Category: Field Reports

The 2015 CMA/ASCAP Awards for Adventurous Programming and Other New Music at CMA

Logo for CMA listing their embrace of classical jazz contemporary world and early music

Underneath the logo for Chamber Music America on the organization’s website is a list of the genres of music they embrace–classical, jazz, contemporary, world, and early music. 21st century music is evolving into an amalgam of all of these things, and much more.

Three ensembles and five presenters were honored for their commitment to new music with 2015 CMA/ASCAP Awards for Adventurous Programming during the 37th national conference of Chamber Music America, which took place at the Westin New York at Times Square from January 15-18, 2015. The eight award recipients were selected by an independent panel of musicians and presenters based on the amount of works composed during the past 25 years that have appeared on their programs during the 2013-2014 concert season as well as for innovations in engaging audiences with new music. Separate awards are given for ensembles and presenters devoted to contemporary music and jazz as well as groups which incorporate new music into a mixed repertory. Presenters are further categorized into large and small based on their annual budgets and the number of concerts they present during the year. This year there was no award given in the “Small Jazz Presenter” category.

The eight awardees were:
Either/Or (New York, NY)—Ensemble, Contemporary
Sean Smith Ensemble (New York, NY)—Ensemble, Jazz
PUBLIQuartet (Brooklyn, NY)—Ensemble, Mixed Repertory
Switchboard Music (San Francisco, CA)—Small Presenter, Contemporary
Music at Noon, The Logan Series (Erie, PA)—Small Presenter, Mixed Repertory
Miller Theatre at Columbia University in the City of New York (New York, NY)—Large Presenter, Contemporary
Festival of New Trumpet Music [FONT Music] (New York, NY)—Large Presenter, Jazz
Yellow Barn (Putney, VT)—Large Presenter, Mixed Repertory

A booklet distributed to conference attendees during the award ceremony listed all eligible repertoire presented by the eight honorees. While any work composed during the past 25 years that the honorees featured was eligible for inclusion (which means works dating as far back as 1989), it was particularly gratifying to see that the majority of the repertoire was created in the 21st century and for four of the eight awardees—FONT Music, PUBLIQuartet, Switchboard Music, and Music at Noon (whose oldest piece was Steve Reich’s 2009 Mallet Quartet!)—it was exclusively so.

The Adventurous Programming Awards Ceremony was one of several new music-related highlights during the CMA conference. Another was the concert, “New Music from CMA,” an annual conference component that is devoted to performances of new repertoire that was directly commissioned through CMA’s grantmaking programs. Works in the Classical Commissioning Program are supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Aaron Copland Fund for Music and the Chamber Music America Endowment, while New Jazz Works supported by the Doris Duke Foundation.

This year attendees braved a half-mile trek from the conference hotel to the DiMenna Center in extremely inclement weather, but it was well worth it. Nico Muhly’s Fast Dances for two harps was lovingly performed by Duo Scorpio. It was followed by a hefty excerpt from The Subliminal and the Sublime, an ethereal work by Chris Dingham played by his sextet Waking Dreams which, in addition to Dingham on vibraphone, featured Loren Stillman on alto sax, Ryan Ferreira on electric guitar, Fabian Almazan on piano, Linda Oh on bass, and Justin Brown on drums. What was supposed to follow that was a performance of Daniel Strong Godfrey’s To Mourn, To Dance by the Cassatt String Quartet, but unfortunately due to the severity of travel on roads in the New York City-Metropolitan area, one of the members of the quartet was unable to get to the venue. While this was extremely disappointing, the all-star Marty Ehrlich Ensemble—Ehrlich on clarinet and saxophone, Ron Horton on trumpet, Ray Anderson on trombone, Jerome Harris on electric guitar, Bradley Jones on bass, and Eric McPherson on drums—lifted up the doldrums with a rousing performance of Ehrlich’s Rundowns and Turnbacks, a politically-charged multi-movement magnum opus lasting some 20 minutes that he had recorded with a much larger group on his 2013 New World recording, A Trumpet in the Morning.

But ultimately the concert was just the tip of a new music iceberg. During the conference there were a total of 18 showcases (basically a half-hour mini-concert), each devoted to a different ensemble that was either categorized as “classical” or “jazz” and the majority of these groups focused on the music of our time. What was particularly interesting was that despite the nominal segregation, many of the groups were clearly indebted to both classical and jazz traditions, freely traversing between performance practices to create 21st century music. Some groups blurred additional lines as well. Don Byron’s New Gospel Quintet (Byron on clarinet and sax, plus vocalist Carla Cook, bassist Brad Davis, drummer Pheeroan akLaff, and the extraordinary Nat Adderley Jr. on piano) found common ground between sacred and secular, making classic gospel hymns by the legendary father of the genre, Thomas A. Dorsey, totally swing. (Although it must be pointed out that doing so is not completely without precedent. Before Dorsey completely devoted himself to devotional music, he was a highly successful jazz and blues composer/pianist known primarily as “Georgia Tom” and in the earlier part of his career he felt equally comfortable creating music for both partying and worshipping.)

Byron playing saxophone and facing singer Carla Cook holding a microphone

Don Byron and Carla Cook trade phrases at each other during the showcase of Byron’s New Gospel Quintet.

Meng Su and Yameng Wang—who call themselves the Beijing Guitar Duo even though they are both from Tsingtao (where, as they pointed out, the beer is made) and are currently based in Baltimore—made an extremely compelling case for Manuel Barrueco’s transcription for two guitars of Eight Memories in Watercolor, the opus 1 of Tan Dun (who was actually in the audience for this performance). The plucked sonorities of the guitars are perhaps even more effectively able to evoke the sound world of the folk music of Tan Dun’s native Hunan province which inspired what was originally a solo piano composition. In their performance on four saxophones of “Ori’s Fearful Symmetry” from Lev “Ljova” Zhurbin’s pan world music-inflected Vjola Suite, a work originally written for strings, the Asylum Quartet were extremely comfortable with (and sounded requisitely-informed ethnomusicologically for) every nuance the score required of them.

Though they’ve premiered pieces by composers on both sides of this ever-so-seeming arbitrary contemporary classical-jazz divide (e.g. Richard Einhorn and Uri Caine), the Sirius Quartet—a quartet of the string variety—devoted their showcase to their own compositions which were largely platforms for their own daredevil virtuosity and their ability to effortlessly traverse idioms as diverse as Chinese traditional music and Nuevo Tango. Another string quartet—Megan Gould and Tomoko Omura on violins, Karen Waltuch on viola and Noah Hoffeld on cello—were half of a larger group called Rhizome led by the aforementioned pianist Fabian Almazan. But in addition to performing Almazen’s own mixed-genre compositions (which also featured guest vocalist Sara Serpa), they also performed what can best be described as a “cover” of the Adagio from Shostakovich’s String Quartet No. 10. Rather than just performing the music as it had been written (although they were all reading from scores), their performance was a surreal re-imagining in which the original 1964 Soviet-era music serves as a backdrop for on-the-spot musings created more than half-a-century later involving additional counterpoint and rhythmic underpinnings from piano, double-bass, and drums.

Perhaps most surprising of all, however, was the showcase by Andy Milne’s group Dapp Theory, a quintet consisting of Milne on piano, Aaron Kruziki on various reeds, Chris Tordini on bass, Kenny Grohowski on drums, and John Moon performing what the program listed as “percussive poetry” and what Milne introduced as “vocal poetics.” The majority of American listeners would identify what Moon was doing as rap, something that some more traditionally-minded chamber music practitioners might consider a cognitive dissonance during a Chamber Music America event. But the interaction between Moon and the four instrumentalists was formidable and undeniably chamber music, a testimony to how rapping can be enriched by direct collaboration with live musicians—something that other hip-hop creators, if only they had been in attendance at the conference, might have been extremely inspired by.

Milne plays piano and Kruziki plays saxophone as John Moon raps into a microphone

Milne (far left on piano), Kruziki (in center holding a saxophone), Tordini (barely visible in back on bass), and Grohowski (not pictured) offer some counterbalance to the “vocal poetics” of John Moon (in front of Tordini on the right) as audience members listen in wonder during Dapp Theory’s showcase.

All in all, the awards, the commissions’ concert and all of those showcases provided a real immersive new music experience throughout the weekend—one in which definitions were constantly being expanded and which celebrated diversity and inclusivity. The impetus to re-imagine what chamber music composition and performance could be also informed many of the discussions people were having during the rest of the Chamber Music America conference.[1] It also was a backdrop for an extremely provocative statement made by flutist Zara Lawler during a fascinating panel called “Sharing the Stage—Reach Across Disciplines to Better Reach Audiences”:

People think Britney Spears’s music is her music even though she didn’t write it. The assumption of classical music is that we are just the vessel for something greater than us … It’s not a fair assumption for most audiences that music comes from the composers.

 The five members of a CMA panel balance their nametags on their heads

A brief moment of levity before an extremely serious panel “Sharing the Stage—Reach Across Disciplines to Better Reach Audiences” which featured, pictured left to right: bass trombonist and “hybrid artist” C. Neil Parsons (moderator), NY Neo-Futurists co-artistic director Joey Rizzolo, flutist Zara Lawler, singer Elizabeth Halliday (from Rhymes with Opera), and choreographer Xan Burley.

As music continues to evolve in the 21st century, the lines between composers, interpreters, and even the audience will perhaps grow even more porous and inclusive. And hopefully in future years, an even greater variety of people creating music today will have a role in these discussions and performances. Of all the ensembles featured in the commissions’ concert and the showcases, only 4 included vocalists even though the majority of people who perform music sing. This is not to imply that instrumental music shouldn’t merit a great deal of attention during these convenings, simply to point out that there is a ton of other non-instrumental chamber music repertoire and a ton of people who create and interpret it who merit inclusion here as well. Although women were widely represented in the performance and administrative spheres (as participants in showcases and recipients of adventurous programming awards), only 3 out of the 73 pieces of music scheduled for performance during the conference were actually composed by women (a mere 4.1%)—Polina Nazaykinskaya’s saxophone quartet Pavana Pour Quatre performed by Asylum and pieces by Tonia Ko and Caroline Shaw for the cello/percussion duo New Morse Code [2]. New music—a great of majority of which is for smaller forces—is being created by people of all ages, geographic locations, economic milieus, faiths, genders, and orientations. Showing the broadest possible range of this form of artistic expression is the best way to ensure that chamber music remains the viable force that it is and should always be.


1. Unfortunately I was unable to attend the entire conference since I was in Minneapolis for the Minnesota Orchestra Composer Institute and could not fly back until Saturday morning, so the above report only reflects what I was able to personally experience.


2. This information is from the ensemble showcase program since sadly I missed New Morse Code’s performances as they occurred before I returned from Minneapolis.

Meeting of New Music Minds at SF Gathering

Composer-musician speed dating.

Composer-musician speed dating. Photo by Shaya Lyon.

From January 15-17, 2015, new music makers from across the country gathered at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music to share three days of performances, presentations, and discussion. Now that the hustle of this busy conference period is behind them, several participants took a moment to reflect on the ideas they confronted and what their take away was as they returned to their home communities.

Rob Deemer

Over the three years that I wrote weekly for NewMusicBox, I often discussed issues within the concept of the American new music “community.” Over the past fifteen years, that community has evolved from pockets of composers and performers who formed in mostly urban areas around the country to a much more connected and integrated community located online through social media networks, and we may have seen the next step in the evolution of our new music community in San Francisco this past week at the New Music Gathering. I found myself describing it as a “reunion for friends who had never met each other,” but it was much more than that–it was proof in action that an environment that removes the problems of proximity, competition, and ego can generate an immense amount of collaboration, friendship, and growth.

Claire Chase in performance at the Gathering

Claire Chase in performance at the Gathering
Photo by Tina Tallon

For a first-run of a DIY conference that encompassed performers, ensembles, and composers equally, this year’s event was an unmitigated success. There was a good balance between known personalities, from Claire Chase’s wise and inspiring keynote address to the recently unshackled Allan Kozinn doing his best to attend everything, and younger professionals and students. There was a healthy tension between time and content throughout the events–so much good stuff and not enough time to cover everything in the allotted schedule. The concert scope was luxuriously wide–a Boulez-by-memory recital by Taka Kigawa was followed later in the evening with a recital honoring Terry Riley by Sarah Cahill, while a touching and plaintive vocal performance by Baltimore’s Megan Ihnen and Hillary LaBonte served as a wonderful counterpoint to the intricate choral harmonies of Volti.

The presentations were just as diverse as well as informative–from Lainie Fefferman’s participative discussion on new music vocal issues to Samatha Buker’s lecture on working with boards to my own panel on presenting new music, there was a lot of listening and questions and discussions that seemed to always pour out into the hallways after the formal presentations were complete. Finally, the Composer-Performer Speed Dating felt extremely valuable to everyone who I talked to; to be able to comfortably introduce oneself to a potential collaborator with no risk of rejection or judgement is something that could easily be replicated elsewhere, but because of the wealth of attendees from around the country, this event seemed to succinctly encapsulate all of the goals of the conference at one time and in one place.

Obviously much gratitude and recognition needs to be directed toward the quartet of New Yorkers who not only came up with the idea, but had the foresight to hold its initial outing on the West Coast, where the San Francisco Conservatory proved to be a fantastic venue. Kudos should also be given to the many professionals who came out and supported this experiment; the New Music Gathering could have been a disaster if it had been weakly attended, but as one of the seemingly overarching themes of the conference was the support of intelligent risk-taking, the successful outcome will hopefully inspire the sustainability of this important new aspect of our community.

Isaac Schankler

It’s really hard for me to pick highlights from the weekend because I had so many positive experiences and interactions, and did my fair share of presenting and performing as well. But the Established Ensembles panel was especially notable, with administrators and artists representing the Kronos Quartet (Sidney Chen and Christina Johnson), ICE (Claire Chase), and Alarm Will Sound (Gavin Chuck and Matt Marks) present. The sheer amount of brain power and experience on stage was staggering. Most interesting were the responses to a question about the challenges of incorporating entrepreneurial or administrative skills into the college music curriculum. All the panelists expressed reservations about this idea, with Chase going so far as to say that anything she could teach would immediately become obsolete. Chuck suggested a practicum class where students would have to do all the work of putting on a concert themselves.

The roundtable on women in new music was also vital, with Lainie Fefferman, Brenna Noonan, Mary Kouyoumdjian, Leaha Maria Villarreal, and Joelle Zigman mediating an extremely lively discussion with the audience. Topics covered included concert programming, young composer competitions, challenges unique to motherhood, ingrained fear of affirmative action, antagonistic teachers, and a lot more. What became abundantly clear is that there is no single solution to achieving gender parity in new music–it’s a war that must be waged on all fronts.

Gathering organizers Daniel Felsenfeld, Mary Kouyoumdjian, Lainie Fefferman, and Matt Marks on stage.

Gathering organizers Daniel Felsenfeld, Mary Kouyoumdjian, Lainie Fefferman, and Matt Marks on stage.
Photo by Tina Tallon

Performance-wise, again, ugh, how can I possibly choose? But I was literally and figuratively shaken by Vanessa Langer’s arresting performance of David Coll’s Position, influence for soprano and sound sculpture. Coll’s metallic sculpture moaned and keened in sympathy with the virtuosic vocals of Langer, who played her part with an exaggerated theatricality perfectly suited to the outsized nature of the piece. On Saturday night, the Living Earth Show put on a multimedia extravaganza with 100 minutes of memorized music including pieces by Brian Ferneyhough and Luciano Chessa, multiple costume changes, video projection, abrasive electronics, choreographed flashlights, and a Moby Dick-inspired interlude in which the audience was served smoked fish and instant coffee. Not all of the individual parts worked by themselves, but as a gestalt experience it was completely engrossing.

So, the New Music Gathering was basically a big party for ourselves, and as a party, it was an indisputably incredible one. But I couldn’t help but wonder what my experience would have been like if I wasn’t the target demographic. I met someone who unabashedly described himself as a composer of “mostly new age music and show tunes.” How did he feel about the whole shebang? I didn’t ask. But the thought kept coming back to me. The Gathering managed to be admirably inclusive within the existing new music community, which is in and of itself an impressive feat. Now, how could we be more inclusive to the uninitiated?

Shaya Lyon

Kronos Quartet and Wu Man talk about their years together, with moderator Mary Kouyoumdjian.

Kronos Quartet and Wu Man talk about their years together, with moderator Mary Kouyoumdjian. Photo by Shaya Lyon.

I’m reeling from the sheer volume of ideas, music, and friendliness that filled these past three days. Every conference should be at least half as productive as this one. The recipe: bring together a bunch of people who love what they do and are committed to doing it more and better. Give them a safe forum to talk about what they know, and how they do, and encourage many questions. Create spaces where they can discover kindred spirits with the purpose of future collaboration. Avoid sales and pitches. Be supportive. Make the goal to advance the collective goal. Rejoice. Eat. Listen. And then sleep.

Throughout the New Music Gathering, I heard composers and musicians talk about challenges with documentation, collaboration, defining a vision, making decisions, making a living–issues not unique to new music. Raw, creative, and largely uncharted, new music may be eliciting questions we’ve long forgotten how to ask in other, more established industries.


Sideband Mobile Quartet (Lainier Fefferman, Anne Hege, Daniel Iglesia and Jascha Narveson) performs with tether controllers. Video courtesy Shaya Lyon.
This is my favorite question of the weekend, a gem from Aaron Siegel (to paraphrase): How can we better ourselves? In order to keep improving at our trade, we need to probe that which is unknown to us. How do we do that? How do we figure out what we don’t know, in order to learn about it? One way is to reach for the fringe (of what we know, what we’re comfortable with).

I leapt at this conference: new music, new people. And the newness didn’t disappoint: there was awkward, and there was awesome. So much to learn.

Composer-musician speed dating; Lainie Fefferman on left.

Composer-musician speed dating; Lainie Fefferman on left. Photo by Shaya Lyon.

Nat Evans

New Music Gathering overall I would say was really successful, and I got a lot out of attending (and presenting) there. Even though it was sort of billed as a “conference-that’s-not-a-conference” it most definitely still was…a conference, which is fine, as this particular one fills a void that exists for a lot of contemporary music. That being said, in the end it still mainly represented the healthy presence of around 100 people who all interact with each other on social media and are in most cases under 40. Is that a healthy cross section of our microcosm? Most definitely! But, it’s not all of it by any means. That’s not the fault of the NMG organizers, as this is the first year and organizing something as big as this is an enormous and oftentimes thankless task, but I do hope that in the coming years people from a more representative cross-section of the music world take notice and apply to be a part of it–I have a feeling that the thoughtful curators will be interested in expanding to represent more ideas in the future.

Also, as great as a lot of the panels, performances, and interactions at the conference were, it also was simply an invaluable time for getting to talk with and meet people from all over the country–some of whom I’d even worked with professionally before but hadn’t actually met. That face-to-face time with folks even if for five or ten minutes seemed to be as much of what the conference was about as anything formally presented.

Garrett Schumann

I had an incredible experience at the New Music Gathering last week, and I think the founders–Daniel Felsenfeld, Matt Marks, Lainie Fefferman, and Mary Kouyoumdjian–deserve a tremendous amount of credit for the event’s success. They led by example as they welcomed a group of wildly different composers and performers to the San Francisco Conservatory, and their enthusiastic selflessness infected everyone who attended and participated in the event. This uncommon leadership resulted in a palpable sense of community that was deeply supportive and encouraging of anyone’s contribution to new music. I left San Francisco inspired but wistful, knowing that feeling of togetherness is a rare thing in our world. However, at least I believe I can count on finding it once a year at future New Music Gatherings.

Judah Adashi

I was delighted to attend the inaugural New Music Gathering (NMG2015) as a composer, artistic director and teacher. My collaborator, cellist and teacher Lavena Johanson, and I presented a performance and talk entitled Putting on a Show: Bringing the Alternative Venue Into the Concert Hall. Lavena played a short concert, performing Caroline Shaw’s in manus tuas for unaccompanied cello and my own my heart comes undone for cello and loop pedal. My piece was accompanied by the premiere of a short film by Tim Holt, featuring dancer Sara Paul. After the performance, I shared some thoughts about creating an inviting communal experience around new music.

Lavena Johanson in performance at the Gathering.

Lavena Johanson in performance at the Gathering.
Photo by Judah Adashi

This was an apt topic for a festival-conference hybrid that achieved just that. I came away from NMG2015 deeply impressed by its organizers. It’s hard to imagine four artists more genuine in their intentions or generous in their approach. Lainie, Danny, Mary, and Matt were unfailingly enthusiastic, engaged, and responsive, committed to making NMG2015 the best possible experience for everyone who presented or attended. They set an ideal tone, striking a balance between familial informality and professionalism. The event was a testament to what happens when seasoned grassroots, D.I.Y. artists get together to create something on a large scale.

What excited me most about NMG, both in concept and realization, was the emphasis on the city in which it was held. NMG2015 warmly captured the spirit of San Francisco’s storied and vibrant new music scene, thanks in no small part to the remarkable facilities, resources, and personnel of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, as well as the Center for New Music. This meaningful connection to a city and its musical community strikes me as the singular heart of the NMG enterprise, and a durable template for its bright future.

Chicago: The Spektral Quartet goes to pieces (and rots)

Like Alice in Wonderland, I can’t tell if the Spektral Quartet is getting bigger or smaller.

At the quartet’s Saturday night concert, Snowpocalypse Antidote, I had the opportunity to reflect on “miniaturization” and the pleasure of small forms. Both in the evening’s single-movement “sampler pack” concert format, and more obviously in the quartet’s ringtone project Mobile Miniatures, Spektral is making a career of embracing the small, the brief, and the compact.

Yet they’re “doing small” in a very big way. After all, those ringtones may be miniatures, but there are more than 100 of them. And the concert may have been comprised of single movements, but to me and my companions that evening, it felt like a major program indeed.

umFgwHkQRm5aFgmcVMRJHKWq39z7c6FI2qNE39BLebFH-EerkJYZNijtaOjWULdLNtjiKJW278kZzwMIvWw_5PpNBJUgGog8oKjkQ6uquRbsAbx8eeZVv-QyGLLwjj4Czm9V8G8STbU8ZieE-VB7uDVpdHH2kOLYG8dms-w=s0-d-e1-ft

One critic friend of mine recently described such concert formats as almost unreviewable, claiming that the potpourri of movements is anathema to a cohesive, comprehensible program. I haven’t attended one of Spektral’s sampler packs for a while, but I’ve had my skeptical thoughts too, especially as the quartet has made the format a touring mainstay and selling point. Yet my doubts dissolved in Saturday’s joyful atmosphere at the simultaneously posh and cozy Logan Center “performance penthouse.” The assembled listeners were like a large dinner party enjoying, one after another, the delightful achievements of seven excellent cooks. It was a tasting menu, to be sure, but the portions were substantial. And most importantly, when the main course arrived–Dave Reminick’s new work The Ancestral Mousetrap–the audience was fresh, energized, and ready to listen carefully to a five-movement world premiere.

The first work performed was American composer Stephen Gorbos’s Passage Through the City, which takes as its inspiration the experience of “walking Chicago’s city streets.” The work was created with project support from local arts incubator High Concept Labs. Gorbos, a Maryland-based composer, has written an approachable piece evoking the grind of Chicago’s streets in every sense: the earnest hard work, the often inhospitable climate, and the constant, admirable hum of human endeavor. The quartet’s palette here was one of luminous, mellow timbres, gorgeously matched.

Although violist Doyle Armbrust announced from the stage that the quartet had neglected–oops–to include much “slow music” in this program, it was the quartet’s refinement and sensitivity that emerged most clearly throughout the evening. The opening of Beethoven’s Op. 132 had a courageous sense of introversion; Chris Fisher-Lochhead’s reimagining of James Blake’s I Never Learnt to Share had gorgeous stillness and lyricism; Haydn’s Op. 33 slow movement featured a poised and tranquil solo from Armbrust. The playing of the quartet’s newest member, violinist Clara Lyon, has a particular brand of elegance which has expanded the quartet’s sound world in a lovely way.

Dave Reminick’s highly anticipated new work for “singing string quartet,” The Ancestral Moustetrap, burst onto this polished and refined stage with an impolite roar. Reminick’s concise, funny, and often dazzling music has found an able playmate in the poetry of Russell Edson–or perhaps it’s the other way around.

Edson, a cult figure commonly referred to as the “godfather of the prose poem,” died in April, while Reminick’s Ancestral Mousetrap was still being composed. As a literary figure, Edson was a firm iconoclast who once claimed to strive for a voice “having no more pretension than a child’s primer. Which may,” he added, “be its own pretension.”

In his 1975 essay entitled “Portrait of the Writer as a Fat Man,” Edson wrote:

How I hate little constipated lines that are afraid to be anything but correct, without an ounce of humor, that gaiety that death teaches! …

How I despise the celebrity poet!

You get the idea. Edson marched to his own drum.

In terms of their form, Edson’s poems are provocative in that some people didn’t think they count as poetry. In terms of their subject matter, they are provocative because they contain what literary critic Sarah Manguso described as “lots of defecation, lots of procreation … lots of animals, particularly monkeys … And let’s not forget: lots of old men and lots of death.”

It’s the death, and particularly the decay of the body, that Reminick’s text selection reveals a keen interest in. Two of the poem/movement’s titles, “Killing the Ape” and “Bringing a Dead Man Back to Life,” speak death for themselves. Two others, “The Old Woman’s Breakfast” and “Oh My God I’ll Never Get Home,” feature the disintegration of the human body. The final, “The Ancestral Mousetrap,” is the most lyrical, describing the trap’s cheese bait:

A mouse would steal this with his death, this still unspent jewel of intent.

Reminick’s score, and its performance Saturday night, was bracing, original, and often jaw-dropping. The first movement, “Killing the Ape,” offers a startling take on the soli/tutti vibe of a concerto grosso, as violinist Austin Wulliman and violist Armbrust each alternate between his usual instrument and a second, gamba-style instrument held between his legs. This movement makes excellent use of the ultra-slow bow speed that creates an unpitched click from individual “grains” of the bow hair. Armbrust, in particular, got his bow to click so loudly that several audience members jumped. All this was delivered beneath Lyon’s ballsy, unaffected delivery of the sung text. In terms of singing in The Ancestral Mousetrap, this is Lyon’s big jazz solo, and her earnest, amateur lounge singer vibe was appealing.

Spektral Quartet

The second movement, “The Old Woman’s Breakfast,” uses all four singing voices for the first time. Here, the quartet alternates admirably between singing in barbershop-style harmony and delivering the composite text a few syllables at a time. Throughout the piece, Wulliman and cellist Russell Rolen both reveal vocal and dramatic skill. It is a delight to hear their musical instincts take new form as they make choices about vocal vibrato, glissandos, and affect.

In the subsequent movements, “Oh my God I’ll Never Get Home” and “Bringing a Dead Man Back Into Life,” the story the players tell becomes more and more gruesome. (In a particularly memorable moment, Armbrust delivers the text “They slap his face. His cheek comes off” with sprechstimme gusto.) The horror of the musical and poetic scenario, with its grotesque insistence that the dead man “respond,” peaks as Wulliman cries: “No use! Under his jacket nothing but maggots and ribs! No use!”

Edson’s favorite grisly topics rarely make it to the concert stage, and for bringing them there in such bold fashion, Reminick is to be heartily congratulated. But there is more to Edson’s poetry–and Reminick’s piece–than the shock value of bodily function and decay. Hidden inside Edson’s horrific images are elegant fragments possessing the balance and mystery of a Zen koan: “the ape climbing out of the ape”; “the porridge into herself, or herself into the porridge”.

In the space between brutality and contemplation, a uniquely tender and comical musical work has been born–one that pays unrepeatable homage to the now-deceased poet. In these poignant renderings of Edson’s death-obsessed texts, we get the message loud and clear: It’s not funny that we’re all going to die, but then again, it is.

Boston: Passports and Layovers from Lorelei and Roomful of Teeth

Logan International Airport in Boston.

Logan International Airport in Boston. (Via.)

If the only thing you ever saw of Boston was Logan International Airport, first of all, my deepest sympathies and, second, your idea of the city might very well be populated only by minutemen, the Red Sox, lobsters, and Cheers. Every city with an airport, I think, has an airport version of itself, based on the cultural shorthand of the souvenir stand. Airport versions of cities are not wrong, exactly, just disorientingly oblique to the people who actually live in those cities. But the airport version of Boston isn’t for me; it’s for tourists. It’s for people who have never seen the place before. It’s like a bullet-point outline to be (hopefully) filled in somewhat over the course of a visit. I’m probably too embedded and too oblivious to accurately judge the usefulness of the airport version of Boston. But I could imagine that it would provide as good a toehold as anything. (A couple years ago, I visited Barcelona for the first time. The airport version of Barcelona was Gaudí, Messi, and ham—in retrospect, a reasonably efficient triangulation.)

I sometimes wonder if, several decades from now, people will look back on the current era of new music and characterize it in terms not far removed from tourism. Because if there’s one thing common to the various kinds of music going under the new music banner right now (and a lot of music beyond that), it’s the pursuit and/or assertion of an aura of authenticity. Traditions, styles, vernaculars—so many new pieces I hear these days pledge allegiance to some form of authenticity, some repertoire, some community. A lot of times, such pieces are the result of a deep engagement with the cited style on the part of composer and performer; a lot of times, it’s simply an expression of momentary curiosity. But much of the listener’s intended satisfaction is to come from the feeling that the experience has been both unfamiliar and authentic. In other words: the ideal tourist experience. Which means that the real version and the airport version might, in fact, be equally effective.

***

On November 2, in the cool, enveloping reverberation of Boston University’s Marsh Chapel, the Lorelei Ensemble, artistic director Beth Willer’s eight-voice all-female choral group, presented a program called “Reconstructed: The New Americana,” venturing in and around an increasingly popular ethnomusicological destination: shape-note singing. The concert sent postcards from the style’s antecedents—colonial hymnody (via its most idiosyncratically great practitioner, William Billings) and folk music—while also placing it in new, modern galleries: four world premieres were interspersed with contemporary additions to the shape-note repertoire.

Early American hymnody and shape-note singing might be two of the most quintessentially American musics there are, in that they live at a nexus of American anxiety—the disconnect between the way the country ought to be and the way that it actually is. Both were aspirational forms, specifically designed to be specifically American, and both were, in turn, often rejected as being too provincial and unpolished. You only really get a sense of this stew of influence and counter-influence in the context of its relatives: the more buttoned-down, reactionary New England hymnody of the later 18th century, African-American gospel, Gilded Age grandeur, maybe even modern Christian rock-pop, a continuous negotiation between exaltation and populism.
All by itself, though, and in Lorelei’s unfailingly, uncannily pure and precise voices, the style found itself at another intersection: the shared Apollonian streak in the early music and modernist strains of classical music. It was certainly something common to the four commissioned works (the commissions supported—full disclosure—by NewMusicUSA). All of them, for all their variety, were dedicated to the not-inconsiderable pleasure of close-packed straight-tone harmonies, soaring echoes, and perfect intervals sung with overtone-sparking exactness. That melange of very old and very new was layered throughout the concert, even in interludes—flutist Ashley Addington and violinist Shaw Pong Liu improvising the familiar strains of “Amazing Grace” into sometimes surprisingly loose translations.

Scott Ordway’s North Woods, interpreting the Maine landscape through the lens of the ancient Roman historian Tacitus’s imaginary descriptions of northern Europe, made use of the most immediate sensation of the choir’s phenomenal purity: clean clarity as cold as ice. But the piece also hinted at the change from wild to civilized, from frontier to familiar destination. With Addington’s piccolo glinting off the music like lens flare, the opening movements were built on a foundation of fast, quasi-aletoric chanting, the ground continually slippery and shifting. By the end, though, the boundaries had been set down: as the first movement’s text circled back (“The nights are dark; the earth casts only a low shadow”), the music coalesced into a kind of domesticated part-song, as if the place itself had finally been fully marked off and mapped.

Joshua Shank’s Saro arranged variants of an old folk song into a quiet allegory of barriers and discrimination. The music, too, took on a notable echo of modern production. Starting out in familiar territory—a poignant solo encased in open intervals and diatonic suspensions—the harmonies gradually blurred into one another, the melody itself detached and slowed down into pure sonority, real-time digital stretching realized in analog form. With Shaw Pong’s violin hovering like a ghostly narrator, the piece felt both contained and unsettled. Mary Montgomery Koppel’s Nokomis’ Fall also used an instrumental anchor—Addington again, this time on bass flute—adding both texture and anchor to her twisty harmonies. Setting a passage from Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha, Koppel emphasized the twice-told ritual aspect of the story with unabashed text-painting; when Nokomis (Hiawatha’s grandmother) finally is plunged from the moon to the earth like a meteor, Koppel laced the scene with a simple, descending whole-tone scale in the flute, obvious and ingenious at the same time.

The most ambitious of the new works was Joshua Bornfield’s Reconstruction, a five-movement a cappella “mass” replacing the rite with 19th-century hymns from the shape-note lineage. (The movements were spread throughout the concert.) The treatment was equally ambitious: “Crowns (Mercy Seat)” turned into a polytonal, polyrhythmic contest between sopranos and mezzos; “Wrath (Battle Hymn of the Republic/John Brown’s Body)” and “Brother, Sister, Mourner (Amazing Grace)” re-energizing their familiar sources with busy Ivesian collages; “Farewell (Long Time Travelin’)” a tide of continuous, exotic reharmonization; and the finale, “Salvation (Song to the Lamb)” dense with melismatic decoration and closing on an open-ended, clustered “Amen.” It was a challenging score, superbly sung, hinting at hidden complexities even beyond its mercurial surface.

The newer shape-note hymns—all from within the past 20 years—pushed boundaries in a more casual, unassuming manner. Dana Maiben’s “Vermont” mixed a bluegrass-like melody with harmonies echoing the great 20th-century Anglican composers, major 2nds and 9ths in luxurious sequences. Adam Jacob Simon’s “Inman” gently hovered between natural minor and relative major, a swirl confined but unresolved. Moira Smiley’s “Utopia” was the most reminiscent of William Billings, a bricolage of modal collisions. The Billings selections (“Africa” and “Taunton”) were themselves transformed, the translation into upper voices revealing Dowland-like strains among his dizzyingly individual counterpoint. Even the most familiar attractions can seem new, if you happen to visit at just the right time.

***

Tourism was all over Roomful of Teeth’s November 21 concert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Kresge Hall. The group itself is the musical equivalent of a compulsive traveler, always adding new and farther-afield techniques and traditions to its toolbox. The appearance was the culmination of that ever-more common form of musical furlough, an academic residency. But the bulk of the program—two premieres, both by MIT composers—were works and music about tourism, in both the symbolic and literal sense.

The first half was Elena Ruehr’s one-act, a cappella opera Cassandra in the Temples, to a libretto by Gretchen E. Henderson. It was presented in an oratorio format; Ruehr, introducing the piece, indicated an eagerness to see it staged. Depending on the director, such staging would either be a trial or a delight: the libretto is more provocative than narrative, more about mood than story. Henderson’s poetry is jammed with wordplay and device, full of near-homonyms and compounding linguistic echoes in a way somewhere between Gertrude Stein and Van Dyke Parks. (Much of it hinges on the text’s visual appearance on the page, which unusually elaborate supertitles attempted to convey.) There is a framework, one centered around tourism: a modern visitor approaches the grave of Cassandra, the legendary Greek prophetess, the visit igniting a parallel retelling of Cassandra’s own crucial visit to the temple where snakes licked her ears, providing her with her gift and curse. Apollo makes an appearance, as does Laocoön and Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, but everything passes as shadows behind the scrim of language.

Ruehr’s music is luminous, constantly musicalizing the sounds of speech in creative, even cheeky ways. A chorus of whispers, like brushed cymbals; sea serpents and snakes sized up in voiced sibilants; Cassandra and Clytemnestra, trapped in their fates, the harmonies sloughing downward along the flat side of the circle of fifths. The score makes good use of Roomful of Teeth’s ability to switch styles on the fly, from throat-singing drones to seething dissonance. (My favorite was Cassandra’s rejection of Apollo—in Henderson’s version, a single “no” slithering down the page—set as sunny, strident ’60s pop, a girl knowing all too well whether or not he’ll still love her tomorrow.) I still can’t imagine exactly how it would be staged, but an abstract Cassandra in the Temples was still plenty diverting, in every sense of the word.

The other premiere, Borderland—a collaborative piece by Christine Southworth and Evan Ziporyn—also began with tourism, in its most nightmarish form. The subject is the conflict in the Ukraine, but half of the piece, its first two movements, viewed it from the vantage—first from the air, then from the ground—of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17, shot down over the country on July 17. A Facebook post, in Dutch, by a boarding passenger was combined with a tweet, in Malaysian, from the airline announcing the disaster, into a staccato weave of open- and closed-mouth sounds—shock and stoicism, perhaps. Then intercepted communications (referencing the weapon used to down the place) between the rebels on the ground and their Russian contact became a tangram of short, repeated fragments, busy, circling crosstalk, anchored around the phrase “А куда нам” (Where are we?). The last two movements turned to Ukranian poetry, by Taras Shevchenko, Ivan Franko, and Bekir Çoban-Zade, set with overtones of birdsong, chirping and chattering behind longer, keening lines. The textual sense was that of an eternal nature regarding passing humanity, the point of calamity giving way to a kind of persistent sadness in the land itself.

The musical setting made use of both minimalistic mosaics of motives and vocal extremes: the Shevchenko poem, for instance, alternated between very low and very high, around an accompanying middle ground, and the last movement, too, placed the texts in (perhaps intentionally) vowel-distorting ranges. For both Cassandra and Borderland, the group used sheet music while its director, Brad Wells, conducted, which actually amplified more than alleviated cautious singing. The concert’s closing three works, by contrast, were Roomful of Teeth standards, performed from memory: Judd Greenstein’s Run Away, gorgeous, simple yet shifty pop harmonies filtered for maximum warmth; Wells’s Otherwise, an exercise in pushing vocal sounds to margins both rich and strident; and the “Allemande” from Caroline Shaw’s Partita, goofy and joyous—and still, I think, the single best demonstration of what the group can do, an extensive tour of the surroundings with an indefatigably, generously, genuinely enthusiastic guide.

***

In The Wicked + The Divine, the ongoing comic book series by writer Kieron Gillan and artist Jamie McKelvie, Cassandra is a journalist, casting questions and camera at the gods-reincarnated-as-pop-stars that are the book’s central mythological conceit. At the outset, the shallowness with which the celebrities inhabit their supposed divine roles fuels Cassandra’s skepticism into flame. “You know what I see?” she snaps. “Kids posturing with a Wikipedia summary’s understanding of myth.”

She’s wrong; they really are gods, with all the attendant powers and arrogance. But she’s also right; they are kids, become gods, with a very incomplete sense of who those gods are or what it all might mean. They are, in essence, existential tourists, trying on the airport version of a divine identity with the hopes that their visit will invest that identity with nuance and depth. And besides: it doesn’t matter. They are still worshipped. Their performances still matter. As the comic’s main, human character responds to one such performance: “I don’t understand a word she’s saying. Nobody does. All we know is that it means everything.” The great advantage musical tourism has over its physical counterpart might be that the terminal can be just as inspiring as the countryside.

Chicago: A scavenger hunt of world premieres

It was Open House Chicago this weekend. Open House is, apparently, a worldwide celebratory architectural free-for-all phenomenon that started in London. But I’ve only ever experienced it in Chicago. Here, it usually falls in late October, when each rainstorm is a tender rite of passage that strips the city of a bit more color. I have a strong memory of spending one Open House weekend in Hyde Park, ducking out of the rain to explore hidden gems in Hyde Park. For me, that’s what Open House is about: it’s about what’s indoors. It’s about the time of year that we start to go inside. The season when we start to hurry a bit from doorway to doorway, putting our heads down, bracing ourselves a little as we go. On Saturday, the cold felt refreshing and energizing. Probably because I bundled up.

openhouse1
For several years running, Access Contemporary Music has “occupied” some of the featured spaces with little ensembles performing a new piece of music, written expressly for the space and occasion, every fifteen minutes. For three hours! With tens of thousands of people attending Open House, these mini-marathon pop-up concerts mean that world premieres by ACM composers receive a large and constantly rotating audience. It’s an exciting concept absolutely worth venturing across the gray, gray Chicago River for. On Saturday, the river was decidedly out of tourist mode: sidewalk closures on the west side of Wacker; crews tearing up something or other; more grit than sparkle.
openhouse3
openhouse4
I was headed to the DIRTT building — which, like so many spots one can explore during Open House, I’d never heard of before. Turns out it’s a high-end green architectural firm that had opened its 10th floor luxury “client lounge” to visitors. In residence between noon and 3 p.m. were cellist Nora Barton and violinist Myra Hinrichs, performing translucence by Romanian composer Gabriel Mălăncioiu. I watched them perform the work — a delicate and effective four-minute piece filled with fluttering false harmonics, passed-off long tones, and a brisk, rhythmic middle section that seemed to suit the earthiness of the surroundings — and then watched them chat with audience members.
openhouse5

One man in particular seemed new to contemporary music, and was open-minded and interested as he chatted with them about the challenges of performing the work. I personally just wanted to ask them what it was like to play a new piece so many times in a row:


Before I left, I visited the DIRTT roof deck and grabbed a cup of coffee from the decidedly modern coffee station opposite the musicians.
openhouse6 openhouse7 openhouse9
Sunday was not a fur-lined-hood day, not a day to hurry from doorway to doorway. It was the opposite: a perfect fall day, a day for a lighter jacket, a day to linger on the walk and enjoy whatever the wind might be doing to your hair.
openhouse10
Sunday’s only ACM Open House spot was at Union Station, where a duo by Tim Corpus was performed in Union Station. Ah, Union Station: the permanent home of chaos, confusion, and disorientation. It is so damn cavernous and never-ending. I wasn’t sure exactly where to go. The track boarding area where I’ve headed to the suburbs many times was deserted, which gave me the opportunity to record one of the strangest sounds in the whole city. Each numbered boarding track announces its track number, over and over again. Supposedly this is to help blind people find the correct track, but it makes for very disorienting ambient noise.


I headed to the overwhelmingly large Great Hall.
openhouse11
openhouse12
In a long-abandoned, paint-peeling room off the Great Hall — formerly the Women’s Lounge, and closed to the public for the past seventy years — is where I found clarinetist Christie Miller and cellist Desiree Miller performing music of Tim Corpus. The Union Station site, and its music, was particularly rich with Chicago history: Corpus chose to write his piece to accompany a letter written by Gertrude Adler in 1934, in which she mentions a visit to Union Station and Macy’s department store. The music was lovingly written and played, with a sense of nostalgia and tenderness in the mellow instrumentation and lyrical lines. And there were, rather inexplicably, giant Christmas ornaments in the corner.
openhouse13
Composer Tim Corpus chatted with an audience member about the space:


Seth Boustead was in the former Women’s Lounge, too, chatting with people in between the six-minute performances. Seth told me that the Open House performances are precisely the kind of thing he’d like to be ACM’s trademark: high-impact, scalable, and portable. The intimate duos mean that no performance gets unwieldy; the enormity of Open House means that composers are reaching larger numbers of people than they could otherwise. In fact, ACM will be a part of Open House New York this year, too.
openhouse14
Cheers from a city full of hidden corners, perfect for holding a bit of music on a fall weekend.

Getting Past Difficult Pronunciations to Answering Some Difficult Questions—the 2014 ISCM World Music Days

Wrocław at night

The old town center of Wrocław at night.

Although it has been established as an important urban center for more than 1000 years, Wrocław remains somewhat off the beaten path. There are few direct flights, not even from most places in Europe. Yet its history connects it to at least five different countries. Celtic tribes settled there in the 4th century B.C.E. although Poland is its earliest recorded claimant (a diocese having been established in the then-named town of Wrotizlava in the year 1000 C.E.). It was ceded to Bohemia (from 1336 to 1526) and then Austria (until 1741). A land grab by Frederick the Great made it part of Prussia and then Germany where under the name of Breslau it became the third largest German city. It was one of the last Nazi strongholds to surrender, but has been part of Poland again since 1945, hence its current name: think “wrought suave”… well, sort of. The President of the City (which is what they call the mayor there) claims that the correct pronunciation is “wroughts love” although that might just be an attempt at clever tourist sloganism on his part.

Given Wrocław’s history as a crossroads filled with conflict while nowadays being somewhat under the radar, it was a particular fitting host city for the 2014 World Music Days (WMD), the annual new music festival of the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM). ISCM is an organization with an almost equally complex history, albeit one that goes back only a mere 91 years. Although WMD is the oldest continuous contemporary music festival (it has taken place in a different city every year since 1923 with only one period of hiatus—between 1940 and 1945—because of the Second World War), it too has been somewhat under the radar in recent years. This is surprising considering that 86 official editions of WMD have taken place on a total of four continents thus far and that the world premieres of several very significant compositions have occurred under its auspices—to name just a few: Béla Bartók’s First Piano Concerto (featuring the composer at the piano), Anton Webern’s choral work Das Augenlicht, Alban Berg’s Violin Concerto (a year after the composer’s death), and Pierre Boulez’s song cycle Le marteau sans maître. George Perle’s Six Etudes for Piano received its first performance during the first and only time thus far that this marathon event was officially held in the United States—in Boston in 1976. (There were supposedly “unofficial” WMDs in New York in 1940 and San Francisco in 1941, but attempting to track down any details on those two convenings is akin to searching for El Dorado.)

Sculpture of Girl with Globe Skirt

A sculpture of a ballerina wearing a globe of the earth as a skirt on one of the main streets in Wrocław was a nice visual metaphor for the World Music Days festival taking place in the city.

The way WMD is programmed is unique among music festivals. Repertoire is chosen by the host festival in tandem with a jury of internationally-known composers which selects works submitted by the various national “sections” of the ISCM which represent some 50 countries on six continents. (Most of these sections put out a call for scores in their home countries which are then also culled through a jury process.) If a “section” submits a total of six works in four different categories (a category being a specific instrumental combination that the host is able to provide), at least one of the submissions is guaranteed a performance. In addition, the host is responsible for covering the full cost of up to a seven-day hotel stay for a delegate from every section. It’s an expensive proposition. This year’s WMD cost well over a million euros. But it’s a remarkable paradigm, one that results in an overwhelming amount of music in a relatively short period of time—this year over the course of 10 days more than 60 different concerts were presented. Given this variety and generosity, finding a way to attend the World Music Days ought to be the equivalent to going on the hajj for new music aficionados.

But the reality of WMD and ISCM has sometimes been somewhat less transformative. The selection process from year to year is completely different; some years with seemingly no POV and other years with too pointed a stylistic bias at the expense of all others. While the 2011 WMD, which was hosted by the Zabreb Biennale, felt like a feast of sonic possibility; the 2013 WMD—which was co-presented by new music festivals in Košice, Bratislava, and Vienna—tended to veer mostly toward modernist aesthetics. And that’s when everyone plays according to the rules. Sometimes they don’t. Some of the delegates who attended this year’s general assemblies, the official business meetings of the membership held in the morning prior to each day’s glut of concerts, were still grumbling about the notorious 2006 WMD in Stuttgart during which most of the ISCM’s submissions were completely ignored.

While the 2014 WMD was much closer in spirit to Zagreb than Košice-Bratislava-Vienna, the feast sometimes felt more gourmand than gourmet. Most of the 2014 concerts lasted more than 2 ½ hours despite concerts in venues scattered across the city often being paced two hours apart from one another. This meant that it was impossible to hear everything. According to one of this year’s festival’s principal coordinators, Izabela Duchnowska from the Department of Culture of the Municipality of Wrocław, most of the works that had been submitted were much longer than they claimed to be. Never completely trust composers!

To further overload an already overloaded schedule, the ISCM concerts and general assemblies were concurrent with the 2014 Conference of the International Association of Music Information Centres (IAMIC). Although some events were coordinated for the attendees of both convenings, many were not.

Photo of motorcyclists

Motorcyclists awaiting the start of the Motorcycle Symphony.

Still, there were many amazing sonic experiences for those intrepid enough to wade through it all. There were stagings of two important Polish operas—Krzysztof Penderecki’s Paradise Lost (a U.S. bicentennial commission originally staged at the Chicago Lyric Opera) and Zygmunt Krauze’s 2011 Pułapka (inspired by the life of Franz Kafka)—as well as Peter Eötvös’s 2004 Angels in America based on the 1993 Pulitzer Prize-winning two-part play by American playwright Tony Kushner. Two outdoor music events were particularly noteworthy. The first was Siren Chants, a mesmerizing collaboration between Christof Schläger and Marjon Smit involving 100 ship horns that stretched across a square mile along the embankment; the second, perhaps even wilder, was Sławomir Kupczak’s Symphony No. 2 for 100 motorcycles and rock band. It was pretty loud. There was even a late night concert by dance pop icon Peaches although admittedly her repertoire did not include any ISCM submissions.

There was a particularly fascinating concert that took place in the fabulously-named Sanatorium of Culture near the Old Town Hall featuring a group called Maly Instrumenty which performs on a broad range of “small instruments”—computer gear, various homemade contraptions, plus a wide range of toys including rubber ducks. One of the pieces on that program was composed especially for them by Paul Preusser, a Denver-born experimental composer who has been living in Wrocław for nearly a decade.

Another concert, held in the historic 1894 Wrocław Puppet Theatre combined a fascinating array of works for soloists employing electronics. By intention, the pieces on the second half of the program ran together without a break thus making it impossible to determine when one piece ended and another began. Before intermission, however, a remarkably self-contained piece for electric guitar and electronics composed and performed by Boston-based Mike Frengel blurred the lines between contemporary music and progressive rock.

(Note: This video is from a 2011 performance in Boston, not from the 2014 WMD in Wrocław.)

There was an entire concert devoted to string orchestra music in another curiously-named venue—a place called NOT—and another of wind band works performed by the Orchestra of the Polish Air Force, which featured the music of composers based on four continents including Fuse by Rob Smith from Houston, Texas.

Another American, Northern California-based Sam Nichols, had a string quartet performed by the Lutosławski Quartet in Wrocław University’s Oratorium Marianum, the site of the premiere of Johannes Brahms’s Academic Festival Overture. This was an occurrence that was not lost on him when he attended rehearsals.

Since 2002, ISCM has also given a Young Composer Award that is adjudicated during the WMD by an international jury comprised of ISCM delegates who assign an award to a composer under the age of 35 whose work is performed in the festival. The winner gets a money prize and a commission for a new piece to be performed in a future edition of the ISCM World Music Days. Previous recipients of this award include Thomas Adès, Helena Tulve, Diana Rotaru, and Eric Nathan. This year’s winner was Flemish composer Stefan Prins for his 2011-12 Piano Hero #1 for MIDI keyboard, video, and electronics. (Malgorzata Walentynowicz’s extremely exciting performance of that athletic work opened the aforementioned Puppet Theatre concert which also featured Mike Frengel.) Honorable mentions for the 2014 ISCM Young Composer Award were Hannes Dufek (Austria), Yair Klartag (Israel), and Dmitry Timofeev (Russia). The judges for the 2014 award were Stephen Lias (ISCM USA Associate Member, Stephen F. Austin State University, Texas, chair), Tomoko Fukui (ISCM Japan Section), Javier Hagen (ISCM Switzerland Section), and Eva Irene Lopszyc (ISCM Argentina Section). The award is supported by Music on Main in Vancouver.

Photo of tram with ISCM WMD signage

It was clear that the ISCM World Music Days was really an important event in Wrocław. Even some of the trams sported the festival logo and colors. Now the question is how to make this annual festival equally important every year wherever it takes place.

Events like all of these make the ISCM and its World Music Days international treasures. But there’s still a long way to go. Perhaps there is some comfort in knowing that the debates that currently rage among its membership are all par for the course. According to the ISCM entry in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians:

From its inception the ISCM was plagued by internal disputes concerning its purpose and operation. There was conflict between those countries that felt that it should promote avant-garde music (principally Germany before 1933 and Austria and Czechoslovakia before 1938) and those that considered any contemporary music to be worthy of the society’s interest (principally France, England, and the USA).

Then again, if this is the way things always were and still often are, how does this bode for the future? As a contemporary music festival, the future is—of course—what should be first and foremost on everyone’s minds.

photo of sculpture of people sunk into and rising out of the sidewalk

One of the most eye-catching art installations in this city filled with extraordinary public art is Jerzy Kalina’s Przejście which consists of 14 life-size human sculptures, some of which are sunken into the sidewalk while others seem to rise out of it, spread across two sides of a busy pedestrian crossing. It is a testimony to the pro-democracy movement in Poland which, after many years, ultimately triumphed over martial law. But it is also tempting to reinterpret it as yet another apt visual metaphor for the transformative role that new music can have in our society if only we can find a way for it to reach as many people as possible and that people pay attention to it once we do.

Boston: A Fight for Love and Glory—Pipeline! at 25

Kudgel, at The Middle East Downstairs, Cambridge, Massachusetts, October 4, 2014.

Kudgel, at The Middle East Downstairs, Cambridge, Massachusetts, October 4, 2014.

Some rituals are abiding. Boxers touch gloves prior to the start of a bout. Dogs turn around before they lie down. And bands, at some point before they stop playing, direct your attention to the merchandise table.
Near the end of Crazy Alice’s set at The Middle East Downstairs in Cambridge on October 4—the band’s first performance in over a decade—the reflex kicked in. “If you guys want any Crazy Alice CDs,” lead singer Jeff Ahearn announced, “come over to my house, we’ll go down to the basement.” He grinned. “I got a shitload of ‘em.”

* * *

This fall, Pipeline!, the local rock-punk-indie showcase that airs weekly on WMBR, MIT’s student-run radio station, is offering a series of opportunities to rummage through old boxes of Boston rock and roll. The program’s playlists and in-studio live sets have long refracted a kind of Platonic ideal of college radio alt-rock through the transient prism of local bands. To celebrate its 25th anniversary, Bob Dubrow (host from 1993 until 2003) has organized no fewer than thirteen shows, a pageant history of the city’s underground rock scene. The most prominent feature of the shows—reunions, dozens of long-defunct local bands getting back together for one more blast—is a testament both to Pipeline’s years of advocacy and, in a more ironic way, to rock and roll’s penchant for attritional Darwinian churn.

The number of shows, and their organization, also demonstrates another rock penchant, categorical subdivision. Choose your stomping ground: mine was the October 4 show, circling (with a couple of outliers) the twin poles of post-punk and hard rock. Much of it was its own form of historically informed performance, a snapshot of a particular early-’90s aesthetic. Interestingly, I might instead have sampled the present: also that day, the Boston Music Awards were presenting a day-long event called “Sound of Our Town,” at a relatively new place (The Lawn on D, a prefab public green in Boston’s self-proclaimed Innovation District) and featuring a cross-section of current stars: Speedy Ortiz, Dutch ReBelle, Eli “Paperboy” Reed. Instead, my love of antiquity won out. But it did raise the question: what, exactly, does this town sound like?

This Pipeline show was heavy on the aforesaid reunions: not just Crazy Alice, but also noisy pioneers Kudgel, alt-fuzz purveyors Bulkhead, the pop-metal stylings of Orangutang. To close the evening, Nat Freedberg (better known around town as Lord Bendover, the rococo front man of novelty-rock act The Upper Crust) reassembled The Clamdiggers, his early, surreal surf-rock project. (To my everlasting sorrow, I am sure, I had to miss Orangutang and The Clamdiggers; Saturdays are work nights for me.)
Thus the subdivision contained further subdivisions. Crazy Alice’s punk-tinged power chords, tight, chugging, and chiming with distortion, was followed by Quintaine Americana: high-proof, southern-tinged heavy hard rock, lead singer Rob Dixon delivering gothic vignettes in a penetrating, snarling drawl. Kudgel was perhaps the most anticipated blast from the past, and a blast it was: gleeful, grinding howls of pop-punk—the so-called “chimp rock” that, along with fellow Boston band The Swirlies, the group invented. Singer/guitarist Mark Erdody hunched over his stand mic (a tortuous posture first adopted, according to Erdody, so he could sing and keep his eyes on the fretboard at the same time) and laced each number’s sing-song shouting with a childlike delight in the profane.

The minimalistic new music/jazz fusion of Birdsongs of the Mesozoic was the evening’s biggest contrast, quieter, precise, carefully arranged (everyone used music), intricately cool. Addressing the audience a little later, Dubrow acknowledged that the group was included as “a palate cleanser.” Still, the ensemble could claim appropriate lineage, having been started, many iterations ago, by Mission of Burma founder Roger Miller (not in attendance) and his one-time Moving Parts bandmate Erik Lindgren (still manning one of the two keyboards). And the group paid homage in their own way, at one point mashing up ex-Velvet Underground local hero Willie “Loco” Alexander’s “Basket Case” with the “Spring Rounds” from Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. Bulkhead, a quartet that ventured near alt-pop stardom in the ’90s, was a louder form of cool: a haze of feedback-laden hooks, lead singer Peter Ryan spinning out wordy rambles of lyrics.

If it wasn’t quite Boston rock royalty, it was at least a slice of the aristocracy, the landed gentry, as it were. But, even at that, there wasn’t much of a common, distinctive sound among the groups. Maybe there is no real sound of the town. Maybe the sound of Boston—a port town, after all—is the sound of whatever comes ashore that week, year, decade. Still, there was something of a shared quality. I will say this: Boston loves its exemplars—those acts that either are so singular as to make (and, sometimes, break) the mold, or that so fully embody a sound, or a genre, or an attitude, as to aspire to a kind of universal standard. On the former side was Kudgel’s self-proclaimed, happily confrontational chimp rock, or Birdsongs of the Mesozoic—classical, rock, and jazz thrown into a diner milkshake machine. On the latter was Crazy Alice, Quintaine Americana, and Bulkhead—pop-punk, southern rock, and left-end-of-the-dial alternative, respectively, all served neat.

* * *

For me, the concert was a pleasantly odd bit of temporal dislocation. I moved to Boston in 1994, in time to dive into the particular scene the evening’s bands largely evoked—hardcore and its similarly loud discontents, holding court at the Rathskeller or Harpers Ferry, those lost, louche temples of disorder. But 1994 was also right around when Kudgel broke up, and Bulkhead broke up, and Orangutang broke up. (Crazy Alice held on for a few more years.) So the experience was less nostalgic and more like opening up a time capsule. For sure, though, nostalgia was a big part of the evening. For once, a rock club audience actually skewed my age, or even a little older. Graying hair—or no hair—held sway on stage. A lot of the shout-outs were to the deceased. But there was no sentimentality; these were once and future punks, not inclined to go quietly, preferring to mosh against the dying of the light. Kudgel had spent one chorus hammering away at Willard Motley’s old mantra of hedonism: “Live fast, die young, leave a good-looking corpse.” Most of the performers still seemed to be aiming for best-two-out-of-three.

If there was an honored ghost for the evening, it was Billy Ruane, the late, legend-in-his-own-time promoter, The Middle East’s longtime booking guru, a mad dervish of enthusiasm and a nucleation point for so much of the city’s rock-and-roll fizz over the past three decades. Every band offered posthumous fealty. A highlight of Birdsongs of the Mesozoic’s set was saxophonist Ken Field’s “Ruane,” a funky, unpredictable box of musical knives. Kudgel brought out their own icon: an old bass drum head, mounted on a stand and emblazoned with the words “Thank God for Billy Ruane.” It remained on stage for the rest of the evening.

If it made the whole experience feel a little bit like an Irish wake—for a colleague, for a period, for a scene—well, there are plenty of things worse than a good Irish wake. And besides: isn’t literature’s most famous Irish wake also an avant-garde expression of eternal renewal? Riverrun, past Harpers and the Rat, from swerve of railyard to Back of Bay: the Pipeline still flows.

Chicago: The Unbearable Intimacy of Wandelweiser

From September 20-22, 2014, Chicago concertgoers had the rare opportunity to experience the music of the Wandelweiser group, the John Cage-influenced artistic collective based in Germany. An exciting example of Chicago arts institutions working together on a project too ambitious to spearhead alone, the Chicago Wandelweiser Festival was a joint endeavor between Nomi Epstein (composer and artistic director of a.pe.ri.od.ic) and Peter Margasak (music writer and organizer of the Frequency Series at Constellation), with support from the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago and the Swiss Cultural Institute.
In spite of the relative aesthetic unity of the Wandelweiser collective, all three evenings of the festival offered something quite different. On the first evening, a.pe.ri.od.ic performed three works of Jurg Frey, celebrating the release of their new all-Frey disc, More or Less, with the composer in attendance. On the second evening, University of Chicago musicologist Seth Brodsky moderated a panel discussion between Frey, Epstein, composer Eva Maria Houben, and pianist Andrew Lee. After the discussion, Lee offered a solo recital featuring works by a variety of Wandelweiser composers. On the final evening, Houben gave a fascinating recital of her solo organ works in the amazing Rockefeller Chapel at the University of Chicago.

Wandelweiser composers are known for embracing silence, fragility, and spontaneity. In preparing to attend the festival, I knew that it would demand a special kind of coverage. I wanted to create a sense of intimate dialogue about the music — the same kind of dialogue, perhaps, that these composers have with each other about their work.

But in order to have a dialogue, there has to be more than one writer. So I asked my friend and colleague Andrew Tham to join me in attempting to create a new kind of concert review: one that embraced, rather than attempted to deny, our subjectivity; one that could be a bit rough around the edges.  What follows is the story of our experience of the festival.

Exhibit A: Scared to Write About Music
When: September 20, 2014, 8:27 p.m. – Concert #1
Where: A seat in the back row of Constellation / A stoplight at Belmont and Western, Chicago, IL
What: During an exchange of text messages, McSweeney follows up on Tham’s earlier email which mentioned that he’s been “scared to write about music lately.”
tham1 tham2

Exhibit B: Armrest Etiquette 
When: September 20, 2014, 8:41 p.m.
Where: Two seats in the back row of Constellation, Chicago, IL
What: Copies of the authors’ notes as the concert begins. Tham muses about who should get which armrest in a concert seating situation, while McSweeney notices the presence and absence of ego in Frey’s music.
Soundtrack: Jurg Frey, More or Less Normal, performed by a.pe.ri.od.ic
andrewnotes1
tham3

Exhibit C: Felt Like We Were Trapped
When: September 21, 2014, 8:58 p.m.
Where: Two seats in the back row of Constellation, Chicago, IL
What: As the concert continues, things get tense.
Soundtrack: Jurg Frey, 60 Pieces of Sound
60pieces

Exhibit D: CRUNCH
When: September 27, 2014, 1:35 p.m.
Where: The authors’ laptops in Edgewater/Humboldt Park, respectively
What: During a post-festival gmail chat, Tham reveals having had an accidental Wandelweiser sonic performance experience with a paper cutter.
Screen Shot 2014-10-06 at 12.24.24 PM
tham_gmailchat2

Exhibit E: At Least We Tried
When: September 30, 2014, 9:30 a.m.
Where: The authors’ laptops in Edgewater/Humboldt Park, respectively
What: Tham expresses his aspirations for this article.
tham_aspirations

Chicago: Enter the Dollhouse—Colombine’s Paradise Theatre


Although I ostensibly attended eighth blackbird’s performance of Colombine’s Paradise Theatre—the new commedia dell’arte-inspired “fantasy” with score by Amy Beth Kirsten and direction by Mark DeChiazza—as a writer and art observer, I could not help absorbing it with the mind of a performer.

A 60-minute tour de force, performed completely from memory and without pause, Colombine’s Paradise Theatre is a stunning display of physical and musical virtuosity on the part of its performers. It is also a testament to eighth blackbird’s commitment to going the extra mile in the creation of new work. Only a mind-boggling amount of labor—memorizing the score and learning elaborate physical staging and choreography—could have produced such a performance.

Colombine demands significant risk-taking and courage from the ensemble. All six players must deliver physical movement and hissing speech parts with panache. Violinist Yvonne Lam, darting and dancing all over the stage as one of the Harlequins, sang frequently and admirably. Pianist Lisa Kaplan, in the role of Colombine, gave an utterly natural, unaffected performance of a cabaret-style song at the piano. Flutist Tim Munro was perhaps pushed furthest, completely abandoning the comfortable mask of the instrumentalist poker-face. He shrieked, sang, sobbed, and hissed his way through the role of Harlequin. When he exited, wailing his final falsetto lines, we had the sense that he had left his soul onstage.

Flutist Tim Munro. (All photographs courtesy of eighth blackbird)

Flutist Tim Munro. (All photographs courtesy of eighth blackbird)

Kirsten’s score evokes diverse environments and moods, from cabaret to Sprechstimme, from witchy incantations to sparse percussion solos. Colombine is quite lyrical at times—particularly in the cello solos, played with great seriousness by Nick Photinos as the Harbinger. Yet the piece is dominated by scherzando whimsy and plenty of humor. Kirsten’s inventive use of doublings keeps the score full and lively at all times. She makes particularly effective use of nonsense syllables and percussive sounds to create spooky rhythmic patterns and textures.

The music is often organized to sound as if characters are inventing the musical material on the spot—repeating it in a testing, probing way, finally landing on a gesture that sticks. It sounds organic and improvisatory, but is completely notated. The pacing of each instrument’s “speech” allows Kirsten to create distinct musical characters in dialogue with each other.
The staging and direction by Mark DeChiazza is one of Colombine’s greatest strengths. It was clear both in the production itself, and in the post-concert discussion, that DeChiazza had generously embraced Kirsten’s inspirations and aesthetic. He has produced a visual and physical world which, while supporting the score, also has complexities and resonances all its own. Particularly ingenious was the way the set allows for a visual imitation of the instruments themselves: percussion setups hanging like chandeliers; metal tubes silently wielded as giant flutes.

While Colombine does not have a clear narrative, it is held together by an interesting set of potential questions. As the protagonist Colombine feels the tug of her various puppet-masters and suitors, we are encouraged to reflect on the power dynamics onstage: Who has agency? Who is excluded? Who has control over another? And what kind of contemporary commentary might the piece be making about commedia dell’arte?

For me, Colombine’s main limitation is that it doesn’t always offer a satisfying perspective on these questions. In particular, the choice to simply reproduce, rather than critically reimagine, the gender dynamics of the stock commedia characters feels like a missed opportunity. Contemporary listeners are quite familiar with the love triangle of two male characters “seducing” their puppet-like female ingenue, and it would have been exciting to experience a more contemporary twist on these patriarchal tropes. The virtuosic, erotic four-hands piano duo between Yvonne Lam and Lisa Kaplan—which helps Colombine pass the proverbial Bechdel test—is a promising moment. But their relationship never becomes thematically important, and in the end, the show doesn’t evince much more gender sophistication than the 16th-century texts that inspired it.

Lam and Kaplan at the piano

Lam and Kaplan at the piano

It might also have been fascinating to see the piece acknowledge—or better yet, dance with—the inevitable historical shadow of Schoenberg. But when asked during the post-concert discussion if she had been influenced by Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, Kirsten seemed surprised. She firmly said no, and mentioned that she had made a point of not listening to the Schoenberg during the creative process of Colombine. Yet with a character named Pierrot, Sprechstimme scenes, a dark and moonlit set, and an almost identical instrumentation, it will be hard for the piece to make its way in the world without evoking Pierrot.

Lisa Kaplan with Matthew Duvall as Pierrot

Lisa Kaplan with Matthew Duvall as Pierrot

With its dazzling visuals, sumptuous score, and stunning performance, Colombine is a game-changer and a standard-bearer for the world of new music and interdisciplinary collaboration. It is sure to inspire an ambitious new crop of staged contemporary chamber music. This is perhaps why I wanted more to chew on theoretically and why I wanted it to be more than a fun, spooky confection. But when audiences enter Colombine’s macabre musical dollhouse—with a sensual surprise in every cobwebbed corner—they will probably, like me, be more than happy to play by her rules for the night.

Chicago: Hiking the Song Path, hearing music everywhere

These golden weeks of early fall are the perfect time for Chicagoans to get outside and engage our senses. Perhaps, with the help of composer and sound artist Ryan Ingebritsen, we might engage our sense of listening in particular.
When I heard about Ingebritsen’s Song Path project — a venture that began in 2010 as a series of “sonic guided tours” of Minnesota State Parks — I jumped at the chance to speak with him about it. The Song Path idea intrigues multiple layers of my existence as a musician, lover of nature, and meditator. For Ingebritsen, Song Path is a practice that explores guided meditation and hiking as a compositional form.

song_path_walkway

Ingebritsen recently designed a Song Path hike at the North Park Village Nature Center on the outskirts of Chicago. I caught up with him to chat about what it means for a primarily electronic artist to lead troupes of people through the woods.

Ellen McSweeney: You work a lot with electronic media, from the Millennium Park sound system to electrified sewing machines. But when you described the Chicago Song Path event, you emphasized the lack of microphones and electronic equipment. Is it refreshing for you, to just work with nature and the human ear?

Ryan Ingebritsen: When I first started working with electronics, it was actually quite a leap for me. Up to that point, I had viewed myself as an acoustic composer who would not get involved in electronics or amplification. In those days there was much more of an aesthetic separation between the two trajectories, at least at music conservatories. But I found that I was always wanting to orchestrate in a way where one sound kind of emerged out of another, and wanted to literally have one sound “become” another and embody something of the other sound. That is when I started working with electronics and amplification more seriously. That led to a career-long obsession with interaction and the interactive process, which in turn led to my obsession with interdependent performance practice between artists of different media or disciplines.

I’d spend hours in the studio with sound, listening to the subtle details that made up those sounds. And in performance, I often play the role of sound environment manipulator, focusing on the specific sound environment in which the performer and audience live. So in a sense, what I do with Song Path is not much different from my live performance practice. I’m just moving an audience through an existing space to create a composition, rather than manipulating a sound environment while they sit in one place.
song_path_listening

EM: How did you first come upon the idea of Song Path, and how has the practice evolved for you in recent years?

RI: I first started to consider the idea of Song Path while just hiking through the woods with my wife Shannon on camping trips. I would find myself in a place with interesting sounds, like a swamp with lots of frogs or field of crickets, and would notice how sometimes these sounds seemed to appear almost out of nowhere and at other times increased gradually in a very dramatic way.
I think one such specific hike at Starved Rock State Park really got me interested in the idea of doing it as a musical event. The various cavernous spaces that had been carved by water over millions of years seemed to imply different “rooms” for which short pieces could be composed. An audience could hike from location to location and hear a multi-movement work.

I got my first opportunity to really develop the Song Path in 2010 through the support of a McKnight Foundation Visiting Composer Fellowship to Minnesota. In certain spaces, such as Whitewater and Banning State Parks in Minnesota, I found that placing musicians around the park to make noises in very specific locations allowed various sonic elements to be revealed. But my intention with putting them there was only to instigate something that was already present in the space. For example, some natural reverberations exist in a valley when one yells in a specific acoustic node. Put a drum in that node, and a spectacular sound is revealed.

song_path_goldenstream
EM: Are walks like these a way to rebalance and refocus your attention, in a world where 24/7 headphones and sonic overload are everywhere?

RI: I think that it is an opportunity to teach the audience to experience their environment in a different way. The head of interpretive programs at Whitewater State Park once told me that after engaging in a purely sonic meditation with his eyes closed, he felt that all of his senses were heightened. I have noticed this myself. Colors seem a bit more vivid and smells a bit more strong. Maybe there’s even a little bit of euphoria.

I will say that a heightened awareness of one’s environment can also be quite a shock to the system, as evidenced by a quick trip I took to Chicago in the middle of the first set of hikes I did. Just getting out of my car onto Western Avenue nearly knocked me over.

EM: Have you ever charted an urban Song Path? What are some of the sonic spots in Chicago that you might put on such a walk?

RI: I have done this for myself a few times, though never with an official audience. One such hike was in Millennium Park. You start it in Lurie Garden, a place that exists because of a man-made structure atop a parking garage that was dug out of a landfill built over 100 years ago that used to be part of Lake Michigan. Then, a garden was planted that reflects the natural landscape that would have existed at that time where a bustling city now stands. We often talk about the intrusion of mankind on nature. This feels more like the intrusion of nature on a man-made environment. It gives you a very small taste of what the place may have sounded like years in the past. But the garden itself also provides a sonic shield from the surrounding city.

I tend to gravitate towards locations where the natural sound environment and man-made sound environment intersect in some specific way. That’s not hard to get, since a sonic landscape untouched by man-made sound almost does not exist on the planet anymore. My friends Eric Leonardson and Dan Godston, associated with the Midwest Society for Acoustic Ecology, have also done hikes in urban spaces, though perhaps with a slightly different aesthetic focus.

EM: What kinds of folks turn out for the walks, and what sorts of reactions and experiences do you witness while leading the walks?
RI: My first round consisted mainly of people who were camping in the Minnesota parks. I literally went tent to tent and talked to people, as did the park rangers. So I had quite a mix of people: from members of the arts scene in Minneapolis to people who were not aware that classical music was something that people still did. Some people said they could not think of what they were experiencing as “music,” but found it a profound experience. I am interested in what that experience is much more than I am interested in what it is called.

Many of my family hikes were attended by parents who were hunters. They said that what I had been doing in the woods — listening deeply and trying not to disturb the natural surroundings so I could hear everything — was very similar to the practice of hunting, or at least what some of them referred to as “real hunting” where it’s just you and the animals: no traps or other tricks. Animals are so sensitive to what they hear that any small movement or noise you make will disturb them and give them some sense of danger. This kind of hunting is a practice of listening more than anything else, and they spend hour upon hour, day after day doing it each season.

I had a hike where a group of atheist hippies from Minneapolis walked alongside a couple that was taking a road trip across the USA visiting different mega-churches. It is rare that a musical experience can engender such commonality among different groups. Musical communication often relies so much on idiom, which in itself often has social or perhaps even political implication. I’ve seen people almost get into physical fights over musical taste, in arguments far more heated than any political debate I have ever seen. But the experience of the hike seems to help tap into something a bit more universal.
Ryan Ingebritsen is the composer of 3 Singers, an innovative opera/sound installation created in collaboration with director and choreographer Erica Mott. The piece will have its Chicago premiere in January.