Category: Field Reports

All Up In Your Space: Billie Howard on How Artists Live

Posted on August 15, 2014 by Ellen McSweeney - Field Reports, Headlines

I’ve been a fan of Billie Jean Howard’s blog By Measure ever since I noticed her profile of violinist Austin Wulliman not long after I moved to Chicago. In each post on By Measure, Howard photographs the home/studio environment of a Chicago musician and asks the artist a few questions about life, work, and space. Although the photographs are never posed, and Howard states unequivocally that she is not a photographer, By Measure has a stylish, sun-splashed, unfussy aesthetic that’s drawn me back as a reader for years.

A studio shared by eight Chicago musicians.

By Measure also offers the voyeuristic pleasure of vicariously poking around another artist’s home. Is there a mess on the desk? Evidence of vice or obsession? A disruptive cat or two?

Howard essentially created By Measure as a way to inspire herself and others–to find and document positive role models of functional, working artists. “I do this project so I can understand what motivates musicians and composers to keep producing,” she explains. “I like to see how they work with what they’ve got, since many of us don’t have a big budget.”

Howard photographs not only airy Chicago apartments but also the dark practice rooms of rock bands. “I especially wonder about bands who have tiny, drab rooms with no windows. How do they write songs and not get into fights?”

When I spoke with her, Howard was vacationing at her grandparents’ home in North Dakota, fresh from a week volunteering at the Girls Rock! Chicago summer camp.

Ellen McSweeney: So, you do this project in order to see what motivates people to create. What kinds of things have you walked away with, in answer to that question? What are some of the things that motivate people to keep working?

Billie Jean Howard: I think some people might just have this inner need to create, so they just keep doing it. Or, in the case of classical musicians, always striving to be better. There’s this innate thing—to keep on going. For other people, it’s just where they get their enjoyment. They have day jobs, and they spend their free time doing it.

EM: What drew you to photograph artists in their home environments?

BJH: I felt like there weren’t many options to see how musicians actually work. You see them on stage, performing, but that’s not where they spend the majority of their time. So I wanted to see how people spend the majority of their time, how they work, to motivate myself—and take away more positive ways that people work with their space, or work with whatever situation they’re in, to stay motivated. And I’m also always interested in little details: what art they have on the wall, what little trinkets they have collected. Everything has a little story and it’s just interesting to see what people surround themselves with.

EM: Yeah! The blog sort of has a delightful Pinterest-y, Apartment Therapy quality—except for real people.

BJH: That’s what I wanted—to get away from this sense of Apartment Therapy or Dwell, or those really high-end interior publications where everything looks so pristine and you wonder how long they spent staging it. I like to come in—sometimes I’ve never seen the space before—and start taking photos; I don’t change anything. I’m interested in seeing how people live and work, rather than some floral arrangement.

I was really inspired by The Selby blog. It’s blown up—he has books now, and it’s quite posh—but the early posts are my favorite.
EM: Have you ever photographed an idea on your blog that you ended up really wanting to take back into your own space?

BJH: Recently I went to Fred Lonberg-Holm’s place, and it was like you could feel the layers of the years of his performing and working in that space. I loved how cheerful it was—he had so many posters and things on the wall, and a setup for him to play cello with all his pedals. But he also has a little table with a sewing machine on it! I guess that’s what he does when he’s listening to music. He has a space within his creative space to get away from his own music. That showed me that it doesn’t have to be all about work, or practicing.

What I want in my band practice space is to have a little area to sit that’s not at our instruments. Sometimes we don’t want to play—we just want to talk for a long time.

Fred Lonberg-Holm in his studio.

EM: I love the picture of Matthew Shelton sort of squatting in a room that looks like he just moved into it. I’ve read a lot of conflicting things about whether a messy workspace is a good sign or a bad sign for an artist. What has been your experience with artists whose space is messy?

BJH: When I started the blog, I was hoping to get more of those messy shots. I get the feeling a lot of people, when I come to their space, they’ve cleaned up. Or we hang out for an hour while they’re cleaning. And I’m always a little disappointed, but I understand they don’t want certain things on the Internet. Matthew doesn’t live in that space I shot—that’s just his studio—so maybe he feels more free to make a mess.

Matthew Shelton

EM: When you’re photographing those small details that capture the musician’s personality, what kinds of things do you look for?

BJH: I like to get shots of the desk—usually there’s a desk, or a surface, that has a laptop and then tons of other little trinkets, or things that they need for their instrument, or books or CDs that they happen to have out. That shows what they’ve been thinking about or listening to: what’s been influencing them. Whether they have lots of little tiny toys from Kid Robot or they have more folky things, I find it usually goes along with their music. And then I try to get a photo of the space as a whole, which is maybe the hard part. Sometimes the space is small and I can’t back up far enough to get the whole room in.

Detail from the studio of Ronnie Kuller

EM: How about artists who share space with others, whether a partner or roommates? Have you noticed differences there? I feel like this photo of Jeff Kimmel immediately suggests that he lives with a very neat person. Or else, he’s a neat freak improviser. Do you remember which it is?

Jeff Kimmel

BJH: Right! Sometimes they’re married or they have a roommate, and so the living space—which might be where they practice—is shared. In Jeff’s case, I think he always just puts his stuff away. He’s got a small instrument that he can just pack away, so you don’t notice it. If the musician is a pianist, the piano is always out—you can tell it’s a musician’s space.

There’s other situations I’ve seen where they clearly split up the room, because the other half belongs to another band. Sometimes I’ll photograph the “other artist” because it looks so neat. Emma Dayhuff is a jazz bassist. She was sharing a space with a harpsichordist who also repairs harpsichords, so there were bits and pieces of harpsichord everywhere, and a workbench, and tools. She’d play her bass in the middle of the room and there were these harpsichord bits everywhere.

EM: I loved how Alex Temple, in your interview a few years ago, described having a U-shaped desk because she needed to go back and forth between different media, between keyboard and manuscript. It’s so evident in these portraits that artists are floating back and forth between digital and analog.

A detail of Alex Temple’s studio

BJH: Yes. Many people have a computer out. Seems like everyone is trying to record themselves, whether to release it, or for a demo, or to hear themselves.

EM: Do you feel like there’s anything distinctly Chicago about your blog? I do.

BJH: I’m curious that you think that, because I’m not sure about whether there’s anything distinctly Chicago about it. Except that most apartments do have the same layout, and most bands do rent these little tiny rooms. People have more space than New York.

EM: That’s exactly what I was thinking. People in New York would probably marvel at the amount of space we have, while people in the suburbs or other parts of the country might feel like we are living in cramped quarters. It’s that sort of sprawling Midwest urban happy medium.

BJH: That is a nice thing about living here—you can find affordable places and the space.

EM: I think it’s also very Chicago in the way that so many of these musicians exist in multiple scenes: pop and classical, notated and improvised, acoustic and electronic. There’s an unpretentious, non-dogmatic way that the musicians conduct their careers, and it’s evident in the photos.

BJH: That’s true! And I’ve been trying to branch out and photograph older musicians, with more established careers. But I get shy.

Tanglewood: Sessions and Lessons on Successful Composition

Posted on July 28, 2014 by Matthew Guerrieri - Field Reports, Headlines

Stefan Asbury leading the TMCO in Roger Sessions Concerto for Orchestra. Photo by Hilary Scott

It is essential that the company be a big one
It should be at least big enough
So that nobody knows exactly
What anyone else is doing
—Frank Loesser, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying

Monday of last week I was at Tanglewood’s Ozawa Hall, sitting in front of a chatty old lady. (The first rule of Tanglewood: you will always be sitting in front of a chatty old lady.) This was the final concert of the Festival of Contemporary Music (which I reviewed for the Boston Globe), and the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra and conductor Stefan Asbury kicked off the program with an old-school favorite of mine: Roger Sessions’s Concerto for Orchestra.

It was not a favorite of the lady behind me. This, in and of itself, is not that surprising. It was a great performance, but Sessions is an acquired taste (one that I am happy to have acquired). But it was the way she talked about it that caught my ear. “It’s not successful,” she kept saying, all through the changeover to the next piece. “It’s not a successful piece of music.”

I’ve probably heard (and used) a similar construction dozens of times, but she was so fixed on that terminology that it just started to sound weirder and weirder. It wasn’t successful. It’s an unsuccessful piece.
What does that even mean?

***

It was pretty clear what it meant in this specific case. She didn’t like it. She just wanted a more objective-sounding way of saying that. For all the criticism of the avant-garde modernist habit of deflecting personal responsibility by reference to some realm of impersonal, the-music-goes-where-it-has-to-go autonomy—here’s a handy example—it’s worth noting that the avant-garde’s discontents do the exact same thing. It’s the style that’s bankrupt; it’s the music that’s unsuccessful. (It’s not me; it’s you.)
So: is this piece successful? From a professional standpoint, Sessions’s Concerto was, in fact, a huge success. It was commissioned and premiered by the Boston Symphony Orchestra. It got great reviews. The BSO recorded it, and the recording got great reviews. It won the Pulitzer Prize. But those are, perhaps, merely career-based externalities, and the buzzwordiness of that phrase is some indication that inherent musical quality is not its inevitable companion. These are the sort of markers that are easiest to dismiss (up to a point: everybody hates the Pulitzer Prize until one of their favorite composers wins the thing).

I think (I hope) I’ve been a little more specific with “successful” and “unsuccessful” when writing or talking about music, measuring it against some given goal: either a composer’s-note mission statement for the piece, or some sort of dramatic necessity, or some trajectory that the music seems to be implying so strongly that to abandon it would be perverse. But a lot of times, I am left in the dark as to those goals. When it comes to, say, a major work by an 85-year-old Roger Sessions, I tend to assume that the composer knew what he was doing, that what we’re hearing is what he intended us to hear. Not being exactly what one wants to hear seems like a pretty thin rationale for judging whether a piece of music succeeds or doesn’t.

The consensus of the group behind me seemed to be that the Concerto wasn’t flashy enough, that it didn’t justify its massive ensemble and its title with sufficient musical fireworks. To be fair, Sessions doesn’t have the generous glitter of that other BSO commission, Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra—if that’s your benchmark, then the piece is going to seem unsuccessful. The question—an old one—is whether or not the listener has some responsibility to try and meet the music on its own terms.
My favorite part of the Sessions Concerto is about a third of the way through (starting at measure 126, if you’re the type to have a score lying around). The winds start to melt away, a couple of the horns fizz up their section with a few measures of stopped notes, and then a Largo section begins with about 45 seconds of nothing but the brass softly winding around each other then suddenly erupting into a brief flame. It’s like musical lava. I could pat myself on the back for enjoying what Sessions is doing at this moment, for getting it, but that’s false, too—the piece isn’t successful just because it’s unwittingly pandering to what I like any more than it’s unsuccessful for not pandering to someone else’s preferences. Still, I think there’s something valuable in getting out of your own way as a listener. I take the Concerto’s Gordon-Willis-photographs-the-Second-Viennese-School sound as something Sessions intended, and find that there’s a lot of beauty in that sound.

While I was out at Tanglewood, I gave a lecture to the Boston University Tanglewood Institute students about their following-weekend orchestra concert, which included Sibelius’s Pohjola’s Daughter and Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherezade. While doing research for the talk, I ran across Rimsky-Korsakov’s wonderfully dry reaction (as reported by Stravinsky) to hearing Sibelius’s Second Symphony for the first time: “Well, I suppose that is also possible.” I decided to make it my mantra for the Festival, a little amulet of equanimity—the music might be good, it might be bad, but before anything, it is what it is, independent of what I wish it was. I still didn’t like every piece on the Festival. But I probably enjoyed the possibilities more than I might have otherwise.

***

Not long ago, I had a dream, part of which involved a fictional piece of music. (Another part involved Monty Python’s Flying Circus being filmed in northern New England, thanks, somehow, to an unsettled border dispute with Canada. Have at it, Jungians.) I don’t remember the (also fictional) composer or title, but I do remember that a recording and score of the piece came packaged with a very Jack Kirby-ish comic book, all far-out, cosmic pop mythology. The music itself was electronic, analog-synthesized nasality and ping, garnished with fashionable atonal and aleatoric features, but on a foundation that had the comfortable structure of a Hollywood soundtrack. The final section of the piece was a setting of a passage from some medieval, Vico-like bit of mysticism, the portentous narration filtered through some early version of a vocoder.

It was, in other words, just about the most late-’60s-America artifact one could possibly imagine. And that’s how it was perceived in the dream world, too. Everyone I was hanging out with in the dream—musicians all—knew the piece; it was one of those grad-school cult pieces, not part of the standard repertoire, but common knowledge among current and former composition students, say. In the dream, a lot of my friends were kind of rolling their eyes at the piece, at its cheesiness, its datedness, its lack of restraint. But that was just why I liked it, the fact that it was so over-saturated with its own zeitgeist.

I woke up and wondered how much American history you could map out this way—with pieces from the classical repertoire that were so much of their own time that they never really escaped it, either aesthetically or, in performance-frequency terms, literally. I didn’t get very far, to be honest. But I did realize one thing: any piece that fit these criteria was, by definition, on some level, unsuccessful.
But, as with that dream-world piece, that tends to have a lot to do with why I like them. The two strongest candidates I came up with—Marc Blitzstein’s Airborne Symphony for the 1940s and Philip Glass’s Songs from Liquid Days for the 1980s—are both pieces that I love. They’re also both pieces that, from one angle, are flawed and dated. But, from another angle, they’re pieces that bring to the fore ideas and aspects of music that more conventionally successful pieces never do.

Songs from Liquid Days is particularly rich in this regard. For those who might have missed it (still reeling, perhaps, from Boy George’s appearance on The A-Team), Songs from Liquid Days was a 1986 album for which Glass set texts by various pop/art-pop artists (Paul Simon, Suzanne Vega, David Byrne, Laurie Anderson) then recruited a bunch of different pop artists (Janice Pendarvis, longtime Rolling Stones backup Bernard Fowler, Linda Ronstadt, The Roches) to sing the results. If that sounds like a mish-mash, well, it is. And my first reaction to something like “Changing Opinion,” the opening track—both when I first heard it and when I recently pulled the album out again—was that all those different contributions, all those agendas, pulled the piece in too many contrary directions.

Which is exactly what I found most compelling about it the second and third times around. Each of the components—the Wagnerian harmonies, the R&B vocals, the nouvelle vague realism/surrealism of the lyrics—is thrown back on itself by the others, until it’s concentrated and pure. The stylistic essences are amplified by the sheer incompatibility. Even its period-piece-ness is profound, tapping into aspects of the era that tend to get sanded away by the retro-culture industry. (“Liquid Days (Part I),” with The Roches warbling in close harmony, nails the antiseptic nostalgia that saturated the ’80s better than any other piece I can think of.)

Is that what the piece set out to do? Nevertheless, it’s what the piece does. Or (to exorcise that autonomous musical realm) it’s what I think it does. And I think it’s pretty successful at it.

***

A lot of people, I suppose, would call Sessions’s Concerto for Orchestra a period piece. I can hear something of that. I hear a particular, post war wing of the new-music establishment. I hear its late-’70s, early-’80s twilight. I hear the pre-World War II Vienna from which Sessions drew so much inspiration. But I also hear the years right around 1990—when I first got to know the piece in college. I listened to a lot of postwar atonal modernism in college. I listened to a lot of everything in college, mainly because I didn’t know a lot of it, and mainly because my musical taste was unformed enough that piling in additional, sometimes contradictory evidentiary material was still easy and fun, like filling a library rather than culling it.

Sessions’s Concerto was commissioned for the BSO’s centennial. He had also been commissioned for the BSO’s 75th anniversary, writing his Third Symphony—a big-canvas culmination of his first explorations of serialist techniques. Cyrus Durgin, then the critic for the Boston Globe, was, it is fair to say, dismayed by Sessions’s Third:

What, then, are we to think? Is this music or not? Time will tell, of course, and all writers about art have been proved wrong at one time or another. But this morning is now, and I will say I do not believe it is music, or if it is, here is music of a curiously masochistic and perverse variety. (“Sessions’ New Third Symphony,” Daily Boston Globe, December 7, 1957)

Give Durgin a little credit—he doesn’t make any pretense of lofty objectivity. This is what he thinks, at this particular time. But deciding whether or not something is a piece of music—that is some prime old-school criticism right there. In a post-tonal, post-serialist, post-Cagean, post-minimalist, post-modern atmosphere, that kind of statement has ceased to be useful, or even meaningful. Child of Tree might not be your cup of tea, but if John Cage, as disciplined a musician as there ever was, hears music in the prick of cactus needles, are you going to tell him he’s wrong? But I think that some people miss that sense of certainty. And I think that’s where a lot of that “successful/unsuccessful” type of critical terminology can start to creep in. I’ll confess: I miss it every once in a while, too.

One’s relationship with music is built up brick by brick, piece by piece, concert by concert, judgment by judgment. I like new music, which probably means that I have a higher tolerance than most for constantly demolishing and renovating that house of taste—which I sometimes think might be more of a sign of immaturity than anything: an 8-year-old’s glee at getting to pick up a sledgehammer and bash in the drywall of my own opinions.

Still, sometimes you just want to sit in your house. I sense this most when I go to a concert when I’m in a bad mood. (This is one consequence of our societal norm of putting concerts in the evening: you can fit in an entire crappy day before the first downbeat.) If I’m there in some professional capacity, that means extra work: talking myself into the possibility of an unexpected epiphany, tasking myself with finding some bit of the music worth praising, obsessively applying Cage’s prescription for boredom (“If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen.”) to keep from completely retreating into a daydream. My job is to recognize that I’m in a bad mood and filter it out; to suppose that whatever I’m hearing is, also, possible.

And then, often times, the concert filters it out for me, and I find that my bad mood has dissipated. How do I know? I find that I’m suddenly more alert. I’m more expectant. I’m more in the present. In short: I’m ready to be proven wrong. And I can’t wait.
Success.

Loudness Isn’t What It Used to Be: Southland Ensemble and Robert Ashley

Posted on July 24, 2014 by Isaac Schankler - Field Reports, Headlines

One of the most memorable events I’ve been to this summer was Southland Ensemble’s June 8 concert featuring the music of Robert Ashley, presented by Dog Star Orchestra as part of their annual new music festival in Los Angeles. The event was hosted by Automata, a small gallery nestled in Chinatown’s Chung King Plaza, and the space was packed to capacity. There was a palpable sense of energy in the room, which felt transformed into another world for the duration of the smartly staged, almost ceremonial performance. The ensemble chose to perform their selection of Ashley’s works continuously without a break, sometimes even simultaneously. Boundaries were blurred—not just between the pieces themselves, but also between music and theater, between audience and performer, between performance and life. This confusion could have been alienating, but in the hands of these committed players, it was instead bewitchingly mysterious. It made me deeply curious about the origins of the concert and the process that led to their programming decisions, so a few days after the performance I posed a few questions to ensemble members Christine Tavolacci, Eric KM Clark, Matt Barbier, and James Klopfleisch.

The concert was bookended by Klopfleisch performing The Entrance, which calls for pennies to be carefully stacked on the keys of an organ, generating long held drones (though whether the sound is the point of the process or a byproduct is ambiguous). The piece appealed to Klopfleisch’s masochistic side—“it requires tremendous focus and is very physically taxing”—but it also had an exceedingly long possible duration, far longer than they expected the concert to last. Having the piece run continuously during the show allowed them to conceive of it as a throughline that bound the concert together. It also recontextualized the space between pieces, as Clark noticed: “I personally love replacements of silence and changes in perception. During The Wolfman, I was standing right beside the organ yet couldn’t hear it at all. As soon as The Wolfman ended, the organ came back into prominence for me. I loved that sensation.” (To me it also suggested an infinity of sound, implying tones both before and after the performance.)

In a sense, this made She Was A Visitor the true beginning of the performance. One of Ashley’s best-known works, this version featured Christine Tavolacci repeatedly intoning the titular phrase with impressive precision and consistency, while the other performers led the audience in mimicking selected sounds and phonemes from the phrase. Tavolacci found this work to be unexpectedly demanding. “In order to successfully and consistently perform the speaking part for a long period of time, I had to exclusively regard the text as a combination of musical sounds,” she explained. “It is one thing to understand a concept, and another to successfully perform it. The moment that you think that you are reciting the words is the moment that the ostinato could potentially fall apart.”

The Wolfman (1964) - James Klopfleisch Photo Credit: Eron Rauch www.eronrauch.com © Southland Ensemble 2014

The Wolfman (1964) – James Klopfleisch. Photo by Eron Rauch

If She Was A Visitor is one of Ashley’s most inviting pieces, The Wolfman is perhaps one of his most forbidding, at least by reputation. The score calls for a vocalist, in the persona of a “sinister nightclub singer,” to be amplified with feedback tuned to the size of the room, creating piercing high-pitched squeals in all but the largest spaces. Here Klopfleisch played the vocalist with appropriate levels of sleaze, while Casey Anderson ran electronics with a unique interpretation of the score. Klopfleisch said that “Casey had the most interesting take on The Wolfman—that even though it is presented as being obscenely loud, loudness is now more relative than it used to be, or rather the technological limitations of the time required the piece to be incredibly loud.” By using software to create digital feedback, Anderson was able to ameliorate the harshest sounds without diluting their power. The result was almost overwhelmingly intense but never painful, and I appreciated being able to hear an incredible amount of detail in the cascading, ever-changing waves of noise.

In Memorian Esteban Gomez (1963) - Casey Anderson (saxophone); Eric KM Clark (harmonium); Christine Tavolacci (flute). Photo Credit: Eron Rauch

In Memorian Esteban Gomez (1963) – Casey Anderson (saxophone); Eric KM Clark (harmonium); Christine Tavolacci (flute). Photo by Eron Rauch

in memoriam… ESTEBAN GOMEZ and Trios (White on White) rounded out the program. Drones were a prominent feature of both, blending effortlessly with the ongoing organ tones from The Entrance. The first Trio, with Tavolacci on flute, Anderson on alto saxophone, and Matt Barbier on trombone, was especially bracing. Barbier was particularly drawn in by this piece. “Our parts are all to be played as loud as possible, so it was challenging to find ways to do that while also making a combination of alto flute, sax, and trombone sound so all three are audible,” he admitted. “It’s a fascinating aspect of Ashley’s music—the small details don’t always seem to mesh with larger ideas at first glance, and part of the process is to find a solution in the details.”

Trios (White on White) (1963) - Matt Barbier (trombone), Casey Anderson (saxophone), Christine Tavolacci (flute). Photo Credit: Eron Rauch

Trios (White on White) (1963) – Matt Barbier (trombone), Casey Anderson (saxophone), Christine Tavolacci (flute). Photo by Eron Rauch

In the second Trio, the overlapping long tones played by Orin Hildestad (violin) and Jonathan Stehney (recorder) were intermittently interrupted with resonant junk percussion played by Klopfleisch. After all this nearly static slow burn, the third Trio was an enjoyably absurdist surprise, with Barbier giving a mini-lecture on the history of his instrument and demonstrating with musical examples. Partway through, a violinist (Eric KM Clark) and violist (Cassia Streb) emerged wearing black tie formal wear and masks to provide off-kilter musical accompaniment. Theatrically, the costuming and staging was inspired, and emblematic of the ensemble’s approach. Throughout the concert, they managed to make creative and enriching additions to Ashley’s ideas, all the while staying true to the spirit of his scores.

Trios (White on White) (1963) - Cassia Streb, Matt Barbier. Photo Credit: Eron Rauch

Trios (White on White) (1963) – Cassia Streb, Matt Barbier. Photo by Eron Rauch

All of the performed works were from Ashley’s early period in the 1960s. Tavolacci observes that while these works remain “highly influential and pivotal pieces in the canon of American experimental music,” they are rarely performed, perhaps because of their reputation for being more conceptual than musical. Southland Ensemble proved that this is anything but the case, that this is vital music that leaps off the page and takes up residence in our imaginations. Something tells me that I will be living with this music for a long time.

Trios (White on White) (1963) - Orin Hildestad and Jonathan Stehney (far left), James Klopfleisch (right). Photo Credit: Eron Rauch

Trios (White on White) (1963) – Orin Hildestad and Jonathan Stehney (far left), James Klopfleisch (right). Photo by Eron Rauch

Boston: SICPP’s Love and Geometry

Posted on June 26, 2014 by Matthew Guerrieri - Field Reports, Headlines

A cynocephalus, from the Nuremberg Chronicle (1493).

It was an angle of birds
directed toward
that latitude of iron and snow
advancing
relentlessly
along their rectilinear road:
with the devouring rectitude
of an evident arrow,
the airborne numbers voyaging
to procreate, formed
from imperative love and geometry.
—Pablo Neruda, “Migración”

I tend to assume that every concert, whether by conscious design or not, contains a coherent narrative of some kind. It might not be the most defensible assumption, but it is useful, to me at least; it gets me into a mode of listening that’s a little more engaged than it might otherwise be. That doesn’t mean the narrative is always plain, though. On paper, the June 17 concert presented by the Summer Institute for Contemporary Performance Practice (SICPP, known to the faithful as “Sick Puppy”), part of the institute’s annual week of new music training, festivities, and shenanigans, made some piece-to-piece local connections but seemed more miscellaneous on a global scale. In performance, though, a theme kept peeking around the edges, hovering peripherally, receding but then coming back into view. It took me a while to get a sense of it; I’m still not sure I got it. But it concerned two concepts that I have long been obsessed with, and that have been more and more salient in recent times: civilization and citizenship.

* * *

Citizenship of a musical kind was prominent. SICPP director Stephen Drury led off with a trio of piano solo works—big and fingerbusting, all past and future beneficiaries of Drury’s committed advocacy. And the concert was SICPP’s most full-fledged (though, sadly, unplanned) memorial to Lee Hyla, who had been scheduled to be the institute’s composer-in-residence. Roger Reynolds stepped in after Hyla fell ill, and programs later in the week featured much of Reynolds’s music, but this concert was Hyla’s—three pieces interspersed with other music that, directly and indirectly, provided comment and complement.
Hyla’s art was that of a model musical citizen who, nonetheless, maintained a wary distance from the more civilized—or civilizing—aspects of music. The raison d’être of Basic Training is a celebration of citizenship: Drury asked Hyla to write it as a tribute to Drury’s teacher, Margaret Ott. The piece itself, though, is a furious, sometimes funny, but ultimately equivocal portrayal of civilization’s progress. From a single-note, deliberately clunky opening (“Neanderthal-like,” according to Hyla’s program note), the piece acquires and deploys increasingly frenetic technique—it’s learning, WarGames-style. (My favorite aspect was how Hyla’s facility with complicated, off-kilter rhythms recreates the kind of distortions that happen when you can almost play something, hesitations and tumbles turning into their own determined groove.) The music consumes itself in virtuosity, then melts into a simpler, orderly, triadic coda; but the triad is minor, and the return of that single opening note, now rounded and polished into a beautiful object, is suffused with melancholy.

Basic Training constructs a culture; John Zorn’s Carny pulverizes it. It is Zorn in his full-on, Carl-Stalling-cartoon-collage mode: not so much a piece as a hundred different pieces run together for maximum slapstick contrast. Quotations abound in motion-blurred plenitude; stylistic signifiers come and go with near-subliminal swiftness. Carny is one of Drury’s specialties (he was one of its dedicatees), and the initial effect was simple astonishment at his fierce precision and energy. But the single performer and instrument, perhaps, gives Carny, for all its information overload, a kind of narrative unity: a montage-based secret history of civilized culture. The piece delights in exposing just how thin the line is that separates comforting dichotomies: tonal and atonal, old and new, high and low—and, finally, comedy and horror. Carny is funny until it’s not, the nonstop cartoon violence turning suspiciously lifelike.

Zorn reaches his coda by way of an outburst of clusters that Drury has called a “nuclear holocaust…. Are we now paying dearly for the previous fun and games?” Drury provided one possible answer by making a segue directly from Zorn’s fade-out ending into Frederic Rzewski’s version of the anti-war spiritual “Down By the Riverside” from his North American Ballads. Rzewski portrays that most crucial responsibility of citizenship—righteous protest—as invitingly easy, then perhaps too easy, then hard-won and triumphant, but then, as the music dwindles away, exhausting as well. That, in turn, gave Hyla’s We Speak Etruscan the air of a cautionary tale. The title of Hyla’s 1994 duo for bass clarinet (Rane Moore) and baritone saxophone (Philipp Staeudlin) references a lost civilization and language; in this context, the music’s truly impressive channeling of the instruments’ capacity for guttural honking sounded like an apocalyptic klaxon, a drive-by warning to turn around before it’s too late. As with Basic Training, the tone was primarily funky and fiery, but shaded by passages of lyricism shot through with minor-mode regret. Part and parcel of the civilizing impulse, Hyla seemed to say, is a wistful nostalgia for anarchic wildness.

* * *

If the first half was all about civilization and its discontents, the concert’s second half opened in back-to-the-land fashion—or, maybe, under-the-land. Chaya Czernowin’s Wintersongs IV: Wounds/Mistletoe (a world premiere) was positively tectonic, slow-shifting, granitic textures heavy with friction. The 17-player ensemble (conducted by Drury) was pitched toward registral extremes, all low growls and high whines, with microtonal abrasions and lots of white noise: snares, cymbals, breath sounds from the winds and brass. Not all of Czernowin’s effects came off—having all the wind players whisper over the mouths of plastic and glass bottles, for instance, was a provocative visual but proved barely audible. But the piece arrived at some great, punishingly bright, skull-rattling sonorities. Like magma, Wintersongs IV moved slow but, eventually, burned hot.

Hyla’s Migración, one of his last pieces (it was premiered in February by the SICPP-affiliated Callithumpian Consort), seemed appropriately airy by comparison. The text is a long Pablo Neruda poem considering natural cycles, winter and spring, life and death. But a tension between the individual and the collective is ever-present. The migrating birds of the title are considered as a machine, a product of technology: “a squadron of feathers, / an ocean liner / fluttering in the air.” The “transparent ship / constructs unity from many wings.” Neruda’s “multiplied hungry heart,” in Hyla’s setting, becomes something like a crowd of strangers on the same ferry.

A mezzo-soprano (Thea Lobo) sings (and, at one point speaks) the text in an equable but relentlessly declamatory style, the nine-player ensemble (conducted, again, by Drury) quilting an accompaniment out of instrumental aphorisms. Neruda’s conflation of evolved and constructed has a timbral echo, an often-yoked trio of piano, harp, and cimbalom, feathery and discrete at the same time, a quiet purr of rivets. The trajectory of Migración felt less conventionally expressive than meditatively compulsory: a reflective commute rather than an adventurous voyage.

Like many a commute, Migración led into a teeming urban grid, Charles Ives’s Set for Theatre Orchestra, with even the ensemble arranged on stage as if by zoning committee: percussion on the north side, timpani on the south side, winds and strings ensconced on the east and west sides, the piano centrally parked. The middle movement, “In the Inn,” was saturated with volatile ragtime, anticipating and recapitulating that thread from Hyla and Zorn and Rzewski. And the third movement, “In the Night,” with the sound of extra instruments drifting in from offstage suburbs, was gorgeous. But it was the opening movement that resonated most with the second half’s town-and-country unease, and the program as a whole: “In the Cage,” brooding, stalking, its leopard in the zoo pacing its pen, and the boy outside wondering as to the nature and benefit of the civilizing bars.

* * *

Pablo Neruda himself had an attitude toward citizenship and civilization similar to Hyla’s, an acute sense of the gap between an artist’s individuality and an artistic movement within society. In a 1971 interview with Canadian radio, Neruda denied that he was a political poet:

I am the poet of the moon, I am the poet of the flowers, I am the poet of love. Meaning I have a very old conception of poetry, which does not contradict the possibility that I have written, and that I continue to write, poems that are dedicated to the development of society and to the power of progress and of peace.

In the end, the thread tying together the concert was that the music never contradicted the possibility, either. Civilization was regarded with skepticism, but still engaged with it energetically and even exultantly; the citizenship on display was constantly reaching out, expanding the network, reweaving the web. The evening’s music squared the circle of the contemporary avant-garde, how the often grim nature of the modern condition can yield such exuberant art, how encyclopedic determinations of style and craft can create the freest expression. The concert postulated its own conclusion—civilization is technique; citizenship is love.

Chicago: The deafening silence of the Beethoven Festival musicians

Posted on June 24, 2014 by Ellen McSweeney - Field Reports, Headlines

I was recently hired to play a daylong ensemble engagement. In my reply, I gladly accepted, and asked what the compensation would be, since the initial email had not included that information. The contractor, an admired mentor with whom I have a frank rapport, told me the number, but also offered that I might want to refrain from such questions in the future. Asking about pay, he suggested, could make me look like money was all I cared about. In his mind, I’d violated a norm. It was almost as if he were surprised I didn’t trust him. And sure enough, when I arrived at the gig—which was well-paid—the check was on my music stand.
When it comes to money and music, it seems we aren’t in agreement about what the norms are. How much is enough? What questions are we allowed to ask? And what do we do when the check never comes? That discomfort has reared its head in a particularly dramatic way this month in Chicago. The Beethoven Festival recently announced its fourth annual event, happening this September. But for local musicians, the announcement was stunning: the festival has not yet finished paying the people who played for them last year. I personally am owed in the neighborhood of $1,000. This is, of course, the complete opposite of having the check on your music stand when you arrive.

Given the number of musicians owed money—and the number of musician who know someone owed money—one would think that the festival’s 2014 announcement would’ve been a lit match in a dry barn. But it wasn’t, quite. A single Facebook post from violinist Austin Wulliman yielded fifty comments from prominent local musicians, including members of eighth blackbird and professors at the University of Chicago. A post on Slipped Disc—which, depending on whom you ask, is widely perceived as either essential rabble-rousing or venomous clickbait—broke the story publicly, but comments from named musicians are scarce. Media stories followed from Chicagoist (where writer Drew Baker had difficulty getting anyone to go on the record) and even the Chicago Reader. But these stories weren’t as widely shared on social media as you might imagine, given the profound violation of norms that the story represents for the Chicago freelance community.

Why were the wronged musicians and their friends still so quiet? And, come to think of it, why did we maintain silence for nine months as we awaited sums of money that, to us, make or break our ability to pay the rent?

For me, the story of the Beethoven Festival is a story of vulnerability: my own individual vulnerability, that of my colleagues, and that of our entire musical community. Much of the most artistically adventurous work in Chicago isn’t unionized, and we take a leap of faith every time we work for each other. Usually, that trust is rewarded, and professional and collaborative bonds are formed that allow us all to thrive. Horn player Matt Oliphant’s blog post on this matter is aptly titled “Beethoven Festival and Respect.” The community is indeed held together by trust, respect, and not much else. If circumstances like these are kept secret, it threatens the security and well-being of every musician in our city.

The unpaid musicians began receiving apologetic emails from Beethoven Festival Artistic Director George Lepauw in early October. As the festival’s dire financial circumstances became clear, a tacit agreement quickly developed that we would not take to social media or the press. We were never asked to remain silent, but we did. I suspect that the other unpaid musicians were, like me, nervous that any public complaint might have resulted in an even longer delay of their payment. After all, for many months it was unclear what logic had been used to determine who would be paid first. (Lepauw described the payments as happening “on a rolling basis.”) At a Christmas background music gig three months after the festival, I had an awkward encounter with a friend.
“Too bad about that Beethoven Festival money, huh?” I said to him as we set up.

“Oh…uh…yeah,” he said, looking at the ground. It took me a moment, but I realized that he’d been paid. We laughed about the bizarre situation. But the truth was, he was personally closer to the festival’s organizers, and his insistence on being paid had helped. (Lepauw told the Reader that 15 of the 60 orchestra members have been paid in full, but there’s been no discussion of how they were selected.)

When the festival sent out small checks to everyone in February—around 30% of what we were owed—one colleague posted a cryptic Facebook status about receiving a fraction of his pay, six months late. A few musicians left grumbling comments, but the offending employer was never named. It makes sense that so many musicians opted to preserve the festival’s reputation and quietly wait for their checks. Musicians were not only concerned that public complaint might have monetary consequences, but also about their own reputations. To complain about the missing funds could be construed as unkind or malicious towards a beleaguered, near-bankrupt organization that was reportedly working hard to right the situation.

Perhaps that’s the biggest reason we kept quiet about the unpaid bills: Compassion. Sympathy. Love, even. We hoped things would get better. No one wanted the Beethoven Festival to fail. No one wanted fewer performance opportunities for Chicago musicians. No one wanted to see a musician’s reputation destroyed, nor an ambitious and idealistic venture go down in flames. I would not wish such a spectacular public relations disaster on any arts organization.

But was it the correct choice for us to remain silent, ostensibly to help the festival right itself? In his official response to Slipped Disc, George Lepauw said, “I have always been, and still am, a musician’s advocate, and am extremely grateful to all the musicians who have been patiently waiting for their dues, and who have been supportive of us throughout this difficult period and have not complained on social media about it.” Lepauw posits that this silence was the noble thing to do—unlike, of course, musicians such as Wulliman, whose lone post Lepauw described as “a campaign of misinformation and blurring of facts that is counterproductive to the intent of repaying musicians.” The implication I perceive in his statement is that silence will be rewarded, and speaking out will only result in further delays of payment. And yet Wulliman had the freedom to voice his dismay expressly because his ensemble, Spektral Quartet, was paid in advance for their performance. Wulliman could speak out, in other words, because he had less to lose.

And it’s a good thing he did. The consequences of our silence go beyond when, or whether, we ever get paid. While we were being nice and patient and quiet, a whole new roster of musicians from throughout the U.S. agreed to play for the 2014 festival. At the very least, the national community should have known that these debts remained unpaid, so that they could have made an informed decision about whether to participate. These individuals, met with the uproar of the past weeks, now face the difficult decision of whether to withdraw. While it is uncomfortable to call our fellow musicians to task here, they have unfortunately agreed to perform for an employer who, in a story about this debacle, actually described the festival’s skyrocketing budget as “an incredible story of success.”

It’s not fun to publicly admit how much a $900 check might matter to us, but the truth is that our position is precarious. This fall, I placed a nervous phone call to an employer about a check that hadn’t yet arrived. It was only two days late, but things were tight for me and it mattered. “I understand,” the woman on the phone said, “I used to live hand-to-mouth.” I cringed and just hoped she could help me.

As tax time approached this year, I owed $2,500 on my $25,000 income. That’s another aspect of the vulnerability of self-employed artists: our social safety net isn’t very strong. Without the security of a full-time employer, we must be particularly diligent in setting aside money for taxes, retirement, and emergencies. Around March 1, I received an email from George Lepauw:

It is likely that within the next week, we will…be able to start issuing checks. However, we may not reach the total needed to pay everyone at once, so we have decided to issue what we can to each of you as we receive funds. After much internal discussion, we feel that this would be a better system than paying some of you but not others. You will therefore get several checks in the course of the next weeks until we are back in the black.

I felt hopeful. Perhaps the check would arrive by April 15; perhaps it would enough money to help with the taxes. But as it turned out, I received only one check for about $300. The other promised payments never came. When tax day rolled around, I couldn’t send an email to the IRS explaining my lack of funds and the noble work of being a musician. I simply wrote a big check and hoped the next month would be better.

Boston: Bromp Treb Busts the Matrix

Posted on June 16, 2014 by Matthew Guerrieri - Field Reports, Headlines

Bromp Treb (Neil Young Cloaca) at Café Fixe, June 10, 2014. Photo by Susanna Bolle.

The pre-concert chatter for Bromp Treb’s June 10 show at Brookline’s Café Fixe (another in the ever-copacetic coffeehouse performance series presented by Non-Event) was all about the crowd—more specifically, the lack thereof. Even given the post-commencement dissipation of the Boston area’s academic population, attendance was looking disappointingly lean. So Neil Young Cloaca, filmmaker and noisemaker, member of the Northampton-based noise quintet Fat Worm of Error, and the one-man band that is Bromp Treb, took his microphone outside and engaged in a little old-fashioned one-on-one promotion. His one successful negotiation—convincing a couple to take a flyer with the promise that they would only have to pay the $5 cover if they stayed for longer than five minutes—was pumped through the speakers inside, becoming the prelude to his set.

In retrospect, it was the perfect introduction. Cloaca, a once and occasional concert promoter himself, is an irrepressible showman. Bromp Treb is an opportunity for him to apply that carnival-barker enthusiasm to a table full of mismatched gear: effects pedals, mixers, a sampler, electronic drum pads, roto-tom, and cowbell. Contact microphones and bouquets of wire; bits of alligator-clipped metal. An electrified tin can. A brillo pad. Cloaca treats all this stuff as a source of caprice, admitting to one audience member that the configuration of the equipment is always changing. More than once during the sound check, Cloaca let out a delighted giggle at some unexpected sound.

The performance proper began with electronic sirens and stuttering static. Some irregular, repeated subbass growls set up a couple of agogo-bell-heavy percussion loops, sliced into each other with cowbell punctuation: an atom-smashed Carnival. The line between patch and glitch was obscured; overmodulated short-circuit pops were turned, via reverb, into makeshift percussion, Cloaca’s own voice was filtered and delayed into an asynchronous house of acoustic mirrors. Throughout, Cloaca’s performing persona was on hyperactive, spasmodic display, pirouetting, pouncing, gyrating, jerking, a cross between a malfunctioning Mick Jagger and a Beckett-like post-apocalyptic last man. During one long, sparse section, Cloaca circled the table, triggering highly distorted samples while playing up theatrical befuddlement, as if he was trying to decipher a recalcitrant machine—or defuse an eccentric bomb.

Much of the sound of Bromp Treb can be heard as either a critique or a celebration of the questionable level of control we have over our own gadgets: Cloaca’s weave of cables and equipment is one designed to exacerbate rather than minimize the instability of any such network. The brush of a live wire against a powered jack; the crackle and heavy breathing of radio frequency interference; the gasoline-and-matches feedback possibilities of too many microphones and criss-crossed inputs—Bromp Treb rushes in where conventional audio engineers would prefer not to tread. At several points, Cloaca simply lifted up a corner of the table and then dropped it back down, the set-up’s fragility yielding an amplified squeal and squelch. It is the sound of the technological web breaking down, failing, consuming itself and us.
The flailing is partly an illusion, especially from the musical end: the sounds might surprise, but Cloaca knows what he’s doing, shaping long arcs and judicious transitions from texture to texture. After some mid-set banter, Cloaca geared back up for another number, this one more noisy and busy than the first: cartoon-worthy sampled drum hits, off-balance, looped beats cutting in and out like intermittent radio signals, a final crescendo into an unorthodox, whooping rave. But the theatrical narrative was similar to the first half: someone discovering, commandeering, gradually losing control of, and finally seeming to merge with a cache of computer-age detritus.

What is most notable about Bromp Treb is how cheerful Cloaca manages to make all this, especially in comparison with the often clinical aura surrounding so much electronic music performance. There is, to be sure, a streak of anxiety in Cloaca’s theater, an acknowledgement, maybe, of the fact that it has become well-nigh impossible for us to extricate ourselves from our self-created technological realm. To use the appropriate reference: we have created a monster, more accurately, a horde of monsters, colonizing every aspect of day-to-day life. But with over-the-top physicality and deliberate unpredictability, Bromp Treb holds out hope that the monsters might end up as warped and goofy as we are: temperamental, volatile, unfathomable, but genially willing dance partners. It is the most optimistic electronic racket you’re likely to hear.

Oh, and that couple Cloaca coaxed in off the street? They paid the cover.

San Antonio: SOLI chamber ensemble—20 years of new music

Posted on June 4, 2014 by AndrewSigler - Field Reports, Headlines

SOLI chamber ensemble. Photo by Jason Murgo

Founded in 1994 as the PRISM quartet,[1] SOLI chamber ensemble has for the past twenty years served as a guiding light for contemporary concert music in and around San Antonio. Winner of the 2013 CMA/ASCAP Adventurous Programming Award, SOLI has commissioned forty new works and premiered each of them for audiences in San Antonio. Though their long-running concert series at Trinity University will continue to be their main base of operations, their recent appointment as resident chamber ensemble at the new Tobin Performing Arts Center (in downtown San Antonio, just a few blocks from the Alamo) puts them in a prominent position to share their music with an even wider audience. In addition, SOLI is also presenting their first CD which features several of the works they have commissioned over the years. This season’s concert series had three distinct programs—Past, Present, and Future—out of which I was able to catch the last. When Caroline Shaw is the senior composer on your program, you know you’re dealing with new music, so I was quite curious to see what SOLI had programmed for the show.
The concert, held in the Ruth Taylor Recital Hall of Trinity University, began with Scott Ordway’s Let there be not darkness, but light. The work was a study in multiple moods which evolved over six or seven minutes. A clangorous opening with chirping single-note sixteenth figures gave way to a slower section with staid and paced piano chords under long lines traded between the strings. The clarinet emerged over this material while hints of the chirping appeared and echoed in the piano. This lead to another section featuring violin, cello, and clarinet exclamations bouncing off of and rising from the piano’s arrhythmic accompaniment, morphing into a sort of ululating texture with everyone (save piano) moving in step before remnants of the opening material closed out the piece.

Guest artist mezzo-soprano Tynan Davis joined the ensemble (sans clarinet this time) for Caroline Shaw’s Cantico delle creature, a work based on text by Francesco d’Assisi and one of the first poems written in the Umbrian dialect of Italian in the 13th century. The work had a calm clarity throughout and seemed in no rush to get from A to B, a quality that felt not static but comfortable and somehow meditative. Often intoning a single pitch, Davis’s performance enhanced these qualities with round pure tones and beautifully shaped lines. It was a work that luxuriated in form more than surface activity, one in which looking for the point of the piece in each line was less successful than letting the whole thing wash over you.

Niccolo Athens’s Piano Trio was a study in tradition, and the three movements were rigorous for both player and listener. The calm, flowing, and wholly tonal opening of the Preludio served well as a bridge from the Shaw, though it upped the ante as it progressed with aggressive tremolo in the strings and deft interplay between strings and piano. The Passacaglia sat large and imposing in the center, occupying the lion’s share of the work, and Athens made good use of its repeating line, often masking it so deftly that, as the movement progressed, I lost track of it. The Scherzo-Finale came along attacca with a strong nod to Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra both in harmonic language and rhythmic vitality, streams of sixteenths interrupted by tutti announcements of the theme. Taking on these well-worn forms can be a daunting challenge for even the most experienced composers, and my first thought when I saw the program was, “Interesting…this title does not scream ‘new music’.” Having said that, it was very well written, exciting, and enjoyable, and reminded me that new music is, of course, many things.
Following the intermission was Yvonne Freckmann’s Switch. Originally programmed as the closer for the first half, a technical glitch forced a shuffling of pieces, one that could really throw a wrench in the works of a carefully curated evening. However, it was a refreshing change from the formality of the first half, and once the technical issues were squared away (by way of an iMac procured from the bowels of the university) the work commenced. Featuring clarinet and live electronics, Switch also used pre-recorded clarinet, occasionally showing up in choirs to add to the drama. Freckmann joined clarinetist Stephanie Key onstage, occasionally cueing the electronics via the iMac as Key moved across the stage reading the spread-out score. The piece was populated by melodies awash in delay and reverb, occasionally pulling away for an excursion into overblown notes and similar extended techniques[2]. Certainly we’re well past the point where electronic pieces are assumed to be de-facto experimental, but too often I hear works in this world that feel wandering and self-indulgent; pieces in which the material and surface dominate. Fortunately, Switch had a satisfying arc and thoughtful attention to form that kept it out of that category.

Davis joined the entire ensemble for the final work of the evening, the world premiere of Matthew Aucoin’s SOLI-commissioned Celan Songs. In seven movements (three of which were instrumental “fragments”), the songs were each of their own world. The first movement had a disjointed march-like rhythm from which a tutti emerged among the instrumentalists while the second put Davis through her paces in terms of range. Much of the work was somewhat dark and a bit angular, its language and sensibility recalling a European pre-war character (speaking perhaps to Paul Celan’s experience as a holocaust survivor) until the fifth movement. Fully of this century, the bubbling arpeggios and long lines wholly contrasted the other movements while somehow connecting with them via Davis’s voice. My first thought was all raised eyebrows and “what’s all this then?”, but Aucoin made it work. Initially slightly disorienting, this most different movement was in many ways the star of the show (or at least this particular piece) and put me on my toes as a listener.

Achieving the high level of performance and commissioning that SOLI has is one thing, but maintaining it for twenty years is quite another. While we live in a world populated by more and more new music groups, it’s worth noting that SOLI got its start around the same time the internet became a thing. It’s difficult (even for those of us who grew up in those dark days) to remember what it was like to operate in a world without the immediate connectivity those tubes afford us, not to mention the fact that without a great deal of precedent, groups like SOLI had to make it up as they went. Even today there is no boilerplate for making your new music group work, but if you’re looking for a model, SOLI has one for you.

1. Not to be confused with the saxophone quartet! And when did groups start moving from names in all caps to all lower-case? This is a dissertation waiting to happen folks.

I suppose we’re moving away from calling these techniques “extended”?

Chicago: The ancient future-music of Sam Scranton

Posted on May 30, 2014 by Ellen McSweeney - Field Reports, Headlines

Photo by Dan Mohr

The premiere of Sam Scranton‘s Detritivore, presented in the tucked-away space of Experimental Sound Studio, felt like a major art event. It is an evening-length ensemble work that is both theatrical and restrained, simultaneously epic and intimate, and was so absorbing that I could not write about it without participating in the reverberations of the piece itself. Scranton’s music is richly layered, allowing dense textures of live spoken text to coexist with folk percussion instruments and found sounds. His compositional voice, drawing on the willingness of minimalism to sit with one sonic idea for a courageously long time, is also utterly his own. It is a rare treat to hear a work that feels both contemporary and timeless, presented by an artist taking wholehearted risks.
Experimental Sound Studio, under the leadership of Lou Mallozzi, has what Mallozzi calls “a long history of presenting work that makes innovative use of text.” Detritivore uses texts that feel both futuristic and ancient, and the work’s humor and humanity make it a true standout. Performed by Scranton along with Andrew Tham, Deidre Huckabay, and Bill Frisch, the piece was originally intended to be performed by a small army of performers. After the premiere performance, Scranton described to me an enormous downtown Chicago food court as a potential space for a repeat performance. Stay tuned, for someday soon you too could read your secrets into a time capsule.

***
May 9, 2014 A.D. 20:03 hours. I see the trees and houses of Ravenswood Avenue moving quickly in and out of my field of vision. I hear my gasping breath and the pounding of my feet on the sidewalk. I think maybe I shouldn’t have gone to yoga before this concert; shouldn’t have tried to do so much today.

20:07 hours. I see the man at Experimental Sound Studios holding programs. I hear him telling me admission is ten dollars. I tell him I’m on the press list. I think I maybe should’ve bought a ticket anyway, but I also think I’m broke. I think thank God these things never start on time.

20:12 hours. I see the patch of floor where I will stand through the entire hour-long work. There’s nowhere to sit. I hear the conversation of the people next to me; one of them is moving to a new city. He says he sold everything but his patio furniture and his couch. I think it might be hard to stand up through this whole thing.

20:15 hours. I see the stage and the instruments: tall vases, light bulbs, bricks, clay tiles. Plastic cassette players sit beside animal-skin drums. I hear the audience applauding. The performers aren’t coming onstage. I hear the man behind me say, “We’ll just have to clap again louder next time.” I think he’s wrong and that the ensemble is doing this on purpose.

20:16 hours. I see the four performers coming onstage in white v-neck t-shirts and jeans. I see the contact mics and headphone cords attached close to their necks by white tape, like bandages on a wound. I hear the long silence that is the beginning of this piece. I think I love my friends, the performers, all four of them now sitting cross-legged on the floor, about to play music that’s never been heard before. I think I’d like to be up there with them.

***
The piece had five parts. This is what I imagined during each part.

In the first part of the piece the performers were a lost pilot on a long, long flight. They read hours, minutes, altitude, azimuth. They were a lonely astronaut in outer space, except that they had drums. They were a forest-dwelling man on a strange military assignment. They read the numbers for a long, long time. I worried the pilot wouldn’t make it. I wondered how long his flight would be. I think I heard them count to twenty hours.

In the second part of the piece the performers were praying for the astronaut. They were on the ground, sending prayers and smoke signals to their family member in the sky. Their lips moved and I didn’t know what they were saying. By the end of this part it felt like a burial ritual for the lost pilot.

Composer Sam Scranton
Photo by Dan Mohr

In the third part the performers became themselves again. They all spoke at once, reading stories from their day into tall glass tubes, as if making recordings for a time capsule. I craned my neck to try to get closer to them and hear what they were saying. One performer said, “I think about having a full time job.” Another said, “I think about taking a shower but I don’t really want to.” The composer said, “I think Edie is being very sweet and good today.” I knew that Edie is his daughter. In the silences, it was awkward and intense. I was afraid one of them would say something embarrassing, or something I didn’t want to hear.
In the fourth section, each performer read a different chronology. Deidre read the history of Blockbuster Video. Andrew read the history of Detroit. Sam read the history of the creation of the universe. At the end of the section, Sam was left alone, his history catapulting forward into the future. He said that in the year 1 trillion A.D. the universe would enter a dark period. I thought about how the tragedies of Blockbuster, or the city of Detroit, felt smaller and sadder to me than the end of the world.

Photo by Dan Mohr

In the fifth section, the performers gathered cross-legged in a circle on the floor. They took their time-capsule vases and bowed them. I think they were having a funeral for the universe, which by the end of Sam’s oral history, had pretty much been destroyed. At the end of the piece was a silence longer than I’ve ever heard at a concert.

Houston: River Oaks Chamber Orchestra

Posted on May 23, 2014 by AndrewSigler - Field Reports, Headlines

Every single problem in the arts can be fixed by working on personal relationships.–Alecia Lawyer

Based in Houston and drawing on some of the finest players in town and from around the nation, River Oaks Chamber Orchestra is gearing up for their tenth season. Since its inception in 2005, ROCO has presented hundreds of concerts to a wide variety of audiences and in many different forms. Founded by oboist Alecia Lawyer, ROCO has commissioned or premiered 34 new works and during their upcoming season they will pass 40, including a co-commission in partnership with New Century Chamber Orchestra and A Far Cry for a piece by Derek Bermel. Lawyer was kind enough to take time out of her busy schedule to fill me in on how ROCO got started and where it’s headed.

Andrew Sigler: How did ROCO come about?

Alecia Lawyer: I had been a part of many start-up orchestras in NYC and in Houston and had had an entrepreneurial trio in NYC while at Juilliard. While in Houston, when my church was being renovated I knew a chamber orchestra would be perfect there in this lovely Frank Lloyd Wright-style building with seating for around 550. I wanted to build something for Houston, but also something very authentic and relevant to the classical music world.
I thought of the musicians who were with me at Juilliard and different festivals who actually smiled when they performed and took joy in their craft on stage; who could be vulnerable and open in performance; who could talk to an audience and engage them, not just entertain them; who performed with such fluency that the music became the language, not the entity. I was lucky to have hired Suzanne Lefevre as personnel manager, who helped form the orchestra, as well.

AS: What are some areas of presentation that set you apart?

AL: We have many simple ways to make the audience feel comfortable without changing our product of fantastic classical music. The concerts start at 5 p.m. and are over before 7 p.m., so people can do more than one thing in a night. I put pronunciation guides for composers’ names [in the program] so people don’t feel dumb, and I include timings of pieces to allow people to get a sense of the scope of a piece. (And if they don’t like it, they know how much longer it is!) I married the idea of a kid’s night out with the concerts and now have ROCOrooters, a music education/childcare program during and after our concerts. We don’t have a regular intermission. It’s “Take 5” [style] and musicians actually clip on nametags and walk into the audience to greet our audience. ROCO is known as “the most fun you can have with serious music.” Our season consists of four main concerts with all 40 professional musicians (half of whom fly in to play) with repeat performances. The rest of our 25-30 concert season is made up of chamber music in various venues and with many partners throughout Houston. We actually perform in ten zip codes here.

AS: Your mission statement is to “shape the future of classical music through energizing, modernizing and personalizing the orchestral experience.” That’s a tall order. How do you accomplish this?

AL: We energize through musician involvement in programming and creative direction, rotating conductors ([the ensemble has] no named conductor), annual conductorless concerts, and world premiere commissions. We modernize through streaming live concerts into patient rooms at MD Anderson Cancer Center and Hallmark Retirement Home. We are dedicated to bringing this music to immobile communities like the V.A. hospital, where we performed a veteran’s concert this season. We also have a Listening Room where you can hear our past concerts for free and also download them. We offer ring tones by our individual musicians so you can carry your favorite ROCO musician with you wherever you go. We have been broadcast nationally over 60 times on Performance Today. We personalize through accessibility where musicians and audience and board have relationships; through our musical collaborations; knowing our audience members by name; keeping the house lights up the whole concert to feel even more connected to our audience; having individuals or groups support each musician’s chair throughout the season (every musician has a sponsor or group of sponsors); commissioning and programming with actual people in mind and involved.

AS: You have a pretty spectacular group of players from all over the place. How were they assembled?

AL: They are not just from Texas! NYC, Vancouver, Boulder, others I cannot think of. It’s more about people I knew and ROCO’s personnel manager, Suzanne Lefevre, who has a wide group of musicians she knows. Plus her job is not what you would expect. She is now named associate artistic director and has always been a partner in building the orchestra.

AS: You have had 34 world premieres (and counting!) in less than ten years. Are any/all of these commissioned works? How do you go about selecting these works/composers?

AL: Yes, all are world premiere commissions. We have more that are either Houston premieres, or world premieres that were not commissioned by us. Some composers came to us in the beginning, but now that we are known for this I get submissions constantly and love it! I am constantly getting suggestions from the musicians in ROCO, as well, for repertoire and commissioning. Our big news this season is that we are doing a co-commission with New Century Chamber Orchestra and A Far Cry having Derek Bermel compose the piece. ROCO will get the world premiere on Valentine’s Day next season.

AS: Houston is a large cosmopolitan city with many outstanding musical organizations of all sizes. How does ROCO fit into this?

AL: Many people don’t realize the difference in groups for classical music. There is a 100-piece symphony orchestra on one end and then chamber groups on the other. In between you have string orchestras of around 18-20 players and then a full-size chamber orchestra like ROCO of 36-40 performers. Each of those four categories is its own animal with repertoire specifically for it. We have other groups in the different categories, but are the only one occupying the full-size chamber orchestra space and truly sticking to that repertoire. I love the flexibility we have for the main concerts with the full group and then chamber groups throughout the rest of the season. It is intentionally being built as a Lego model, where small groups like our ROCO Brass Quintet have their own series of concerts under the ROCO brand.

AS: You’ve presented at Yale, SMU, Round Top, Juilliard, UT Austin, and the Texas Music Festival concerning your entrepreneurial approach to community-specific orchestra building. What is your approach?

AL: I call what I do “Wildcatting in the arts” which might need explaining if you are not from Texas! I meet with the performance majors and the arts management students and talk about starting ROCO. The talks have gone in many different directions from development and board building to programming/commissioning. However, my favorite thing to do is to talk about ROCO as a case study of reactions to my own past in performance and then have individual appointment times for students to come discuss their own ideas. I believe that orchestras should not be cookie-cutter and actually have a personality like the city in which they are created.

I love the process of connecting people together through the arts. Each conversation, whether about music, money, or venues, is one of discovery and craft. Every single problem in the arts can be fixed by working on personal relationships. Gratefulness, joy, and connection are our panaceas.

*
World Premiere/Commissions by ROCO for the full chamber orchestra
Brad Sayles – Echoes of Invention for narrator and orchestra (2008)
Karim Al-Zand – Visions from Another World After Illustrations by JJ Grandville (2008)
Carter Pann – Mercury Concerto (2009)
Brad Sayles – Buffalo Bayou Suite (2010)
Scott McAllister – Concerto for Double Bass and Chamber Orchestra (2010)
Karim Al-Zand – Handel’s Messiah Pregame Show (2011) In collaboration with Houston Chamber Choir
Paul English – Lumiere Lunaire (2012) (In honor of the 100th anniversary of Pierrot Lunaire and based upon JoAnn Falletta’s poem about Pierrot)
Tony Brandt – Maternity (2012) based upon neuroscientist David Eagleman’s writings about women throughout evolution back to the amoeba.
Reena Esmail – Teen Murti for string orchestra (2013)
Carter Pann – The Extension of My Eye, Le Tombeau d’Henri Carter-Bresson (2014)

World Premieres
Steve Laven – Beyond the Odyssey (2006)
Tony Brandt – Nano Symphony (2010)
Todd Frazier – “Save the World” in Memorium; Richard Smalley (2010)

Houston Premieres
Derek Bermel – Natural Selection (2006)
Michael McLean – Elements for solo violin and strings (2006)
Daniel Kellog – Mozart’s Hymn for String Orchestra in 16 Parts (2008)
Pierre Jalbert – Autumn Rhapsody (2012)
Huang Ro – Folk Songs for orchestra (2013)

Chamber Music World Premiere/Commissions
22 Works for our annual Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) musical and literary ofrenda. Composers write small pieces about life, death, remembrance, or other themes for an oboe, viola, and cello trio from ROCO with a singer.
We also have commissioned and premiered two other chamber works on our chamber music series we are now calling ROCO Unchambered.

Boston: Caroline Shaw’s Common Cause

Posted on May 21, 2014 by Matthew Guerrieri - Field Reports, Headlines

"Your Second or Permanent Teeth" (anatomical diagram)

From Harrison Wader Ferguson, D.D.S., A Child’s Book of the Teeth (1922).

In his 1547 treatise Dodecachordon, Heinrich Glarean, having lionized the likes of Obrecht, Ockeghem, and Josquin (especially Josquin), made sure—like you do—to despair that the younger generation was ruining everything. To be sure, even Josquin had his infelicitous moments: “in some places in his songs he did not fully and properly restrain his impetuous talent, although this ordinary fault may be condoned because of his otherwise incomparable gifts.” Those coming after Josquin, however, made this exception the rule, as Glarean complained:

The art now displays such unrestraint that learned men are nearly sick of it. This has many causes, but mostly it is because composers are ashamed to follow in the footsteps of predecessors who observed the relation of modes exactly; we have fallen into another, distorted style of song which is in no way pleasing—it is only new.

It was probably coincidental that, for the May 10 and 11 premiere performances of Caroline Shaw’s Music in Common Time, the vocal group Roomful of Teeth and the string ensemble A Far Cry preceded the piece with Josquin at his most elegantly, explicitly generational: his “Déploration” on the death of his elder colleague Johannes Ockeghem (in an arrangement by Shaw). But, then again, after winning the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for her Partita (the youngest composer to ever receive the honor), Shaw came in for a share of Glarean-like grief courtesy of John Adams, who implicitly held Shaw up as an example of “extremely simplistic, user-friendly, lightweight” music: “People are winning Pulitzer Prizes writing this stuff now.” He went on:

If you read a lot of history, which I do, you see that civilizations produce periods of high culture, and then they can fall into periods of absolute mediocrity that can go on for generation after generation.

So to have the “Déploration” on the program, that road from Ockeghem to Josquin to implied musical perdition, was a nice reminder that, if you read even a little history, you see that these sorts of bumpy transitions are nothing new. Music in Common Time is, among other things, a border stone marking one of those most porous yet most impassible of barriers: a proximate, parapatric stylistic divide.

* * *

A Far Cry, seven seasons old, has, since 2010, been the in residence at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (where I heard this program on May 11). They are a conductorless gang of energetic fashion. (Their standard-repertoire contribution to the program, Mahler’s string-orchestra arrangement of Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden” Quartet (D. 810), was incessantly high-contrast and bracing.) Roomful of Teeth charts a line between musical polish and enthusiasm. Their singing in the Josquin, for instance, channeled the precision of an early music outfit but eschewed the homogeneity: individual voices could still be heard amidst the collective. Both groups are cut from similar cloth: younger-skewing ensembles proficient enough to slip into the churn of the classical-music performance business, and idiosyncratic enough to create the sense that they’re reprogramming the machine. An additional layer of professional and personal connections between the two groups (which Shaw hinted at in a breezy program note) made for a natural collaboration; Shaw’s new piece—somewhat mind-bendingly, her first formal commission—provided the occasion.

Music in Common Time is not quite a concerto, although the eight voices tend to move more as a unified group than the string orchestra, which is frequently divided into distinct factions. An opening stretch—a staggered, rising, arpeggiated triad (D major, picking up where Partita left off)—shifts into the sturdiest of diatonic progressions, then gives way to a vocal break, one of two sections with text: “Over the roads,” the voices sing, in a tongue-twisting interlude of traveling music. (That dialectic, one ensemble gently interrupting the other, happens throughout.) After a bit of folk-tinged, almost Holst-like atmosphere, the opening section returns, only to be undercut by thickets of snap-pizzicato, becoming a conventionally plucked accompaniment, over which the voices embark on a short study in portamento, sliding up and down into pure harmonies.

The center of the piece was engrossing, a negotiation between a perpetually rising sequence of secondary dominants in the strings and faster, descending parallel chords in the voices, occasionally meeting up for chance cadences. It was chased with a brief dose of ringing-partial throat-singing—one of the piece’s few congruences with Partita’s more exuberant kitchen sink of vocal techniques. That led to the final section: first the voices introduced another bit of sentimentally elusive text (“years ago, I forget; years to come, just let them”) set as a sweetly unsteady shape-note sing; then a tranquil standoff of a coda, half the strings staying put while the other half, along with the voices, moved to a different key center.

The overall effect is that of a linked chain, a point-to-point sojourn. Arrivals are based less on contrapuntal resolution and more on the satisfying effect of a particular sonority. (The sound of a widely spaced triad—roots, thirds, and fifths saturating the overtone spectrum—is a recurring component; it also featured in Shaw’s Josquin arrangement, suboctaves from the double basses trundling in to give crucial harmonies a boost of widescreen warmth.)

But what’s most interesting about Music in Common Time is its relationship to style. Current usage of the term “post-minimalist” can be a little squishy, but in a way that goes beyond historical chronology (and to a more immediately apparent extent than Partita), Music in Common Time is truly post-minimalist, at least in the lower-case sense: the structure and gist are not minimalist, but almost all of its building blocks are minimalist signifiers, tropes and gestures that evolved along with minimalist practice. The triad as object; overlapping consonance as a stretched canvas; the chord-to-chord movement of basic progressions turned into scene and act breaks; variation via altered phrase length rather than elaborated melody—all of these figure into Shaw’s rhetoric, but in a way far removed from minimalism’s deliberate, patient process.

The tropes become objects of recognition at least as much as objects of exploration; the garnishes—the Bartók pizzicato, the more exotic vocal excursions, the polytonality—play off of expectations of what we might be accustomed to hearing those other ideas do in a minimalist context. In other words, Shaw is most definitely not observing the relation of modes exactly, at least by the lights of her elders. Which is as it should be. Music always does this, always has done this, always will do this. Music in Common Time is only unusual in the genial straightforwardness with which it repurposes inherited goods.

It reminded me of my favorite piece of curmudgeonly compositional grumbling, coming a century after Heinrich Glarean, when the Baroque era was just getting traction, but was far enough along for Samuel Scheidt to complain about where things were headed:

I am astonished at the foolish music written in these times…. It certainly must be a remarkably elevated art when a pile of consonances are thrown together any which way.

This is both supremely sarcastic and basically true. It is a remarkably elevated art that is so incapable of settling down, constantly inspiring its practitioners to use the output of one set of rules as the input for a completely different set of rules. Musical style is a moving target. It certainly must be.

Matthew Guerrieri

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