Category: Field Reports

Bang on a Can Marathon 2013 Live Blog

Posted on June 16, 2013 by - Field Reports, Headlines

ng on a Can Tubas
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Ready for nine hours of new music? For those who can’t be in the crowd for the 2013 Bang on a Can Marathon in New York City on Sunday, June 16 (Michael Schimmel Center for the Arts @ Pace University), we’ve embedded intrepid NMBx columnist Rob Deemer to keep you apprised of the goings on. So get ready, get set…
12:59. One minute to go and the audience is still filing into the hall here. Christina Jensen explained that, while normally the Marathon would be held at the World Financial Center, that venue is currently under contruction. The Schimmel Center at Pace University is an excellent venue – I saw David T. Little’s performance of his Soldier’s Songs earlier this year and it works great for both acoustic & amplified genres. I’ll be curious how the traditional setting affects the feel of the Marathon throughout the day – if you have questions or comments, please leave them below! 
1:19. The Marathon kicks off with Alarm Will Sound performing “El Dude”, the first movement from Derek Bermel’s Canzonas Americanas. This is my first time hearing AWS live, so check one more item off that particular bucket list! The ensemble is tight as they maneuver through Bermel’s serpentine counterpoint and backbeats; while it doesn’t swing per se, it comes mighty close at points. The luscious harmonies are well-orchestrated throughout the ensemble and overall the performers seemed to enjoy chewing into this piece. Acoustics have always been tricky with these concerts in the past – this performance was balanced well on stage, from my bearing, but some of the strings and other instruments are being amplified while others aren’t, which makes for a slightly off-kilter experience from the audience.

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Alarm Will Sound
(Photo by Thomas Deneuville and used with permission)

1:28. Alarm Will Sound continues with a work by Minnesota-based composer Jeffrey Brooks entitled After The Treewatcher. I’m not sure if it’s the particular way this piece is textured (it’s much thicker overall than Bermel’s with synths and electric guitar prevalent throughout), but the balance issue seems to be fixed. Brooks’ work is big and brash – very tasty piece!

1:38. In a complete contrast to AWS’s two big pieces, trumpeter Peter Evans comes out to perform a solo work of his own. Performing into a microphone, the virtuosic skitterings slowly morphed into a distorted sound mass…I’m not sure what kind of electronics are being used from the back of the hall (if there’s no electronics on this, then color me gobsmacked), but the performance as whole is very effective. Whispering in jazz-tinged lines that don’t ever seem to settle in one direction or another, Evans builds into something that could only be described as an Arban etude from hell. Scary chops and supremely musical performance.
1:51. Both Bang on a Can and Alarm Will Sound have been active in cultivating emerging composer talents – BOAC with their Summer Festival at MASS MOCA and AWS at the Mizzou New Music Festival at the University of Missouri – and the next piece has connections to them both. British composer Charlie Piper has attended both festivals and wrote Zoetrope for Alarm Will Sound last year. With its emphasis on cross-rhythms, insistent pulse, and fanciful colors, this piece is definitely within the BOAC oeuvre, but Piper’s use of light textures and transparent textures makes it stand out.
1:53. Christina Jennings just handed me a URL that you’ll want to check out: www.ustream.tv/channel/littledogtv – this will be in tandem with an upcoming piece by Lukas Ligeti!
2:07. Conductor and Artistic Director Alan Pierson announced from the stage that Caleb Burhans, one of the ensemble’s core members and composer of the next piece, got into a pretty serious accident last night after AWS performed an all-Burhans concert at Le Poisson Rouge last night. With hopes that he recovers fully, they lay into Caleb’s o ye of little faith…(do you know where your children are?) with conviction. o ye… relies less on constant pulse (though it is never missing) and more on slowly-evolving chordal gestures that build to a rumbling crescendo.
2:08. UPDATE: The link above will be a livestream of the Ligeti piece in a few moments…there will be a handful of performances that will be livestreamed today. Stay tuned!
2:16. As I mentioned before, the feel of this Marathon is pretty different – not bad, just different – than the previous ones in the Financial Center. The pace seems to be much quicker between pieces and you see less of the relaxed atmosphere than in the mall-like venue across town…again, no criticism, just an observation. I’ve wondered how well these concert Marathons would connect in a more traditional, enclosed space – time will tell.
2:36. Lukas Ligeti has been exploring the music of African and incorporating its concepts into his music for quite some time now and his new work for two drumsets, Iakoni in kazonnde, is a very impressive example of this integration. Inspired by Ghanian agogo bell traditions, Ligeti pits one drumset against another with intricate cross-rhythms overlaying on top of one another. It’s not as flashy as one might expect a double drumset piece to be, but infinitely more interesting.
2:48. Proof that the rock band/chamber music combination is not just an American concept, Cabaret Contemporain seems to have picked up the idea and ran with it in their homeland of France. They’ll be starting in just a few minutes…

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Cabaret Contemporain
(Photo by Thomas Deneuville and used with permission)

3:05. Wow – wasn’t expecting that. Not sure what I was expecting, but I’m liking it nonetheless. I’ve seen BOAC have DJ’s perform during past Marathons and this performance reminded of that – except it’s a live group with keyboards, electric guitar, drumset and two upright basses (though one had to leave the stage due to technical difficulties beyond his control only to emerge minute later to the delight of the audience). Not very subtle – it wasn’t meant to be – but quite satisfying in a visceral way. Their attention to timbre, balance, and texture is pretty impressive – it’s not often you see a bass player playing beneath the bridge and a pianist playing inside the piano while a guitarist and drumset lays down a complex techno beat. If you haven’t heard of this group – now’s the time.
3:32. After the first of several pauses, the Brooklyn Youth Chorus performs two new works, the first one, Before the Words, is an a cappella work by Shara Worden (she of My Brightest Diamond). Joyous in nature, Shara’s first foray into choral repertoire is deceptively challenging for the choir, but the young singers do a wonderful job of executing the interlocking textures – kudos to the two solo singers who came out front! All of these singers seem about 12-15 in age…really glad to see composers working with younger performers in such a high-profile context.
3:40. The 45-member choir is now being joined by a string quartet and piano to perform Nico Muhly’s Respect of a Storm. This piece pushed the envelope in different directions than Worden’s and didn’t fare as well…the textures seemed blurred at times and while the string quartet didn’t get in the way, it didn’t seem necessary either. The Chorus’ performance was solid, however, and one hopes that more choirs take this group as a model for working with new literature and living composers.

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NYUSTEEL w/ NYU Contemporary Music Ensemble
(Photo by Thomas Deneuville and used with permission)

4:10. From Michael Gordon’s comments, Kendall Williams’ Conception is the first instance of a steel band – in this case NYUSTEEL along with the NYU Contemporary Music Ensemble) – that they’ve had at a BOAC Marathon. The work combines a six-piece steel pan ensemble with a 10-piece mixed chamber ensemble and the result is quite good – I’d be curious to hear what it sounded without the amplification (which made sections almost unbearably loud from my perch in the balcony). Williams mentioned that he’s played steel pan for over 20 years and is a graduate of NYU, so he knew the group well and wrote a damn fine piece for them.
4:19. You’ll probably notice that I mention the use of pulse, repetition, ostinati, etc. a lot today…I’m gonna stay away from labels, but safe to say we are at the Bang on a Can Marathon, so there are several threads that tend to run through much of the repertoire  during the day that I’ll try to explore as we go along.
4:33. One of the  characteristics of the BOAC Marathons are their penchant for sudden stylistic “left turns”, and we’ve just took one. Yungchen Lhamo and Anton Batagov (voice & piano respectively) are performing two works (entitled White Palace and Medicine Buddha) that are much more relaxed and tranquil than anything else we’ve heard so far. Batagov’s effective accompaniment serves as an undulating foundation upon which Lhamo meanders utilizing the vocal techniques she learned in her native Tibet. It is mysterious at times, listless at others, and ethereal throughout.

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Brooklyn Youth Chorus and TILT Brass
(photo by Thomas Deneuville and used with permission)

4:58. The Brooklyn Youth Chorus returns to the stage along with members of the NYC-based TILT brass ensemble for Astral Epitaphs, a work John King composed for the final performances of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company at the Park Avenue Armory two years ago. From what I can tell, the work is completely aleatoric, with each instrument and the choir being picked up by microphones that are being fed into a computer and relayed back through spatial speakers throughout the room with various elctro-acoustic transformations. With an array of 45 singers in a half-circle around the stage and three trumpets and three trombones lined up in front, the work is as visually stunning as it is aurally. I can imagine this piece was scheduled before the move to the Pace Center was necessary – the effect in the Financial Center’s Winter Garden would not be quite so harsh at points and more expansive in others…but overall the impact of the piece was very strong, especially as the choir began to sing in (relative) unison at the conclusion.
5:20. In-yo-face duo Talk Normal is about half-way through their set of three pieces…I’ll talk more about the music in a sec, but I’d like to point out that we’re sitting in a 700-seat theatre and not a stadium…I have the utmost respect for viscerality in performances, but I also like my eardrums. Taking the risk of sounding like an old man – it’s a little too loud. Just a touch. UPDATE: Ok, rant over. Talk Normal was actually quite inventive in their concept – they obviously wanted to make an impact with the audience and they most certainly achieved that.

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Asphalt Orchestra
(photo by Thomas Deneuville and used with permission)

5:30.  It wouldn’t be a BOAC Marathon without the Asphalt Orchestra bringing their front line attitude bear. As the only new music marching band, they really do have a vast latitude with which to push & pull their repertoire. Today they’re  playing arrangements of several Pixies tunes arranged by the members of the ensemble as a sneak peek of their concert next week at Lincoln Center. Ken Thomson in particular is on fire during this set and Ken Bentley stands out in a great way on sousaphone.
5:54. Going on five hours planted in one spot…luckily I’m being easily distracted by the beautiful solo violin performance of Monica Germino. More soon…
6:07. I’ve seen a fair helping of works for solo instrument and electronics, but Julia Wolfe’s With a blue dress on may be my new favorite…a major work for solo violin (expecting the violinist to sing) along with looping and other digital effects based off of the folk tune “Pretty Little Girl with the Blue Dress On”. Germino was awe-inspiring in her performance of the work and the sound design by Frank van der Weii was just right…definitely one of the highlights of the concert so far.
The next work is Schnee by Hans Abrahamsen performed by the Talea Ensemble…Michael Gordon just warned us that it was an hour long and suggested those of us who have been here for a while might want to use the opportunity to grab a bite. I shall do just that…

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Talea Ensemble
(Photo by Thomas Deneuville and used with permission)

7:38. Alright – just was able to grab some dinner with Alexandra Gardner, so we’re both much more with it (6 hours in one place is a long time). I’d like to take this opportunity to give special props to Thomas Deneuville, the force of nature behind the online new music magazine I Care If You Listen. This is the second year that Thomas and I have sat next to each other as we live-blogged our way through the Marathon and while I was able to offer my power strip for his equipment, he’s been nice enough to share his photos of the concert (which are much better than anything I can get with my iPhone). When you get a chance, check out ICIYL!
7:45. A newcomer on the NYC new music scene, Hotel Elefant makes their debut performance on the BOAC Marathon by performing Angélica Negrôn’s trio for flute, viola/mandolin, and harp,  Drawings for Meyoko. Audacious, since the work was composed for another not-ancient ensemble – the Janus Trio – but also because the ensemble is so much bigger than this trio. Made up of 20 performers from NYC, Hotel Elefant is one of many new groups combining strong performers with an entrepreneurial mindset. It was a pleasure for me to hear the work, since I was already familiar with it from the Janus Trio’s recording and it’s so rare that we get to hear new works performed by more than one ensemble. The three performers, Domenica Fossati (alto flute), Andie Tanning Springer (viola and mandolin), and Kathryn Andrews (harp), were equally audacious and unafraid in the face of technical difficulties when they abruptly and calmly stopped the performance because they had lost their click track. A few minutes later and the second try came across quite strongly…Negrôn’s delicate electronics and intricate writing is top-notch and the trio performed beautifully in the face of adversity.
8:12. BOAC was nice enough to bring back the French quintet Cabaret Contemporain for a second set and while I think this set is even stronger than the first one (which was pretty amazing), it’s still a little disjunct to hear a group playing music that seems to scream to be danced to in front of 600+ audience members sitting there politely. Not a criticism, but an interesting observation…not sure what to make of it.

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Bang on a Can All-Stars with Shara Worden
(Photo by Thomas Deneuville and used with permission)

8:56. Almost eight hours in and the Bang on a Can All-Stars with their newest member, Ken Thomson, on clarinet and guest vocalist Shara Worden, have taken the stage. Introducing the next work is the composer, David Lang, as he describes his process of scanning through all of Schubert’s vocal works to find instances of Death being portrayed as a sentient being speaking about the afterlife, organizing them into a sensible order and setting them for the All-Stars. As with many of Lang’s other works, each section within the work seems to have one primary mood and texture with subtle changes shifting constantly. Worden’s voice is hauntingly beautiful in this context and the timbre of her voice soon becomes necessary – even a requirement – to make the full impact of the work come through – it’s hard to imagine anyone else supplying so much character while hewing to a narrowly limited melodic range. The ensemble as a whole gels effortlessly with no one sticking out or fading into the woodwork.

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Maya Beiser with the Provenance Project Band
(Photo by Thomas Deneuville and used with permission)

9:46. After taking a quick break to wish my dad “Happy Father’s Day” (hi, Dad!), I got back in time to hear cellist Maya Beiser perform Tamar Muskal’s Mar de Leche with the Provenance Project Band. Beiser sang magnificently through Muskal’s Arab-infused melodies while her compatriots on oud and hand drums all demonstrated their mastery on their instruments throughout the work. Beiser, more than almost anyone performing today, demonstrates a persona and an energy onstage that is difficult to define but definitely becomes an important part of not only her playing but of the work itself.
10:16. Blown away by the All-Stars’ performance of Annea Lockwood’s Vortex – great to hear the new version of the group with Ken going freakin’ nuts on bass clarinet. It’s been 10 hours since I got here and as much as I want to suck the marrow out of this bone to the very end, I am cashed out. I hope you’ve enjoyed my musings throughout the day and hope you get to come experience the Marathon at some point soon yourself.

Composing in the Wilderness

Posted on May 31, 2013 by - Field Reports, Headlines

Composers in the wild
Ah, summer; the time when composers emerge from studios around the country—pasty and back-bent, one hand up to block the sun—and get their annual vitamin D supplement at a variety of summer festivals, conferences, residencies, and retreats. Intensive discussions of the nature of their art are followed by the occasional Frisbee toss or trail stroll, but beyond the potential for a thrown-out back while spreading a sheet out on the ground pre-concert, the potential for physical exertion is modest at best. And frankly, donning a T-shirt, sandals, and a fanny pack does not an outdoorsman make. Just ask Stephen Lias.

Lias has a touch of wanderlust. A professor of composition and director of graduate studies at Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches, Texas, he spends the bulk of his year shepherding students through the wilds of academia. But when summer rolls around, he makes his way out of the halls and into the world. Over the last few years, he’s spent his summers in residence at a number of national parks—including Rocky Mountain, Denali, Glacier Bay, and Gates of the Arctic—composing works that have been premiered at major international conferences and festivals in Colorado, Texas, Sydney, and Taiwan. He was featured in National Parks magazine in the fall of 2011 for his efforts and is presently working with the East Texas Symphony and the Boulder Symphony to premiere upcoming pieces about national parks. Taking a page from the “Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life” book, Lias has figured out a way to combine his love of composition and pedagogy with his love of trail-blazing and bear-dodging with his Composing in the Wilderness project.

Davyd Betchkal talks about sound with the composers

Davyd Betchkal talks about sound with the composers

In the summer of 2012, Lias found a way to involve other composers in his nature explorations, organizing a field seminar in Alaska’s Denali National Park and at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, which culminated in performances at the Fairbanks Summer Arts Festival. Nine composers who came from as far as Australia were transported from a dorm at the university to the Teklanika Field Camp deep within the park. This camp served as a hub for a number of excursions during which the composers not only passively soaked up the surroundings but learned a great deal about the geography, wildlife, and sounds of the area. They were joined by park guide Margi Dashevsky (described by composer Stephen Wood as “our adventurer/environmentalist/protector/mother”) and Denali soundscape scientist and researcher Davyd Betchkal. Betchkal’s activities in Denali were of particular interest to the participants. His position involves the study of the acoustics of the environment via direct observation as well as through the use of recording stations placed around the park in mountains, glaciers, valleys, bogs…everywhere. He takes the data and uses it to draw conclusions about the experience that people will have in the park, as well as how the sounds made by those visitors impact the park itself.

As Wood later explained, “He took us into the field and talked to us about how to analyze the sound…how to draw from the collage of sound and isolate individual regions in terms of specific characteristics and how to develop an understanding of how they work in terms of ADSR [1]. It had a huge impact and made me more aware of what was going instead of simply being overwhelmed by the volume of sound. I’m now actively going into nature and drawing inspiration from it.”

Stephen Wood checks out the soundscape

Stephen Wood checks out the soundscape

While not required to write “about” their surroundings, the composers took inspiration from these treks and many wrote music which spoke to their experiences. Each day in the field included approximately one hour of composing time followed by a return to the campsite. Simple but functional tent-cabins with wood floors, knee walls, and canvas tops welcomed the composers after a long day of hiking. A large yurt housed the dining facility, and an outhouse latrine was “more than adequate.”

As with other summer festivals, rehearsals and performances of the works are part of the deal, but in this case the pieces which were performed were those written during the relatively brief time out in the wild. The compositions were then premiered by members of the Fairbanks Summer Arts Festival Orchestra at the Davis Concert Hall in Fairbanks. Each composer was pre-assigned a chamber ensemble, ensuring that the festival’s resources were evenly distributed among the composers. Once the group returned to Fairbanks, they had less than 24 hours to prepare their scores and parts for their respective ensembles, and each ensemble only had a handful of rehearsals totaling a few hours to prepare the works for performance. Said Wood, “I had two 30-minute rehearsals for my piece, but you’d never know it. The musicians were amazing. Many of them played on more than one piece (not to mention their other festival responsibilities) but the level was very high.” Among the participating artists was the ensemble-in-residence Red Shift, which includes Fairbanks native Andie Springer.

Red Shift rehearses a festival work

Red Shift rehearses a festival work

The field seminar will be offered again this summer through Alaska Geographic. Following four days in Denali, the composers will then spend another four days in the Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve ruminating on their Denali experiences and composing works to be rehearsed and performed on the final day of the festival. Though only in its second year, Lias is optimistic about the future. “This convergence of creative artists who are outdoors-minded has the potential to bring together two very different types of people, but also to generate new streams of musical thought.  As a result of last year’s Composing in the Wilderness, we saw a new contemporary jazz group called Chlorophyll created in the Atlanta area, and more national parks are opening their residency programs to composers and finding ways of featuring these new compositions through their interpretive programs.” Along those lines, Wood has taken his experiences in Alaska to heart. Since last summer, he has spent time focused on the flora surrounding the Atlanta area, and will be presenting a concert with his recent oboe quartet diammorpha smallii, based on the plant of the same name, as the central piece. He is also returning to Alaska this year for another round.

1. ADSR is short for “Attack, Decay, Sustain, Release,” which are the four elements of a waveform.

New England’s Prospect: Twistin’ the Night Away

Posted on May 29, 2013 by - Field Reports, Headlines

Folio from Jâmi al-Siyar by Mohammad Tahir Suhravardî, illustrating the meeting of Mavlana and Molla Shams al-Din in Konya

Folio from Jâmi al-Siyar by Mohammad Tahir Suhravardî, illustrating the meeting of Mavlana and Molla Shams al-Din in Konya
Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

If operas are rituals, Guerrilla Opera gives the rituals a good old-fashioned Boston tryout. Adam Roberts’s Giver of Light, given its first performance on May 23 at the Boston Conservatory’s Zack Box Theater, is the eighth opera the group has commissioned and premiered since 2008. The offerings—compact-sized repertoire, small casts, chamber-sized orchestration, intimate dimensions—are an interesting intersection of scrappy and polished: consistently excellent singing and playing in an atmosphere that often seems to emphasize little theater, “Let’s put on a show!” qualities. The group (led by percussionist Mike Williams and composer Rudolf Rojahn) is all about getting new operas into the world, conscientious productions with cheap tickets (and, as of recently—and of particular benefit to a reviewer who arrived late because of Red Sox traffic—streaming broadcasts over the internet). Guerrilla Opera’s own ritual is one of DIY empowerment. New opera? Just do it.
It was a nice parallel, then, that Giver of Light put ritual itself at its center, and, perhaps, that was the reason that the ritual was the most compelling part of the work. The opera presents a modern translation of the relationship between the Sufi scholar Rumi and Shams-i-Tabrīzī; Rumi’s meeting with Shams led to a short but intense relationship that inspired Rumi’s turn towards poetry and ascetic mysticism. In Roberts’s libretto, Rumi becomes John (Johan Budris), enrolled in the American Dream quadrivium of house, wife (Aliana de la Guardia), kid (Jennifer Ashe), and job; Shams becomes Darren (Brian Church), the new school bus driver, who becomes John’s unlikely/inevitable soulmate. (Whether or not the relationship has a sexual component is—much like Rumi’s own writings and the historical record—left vague, though the suspicion is explicitly mentioned.)

The setting was “the American Midwest”—and it was quite clearly not an actual American Midwest, be that Wichita or Chicago or any of the region’s other strikingly particular locales, but the great symbolic Midwest that has become one of the go-to stand-ins for suburban ennui. Roberts, whose biography traverses a host of American landmarks (Eastman, Harvard, Tanglewood) but who is currently based in Istanbul, is out to delete the story’s historical and geographic distance. “We are more ‘connected’ than ever before and perhaps more lonely,” Roberts writes about his opera. “I can only imagine that people today must relate to Rumi’s longing for intensity.”

Sure enough, Giver of Light was most compelling at its most intense, when Darren, and then Darren and John, meditate themselves into ecstasy. An undercurrent of electronics (realized by Anıl Çamcı and manned by Rojahn) opens out into a landscape of overtone singing, as clarinet (Amy Advocat), saxophone (Kent O’Doherty), cello (Javier Caballero), and percussion (Williams) pile their lines into appropriately dervish-like whirls. Gloriously weird and sonically rich, these scenes tapped into opera at its most transporting, when the liturgy leaves behind any justification of its unrealism and simply takes off into pure musical spectacle.

The rest was diverting, but, in an odd way, almost too schematic for its own good. The characters were all archetypes, as Roberts admitted, “general enough that we may see our own reflections in them,” he wrote, but his bright outlines weren’t quite fully filled in. Roberts’s division, musically and textually, between inner and outer life—Darren and John’s rapture vs. suspiciously uncomprehending family and society—was effectively drawn but not really bridged. Shifts from one world to the other, especially as the drama telescoped and scenes commenced at an immediately heightened pitch, were jarring. Part of the point, perhaps, but it had the effect of making the non-mystic characters seem more brittle and less sympathetic. One of opera’s great magic acts is its ability to have melodrama and ritual, the worldly and the sacred, provocatively intermingle; Giver of Light achieves something of that in its first half, but then amplifies the melodrama into opposition.

There was still a lot to like: Roberts’s busy, burbling music, his clarity with vocal writing, his flexibility in changing his text setting to match the drama (the way angry characters’ words break down into stuttering, fractured babbling, for instance). Andrew Eggert’s direction told the story with a minimum of fuss; Tláloc López-Watermann’s lighting was both splashy and evocative; Julia Noulin-Mérat’s set made efficient use of pop art tropes and a great, psychedelic reveal, Rumi’s texts in black light radiance. The quartet of singers was excellent: de la Guardia an energetic, dramatic clarion, Ashe bright and clear, Budris pouring out lyrical warmth, Church giving Darren an inviting but also unsettling resonance.

Mostly, I liked the piece’s sheer risk: Giver of Light takes chances, and if not all of them pay out, still, it’s a lot better than cautiously going through the motions. It’s the sort of piece that Guerrilla Opera is made for: original and a little bit speculative, in need of realization to hone in on its identity. Opera is hard: its pace, its tone, a libretto perched between dialogue and poetry, characters that read quickly but still have texture. Composers and, in a way, the works themselves learn by doing, in production and in performance. The path to operatic enlightenment is, in both the ritualistic and utilitarian senses, practice.

New England’s Prospect: Polytropos

Posted on May 23, 2013 by - Field Reports, Headlines

Tell me, O Muse, of the generation of many devices, who wandered full many ways. I come to generalize about an entire cohort of composers, based solely—sample size be damned—on the Boston Modern Orchestra Project’s May 17 concert at Jordan Hall. A foolhardy and even dangerous venture, surely? Well, consider it, in part, payback for making me type “Gen OrcXstrated,” which is what BMOP named the program, a collision of letters that I am still not quite sure how to pronounce. (And, yes, I am fully cognizant of the irony of bitching about unorthodox orthography in a publication called NewMusicBox.) But also consider it—the generalization, not the orthography—a tribute to the curation by BMOP and Artistic Director Gil Rose, who came up with three pieces that managed to be both stylistically divergent and yet similar in enough crucial ways to make the venture worthwhile.
It should be mentioned, though, that the whole “Gen X” thing was a bit of a contrivance, given that the three composers programmed—Mason Bates (b. 1977), Huang Ruo (b. 1976), and Andrew Norman (b. 1979)—were all very much from the tail end of Generation X, and that Generation X itself—roughly defined as post-Baby Boom to 1980 or so—was always a pretty fishy confederation to begin with. It might be more useful, if only slightly, to define the concert’s composers in terms of the internet: the World Wide Web came online just as they were hitting adolescence. As it turns out, that makes for a more intriguing connection, maybe not as immediately apparent, but, in the end, more of a generational statement than birth date or musical vocabulary.

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Mason Bates

Mason Bates
Photo by Ryan Schude

The communication was awfully fluent. All three pieces were full of what Rose and BMOP do best: color and energy. The performances combined go-for-broke commitment with a groovy confidence; the pieces themselves were never boring. (The audience, however, was surprisingly thin, a symptom, perhaps, of Boston’s annual end-of-term exodus.)

Bates’s 2011 Sea-Blue Circuitry—given its New England premiere—put a lot of computer technology imagery front and center. It’s multi-platform, to begin with: originally premiered as a wind ensemble piece, here performed in full and expertly tailored orchestral costume. The posited trajectory is machine-to-nature-to-machine—a middle slow movement takes as its inspiration “Marine Snow,” the slow descent of dead organic matter to the sea floor—but the whole thing felt pretty automated. I would guess that most people only casually familiar with the term “post-minimalism” would associate it with something like Sea-Blue Circuitry: bright, looping, triadically colored thumping rhythms, in which the thump is more important than the loop. Jazz and pop references were stylized into occasional blues-scale touches; a movie music sheen was omnipresent.

Huang Ruo

Huang Ruo

Huang’s Path of Echoes: Chamber Symphony No. 1 (from 2006, another Boston premiere) couldn’t have been more different, on the surface anyway. It’s a riot of effects and extended techniques: a movement of glissandi followed by a movement of repeated notes and tremolos, a long toccata for timpani (Craig McNutt) and metallic things (Robert Schulz) leading into a finale of parts, flute and clarinet detaching and whistling through their headstocks. The collection of sounds is meant to echo across sections, sometimes closely, sometimes distantly, but the feel was of a collage, a cut-up structure, the section-based orchestration—winds and strings each moving en masse, brass and percussion punching in highlights—organized as non-stop montage.

Norman’s Play, a world premiere, dwarfed the other two in length (a forty-five-minute expanse) and ambition. (The work is the culmination of Norman’s term as BMOP’s composer-in-residence.) The title and conceit refer to computer games—the piece’s movements are labeled “Level 1,” “Level 2,” and “Level 3”—but the actual games were both organizational and semiotic in nature. It’s a front-loaded piece: the first movement a fiercely dense scrum of ideas and signals then given more stretched-out treatment in the last two sections. One idea—a slapstick crack that turns on a furious solo from a back-bench string player—proved particularly important, both in seeding the work’s formal rules (percussion punctuation spurring a sudden change in texture or idea from the rest of the ensemble) and in the finale, in which the wedge structure of the third movement is reduced to a compound ascending-descending scale portioned out, note by note, by single string players across the orchestra.

Andrew Norman

Andrew Norman

Play, for all its activity, is essentially ruminative; the first movement almost functions as a surfeit of climaxes to make up for the lack of such catharsis in the rest of the piece. “Level 2” emerged out of borderline pitch, tapped bows, fingers hammered on the fingerboard, brass players smacking their mouthpieces. It built up to an echo of the first movement (a save point, maybe), then got lost in the game: a tangle of wind counterpoint and a cloud of string glissandi, clicked on and off by the percussion. This settled into a very long string of elegiac string chords, bows inching ever closer to bridges, before another round of percussion Red Light/Green Light froze into a grand pause. “Level 3” started soft as well, with a host of those back-desk string solos, then embarked on another build, this time to a buzz of diatonic imitation (if the string chords of “Level 2” were like Morton Feldman rifling through Ralph Vaughan Williams’s effects, this came off as Aaron Copland on a caffeine bender), but, again, the music disintegrated into sparseness. The music seemed to embody something of digital life—crowded but empty. But it’s in the congruence with the other two works that one can hear just how much of its time Play really is.

***

So what are the common threads? In the first place, there’s not much melody. There’s melodic material, of course, but the lack of a really strong melodic theme among the works was notable. Bates came the closest, in the middle “Marine Snow” movement of Sea-Blue Circuitry, but what theme there was only assembled a couple of times, and what development there was consisted of disassembling it again, the better to slip back into the churn of rhythm. The rest was mainly the trading of two or three notes at a time, occasionally four. Play was similar—even when the wedge theme of the final movement emerged in extended, monophonic form, the feel was much more that of a concluding formal schematic than of a melodic line with a tension and release of its own. Path of Echoes had instances of melody—a short brass call in its central movement combined with the violins to make a divertingly woozy call to arms—but, tellingly, when it came back as an echo, it had been translated into semi-pitched percussion. It’s indicative of the continuing reign of musical process that started with serialism and continued through minimalism: the manipulation of the content is as important, if not more important, than the content itself. The long-line melodic foreground is gone; the quick-fire interplay of melodic cells is prevalent.

That kind of local interaction stretched and manipulated into chunks of music speaks to what seems a strong influence on all the music: that of the soundtrack, be it film, television, or video game. It’s not so much the style—though Sea-Blue Circuitry definitely displays a certain John Williams tinta—but rather the construction: a given musical mood filling up a given stretch of time. In every piece, the sense of boxes, of solid-color shapes, of timestamps was strong. The large-scale organization is by block and module.

Combine those two features—the atomization of melody and the modular approach to musical time—and there’s an implication about form that really gets at how the pieces all work. The formal surface of all three pieces tends toward simple trajectories, one texture gradually giving way to another texture, sometimes by incremental change, more often by a crescendo-decrescendo of cross-cutting. All musical forms do something like this, but the difference is in the amount of dramatic space required. Compare good old sonata-allegro form, for instance: because the formal components are self-contained themes and (relatively, at least) closely related tonal centers, the formal dialectic can play out over a much more circumscribed space and style—long-line melodies, for instance, can be easily distinguished from each other even without a lot of variation in mood, speed, or tonality. But if the melodic material remains largely at the cell level, the larger units, the ones that will act out the dialectic, need more variation to be perceived as formal components.  In order for their formal ideas to unfold in an intelligible way, the blocks that Bates, Huang, and Norman build up out of fragments—the segments of time they fill up—have to be highly contrasted. Which they are: in all three pieces, the contrasts were stark: fast and slow, bright and dark, loud and soft, dense and sparse, active and static.
And, suddenly, there it is: life in the early 21st century—in which the act of filling ever-longer stretches of time with ever-smaller bits of information creates ever-greater polarization. That is a shift in the discourse, one more significant than styles or schools or generational demographics. For all their variance, both within and without, the three composers on Friday’s concert, wittingly or not, have taken that shift and made music out of it. It’s music for a world of blocks and divisions, of memes and samples, of the machinery of spin centrifugating to extremes. It’s the soundtrack of a society that never makes it home, but instead just keeps sailing back and forth between Scylla and Charybdis.

Different Spaces: Erewhon and Fusion

Posted on May 16, 2013 by - Field Reports, Headlines

About halfway between Austin and Houston along Highway 290 is the little town of Round Top, Texas. You do have to take a brief jog off of 290 along Round Top road, but beyond that modest detour your trip from Austin is a pleasant but otherwise non-eventful one populated by tractors, fields, and the occasional cow; the whole thing is right out of central casting. Then, a few miles from your destination, a change occurs. You’ll notice tent frames as far as the eye can see, the skeletons of a seasonal economy that will shortly come alive as the Round Top Antique Fair, a semi-annual event that transforms the area from a quaint rural town to bustling marketplace.

Matthew Teodori introduces Erewhon

Matthew Teodori introduces Erewhon

This scene was a somewhat surreal prelude to what actually took me down this particular stretch of Texas road. The real attraction and the area’s claim to fame is only a few miles further along at the Round Top Festival Institute where I recently saw the U.S. premiere of Hugues Dufourt’s hour-long Erewhon. Performed by an expanded line upon line percussion, the setup of around 150 instruments fit perfectly in the cavernous Festival Hall. Take a minute and think of every percussion instrument you’ve ever heard of. Now take a few more minutes and really dig deep. Now understand that every single one of those things was up on stage, with a few doublings to boot, and each was used to great effect over the course of the four-movement work.

Played without intermission, the piece began with rolls on floor toms and bass drums which were passed around the stage, with cymbal filigree serving to cut through the thunder. Marimba played with sticks provided timbral contrast while acting as a preface for the thundersheets and gongs that filled out the movement. The second movement was populated with alternating and overlapping washes of woods and metals with marimba and glockenspiel serving to head each choir. Rhythmic unisons rose from this texture and outlined melodic fragments which were in turn swallowed by rolls on cymbals and gongs, all giving the impression of time slowing down. The third movement began with similar material, though here the chimes outlined more distinctive pitch content above the ominous rumbling. The vibes returned, jittering awake and twisting in the shimmering gong wash, setting the stage for the final movement. The pitter patter of the toms in relatively steady and discernible patterns of sixteenth notes coalesced into a huge unison, perking up the whole room as bass drum and timpani joined the fray. This built to another peak, stopped abruptly, and restarted as a “greatest hits” of textures from the first three movements returned.


With all six players going to town for the bulk of the work, it became clear that density was the order of the day, but I was as or more intrigued by the role the location and its legacy played in my perception of the work. Pianist James Dick founded the Round Top Institute in 1971, and it’s well known for its summer festival and presentations of standard repertoire. It was interesting to see such dense music presented to a festival audience on a spring afternoon and frankly encouraging to hear the enthusiastic reaction to the work. Except for the two kids who I believe earned a week of ice cream for sitting quietly for the hour-long presentation, the piece was quite well received.

*

After leaving Round Top’s ornate hall, I headed back to Austin to check out an experiment.  I’ll admit to some skepticism when I heard about Craig Hella Johnson’s latest project entitled Fusion: Choral Song Meets Slam Poetry. Finding compelling novelty in the combination of two disparate genres (any two genres) is challenging and often simply serves to illustrate the differences in those genres. Further upping the difficulty level, Hella Johnson chose to present this work not in the churches and concert halls where he typically leads the vocal ensemble Conspirare, but at The North Door, the multi-level club where Fast Forward Austin held its festival last year. Of course, audiences come in all shapes and sizes, but in my experience the Conspirare audience does skew towards the traditional. However, they also have come to expect excellence and to accept a measure of guidance in the two decades Hella Johnson has run the show, and as such seemed game to give it a shot.

Hella Johnson took the stage and welcomed the audience to what he described as a “workshop and a work in progress,” the product of several rehearsals during which the three poets and seven singers shared their talents and attempted to see where they might intersect. He then conducted a literal embodiment of that guidance with a brief series of breathing and sound experiments with the audience, asking the members to “shhhh” and “sssss” their way through a centering exercise in hopes of connecting them with the nature of creating sound. Everybody was game and after giving it the old college try, they settled in to hear the pros go to work.

And go to work they did. Reimagined versions of masterworks by Monteverdi and Purcell were juxtaposed with extroverted slam poetry, which was sometimes delivered alone and other times delivered with Hella Johnson improvising at the piano or with singers providing accompaniment. Poets Kevin Burke, Danny Strack, and Lacey Roop delivered polished and thoroughly engaging performances—with all the trappings, gesticulations, and emotive power of a typical slam performance, including the occasional mid-delivery whoop and holler from the audience in mid-delivery. I suspect that some of these initial reactions were from audience members familiar with the give and take of slam poetry, but as the night went on, the rest of the audience warmed to this interaction, gaining confidence from Hella Johnson’s initial invitation to participate and building on it with reactions to elements of the poetry and music that spoke to them in particular. Among the many poetry highlights of the evening was Lacey Roop’s “Shark Boy,” a poem lamenting the almost certain change a young boy will make on his way to manhood, after which we were all a bit of a mess. The poets also played backup at times, quietly vamping on the lyrics from a wide range of tunes, from the aforementioned concert classics to reworked pop tunes. The physical space was used to great effect, with some music played from the stage and some from other points around and behind the audience, including the balcony. This constant change of perspective and content was refreshing and served to refocus each piece into its own vignette.

Poets Danny Strack, Lacey Roop and Kevin Burke with Craig Hell Johnson and KUT's Mike Lee

Poets Danny Strack, Lacey Roop and Kevin Burke with Craig Hell Johnson and KUT’s Mike Lee

Perhaps what drove my initial skepticism was that I was looking for (or expecting) the wrong thing. I was concerned that a pet project built on an arguably acquired taste was going to be foisted upon an audience that had little interest in the material and even less on the delivery, and one that sure as hell wasn’t going to start whooping during Strack’s vivid descriptions of sexuality. I’m sure there were those who would otherwise take a pass on a presentation like this, but there was no mistaking the overwhelmingly positive reaction to the evening’s proceedings. There was no intermission during which I could casually eavesdrop, but there were many people who lingered after the show and I heard nothing but extreme enthusiasm. The word “interesting” was not used once.

Aside from the spectacular content, these shows illustrated (to me at least) the impact of the venue and how spaces shape the experience and help guide the audience. I wonder what these two shows would have been like had they switched venues. How many whoops and hollers would one have heard in the beautiful and ornate hall, performer encouragement notwithstanding? Assuming that all the instruments would fit, how would the presentation of Erewhon go over in a club just east of I-35? Would an audience sit quietly through an hour of such challenging music in an environment in which hopping up and leaving doesn’t involve a break of protocol and a series of eyes staring you down as you exit the hall? There are no definitive answers to these questions, but in the search to understand what drives contemporary audiences to shows, I think it’s important to keep asking them.

Music Writers on Writing: Peter Margasak

Posted on May 9, 2013 by - Field Reports, Headlines

As a performer working my first job as a music writer, I’ve asked myself a lot of questions about what it is I’m doing. What’s the role of the writer—or, more ominously, the critic—in today’s musical ecosystem? Does anyone even read concert reviews anymore? How much critical distance is too much or, in my own case, too little? In this series of interviews, I’m going straight to the source—music critics themselves—to find out why they do what they do.

My first conversation is with Peter Margasak, whose eclectic taste and thoughtful writing have been mainstays of the Chicago Reader music pages for almost twenty years. Margasak’s newest venture, as curator of the Frequency Series at Constellation, puts him in closer relationship to Chicago’s contemporary music scene than ever before. The series will place Chicago’s new music ensembles alongside improvisers, electronic musicians, instrument inventors, and world music groups drawn from the diverse musical communities that Margasak covers. Our conversation revealed Peter as a down-to-earth, curious, constantly self-educating music journalist with a growing interest in advocacy.

Ellen McSweeney: Are you a musician? How did you get started as a music writer?
Peter Margasak: I’m not a musician. My parents just always had records. Neither one was really a musician, but they’d have records and I’d always listen. I remember getting a little toy record player when I was five or six. I was getting really into Top 40 by third grade, and my dad would tell me to listen to actual albums!

The thing that really put it into overdrive was getting into punk rock. I got into it largely for superficial reasons—because it was a weird thing to do—but then I listened long enough that it stopped being a social marker for me. I started listening to jazz records—the kids didn’t think that was cool.

I started a ‘zine called Butt Rag, and I did nine issues. By the end, they were 100 pages long and I was getting printed on newsprint. And that’s how The Reader found me. They used to have a column called Spot Check, and they had seen Butt Rag, which was very snotty. And they said, you need to do that here.

EM: What do you think about this idea that the critic needs to be an expert?

PM: The older I’ve gotten, the more cautious I am. When I was younger, I had no problem writing about music I had no idea about. Now I try to be really careful when I write about stuff, because I’m admittedly kind of a novice with [contemporary classical] music. I know there’s people that read it who are probably like, “Who is this guy??”

Older jazz musicians will come to me and say, “Are you a musician? No? Well, how can you write about music then?” My response is, “If you’re not a musician, how can you listen to music?” I don’t analyze stuff musicologically for people. I don’t think people that read The Reader want that. You don’t want to alienate people when they open it up.

I think a lot of the music I’ve been taken by and written about can be appreciated on different levels. Like [Ensemble Dal Niente’s performance of Georg Friedrich] Haas—all that weird psychoacoustic stuff in there. It makes me think of La Monte Young, something about the physicality of it. I don’t have to know everything about Beethoven to appreciate Haas.

Ensemble Dal Niente performs George Friedrich Haas's in vain

Ensemble Dal Niente performs George Friedrich Haas’s in vain

EM: What draws you to contemporary classical music?

PM: What draws me is that it’s not, unlike the rest of classical music, built around the 5,000th recording of a piece. I mean, I want to know what the best recordings are, but with newer music, sometimes only one recording exists. That’s “the record.” The composer is not this precious historic figure; he’s this person that’s in the room. That’s what I see happening here. The Marcos Balter stuff with Deerhoof—it’s really exciting to see that. Musicians have this shared sensibility where that collaboration isn’t crass or artificial. It makes sense now—they can work together. The media tries to sort musicians into neat categories. The reality has never been that simple.

EM: Is there any negative baggage for you around the term “music critic”? Is “music writer” better?

PM: Working at The Reader, one of the things I had to actually learn was how to be a journalist. “Music critic” isn’t satisfactory to me. I’ve learned to do reporting, to do research. It’s not about saying, “This music makes me feel this way!” The context and the story behind it are often just as rewarding, and are crucial to understanding the actual music.

When I wrote about Katinka Kleijn collaborating with Dan Dehaan and Ryan Ingebritsen, it took a lot of back-and-forth for me to understand what they were doing. I can’t tell you how many emails I had with Daniel, learning how the technical side works. I need to understand it if I’m going to tell someone else how it’s used. I want to not just put out my opinion, but also inform people.
When people ask what I do, I just say music journalist. Criticism is part of that. I have no problem with music criticism; I think it’s just not an adequate description of what I do.

Intelligence In The Human-Machine Photo courtesy Industry of the Ordinary

Katinka Kleijn collaborating with Dan Dehaan and Ryan Ingebritsen for Intelligence In The Human Machine
Photo courtesy Industry of the Ordinary

EM: How do you decide what to cover? What guides you internally as you decide what concerts to go to and what deserves coverage?

PM: Some weeks, when there’s been a lot of touring stuff going on, I have a list of 20 things I could cover. But maybe I can only do six. It’s a combination of writing about things that are underexposed and deserve to be heard, but also things that I feel like I have something to say about. I don’t want to just write about something where there’s no need for me to chime in. I want to choose something where I can add something to the conversation. I don’t write about stuff that I hate. At The Reader, we like to focus on things that are going to be positive. There’s already not enough space; why waste it on being negative about something?
For me, it’s tricky because i’m interested in so many different kinds of music. It’s maddening trying to keep up with all of it. My wife could tell you how maddening. She has to live with all the detritus.

EM: What do you think is the ideal role of a music journalist?

PM: I think the role is to lead to discovery, to inform, to filter. That’s one thing you hear about with the internet. We don’t need critics anymore because everyone can share their opinion. But when everyone does that, then who do you trust? You have to build a relationship with a writer. Sometimes if a certain writer likes something, I know I’m not going to like it, or vice versa.

A music writer is a storyteller. That was one thing I learned at The Reader: you tell a story. The other stuff, like educating, is happenstance. You don’t try to be a teacher, dictating what people need to know. If you tell it as a story, people absorb it in a much more natural, meaningful way.

I think because of my broad interests, I can connect things: classical music to jazz, or to noise. There are these through-lines that a lot of people don’t really think about. I just wrote about Takehisa Kosugi—kind of a relentlessly experimental musician, part of the Japanese Fluxus movement, one of the main composers for Merce Cunningham’s dance troupe. [On] one of the performances he did (when he recorded for Cunningham), Sonic Youth, and John Paul Jones from Led Zeppelin played with him. At The Reader, that might help draw people in. That’s not my main job, but when I see the opportunity to draw that kind of connection that will help people, or make them curious, I take it. I think seeking that connection is the way I’m wired.

EM: [clickety clack clickety clack type type type type type]

PM: You’re a really fast typer. I wish I could do that. I hate transcribing more than anything.

All Bets Are Off: the West Coast Premiere of David Lang’s battle hymns

Posted on May 2, 2013 by - Field Reports, Headlines

In the fall of 1996, I joined teachers, parents, students, and alumni at San Francisco’s Kezar Stadium for a high school football game. The stadium hummed with an expectancy that indicated this was no ordinary match-up; this was the Bruce-Mahoney game. Played between two cross-town rival high schools since the 1940s, for a trophy named in memory of two alumni who lost their lives in World War II, the Bruce-Mahoney binds generations of San Franciscans together in history and community.

For many years, the two schools played their basketball games in the adjacent Kezar Pavilion, and I could easily recall the din of squeaky sneakers, referees’ whistles, and screaming spectators as I took my seat on the cold, hard bleachers for the West Coast premiere of David Lang’s battle hymns. Presented by Volti and the San Francisco Choral Society on April 26, 27, and 28, battle hymns benefited from its setting in ways that no one who created the production likely imagined. During the performance, I felt connected to all the San Franciscans who had cheered and lamented the wins and losses played by the city’s youth in that very building. It’s an old gymnasium, no stranger to passion and commitment, and the 75-minute, soul-baring performance of battle hymns seemed right at home there.

David Lang’s battle hymns

Volti, the San Francisco Choral Society, and the Leah Stein Dance Company joined forces to present David Lang’s battle hymns. Photo by Mike Morelli.

Lang’s large-scale reflection on war comprises five sections, or songs, three of which use Stephen Foster lyrics as their basis. The production in San Francisco began with a foreshadowing of the third section of the work. A sole member of the Piedmont East Bay Children’s Choir emerged from underneath the empty section of bleachers where she had been hiding and sang in pure tone: “I’ll be a soldier.” She was then joined in overlapping succession by other young choristers scattered around the gymnasium. The children’s voices bloomed in the austere space, the unisons and perfect intervals creating a layered bed of diatonic harmonies.
The acoustics of the room worked in favor of Lang’s post-minimalist harmonic language; occasionally, though, the blended sound obscured the text. Volti and the San Francisco Choral Society combined to form a darkly uniformed corps of more than 100 singers, and as they sang—relentlessly, in precise homophony—a litany of alphabetized fragments from a Civil War soldier’s letter to his wife, I was grateful for the lone tenor (David Kurtenbach) walking the perimeter of the space and singing the same text fragments out of sync with his cohorts. His enunciation was crisp and clear. Interweaving repetitions, used throughout battle hymns, allowed me to catch snippets of texts, even when they disappeared into the hypnotic musical fabric.

San Francisco Choral Society and Volti

Attired in uniform, the massed choir consisted of singers from the San Francisco Choral Society and Volti, the Bay Area’s premiere new music vocal ensemble. Both groups are directed by Robert Geary. Photo by Mike Morelli.

The second section of battle hymns is a setting of the lyrics to Stephen Foster’s “Was My Brother in the Battle?” (Lang’s version is titled “tell me.”) In the San Francisco production, the adult choir asserted its role as it often would, physically, forming two impenetrable rows diagonally across the performance space. Over an insistent ground bass phrase, “tell me,” the choir asked questions about a soldier’s fate, “did he struggle? did he fall?” The response was cruel consolation. Leah Stein’s dancers crossed their hands over their mouths in shades of mute grief, awful uncertainty, and the refusal to reply. At the end of “tell me,” the children’s choir assembled downstage, singing with their hands over their mouths in the same choreographic gesture as Stein’s dancers. Their vocalizations swelled into an ethereal sound reminiscent of crickets on a summer evening. This was one of battle hymns’ most powerful moments.

Scene from David Lang's battle hymns

One of Leah Stein’s dancers (right) places her hand on the shoulder of a singer from the Piedmont East Bay Children’s Choir. Photo by Mike Morelli.

As a choral work, battle hymns could stand on its own as a concert piece (and at far less expense than the production I saw). Yet the choreography created by Leah Stein, who co-commissioned battle hymns for its premiere in 2009 in Philadelphia, helped extend the emotional pitch of the piece beyond the formality of concert music. As a dancer flexed and straightened her arm and wrist in semaphore-like movements, I felt compelled to try to understand her cryptic signals. Life and death seemed to depend on it. Moments later, the dancers crumpled randomly to the floor as if knocked from above by a great unseen hand. The choreographed activities—whether scrappy, contact-driven, or rhythmic—responded to the thematic content in ways that supercharged my own response to the work as a whole.

The Leah Stein Dance Company

The Leah Stein Dance Company, dressed in rugged khakis and wearing boots, played counterpoint to the singers’ orderly formations. Photo by Mike Morelli.

In “I’ll be a soldier,” battle hymns’ third section and a reprise of the opening, a portion of the audience was led to the center of the performance space. The stern-faced adult chorus members surrounded the “active audience” on three sides. Downstage, essentially sandwiched by two audiences, the children’s chorus seemed to play at lining themselves up in formation, while the dancers punctuated the spaces in between. The simplicity of Lang’s compositional language—warm, open choral harmonies, melodies descending the natural minor scale—was totally immersive; I felt myself becoming the “I” of the refrain, “I’ll be a soldier.” Who was a participant and who was an onlooker? Seeing the active audience in their contemporary street clothes through the scrim of dancers and children did not clarify matters. When the children collapsed to the floor, miming death, we all seemed equally responsible and helpless.

At the end of battle hymns, Lang’s setting of Stephan Foster’s “beautiful dreamer” renders the adult choir—the once-formidable corps—helpless. The chorus sang as if in slow motion, drawing vowels out to a point that distorted the syntax, erasing any similarity to Foster’s tune. The pure vocal tones were freely punctuated by whispers, gasps, and muttered repetitions of “beautiful dreamer, beautiful, beautiful.” Significantly, the performers wandered the entire space, no longer in any kind of regimented formation. They appeared shell-shocked, or transfigured, unified only in sound, not in body. The piece drew to a close as one member of the children’s chorus walked solemnly forward. Reluctant to break the spell, the audience sat in silence for several long minutes, a rare admission of their engagement in the shared experience.

I was bewildered and astonished sixteen years ago when that football game I attended ended in a tie. What, no overtime? But a draw it was, and with the other stunned teachers, parents, and students, I bundled myself against the chill fog and climbed the stadium steps in silence. Everyone was subdued, some quietly murmuring as they drifted across the parking lot. Our dispersion mirrored the final scene of battle hymns. The kids had fought a good fight, in honor of young men who had done the same before them, but no one had won. Resigned, all we could do was wander home. Mine is a provincial perspective, perhaps, but battle hymns in San Francisco was all the more poignant and powerful because of its site-specific echo of local history. I am hard-pressed to imagine it performed as successfully, in the Bay Area, anywhere else.

Kezar Pavilion

The back side of Kezar Pavilion, viewed from Kezar Stadium. The stadium was the original home of the San Francisco 49ers, and it continues to host high school games. Kezar Pavilion was an atypical but fitting venue for the West Coast premiere of David Lang’s battle hymns.

Fast Forward Austin 2013

Posted on April 22, 2013 by - Field Reports, Headlines

Fast Forward Austin
The first two installments of Fast Forward Austin set the bar quite high. Its goals were to provide a forum for local and national performers of new music, to explore new performance spaces, and to enhance educational opportunities for underserved communities. From its modest beginnings in a small venue in East Austin, the festival moved last year to a multi-level club just east of I-35, and found itself in the even larger Scottish Rite Theater for this year’s show. Located closer to downtown Austin, SRT served as an exclusively Masonic facility (with a few exceptions) until 2004 when it began the Scottish Rite Children’s Theatre program, and not long afterward it became a venue for avant-jazz and other offerings. To enter the theater is to find oneself surrounded by rich, dark woods on all sides. Leather furniture that was carefully placed in its present position during the Eisenhower administration is still wet behind the ears relative to a building that was built in the late 19th century. A certain amount of cognitive dissonance occurs when you leave the hipster/food truck/cosmopolitan what-have-you of downtown Austin and enter the SRT time capsule. Once you’ve turned the corner and passed by the portraits of Davy Crockett, Sam Houston, and Jim Bowie in the “Hall of Texas Masonic Heroes,” you can’t help but wonder if perhaps you’ve had a The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe moment. And then upon entering the beautiful main theater, you know that you have.

With a pentient for variety and an eye on the visual, this year’s show built on past accomplishments and added a half dozen commissions to boot. Kicking off the eight hour marathon with Chris Cerrone’s Double Happiness was the Living Earth Show [1]. Hailing from the Bay area, the guitar and percussion duo had premiered the piece just one week prior. High and spacey electronics laid the foundation for unison lines shared between the electric guitar and vibraphone. The gentle plunk of muted chimes played by Andrew Meyerson could be heard over a passacaglia of sorts as guitarist Travis Andrews negotiated his parts. Another highlight of the set was Max Stoffregen’s Quasi-Mason. Derived from his friend Mason Lindhal’s tune, the piece played on bowed vibes riffs and looped layers in the guitar, and had a really nice touch with added pick scratches on the recap. In my notes about Austin’s Weird Weeds I wrote “earworms.” Looking every bit the regular rock band, WW was anything but. Gone was the typical alternating verse/chorus form with a bridge thrown in for good measure, and in its place were monolithic, insistent chord progressions and grooves which stayed around just long enough to make you comfortable before taking an unexpected turn on a dime. Primarily an A/B affair, (that is to say, most of the songs had one big “A” and one big “B”) the tunes were familiar on the surface but so formally polar that the whole affair sounded like the soundtrack to an odd neighborhood. Austin Soundwaves returned this year with a full orchestra to perform Hermes Camacho’s The Bear Prince, with the composer conducting. The charming piece for orchestra and two narrators was performed by a group comprised primarily of students with only a year or two of lessons under their belts. Simple melodies and evocative motives in the vein of Peter and the Wolf populated the work, and the performance was quite polished and communicative, drawing the first standing ovation of the festival. Convergence Vocal Ensemble presented a “mix tape” of pop and rock tunes reimagined by around a half dozen composers, as well as a few straight up covers for good measure. (Full disclosure, I was one of those composers.) Mezzo-sopranos Beth Beauchamp, Tynan Davis, Laura Mercado-Wright, and bass Cameron Beauchamp were joined by guitarists Brent Baldwin and Thann Scoggin as well as percussionists Tom Burritt and Adam Groh for a set that was a study in contrasts. Brent Baldwin’s charming ukulele-accompanied version of The Magnetic Field’s Absolutely Cuckoo was contrasted by the thorny deconstruction of Steely Dan’s Fire in the Hole by Avery Fisher. Caroline Shaw’s work on The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face started as a beautiful straight-up a cappella rendering for the mezzos and blossomed into a wonderfully rich take on the work without masking its simple beauty. Joshua Shank arranged the Walt Whitman inspired Sheryl Crow song Riverwide. Preceded by a short prelude of Whitman’s Among the Multitude, the piece featured Cameron Beauchamp’s beautiful solo over a bed of Ebow’d guitar. Rounding out the set was La Llorona arranged by Graham Reynolds featuring Mercado-Wright belting out the jams.


At the halfway point of the festival, flautist Francois Minaux and visual artist Ryan Cronk set up outside of the main hall under the piercing eyes in the Hall of Heroes for an improvised set of painting, digitally fractured flute, and audience participation. A live mic was left on a stand as an invitation for those passing by to join the performance. As people sang and spoke into the microphone, their input was processed along with the signal of the flute, and these sounds informed Cronk’s painting as his strokes influenced Minaux’s playing.

The Meehan/Perkins Duo returned this year with Parallels, a huge new commission by Tristan Perich. Apropos to the title, both players had identical setups consisting of five differently sized triangles and hi-hat and each was flanked by sets of hanging, enclosure-less speakers. Tight hocketed figures were fleshed out and built a larger narrative as the mics picked up the attacks of the triangles and triggered electronics through the speakers. As the piece slowly evolved the hi-hats played a larger role, sounding a bit like snare drums to ears that had spent several minutes living in the high Hz world of the triangles.


An epic work, Parallels provided a great start to the second half of the day and its driving repetitive character was a bit of a prelude to the ending of the festival. Following Meehan/Perkins was Jon Russell and Jeff Anderle’s bass clarinet duo Sqwonk. They continued the evening’s tight hocketing with a performance of Knee Gas (ON) by Russell and Anderle’s Switchboard Music Festival cohort Ryan Brown. Starting off in all its sqwonking glory, the piece eventually backed off on the heavy intensity while maintaining its rhythmic vitality as multiple, overlapping lines developed. Perhaps it was the cyclical riff-like nature of the material or the visual impact of the players, [2] but the character of the piece and its performance begs for a transcription for two electric guitars. Along those lines, Ian Dicke’s Profiteering brought something of a syncopated rock sensibility to the proceedings. Symmetrical phrases and rounded formal cues were overtaken by a sweeping, lyrical middle section which was then followed in short order by polyrhythms which fell over one another before returning to the opening material. Funny, engaging, and highly polished, Sqwonk was absolutely a highlight of the festival. The evening’s finale was a performance (the Austin premier, no less) of Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians. A number of beanbags, pillows, and other cushions had been available at the foot of the stage for the duration of the festival, but as the performers took the stage a not-too-insignificant percentage of the audience took advantage of this particular seating opportunity. Featuring the University of Texas Percussion Group along with other musicians from UT and the Austin area, the wonderfully played hour plus marathon was a fitting ending to a big day of premiers, education, and community.

Fast Forward Austin has over the past few years branched out from its initial one-day festival concept. It has twice curated the Austin incarnation of Phil Kline’s Unsilent Night, co-presented concerts with the Nonclassical label during SXSW, and brought its brand of Austin sensibilities to New York. With its founders developing new projects throughout the country (as well as in Sweden and Portugal) FFA is certainly on track to continue its pattern of growth in the years to come.

***


1. Best Kickstarter ever.

2. I’m telling you, they got a least few moves from these guys. Right round 2:45-3:00.

New England’s Prospect: Auslesen

Posted on April 22, 2013 by - Field Reports, Headlines

Paul Fromm. Photo courtesy of Fromm Music Foundation

Paul Fromm. Photo courtesy of Fromm Music Foundation

Sancho spent the afternoon in drawing up certain ordinances relating to the good government of what he fancied the island; and he ordained that there were to be no provision hucksters in the State, and that men might import wine into it from any place they pleased, provided they declared the quarter it came from, so that a price might be put upon it according to its quality, reputation, and the estimation it was held in; and he that watered his wine, or changed the name, was to forfeit his life for it.

—Cervantes, Don Quixote (trans. John Ormsby)

Not surprisingly, Paul Fromm made the production of new music into something resembling the wine business. Born into a German family of winemakers, Fromm came to America after the Nazis took power and became an importer of wine and spirits; by 1952, he was successful enough to launch the foundation that still bears his name, channeling the money he made into the modern music that he loved. He took the same approach to music that he did to wine: cultivate relationships with the producers, invest up front, and endeavor to get the subsequent delivery, whatever the quality of the vintage, into the marketplace.
The Fromm Foundation, founded in 1952, wasn’t the largest source of new-music funding in postwar America, but it was the prototype; scores of composers (including—full disclosure—me, a couple of careers ago) have been the beneficiaries of Fromm money. The Foundation can even claim a few bona fide new-music classics, a handful of which anchored this year’s pair of Fromm concerts at Harvard University. The programs, performed by the Boston ensemble Sound Icon and its conductor, Jeffrey Means, on April 12 and 13, collectively marked the 60th anniversary of the Foundation, which has been based at Harvard since 1972. But they also created a strange sense of warp: a retrospective of a forward-looking endeavor. No fewer than three of the programmed works—Luciano Berio’s Circles, Gunther Schuller’s Tre Invenzione, and Bruno Maderna’s Giardino Religioso—had also been part of the 2010 Festival of Contemporary Music at Tanglewood, a festival designed to celebrate the Tanglewood Music Center’s 70th anniversary, and, by extension, the Fromm Foundation’s long support of new music at the Center. The Schuller and Maderna works, in fact, had both been composed to mark the Foundation’s 20th anniversary.

Anniversaries within anniversaries, commemorations within commemorations. Even as the concerts did their best to encompass variety, a vague sense of vertiginous insularity was never far away. I suppose that tension, too, was a kind of commemoration: for all Fromm’s insistence on breadth—his shifting of support from Tanglewood’s new-music festival to Aspen’s when he decided the former’s programming was too stubbornly restricted, his cutting ties to Perspectives of New Music over that publication’s excessively academic bent—the Foundation, probably more than any other organization, was responsible for the care and nurture of the late 20th-century American new-music establishment.

On the other hand: holy Christmas, Paul Fromm commissioned some fantastic music. Circles, for instance, a thoroughly avant-garde parley between a soprano (Jennifer Ashe, in this concert, tossing off each sleight-of voice with unperturbed, uncanny precision), two percussionists (Nick Tolle and Mike Williams) and a harp (Franziska Huhn), still dances and stings in “golden swarms,” as in the e. e. cummings poems it sets. Or Leon Kirchner’s 1960 Concerto for violin, cello, 10 winds, and percussion, the ideas more than a little Romantic—long structural lines, full-range melodies, harmonies slipping from one expressive dissonance to another—but the execution done with lean modernist muscle.

The performance of the Kirchner, with violinist Gabriela Diaz and cellist Robert Mayes as soloists, and Means on the podium, erred on the side of new-music style, everything crisp and exact, rigor more than trajectory. Something of that quality also marked Schuller’s Tre Invenzione, the most redolently retro piece on the programs—pure 70s modernism, all pointillistic angles and tactics, the piano, harpsichord, electric piano, and celesta lined up at the back of Paine Hall’s stage like new cars in a showroom—but also, one suspected, a score more playfully lyrical than the performance let on.  But that approach was pitch-perfect for what might be the greatest of Fromm’s greatest hits, Elliott Carter’s 1961 Double Concerto, given a big, bracing, brawny rendition, harpsichordist Yoko Hagino and pianist Paavali Jumpannen fierce and theatrical, the twin orchestras meticulous and bright.
The newer Fromm Foundation commissions seemed, at times, to feel some need to live up to the confident ambition of those older exemplars; the later works’ stylistic variance was balanced by their common encyclopedic qualities. Liza Lim’s 2006 Shimmer Songs was scaffolded by noisiness, three percussionists (Tolle, Williams, and Robert Schulz) manning batteries of shakers, gourds, temple gongs, and metallically swishing reco-recos to further obscure a string quartet (Diaz, Shaw Pong Liu, Jordan Voelker, and Mayes) whose pitches came already qualified with a host of glissandi, extra-wide vibrato, and col legno effects. Lee Hyla’s 1984 Pre-Pulse Suspended was an 11-player mix of late-modern fragmentation and post-minimalist ostinati, pulsing textures both aggressive and understated circled and regarded from seemingly every possible perspective. Barbara White’s Third Rule of Thumb, from 1999, had that same multiple-angle approach, but this time limited to a percussion quartet (Tolle, Williams, Schulz, and Matt Sharrock) working everything from woodblocks to claves to African drums to metal cans; White’s tangram-like grooves proved both satisfyingly visceral and winningly malleable.

The one premiere of the weekend demonstrated both the Foundation’s penchant for the au courant and the virtues of giving its composers a wide berth. Karola Obermüller’s elusive corridors, for bass clarinet (Michael Norsworthy) and piano (Hagino), had—like just about every other new piece I’ve heard in Boston as of late—a significant electronic component, featuring Obermüller stationed at the MacBook that has become as standard a piece of new-music equipment as any instrument. The electronics initially created an effective but familiar electronic fog of echoes which would coalesce around the instruments themselves and then detach, but, towards the end, Obermüller dialed back the processing to a minimum; with Hagino working the high and low extremes of the keyboard and Norsworthy jabbing in commentary, the music turned surprising and bewitching. Fromm, one suspects, would have enjoyed the return on his investment.

Still, one came away from the concerts with a suspicion that the investment still hasn’t quite paid off. Fromm’s focus on composers created, for a long while, a new-music industry more focused on commissions and premieres than long-term cultivation. Friday’s concert closed with Giardino Religioso, Maderna’s tribute to Fromm’s largesse, but also one of the most startlingly beautiful pieces of music of the past fifty years: a vegetal, overgrown profusion of wonders both expected and aleatoric, 20 players roped into a high-wire act of pervasive gorgeousness. I have now heard the piece twice, and both times were Fromm commemorations; I remain baffled by the work’s rarity outside such a context. The music that Fromm and his foundation brought into being, it seems, now awaits its push into the spotlight, into the common repertoire, into the larger culture. The weekend’s concerts reiterated the evidence that there are pressings that more than deserve it. The best of Fromm’s wine is ready to drink.

Chorale and Fugue

Posted on April 18, 2013 by - Field Reports, Headlines

It’s a little bit depressing how efficiently the patterns play out now. Part of that is technology. I was idly refreshing on my browser, waiting for news of this year’s Pulitzer Prizes, when word began to filter through that two bombs had exploded near the finish line of the Boston Marathon. Online, I could see, in real time, the familiar responses to tragedy promulgate within an hour or two, both the positive—the coordination of charitable efforts, the “#prayforboston” hashtags, the scheduling of candlelight vigils—and the negative—the scam charities, the conspiracy theories, the racism. The common thread is agency: the need for a reason, a narrative, or an action that might dignify the dead and the wounded and the maimed with something other than randomness and chance. Most try to channel it, a few try to prey on it, but we all feel it.

The Bernstein quote first popped up in my Twitter feed about forty minutes after the bombs went off—ironically, only a couple of tweets after someone hoping that, this time, it wouldn’t pop up. We all know it by now, the peroration of remarks Leonard Bernstein made at a United Jewish Appeal benefit in New York, three days after John F. Kennedy was assassinated. “This will be our reply to violence,” Bernstein pronounced, “to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than before.” To any somewhat cynical person—and I very much fall into that category—the sentiment seems more than a little vacuous. But it is also an irresistibly direct statement of agency in the face of horror. It is something to do. It’s what musicians know how to do. (It is, conveniently—as the cynic in my head reminds me—what musicians would do anyway.) Does it really do anything, though?
There is a story about Abu Yūsuf Yaʻqūb ibn ʼIsḥāq al-Kindī, the 9th-century Arab philosopher. Much of al-Kindī’s extensive scholarship concerned music—legend has it that he was the one who added a fifth string to the oud. His knowledge of the therapeutic qualities of music was such that, according to the chronicler Ibn al-Qifti, al-Kindī was once summoned to the home of a wealthy merchant whose son had been seized with a paralytic apoplexy. Al-Kindī brought with him four of his musical pupils, “who knew the melodic modes that sadden, gladden or strengthen the heart and soul,” as scholar Fadlou Shehadi tells the tale. The pupils began to play right next to the boy’s head, as al-Kindī monitored the patient. “Kindi kept his hand on the pulse, and as the playing proceeded he could feel the pulse strengthen. Gradually the boy began to regain consciousness. He even sat up and was able to speak.” But “the players became remiss and strayed from the melodic mode they were in. Upon this the boy fell back into the apoplexic state.” The father ordered the musicians to go back to their original song, but it was too late. “The boy had now used up in full the gift that God had given him.” What are we supposed to make of such a fable? The music did something, but it wasn’t enough. Then again, the music wasn’t enough, but it did something.

The medical context of the story is not insignificant. Sometimes I think that the best one can say about music’s benefit is a riff on Hippocrates: it does no harm. At the very least, you would have to really, really work at it. Given how easy harm has become, I suppose that’s something. Whether music can keep pace with our capacity for violence? That I don’t know. (The pace is terrific: the same day as the attack in Boston, for instance, a wave of bombings in Iraq killed over thirty people.)
The Facebook/Twitter/Tumblr version of the Bernstein quote invariably leaves out the sentence preceding it. “Our music,” Bernstein said, “will never again be quite the same.” Ever willing himself to cultural optimism, Bernstein probably meant that our music would be better, but I wonder. The thing about attacks like the one on Monday is how they yank at the thread of the social fabric. The Boston Marathon route runs through Framingham, about a 15-minute walk from my house. The downtown district is not without its frictions—mostly working- to middle-class whites and South American immigrants, jostling for position in a neighborhood where economic traction has been pretty tenuous. For the marathon, though, that all fades to the background. The kids are out of school, the lawn chairs are lined up along Route 135. The crowd is a cheerful mixture of family-gathering chaotic and ballpark drunk. The elite runners get applause, but it’s the amateurs—the costumes, the charity runners, the old guys—that get the biggest response. For a day, everyone’s on common ground. Next year, almost certainly, that footprint will shrink. One more civic forum, however informal, will be circumscribed by fear and caution.

I think musicians have a feel for such vandalism to civic society. Music is at once the most anti-social and social of the arts, the solitary pursuit of proficiency—practice, composition, study—only manifested in extroverted gestures directed towards and among collaborators and audience. Trust and generosity are, in music, not really sentimental qualities. They’re the currency, the supply chain, the raw materials. If music is being made, then some sort of social connection is being forged; if the social fabric is damaged, the connection requires that much more effort. Is that connection the benefit? I’m more skeptical than I used to be as to just how much of it can be transferred out of the hall. But connections are there, if only for a little while.

Sextus Empiricus, "from an old coin," from Les Hipotiposes ou Institutions Pirroniennes de Sextus Empiricus (Paris, 1725). The legend on the coin reads "Sextus Hero"; it is probably not Sextus Empiricus at all, but the Roman general Sextus Pompey.

Sextus Empiricus, “from an old coin,” from Les Hipotiposes ou Institutions Pirroniennes de Sextus Empiricus (Paris, 1725). The legend on the coin reads “Sextus Hero”; it is probably not Sextus Empiricus at all, but the Roman general Sextus Pompey.

The most dismissive analysis of the power of music that I know of comes from an actual, Classical, 2nd-century, capital-S Skeptic, Sextus Empiricus. In his treatise Adversus musicos (“Against the Musicians”), Sextus sets up all the traditional benefits of music—inspiring courage, soothing anger, “a consolation to those who are grief-stricken”—only to knock them down. Even if the mele, the melodies of music, can affect the emotions in this way, “music has not been established as useful for life because of this. It is not because it has the power of discretion that it restrains the heart, but rather because it has the power of distraction. Consequently, when such mele are silenced in any way, the mind, as if it were not treated by them, reverts again to the former heart.”

But Sextus isn’t finished; his argument leads him past a discussion of music’s usefulness to a questioning of its very being. Music is, at its core, merely a theory of notes, of their qualities, their character, their color. “Every theory of melody according to the musicians does not have its substance in any other thing except the notes. And because of this, if they are abolished, music will be nothing.” But, Sextus argues, sound is already nothing, substanceless, forever either coming into being or fading away—and notes are nothing but sound. In a similar way, rhythm is nothing, since it is nothing but time, and time, “since it is composed from what is past and no longer is and from what is future and is not yet, will be nonexistent.” Music, Sextus concludes, doesn’t actually exist.

This is, of course, a ridiculous argument—which, in a weird way, is unfortunate. Sextus reasoned away sound, time, and music, but he could also reason away the pain and hurt of life. Especially at these sorts of times, we can’t do that; the pain and the hurt exist. But the music does, too. Music will be made in response to this tragedy, and many more tragedies to come. Maybe it will do some lasting good or maybe, as Sextus insisted, it will just be a temporary distraction. In the immediate aftermath, the power of music in the face of violence doesn’t seem to come near even al-Kindī’s brief melioration. But there is one claim—contra Sextus—that anyone can hold on to: music is something that happens. And it’s better than a lot of other things that happen.