Category: Headlines

Enthusiastic, Shy, Quirky and Brilliant: Remembering John Eaton (1935-2015)

Posted on December 31, 2015 by - Headlines, Memorials

[Ed. Note: There have been numerous tributes to composer John Eaton in the weeks since his sudden death following a fall on December 2, 2015. Whether through his seminal explorations of microtonality, his pioneering use of early keyboard synthesizers, or his later development of pocket operas, Eaton touched the lives of many musicians and listeners. Melinda Wagner’s account of him, which goes back to when he was a high school student and an aspiring jazz pianist, offers yet another perspective on this fascinating American maverick.-FJO]

Eaton, Melinda Wagner and her mother sitting at a table in a restaurant.

John Eaton with Melinda Wagner’s mother Bettejo Goodall Wagner, and Eaton’s wife Nelda Nelson-Eaton in Chicago in 1993.

Along with countless others, I was deeply saddened to learn of the death of John Eaton, earlier this month. Widely admired as an innovative, singular and uncompromising artist, Johnʼs contribution to the world of music, in particular to that of the opera repertoire, is beyond compare. While I never got the chance to know John well, I nonetheless knew him to be a much beloved, dear man. Indeed, John was an abiding presence in my familyʼs lore for as long as I can remember, a source of great pride and warm memories.

When my mother was just a few years out of college, she took a position teaching music at East Stroudsburg High School in Pennsylvania. John Eaton, then 16 or so, was one of her first students. My mother was already a gifted musician and teacher. A fine pianist, she had appeared on her own radio show at the age of 11, playing the piano (and tap dancing!) for the Williamsport radio audience. Growing up, she was a bit of an anomaly in her tiny hometown, Liberty, Pennsylvania (pop. 200), a small farming community nestled in the Allegheny Mountains. In spite of her own gifts, and a fine music education (Mansfield Teacherʼs College), nothing–absolutely nothing–prepared her for John Eaton! Prodigiously talented, an accomplished pianist, John was also, in her telling, bursting with ideas. He was fun, enthusiastic, shy, quirky–and brilliant.

John was one of those kids who likes to hang out in the music room. He often brought his projects to show my mother, including original compositions and jazz arrangements. She remembered “lots and lots” of notes. As for Johnʼs original, “serious” works, well, she had never seen such complicated ideas coming from anyone. Even his arrangement of her favorite standard tune, “Embraceable You,” while beautiful, was florid and densely contrapuntal, perhaps a bit intimidating. John was already onto something.

Johnʼs parents welcomed my mother into their home. She was very young, single, and living (I believe) in a boarding house. It goes without saying that she was grateful for company and home-cooked meals. Johnʼs father, Harold Eaton, was an esteemed Methodist pastor in East Stroudsburg at the time. (He retired in 1975.) She was enormously fond of him and his wife, and they all stayed in touch for many years.

When John was accepted to Princeton University, my mother was so impressed and proud! No one from Liberty, Pennsylvania, had ever met an Ivy-bound person! She kept a clipping from the local newspaper article announcing his scholarship; I remember seeing it pasted into our family album until, eventually, it yellowed and crumbled into dust.

The cover of the LP Johnny Eaton and his Princetonians which features five photos of Eaton playing the piano

While still an undergraduate at Princeton, John and his jazz quartet (piano, flute, vibraphone, bass and drums) made an acetate disc that somehow reached the desk of a CBS executive. The disc was later forwarded to Columbia Records, and against all odds, Johnny Eaton and his Princetonians appeared on a major label, although no one had yet heard of any of them. Twenty years later, I took my motherʼs copy with me to college. There, Johnʼs whimsical, impressionistic arrangement of “My Funny Valentine” became one of my favorites. I found his original tunes to be full of personality, technical rigor, and humor. Of his own “Flute Cake,” John wrote, “It has a bit of the rococo spirit–when war was an upper-class sport, when Rousseau enticed countesses to milk cows (with gloves on), and when Figaro and Suzanne poked fun at a decadent (but since much missed) aristocracy. All of which shows that no verbal absolutes are valid in any music–jazz can be flighty as well as earthy.” As a novice student of Music Theory, I was most intrigued by “Babbittry,” Johnʼs tribute to his teacher, Milton Babbitt. Apparently, inspiration for this piece came to him through the strains of Schoenbergʼs Fourth String Quartet.

In spite of his history with my mother, I did not actually meet John Eaton until 1993. I had just seen a performance of his charming chamber opera, Peer Gynt in Manhattan. And there he was, afterwards, accepting handshakes and congratulations–pleased, delighted, eyes twinkling. When I finally reached him through the crowd and mentioned my motherʼs name, I received the most wonderful bear hug. And how pleased he was to learn that I had become a composer!

I regret very deeply that I missed the chance to study with him (John replaced Ralph Shapey at the University of Chicago soon after I left), and I wish we had had the chance to “talk shop.” I am immeasurably grateful, though, not only for John Eatonʼs music, but also for the enduring, cherished friendship this beloved, dear man shared with my mom.

Wagner 1955 handwritten on the back cover of the Eaton and his Princetonians LP

Remembering Composer and MTC Founder John Duffy (1926-2015)

Posted on December 22, 2015 by - Headlines, Ledes, Memorials

John Duffy

John Duffy
Photo by Glen McClure

American composer and beloved new music advocate John Duffy, who founded Meet The Composer in 1974, died in Virginia this morning after a long illness. He was 89.

In 2011, Meet The Composer and the American Music Center merged to form New Music USA. Ed Harsh, current president and CEO, reflects on Duffy’s profound impact on the field in the post below. Many in our community will feel this loss deeply. We encourage you to share your memories of John in the comments section.

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With John Duffy, everything was possible. He radiated an optimism as forthright and clear as it was free of guile and self-importance. Though the limits of observable reality might be challenged, audacity never distracted from core purpose. His optimism happily went about its business. It lived solidly on terra firma. It got things done.

In the immediate aftermath of a person’s death, we can feel an urge to sum up their impact and role and even character. We want to come to some kind of conclusion about what their life may have “meant,” perhaps as a benchmark against which to take some measure of our own. I certainly don’t propose to do that here. It’s a shaky notion in any case to impose a stable unity onto a life’s complex assemblage of experiences and relationships, joys and sorrows, narrative through-lines and irrational disconnects over time. Summing up any life is foolhardy—especially one as rich as John’s was.

My aim is something more modest and personal, though it’s certainly still daunting. I want to reflect on a few of the characteristics I treasured in John that I feel are his legacy to New Music USA, the second incarnation of his visionary creation Meet The Composer. Mine is just one perspective. I hope others will share in the comment section below their own personal perspectives and stories. John meant so many things to so many people. The more we share, the more we’ll be able to appreciate him.

A gathering of voices would be entirely appropriate to John’s devotion to the American ideals of democracy and pluralism. He was known to list the quality of “tolerance” at the top of his list of values he appreciated most. The example of his own life suggests something broader, more positive and more proactive than mere tolerance. He was omnivorously curious about and respectful of all music. Even if a given artist’s work might not have been to his taste, he would be interested to know more about it, to understand a bit better what drove its creation. What’s more, he wanted others to be interested, too.

This omnivorous openness was paired with a healthy disregard for conventional hierarchies. He didn’t recognize them as valid, so he ignored them. For John, the idea that a “classical” symphonic work was, by nature, automatically worthy of higher status than the work of, say, Ornette Coleman or Burt Bacharach—to use two of his favorite examples—was simply bunk. He was quick to fight the ingrained privilege and prejudice that often hide behind those hierarchies. The energy and self-assuredness he brought to such spirited struggles embodied for me a muscular, practical, American blue-collar view of the value inherent in solidly workmanlike effort, no matter its form.

The exploding variety of creativity we’re blessed with in 2015, which blows through genre categories like so much thin air, may obscure for us now the uncommon character of his views. It’s worth pausing for a moment to make sure that we don’t take John’s openness for granted. Because we shouldn’t. His views were decades ahead of their time and distinctly radical when Meet The Composer was founded in the 1970s.

We should likewise not underestimate the quality of courage he showed in standing up for his own convictions. The name of his organizational creation is its own example. He frequently told the story of thinking deeply about the name for his then-new program. He scribbled one possible name after another on a big yellow legal pad. Under the influence of the direct, human immediacy of Walt Whitman’s poetry, he wrote down “Meet The Composer.” When he finally chose that name—against the advice of many, let it be noted—he was met with a lot of resistance. “The higher ups” at the New York State Council on the Arts hated it, writing letters to him explaining that it wasn’t classy enough. He said he read the letters and just put them away in a drawer, figuring that people would come around to his view sooner or later. Which they did.

John embodied faith, broadly defined; faith in himself and in his fellow artists. This is the fuel that powered his will. And what a will it was, able to conjure abstract vision into very real being. For years in the late 1970s and early 1980s he enthusiastically regaled anyone who would listen with his idea for putting composers in residence with orchestras around the country. We can only imagine how many dozens (hundreds?) of indulgent smiles or blank stares he had to suffer. What an improbable idea it was for a little nonprofit with a tiny budget…. By 1992—ten years, several million dollars, and one transformed orchestral new music world later—it wasn’t improbable anymore. It was obvious.

That was a big victory, but it wasn’t the only one. There was also the MTC commissioning program, the composer-choreographer program, the New Residencies program. So many new realities conjured, to the benefit of so many. Yes, that’s the thing: to the benefit of so many. No one I’ve met more exemplified generosity of spirit than John. He used the term “angelic spark” relating to people who helped others in the spirit of pure common service. The term fits him so well.

I feel sure that in John’s case the spark was inherent and inborn. Life experience just as surely brought it brightly to the fore. John cited a key moment during his naval service in the Pacific during World War II. As he related the story, his ship was attacked and a number of shipmates were killed. He and another sailor stood guard over the bodies through the night. In the morning, with a few Old Testament words from the ship’s captain, the bodies were slid into the sea. That stark demonstration of life’s fragility seems to have inspired in John a permanent commitment to make a difference, to live a life of value and of service.

Future years would determine the focal point of that service: composers. You could talk to John for only a few minutes before feeling the energy, the power, the almost talismanic specialness that he conferred on composers. In truth, John felt this way about all artists, but when he spoke of composers the magic was palpably electric. The more society could come to put composers to work, the more society would benefit. Composers were the greatest national resource imaginable.

And composers deserved to be paid like the professionals they are. John’s experience as a composer in a broad range of marketplaces gave him a tactile understanding of creators’ economic value. He was an Emmy-winning composer for TV with deep experience in music for the theater as well as the concert hall. He understood the worthiness of matching appropriate money to appropriate work, and his perspective generated the ethos of MTC, which raised the consciousness of subsequent generations.

Bang on a Can Benefit Concert and Party Honoring John Duffy

Bang on a Can Benefit Concert and Party Honoring John Duffy, September 13, 1998. Left to right, seated: Michael Gordon, Julia Wolfe, John Duffy; standing: Cecil Taylor, Billy Taylor, David Lang, Steve Reich, and Alvin Singleton.
Photo by Peter Serling

To artists given less than their due attention and appreciation by their culture, John’s valuation of composers, both figurative and very literal, was manna for the starving. Like an oasis, John’s championing leadership brought new life and new energy to a community of composers who felt like creative travelers crossing a vast desert. His vision inspired high hopes for what might be built, in fact built together, on the other side. My vaguely Moses-like imagery here is intentional. On a less cosmic scale, John’s positive vision commanded deep reverence and even deeper human attachments. The theologian Forrest Church wrote that although agnostic on the subject of life after death, Church was completely convinced on the subject of love after death. He believed the most profound measure of the wealth of our lives to be the love we leave behind when we die. By this measure, John was a wealthy man indeed.

So IS everything possible? No. Not really. If it were, John would still be with us, having fought back like a champ once again, overcoming the will of the misguided cells in his body. There are certain rules we can’t change. One is that people die. But John’s life leaves a resilient legacy, especially precious at moments when our courage and faith are tested. John reminds us that what’s possible goes way beyond the horizon we see, and maybe even as far as we dare to dream.

John Duffy was featured by NewMusicBox in October 2003. Read the full hour-long conversation John Duffy: The Composer as Statesman.

A Week in Havana

Posted on December 16, 2015 by - Field Reports, Headlines

A group of old American cars driving along a major thoroughfare with some old, monumental buildings in the background.

Along Havana’s Parque Central in 2015. (Photo by Amadeus Regucera.)

When we finally exited the José Martí International Airport shortly before noon, there were literally hundreds of Cubans lining the path we followed that angled through them, connecting the airport exit to the parking lot. It was as if we were rock stars—this first-time group of composers, musicians, and their supporters arriving from the United States to take part in the 28th annual Festival de Música Contemporánea de la Habana. Only the masses weren’t there for us—planes arrive in Cuba when they get there, and those awaiting loved ones crowd around the exit, likely for hours on end. During the hour or so we waited for our bus into Havana (Cuba runs on perpetual delays) I witnessed several of the most passionate and tearful reunions of my life, there at the airport exit and out in the parking lot, which was full of tailgaters. None were surprised by the waits they endured—they had counted on them, clearly—and they made the most of them.

The Festival de Música Contemporánea de la Habana took place this November, and for the first time in its history a delegation of musicians and composers from the United States was invited to participate. The American Composers Forum and Third Sound selected the composers, which included myself, Kati Agócs, Ingrid Arauco, Kai-Young Chan, Cindy Cox, Michael Harrison, Jennifer Higdon, Christopher Jones, Amadeus Regucera, and Spencer Topel. Third Sound musicians—Patrick Castillo (Third Sound’s managing director), Romie de Guise-Langlois, Karen Kim, Sooyun Kim, Michael Nicolas, and Orion Weiss—came to perform, and ACF also assembled a 30-member strong group of U.S. observers/patrons, which included former and current ACF board members, UC Berkeley administrators and faculty, new music bloggers, a representative of the Mellon Foundation, NPR’s Anastasia Tsioulcas, and a two-man documentary crew. It was a huge endeavor.

Patrick Castillo, Jeremy Gill, Imogene Tondre (our guide), Christopher Jones, Cindy Cox, Michael Harrison, Spencer Topel, Ingrid Arauco, Amadeus Regucera, Jennifer Higdon, Kai-Young Chan, Romie de Guise-Langlois (clarinet), and Kati Agocs standing on a streetcorner in Havana, Cuba

The first-ever contingent of U.S. composers on the ground in Havana. Pictured are (left to right): Patrick Castillo, Jeremy Gill, Imogene Tondre (our guide), Christopher Jones, Cindy Cox, Michael Harrison, Spencer Topel, Ingrid Arauco, Amadeus Regucera, Jennifer Higdon, Kai-Young Chan, Romie de Guise-Langlois (clarinet), Kati Agocs. (Photo by Karen Kim.)

The composers and musicians stayed in casas particulares, rented rooms in residents’ flats (think Airbnb) which were mostly in the same seven-story condo in Vedado, a neighborhood that bordered Centro Habana where many of the festival concerts took place. Our casas were right across the street from the grand Hotel Nacional de Cuba, but the neighborhood itself was quite residential—an ideal vantage point for getting to know the people and the city. (Composer Amadeus Regucera and I formed a quick bond with the madre of our casa—a chain-smoking, middle-aged dear to whom we were both mi amor.) We were responsible for getting ourselves around town, by foot or by taxi—available everywhere, unregulated but safe and very convenient.

This was my first visit to Cuba (none of us, except Patrick, had been there before), and I prepared for the trip with daily Spanish practice for about three months prior. It helped immensely—few locals spoke much English, and the shop owners, taxi drivers, craftspeople, and artists—eager to sell their wares—were more than willing to engage my extremely rudimentary Spanish. I also read two (happily) complementary books about Cuban music: Alejo Carpentier’s Music in Cuba, written in the early 1940s, and Ned Sublette’s Cuba and Its Music from 2004. Carpentier trained as a musician and composer but is one of the best-known Cuban novelists; his book is mostly concerned with the history of Cuban art music as developed from Western models during the 16th century through the 1930s. Sublette’s interests lay with popular music, and he tries a bit too hard to provide the political and social context for the music that he clearly loves. Though I found his book practically unreadable—it seemed supersaturated with pointless facts and anecdotes—I appreciated it much more after spending a week in Cuba: its haphazard arrangement mirrors the country as I experienced it.

Cuba is a country of contradictions, an island that feels continental. (It is roughly the same size, in land and population, as Pennsylvania.) And Havana, where we spent the majority of our time, is a magnificent, European conception that is literally crumbling underfoot, a tropical paradise choking on the acrid smoke spewing from its vintage 1950s American cars. A walk of a few blocks in Centro Habana or Habana Vieja can take you through an astoundingly ornate Spanish-style courtyard (well-maintained, though its fountain is usually dry), past a string of partially collapsed, still inhabited homes, to the doors of an air-conditioned and tourist-themed bar. On the day of our concert, I walked the Malecón (the highway that runs along the northern edge of Havana, the splashing of the Atlantic on the rocks below often reaching the street itself) for about an hour, from my casa in Vedado to the Basilica Menor de San Francisco de Asis. Interspersed among the typical buildings, grandly executed but literally dissolving in the sea air, were sparkling new modern renovations—hotels and cafes filled with tourists tapping away on their laptops—at least three of them, that day, policed by machine-gun-wielding, uniformed guards.

Havana was bewildering, but certainly not without its charms: one striking and wonderfully refreshing aspect of life in Havana is its racial integration. At every level of society I saw as many dark-skinned authority figures (police, teachers, leaders of dance troupes) as light-skinned. It is true that the batá and rumba musicians we saw were more likely black and mulatto, and that the young women that constituted the Camerata Romeu and performed Western-derived art music were mostly white and mestizo, but this felt like a natural expression of their various heritages. The audiences for both were mixed, and the art forms that drew more equally on a mixing of these heritages, as with the Danza Contemporánea de Cuba, were comparably mixed in terms of their personnel. Mixed-race groups of friends and couples—young and old—were the norm in restaurants and on the streets. The racial tension and segregation that persist in the United States, even in our most integrated cities, was as far as I could tell totally absent in Havana, despite our shared history of slavery (which endured a generation longer in Cuba than in the States) and post-slavery discrimination.

The Festival de la Habana included daily colloquia (mornings) and usually two concerts per day (at 4:00 and 6:00 p.m.). Events were spread throughout the city, making it tough to get from one concert to the next on time. Most of the concerts featured Cuban musicians and were heavily populated with music by Cuban composers, but there were visiting performers from Argentina, Canada, Denmark, Korea, Italy, Spain, and the United States performing music by composers from their home countries as well as from Belgium, Brazil, Colombia, the Czech Republic, France, Greece, Hong Kong, Hungary, Japan, Poland, Taiwan, Turkey, and Venezuela. Juggling events organized by ACF, which for the patrons included only two festival concerts—one of Cuban composers by Cuban musicians and Third Sound, and ours—and the festival itself was tricky, as most of us wanted to see and experience as much of Havana as possible. Furthermore, our arriving after the festival began and leaving before it ended (unexpectedly—more on that below) precluded our attending the grandest concerts—one by the Orquesta Sinfónico Nacional de Cuba before we arrived, and two featuring musicians from Korea and the most internationally diverse program after we had left.

The concerts I managed to attend revealed an extremely high level of musical proficiency on the parts of younger Cuban players, in particular. Nearly all of the young composers performed their own works, solo or in groups, and while the music tended to be somewhat old-fashioned (think slightly spicier Albéniz, with all the requisite virtuosity, lots of rhythmic ostinati, some polytonality, mixed in with the wholesome counterpoint of later Hindemith), the performances were often very fine, particularly when one considered the state of the instruments the players were relegated to. (For our concert, we used the finest piano in the country that had only a partially-functioning sostenuto pedal, and the local Camerata Romeu—a wonderful, all-female string orchestra that performs full concerts memorized—was one cellist short for a concert because her bridge broke and there was no replacement.) One can imagine the state of the pads on flutes, the age of the reeds on clarinets—but the musicians played with effortless grace, and it was abundantly clear to me that they had acquired their technique through their ears and not their eyes (unlike what has become depressingly common with young musicians in the States). Even less developed players in Cuba consistently created a clear musical line, and I rarely heard rhythmic awkwardness or, even more astonishing given the instruments, pitch problems. They were listening, and it was wonderful.

The Cuban composers that impressed me the most were Wilma Alba Cal and Juan Piñera. Piñera is one of Cuba’s senior composers and was well represented at the festival: his music featured interesting, clear ideas (more imaginative than his colleagues). I only heard one work by Alba Cal, but it was lovely, unaffected, beautifully paced and refreshingly simple without being simplistic. She looked relatively young, so we can hope to hear much more from her. (Third Sound will present works by Cal and Piñera at St. Bart’s in NYC on January 12, 2016, along with several of the U.S. composers’ works.) Of the international crowd I was most impressed by Claudio Ambrosini’s Prelude à l’apres-midi d’un fauve from 1994 for flute (doubling alto), violin, and piano. I couldn’t hear how it related to its titular companion (or imagine what his title suggested—isn’t Debussy’s faune already a fauve?) but it was one of the more interesting pieces that I heard, with a compelling narrative structure that surprised yet satisfied.

Overall, I was somewhat bemused by the music of the Cuban composers I heard. The anachronistic aura I perceived applied to most of the senior composers as well as the younger: it sounded as if the most recent music they had internalized was Milhaud’s (there was a penchant among the young for his crunchy but harmless bitonality, and among the young and old for his overt exoticism). One program on the festival listed a performance of Bartók’s Contrasts (written in 1938 at the behest of clarinet superstar Benny Goodman) as a Cuban premiere. If this is true, there must be many, many composers from the previous century as well as our own that Cuban composers have yet to hear.

Interestingly, I experienced a bit of a time warp with the popular music I heard in Cuba, as well. American pop was blessedly scarce during our trip, but when it did turn up, it was mostly from a generation or two prior (I went to sleep one night with “Material Girl” floating up to my fifth-floor casa from the streets below, and awoke the next morning to Stevie Wonder’s clarion call), and at least one jazz combo I heard was the spitting sonic image of the Spyro Gyra my father listened to in the late 1980s. (This latter was clearly aimed at tourists—the hosting bar’s cover charge was $10, a princely sum even considering the two mojitos it included). The most interesting popular music I heard in Cuba was by an Afro-Cuban band comprising a tres (a three-course guitar with the outer courses tuned in octaves, the inner in unisons), guitar, stand-up bass, congas, guiro, and maracas (which Alejo Carpentier claimed was the only pre-Columbian instrument still in use in Cuba). Fronted by two and sometimes three singers (who doubled on percussion), the group was young, dynamic and featured to my ears the most interesting mix of styles. They performed in a simple bar crammed with locals (two blocks from where we were staying) and didn’t sound “dated” in the slightest.

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It was a fascinating trip, and I can only imagine how complicated it must have been to organize. (Kudos to ACF and Patrick Castillo for that.) The only problems we encountered stemmed from the very real challenge of acquiring good and current information. Cuba is still very much a closed society: none of us had reliable internet access during the trip, and the few that had working cell phones had acquired them in advance in Canada. Normally, this was fine—we adopted an older social model, meeting at previously determined locations and times around the city—but not always: when Havana Air bumped seven of the ten composers to an earlier flight out of Cuba (without informing anyone), it took us the better part of the week to figure out if our tickets, which we only received at the airport in Miami, contained a printing or a scheduling error. Only the day before our eventual departure did we learn that we would, in fact, be leaving a day earlier than planned.

This was an inconvenience for us, but certainly nothing compared to what the Cuban people experience on a daily basis. Couple a regular lack of information with the economic hardship still rampant in the country (I was told that a doctor on average earns $40 per month, equivalent to the composers’ and musicians’ per diem granted by ACF), and a bleak picture emerges. State-sponsored professional musicians typically earn $20–30 per month, and are not permitted to take extra gigs despite the ample free time that their roughly 9 a.m.–2 p.m. average daily rehearsal routine allows. Not surprisingly, a black market economy flourishes in Havana, as do semi-legal workarounds: private restaurants, for example, can exist only if they are located in people’s homes; those who are able to do so buy up consecutive flats to make reasonably-sized spaces to accommodate larger parties. (We visited quite a few.)

An old green car in front of the ruined facade of a building. (It is clear that there is no longer a room and the glass windows are all missing.)

A typical sight in Havana. An old American car in front of a partially-collapsed building. (Photo by Amadeus Regucera.)

To those of us on this trip, and for the American-born guides that showed us around, Havana was a enchanting place, but it’s tempting to see only the good when one has access to the best restaurants and hotels and can earn two years of an average Cuban’s salary in a week by showing tourists the town. We were able to bring many gifts for the Cubans we met (Music Espresso in Boston donated a stack of manuscript books that I passed on to an elementary school music theory teacher, the mother of our guide’s Cuban boyfriend, and many others came similarly laden), but these only go so far. One hopes that however U.S.-Cuban relations develop, the quality of life for the Cuban people—friendly, welcoming, tremendously hard-working—is our and their government’s first priority.

After returning to Miami, en route to our hotel, three of us early-returning composers shared a cab. The driver noticed a box of mini Cohibas I was carrying and started talking: he had fled the island 24 years prior, escaping by raft on his fourth attempt over about a decade. Back then, goods beyond rations were only sold in U.S. dollars, and it was illegal for Cubans to carry U.S. currency. Women would sell sex to tourists and have their johns pay by shopping for them at restricted stores. It went without saying, but one of us asked if he was better off in the States. “100%” he said. “There was no freedom there. No life.” He has never been back.

Fernando and others stand around a well.

Fernando and his well. (Photo by Jeremy Gill.)

That was a generation ago, and one hopes that a potential future Cuba is instead revealed in the person of Fernando, the owner and proprietor of a small, organic farm we visited in Artemisa (our only trip outside of Havana). After earning a Ph.D. in agricultural science (which he said prepared him “theoretically” for the work he now does “practically”), he began touring the world, advocating for small, sustainable farms in developing countries, while maintaining his own farm, staffed by six employees that he pays twice the average national salary. The thatched roof of the stone barn he built by hand sports solar panels, and the methane that he harvests from his cows’ dung is piped into the home he and his wife restored, providing cooking gas. He sells to Havana restaurants, and will soon institute a farm box program for local residents. Several years in, he is earning a profit and is slowly, steadily expanding. He showed us the well that he and his first two employees dug by hand (14 meters down), and called it a “metaphor” for how hard they were willing to work for the betterment of their beautiful and confounding country.

Rows of jars with seeds of various vegetables, all labelled.

Starters at Fernandoʼs farm. (Photo by Jeremy Gill.)

About Those 2016 Grammy Nominations

Posted on December 7, 2015 by - Headlines, Ledes

The official social profile image for the Grammy Awards, a cartoon of an old horn gramophone.

The 58th annual Grammy Award nominations were announced by The National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences this morning. The Grammy ceremony will take place once again at L.A.’s Staples Center on Feb. 15, 2016, and will be broadcast on CBS. A complete list of nominations in all 83 award categories is available on the Recording Academy’s website.

For the next few months media pundits will probably debate whether the latest from Taylor Swift, Kendrick Lamar, or The Weeknd will get the nod as 2016 Album of the Year, but the choice for Best Contemporary Classical Composition might ultimately be more interesting. It certainly seems even more competitive. Odds might favor Julia Wolfe’s Anthracite Fields (just released by Cantaloupe Music in September in a performance featuring the Bang on a Can All-Stars joined by The Choir Of Trinity Wall Street conducted by Julian Wachner) since it was already awarded the 2015 Pulitzer Prize in Music back in April and the 2015 Best CCC Grammy went to John Luther Adams’s Become Ocean, a work beloved by Taylor Swift, which was awarded the Pulitzer last year. However, it might be too soon to rule out Andrew Norman’s Play since it has been hailed by several influential music critics as possibly the most important 21st-century orchestral work. Also, the Grammy adjudicators love anniversaries and it is the 20th anniversary for the folks performing Play on the recording, Gil Rose’s Boston Modern Orchestra Project, who have also recently been named Ensemble of the Year by Musical America.

Then again, the only thing that gets the Grammy folks to pay attention more than a big number anniversary is memorializing someone. Another one of the 2016 nominees, Prayers and Remembrances by Stephen Paulus, fits that category on multiple levels. Friends of people who were killed on the September 11, 2001 United and American Airline flights commissioned it for a performance on the 10th anniversary. And the recording the work is included on, an all-Paulus choral disc titled Far in the Heavens, was the final disc of Paulus’s music recorded under his supervision since shortly after the recording sessions Paulus suffered a stroke from which he never recovered and died in October 2014. However, Grammys sometimes beget other Grammys. The only nominee who has previously won is Joan Tower—in 2008, for Made in America recorded by Naxos. This year Tower is up for the honor once again for her 2010 composition Stroke, also on Naxos. So the only longshot this year is The Importance of Being Earnest, a 2010 Oscar Wilde-inspired opera by Irish composer Gerald Barry released by the British label NMC Recordings, which was surprisingly overlooked for Best Opera recording (all nominated operas are by long dead composers) even though the star of Earnest is the phenomenal Barbara Hannigan and the recording is conducted by Thomas Adès. So if Barry’s opera were to actually win, it would vindicate the Grammy’s sin of omission in the other award category.

While recordings of operas by contemporary composers appear to have been locked out of the Best Opera nominations, nominations in other classical categories include more recent fare. Contemporary music dominates the repertoire of discs nominated for Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance. Aside from discs devoted to Brahms and Shostakovich, everything else is cutting-edge new. All nine of the works featured on Render, the vocal ensemble Roomful of Teeth’s latest New Amsterdam disc, are world-premiere recordings (including Missy Mazzoli’s Vesper Sparrow, which is among the works chosen to be performed at the 2016 ISCM World Music Days). Four of the five pieces on Filament, a Cedille disc by the sextet eighth blackbird, are also world premieres; the only “old” piece is Philip Glass’s 1968 composition Two Pages, although 8bb’s arrangement for this work whose instrumentation is left up to the performers is the first for this specific instrumental combination. The remaining nominee is Tom Flaherty’s Airdancing, a work scored for toy piano, piano, and electronics performed by Nadia Shpachenko and Genevieve Feiwen Lee on Shpachenko’s album Woman at the New Piano (on Reference Recordings). So all bets are off on who the winner will be. In the Best Choral Performance category, the aforementioned all-Stephen Paulus recording, Far in the Heavens (performed by True Concord Voices and Orchestra under the direction of Eric Holtan), seems a favorite, but in addition to competition from recordings devoted to Monteverdi, Beethoven, and Rachmaninoff, another nominee, Pablo Neruda: The Poet Sings, is an all-American choral disc performed by Conspirare under the direction of Craig Hella Johnson featuring works by Donald Grantham, Shawn Kirchner, and Cary Ratcliff.

Woman at the New Piano has also been nominated for Best Classical Compendium, as has Ask Your Mama, a Langston Hughes-inspired, polystylistic multi-media gesamkunstwerk composed by Laura Karpman (Avie Records) and another album devoted to the music of Stephen Paulus—a Naxos disc containing Veil of Tears for strings and two of his concertos, the Grand Concerto for organ and orchestra and Three Places of Enlightenment for string quartet and orchestra. The only recording of music by a living composer to be nominated for Best Classical Instrumental Solo is Ursula Oppens’s new Cedille recording of Frederick Rzewski’s The People United Will Never Be Defeated, but considering how many recordings of that piece have now been made (including a previous one by Oppens, which was its first), it is tempting to think of it as standard repertoire as well. Ask Your Mama is also up for Best Engineered Album and its engineer, Judith Sherman (who also was behind the console for the Rzewski disc) is in the running for Producer of the Year, Classical facing off against Blanton Alspaugh, Marina A. Ledin and Victor Ledin, ECM’s Manfred Eicher, and Dan Merceruio of Sono Luminus. The New Zealand Symphony Orchestra’s recording of Symphony ‘Humen 1839’, a joint composition by husband and wife Zhou Long and Chen Yi, is up for Best Orchestral Performance, as is an all-American disc (on Pentatone) performed by the Oregon Symphony conducted by Carlos Kalmar entitled Spirit of the American Range which includes works by George Antheil, Aaron Copland, and Walter Piston. Another orchestral disc, a Naxos all-Christopher Rouse album performed by the Albany Symphony conducted by David Alan Miller, has strangely been nominated for Best Classical Solo Vocal Album. While the disc contains Kabir Padavali, one of Rouse’s few vocal compositions and a total winner, and soprano Talise Trevigne’s performance of it is stunning, it is only one of two works on the album; the other work—the piano concerto Seeing which features pianist Orion Weiss—is completely non-vocal.

Scores by Alexandre Desplat (The Imitation Game), Justin Hurwitz (Whiplash), Jóhann Jóhannsson (The Theory of Everything), and Antonio Sanchez (Birdman), and Hans Zimmer (Interstellar) are the finalists for Best Score Soundtrack for Visual Media whereas brand new works will face off against two 1951 scores that have been revived this past year for Best Musical Theater Album. Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton, Jeanine Tesori’s Fun Home and Something Rotten! by Karey Kirkpatrick and Wayne Kirkpatrick will be challenged by Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The King and I and a stage adaptation of the George Gershwin-songed motion picture An American in Paris.

In the various jazz categories, Joey Alexander, Christian McBride, Donny McCaslin, Joshua Redman, and John Scofield have all been nominated for Best Improvised Jazz Solo and albums by Alexander and Scofield will compete against discs by Terence Blanchard, Robert Glasper, and Jimmy Greene for Best Jazz Instrumental Album. Nominees in this category are exclusively for smaller combos since the Grammys offer another award, Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album, for bigger groups; the 2016 contenders for that accolade are the Gil Evans Project, Marshall Gilkes and WDR Big Band, Arturo O’Farrill and The Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra, Patrick Williams, and the Maria Schneider Orchestra. Maria Schneider, of course, was the recipient of the Best Contemporary Classical Composition Award for her Winter Morning Walks in 2014; 21st-century music reality, unlike the Grammy Awards, is not neatly compartmentalized into distinguishable musical genres.

Perhaps the strangest of all Grammy categories is Best Instrumental Composition which perversely excludes works nominated for Best Contemporary Classical Composition from consideration—although one of the 2016 nominees, David Balakrishnan’s Confetti Man, is the title track from the latest album of his group, the Turtle Island Quartet, released on the “classical” label Azica Records. Among the others are Arturo O’Farrill’s Afro Latin Jazz Suite and Marshall Gilkes’s Vesper from their respective Best Large Jazz Ensemble-nominated albums Cuba: The Conversation Continues (on Motema Music) and Köln (on Alternative Side Records) and two other big band jazz scores from albums that were not among the Best Large Jazz Ensemble finalists—Bob Mintzer’s Civil War written for the Bob Mintzer Big Band and Rich DeRosa’s Neil written for the University Of North Texas One O’Clock Lab Band.

It might take Taylor Swift recording an album with John Luther Adams or (an even greater probability) Caroline Shaw recording with Kanye West for the folks in charge of the Grammy Awards to catch up with the breadth of music that people are now listening to and how they are listening to it. Once that happens, hopefully the various categories in which musical achievement are acknowledged by the Recording Academy won’t feel quite as straitjacketed.

He Knew Everything and Everyone–Remembering David Stock (1939-2015)

Posted on December 4, 2015 by - Headlines, Memorials

David Stock wearing suspenders and smiling as he holds a plate with a couple of cupcakes.

David Stock at Carnegie Mellon in 2014. (This and other photos featured herein courtesy either Lindsey Goodman or the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble.)

[Ed. Note: It has been a month since composer/conductor David Stock died at the age of 76 following a brief illness brought on by a rare blood disorder. Born and based for the majority of his life in Pittsburgh, where he established the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble in 1976, Stock was arguably the Steel City’s greatest advocate for contemporary music. But his sphere of influence spanned across the United States and reached internationally as well. In the days following his death, the outpouring of reminiscences on social media about Stock and his personal impact on people was truly overwhelming.

Among those who Stock touched deeply were Randall Woolf and Kathleen Supové. Woolf, a freelance composer, arranger, and composition teacher living in Brooklyn, composed a piano concerto Skin Deep that was premiered by Stock and PNME and he also served as Stock’s copyist for many years. Kathleen Supové, a pianist who performs, premieres, records, and champions new music, had served as a soloist under Stock’s direction both with PNME and the Duquesne Symphony Orchestra. Woolf and Supové also happen to be a married couple, which also seemed an apt way to honor David Stock for whom family was a paramount concern—his own family as well as the entire family that is the new music community.–FJO]

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Randall Woolf: When you look up the word “avuncular” in the dictionary, there is a picture of David Stock. Mustachioed and thin, except for a nearly spherical abdomen, he always reminded me of some of my own uncles—a gang of roofing contractors, usually found in or near a Jewish deli. Always informal, often making a deal of one kind or another, David was distinctly non-academic. You also might say he was quite interested in food. I always remember him starting a rehearsal by raising his baton and stopping his first upbeat to inquire, “Wait….where are we going to eat after the concert?” He was charming, relaxed, and utterly without pretense.

Randall Woolf wearing a hat

Randall Woolf

But if you were to peer inside the head of this uncle, you would see a vast network, encompassing the entire globe and connected to musicians of all stripes, from China to Venezuela to Iran. David was one of the most knowledgeable musicians I have ever known, truly a mind without borders or prejudice, hungry for every new style, name, and concept in the world of music. The group he founded, the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble, was his library and laboratory. So many prominent names in American new music got their first attention from David and his group. As long as it was musical and new, David was into it. And not just the music—David was friend to the person who wrote it, as well. The list of people he mentored, including Kathy and me, really does seem endless. Not just composers, but performers as well, and spouses and relatives. As soon as he got to know you, he began to meditate on how his network could be used to help you, to make connections, to further your creativity, to further the cause of new music, and even to help you make a living. For as brilliant and accomplished as he was, he was a staunch anti-snob and always remembered how it felt to be starting out, needing gigs and support—be it emotional, musical, or financial.

For many years, I worked for David as his copyist. The copyist’s view of music is a strange one; you get more involved in the nuts and bolts of the piece than the musical message and develop a serious case of “cannot see the forest for the trees.” David’s music was usually constructed of recurring blocks and textures, which got longer and shorter when repeated, and a handful of accompaniments. It was kind of plain looking on the page. But when I would listen to a piece I had just copied, I was moved and touched so deeply; his music was so alive and human, so emotionally convincing and gripping, that it was at times hard to believe it was the same music I had seen in the score. It reminds me of how his brilliance and erudition were belied by his casual, folksy appearance and manner. He was all of a piece—a caring, giving, brilliant, and musical man.

A more formal photo of David Stock seating at the piano with a manuscript of one of his many musical compositions.

A more formal photo of David Stock seating at the piano with a manuscript of one of his many musical compositions.

Kathleen Supové: I’m tempted to start and end my tribute to David Stock by saying “what Randy said”! I couldn’t have put it better myself, but maybe I can amplify it in some personal ways.

I first met David by chance in the very early ’80s at a Musica Viva concert in Boston. He was immediately so warm and friendly and was concerned about some professional service I’d used or something—how it was going, were they helpful, that kind of thing. I don’t remember much about the issue at hand, but I did remember David!

A few years later, Randy went off to a festival that David held with the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble. When I heard the details, I knew right away that if aliens coming in from Mars wanted to know about new music in the United States, they should land at this festival. I learned a lot myself.

Kathleen Supove wearing a bright green dress.

Kathleen Supové

When I finally got to know him better (which was not hard to do, even if you were shy), I realized he was a person who not only knew everything, he knew everyone. I would even play a game with him where I would try to think of someone in our field whom he didn’t know! Just when I thought I was getting the best of him, I’d find out he had conducted their first East Coast performance or introduced them to their spouse or some such thing.

He hired me to play concertos with PNME and also the Duquesne Symphony Orchestra (he was no slouch as a conductor either)—most notably Skin Deep, which he commissioned from Randy. Yes, indeed, he was the first to think of a concerto for me, by Randy! We performed it several times, as well as Michael Daugherty’s Le Tombeau de Liberace on a couple of occasions. One year while doing our taxes, we noticed that at least 1/3 of our income came from something related to David Stock. We joked that he could have claimed us as dependents! Seriously, though, David was the closest thing to a mentor that either of us ever had.

The last time I saw him was September 11, 2011. We both performed on a Peace Concert/10th Anniversary 9-11 remembrance sponsored by Stephen Burns and Fulcrum Point. He conducted the world premiere of an ensemble arrangement of his Three Yiddish Songs. It had been a long concert, many long, soulful, heavy pieces in a row. When David’s piece started, I remember feeling so uplifted and even joyful in response to this buoyant music, in part because of his wizardly orchestration, and also just because he had such a multi-layered emotional response to this tragedy. After the concert, we all went to a wonderful Greek restaurant in downtown Chicago. Someone in our entourage knew the owners, so they brought us platter after platter of rich, tantalizing dishes. David was in heaven.

A group of eight musicians wearing yellow hard hats and playing various instruments (doublebass, harp, clarinet, trumpet, French horn, violin) conducted by a young David Stock wearing a white hard hat in what looks like a cable car.

An early promotional photo of the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble. David Stock is wearing a white hard hat in the back.

Both of Us: The best way to celebrate who David Stock was is to perform some of his music! He has a lot of it: six symphonies, ten string quartets, twelve concertos, and more—humorous pieces, sad pieces, austere pieces, energy-filled danceable pieces, Jewish pieces, jazzy pieces. May he remain a part of American music forever.

Adams’s Become Ocean Inspires Taylor Swift to Make $50K Gift

Posted on December 3, 2015 by - Headlines, Ledes

become ocean

The New York Times reports that Taylor Swift has made a $50,000 donation to the Seattle Symphony, inspired by their Grammy-winning recording of John Luther Adams’s Become Ocean.

“Ms. Swift, one of today’s most popular and powerful pop stars, praised the recording of Mr. Adams’s large-scale, hypnotic, environmentally aware “Become Ocean” in a letter she wrote to the orchestra’s music director, Ludovic Morlot.

‘I was thrilled to hear that Taylor was moved by ‘Become Ocean,’ like all of us at the Seattle Symphony,” Mr. Morlot said in a statement. “This is a powerful piece with a unique soundscape. We’re especially thankful that she wishes to support our musicians, and that she shares our belief that all people should be able to experience symphonic music.'”

Her gift will support education programs and the musicians’ pension fund.

Swift previously gave $100,000 to the Nashville Symphony.

2015 Koussevitzky Commissions Announced

Posted on November 11, 2015 by - Headlines, Ledes

Nina C. Young, Liei Liang, and Dan Visconti

Nina C. Young, Liei Liang, and Dan Visconti

Lei Liang, Dan Visconti, and Nina C. Young are among the recipients of commissions that have just been announced by the Serge Koussevitzky Music Foundation in the Library of Congress. The Foundation has announced that it will award a total of five commissions for the creation of new musical works. The commissions, awarded to both American and international composers, are granted jointly by the foundation and the performing organizations (also both American and international) that will present performances of the newly composed works. In addition, a special commission was awarded this past year to renowned composer Gunther Schuller, who completed the song-cycle Singing Poems, co-commissioned by the Boston ensemble Collage New Music, shortly before his death in June 2015.

The five award winners and the groups co-sponsoring their commissions are:

Serge Koussevitzky, conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra from 1924 to 1949, was a champion of contemporary music. Throughout his distinguished career, he played a vital role in the creation of new works by commissioning such composers as Béla Bartók, Leonard Bernstein, and Igor Stravinsky. He established the Koussevitzky Foundation in the Library to continue his lifelong commitment to composers and new music. Applications for commissions are accepted annually. The Koussevitzky commissioning program is designed primarily for established composers who have demonstrated considerable merit through their works and for orchestras and chamber groups that have a record of excellence in the performance of contemporary music. For more information, visit the Foundation’s website.

(—from the press release)

Seven Musicians Are Among the 37 New USA Fellows Announced for 2015

Posted on November 10, 2015 by - Headlines, Ledes

Official logo for United States Artists

United States Artists (USA) has announced the 37 new USA Fellows for 2015. Each individual artist or collaborative will receive an unrestricted award of $50,000 to support their artistic practice and professional development. The USA Fellowship is awarded to artists at all stages of their careers in the following disciplines: architecture & design, crafts, dance, literature, media, music, theater and performance, traditional arts and visual arts. The 2015 music awardees are: composer David Lang; cellist Maya Beiser; composer/saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa; rappers Invincible (a.k.a. ill Weaver) and Jasiri X; singer/songwriter and electric blues guitarist Joe Louis Walker; and composer, singer, and My Brightest Diamond frontperson Shara Worden.

This year’s awardees were selected from over 400 nominated artists living in the United States and US Territories and were chosen by panels of expert peers in each artistic discipline. Since its inception in 2006, USA has awarded nearly 450 artists with over $21 million in support. More information, including details about all 37 new 2015 fellows, is available on the United States Artists website.

(—from the press release)

Two American Composers Among Five Chosen for Gaudeamus Shortlist

Posted on October 23, 2015 by - Headlines, Ledes

David Bird and Anthony Vine

David Bird and Anthony Vine

A professional jury consisting of Seung-Won Oh, Pierre Jodlowski, and Willem Jeths has drawn up a shortlist of five composers for the 2016 Gaudeamus Award, an international prize eligible to composers under the age of 30 consisting of a composition commission worth € 5,000. American composers David Bird (b. 1990) and Anthony Vine (b. 1988) are among the five chosen from over 175 scores from 28 different countries submitted. The other composers chosen are James O’Callaghan (b. 1988, Canada), Shih-Wei Lo (b. 1985, Taiwan), and Giulio Colangelo (b. 1986, Italy). The Gaudeamus Award has been conferred annually since 1957. For more information is available on the Gaudemus website.

(–from the press release)

It’s Difficult to be a World Showcase with Limited Resources: The 2015 ISCM World Music Days

Posted on October 23, 2015 by - Field Reports, Headlines

An aerial view of the old town of Ljubljana

A view of Ljubljana from one of its highest points, Ljubljana Castle.

Before trekking to Ljubljana, Slovenia for the 2015 World Music Days (WMD), the signature annual music festival of the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM), I had attended three previous editions of this one-of-a-kind event. There is no other music festival on the planet that attempts to bring together a selection of recently composed music that has been vetted by new music organizations from countries on six continents. (WMD takes place in a different location every year in co-production with a local presenter, and the programming is always a combination of local new music and mandated international repertoire culled from ISCM member organizations’ submissions.) Folks wanting to plunge directly into my day-by-day play-by-play report of the 2015 proceedings should feel free to jump ahead, but if you’d prefer some additional context about how this year’s edition measured up to some of its predecessors before doing so, stay right where you are.

The first WMD I experienced, coordinated in partnership with the 2011 Zagreb Bienniale, blew my mind. But the second one—which sprawled from Košice to Bratislava to Vienna—was often a source of frustration due to a seeming stylistic uniformity despite its myriad venues and geographically diverse repertoire. Last year’s convening, in Wrocław, thankfully did not suffer from such aesthetic constraints, but it was frustrating for other reasons. Concerts were over-programmed and scattered in performance spaces very far apart from one another, making it nearly impossible for attendees to reach them in a timely fashion. Plus, even getting to Wrocław requires significant coordination. There are very few direct flights to and from most major international cities. (My own commute there was a complete nightmare; for the sake of civility I will keep the airline that took me there nameless, especially since at this juncture I am unable to say or write its name without prefacing it with an expletive.) I mention all of this to acknowledge that since I didn’t arrive tabula rasa in Ljubljana, comparisons herein with my previous WMD experiences are inevitable.

For starters, current economic realities led to a convening that was far less grandiose than its predecessors. There was also an added twist that affected ISCM-member attendees. In previous years, the hosts for WMD were required to cover the full cost of up to a seven-day hotel stay for one delegate from every organization that is a member of ISCM. But this year only three nights were covered even though the festival spanned a total of seven days. Since, in addition to all the concert fare, ISCM delegates are required to attend general assembly meetings where a wide range of ISCM business matters are discussed, the assemblies were crammed into marathon five-hour blocks on the first three weekdays to ensure maximum assembly participation from folks who were unable to stay the additional days due to the added costs. But that not only made those sessions unduly long, it led to a noticeable decline in concert attendance after those first three free-hotel days were up. This was all the more noticeable because ISCM delegates formed the majority of the audience at most of these concerts; in fact, some performances seemed to occur beyond the radar of local music aficionados. (I had several conversations with people I met in various shops and restaurants who expressed an interest in music but had no idea that this festival was going on.)

A bicycle parked in front of a poster for the 2015 ISCM World Music Days on a street in Ljubljana.

Aside from posters at the concert venues and on the door of the building that houses the Slovenian Composers Society, this was one of the only posters for the 2015 World Music Days I noticed in downtown Ljubljana.

The paltry signage for WMD around town (I only spotted a handful of posters) was a stark contrast to Wrocław, where tramcars were festooned with WMD banners, and Zagreb, where television film crews showed up to the festivities. (Admittedly, it helped that Croatia’s then president was composer Ivo Josipović and that his music was programmed during the festival.)

In addition to the Ljubljana concerts being poorly attended, there were significantly fewer of them and they took place in only a handful of venues. On a positive note, having fewer concerts made it not only possible to attend everything, but also to have time to process it all—which can be quite a mental challenge since concert programs typically consist of 100% new material, often by completely unfamiliar composers. Given the somewhat reduced schedule, it should have theoretically also been possible for festival attendees to explore this small and extremely picturesque central European city, but since the hotel in which the delegates were put up (which was also where the assemblies took place) was alongside a highway on the city’s outskirts and getting back and forth required a chartered bus, it was a challenge to add on any activities that were not part of the official program of events.

During previous WMDs I participated in, there had usually been various symposia coordinated in relation to the festival as well as pre-concert talks with some of the participating composers. In Llubljana, there were only a few pre-concert talks and we were informed that some of them were being conducted only in Slovenian with no translations provided. While there was a musicological conference concurrent with the festival titled “From Modernism to Postmodernism” and some of the sessions looked compelling, they took place at the same time as the general assemblies and continued past the start of the first concert each day, so there was no way to get to any of it. I also was unable to attend any of the “Accompanying Programme” concerts which were almost exclusively devoted to Slovenian repertoire since they took place at inconvenient hours, mostly very late at night.

Delegates to the ISCM General Assembly sitting across from each other in alphabetical order by country on desks arranged in a large rectagular formation to ensure that everyone can see each other.

The 2015 ISCM General Assembly was convened in marathon five-hour sessions for three consecutive days.

But at least I managed to attend every “Main Programme” concert (the ones that featured repertoire submitted by ISCM members) except for the very first one—an orchestral concert on Sunday featuring works by Claude Ledoux (Belgium), Helena Winkelman (Switzerland), Nicolai Worsaae (Denmark), and three Slovenians: Božidar Kos, Ivo Petrić, and Primož Ramovš. (I was particularly disappointed that I missed Ledoux’s Crossing Edges, a concerto based on spectral principals showcasing the erhu, the traditional Chinese two-stringed spike fiddle.) I could not arrive in Ljubljana until Monday morning, just in time to catch the tail end of the first general assembly. (Though not quite as off the beaten path as Wrocław, there are also no direct flights between Ljubljana and New York City, and there isn’t a lot of flexibility in terms of travel times.)


How to Overcome Jetlag in a Day: Listen to Tons of Spiky Music and Talk to Lots of People

The stage of Kozina Hall showing some instruments, chairs, and (on the back wall) organ pipes.

The stage before one of the 2015 WMD concerts at Marjan Kozina Hall.

The first concert I attended combined chamber works scored for wind quintet with music for percussion ensemble at Slovenian Philharmonic’s Marjan Kozina Hall (named after an important mid-century Slovene composer who was also the first post-WW2 manager of the Philharmonic). Alternating the repertoire between Slowind and SToP (the percussion group) was much more effective than having each set of players perform half a concert by themselves, since the separation of similarly instrumented works allowed for greater clarity and aural digestion. That said, I remember precious little of Greek composer Vassilis Bakopoulos’s Wind Quintet No. 1 (2012) or Slovenian composer Corrado Rojac’s 2003 Clichés for wind quintet. Admittedly my clock was not completely adjusted yet. I was, however, quite taken with Motion/Emotion, a 2011 wind quintet by Sunleif Rasmussen, whom I’ve been told is the most successful composer from the Faroe Islands. Rasmussen was in attendance, and it was wonderful to finally meet him.

In Cloud Cluster, a four-movement percussion quintet of almost symphonic proportions by Xiaozhong Yang from Chengdu, China, the instruments are frequently used more for their sonorities than for rhythmic dexterity. According to the program notes by the composer, its four movements—“Drift,” “Assemblage,” “Surge,” and “Scattering”—are an attempt to depict the behavior of clouds, how they shape, change, and dissolve over time. The work begins with two players blowing into bottles and ends with them throwing stones into the air. Vibrant City, a percussion quintet by Chris Hung from Hong Kong, is a sonic evocation of that fast-paced metropolis in which shimmering melodies are woven across the pitched percussion instruments against an ever-shifting rhythmic backdrop of swacks and thwacks from unpitched instruments. But for me the most exciting piece was the insistent TWOMB: For John Cage for percussion sextet (2012), the sole work on the festival that was co-written by two composers, Peter Adriaansz and Maarten Altena, both from the Netherlands. Also quite compelling was when the two disparate sound worlds of winds and percussion came together—for Larisa Vrhunc’s The Rate of Decay, which was a sonic tug of war between two horn players and two percussionists—though neither of the hornists who performed in that piece were members of Slowind. Ultimately, though, Louisville, Kentucky-based Jacob Gotlib’s Portrait Sequence for percussion duo (2012) was the most unusual piece on the program. He describes it as an anti-percussion piece. I’ll let him explain it himself…

The second concert, held at the Ljubljana Conservatory of Music and Ballet, consisted of seven works performed by the Ensemble Neofonia under the direction of Steven Loy, an American-born composer and conductor who has lived in Europe for the past 20 years and is now based in Ljubljana. The program included works from Slovenia, Hong Kong, Ukraine, Slovakia, Poland, South Korea, and the United States. Unfortunately Lewisville, Texas-based Timothy Harenda was unable to travel to Ljubljana to hear his 2014 composition Purple Quartz for bass flute, bass clarinet, cello, vibraphone, and piano, which alternated traditional performance techniques with noisy percussive gestures in an attempt to sonically convey the duality of quartz stones. But thankfully Slovenian composer Uroš Rojko was on hand to hear a particularly satisfying performance of his 2003-04 Stone Wind for flute, clarinet, horn, percussion, violin, and contrabass; the off-stage flute and clarinet echoes at the very end of the piece were magical.

Motions, Stases by Polish-born composer Krzysztof Wołec (who currently teaches composition at the University of Louisville) was an exciting concertante work in which pianist Małgorzata Wałentynowicz was sometimes clearly the aural focal point but at other times was engaged in sonic combat with the ensemble in order to remain in the foreground. Fata Morgana, a work for a somewhat unusual combination of five instruments (violin, viola, doublebass, oboe, and bassoon) by Hong Kong-born composer Kai-Young Chan, who is currently a doctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, is an attempt at creating sonic mirages with some effective melismatic flourishes.

Sadly I found myself zoning in and out for most of the remainder of the program, jetlag getting the better of me by that point. There was a third concert back at the delegates’ hotel at 10 p.m. (part of the “Accompanying Programme”) which consisted exclusively of Slovenian works that were all composed this year. Much as I wanted to hear the work on the program by Brina Jež Brezavšček, having been entranced by pieces on a disc devoted exclusively to her music that was given to me a few years back by my friends at the Slovenian Music Information Centre (SIGIC), instead I gave in to the jetlag, returned to my room, and passed out.

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The stage at the concert hall at Ljubljana Conservatory.

The stage at the concert hall at Ljubljana Conservatory.

By Tuesday, however, I was perfectly acclimated to the time zone. So I was totally ready for the first concert, again at the Conservatory, which featured solos and duos involving piano, clarinet, euphonium, and pre-recorded electronic sounds. Curiously, each piece with an electronic component used different language to acknowledge it. New Zealander Chris Cree Brown’s 2012-13 Sound Barrel was described as being scored for euphonium and “fixed media.” Icelander Rikhardur H. Frideriksson’s completely electronic Brons, a mesmerizing work created in 2004 and revised in 2008 which was constructed exclusively from pre-recorded sounds of gongs and tam-tams, was simply listed as being “for electroacoustic.” Janez Matičič’s 1970 Cosmophonie, an acknowledged Slovenian electronic music classic, was described, as were most similarly scored works from that time, as being for piano and “magnetic tape.” But South African composer Michael Blake’s Tombeau de Mosoeu Moerane was listed as being scored for clarinet and “four-channel tape” despite the fact that it was completed in 2013 and the equipment on stage looked more like a laptop than a tape recorder. Perhaps in the future the ISCM can take an official position on the proper taxonomy for such repertoire.

Of course, none of this has anything to do with the actual music. I already described the sound world for Brons. Sound Barrel offered some really exciting interplay between the flabby low brass sonorities of the euphonium and crunchier electronically generated sounds, some of which were even lower. The reedy sonorities of the pre-recorded electronic material in Tombeau provided a very empathic sound bed for the live clarinet sounds. (Blake’s work was actually originally scored for birbynė, a Lithuanian aerophone traditionally performed by shepherds that can be played with either a single or a double reed.) The electronic sound world in Cosmophonie, on the other hand, was a real blast from the past—vintage bleeps and bloops interrupted virtuosic piano runs and clusters, which were played with extraordinary grace by Nina Prešiček. Matičič, who divides his time between Ljubljana and Paris and who turns 90 next year, was in the audience and, since I’m a huge fan of his three piano sonatas (thanks again to another disc I got from SIGIC), I was delighted to briefly talk with him. In addition to those electro-acoustic compositions, other concert standouts were Contemplation, a daredevil solo clarinet piece by Taiwanese composer Chien-Wei Wang, and Dialogues, a rhythmically charged solo piano showcase by Venezuelan Osvaldo Torres which was also very convincingly delivered by Prešiček.

But the next concert, a program back at Kozina Hall performed by the Slovenian Philharmonic String Chamber Orchestra under the direction of Simon Krečič, offered some of the most persuasive performances of the entire festival. In Chartres (2012), by Parisian-based Lithuanian composer and vocal improviser Justina Repečkaitė, a slowly moving chain of drones and microtonal slides attempts to evoke the south window of the Chartres Cathedral. Although Bratislava-based Oľga Kroupová’s 2014 Gryllus Musicalis is a concerto for solo violin and strings (the first of two that was presented during the concert), many of the individual players act as co-soloists throughout. In Paolo Geminiani’s Imminenze (2000), one of the cellos initially takes on a seeming concertante role, but by the end everyone is a soloist to some extent.

I was really smitten with Rituel Bizarre for prepared string orchestra (2010), a visceral exploration of timbres that are midway between tones and noises created by Swedish composer Ansgar Beste, who after living for many years in Germany has been pursuing a PhD in Norway. Equally stunning, but for very different reasons, was Páll Ragnar Palsson’s deeply emotional Supremacy of Peace which was inspired by the stark contrast of abandoned factories and pristine farmlands in northeast Estonia. (I learned later in the week after talking with Palsson and other WMD attendees from his home country, Iceland, that he came to notated composition after performing for most his youth in the highly successful Icelandic indie rock band Maus.)

The remainder of the program was devoted to two mid-20th century Slovenian classics: “Ne, jaz nočem še umreti” (“No, I Do Not Want to Die”), an extremely sentimental aria composed in 1951 by Alojz Srebotnjak (1931-2010) that was milked for full impact by baritone Gabriel Lipuš; and Inventiones Ferales, an extraordinary 1963 violin concerto by Uroš Krek (1922-2008) which deserves to enter the standard repertoire. Yet again, thanks to my SIGIC friends, I already knew and admired this piece from a recording; but hearing such a strong live performance of it, particularly the stunning solo passages played by Janez Podlesek, made my belief in the piece even stronger.

Can There be Peace and Love Among All Beings in the Universe?

A pipe on the side of a building in the old town of Ljubljana is embellished by a drawing of a scubadiver.

Many of the buildings in Ljubljana are strewn with graffiti. It’s somewhat unsightly in the old town, but some of it is actually really quite good.

The first of Wednesday’s concerts, both of which took place at Kozina Hall, was a short choral program performed by the Slovenian Philharmonic Choir under the direction of Martina Batič. While I was not as wowed by them as I had been by Anna Szostak and the Camerata Silesia Katowice, a Polish choir that performed on the WMD for two consecutive years (in Vienna in 2013 and then closer to home in Wrocław in 2014), I was still extremely impressed with how the Slovenian choristers were able to (mostly) effortlessly handle the variety of extended vocal techniques that were featured in some of the repertoire, particularly in Portuguese composer Nuno Costa’s 2014 Pater Noster, an idiosyncratic setting that made the audiences hear the familiar words of this famous hymn in a completely different way. The work ultimately fetched Costa the 2015 ISCM Young Composer Award (YCA), a cash prize funded by the Vancouver, Canada-based concert presenter Music on Main which enables the ISCM to commission a new work by the winner that will be performed at a future WMD. (The members of the ISCM’s 2015 YCA jury were Alejandro Guarello from Chile, Gudny Gudmundsdottir from Iceland, and Glenda Keam from New Zealand; Stephen Lias, who runs a Texas section of ISCM, served as the jury coordinator.)

Other highlights included Ako ko čuje glas moj (If You Hear My Voice) a mellifluous setting of a New Testament passage by Serbian composer Ivana Stefanović and a chromatic, mostly homophonic setting of the hymn Omnia Tempus Habent by Hungarian composer Péter Zombola. Hommage a Papaji, a tribute to Indian mystic Hariwansh Lal Poonja by Romanian composer Gabriel Mălăncioiu contained some extremely lush harmonies that seemed to float beyond consciousness; but by the end its spell was completely broken by all the singers interminably reciting one line over and over again (“Let there be Peace and Love among all Beings of the Universe”). Denmark was represented on the program by a lovely two-movement work from 2010, Singing – Swinging, by the most famous living Danish composer, Per Nørgård. At the conclusion of the concert, brass players and percussionists joined the chorus for Seventh Angel, a cantata by another elder statesman, Slovenian Pavel Mihelčič, who served as the artistic director and president of the program committee for the 2015 WMD.

Mihelčič is also the artistic director for the new music ensemble MD7 which took the stage for the Wednesday’s other concert. This concert, featuring repertoire from three continents (Europe, Asia, and North America), was again conducted by Steven Loy with whom I had a chance to speak briefly about what brought him from Virginia to Slovenia.

Highlights of the MD7 program included the otherworldly Pangaea Ultima by Canadian Gordon Fitzell, British composer Nina Whiteman’s The Galaxy Rotation Problem which was chock full of microtonal inflections, Pan by Heera Kim from South Korea which alternates passages of relentless freneticism with stasis, and Tlesk vode (The Snap of Water) by Slovenian composer Tadeja Vulc in which one of the percussionists makes various sounds with a vat full of water. As Vulc acknowledged in her program note, “These sounds have been explored to the finest detail by composer Tan Dun, but that does not mean that others are not permitted to use them. I have woven some of them into my work, in which Tan Dun’s name is also concealed.” But, judging from audience reactions, the showstopper of the evening was Yao Chen’s extremely dramatic O… What an Awakening! for soprano and Pierrot quintet (flute, clarinet, violin, cello, and piano), a work funded by New Music USA that was chosen for presentation during the 2015 WMD from the six repertoire choices we submitted. Below is a video recording from the premiere performance of the work, by the San Francisco-based chamber ensemble Wild Rumpus, which to my ears is even more riveting than MD7’s spirited performance of the piece in Ljubljana.

After the concert, I spoke briefly with Yao Chen who described the genesis of the piece which was written during his final year of compositional studies at the University of Chicago.

Missy Mazzoli

Missy Mazzoli (photo by Marylene Mey, courtesy G. Schirmer/Music Sales)

During the first ISCM General Assembly, the repertoire choices were announced for the 2016 World New Music Days which will take place in Tongyeong, South Korea from March 29 to April 3, 2016. I am happy to report that, from the six pieces that New Music USA submitted for consideration, Missy Mazzoli’s choral work, Vesper Sparrow, has been chosen for performance. (Vesper Sparrow is the opening track of roomful of teeth’s new recording render on New Amsterdam Records. The recording was awarded a New Music USA Project grant.

 

Thursday’s first concert, the last one that took place in Kozina Hall, was another chamber music program. The concert opened with a set of four songs for soprano and piano by Jakob Jež, an octogenarian composer who is a sort of Slovenian Ned Rorem, and the first half ended with the almost neo-romantic sounding Two Concertante Duos for cello and piano by Ljubo Rančigaj. But I was most impressed with the work sandwiched in between them, Chilean composer Juan Manuel Quinteros’s deft piano trio, Macondo, named after the fictional town described by Gabriel Garcia Marquez in his landmark magical realist novel One Hundred Years of Solitude.

There was a work that sounded even more indebted to magical realism, Nemico Orfeo by Canadian-born, U.K.-based Cassandra Miller scored for soprano voice, cello, and two flutes which were situated out of sight in the balcony. The effect was enchanting, though I’m not sure how it would have come off if the concert hall had been full and there were audience members sitting up there. Since the music hinted at a Baroque aesthetic sensibility, I also would have preferred to have heard it sung by a singer with a less pronounced vibrato. Soprano Jerica Steklasa, though extremely personable and fluent throughout, sounded a little too verismo for this subtle, somewhat surreal music. I have to admit I could not hear the references to jazz pianist Bill Evans that were supposedly strewn through Israeli composer Ziv Cojocaru’s Do You Like Bill, a 2013 work scored for Pierrot quintet, but Latvian composer Renāte Stivriņa’s often extremely quiet but sometimes very noisy Composition 10, which was inspired by a 1939 non-representational painting by Wassily Kandinsky, sounded requisitely abstract.

The facade of the record store Spin Vinyl showing a bunch of LPs, including one by Elvis Presley, in the window.

Legend has it that this quaint little shop in the middle of Ljubljana’s old town was the first place to sell punk rock records behind the Iron Curtain.

A brief aside: Earlier in the day, since at this point the ISCM general assemblies had concluded and I had some time to wander around, I popped into a few local music shops but was not able to find many things that I didn’t already have. I was happy to find a CD devoted to the art songs of Josip Ipavec (1873-1921) as well as scores for most of them at a small but very nice store located in the same building as the offices of the Slovenian Music Information Centre and the Slovenian Composers Society. But at Spin Vinyl, the premiere local rock shop which is located besides the river that runs through the heart of the old town, I failed to track down the first two albums by the extremely impressive Slovenian instrumental rock/post-jazz group Štefan Kovac Marko Banda (a.k.a. ŠKM banda) whose subsequent recordings I got turned onto by Slovenian music journalist Igor Bašin when he visited New York City last year. Immediately prior to the concert I stumbled into a street fair right outside Kozina Hall that was organized by University of Ljubljana. So of course I went searching for music there. As luck would have it, one of the booths contained material from the Slovenian Philharmonic, including discs. I was immediately drawn to one devoted the music of Lucijan Marija Škerjanc (1900-1973) which included a harp concerto, but strangely the discs were just for display and they would not sell it to me. They told me that I could find it in the gift shop in Kozina Hall but there was no such shop, so I went back again and told them I was only around for another two days and was very interested in the disc to no avail. However, during the intermission of the chamber music concert I described above, I was greeted by a member of the staff of the Slovenian Philharmonic who handed me a huge pile of CDs for free including that Škerjanc disc as well as discs devoted to the music of the hall’s namesake Marjan Kozina. I still haven’t had a chance to listen to all of them but that Škerjanc Harp Concerto is a gem, another work which, like Uroš Krek’s violin concerto Inventiones Ferales, deserves a more prominent place in the orchestral repertoire.

 

One of the doorways of the extremely ornate Orfejev Salon whose side beams are two larger than lifesize sculptures of women.

One of the doorways of the extremely ornate Orfejev Salon

The string quartet concert later that evening was held in the most picturesque (though also somewhat claustrophobic) venue of the entire week, the Baroque-ly ornate Orfejev Salon in the Slovenian National Opera and Ballet Theatre. The very appropriately named Dissonance Quartet (fronted by first violinist Janez Podlesek, the very impressive soloist in the Krek concerto) played a really tough program. The first half of the program featured three works from three continents (South Korean Jae-Moon Lee’s String Quartet No. 2, String Quartet by Egyptian Amir Okba, and Nocturna Itinera by Portuguese composer Patricia Sucena de Almeida) which might lead people to believe that the techniques of Helmut Lachenmann have become standard to musical vocabulary worldwide. And Alexander Khubeev’s String Quartet No. 2, which opened the second half of the program, showed that this style has its adherents in Russia as well, though I wonder what Vladimir Putin would think of such music.

After such unremittingly gnarly fare, it was a joy to hear Norwegian composer Rolf Wallin’s Curiosity Cabinet, a collection of eleven miniatures that whimsically explore a wide range of musical styles. The concert concluded with the 1983 String Quartet by 81-year-old Lojze Lebič whom I had heard repeatedly described during the week as Slovenia’s most significant living composer. I am philosophically opposed to such ranking, and in this case somewhat baffled by it since I am so fond of Janez Matičič and Uroš Rojko, both of whom wrote amazing pieces that were also presented during the festival; nevertheless Lebič’s quartet was a formidable work.

The Last Day of the Festival

A sculpture of a man playing a tenor drum that actually moves.

A sculpture of a man playing a tenor drum that actually moves.

On Friday afternoon, 4saxess offered up a program of saxophone quartets that was far more diverse than that of its string counterparts the night before. Almost Silenced by Urška Pompe, who serves as the senior lecturer in music theory at the Ljubljana Academy of Music, is a virtual encyclopedia of extended saxophone techniques, whereas multiphonics form the principal content of the brief Albumblatt II by Bonn, Germany-born, Chicago-based Hans Thomalla and breathy utterances are the centerpiece of the two-movement Goldspell, by Mirela Ivičević, a Croatian composer and performance artist who currently lives in Vienna. In Australian Lachlan Skipworth’s Dark Nebulae, breathy sonorities and multiphonic clusters come together to serve as a sonic metaphor for the vast clouds of atomic dust in the far reaches of outer space; it is highly evocative and haunting music.

Exactly opposite in effect was Austrian Matthias Kranebitter’s Minced and Bulbous for which the players were joined offstage by Neven Smolčič who triggered pre-recorded electronic sounds from a laptop. Though in Kranebitter’s notes he claimed to be inspired by the paintings and music of Don Van Vliet (a.k.a. Captain Beefheart), it sounded more like a video game that had taken a wrong turn—it was often assaultive in its ferocity, but thoroughly engaging nevertheless (perhaps thoroughly engaging because of its unbridled ferocity). That wasn’t the only piece which added other sonorities to the saxophones; for Bamboo Spirits by Japanese composer Tomoyuki Hisatome which opened the program, audience members were given a sheet on which a short melody was notated and were requested to sing along and, since this was a pretty sophistical audience, we did quite a good job of it. It seemed sort of hokey at first, but it actually proved to be quite effective.

The immense lobby of Gallus Hall.

The lobby of Gallus Hall felt more like a passageway at an airport than the lobby of a concert hall.

The final concert of the 2015 ISCM World Music Days, which took place in the massive Gallus Hall, was among its most impressive. It offered a total of six pieces in the 10-15 minute range, all by European composers, performed by the Slovenian Philharmonic under the direction of TaeJung Lee. The program included two mini-concertos by two of the most prominent younger Slovenian composers: Into the Shades for violin and orchestra by Nina Šenk (again featuring soloist Janez Podlesek who must have gotten no sleep that week) and Hawk-eye for French horn and orchestra by Vito Žuraj. Though Into the Shades was composed three years ago and was recorded in 2013 by Podlesek and the Slovenian Philharmonic (it’s one of the recordings in the stack I was given), this was actually its first live performance. Much in the spirit of single-movement konzertstücke which once upon a time were often featured on orchestra programs, Šenk’s composition is mostly a springboard for the soloist; in fact, in her notes she describes the orchestral accompaniment functioning merely as a sonic “shadow” of the solo violin part. Hawk-eye, on the other hand, is a feat of dazzlingly virtuosity in which an extraordinarily wide range of sounds race by, in both the orchestra and the daredevil solo part, often with a clear sense of humor but always inherently musical. With this work Žuraj has completely redefined the horn concerto as a medium and has set a new standard, perhaps even beyond Ligeti’s Hamburg Concerto, for what such a work can be.

Strangely the concert also featured two works from Finland: Rope (2010/2012) by Veli-Mati Puumala and Whisked Whistle (2011) by Max Savikangas. Rope is extremely picturesque music that sounds like a soundtrack to off-kilter cartoon of the Road Runner variety; phrases bounce from instrument to instrument and never seem to settle anywhere for very long. Whisked Whistle was Savikangas’s first orchestral composition. Like Hawk-eye, it is also chuck full of unusual sonic effects, but they also always have a clear musical purpose. At one point in this piece there’s a passage that’s very reminiscent of the persistent three-note tattoo in Christopher Rouse’s Symphony No. 1, but Savikangas assured me during the post-concert reception that he was not familiar with Rouse’s piece and the similarities are a coincidence. It is further proof that great ideas don’t belong to any one person but are rather out there in the universe to be discovered and explored.

Irish composer Patrick Brennan’s colorfully-orchestrated, dance-like Ballabile, which concluded the first half of the concert, would have been even more effective as a concert opener. But the final work of the entire festival was entirely in the right place: inFALL by Hector Parra, a Barcelona-born composer currently residing in Paris, is a trill and tremolo laden sonic essay scored for a Maherian-sized orchestra that grows more and more intense and finally explodes.


Is It Possible to Make the World Music Days More Vital?

Delegates for the ISCM World Music Days stand together with flags and trees in the background.

After the final ISCM General Assembly, the delegates posed outside the hotel for the traditional ISCM group photo. I’m in there somewhere.

All in all, the 2015 edition of the World Music Days was filled with lots of truly memorable music that was very well performed and I was very happy that I had the opportunity to be there to experience it firsthand. Still, I could not help thinking that this one-of-a-kind new music assemblage could be so much more than what had been presented in Ljubljana. Despite a greater stylistic diversity than what I witnessed two years ago in Bratislava and Vienna (I wasn’t able to travel to Košice where the 2013 WMD kicked off), there were too many similarities between pieces. Even though there are post-Lachenmann string quartets being composed all over the world (which I learned as a result of the program by the Dissonance Quartet), most composers of string quartets are not writing in a post-Lachenmann idiom. So why wasn’t that particular program more reflective of the stunning breadth of current string quartet composition? Almost every piece on the saxophone quartet concert explored extended techniques, but there’s plenty of fabulous music being created these days for four saxophones which emphasizes other, uniquely idiomatic qualities of that instrumentation. Again, why not offer a greater slice of possibilities? And, in a festival that is supposed to highlight geographical diversity, how could there possibly be an orchestra concert that only featured music from Europe?

These were some of the questions I kept asking throughout the week, but there are others that are perhaps even more important to answer. Given the fact that WMD is the only festival during which you can hear recent repertoire from all six humanly inhabited continents that has been chosen by people on all of those continents, why isn’t it an event more people with an interest in new music want to make an annual pilgrimage to? Sure it is not so easy (and is actually quite expensive) to fly to a city in a foreign country, often a remote one, and spend a week there attending concerts. The fact that many of the delegates who were provided with three nights of free hotel stay did not stay additional days to attend the entire festival was disheartening, but also understandable on an economic level. But also understandable on an economic level is how difficult it now is for a local presenter to raise funds to cover such costs on top of mounting a week-long festival. I don’t know how much was ultimately spent by the festival organizers in Ljubljana on the 2015 WMD (the festival in Wrocław cost well over a million euros), but I did learn that a major corporate sponsor for it backed out and that, as a result, it almost didn’t happen.

It would be impossible for the ISCM to present a festival without a local co-presenter who organizes the concerts, secures the venues and the musicians, and publishes the hefty program book. But those local presenters exert a major influence on the tone of the festival, what repertoire is ultimately chosen from the submissions made by the ISCM member organizations, and what connections are made (or not made) between the works that have been chosen.

The process for submitting works for consideration, while guaranteeing that every country will have a work performed if the organization from that country follows the rules when making its submissions (six different pieces in at least four different instrumental combination categories must be offered), hinders the variety. Works for standard ensembles (e.g. string quartet, orchestra, mixed chorus) form only a small fraction of the vibrant new music being created these days, but organizing a program of oddball combinations would be a logistical nightmare (and an even more expensive proposition). Score-based music is more easily interpreted by local musicians, who are not always able to work with the selected composers, but focusing almost exclusively on music disseminated this way offers a skewed view of today’s new music scene where so much improvisatory and orally-learned music is being made. Sure, there is always some space accorded to electro-acoustic music, it often feels like an add-on, and in Ljubljana there was only one electronic work featured that did not also involve a live musician reading from a score.

At a used book store in Ljubljana a grand piano is covered with plush toys and a statue of former Yugoslavian dictator Josip Tito.

A rather wry bit of nostalgia. At a used book store in Ljubljana a grand piano is covered with plush toys and a statue of former Yugoslavian dictator Josip Tito.

If it is the “World Music Days” or even the “World New Music Days” as opposed to being just the “World Post-Classical Music Days,” why isn’t the festival designed to better accommodate the majority of today’s approaches to music making? So much of the world is still not participating in this festival. With the inclusion of a new member from Egypt who was voted into the organization last year, Africa is now represented by more than South Africa. But there is still no one at the table from Brazil, Colombia, Cuba, India, Indonesia, Morocco, Nigeria, Thailand, and many other countries where there is a very exciting, albeit not necessarily “contemporary classical,” new music scene.

Perhaps instead of offering a performance slot to an organization in a country that dutifully submits six different pieces from that country scored for at least four kinds of ensembles, there should be a separate call for scores in each country each year on a rotating basis that ensures that different kinds of music from each country will get a hearing over a period of a certain number of years. E.g. Japan would be asked to submit six orchestral pieces from the last decade from which one would be selected, Australia a work for mixed chorus; but also Chile would be asked to submit six singer-songwriters from which one would be flown over; Belgium and four other countries would all be asked to submit a list of six jazz musicians from which one from each would be chosen to form a combo. Additional time would be carved out for attendees to hear about local new music scenes from around the world in audiovisual presentations, etc.

There would undoubtedly still be a lot of fabulous music that wouldn’t get on the radar of the WMD, but it could make for a very different kind of event that should have even greater appeal to audiences around the world—something that would only help further the cause of the creation and performance of new music and international collaborations, all of which are at the heart of the mission of the ISCM.

A statue of the composer Gustav Maher in front of a pizzeria.

I discovered this wonderful statue of statue of Gustav Mahler outside an excellent pizzeria in Ljubljana’s old town

Beyond the Radar of the World Music Days

I couldn’t get my mind off of these thoughts during the week of vacation time my wife and I spent in Austria following the new music bonanza in Ljubljana. And based on what we wound up doing there, much of it was ultimately not really a vacation—if you live your life for music, separating business and pleasure is a futile activity. We stayed in Krems, a small town that is an hour west of Vienna by train, with Antje Müller, a former work colleague of my wife’s who has since become a close friend. Antje now runs the Ernst Krenek Institute which is devoted to the promulgation of the music of this extraordinarily prolific composer (242 opus numbers of which 22 are operas!) who was born in Austria but spent the majority of his long life (90+ years) teaching and composing in Southern California. His widow, the American composer Gladys Nordenstrom—herself now 91—still lives there.

A memorabilia diplay case showing posters, a pack of cigarettes and other items related to Ernst Krenek's opera Jonny spielt auf.

At the Ernst Krenek Institute, there are display cases of memorabilia for several of his most important works including one for his 1927 opera Jonny spielt auf. The work was so popular that it even spawned a cigarette brand called Jonny; a pack of Jonnys is included in the display.

Our nine-hour train commute from Ljubljana to Krems brought us there a day before Antje returned from a trip she had taken. So she had her friend, a musicologist named Eva Stöckler, meet up with us to give us the keys and to give us an orientation to this quaint, Medieval mini-city which also houses an impressive cartoon museum and is near some of Austria’s greatest vineyards. (One, Geyerhof, which we visited later that week, has been making wine since at least the 12th century.)

Johannes Simetsberger

Johannes Simetsberger

Anyway, it turns out that Eva is married to a fascinating composer named Johannes Simetsberger, who for the last decade has devoted himself to creating pieces that contain a total of only five pitches. When she told me about him, I had to arrange a meeting with him. Strangely, though he has composed more than a hundred works, none of them have ever been performed. According to him, since he’s self-taught as a composer (he’s trained as a musicologist) and writes in an idiosyncratic personal style that is dissimilar from that of most “professional” composers, it has been very difficult for him to connect to the various Austrian musical cliques. But he’s perfectly content with his life because he has devoted it to improving people’s lives. He has two “day jobs,” one as a social worker where he helps people with disabilities in Vienna collect unemployment; composing music is an activity he gets to engage in two hours each day during his train commute.

Martin Theodor Gut

Martin Theodor Gut

Eva also told us that she studies classical and jazz guitar and it turned out that her teacher, Martin Theodor Gut, was another outsider composer who creates music for specially built instruments tuned to a 12-note just intonation scale of his own creation; one of his instruments is very similar to the quadrichord of Paul Dresher whom he had never heard of. Martin’s scale, which is based on the 1st through 13th partials of a tonic and dominant, is remarkably malleable and also contains some really pungent intervals.

The music of Johannes Simetsberger and Martin Theodor Gut, which I randomly became exposed to through a friend of a friend while on holiday, was some of the most intriguing new music I have been exposed to all year—more so than a great deal of the music I heard during the World Music Days or any other of the myriad new music events I attend around the United States throughout the year. If the small community of Krems is inhabited by two such composers, who strangely were only barely aware of each other, how many such composers exist all over the world and what can we do to connect them to each other and to get audiences to hear their music? This too, I believe, needs to be part of the mission of the ISCM.