instrumental combinations that blend dizi with other Chinese and Western instruments over the next few years, there will be many greater timbral and harmonic possibilities than an ensemble of dizi alone is able to provide.

Ultimately, Zhang Weiliang’s goal is to forge more international collaboration and understanding through dizi, creating art which is at once Chinese music and able to be universally enjoyed.

Rachel C. Walker

Subscribe to our newsletter and never miss a beat!