Category: Headlines

American Composers Forum Announces 2015 Champions of New Music

Posted on February 10, 2015 by NewMusicBox Staff - Headlines, Ledes

The American Composers Forum Board of Directors has voted to present its 2015 “Champion of New Music” award to three recipients: conductor Michael Morgan, flutist and director of the International Contemporary Ensemble Claire Chase, and the American Composers Orchestra at public ceremonies this year in Oakland, Brooklyn, and New York City.

The “Champion of New Music” award was established by ACF in 2005 as a national mark of recognition to honor individuals or ensembles that have made a significant contribution to the work and livelihoods of contemporary composers. ACF President and CEO John Nuechterlein will present the awards at three events in the coming months.

The award to Michael Morgan will be given on February 20, 2015, during a concert by the Oakland East Bay Symphony in Oakland, California.
The award to Claire Chase will be given on April 21, 2015, at a special anniversary event for ICE in Brooklyn, New York.
The award to the American Composers Orchestra will be given on May 7, 2015, at the Underwood Reading Sessions at the DiMenna Center in New York City.

Michael Morgan

Michael Morgan has served as music director of the Oakland East Bay Symphony since 1990. OEBS comprises not only a professional orchestra, but also members of the Oakland Symphony Chorus and Oakland Symphony Youth Orchestra, and its staff, board members, and community volunteers. OEBS aims to make classical music accessible, particularly to those individuals in the community who might otherwise never hear live symphonic music. Morgan’s commitment to new works by American composers is well documented, and under his leadership OEBS won an ASCAP award for Adventurous Programming in 2006. While a student at Oberlin studying composition, Morgan spent a summer at Tanglewood as a student of Gunther Schuller and Seiji Ozawa, and worked with Leonard Bernstein. In 1980, he won the Hans Swarovsky International Conductors Competition in Vienna, Austria, and became assistant conductor of the St Louis Symphony under Leonard Slatkin. In 1986, Georg Solti chose him to become the assistant conductor of the Chicago Symphony, a position he held for five years. As a guest conductor he has appeared with most of America’s major orchestras.

Claire Chase

Flutist Claire Chase, a 2012 MacArthur Fellow, is a soloist, collaborative artist, and activist for new music. Over the past decade she has given the world premieres of over 100 new works for flute, many of them tailor-made for her. In 2014 she began Density 2036, a project to commission, premiere, and record an entirely new program of pieces for flute every year until 2036, the 100th anniversary of the eponymous and seminal piece by Edgard Varèse. Chase is the founder and co-artistic director of the International Contemporary Ensemble, which she formed in 2001 with the goal of creating the United States’s first large-scale chamber ensemble dedicated to new and experimental music. ICE, whose artist-driven nonprofit structure, alternative concert presentations, and educational initiatives have served as innovative models within the new music field, is a uniquely structured, modular ensemble comprised of thirty dynamic and versatile young performers which has now given more than 500 premiere performances all over the world.

The American Composers Orchestra

The American Composers Orchestra is the only orchestra in the world dedicated to the creation, performance, preservation, and promulgation of music by American composers. Founded in 1977, ACO pursues a singular mission by maintaining an unparalleled range of activities, including concerts, commissions, recordings, educational programs, and new music reading sessions. To date, ACO has performed music by over 600 composers, including more than 200 world premieres and commissioned works. ACO’s innovative EarShot reading program in collaboration with the American Composers Forum, League of American Orchestras, and New Music USA, helps orchestras around the country to identify and support promising composers in the early stages of their careers.

Past recipients of the “Champion of New Music” Award include conductor Marin Alsop, retired ASCAP Vice President of Concert Music Frances Richard, percussionist Steven Schick (all 2014), the JACK Quartet (2012), eighth blackbird (2011), Bill Ryan and the Grand Valley State University New Music Ensemble (2010), Osmo Vänskä and the Minnesota Orchestra, Philip Brunelle and VocalEssence (both 2009), Bruce Carlson and The Schubert Club (2007), Dale Warland and the Dale Warland Singers (2006), and Cindy Gehrig and the Jerome Foundation (2005).

(—from the press release)

2015 New Music Bake Sale Line-Up Announced

Posted on February 10, 2015 by Kevin Clark - Headlines

The New Music Bake Sale has been a staple of both New York City’s new music community and of cookies, brownies, and the occasional dumpling, for more than five years. This year’s event is taking place on March 15 from 4-11 p.m. at Roulette. Tickets are $10, and inside you can visit the tables of dozens of ensembles and organizations, hear their music on a playlist throughout the event, and eat their baked goods.

The event has become a real tradition, and provides a real hub through which new and established members of the new music community can connect. That’s why this year New Music USA is proud to be once again the lead sponsor of the New Music Bake Sale.

Every hour, on the hour, live performances will happen on Roulette’s stage:

4PM	andPlay
5PM	Eleonore Oppenheim
6PM	thingNY
7PM	C4: The Choral Composer/Conductor Collective
8PM	Anti-Depressant: Kathleen Supové and Jennifer Choi
9PM	Tigue
10PM	The Knells

Can’t make it in person? The Bake Sale has made a Soundcloud playlist of music from the performers selling baked goods during the event. As more music comes in, more tracks will be added to the playlist through the date of the Bake Sale itself:

For more information, visit newmusicbakesale.org.

Come Away – Ezra Sims (1928-2015)

Posted on February 9, 2015 by Theodore Mook - Headlines, Ledes

At around 9:30 at night on January 30, Ezra Sims passed away in his sleep, lovely and soothing (as the Whitman goes), after a heroic struggle against the infirmities that had plagued him for the past few years. His frustration was palpable, his suffering devastating, but still, I couldn’t help but snicker when he would complain to his doctors about his failing mind—which, even at what he felt was diminished capacity, could pull the first sentence verbatim from a book he’d read 15 years earlier. Or remember a theme from a Schumann Symphony or the graceful nuance of a particular turn of line or phrase from, well, just about anything. I always felt like I should have an encyclopedia and a dictionary handy when I talked to Ezra, but it would have taken a staff of ten to keep up with him.

The Sextet (1981) was the first Sims piece I played: a Dinosaur Annex performance in the Spring of 1982, with Janet Packer, Anne Black, Ian Greitzer, Ken Radnofsky, and Tom Haunton. During one of the rehearsals, once I lifted my head up enough to hear what was going on around me, I discovered this was no mere new music piece, as Ezra would say, but a turmoil: churning, vital, sensual, bouyant, joyful, painful—life itself, in sound. This new music seemed to fill its lungs with the same air I did, and changed my circuitry forever.

Only where love and need are one,
and the work is play for mortal stakes,
Is the deed ever really done
For Heaven and the future’s sakes.
—Robert Frost, “Two Tramps in Mud Time”

His home at 1168 Mass Ave was a nexus for all of us, a place so saturated with airborne yeast (empty beer bottles) that Ezra left his dough on the kitchen counter to rise on its own. Those of us touched by the force of his personality and culture rose as well, lovingly—not always very gently—mentored by this fussy, brilliant man. He touched us all and he kept in touch with everyone: piles of letters written in his heavy hand signed with his graceful initials (the same which adorned his gorgeous handwritten scores), admonishing notes, phone calls, dinner parties, excursions to museums, more admonishing notes, long walks, mushroom hunting, New Year’s cards, lunch invitations —none of his communications ever trivial and always, in later recounting to friends, a glue which held us all together. There were some dubious soups, with mushrooms discovered on some rotting log in Cambridge which would spark conversations about John Cage, Tanglewood, Merce Cunningham, the Judson, John Herbert MacDowell, a tsunami of cultural connections—all the while wondering quietly whether or not you would live to see the next sunrise. Are you sure these mushrooms are OK?

After his move to Hurley Street, things were much the same. Ezra was amused by a neighborhood fool dog, the crazy landscape innovations next door, the abundant spring flowers, the fish place, and cockles, and we were satisfied by the musty comfort of the same old books, the art, and Ezra himself at the table In the days to come, perhaps we lost a little in the indirectness of email, the brittle replication of computer scores instead of the nuanced calligraphy of his older ones, but we were older, too, with families and jobs. The world changed: a harsher, glancing light that grates against the Turner-esque glow of Ezra’s harmonies. Not so much dissonant as nostalgic, mourning the loss of a civility that now seems archaic rather than heroic.

Ezra leaves us each with set of quotes. On the occasion of peeling off his sarong at a dinner gathering: “I hope no one minds a naked host.” On the occasion of being served brown rice at a Japanese restaurant: “Had I known it was that sort of place, I shan’t have come.” At a rehearsal of Lee Hyla’s String Trio at his house, popping his head in the door: “That intonation will not leave this house!” While he was reviewing recording takes, the successive phone calls: “How could you?”, “What on earth happened? How could you?”, “What happened?” He worried about us, gossiped about us, complained, criticized, corrected, and over time for me, became a refuge.

All of the characters from one of Ezra’s favorite books, Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons—Feckless the cow, the spooky aunt, the oversexed farm boy Seth, the crazy preacher father who takes off to spread the word (“you miserable, crawling worms….”)— have counterparts in Ezra’s Birmingham childhood. No, not an exact match to the Sims family, but outrageous overtones which made the description of his Birmingham life more vivid, like the music he would come to write years later. His boyhood cow, an “improving” aunt (in that she was bent on raising the cultural standards of those around her), preacher-grandfather AJ Sims, Sister (always Sister, I don’t think I ever knew her name), and the youthful Ezra—bass player, guzzling milk out of the pail, the passionate discoverer of Stravinsky in the local record shop—all fashioned the deep Southern gentility, culinary habits (salt in the coffee?), food preferences (How much milk does he drink? Salt in the coffee? Really?), embedded into the Ezra we grew to love. Together with his friend Arthur, lapping up the pot liquor, feeding the iron pig, savoring the overcooked greens, and exuding an erudite southern poise which, however scandalous the conversation, was expressed with an eloquence that made our young Yankee sensibilities seem cold, lumpy, and crude. And though they knew the difference between Dutch and Polish rudders, the unexpressed secret was all the funnier.

Ezra’s early musical experiences—playing the bass in the school orchestra (because he was big for his age), singing in the chorus—may have taught him his harmonic subtlety, but I’m inclined to be more mystical. He went from Birmingham, through steel mills, Chinese language school, Yale, Mills, and New York encountering a cast of characters and circumstances powerful enough to derail even the most individual soul. But he ultimately came to a place so uniquely his own that it has no siblings, no cousins, no counterparts. His ear made the demands, and once he found the sound his ears sought, he drew the map for us to retrace his steps back to the music traditions he loved. He was not an iconoclast, but a logical evolutionist, who ironically arrived at his destination by a leap of faith.

He did not compromise, and went for years without a performance. It was not easy to find performers willing to undertake the work, but by some miraculous alchemy, Rodney Lister, Scott Wheeler, Toby Armour, Richard Pittman, Boston Music Viva, Ian Greitzer, Janet Packer, Kathy Matasy, Ann Black Diane Heffner—and the loyal cohorts they spawned—brought Ezra’s music to life. And not just the notes, but the music underneath, with its radiance and warmth. Despite his crankiness, and the harshly direct statements he could make, we celebrated his steadfast individuality and his courage. And if we couldn’t quite create our own universe like he did, he inspired us to try. He is a center, a focus, a force of gravity, and will always be so.

But we will miss him.

2015 ASCAP Herb Alpert Young Jazz Composer Awards Announced

Posted on February 6, 2015 by NewMusicBox Staff - Headlines, Ledes

ASCAP Foundation President Paul Williams has announced the recipients of the 2015 Herb Alpert Young Jazz Composer Awards. Established by The ASCAP Foundation in 2002 to encourage gifted jazz composers up to the age of 30, in 2012 the program was named in honor of composer, arranger and record producer Herb Alpert in recognition of The Herb Alpert Foundation’s multi-year financial commitment to support this unique program. The 26 recipients, who receive cash awards, range in age from 16 to 30, and are selected through a juried national competition. An additional three recipients received an honorable mention. The Herb Alpert Young Jazz Composer Award Winners will be honored during ASCAP’s Jazz Wall of Fame event at ASCAP at a date to be announced.

The 2015 Herb Alpert Young Jazz Composer Award recipients are listed with their age, current residence and place of origin:

Caio Afiune, 25 of Boston, MA (São Paulo. Brazil)
Quentin Angus, age 27 of New York, NY (Mount Pleasant, Australia)
Bryson Barnes, age 29 of New York, NY (Fairbanks, AK)
Bryn Bliska, age 22 of Cambridge, MA (Greenbrae, CA)
Lorenzo Carrano, age 27 of South Miami, FL (Naples, Italy)
Mike Conrad, age 26 of Waterloo, IA (Arlington Heights, IL)
Rafael Piccolotto de Lima, age 29 of Miami, FL (São Paulo. Brazil)
Nick Finzer, age 26 of New York, NY (Rochester, NY)
Jon Hatamiya, age 23 of Los Angeles, CA (Davis, CA)
Josh Johnson, age 25 of Los Angeles, CA (Takoma Park, MD)
Gene Knific, age 22 of Kalamazoo, MI
Pascal Le Boeuf, age 28 of New York, NY (Santa Cruz, CA)
Guy Mintus, age 23 of New York, NY (Hod Hasharon, Israel)
Adam Neely, age 26 of Brooklyn, NY (Silver Spring, MD)
Mark Ninmer, age 16 of Taylorville, IL
Scott Ninmer, age 26 of Alexandria, VA (Taylorville, IL)
Christopher Ott, age 27 of Brooklyn, NY (Kettering, OH)
Josh Plotner, age 22 of Boston, MA (Park Ridge, IL)
John Raymond, age 29 of Brooklyn, NY (Minneapolis, MN)
Michael Schreier, age 23 of Greeley, CO (Omaha, NE)
Erica Seguine, age 27 of Bloomfield, NJ (Albany, NY)
Jeremy Siskind, age 28 of Kalamazoo, MI (Santa Ana, CA)
David von Kampen, age 28 of Lincoln, NE (Farmington Hills, MI)
Marcus Wilcher, age 30 of Austin, TX (Los Angeles, CA)
Zac Zinger, age 26 of Woodside, NY (Pittsburgh, PA)
Christopher Zuar, age 27 of New York, NY

Composers receiving Honorable Mention this year are: Colleen Clark, age 26 of New York, NY (Norwich, CT); ArcoIris Sandoval, age 27 of New York, NY (Tucson, AZ); Drew Zaremba, age 23 of Denton, TX (Little Rock, AR). The ASCAP composer/judges for the 2015 competition were: Chuck Iwanusa, Ted Piltzecker, and Sachal Vasandani. Additional funding for this program is provided by The ASCAP Foundation Bart Howard Fund.

(—from the press release)

Digital to Analog: Poems and Histories

Posted on February 4, 2015 by Matthew Guerrieri - Field Reports, Headlines

[Richard Monckton] Milnes brought [Thomas] Carlyle to the railway, and showed him the departing train. Carlyle looked at it and then said, “These are our poems, Milnes.” Milnes ought to have answered, “Aye, and our histories, Carlyle.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals

At the height of the Iraq War, the United States Department of Defense spent over three billion dollars a year to neutralize technology I carry in my pocket. That was, at one time, the annual budget for the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization (JIEDDO), formed in 2006 as a clearinghouse for Pentagon and private contractor efforts to jam the electronic signals that were being used to trigger the IEDs that were causing the majority of U.S. casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan. (And JIEDDO represented only a portion of the expense.) One of the more common sources of such signals were, and remain, cell phones. A couple of wires, some explosive material, some screws or other bits of metal, and my phone—or yours—can be made into a shrapnel-filled bomb.

***

I’m going to guess that improvised explosive devices were not on Andrew Pekler’s mind when he conceived his 2013 installation The Prepaid Piano. Pekler—a USSR-born, California-raised, Berlin-residing electronic-music polymath—put five mobile phones, each set to vibrate, directly on the strings of a grand piano, in five different places. Audience members were then free to call any of the phones, either from their own phones or from phones provided in the hall; contact microphones on the piano’s soundboard then passed the vibrations over to a modular synthesizer, which looped and altered the sounds, the loops changing with the proliferation of incoming calls, while more direct interventions—knocking the case, plucking the strings—provided their own cycles of punctuation.

As documented on the 2014 LP The Prepaid Piano & Replayed (co-released by the UK-based Entr’acte and the Italy-based Senufo Editions), the result is more extremely sophisticated lark (in the John-Cage-as-trickster-sensei spirit of the punning title) than ripped-from-the-headlines commentary. The amplified sounds crackle, pop, and metallically purr; the synthesis ropes it all into a loping grind. It’s engagingly textured, fun, maybe a little melancholy in its slow-rolling machinery, but still a long way from any evocation of the more violent technologies that rend the world on a daily basis. But consider the elements of The Prepaid Piano: cell phones, wires, screws, electricity.

The trope of regarding technological advances—particularly those that enable or shape connections among people—as inherently insidious is so ingrained that it’s almost reflexive at this point. But all technology is both useful and dangerous, with human behavior tipping that balance to one side or another. Usefulness usually wins out: the more convenient a technology is, the more risk we’re liable to accept in adopting it. Cell phones embody that—they’re so useful that it’s hard to remember (or imagine) what life was like before they were prevalent; but, then again, they’re damaging enough that people inevitably wonder whether that previous life wasn’t, in fact, better.

Cell phone technology is particularly notable because the most crucial part of it—the cellular network itself—is completely unseen. You’d be hard-pressed to design a better allegory for the good/bad potential of technological advance than the cellular network. It is ubiquitous and invisible. It holds the potential for a connection to the world and a harsh, bloody severance from it. And it is everywhere, all around us, all the time.

* * *

On January 17, pianist Vicky Chow gave a recital at Northeastern University’s Fenway Center. Chow is best known as the pianist for the Bang on a Can All-Stars and is a standing member of other new music groups as well. For this concert, though, most of the collaborators were virtual. Christopher Cerrone’s Hoyt-Schermerhorn, for instance, a 2010 meditation sparked by a long wait for a subway train, layered in a third rail of digital processing, the upper end of the keyboard triggering glitchy, distorted echoes over a gentle, subterranean meandering of parallel tenths. Hoyt-Shermerhorn was a Boston premiere, as was Steve Reich’s Piano Counterpoint, the 1973 ensemble piece Six Pianos re-arranged (by Vincent Corver) for a solo pianist playing along to four pre-recorded tracks; Chow’s snap-tight rhythm and technique, along with the timbre—brighter than the original—re-emphasized the music’s mechanical churn (as well as its sense of a very 1970s-NYC prescribed commotion, echoing of Stephen Sondheim’s “Another Hundred People” from Company as testament to the strength of that zeitgeist).

Ronald Bruce Smith’s Piano Book was a world premiere. Smith (a Northeastern professor) pulled out most of the traditional recipes for disguising the piano’s decay—trills, scales, Debussy-like flourishes, an entire section riffing on Baroque-style ornaments—and étude-like tricks for keeping more than two registers in play with only two hands. (Chow juggled it all with flair.) But amplification and processing were present here, too, electronically stretching the piano’s resonance and pedaled sustain into thick, soft clouds of sound. It struck me that all the technology was serving a purpose similar to that of the cellular network: it was making the piano more musically convenient, expanding its palette, increasing its capability, not just disguising its quirks but electronically eliminating them.

The finale, John Zorn’s 2014 Trilogy (another Boston premiere) seemed, at first, to cast all that aside. The collaborators here were human—bassist Trevor Roy Dunn and drummer Ian Ding—and the electronic mediation was limited to the sort of basic amplification one would use for the ensemble being evoked, a standard jazz trio. But Trilogy is trickier than it seems: Chow was playing from a fully through-composed part while Dunn and Ding improvised around her, an illusion of jazz, punctiliousness and freedom blurred together, almost imperceptibly. Zorn, it turns out, was playing with technologies, too, just much older ones: musical notation and improvisation, using the one to expand the other just as the other three works on the program were used processing and playback to expand on the piano’s possibilities.

One effect of it all was to render another, rather sophisticated piece of technology largely invisible—that is, the piano itself. Pianos are complex, ingenious, immensely satisfying pieces of engineering. So are all acoustic instruments, in their own ways—decades or, in some cases, centuries of incremental improvements yielding machines of remarkable and efficient expressivity. And yet, for the better part of a century, that development has largely been frozen. The piano Chow was playing was not appreciably different from one Rachmaninoff would have played. The persistent presence of old repertoire in classical music has enshrined acoustic instruments’ virtues and limitations as equally sacred.

I can appreciate the expressive potential of preserving an instrument’s seeming imperfections—the piano’s inability to sustain a tone much past a few seconds, for example, has probably fueled as much compositional creativity over the past two hundred years as any aesthetic revolution. But, then again, that preservation has been going on for the entirety of my musical life and much longer, so of course I would find a way to get used to it. Good and/or bad, it is one of the defining characteristics of classical music now. Part of that is classical music’s great boon and burden, the weight of history: to know that the great virtuosi of the past played essentially the same instruments that we do is a powerful connection. And I would guess that’s why the dominant use of electronics in more-or-less-classical new music in the 21st century is still in tandem with the old acoustic instruments. One technology is layered over with another: strata of innovations.

***

The flip side of The Prepaid Piano & Replayed turns those layers into a palimpsest, effacing its acoustic, site-specific nature by way of Ableton Live’s audio-to-MIDI converter; the original recording, thus transformed, becomes a stream of instructions to a synthesizer. The virtual transfers enable Pekler to treat digital technology in the same, expressively-mine-the-imperfections way that generations of classical composers and performers have treated acoustic technology: the complex, noisy nature of The Prepaid Piano is, as Pekler admits, ideally designed to bring out the limitations of audio-to-MIDI. In a way, it highlights how much of the piece exists at the edge of so many less obvious musical technologies, especially those surrounding communication: composer to performer, performer to audience, audience to performer, and so forth. The Prepaid Piano & Replayed was issued as a limited edition of 300 vinyl copies—music designed around infinitely distributable wireless and digital means packaged into a rare and resolutely physical object.

For me, what Pekler’s project and Chow’s recital had in common was that they both prompted consideration of a particular feature of technology, musical technology in this case, but applicable to all technologies: the technology you notice is almost always, at the same time, pushing another technology into the unnoticed background. In that regard, technology isn’t entirely neutral, at least at first glance: the interface is always compressing the data, some information in sharper focus than other information. And I’ve found that one really fascinating question to ask myself while listening to music that utilizes technology—old technology, new technology, high technology, low technology—is this: what’s being hidden? What’s being effaced? What’s being pushed to the foreground, and what’s being pushed to the background?

In the coming months I want to explore some byways of how technology—cutting-edge or not—is being used in new music. Part of that story is already history; part of it is still, and always, being written. The quote at the top of this article, about poet Richard Monckton Milnes and historian Thomas Carlyle observing the trains, can be a bit of a guiding light. Emerson (who knew both Milnes and Carlyle) recorded it in his journals in 1842, when steam-powered rail travel was less than twenty years old. What was then Carlyle (and, in Emerson’s imagination, Milnes) offering a friendly reproach to get with the times now reads as an image of how technologies, as they become obsolete, can move entire systems of thought into a kind of limbo, passed by but still there. Humphrey Jennings, documentary filmmaker and general Renaissance man, included Emerson’s story in his extraordinary, unfinished, posthumously published anthology Pandæmonium 1660-1886: The Coming of the Machine as Seen by Contemporary Observers. Jennings commented on the passage:

It was in this year 1842 that J. C. Doppler noticed the differing pitch of train whistles—advancing and retiring—and proposed, by analogy, the Doppler effect in the spectra of certain stars.

Sounds—and music, and technologies—come and go, but even their coming and going is its own kind of testimony.

Mason Bates Appointed Kennedy Center’s First Composer-In-Residence

Posted on January 28, 2015 by NewMusicBox Staff - Headlines, Ledes

Mason Bates standing in front of a brick wall

Mason Bates. Photo by Ryan Schude, courtesy Kennedy Center

The Kennedy Center has announced that composer Mason Bates will join the Center in the 2015-2016 season as its first Composer-In-Residence. During his three-year residency, Bates will compose music across artistic genres and curate a new contemporary music series. He will also advance initiatives that use technology to educate audiences and will encourage the inclusion of local artists and DJs in performances at the Kennedy Center.

“The Kennedy Center’s astonishingly diverse programs played such a crucial role in my early education in Virginia, so it thrills me to join this great team as Composer-In-Residence,” said Mason Bates. “With its rich variety of art forms, the Kennedy Center is the perfect place for new art to impact not only the surrounding communities, but the national conversation as well.”

Planned Kennedy Center commissions over the course of Bates’s residency include works for the National Symphony Orchestra, Washington National Opera, the Fortas Chamber Music Concerts, and performances of contemporary dance. He will also be featured as a performer at many Kennedy Center performances across genres.

The new contemporary music series will present the works of living composers using Bates’s signature re-imagining of the classical music experience. His innovative ideas for integrating traditional symphonic works with new music and performing them in alternative venues have attracted large and enthusiastic crowds to new music concerts throughout the United States and abroad. More information on Bates’s work as Composer-In-Residence—including new commissions, the contemporary music series, and other performances during the 2015-2016 season—will be announced at the Kennedy Center’s season announcement in March.

(—from the press release)

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

Posted on January 23, 2015 by Frank J. Oteri - Field Reports, Headlines

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Byron playing saxophone and facing singer Carla Cook holding a microphone

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New Music USA Awards $284,250 to 62 Projects

Posted on January 22, 2015 by NewMusicBox Staff - Headlines, Ledes

New Music USA announced yesterday its third round of project grants awards, totaling $284,250 in funding to support artistic work involving a wide range of new American music. The program recognizes and supports the multiple roles composers and contemporary music practitioners play in the artistic landscape and responds to the creative spirit of collaboration between artists from multiple disciplines. The 62 awarded projects include concerts and recordings as well as dance, film, theater, opera, and more, all involving contemporary music as an essential element.

In response to feedback from artists who were surveyed last summer following the two inaugural rounds of the program, the third round grants included a special focus on requests of $3,000 and below. Approximately 65% of grants awarded were in this category. The next round of project grants will open for requests in March 2015, and decisions will be announced in June 2015.

To learn more, visit New Music USA.

Meeting of New Music Minds at SF Gathering

Posted on January 22, 2015 by NewMusicBox Staff - Field Reports, Headlines

Composer-musician speed dating. Photo by Shaya Lyon.

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

Rob Deemer

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

Claire Chase in performance at the Gathering
Photo by Tina Tallon

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

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

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

Isaac Schankler

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

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

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

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

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

Shaya Lyon

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nat Evans

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

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

Garrett Schumann

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

Judah Adashi

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on January 20, 2015 by Ellen McSweeney - Field Reports, Headlines

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How I despise the celebrity poet!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ellen McSweeney

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