Category: Field Reports

Heartbreak and Hallucination: Ensemble Dal Niente Performs in vain

Posted on March 5, 2013 by Ellen McSweeney - Field Reports, Headlines

Ensemble Dal Niente performs in vain
Photo by Chelsea Ross

From the moment that Ensemble Dal Niente announced that George Friedrich Haas’s widely admired work in vain would be the cornerstone of their 2012-13 season, Chicago has been buzzing about the performance. Ensemble members declared on social media that the piece was on their performance bucket list. Critic Peter Margasak of the Chicago Reader—which rarely covers fully notated contemporary classical music—described it as the concert he was most excited about this year. The performers, composers, and new music lovers that make up Ensemble Dal Niente’s audience seemed to feel the same way: that a very special and important work was finally coming to Chicago.

Eager to know what all the fuss was about, I delved into both the political and aesthetic contexts in which the work was written. I learned that Haas’s music is closely connected to the spectral school, but that it also contains shades of Ligeti, of Bruckner, even of Schubert.

As a newcomer to Haas, I wanted to interview Michael Lewanski, Dal Niente’s conductor, about why the ensemble had made Haas the center of its programming this year. I asked Lewanski why the piece was such a big deal, and he smiled. “I just love this piece. But there is a slightly mysterious, unknowable aspect to why it’s a masterpiece.”

“Accessible is a word I don’t like to use,” he continued cautiously. “I’m resistant to the notion that contemporary music is NOT accessible—but people nevertheless think that. If someone said to me, I hate contemporary music. What should I listen to? This is the music I would give them. It’s very viscerally beautiful. Somehow, it also seems to fit into this tradition that the Viennese have where they’re worried about two very different types of publics. There’s a lot of music that has the title, “For Connoiseurs and Amateurs,” because they really cared about doing both. They wanted to be able to appeal to both and speak to both.”

“I think it’s a mistake,” he continued, “to think that in vain is super original. It’s not Haas showing us a bunch of new sounds. It’s contextualizing all this stuff in new and unimagined ways. There is nothing less new than the overtone series. That is the least new thing in music. But the way he presents it—there’s this moment in the first dark section when the strings gradually coalesce into the harmonic series over B. It’s this riveting, spine-tingling, jaw-dropping moment. It’s the same thing you’ve heard for your whole life, but you hear it in this new way. You’re hearing it with new ears.”

One of the most important things I discovered during our interview was that Lewanski saw a key difference between Haas and the pure spectralists: while they write “music about sound,” Haas uses “sound as a metaphor.”

And this made sense, because in the course of learning about in vain, I had begun to construct elaborate metaphors around the piece. And I’m not the only one: in this video, Simon Rattle compares the music to the staircases of M.C. Escher, or to Sisyphus pushing his stone up the hill. In his column on Haas, Alex Ross identifies profound themes of truth, of human darkness, even of Biblical pride.

Why does in vain lend itself so easily to broad metaphorical brushstrokes? Perhaps because in the years preceding in vain‘s composition, the far-right Austrian Freedom Party was becoming increasingly reactionary and increasingly powerful. This surge was led by Joerg Haider, the charismatic and controversial son of Nazi parents who, in 1999, led the party to a 27% victory and a firm place in the coalition government. Haider said publicly that “the multicultural society is a fiction that cannot work”; Haider was virulently anti-immigration; Haider regularly attended the retirement parties of Nazi soldiers without comment.

This was the dark stuff that, according to everything I’d read, in vain would be “about.” The narrative arc of the piece—where an extended episode of equal-tempered scales yields to a darkened paradise of the overtone series, only to be vanquished by the tyranny of the scales once again—certainly seemed to resonate with Austria’s recent political history. For progressive Austrians and for observers all over the world, the electoral success of the Austrian Freedom Party indicated a terrifying backslide into the xenophobia and racism that characterized the worst period in European history. Haas described the end of in vain as “the return to a situation thought to be overcome.” And so my mind prepared the analogies:

equal temperament : the specter of history :: just intonation: a hopeful future
scales : political noise :: long tones : truth

Because my research had yielded such a compelling narrative of political history, I wondered if there was a layer of musical history in the metaphor, too. What significance does, say, a Schubertian seventh chord or a Brucknerian climax have for Haas? In this musical world of stark contrasts—light and dark, scales and long tones, chaos and unity—are Haas’s Austrian predecessors good guys or bad guys? I needed to know. Did the analogy look like this?

Murail : progress :: Schubert : dubious tradition

Or more like this?

Grisey : presence :: Bruckner : revelation

In the evening’s program note, there was an even more compelling idea: that in vain is a meta-narrative about the futility of composition itself. And indeed, the work is built from such elemental building blocks—scales, arpeggios, and long tones—that it very well could be music about music. At times the musicians, repeating their fragments over and over in long episodes, seem like 24 obsessive souls toiling alone in their practice rooms.

But as it turns out, there is nothing to compare this music to. As it turns out, I was grasping at straws. When the performance of in vain began, none of my research mattered. I scratched blindly at my paper in the dark concert hall, wondering if I’d be able to read a word. Or if I would care. If that isn’t an example of futility, I don’t know what is.

**
What I saw and heard at Dal Niente’s performance last Thursday was, for me, more than a political statement. It was more than a treatise on intonation. It was more than any metaphor could have prepared me for.

The opening musical landscape—the strings fussing anxiously at their scales, the horns portending doom—suggested the hyperactive loneliness of modern life. But then came the lighting change that Haas calls for in his score. Like a flock of unsuspecting birds, the musicians (and the audience as well) were plunged into complete darkness. Here, it seemed the players could finally speak with their real voices. In the dark, the instruments seemed to be living creatures, calling to each other across a chasm. When, after a great silence, the harp began to play its coaxing, gentle fragments, I was certain we had entered the underworld.

But I could never be sure where I was. Throughout the work, sound was in a state of transformation. Perfectly consonant harmonic-series chords evaporated as quickly as they had appeared. Long tones were passed from instrument to instrument in a slow-motion, timbre-bending relay. There was a pervasive sense of auditory hallucination: did I just hear what I think I heard?
When the second “dark section” began, and all the lights in the hall were again extinguished, the cascading tremolos felt like the music of religious revelation and ecstasy. Sudden flashes of light made the onstage ensemble flame, glow, and recede like an apparition. The music went on and on, the tension stretching like a rubber band. At some point, the percussion roared so loudly, the lights flashed so brightly, and the sound became so urgent that I leaned back instinctively, like a cartoon character who stands inches away from the open jaws of a lion. The brass sounded a kind of alarm and the lights flashed in panic. And it must have been my imagination, must have been another ghostly vision, when I caught a glimpse of Michael Lewanski’s face. Surely that could not have been the conductor, facing us, hands down at his sides, a powerless witness to this apocalypse of sound.
And then, with the excruciating cry of the tam-tams, heaven collapsed. The light returned, and we were left only with 24 exhausted creatures, dragging themselves through their paces once again.

A desolate emptiness settled into my body. I reached for my pen.
Heartbreak, I wrote. Whatever that was, it’s over.

Opera Parallèle Presents Golijov’s Ainadamar

Posted on February 28, 2013 by Sidney Chen - Field Reports, Headlines

Moving silently throughout the lobby and the theater prior to the start of Opera Parallèle’s recent performances were girls dressed entirely in white, carrying valises, and young women, also in white though their dress hems were soaked in red. These ghostly apparitions moved up and down the aisles and sat quietly among audience members, not interacting but making their presence felt. By the start of the show, all of Las Niñas had made their way onto the stage of the Lam Research Theater at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts for the opening scene of Osvaldo Golijov’s Ainadamar, which received its first San Francisco production earlier this month.

Golijov’s opera, with a libretto by David Henry Hwang (which was translated into Spanish by Golijov), dramatizes the life of Spanish actress Margarita Xirgu (1888–1969), muse to writer Federico Garcia Lorca (1898–1936; murdered by Fascist forces at the start of the Spanish Civil War). In real life, Xirgu created the role of Mariana Pineda in Lorca’s play of the same name; Pineda was herself an Andalucian historical figure who also was executed for her unyielding commitment to liberal causes. The 90-minute opera shows Xirgu in the moments at the end of her life, preparing to go onstage in a production of Mariana Pineda, remembering her (non-romantic) relationship with Lorca in flashbacks and visualizing the circumstances of his execution. The opera concludes with Xirgu’s own passing and transfiguration.

Marnie Breckenridge (center) as Margarita Xirgu, flanked by chorus members, flamenco dancers, and Lisa Chavez (in bowtie) as Federico García Lorca
Photo by Steve DiBartolomeo

Xirgu, sung by soprano Marnie Breckenridge, and Lorca, a trouser role performed by Lisa Chavez, were joined by Xirgu’s student/protégée Nuria (Maya Kherani) and a chorus of treble voices, sung in these performances by a 13-voice women’s choir and the 15 young members of the San Francisco Girls Chorus dressed in white. Opera Parallèle’s production also featured five women flamenco dancers led by La Tania, who are seen during the opening chorus having their children torn from their arms by male soldiers, a reference to the tens of thousands of “lost children” who were stolen from Republican families by Nationalists for re-education.

Flamenco dancer La Tania (in white) and four members of her troupe, with Breckenridge, above
hoto by Steve Dibartolomeo

By casting a chorus of young girls alongside the women, and also adding a corps of female dancers who at times appeared as mother figures, Opera Parallèle’s production, directed by Brian Staufenbiel, highlighted the impact of the war on women as well as intergenerational female relationships. While the score calls for a female choir (divided into three groups) to sing Las Niñas’ part, it does not specify children. This choice was a significant and thought-provoking shift from the 2005 production in Santa Fe directed by Peter Sellars, who had been instrumental in significantly revising the dramatic structure of the work after the initial performances in 2003 at Tanglewood. Whereas Sellars’s production, which had an ensemble of only eight adult women who often surrounded Xirgu like acolytes, placed its emphasis on far-right militarism and showed Lorca being shot in the ass repeatedly on stage after being called a maricón (faggot) during the “Interludio de Balazos” (“Gunshot interlude”), Staufenbiel placed Lorca’s killing offstage, instead bringing on three male soldiers to shoot the dancers, who had previously been shown protesting and lamenting Lorca’s imminent execution.

Jesús Montoya and Breckenridge enact the execution of Mariana Pineda by garrote
Photo by Steve Dibartolomeo

The score places a number of unusual demands on both the cast and the production team. Margarita Xirgu, nominally a soprano role given the luminous high Bs and Cs written for the final moments of her life, spends much of the opera singing at the bottom of and below the staff as a mature woman, but also jumps to usual soprano range for flashbacks to her youth. The role of Lorca is written astonishingly and consistently low, tapping into an unfamiliar husky timbre that is disorienting and intriguing in its power. The primary male role (there are three other small roles for men, in the passion play that surrounds Lorca’s death) is the fascist officer, Ruiz Alonso, who was played in this production by Jesús Montoya, a flamenco singer who produces a full-throated and passionately raw sound that isn’t taught in conservatory voice studios. (Montoya, who recorded the role for Deutsche Grammophon, has sung in multiple productions of Ainadamar, though this is the first one in which he has had to act the role on stage.) All of the performances, including Kherani’s crystalline Nuria, were vocally commanding, but Breckenridge’s committed physical embodiment of Xirgu provided the continuous thread that held the production together.

Chavez, Breckenridge and Kherani in the final trio
Photo by Steve DiBartolomeo

Because the vocal parts are often in unusual ranges, the singers are amplified throughout the performance. Also, there are prerecorded elements throughout the show—the sound of drops of water (Ainadamar, which translates as Fountain of Tears, is a reference to a fountain outside of Alfácar), galloping horses, gunshots, and a field recording of a prayer ceremony—in addition to extensive percussion and keyboard parts within a highly spirited and impressively cohesive 32-piece orchestra, conducted by Nicole Paiement. Unfortunately, these disparate elements required a more sophisticated and integrated sound design than what Opera Parallèle was able to provide, and as a result there was inconsistency in the levels of the singers and some occasional distortion at the performance I attended.

Nicole Paiement and Brian Staufenbiel with members of the San Francisco Girls Chorus, at an open rehearsal

Ainadamar is Opera Parallèle’s first production since changing its name from Ensemble Parallèle. This small company, founded in 1993 by Paiement, has turned their focus to contemporary opera with several successful productions over the past few seasons—last year’s production of John Harbison’s The Great Gatsby was an award winner in January’s National Opera Association competition—and the change brings their name in line with their current identity. The company has been making a concerted effort to open up the rehearsal process to audiences, offering sneak previews and open rehearsals to the public free of charge. Opera Parallèle’s season continues with a double-bill of Leonard Bernstein’s Trouble in Tahiti and Samuel Barber’s A Hand of Bridge in April, and a workshop of the company’s first commission, Dante De Silva’s Gesualdo, Prince of Madness, in June.

***
News in Brief: The San Francisco Girls Chorus announced this month that Lisa Bielawa—composer, longtime vocalist of the Philip Glass Ensemble, founder of the MATA Festival, and a Girls Chorus alumna—has been named artistic director, charged with overseeing the group’s programming and developing new artistic partnerships. Bielawa will divide her time between San Francisco and New York; principal conducting duties at the chorus will be assumed by Valerie Sainte-Agathe.

Kronos Quartet Wraps Residency with a San Francisco Celebration

Posted on February 26, 2013 by Dustin Soiseth - Field Reports, Headlines

Photo by Michael Wilson

The Kronos Quartet wrapped up a three-year residency at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts this month with a program devoted to San Francisco composers, and as I rode the train into the city I thought about the impact they have had on new music, classical music in general, and even popular culture. But even a global ensemble like Kronos is still a hometown band somewhere, part of a musical community in which they participate and which in turn supports them. This program of all San Francisco composers—Dan Becker, Stephen Prutsman, Nathaniel Stookey, and Pamela Z—was an acknowledgement of the influence San Francisco has had on Kronos, its home since 1978.

Dan Becker

The concert, titled “Listen Local,” began with Dan Becker’s Carrying the Past, which incorporates excerpts of 78rpm recordings of his grandfather, who was a big band trumpet player in the 1920s. It opens with one of these excerpts and the string quartet slowly emerges from the scratchy, vintage sound. The intensity quickly builds and sharp exclamations cut through a tangle of complex, competing rhythmic patterns. Carrying the Past proceeds in sections separated by short interludes of big band excerpts alone, which serve as commas or points of stillness in the work. When the string quartet is playing the excerpts are often more abstract, especially toward the end of the piece where they mimic sci-fi whizzes, zooms, and pops. Kronos’s playing was razor sharp, especially in the keening, intertwining melodic lines played by violinists David Harrington and John Sherba, though I sometimes had difficulty hearing Sherba in the mix. (The quartet was amplified.) If their subtle use of vibrato on these high, sustained notes accentuated some minor pitch issues, it also created a sense of rawness and electricity.

Nathaniel Stookey
Photo by Ole Lütjens

Next was world premiere of San Francisco native Nathaniel Stookey’s String Quartet No. 3, “The Mezzanine,” inspired by Nicholson Baker’s novel of the same name. Baker’s book is a probing account, extensively footnoted, Proustian in its attention to detail, of a man’s thought processes as he performs various mundane tasks during his lunch hour. “We composers often go to great lengths to discourage our audience from looking for connections between our music and the titles we give it,” Stookey wrote in the program note. “In the case of my third quartet, the music really is about escalators, drinking straws, shoelaces, vending machines, and cigarette butts.”

The escalator reference is clear in the quartet’s first movement. Fragments of whole-tone scales calmly ascend independently of one another, occasionally aligning to produce warm major sonorities. The second movement—a stream-of-consciousness mix of styles—contains frenetic, rhythmic episodes alternating with Baroque-like asides, a gentle trio anchored by Jeffrey Zeigler’s resonant cello pizzicati, and a melancholy habanera. Throughout the work phrases are often interrupted by abrupt changes to a crystalline musical texture marked by the use of upper registers, fleet melodic fragments, or spiccato runs. Perhaps this, as well as movements like the second that seem to end by wandering off mid-phrase, depict the thought processes of Howie, the protagonist of Baker’s novel. The final movement of Stookey’s quartet pits heavy, sawing triplet figures against a fiddle tune, played with gusto by Harrington. These two ideas alternate and eventually form an uneasy coexistence with the fiddle tune shouting to be heard over the triplets. In the closing bars the ascending escalator figures of the opening return and carry the music away.

Stephen Prutsman

After the break the Kronos Quartet performed four arrangements created especially for them by their long-time collaborator Stephen Prutsman. Violinist John Sherba took a starring turn in Prutsman’s arrangement of Indian film composer Rahul Dev Burman’s Mehbooba Mehbooba (Beloved, O Beloved), a bouncy Bollywood-style number depicting a sultry gypsy dance. Violist Hank Dutt was outstanding in Prutsman’s arrangement of Tanburi Cemil Bey’s Evic Taksim. It opens with wheezing, harmonium-like chords and unfolds like a recitative. Hushed, sustained harmonies support Dutt’s wonderfully rhapsodic playing. Every ornament and glissando was utterly natural, and his tone was so throaty, so richly textured you could almost reach out and touch it. Wa Habibi (O My Beloved), based on an Arab Orthodox hymn, was a chorale-like lament, while the closing arrangement of Ethiopian saxophonist Gétatchèw Mèkurya’s Aha Gèdawo projected the swagger and fury of warriors right before battle. Here Prutsman piled on layer after layer of aggressive musical gestures creating a dense polyrhythmic texture, and Kronos tore into their instruments, sounding as close to a howling saxophone as a string quartet can. They seemed to really be in their element with the works, savoring the glissandi and microtonal inflections in the works by Burman and Bey, and relishing in the chest thumping in Mèkurya’s Ethiopian war cry. It was the most warm, open playing of the night.

The world premiere of composer/performer and media artist Pamela Z’s And the Movement of the Tongue rounded out the program, and it proved to be an evocative, funny, touching, and brilliant work. Inspired by speaking accents, its twelve brief movements are each based on the interplay of composed music and recorded sound. Z describes her process in the program note:

To create the piece, I conducted and recorded interviews with a number of people who speak English with a variety of either regional, foreign language, or cultural accents. Combing through those recorded interviews, I hand-selected speech fragments (phonemes, words, phrases, and complete sentences) that I found to be sonically or musically interesting. I created hundreds of audio clips, which I used to construct the text collage that became a kind of armature for the work. Many of the motifs in the string parts were derived from the melodic and rhythmic material found in the samples of those speech fragments.

Pamela Z
Photo by Donald Swearingen

The recorded material is the main focus of And the Movement of the Tongue and for the most part the string quartet plays a supporting role, which Kronos did with the perfect balance of expression and restraint. Most of the movements are based on a basic musical idea or texture, played by the quartet, that accompanies the recorded text collage. In the third movement, “Rain,” for example, pizzicato playing by the quartet mimics the irregular patter of rain drops while the text collage is a mash up of different pronunciations of the word “rain.” In “Tongue,” the fifth movement, recorded fragments of non-native English speakers talking about tongue placement in English pronunciation float on a bed of simple oscillating harmonies. In the eleventh movement, “I Don’t Know,” Pamela Z layers musical phrases—musical transcriptions of the spoken words and phrases in the text collage—over short, recurring melodic fragments. And the Movement of the Tongue is profound in a very human way. Like a great film score, the music suggests a context for the spoken words and illustrates their musicality as well. It hints at the small things, like accents, that distinguish us, and it also makes us acknowledge issues beyond our control, such as how others often choose to define us. For an encore Kronos played an arrangement of the Prelude from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde.

Aside from the balance issues in Becker’s Carrying the Past, sound designer Scott Frasier did a nice job blending the live and recorded sounds, though I did feel that the quartet sound was a bit compressed and lacking in warmth. Laurence Neff’s lighting design was understated and beautifully coordinated with the music. Witnessing well-done stagecraft like that really makes me wonder why more groups aren’t employing it.
If this concert was about celebrating the vibrant San Francisco community of which the Kronos Quartet is a part, there was no better embodiment of this than the woman sitting behind me with her service dog. Before the concert started, one of the ushers said jokingly, “I hope your dog likes music,” to which the woman replied seriously, “Oh yes, she’s a long-time fan of Kronos.” When your hometown fans include multiple species, you know you’re doing something right.

*
Dustin Soiseth is a conductor and co-founder of The Loose Filter Project. He lives in Oakland.

SFCMP Presents Sold-Out Reich Event

Posted on February 21, 2013 by Sidney Chen - Field Reports, Headlines

I’ve never seen the lobby of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music as crowded as on January 28 before the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players’s concert of music by Steve Reich, built around Reich’s magnum opus Music for 18 Musicians. SFCMP had completely sold out the conservatory’s 450-seat concert hall in advance: it became one of those events where numerous people suddenly turned to Facebook the morning of the show to cast about for tickets. There was a sense of anxious jostling while trying to get into the performance hall that we don’t usually associate with new music concerts. This is the second season in SFCMP’s 42-year history that has been under the artistic direction of Steven Schick, the longtime champion of contemporary music for percussion. Given the enthusiasm surrounding this program—titled “Confirmation,” a reference to Reich’s pithy response when asked what he had gained after his 1970 trip to West Africa—it will be interesting to see what other interests Schick and SFCMP can tap into as his tenure progresses.

Steven Schick, courtesy of the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players

Steven Schick
Photo courtesy of the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players

The repertoire was a reprise of a concert Schick had presented a year ago at University of California, San Diego (where Schick is a professor) with his new music ensemble red fish blue fish, augmented with members of the Bang on a Can All-Stars. Here, the core musicians were members of SFCMP, who were joined by conservatory students. The student musicians’ contribution to this effort was not insignificant: for Music for 18 Musicians, five of the percussionists, two pianists, and the four vocalists were drawn from the student body. (All told there were 21 musicians on stage.) It was an admirable example of this professional ensemble integrating its work with an educational institution to create an opportunity that would have been difficult to realize without SFCMP and Schick’s guidance.

Clapping music score http://i29.tinypic.com/4kv5lu.jpg
— Steve Reich (@SteveReich) April 28, 2009

The evening opened with the three percussionists of SFCMP—William Winant, Daniel Kennedy, and Christopher Froh, all pioneering musicians in their own right—and Schick performing Clapping Music, which began before the applause welcoming them to the stage had died down. It was performed two on a part, with Schick and Kennedy taking the base track and Winant and Froh moving out of phase. The musicians approached it with a sense of playfulness that would seem out of place with a pure process piece if it weren’t so purely enjoyable to see and hear four guys who clearly enjoyed the physicality of rhythm making sounds simultaneously simple and complex with just the skin on their hands.

The Conservatory Guitar Ensemble, under the direction of SFCMP guitarist and professor David Tanenbaum, followed with Electric Counterpoint, featuring conservatory alumnus Travis Andrews performing the solo part. While the piece was originally written for one musician prerecording ten guitar parts and two electric bass parts and then playing the eleventh guitar live in concert, this performance featured Andrews and the two bassists playing electric instruments with twelve members of the ensemble playing acoustic guitars. As the piece is built on a series of canons, the timbral differences between the electric and the acoustic instruments plus the spatial displacement of the electric instruments made for a disjointed listening experience where the various canonic lines (though sensitively played, especially in the second movement) failed to present in a balanced and unified way. At the top of the show, there was an announcement that the sound check had been limited due to a scheduling conflict with the hall, which may have contributed to this issue.

The hour-long Music for 18 Musicians (online score here) filled the rest of the program. I will assume that most NewMusicBox readers are familiar with this massive work, for two string players, two clarinetists, four treble voices, four pianos, three marimbas, two xylophones, and vibraphone. (Schick, on vibraphone, and SFCMP clarinetist Jeff Anderle, a Bay Area new music mainstay, took the cueing roles.) I suspect, too, that most NewMusicBox readers have already formed their own opinions about this piece since its first performance in 1976; for me, working as a production assistant on the 1997 Nonesuch recording of Music for 18 remains one of the greatest fortunes of my musical life, and I count myself among those unabashed lovers of this transcendent work that breathes and pulses like an organism.

There were some balance glitches that may have stemmed from the sound check issue noted above; in particular, the vocalists were often submerged and at points the high frequencies of the xylophones pierced aggressively through the texture. (Nevertheless, high soprano Sara Hagenbuch deserves recognition for her stamina and precision throughout.) Despite these occasional issues, SFCMP and their conservatory cohorts were able to deliver the essential delight of the piece to a hungry audience. One of the joys about experiencing Music for 18 live is being able to observe visually all of the organism’s components interacting, intertwining, handing things off to each other, shifting gears as a unit when a new entity steps into the aural picture. The most memorable moment of the evening came in the transition to Section VI, when Winant, who had been sitting to the side for some sections of the first 25 minutes of the work, stepped to center stage, raised a large set of yellow maracas, and suddenly unleashed a dance party. That was the point when I put the pen and notebook down, and started riding the waves.

The San Francisco Contemporary Music Players’s next subscription concert is on Monday, February 25, at Herbst Theatre, featuring world premieres by Mark Applebaum and George Lewis, and works by Paul Dresher, Eve Beglarian, and Stuart Saunders Smith.

Scratch That: In Sickness and In Health

Posted on February 21, 2013 by Ellen McSweeney - Field Reports, Headlines

Spektral Quartet violinist Aurelien Pederzoli opened up on the quartet’s blog yesterday about taking some time off for injury. Spektral is now the second Chicago quartet to go blog-public this year about a member’s performance injury. (The first, full disclosure, is Scratch’s own quartet; we’ve been without our founding violist since May of last year.) Both these musicians have shown tremendous honesty and vulnerability in their public writing—which, given the widespread ignorance and unfortunate prevalence of career-threatening injury, is a public service. Scratch wishes both of them speedy healing.

Unfortunately, the contemporary music program that Baroque Band was putting on—yes, you read that right—at the Museum of Contemporary Art has been cancelled due to “a sudden illness within the ensemble.” This cancellation only emphasizes the fact that while it’s possible to sub someone in last-minute on baroque rep, it’s less easy when you’re playing three brand new commissions. This was quite a big event for Baroque Band and Scratch hopes that recovery is swift and we’ll get a chance to hear the program soon.

If the above two items are any indication, Chicago musicians are feeling a bit beaten up by winter. The lengthening days are tempting us to think about spring, but we know it’s a long way off. There are a bunch of concerts this week to bundle up for and enjoy, including Mabel Kwan’s recital on Saturday; Maverick Ensemble on Sunday; and MusicNOW on Monday. Also on Monday is the Chicago Chamber Musicians—whose audience, according to young whippersnapper Allegra Montanari, is among the most blue-haired in the city—in a program featuring the music of Esa-Pekka Salonen.

Cheer up, everyone! Musicians, in Scratch’s opinion, count as artists. And we’re all officially invited to the Chicago Artists Resource Creative Expo on March 1 and 2. We’ve heard great things about the learning and networking that happens at the Expo, and we’re delighted that this arts service organization exists in our city. Workshop topics include board-building, fundraising, business plans, and copyright issues; keynote speakers include a leader in “design discourse,” a chef, and the President of Pitchfork magazine. If you’re more into cocktails than keynotes, you could just go to the Chicago Artists Resource’s “re-launch” party—which hints excitingly at a newly energized organization, in addition to the spiffed-up website—on February 27.

Also, lighten up! Now that Scratch is moonlighting as a folk musician, we’re spending more time in the world of Chicago’s non-classical music blogs. Did you know there are lots of them? And that some of them are quite fun? We’ve especially enjoyed reading Windy City Rock, Loud Loop Press, and Faronheit. It’s interesting to observe the differences between the rock music media and the classical music media. Perhaps the biggest difference is the sheer enthusiasm, the shameless fandom of the rock blogs, their identity as an engine of discovery rather than criticism.

More delightful proof that Chicago musicians don’t take themselves too seriously.

(Next week, Scratch will take a week off from the regular column and delve into George Friedrich Haas’s In Vain, which Dal Niente performs February 28. But don’t forget, Chicagoans, that you can email Scratch That with concert tips, news, gossip, and jokes.

ZOFO Champions New Piano-Four-Hands Rep in San Francisco

Posted on February 8, 2013 by Dustin Soiseth - Field Reports, Headlines

On January 25, Eva-Maria Zimmermann and Keisuke Nakagoshi, who perform together as the piano-four-hands ensemble ZOFO, gave an exciting concert of new works at Old First Church in San Francisco (where they are currently artists-in-residence). I thought that forming a piano duet was an interesting choice for two young pianists with successful solo careers, so I asked Eva-Maria Zimmermann for her perspective on what makes piano-four-hands such a compelling experience. She explained:

We often talk about piano duet as “the most intimate form of chamber music.” In “regular” chamber music, the pianist is separated from the other players due to the positioning of the piano, or through the instrument itself. In my experience playing piano quartets, I often felt that the string players had this wonderful circle of communication and that I as a pianist was an outsider—this has nothing to do with personality—it’s just how the players have to be positioned. [There’s] none of that when we play one-piano-four-hands. There’s a very direct communication going on and I feel part of a team as I never did before.
The challenges are that we share the same instrument, i.e. the same keyboard, pedal, and often bench. We have to choreograph almost every movement in order not to bump our hands (or sometimes feet) into each other. Keisuke and I love to think about the best way to move in order to bring out the character of the piece, as well as to make it look beautiful and compelling. The challenge is to move naturally although your space is limited—I sometimes think of figure skating. The slightest imprecision from one partner can destabilize the other partner’s pirouette or jump. For me the great thing of playing with Keisuke is, that—after having rehearsed intensively—I feel completely free in expression and movement in spite of all these challenges.

ZOFO
Photo by Max Kellenberger

Since forming in 2009, ZOFO, which is shorthand for 20-finger orchestra (ZO = 20 and FO = finger orchestra), has already debuted at Carnegie Hall, won a chamber music competition, and signed a multi-disc recording contract. Their first album, Mind Meld, was released in 2012 and received two Grammy nominations, and their second album, titled Mosh Pit, is due out later this spring. In addition to performing existing piano-four-hand repertoire and four-hand transcriptions of other works–Mind Meld featured two original works and two transcriptions, for example–they are also actively commissioning new works for piano-four-hands and this recent concert featured pieces composed especially for them by Stefan Cwik, Gabriela Lena Frank, ZOFO’s Nakagoshi, Nicholas Pavkovic, and Allen Shawn. I reached out to these composers via email before the concert to get their perspectives on composing for, and in some cases performing as part of, this ensemble.

The figure skating metaphor echoes the sentiments of composer Allen Shawn, who compared Zimmermann and Nakagoshi to Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire. In addition to composing for piano-four-hands Shawn has played much of the ensemble’s repertoire and shared similar thoughts regarding the unique experience of performing on an instrument normally played by oneself. “On the one hand, it is so intimate and wonderful to try to match the tone and articulation of your partner,” he noted, “and to somehow handle the pedaling, and become an ensemble. It is chamber music—but on the same instrument. On the other hand, it is a real challenge to collaborate on an instrument that you are used to playing alone. Suddenly you are playing half a piano, and you are sitting in a different place, and are physically oriented differently.”

Gabriela Lena Frank, an accomplished pianist herself, considered this different physical orientation when composing Sonata Serrana No. 1 for ZOFO. She explained that “one thing that dramatically altered the landscape was the positioning of each pianist high or low on the keyboard. Chord positions normally comfortable when you’re parked in front of middle C become very awkward when you’re to the left or right of it instead. There are also challenges in considering the lack of elbow room sitting in such close proximity to another person–you can’t just take all the space you’d like to getting a running jump on things anymore. And then there’s overall balance of registers–duos quickly sound like solos if you have one person sit out for too long. Yet, having both pianists play all the time usually means all of the registers are being employed which can lend a tiresome sameness to the sound.” Whether it was considering the implications of reduced elbow room or making the switch from composing at the piano to composing for piano, all of the composers talked about making these types of adjustments.

The concert opened with a work by a composer who is undoubtably very familiar with the piano-four-hands medium, ZOFO’s own Keisuke Nakagoshi. His Synæsthesia is a beautiful, evocative work inspired by the synæesthethc abilities of Messiaen and Scriabin, and the presence of both composers is strongly felt. It begins with a quasi-mystical atmosphere—the harmonic language here is reminiscent of Scriabin’s late piano sonatas—with repeated chant-like notes in the middle register alternating with bird call flourishes at the top of the keyboard. After an early climax with huge Messiaen-like stacked sonorities, a consistent pulse emerges while melodic fragments coalesce into an eerie melody. It ends softly with ascending scale figures and a return of the chant-like tones.

In most respects these were the most extraordinary sounds and pianistic textures of the evening, and they were executed brilliantly. Nakagoshi spread his music across the keyboard. Melodic fragments were often enveloped by sustained tones or flourished but were never covered or muddled. Even the most orchestral textures were perfectly balanced. This level of virtuosic playing that was also supple and intimate—every texture clear and focused, every important musical idea projected—continued throughout the evening.

Next on the program was Allen Shawn’s Fantasy. Cast in a broad ternary form, the outer sections are by turns dark, wistful, and poignant while the contrasting middle section is more rhythmic, with macabre march-like figures and a hint of menacing dance band cacophony. Shawn wrote that his music has become “darker more of the time, more introspective” over the years and Fantasy definitely feels weighed down by struggle or stress. The work is unified by two nostalgic melodies—Shawn described them as “somewhat 19th century–echoes of Schumann or Mahler, perhaps” that reoccur in different contexts throughout the work, and the piece’s impact was due in large part to the different emotional landscapes that result, always clearly emphasized by ZOFO’s balanced and expressive playing. When heard against dissonant harmonic backdrops, the melodic fragments stood out like bewildered children surrounded by chaos and destruction.

Like Shawn, composer Stefan Cwik also used a melodic idea to unify his piece Acrobats, a short, action-packed work consisting of a theme and five variations. As a composer who normally composes at the piano, often using two grand staves, Cwik noted that he took care in making sure he was composing specifically for piano-four-hands. “If the piece was a set of etudes that explored techniques and textures that are only capable with four hands,” he pointed out, “then I would be forced to explore all of the possibilities of four-hand writing.” Explore them he does, and Acrobats is a showcase of what two people can accomplish on the same keyboard–including two changes of position and some plucking under the lid–but it is also a bit disjointed. The seams clearly show despite all the movements being played attaca. The most compelling sections were the second variation where great peals of sound mimic the overtones of large church bells, and the fifth variation where Zimmermann and Nakagoshi trade fleet figures back and forth as if playing tag on the keyboard. Despite its structural shortcomings, it was virtuosic and exciting.

Marantz Pianocorder Vorsetzer, the machine for which Chimera was originally composed.

After the break came Nicholas Pavkovic’s Chimera, originally written for performance on piano by the Marantz Pianocorder Vorsetzer, a device that turns any piano into a player piano. After hearing the original work, titled Contraption No. 1, Nakagoshi commissioned an arrangement for piano-four-hands. “Of course there was no notation at that point,” Pavkovic wrote, “and since I had simply flung notes around with abandon when creating the piece, it sounded rather fiercely unplayable. But I did manage to tame it into a format that 20 fingers could manage.” Pavkovic was inspired by Fritz Lang’s 1927 silent film Metropolis, in which a young woman’s struggle for class equality is undermined by her robot doppelganger. His program note explained that “Chimera is a kind of dialog between rational and irrational elements, fused by common musical material. A lyrical line is cloaked and interrupted by a second, insistent voice of mechanical wildness, a fugue state, a tangle of terrifying, uncontrollable associations and compulsions.”

Many composers who have written for mechanized keyboards have used them to compose complex music beyond the technical limits of humans—many of Nancarrow’s player piano works, or much of Zappa’s Jazz from Hell, for example—but by emphasizing the lyrical, Pavkovic takes a slightly different approach. The work, though difficult, was also intensely rhapsodic. Chimera proceeds in fits and starts with fiendish figures followed by more plangent lyrical melodic fragments—the rational voice lamenting the irrational one. Though certain moments were exciting, like in the middle of the work where repeated figures in the middle of the keyboard were paired with virtuosic melodic fragments and flourishes in the upper register, Chimera seemed too episodic; a series of musical ideas and gestures that almost, but don’t quite, form a convincing whole.

The final piece of the evening was also ZOFO’s first commission, Gabriela Lena Frank’s Sonata Serrana No. 1. It is a brash, vivacious work bursting with rhythmic vitality, and Zimmermann and Nakagoshi tore into it with obvious relish. The first movement, “Allegro Solar,” opens with a big, full-throated theme followed by delicate, scampering material and a rousing close (the loudest ending of the piece, actually). The second movement, “Scherzo Nocturno,” has roiling textures and dense harmonies that evaporate away in a wonderfully quiet, open-ended finish. “Adagio para el Anochecer (Adagio for Dusk)” built quickly to passionate outbursts and just as quickly subsided and closed with searching, repeated notes, like a parent wandering the neighborhood calling for a wayward child at dinnertime.

Preconcert talk (l to r) Keisuke Nakagoshi, Gabriela Lena Frank, Nicholas Pavkovic, Stefan Cwik, and moderator Charlton Lee.

Speaking before the performance, Frank talked about being inspired by Bartók’s “gradations” when using folk material, meaning he sometimes used it in a more abstract sense and other times presented it front and center with little alteration. While Sonata Serrana No. 1 as a whole is influenced by musical elements from Frank’s Peruvian heritage, the final movement, “Karnavalito (Festive Song in the Quechua Indian style),” is the most overtly folkloric–raucous and dance-like with tremendous energy. It had the entire audience moving. After a bluesy call-and-response section between the two pianists, Frank sets up a final push to the end featuring rapid-fire chuta notes—the repeated notes heard in panpipe music—before ending in a wisp of smoke, like a carnival that packs up and steals away in the middle of the night.

If up to this point I haven’t singled out the playing of Zimmermann and Nakagoshi all that much it’s because their performance was so assured, so confident. Their movements were so elegant and without ostentatious showmanship that they, as individual musicians, receded into the background. This was especially pronounced in Nakagoshi and Frank’s pieces, and I was reminded of a quote by the 17th-century Chinese painter Lu Ch’ai, which is one of my favorites: “The end of all method is to seem to have no method.” In their best moments, ZOFO simply disappeared into the music.

During the pre-concert talk Gabriela Lena Frank said that piano-four-hands was an “underdog” ensemble and she especially liked composing for ZOFO for that reason. A unique instrumentation hasn’t stopped other new music ensembles from creating repertoires for themselves, and ZOFO seems to be on that path, too. With outstanding musicians like Eva-Maria Zimmermann and Keisuke Nakagoshi championing piano-four-hands, perhaps more composers will be encouraged to take up the cause.

***
Dustin Soiseth is a conductor and co-founder of the Loose Filter Project. He lives in Oakland.

New England’s Prospect: Movietone

Posted on February 7, 2013 by Matthew Guerrieri - Field Reports, Headlines

Students of the New England Conservatory Contemporary Improvisation department in “Brando Noir,” January 29, 2013.

Near the beginning of The Wild One, biker gang leader Johnny Strabler (played by Marlon Brando) pays a visit to Wrightsville’s local diner, where Kathie (played by Mary Murphy) is working behind the counter. If you’ve ever wondered what the big deal about Brando was—if, for instance, you only know him from some of the more baroque extravagances of his late career—this little scene will get you up to speed. Brando lays down a rhythmic track of amazing fluidity: he swerves, he swaggers, he dances; his dialogue has laconic syncopation; he uses props—gloves, money—to provide his own punctuation, his own percussive fills. Everything he does—the way he swirls the chairs, the way he glides away from the bar, even the way he uncurls his fingers after digging in his pocket for jukebox change—is insistently musical. He’s a bit of jazz dressed in leather and moving through space.
I suppose that’s why “Brando Noir,” the concert mounted on January 29 by the New England Conservatory’s Contemporary Improvisation department, seemed so promising on paper. But that scene—one of the few from the concert’s anthology of Brando moments that was screened with its original soundtrack—had what about half the music on the program, as fine as much of it was, lacked: a sense of engaging with the music and cadence that’s already present in a film. The evening bounced in and out of sync with the cinematic dynamic.

The concert, produced by Boston jazz hero (and co-founder of the Contemporary Improvisation department) Ran Blake and Aaron Hartley, took the form of a four-act suite. After opening remarks by current department chair Hankus Netsky (which I missed—thanks, Boston parking) and NEC President Tony Woodcock, selected scenes from four Brando films—The Wild One, the World War II drama The Young Lions, the method Western The Appaloosa, and the kidnapping thriller The Night of the Following Day—were projected on a screen at the back of the Jordan Hall stage while various collections, large and small, of student musicians played live accompaniment.

The Wild One opened at the source: Leith Stevens’s original score, in a brawny arrangement by Ken Schaphorst, conducting a performance by the NEC Jazz Orchestra that hung just out of swinging focus. A later cue, Schaphorst again arranging Stevens’s music for a sequence where the gang ominously yet balletically circles Murphy’s character, was tighter. And—especially in that second scene—it scaffolded the mood and action better than the contributions of Full Tang, a student quartet (Eric Lane, Ryan Dugre, Adam Clark, and Danilo Henriquez) that provided blocks of genre: a jazz-funk ostinato and a stylized ’50s-rock beat that, while confidently done, mostly sat alongside the images for a while. But for the vigilante-mob action sequence that sends the film to its final denouement, violinist Yasmine Azaiez and accordionist Cory Pesaturo went to the opposite extreme: free improvisation, both instruments distorted and amplified, the music shadowing the action—sometimes a bit too closely, but fully engaged with the movie’s own rhythm, not trying to impose a rhythm from outside.

The sequence of scenes from The Young Lions, stylistically varied, was the most consistently solid. Survivors Breakfast, a 16-player improvisation loosely directed by Anthony Coleman, started out promising—an out-of-focus Biedermeier dance band—then turned to soft clouds of extended techniques that tracked dialogue between Barbara Rush’s American tourist and Brando’s German ski instructor (later to become an ambivalent Wehrmacht soldier). Tim Leinhard, conducting vocalist Sara Serpa and an 11-piece ensemble, scored a couple scenes with the most conventional film music of the night, but did it with skill: dark, romantic, vaguely jazzy, with a sweep calibrated to the movie’s shifting moods. Two other sequences, one with percussionist Jeremy Barnett, the other a duet between Jussi Reijonen (on bass) and Nima Jannmohammadi (on kamancheh), went back to avant-garde improvisation, layering austere unease over the film while following its contours.

The second half of the concert had moments like that, but also a number of incongruous set pieces. After an opening vocal solo by Serpa that set the mood but failed to shift into storytelling, Dylan McKinstry and Robin Lohrey offered a similarly moody mandolin-and-piano piece of songwriting that nevertheless ignored the slippery shifts of power and mood in their scene from The Appaloosa—a bit of witty, treacherous byplay between Brando’s wandering cowboy and John Saxon’s deliciously villainous pistolere chieftain. And while a bluesy cue from Ilya Portonov, Anna Patton, Daniel Pencer, and Andria Nicodemou pleasantly set up another confrontation between the two characters, the confrontation itself took place alongside a Spanish/English version of “What a Difference a Day Makes” that (however nicely sung by Natalie Cadet and Greta DiGiorgio) grew more ill-matched as it went. (It was partially redeemed by a showdown scored—by Nedelka Prescod, Amir Milstein, Brad Barrett, and Jerry Peake—with understatedly fractious ruminations, Leake clouding the scene with a haze of soft cymbals and bells.)

The Night of the Following Day had the full gamut of the concert’s ups and downs. It opened with a lovely, deft piece of pure illustration: Rachel Panitch, Abigale Reisman, Valerie Thompson, and Vessela Stoyanova followed a landing airliner with a baleful pizzicato-and-vibraphone aleatory, then shifted into a Parisian cafe waltz, foreshadowing the establishment shot of the Orly airport, and then—just when one was starting to wonder how earnest or satirical such a musical cliché was meant to be—swiftly, ruthlessly deconstructed it as the kidnapping plot kicked into gear. The movie’s other, most improvisatory accompaniments were similarly effective: Hui Weng, on guzheng, producing a host of strumming effects for varied punctuation; Tal Zilber with a lurking piano, overlaid with electronic processing that neatly traced the dramatic thread.

But those were interspersed with sequences that seemed more like blind dates. Deepti Navaratna and Sonny Lalchandani chaperoned a bad guy exposition scene with lovely voice-and-sitar ragas, but it felt like a disconnected notion. Eden MacAdam-Somer, on voice and violin, was accompanied by Netsky on piano in a charming, accomplished original cabaret tune, “Cocktails at 4,” but the ironic distance was simply too far from the violence of their scene to register even as commentary. In fact, it was a double distraction—the music pulling attention away from the film while the film pulled attention away from the music. That figured in the finale, too, the film’s beachfront standoff scored by the Sail Away Ladies (MacAdam-Somer, Mia Friedman, Sarah Jarosz, and Ari Friedman) with a bewitching cover of Joanna Newsom’s “The Book of Right-On” that nevertheless seemed to cancel out the on-screen suspense. (The ironic record-collection curation technique of a Kubrick or a Tarantino is harder than it looks—and requires a director willing to relinquish the cinematic rhythm to the music.)

Film music is weird and alchemical, no matter how it’s produced. The familiar tradition is through-composed, precise, timed, the vein that Leinhard effectively mined for The Young Lions. But otherwise, it was the groups that hewed to an older tradition, the silent-movie tradition of organists and pianists in every theatre—improvising—that best served the films, using the structure and flow of film to spark unexpected sounds that, in turn, sparked a different perception of the filmed image. That was Brando’s method, anyway, at his best: distilling the energy of a scene or a film and then amplifying it into something a little more outlandish, a little more subtle, a little more dangerous.

Scratch That: The Agony and the Ecstasy

Posted on February 4, 2013 by Ellen McSweeney - Field Reports, Headlines

Five Things New Music Advocates Can Learn From The Super Bowl
I know, I know. You’re probably right to be skeptical. Our scrappy, small-budget ensembles and presenters don’t have much in common with the billionaire behemoth that is the NFL. Our concerts aren’t beamed out to millions of televisions every week. Contemporary music doesn’t have a nationwide Pee-wee program or online fantasy league. Even if we pooled all our money, we couldn’t hire PSY to dance with a bunch of pistachios.

The NFL is a problematic institution. The teams drain tax money from cities and if Jay Cutler’s facial expressions are any indication, brain injury is a serious issue.
But still: the Super Bowl is one of planet Earth’s most massively successful entertainment events, each and every year. We could probably learn a thing or two.

1. Hype is everything. The Super Bowl is preceded by two weeks of constant discussion, trash talk, and speculation. The NFL and the television networks create narratives (the battle of the Harbaugh brothers! Ray Lewis’s emotional last game!) and infuse the Super Bowl with enormous drama. They make it clear how much is at stake. This helps give the game more technical and emotional meaning for fans, and by kickoff time, we’re fully invested.

Takeaways: Don’t be afraid to talk yourself up. Tell stories about what concerts, collaborations, and recordings mean for you. Give fans and listeners multiple “hooks” and entry points to help them engage. Help build a thriving music media.

2. Fans really care about the human personalities on the team. Over the course of the season, fans master the players’ favorite dance moves, learn the meaning of their tattoos, and figure out who prays and who doesn’t. Big personalities fascinate us and make the game interesting. Fans want to hear the primal scream of Ray Lewis, to see the flustered paper throwing of Jim Harbaugh.

Takeaways: Go ahead and wear that funky accessory onstage. Don’t try to smooth over your eccentricities online. Embrace what makes you, and your music, special and noteworthy.

3. Watching is social. Thousands of people—many of whom don’t normally care about football—excitedly assembled nachos and trudged over to friends’ houses on a cold Sunday night. The Super Bowl brings people together to share an experience. That’s something that doesn’t happen often enough in our lonely society; as we know, it’s also one of the greatest things about live music.

Takeaways: Create concert and listening experiences that let humans connect with other humans. And don’t underestimate the power of great snacks.

4. The game experience is deepened by a sense of history. Football announcers are constantly pointing out historical signposts that help give meaning to key moments in the game. Our work is steeped in history, too. But do we really use history to our advantage? Do we talk about the Chicago musician who performed this piece first? Or get the composer to tell personal, vivid stories about where they were when they composed the piece?

Takeaways: Let’s find new, more exciting ways to talk about the rich personal history of our art form.

5. The flip side of victory is loss—and loss matters, too. Ever since I was a twelve-year-old girl rooting for the Patriots, I’ve empathized with the losing team. Sunday night, as I watched the sad 49ers trudge off the field, I sensed their acute vulnerability. They had given everything they had, in front of an audience of millions, and they had failed. There’s something about loss and failure that humanizes the athletes and makes us pull harder for their future success.

Takeaways: Don’t be afraid to show vulnerability or to fail in public. Do like Jennifer Jolley and Megan Ihnen—fail in public. Your fans, friends, and colleagues will understand your commitments and respect you all the more for it. P.S.: A grumbled congrats to Megan—and 2/3rds of the NMBx editorial staff, now that I think about it—on that Ravens victory!

eighth blackbird: Shifted During Flight

Posted on February 4, 2013 by AndrewSigler - Field Reports, Headlines

eighth blackbird, photo by Luke Ratray

“I didn’t expect it to be so charming…”
The ensemble eighth blackbird has set up shop in Austin for ten days populated with concerts, masterclasses, and lessons. I heard the above quote in the foyer during the intermission of the first of two concerts scheduled during their residency with Texas Performing Arts, and I’m inclined to agree with the sentiment. The group has always been more bon vivant than enfant terrible, their collective personality more welcoming than foreboding. I’m pretty sure everybody is smiling in their press photo. Having said that, not all audience members attending these shows know exactly what to expect. “New Music” can still shiver a few timbers among concertgoers, and when they see a program full of unfamiliar composers, some will look for the exit doors. Of course, eighth blackbird put any concerns to rest with their spot-on performances and engaging personalities.

The concert opened with Nico Muhly’s Doublespeak. Written in honor of Philip Glass’s 75th birthday, Muhly managed to pay homage to the man without aping his greatest hits. The work opened with repetitive germs played by violinist Yvonne Lam which grew bit by bit as the other players joined in, but just as the material began to gel, the work slammed to a halt, sputtered for a moment, and came back to life, this time with Nicholas Photinos leading the charge on cello. Muhly drew deeply from Glass’s harmonic and rhythmic vocabulary; driving rhythms filled out with simple harmonies drove the piece forward until about a quarter of the way in where Muhly injected a bit of chromaticism that seemed for a moment to draw the piece in a different direction. Soon the original texture returned, revealing something of a modified rondo. The sections bounced back and forth until the final moments of the piece, when Photinos and percussionist Matthew Duvall picked out syncopated hits together, the last hit ending the piece.

Flanked by Photinos and clarinetist Michael J. Maccaferri as narrators, Lam performed Knee Play II from Glass’s Einstein on the Beach. These bookend entr’acte sections were used to facilitate set changes and to begin and end Einstein, and the presentation here of Knee Play II apart from the full opera allowed for focus on an otherwise somewhat utilitarian work. I have to say that I was surprised at the level of tension created by watching Lam perform the simple scales and arpeggios (played expertly and super quick folks, no doubt) that constituted the piece. Obviously it wasn’t an easy work, but seeing her chug away while Photinos and Maccaferri read—or chanted…or chanted slightly creepily—in monotone stereo certainly added to the tension. Will she miss? Will the narrative distract her from her duties? Of course, Lam didn’t miss a thing and Photinos and Maccaferri complemented her playing quite well.

The tension of Knee Play II was dissipated in short order by Tom Johnson’s Counting Duets. Described by Lisa Kaplan as “Sesame Street on crack,” the work was performed by Maccaferri and flutist Tim Munro in another duet, this one involving numbers spoken. While the cheeky introduction was endearing, it was the piece itself that hooked the audience, many of whom (present company included) were laughing out loud by the time the work ended. The four movements involved Maccaferri and Munro counting, hocketing, whispering, and yelling simple number sequences to/at each other while they constantly changed their physical position on stage relative to one another. I could talk about the simple additive processes (though written in 1982, similar at a DNA level to the final movement of David Lang’s So Called Laws of Nature) but at the risk of assuming composer intention here, I think that’s missing the point. The piece engaged the audience by laying bare the processes that drove it, giving them an opportunity to figure out each short puzzle as it played out. This, coupled with the visual impact of the tall and lanky Munro and the less tall Maccaferri rapidly yelling numbers back and forth at one another, made for one of the most engaging moments of the night: when both performers walked off stage and the lights were dimmed, seeming to indicate the end of the piece. As the audience began to enthusiastically applaud, Munro (now slightly horse from yelling) began the final sequence from stage right as Maccaferri responded from stage left. Everyone quieted down until they finished and returned to the stage to some of the loudest applause of the night. My wife and I are expecting a baby in a few months, and about halfway through the piece she grabbed my notebook and wrote what you see in the image below:

So there you go. Everybody liked it.

In sharp contrast to the lightness of the Johnson, Aaron Jay Kernis’s Pieces of Winter Sky saw the return of the entire ensemble to the stage for this longer, more somber work. The third of four commissions of the night, the Kernis began with Kaplan and Duvall bowing inside the piano with loose bow strings, the thin, ethereal, overtone-laden pitches joined by harmonics in the other instruments. Short bird-song melodies were traded among the players, only to fade into nothingness before fully forming. A violin solo was accompanied by the bowing and scraping of cymbals by all five other members as the ghost of Winterreise passed through the room. Derek Bermel’s Tied Shifts is one of eighth blackbird’s chestnuts, and it was treat to watch and hear. A study in Bulgarian rhythms and careful choreography, the ante was upped in the visual impact department as the blackbirds moved about the stage. Arrangements of two of Ligeti’s mid-’80s piano etudes followed, including No. 4, Fanfares, which recalled the moto perpetuo intensity of the Glass, now spread across the ensemble. Finally, Andy Akiho’s erase, the commissioned work resulting from the ensemble’s 2011 composition competition rounded out the program. A tour de force, the piece careened through tutti roller coasters, glissando workouts in the piano and on the vibes, and noir-through-a-kaleidoscope excursions complete with Maccaferri conjuring with his bass clarinet. The piece shattered to a close with Duvall doing a bit of John Bonham to take us home.

I expected to see a fantastic show and was not disappointed, but what struck me most was how well integrated the whole program was. The Muhly lead to the Glass both musically and in terms of the relationship between the composers, and the blackbirds indicated that without making a big deal out of it. The Glass lead to the Johnson, the trio now a duet, and the symmetry inherent in the structure of the works linked them while their characters contrasted. Even across the bridge of intermission, connections were made such that the concert was more like a large piece itself, a reminder of what it was like when we bought albums (records, tapes, CDs, whatever) that were shaped not just by their content but by their ordering. It’s attention to these factors that give eighth blackbird their edge, and I’m certainly looking forward to their next show.

New England’s Prospect: Object Oriented

Posted on January 31, 2013 by Matthew Guerrieri - Field Reports, Headlines

Karl Rudolf Koenig’s Compound Wave-Siren, used to investigate beat- and difference-tones? (From Silvanius P. Thompson, The Physical Foundation of Music, 1890)

Music which does not paint is nothing but noise.

—Jean d’Alembert

True absolute music, however, stands precisely in opposition to form. It has the God-given attribute of floating on air and being free of all material conditions.

—Ferruccio Busoni

They’re both wrong, of course. Even putting aside the new musicology staple that all music is programmatic in that it portrays the societal and political hierarchy out of which it emerges, there’s the whole complication of sound, which is both noise and part of the material world. Then again, we’re largely past the whole absolute/programmatic debate that so consumed the classical music world of a century ago. We can bat around the terms, but we don’t use them as critical or even moral cudgels anymore.

But that doesn’t mean the terms are null and void. One of the passing revelations of the Callithumpian Consort‘s concert in Jordan Hall on Saturday, January 26, was that exactly where along the absolute/programmatic continuum a piece is situated can, in fact, make or break the piece. It was two pieces on the concert in particular; and they were similar in certain ways: both deliberately limited in their sound world, both formally simple, both situated somewhere beyond the usual musical discourse of melody and accompaniment, tension and release. And yet I thought one piece marvelous, while the other, for me anyway, didn’t work at all. That very probably is as much about me as a listener as it is about the pieces themselves. But it all had to do with sound: it turns out that, in music that might plausibly be loosely gathered under the umbrella of post-serial experimentalism, music that deliberately wanders the no man’s land between musical sound and noise, the relationship between programmatic intent and sonic (and aesthetic) effect is actually pretty tricky.

* * *

The sound of tress/burl, a sextet by Marek Poliks, is, basically, harsh. A string trio (violinist Gabriela Diaz, violist Ethan Wood, and cellist Benjamin Schwartz) lets loose with bursts of forcefully edgy sounds: grinding double- and triple-stops, high whines, all heavily bowed near the bridge. They go on for a while—the stanzas never quite the same, but made up of the same elements—except for a sudden grand pause in the middle of their course. The entire thing (grand pause included) is then recapitulated, but translated into a different trio: piccolo (Jesse Rozinski), contrabass clarinet (Alexis Lanz), and piano (Elaine Rombola).
This was the second time I had heard the piece. At last summer’s SICPP Iditarod, tress/burl had seemed to me both intriguingly obsessive and, perhaps, too long—a contradictory impression, the more I think about it. In the context of this concert, though, even the intrigue was absent. I often enjoy purposefully harsh sounds, but it was almost as if the sounds weren’t harsh enough, or maybe not interesting enough in their harshness: I didn’t feel any invitation to consider what it is that makes a sound harsh or extreme, or any sense that these were even to be considered as sounds, in time, in a physical space.
Poliks writes this:

tress/burl was conceived negatively (anti-god, anti-sexism, anti-populism, anti-modern), but it ossified into something constructive (the paranoia and weakness of normative masculinity, aimlessly romanticizing itself in the face of its own obsolescence).

That’s a mouthful, and more than a little bit of jargon, but I respect the effort. There are a lot of pieces—including a lot of my favorites—that might be said to encompass some sense of romanticizing an obsolescent masculinity. One could plausibly argue that Ravel’s La Valse has something of that, or certain of Shostakovich’s more nominally propaganda-driven symphonies. One could argue that Richard Wagner was never not writing about the romanticization of an obsolescent masculinity.
But the program here was a barrier. Why? It comes back to the sound—an idea crystallized by another piece on the program.

* * *

Alvin Lucier wrote Braid for the Callithumpian Consort in 2012. The process is in the foreground: a string quartet (violinists Diamanda La Berge Dramm and Ryan Shannon, violist Danielle Rebecca Wiebe, and cellist Hsaio-Hsuan Sharen Chang) spend the entire piece winding through overlapping slow glissandi—the “braid” of the title. Against it, flute, clarinet, and English horn (Rosinski and Lanz joined by Elizabeth England) play sustained chords, designed to dovetail with the glissandi and then produce beating effects as the strings slide away.

Braid is one of the most ingeniously perfect pieces I’ve heard in a while. It strikes an exact balance between consistency and variety: the strings are constantly in motion, the winds never play the same harmony twice, but the meshing of the two always comes back to those same beating effects. The sound is completely mutable; the intent is completely uniform.

But why did Braid work so well for me, when tress/burl didn’t? In a way, they’re similarly extreme, hermetic, even obstinate. But the pieces fall on crucially distinct points on the absolute/programmatic continuum. Braid, for all its abstract quality, has a program, too, but it’s a program about sound, about illustrating something about the nature of physical sound in a musical context. Doesn’t all music do this though? Well, no—a lot of music takes the nature of physical sound for granted, or at least allows the listener to take it for granted, because the intent is something lurking a few interpretive layers removed from the sound itself: something about the theoretical grammar, something about the drama or theatricality of performance, or (the most traditional programmatic intent) something literary or otherwise extra-musical. This is why the experimental tradition that Lucier—and Poliks—are working in can be considered something distinct.

It would be a cliché to say that Lucier loves sound, and communicates that in his music. I realized that what’s really going on is this: the program/agenda/intent (choose your favorite term) behind Braid is one that reinforces compositional decisions that make what Lucier appreciates about the sounds what the listener appreciates as well—whereas the program behind tress/burl reinforces decisions that work against that. In fact, everything I didn’t like about tress/burl—the lack of sonic variety, the distancing nature of the sound itself, the didactic lack of formal surprise—could be justified as part of the program, an illustration of the brutalization of that romanticized masculinity. (Though I would consider that an incomplete illustration: if you don’t acknowledge the seductive nature of such romanticizations, you fail to completely understand them.) If a piece’s program is actually making the piece less effective as a sonic object, does that invalidate the program? Not necessarily. But when it’s being applied to a style where the nature of the sound is so central to the effect of the piece, it certainly doesn’t help.

* * *

The rest of the concert dealt with such concerns in a more glancing, implicit way. Edmund Caballero’s What is time, please? Convergences III, a world premiere, started off in a conceptually limited way: pianist Yukiko Takagi reiterating a fundamental pitch in all octaves and articulations while Caballero overlaid the notes with metallically reverberant electronic processing. After a few minutes, however, the piano part suddenly lets in handfuls of glassy, higher overtones, and the piece picks up significant steam, eventually turning into a computer-amplified evocation of the not inconsiderable glee of holding the sustain pedal down and keeping as many of the piano’s strings in play as possible: almost drowning in the instrument.

The finale was a classic, John Cage’s 1950 String Quartet in Four Parts, given a dazzlingly contemplative reading by Diaz, Wood, Schwartz, and violist Karina Fox. Here, the program (the four seasons as interpreted in Indian philosophy) and the process (mostly tonal harmonies rendered non-functional through random ordering) don’t so much mesh as provide a source and a medium for replication, a meditation on sounds that functions as a kind of stand-in for a meditation on nature. The opener was, on the surface, a complete contrast: Earle Brown’s 1965 String Quartet, performed by Diaz, Wodd Schwartz, and violist Mary Ferrillo, a rerun from last week’s Earle Brown Symposium. The form was rationally symmetrical, the sounds very much those of mid-century atonal modernism (though with twists here and there, as when, at the very center of the structure, a dissonant drone slides into the open strings of the instruments). What’s interesting about the Quartet is the way it both borrows something of the technique of film montage but flips it on its head: as the music switches between its textural modules, it’s the edits themselves that become the focus of attention, the point where the shots join taking on more importance than the shots themselves. It was diverting compositional aikido: musical decisions that make the decisions themselves the musical experience.

Matthew Guerrieri

Subscribe to our newsletter and never miss a beat!