Category: Field Reports

Scratch That: He Said, She Said

Posted on January 30, 2013 by - Field Reports, Headlines

Without a doubt, my favorite new musical activity of the week was browsing the LP bins at Reckless Records in Wicker Park. I know it’s criminal that it’s taken me this long to get to it. But I’ve finally discovered a reason to browse those bins, even though I don’t own a turntable. The staff-written record descriptions, printed on humble adhesive labels and stuck onto the LP’s shrinkwrap, are awesome. Take this description of an Aesop Rock record: “Never really liked this sort of left field Hip Hop, but what stands out to me here is that despite the density of the lyrics and the dark feeling of paranoia, the soundscape has a groove to it.” Or this one: “The kind of dudes you’d expect to see performing at a bowling alley on a Monday night in 1982, playing outdated AM funk, singing unintelligible lyrics to a sad discoball backdrop and a bad teenage makeout session. And they’re totally sincere and it’s the most endearing thing I’ve maybe ever heard.” It’s like having your cool, music-savvy friend stand over your shoulder and give you tips while you shop. Maybe I have room for a turntable after all…and maybe these little labels can teach us a thing or two about how to talk about the “weird” music we’re all working so hard to make.

It was a lot of fun to get some response to my column last week about a national conference devoted to issues and performances in new music. Rob Deemer engaged a few of the potential problems and benefits of my idea, and lots of others piped up in the comments, on Facebook, and in emails to me. Be sure to check out the conversation and contribute to it if you’d like.
There’s a new music-happenings website in Chicago! It’s called chicagomusic.org and it’s a joint venture between scrappy neighborhood organization Elastic Arts and a little corporation called Boeing. The site’s managing editor is Elastic’s Paul Giallorenzo; last year Elastic won a $150,000 grant from Boeing to run the site. Already, chicagomusic.org casts a wide swath— current featured artists include hip-hop groups, improvisers, and a whole page devoted to classical/new music. The page has some great interviews, previews, and other interesting content. We’re excited to see such a vibrant new resource for discovering Chicago artists, and can’t wait to find out what will appear on those pages in the coming months.

While some Chicagoans are headed to New York— Ensemble Dal Niente’s date with Marcos Balter and Deerhoof  on the Ecstatic Music Festival is fast approaching—some New Yorkers are also traveling to us. Nadia Sirota is coming to town for a show with the Anubis Quartet on February 11, and ICE, Carla Kilstedt, and Phyllis Chen will play what looks to be a fascinating show on February 17.
Finally, a note of intention. One of the most important issues raised in my entire experience at the Chamber Music America conference occurred during the panel Steve Smith moderated on presenting the work of women composers. The panelists pointed out the abysmally low numbers of women being programmed by major cultural institutions, and then the low numbers of women on the faculty of composition departments, and the low numbers of women in doctoral composition programs. And that’s when Missy Mazzoli talked about perhaps the most important statistic: the number of young women applying—or, more to the point, not applying—to composition programs at all. The giant question in the room seemed to be: What’s happening to young women between the age of 14 and 18? Why are they less likely to see themselves as composers? Are their talents being properly nurtured, encouraged, and developed? It’s a monumentally complex question, and one very dear to my heart. Over the next few months, I’d like to devote some of my NewMusicBox energies to exploring the issue of creativity and confidence in young women. If you have ideas or resources around this question, please share them in the comments.

Cross-Sections and Scholarly Fields: Earle Brown Symposium in Boston

Posted on January 24, 2013 by - Field Reports, Headlines

Fenway Center
After performing a four-hands version of Earle Brown’s seminal December ’52 at Calderwood Hall in Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, pianists Steven Drury and Steffen Schleiermacher flipped the score 180 degrees and started from the top (which had been the bottom). They also switched places at the keyboard. A facsimile of this early graphic score was projected on a large screen for all to see. That theatrical moment, which took place Friday afternoon, January 18, toward the end of the first day of a vast Earle Brown symposium in Boston, exemplified one aspect of this important mini-festival—its embrace of openness and possibility.

An early associate of John Cage, Morton Feldman, and Christian Wolff, Earle Brown was most famous for his development of and commitment to the idea of open form in music beginning in the early 1950s. It’s often textbook images of his scores for these early works, rather than all-too-rare performances of the music itself, that form the basis of his reputation for many musicians. It was the goal of the Earle Brown: Beyond Notation seminar to rectify this situation and expand the understanding and status of this great American composer and conductor.

Susan Sollins-Brown Photo by Anthony De Ritis

Susan Sollins-Brown, president of the Earle Brown Music Foundation
Photo by Anthony De Ritis

Sponsored by Northeastern University and organized by Northeastern and the Earle Brown Music Foundation with the cooperation of the Gardner Museum, the idea for the symposium had its beginnings when Anthony De Ritis, head of Northeastern’s music department, heard about Brown’s death in the summer of 2002. Brown, a native of Lunenburg, Massachusetts, was a student of mathematics and engineering at Northeastern in the mid-1940s before joining the Army Air Corps, and later went on to study at Schillinger House, which became Boston’s Berklee College of Music in the 1960s. De Ritis got in touch with various of Brown’s colleagues and scholars of his music; meanwhile since the composer’s death these same colleagues and scholars had been unearthing and organizing a wealth of information and source material. Three years ago, Northeastern brought musicologist Rebecca Kim on board expressly to organize the events that took place January 18 and 19. Among her main collaborators were Thomas Fichter, director of the Earle Brown Music Foundation; Susan Sollins-Brown, president of the Foundation; Anthony De Ritis; and Steven Drury, pianist and director of the Callithumpian Consort, a new music ensemble based at the New England Conservatory (but made up of freelance musicians). Other participants included pianist Steffen Schleiermacher, a longtime Brown advocate, as well as numerous composers and scholars with various perspectives on the composer’s life and work. (Since I won’t be touching on every one of the many papers, I direct the curious to the symposium website.) Fichter suggests that the last ten years of research and organization have made this just the right time for this endeavor, and going forward the Earle Brown Music Foundation hopes to provide unprecedented access to the archives. (In a panel on Friday, Fichter discussed the former and present status of Brown’s scores and materials.)

Symposium principals

Symposium principals (l-r) Thomas Fichter, Susan Sollins-Brown, Rebecca Kim, Stephen Drury, Carloyn Brown, and Anthony De Ritis
Photo by Sara Haefeli

In addition to the presentation of a number of papers, the two-day symposium featured several performances of Brown’s music, culminating at the end of both days with a full-length concert of his work, juxtaposed with music by composers allied with or influenced by him. These events took place in Northeastern’s Blackman Auditorium; the converted church concert space of the university’s Fenway Center, and in the Gardner Museum’s unusual, Renzo Piano-designed Calderwood Hall, which opened a year ago in January 2012. Due to other commitments, I was unable to attend all of the presentations over the course of the two days, but Northeastern was kind enough to provide audio transcripts for those papers I didn’t hear in person; thus I was able to create my own “available form” of the festival by hearing the papers in a different order. I also had a chance to talk to several of the participants to get an insider’s take on the proceedings. Rebecca Kim, Anthony De Ritis, Carolyn Brown, and Susan Sollins-Brown helped put things in perspective for me.

Without performances of Brown’s music in the immediate context, many of the ideas explored in the informative, and in some cases illuminating, papers would remain in the abstract. In addition to Friday afternoon’s piano four-hands performance of December ’52, Steffen Schleiermacher also gave a single-piano performance of the composer’s 25 pages in Calderwood Hall during that same session, which featured papers on the influence of visual art in Brown’s work. “Workshop” sessions the following morning had Drury and (in a separate presentation) flutist Shanna Gutiérrez playing open-form works with consideration of aesthetic and performative issues.

In the early afternoon on the first day, during one of the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s semi-regular Friday afternoon chamber music concerts at the Fenway Center, BSO cellist Mickey Katz and pianist Aaron Likness performed Brown’s Music for Cello and Piano (1955) on a concert with Verdi’s String Quartet and music by William Grant Still and André Previn. The full-length concert Friday night included performances by the musicians of the Callithumpian Consort (one of few ensembles experienced in performances of this music) of the composer’s String Quartet (1965) and Times Five (1963). Schleiermacher performed Folio (1952-54), followed immediately by Stockhausen’s open-form Klavierstück XI. The Callithumpians also performed Christian Wolff’s recent, open-instrumentation Microexercises and Lee Weisert’s New England Drift. The concert opened with Brown’s brief tape piece Octet I, realized during his work with Cage on the “Project for Magnetic Tape.” Although a later mixed-down version of this piece has long been known, it was only recently that Octet I’s eight individual tracks, allowing for octophonic projection, were discovered. (Volker Straebel discussed the composition of this piece in his Saturday paper.)

Available Forms

Available Forms
Photo by Robert Kirzinger

Saturday night’s concert began with Schleiermacher’s performance of Pierre Boulez’s Constellation-Miroir from Sonata No. 3 and continued with Schleiermacher, Drury, and Yukiko Takagi’s performance of Brown’s three-piano Corroboree. The Callithumpians, led by Drury and featuring violin soloist Ethan Wood, performed the latest of the Brown pieces in these concerts, Centering—a wonderful example of the supple and colorful, and very musical, textures and harmonies of his post-1950s music. Substantiating this attractive later style was Sign Sounds (1972), which ended the concert, and of which Drury and the Callithumpians gave two very different performances, our sole (and very valuable) opportunity to hear how different from one another two performances of Brown’s open-form ensemble works could sound. Also on the program were John Zorn’s cut-up piece For Your Eyes Only and Brown’s Available Forms I (a central touchstone in Richard Toop’s Saturday-morning keynote paper read by Rebecca Kim).

Kyle Gann’s Friday morning keynote talk, which delved a little into technical musicology, also succinctly made one of the big points of the festival. Gann said, “I look forward this weekend to rescuing Earle Brown from this ‘New York School’ limbo that he seems to have fallen into…. He came into the 1950s New York with his own set of ideas and it is high time we completed the story of where those ideas uniquely led. Let this weekend mark the point at which musicologists quit talking about ‘Earle Brown, one of the composers of the New York School,’ and start talking about ‘Earle Brown.’ Full stop.” This view was seconded in Rebecca Kim’s paper later in the day, in which, after creating a distance between Brown and the New York School, she spoke of Brown’s influences outside of the Cage sphere, such as the surrealism of Max Ernst and the mobiles of Calder, along with providing an overview of the early Brown musical biography. This also offered context for some of the other presentations. Kim’s talk also provided a useful connection to the installation in Northeastern’s Gallery 360, which featured a number of historic images Kim had unearthed from the Lunenburg Historical Society, along with materials from Brown’s archive. The audio aspect of the installation was Brown’s Music for Galerie Stadler in its first U.S. hearing.

Kyle Gann and Carolyn Brown Photo by Anthony De Ritis

Kyle Gann and Carolyn Brown
Photo by Anthony De Ritis

The most delightful presentations were by Earle Brown’s first wife, the dancer Carolyn Brown, and his second wife, Susan Sollins-Brown, an art historian and producer. Carolyn (who refers affectionately to Sollins-Brown as her “wife-in-law”) gave an entirely biographical talk about Earle Brown’s early years around Lunenburg, where he was virtually an additional member of her family. Her mother was a dance teacher; Carolyn later became a key member of Merce Cunningham’s company, and the physicality of dance in combination with the activity of jazz without question deeply informed the composer’s music. Susan Sollins-Brown, along with an incidental debunking of the idea that Brown and Morton Feldman maintained lifelong animosity from the early 1960s onward, presented some twenty minutes of her unfinished, ongoing film on the composer, created from new interviews and archival footage. (Sollins-Brown is the executive director of PBS’s valuable Art21 series of artist documentaries.)
Brown’s interest in the visual arts was the crux of papers by David Ryan and by art historian Natilee Harren, whose illumination of direct connections between Brown’s music and the Fluxus artists was particularly revelatory (especially given the Fluxus group’s ties to Cage). Both were richly accompanied by visuals of the art being discussed. (These were appropriately presented at the Gardner Museum.)

Among the more musicologically oriented papers were Louis Pine’s somewhat technical illustrations of Brown’s applications of the Schillinger technique, which he applied from his earliest important works and throughout his career. (Unstated in Pine’s presentation but arguably salient to this discussion was Brown’s connection through this technique to commercial and jazz composers including Gershwin and Benny Goodman; although it was touched upon, little was made in any of these papers of Brown’s relationship to jazz from an early age, except anecdotally.) Richard Toop was unable to attend due to ongoing treatment for cancer, but following his pre-recorded preamble his rather warm and personal reminiscence, Saturday’s keynote talk, was read by Rebecca Kim. The subject was Brown’s relationship to European composers of the 1960s era, with a rundown of the remarkable number of prestigious commissions (“all-star gigs,” Toop calls them) he received during this period. So many works we just don’t hear! Drury spoke to Brown’s longtime colleague Christian Wolff about the milieu in which the New York School composers worked, as well as suggesting a view of performance of their works today. Several other papers on Saturday also touched on musicological aspects of open-form and process in Brown’s music, as well as the composer as a teacher and colleague.

Stephen Drury and Christian Wolff Photo by Anthony De Ritis

Stephen Drury and Christian Wolff
Photo by Anthony De Ritis

It was perhaps inevitable that consideration of Earle Brown’s music still canted toward the early works, since that’s where his innovations took root and were most clearly presented; nonetheless it’s a pity that not many of the later works were discussed in depth (in lieu of more general principles). It’s a great shame that resources were not available for performances of any of the larger orchestral works. Still, the Earle Brown: Beyond Notation symposium provided a fine foundation for the hopes of all involved that Brown and his music will be the subjects of much future research and, more importantly, that there will be renewed U.S. interest in performances of his works.

***

Composer and writer Robert Kirzinger is on the staff of the Boston Symphony Orchestra as a writer, editor, and speaker. He is the program annotator for the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, works with several Boston ensembles, and teaches occasionally at Northeastern University.

Scratch That: Cutting Edge or Marginalized?

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

Five new music angles on the Chamber Music America conference:

1. What’s the big deal? New music is everywhere at Chamber Music America. The organization is doing a great deal to commission and promote contemporary music, and the conference was a great place to be for the new music community. The keynote speaker, Todd Machover, is a composer from MIT whose mind-blowing talk was a highlight of the weekend. A panel on women composers with Steve Smith, Missy Mazzoli, and several high-profile women composer/curators drew a standing-room crowd at nine a.m. on a Saturday. Even among presenters who serve a more musically conservative constituency, there seemed to be an overwhelming consensus that bringing contemporary music into the fold is essential. The conference made it clear that some of the most exciting developments in chamber music are happening in new music.

2. New music is everywhere … unless you’re a string quartet or piano trio. On Friday and Saturday afternoons, conference attendees heard lots of different ensembles—filed under jazz/experimental or classical/contemporary—perform 25-minute programs. During these showcases, traditional ensembles like string quartets and piano trios hardly programmed any music by living composers. Among these types of ensembles, only BELLA Piano Trio planned to play a living composer on their program. But when it came time to perform Jennifer Higdon’s Fiery Red, the trio ended up swapping in some Dvořák instead. (Contemporary quartet mainstay ETHEL was an exception, as was Chicago’s Axiom Brass, which makes sense given that brass repertoire is newer in general.) The jazz ensemble performances overflowed with newly composed work, but among the Fully Notated, Orchestral-Instrument set, it was still a Haydn, Mendelssohn, and Brahms kind of scene. These showcasing ensembles want to make a great impression on their audience—a group of high-profile artist managers, presenters, and oh right, some musicians, too—and most of them chose not to make new music a part of their “sell.”

3. Do CMA’s membership requirements exclude new music groups doing important work? The most prominent new music ensembles in America were not at the conference. I’m thinking here of groups like ICE, wildUP, Ensemble Dal Niente, and lots of prominent New York-based ensembles like yMusic and Alarm Will Sound. This led me to realize for the first time that many of these ensembles aren’t, by strict definition, chamber groups. They have larger, more flexible rosters and the repertoire often demands a conductor—something that CMA membership precludes. Yet I’ve always thought of chamber music as being the heart of what ICE or Dal Niente does. Is all-contemporary programming too challenging for the moderately old-school constituency of CMA? Or are these enterprising groups more likely to have forged a different organizational model—one that doesn’t rely so much on managers and booking agents? Two days after the conference, I received this amazing newsletter describing the Ecstatic Music Festival and wondered if perhaps the best new music groups are simply too busy to send someone to a conference that doesn’t quite align with their needs.

4. The creative, collaborative, DIY spirit of the Chicago chamber music scene is special and needs to be exported better. Chamber music innovations happening in Chicago aren’t nearly as well-known as they should be. Conference buzzwords like flexible-format concerts, interdisciplinary collaboration, and unconventional venues are so essential to the Chicago scene that they’ve almost become old hat. What’s even cooler about Chicago is that most of these innovations are artist-driven, because almost all our ensembles are artist-run. The lack of staff is exhausting, but it also allows our organizations to take risks, to be more dynamic and adaptive, and to have lower overhead. When you think about Spektral Quartet curating an evening of works about war, or Fifth House creating cinematic concert experiences that redefine music-theater collaboration, or the sheer scope of the Beethoven Festival, you realize what exciting stuff is happening in our city. And most of it is happening without management.

5. The national new music community needs a professional conference of its own. Imagine a conference as lively and vibrant as CMA, but more centered on performance and ideas than on a marketplace of acts for sale. By day, the conference could host amazing panel discussions on a range of important issues in the field: perhaps Claire Chase lecturing on new ensemble models, Alex Ross chairing a panel on music writing, Marcos Balter speaking on commission etiquette, or Third Coast Percussion talking about the way they divide organizational work. By night, we’d all hear great off-site performances at the Hideout, the Empty Bottle, Mayne Stage (which is a decidedly better venue than Le Poisson Rouge), Corbett & Dempsey, and a host of others. Because I forgot to mention one important detail: the first conference should be in Chicago. Let’s make it happen.

Scratch That: Nothing More Than Feelings

Posted on January 15, 2013 by - Field Reports, Headlines

Drama alert: we’ve received word of a Photographer Debacle at the Chicago Composers Orchestra concert last week. Apparently, an ill-informed photographer passed out his business card and introduced himself to many orchestra members…while they were performing. We’ll resist linking to his website for fear of retribution; wronged orchestral players and their allies can be a fierce and unforgiving bunch.

January is a difficult month for Scratch, as our usual concert-going days are occupied by unmissable NFL playoff action. Fortunately, someone in the advertising department understands that there’s a niche audience that wants to see legendary football players pretending to be piano virtuosos with great hair:


Does Scratch That seem a little jittery? That’s because we’re packing a suitcase and heading to New York City for the Chamber Music America conference! We’re especially excited for Saturday’s panel on women composers, and a career advising session where we can finally ask Astrid Baumgardner if writing this column is a good career move for us. You can follow @ellen_mcsweeney for live tweets of the conference, assuming we’ll be able to tear our naive Midwestern eyes away from the bright lights, tall skyscrapers, and impressively large attitudes.

Chicago will continue to hum with winter concerts while we’re away, including ICE bassoonist Rebekah Heller’s solo recital at Corbett vs. Dempsey. She’s performing new works by Chicago composers Marcos Balter and Daniel Dehaan. This evocative blog post from Dehaan describes the epic motorcycle trip he took in order to capture the sights and sounds of Alaska (and much of the West Coast). You know—just your average “creative process” post.

Is it just us, or are musicians starting to blog about their feelings more? Either way, we’re in favor. This post from Luke Gullickson resonated, and this one from Emily Wright inspired. Keep up the good work, people.

New Music in New Places: After Hours Concerts in Austin

Posted on January 10, 2013 by - Field Reports, Headlines

Michael Hertel, Sunil Gadgil, and lots of cans.

Michael Hertel, Sunil Gadgil, and lots of cans.

There are pros and cons to consider when messing around with contemporary concert presentation. Change it too little and you may not attract the newer (read: younger) audiences that can sustain your project. Change it too much and you run the risk of alienating your base. The attractive features of your new venue may clash with the needs of the music. I’ve been to more than a few shows where the magical moments were ruined by the ring of a cash register or the frothing of milk. Cell phone etiquette? Good luck. As much as we rail against these protocols, they do serve a purpose. But if you find the right curator, a balance can be struck between cool venue and great music.

After Hours Concerts run by saxophonist Spencer Nielsen held its inaugural concert at Austin Beerworks. Doubling down on the “Why don’t we have a concert at the coffeehouse/bar?” concept, Nielsen and (most of) his Bel Cuore cohorts held court at the brewery itself. Located in a warehouse in North Austin, Austin Beerworks is one of a number of microbreweries that have recently sprung up after so many went south following the bursting of the late ’90s tech bubble. The ticket price for the show covered admittance to the concert, a few beers [1], and an ABW pint glass. Not a bad deal.


Cool new music locations are sometimes hard to find, especially when they are located among row upon row of nondescript warehouses. I get lost in my own home, so I walked in a bit late as the first piece, Rob Smith’s Morse Code Pop, was being performed by Nielsen and Michael Hertel. Written for alto and baritone saxophone, the punchy syncopated rhythms hopped and skipped around a pulse that was occasionally outlined by key clicks and foot stomps mimicking hi-hats. Nielsen followed the up-tempo Smith piece with Joan Tower’s Wings. Mostly lyrical lines were accented with grace notes leading to pedal point trills, all impressively negotiated by Nielsen with a clear, round tone. Sunil Gadgil joined Hertel and Nielsen for William Albright’s Doo Dah. A somber work overall, the three saxes traded and shared long lines that, as they came together, created beating combination tones before resolving. Short fast lines lead to something of a Scelsian moment, a single tone played among the three which seemed to expand and contract before wheeling out of control into a wild polyphony, the lines moving every which way. Side trips into fugue, blues, and jazz found common ground in timbral exploration. Albright’s goal was to make the three instruments into one, and it was particularly impressive to hear the trio simply fill the large room with sound.

line upon line and the vat cathedral

line upon line and the vat cathedral

As Bel Cuore headed for the bar [2], line upon line percussion took the stage. Their set opened with Ian Dicke’s commentary on consumerism, Missa Materialis. In five movements, the piece was not only aurally compelling but also visually stimulating. The first movement evoked tribal rhythms performed on a trash can with broken sixteenth note figures played on anvil. The motoric qualities of this movement gave way to a call and response on ratchets which started with the players “discovering” the sounds the instruments made; a discovery made particularly enjoyable by their theatrical delivery which helped tell the story without descending into campy silliness. A more melancholy section followed, one populated by whistling, musical saw, and vibes, recalling the character of an old radio show. The piece ends with a movement featuring plastic grocery bags, wine glasses, and a brave rendition of Agnus Dei with a bit of vibes thrown in for good measure. Steven Snowden’s A Man With a Gun Lives Here for bass drum (primarily) and three players is in three movements and gets its name from the so-called “hobo code” which consisted of symbols used in the early 20th century to indicate a place to get a meal, potential danger, and other characteristics of a given location. In the first movement, “Be prepared to defend yourself,” syncopated rhythmic patterns that form and disintegrate are interrupted by low rumbles created by a rubber mallet slowly drawn across the head of the drum. “There Are Thieves About” featured grooves played on the rim and various metals, with Cullen Faulk diving in to give “zrbtts” [3] to the drumhead. The final movement shares its name with the piece and featured brushes used on and around the drum. As the brushes swished and banged, a paper bag materialized and was integrated into the rhythmic texture. It was picked up, passed around, and slid across the drum as a crescendo slowly built. At the climax, Faulk (who was positioned in the center) raised the bag in the air where it was stabbed on either side by Matthew Teodori and Adam Bedell. The buckshot within spilled onto the drum, and as it rolled around it looked like flocking birds and sounded a bit like the wind.

Backstage at the merch counter.

Backstage at the merch counter.

Let’s just say that having a concert in a brewery is likely going to draw a crowd. While it wasn’t church-quiet in there, the ambient noise of the room was certainly within listenable parameters and at times added to the impact of the music. The visual aspect was sort of cathedral-like, with the vats positioned like some huge shell behind the performers, but it looked pretty cool and it gave some acoustic character to the warehouse. After Hours Concerts has shows scheduled at Texas Coffee Traders and Springdale Farms this spring, and I’ll be sure to check them out. Espressos and wheat grass shots, here I come!

***


1. May I recommend the “Mister Falcon?” It was a mix of two of their beers, and if it wasn’t so delicious I would have had the presence of mind to write them down. Also worth noting is that Mister Falcon and Mother Falcon are both used extensively in broadcast versions of movies featuring Samuel Jackson.

2. I don’t really know if they went to the bar. It’s very possible they headed offstage for bottled water, juice, or a quick run around the building.

3. Ah, the ’80s.

Scratch That: It’s Over!

Posted on January 8, 2013 by - Field Reports, Headlines

Vacation's Over!Musical Chicagoans have emerged from their holiday slumber with mixed feelings, and frankly we don’t blame them.
As our friend Drew put it, there’s just no easy way to do January. It’s cold, it’s dark, and your husband made you take the Christmas tree down two weeks before you were emotionally ready. There’s only one thing that’ll get you through it: concerts. Especially concerts in warm greenhouses filled with green, living things. That’s right: it’s time again for Amidst Lush Plantlife, Chicago Composers Orchestra’s second annual romp at the Garfield Park Conservatory, happening this Wednesday night.

In the non-greenhouse show category (please, no booing), Third Coast Percussion is in town for a show at University of Chicago on Friday, and on Saturday the NbN Trio presents AMBEDO to cap off their High Concept Laboratories residency.

Did anyone else hear that re-run of This American Life called “Mapping”? With the story about the guy who researched the emotional quality of intervals? He discovered that the combination of his office heater, computer motor, and phone dial tone created an unhappy pitch cluster that (he believed) was contributing to his bad mood at work. It’s simultaneously a really dumb idea and a somewhat interesting one. We hate musical pseudo-science as much as the next gal, but it’s not every day that This American Life nerds out about tritones. (Best pop culture discussion of keys/moods ever: below, obviously.)


Before the break, we enjoyed this lively behind-the-scenes post by Chicago Civic Orchestra violinist Katie Klocke. CSO artist-in-residence Yo-Yo Ma is, apparently, helping to mount an unconventional performance in which Civic will perform Beethoven 6 under a tree, from memory. (This is in the spring, of course; they don’t treat Civic musicians THAT badly!) Ma’s presence in Chicago is deeply felt and enthusiastically received. But are we alone in feeling like a cranky old lady seeing all these twenty-two year olds getting on a first-name Facebook basis with “Yo-Yo”?

Scratch That is probably very late to this party, but we’re really excited about The Yard, a sassy and vibrant Juillard student-run paper and website. While the paper is admittedly focused on a very small demographic–that is, music students at Juilliard–it also has a broader mission to “serve the next generation of performing artists.” The paper has a very able crew of comedy writers who are creating a body of satirical work to rival The Onion, as well as insightful columns from young performers and a brave article about Fashion’s Night Out in which the author confesses to having left her bra at Michael Kors. The whole thing is a fun, exciting development in musician-centered media and we need more sites like it.

A lot of our friends are getting knocked up. Oh, yours too? Are any of them freelance musicians? Nope, ours neither. We’ve been thinking a lot about the challenges of having kids as a musician. Google doesn’t yield a lot of encouragement, but there is this piece about (rock/pop) musical mamas. And this article about the benefits of being raised in a frugal home. So it’s a good thing! Low income is a good thing, right!?!

Open House: Del Sol Days

Posted on January 3, 2013 by - Field Reports, Headlines

The Del Sol String Quartet, an integral and seemingly ubiquitous part of the San Francisco Bay Area’s new music community, celebrated its 20th anniversary last month with Del Sol Days, a five-day festival of performances, open rehearsals, and other public events at Z Space, a performance space in the Mission district of San Francisco (formerly Theatre Artaud). Del Sol focuses their repertoire exclusively on contemporary work, and in the week’s three concerts they gave world premieres of four pieces by American composers.

Kate Stenberg, Rick Shinozaki, Charlton Lee and Kathryn Bates Williams (left to right), performing in front of a set by Nick Noyes Architecture

Kate Stenberg, Rick Shinozaki, Charlton Lee, and Kathryn Bates Williams (left to right), performing in front of a set by Nick Noyes Architecture.

Del Sol was founded in 1992 by violist Charlton Lee, with current first violinist Kate Stenberg joining shortly afterwards in 1995. Violinist Rick Shinozaki has been a part of the group’s growth for nearly a decade; the most recent addition of cellist Kathryn Bates Williams happened in 2010. All four have deep roots in the San Francisco area: the three longstanding members are Bay Area natives, and three are also alumni of the San Francisco Conservatory. Given their frequent appearances in the area–whether at the Other Minds Festival, at this year’s Cabrillo Festival, at Oakland’s Garden of Memory, at the Switchboard Festival, collaborating with local dance companies and other Bay Area musicians, and so on–it can be easy to take Del Sol’s presence for granted. Del Sol Days was a welcome opportunity to be reminded that this consistently hard-working ensemble has been doing a yeoman’s job in our musical community for two decades now.


Of the three performances, I was able to hear only the closing event on December 8. The performance series had opened on the first night with the first San Francisco appearance of an installation by Santa Fe-based composer and video artist Chris Jonas titled GARDEN, Chapter 1: Night, which enclosed the musicians in four walls of scrims on which images were projected. The scrims were removed and replaced with a set designed by Nick Noyes Architecture on the second night, which followed a more conventional concert format, including premieres of works by Lembit Beecher and Matthew Cmiel, and a work that has been in Del Sol’s active repertoire for many years, Gabriela Lena Frank’s Leyendas: An Andean Walkabout. (Del Sol recorded one movement of this work for their 2008 album Ring of Fire: Music of the Pacific Rim.)

Del Sol String Quartet’s founder and violist Charlton Lee

Del Sol String Quartet’s founder and violist Charlton Lee.

It was immediately apparent from the start of the third evening that Del Sol considered themselves among friends, and indeed many in the audience knew each other and were excited to be celebrating this anniversary with the quartet. Cmiel, himself a local fixture whose work Invocation had been premiered the night before, welcomed the audience with a casual spoken introduction, and during the concert each musician had an opportunity to take the mic to address the audience directly with reflections on the group’s history and personal commentary on the repertoire they were performing.

The evening’s program began with two world premieres, by San Francisco-based Irene Sazer and Bay Area-born Dylan Mattingly. In her work Thunder, Sazer, who is a founder of both the Turtle Island and Real Vocal String Quartets, asks Del Sol to vocalize on phonemes and sing simple melodies while playing, as Real Vocal is accustomed to doing. (Del Sol has been asked to multitask before: in a work by Ken Ueno premiered at this year’s Other Minds Festival, Lee is charged with overtone singing while playing; in Chinary Ung’s Spiral X: “In Memoriam”, also on Ring of Fire, the musicians sing, whistle, and shout precisely notated material as well.) In introducing Gone, Gone, Gone, Lee noted that they first worked with now 21-year-old Mattingly when he was a child participant in Del Sol’s QuartetFest, a chamber music workshop for young string players that has been running for 16 years. In this new work, Mattingly mines the legacy of American folk music for harmonic and melodic material, weaving it into a broad landscape of sustained chords reminiscent of mentor John Adams’s Christian Zeal and Activity to open the piece and ebulliently cascading lines to close.

Del Sol then reprised Bagatelles by Oakland resident Mason Bates, which they had premiered at this past summer’s Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music in Santa Cruz. Bates sampled the musicians in a studio making “all manner of strange sounds” as he writes in the program notes, and processed the samples to create the beat-heavy electronic backing track for three of the four short movements. A video of the second and fourth movements, “Scrapyard Exotica” and “Viscera,” previewed at a Grantmakers in the Arts conference, can be seen below, starting at 6:00.


The second half of the program featured Bay Area didjeridu player Stephen Kent, who has collaborated with Del Sol on Australian composer Peter Sculthorpe’s String Quartet No. 16. Kent and the quartet performed this work in 2007 at the Library of Congress (certainly Stradivarius could never have imagined the didjeridu’s overtones vibrating the wood in his instruments) and recorded one movement for Ring of Fire. After a brief solo set in which Kent played didjeridu while singing and ringing wind chimes, Kent gave an impassioned introduction to Sculthorpe’s work, which was written in response to the humanitarian crisis that has developed in Australia due to the flight of Afghan refugees (PDF) seeking asylum. (In August alone nearly 2,000 Afghans arrived in Australia by boat.)

Stephen Kent, didjeridu, performing Sculthorpe’s String Quartet No. 16 with Del Sol

Stephen Kent, didjeridu, performing Sculthorpe’s String Quartet No. 16 with Del Sol

This was both Del Sol’s cleanest and most emotionally charged playing of the evening, with Kent’s variously sized didjeridus sounding like animalistic spirits pervading the Afghan love song on which three of the five movements are based. The first four movements, titled “Loneliness,” “Anger,” “Yearning,” and “Trauma,” are heartrending in their despair, but Sculthorpe closes the work with “Freedom,” giving the first violin a soaring melody which flies unfettered above the Australian expanse provided by the didjeridu’s drone.

San Francisco Sampler: Chamber Music Day

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

Taraneh Hemami’s installation FREE at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

Taraneh Hemami’s installation FREE at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

By a happy coincidence, the large neon and steel installation by Iranian-born, San Francisco-based visual artist Taraneh Hemami titled FREE (which celebrates the transformative events of Arab Spring with text in both English and Arabic) was hanging over the lobby of the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts during Chamber Music Day, a free seven-hour extravaganza of performances. Chamber Music Day is an annual event that the San Francisco Friends of Chamber Music has been putting on since 2008, in a different venue each year. This year’s event, co-presented by YBCA, took advantage of multiple spaces in the arts center, using both the main theater (best known to the outside world for the many Apple products launched from its stage) and the multi-use Forum, as well as a screening room, a lounge, and lobby spaces, for performances and demonstrations for seven hours on a Sunday afternoon. Audience members were encouraged to shuttle freely among the forty or so scheduled performances, which took place throughout the campus in short 20- to 30-minute concurrent sets. By lowering the barriers of cost, time, and distance, Chamber Music Day offers a zero-commitment way for audiences to hear a wide variety of Bay Area musicians, including those they aren’t familiar with.

While there is plenty of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms to be heard during Chamber Music Day, the event specifically aims to include music beyond those expected boundaries, identifying early and baroque, classical, contemporary, improvisation, and world/jazz as subcategories for the day. Given YBCA’s multidisciplinary interests as a center for visual as well as performing arts, this year’s Chamber Music Day (November 18) also included a full afternoon’s slate of short films with live musical accompaniment, in most cases by the composers themselves.

The Living Earth Show, performing Adrian Knight’s Family Man in the YBCA Forum

The Living Earth Show, performing Adrian Knight’s Family Man in the YBCA Forum.

“I just can’t stand what passes for music by most modern composers. Noise is noise from a car, bus, or flute. Still, I loved the traditional music and that odd little piece about the bird.” –Ralph (from the SF Friends of Chamber Music’s refreshingly frank audience comments page)

Among the first things I heard that afternoon was a performance of John Cage’s Concerto for Piano given by the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players and before I encountered a single note of Beethoven. Among those included under the contemporary, improvised, and jazz music umbrellas at Chamber Music Day were guitarist/composer John Shiurba’s 8@8 project, excerpts from Francis Wong’s Diaspora Tale #2, guitar and percussion duo The Living Earth Show, Beth Custer’s clarinet quartet Clarinet Thing, and Grosse Abfahrt, an improvisation by six musicians led by trumpeter Tom Djll, which seamlessly melded electronic and acoustic sounds. Particularly entertaining was a set by WiENER KiDS, a jazz trio of two saxophonists and drummer, and composer Jordan Glenn, who introduced a gentle, intimate piece by saying they were about to play “a ballad called My Bike.”

Vocallective, performing Osvaldo Golijov’s Lua descolorida

Vocallective, performing Osvaldo Golijov’s Lua descolorida.

Given the multiple performance spaces, it was of course possible to hear only a small selection of the day’s offerings. Among those performers working with fully notated contemporary music was Vocallective, a group of young musicians recently founded by clear-voiced soprano Indre Viskontas, performing a set of three works by Osvaldo Golijov, including two pieces for soprano and chamber ensemble and Tenebrae for string quartet. San Francisco Performances, one of the Bay Area’s premiere presenters of chamber music, also brought mezzo-soprano Laura Krumm, a San Francisco Opera young artist, into the theater to reprise some selections from Jake Heggie’s song cycle Camille Claudel: Into the Fire which she had performed at a recent salon performance.

Regina Schaffer and Sarah Cahill (L-R) playing Terry Riley in the YBCA Lam Research Theater (with composer Luciano Chessa, who was called up from the audience to fill in for an absent page turner)

Regina Schaffer and Sarah Cahill (L-R) playing Terry Riley in the YBCA Lam Research Theater (with composer Luciano Chessa, who was called up from the audience to fill in for an absent page turner.)

Towards the end of the day, Sarah Cahill and Regina Schaffer took the stage in the theater to perform two four-hand piano works that Cahill had commissioned from Terry Riley, Waltz for Charismas and Etude from the Old Country. Cahill and Schaffer have been programming these works regularly in concert and are preparing to release recordings. Cahill introduced them by reading a brief note from Riley about the pieces:

In the days before radio and television, homes across the United States had pianos in the parlour, and families entertained themselves with music for four hands at one piano. My new four-hand piano works were written in the hope that people will throw their televisions out the window and return to activities that will bring spirit, content and meaning to their lives.

Of course, it would take some serious chops to play these challenging and passionate pieces in one’s parlor, and I was happy to sit back and allow Cahill and Schaffer to bring their spirited performance to my ears.

***

Clerestory

Clerestory in the Fleet Room at Fort Mason Center in San Francisco.

For all the undeniable benefits of bringing audiences into a space to hear music they wouldn’t necessarily encounter on their own, a lively, unfettered, and varied event like Chamber Music Day does pose some challenges for both performers and audiences. For the musician, the quick turnovers between sets and limited time for sound checks occasionally did not benefit the performances; and from the listener’s standpoint, the constant movement of audience members and the brevity of the sets sometimes made it difficult to focus one’s ears, especially for quieter performances.

Fortunately I had had the opportunity to hear Clerestory, a men’s unaccompanied vocal ensemble, perform their Chamber Music Day set as part of a solo concert earlier this fall in a more controlled setting. This finely tuned ensemble, which includes countertenors singing up into soprano range, was formed in 2006 by Jesse Antin, a alumnus of Chanticleer. (Nearly all of Clerestory’s other singers have spent some time with Chanticleer as well.)

Clerestory opened their seventh season this fall with their first-ever commission, a 25-minute cycle of six Herman Melville poetry settings by Seattle composer Eric Banks titled These Oceans Vast, which was the centerpiece of a sea-themed program. (All of the concerts were presented in venues with broad views of the ocean and San Francisco Bay.) Throughout much of the work, Banks uses either small repeating gestures or stacked clusters to establish a slowly undulating bed over which the text is delivered, sometimes in melodies delivered by one or two singers, and in the particularly successful second movement, in a close four-part canon through which the sailor narrator’s mind tries to brush away fear by nervously chattering “Give me the nerve… Give me the calm.” Banks saves a rare moment of homophony until the end of the fourth song, where the narrator, full of yearning for his beloved at this point in his long voyage, calls out, “O love, O love, these oceans vast!”

Clerestory (pronounced “clear story,” referring to high cathedral windows) has built their audience in part over the years by generously posting recordings of all their concert programs on their website. These Oceans Vast can be streamed in its entirety or downloaded here.

Scratch That: Glance Back, Look Ahead

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

As Chicago braces for a freezing cold start to this new year, let’s pretend the internet doesn’t exist and email is an impossibility. Imagine that I bundled up and trudged all over the city to visit these Chicago musicians in their natural habitats: meeting Julia Filson for a drink at The Aviary, running into Cliff Colnot at an Esperanza Spalding show, or visiting Hans Thomalla in his studio as he worked with a young composer. Picture Andrew Nogal drinking the best possible coffee before getting to work on some new reeds; imagine Mike Junokas fusing electrical wires together in Wicker Park. There’s a lot of fascinating work being done by musicians in Chicago, and behind that work is a group of fascinating people. I picked an eclectic bunch and asked them what they loved about 2012 and where they’re headed in 2013. I learned that most composers don’t like to make resolutions. But as we embark on a fresh set of months, I think you’ll be inspired by these reflections–and the good-looking headshots.

Check in with:
Julia Filson, French horn player of Gaudete Brass
Andrew Nogal, oboist of Ensemble Dal Niente and The City of Tomorrow
Jenna Lyle, composer and doctoral student at Northwestern University
David Skidmore of Third Coast Percussion
Mike Junokas, composer/performer of HARD R
Augusta Read Thomas, composer and professor, University of Chicago
George Flynn, composer, chair emeritus of the composition department at DePaul University
Cliff Colnot, conductor, composer, arranger, and director of ensembles at DePaul University
Nomi Epstein, composer and performer
Melissa Snoza, flutist and executive director of Fifth House Ensemble
Hans Thomalla, composer and co-director of Northwestern’s Institute for New Music

ensemble dal niente: Hard Music Hard Liquor

Posted on December 20, 2012 by - Field Reports, Headlines

As the performers stepped onstage for the seventh of nine pieces on ensemble dal niente’s Hard Music Hard Liquor program Friday night, I whispered to my husband: “This is going to be a really hard concert to write about.” By the end of an evening this aesthetically diverse, your head is spinning a little.

The show was called Hard Music Hard Liquor–a boozy celebration of new music virtuosity–but the challenges that it posed went beyond the realm of technique. Many of the pieces asserted strong and provocative ideas about the dynamic between composer, performer, and audience. These pieces asked us to consider important questions such as: How far can a composer push a player? Can a composer continue to assert himself in the performance of a piece, long after he’s handed over the score? What role do we play as observers, and how do our previous listening experiences affect the we hear these new works?

In Ray Evanoff’s Negotiating the Absolute Location of Buoyancy, we heard growls, groans, and whimpers–an arresting, ultra-subdued mad scene for solo French horn, spoken like a captive struggling to speak through a gag. In this case, the gag was the horn. At times I felt Matt Oliphant was locked in mortal combat with his instrument. Given the horn’s notorious difficulty, this piece sets the audience on edge, with Evanoff challenging us to hear music in the guttural, unpredictable sound palette that can sometimes characterize “mistakes.”

Stefan Prins’s Piano Hero #1, for midi-keyboard, video, and live electronics, performed by Mabel Kwan

Stefan Prins’s Piano Hero #1, for midi-keyboard, video, and live electronics, performed by Mabel Kwan. Photo by Ryan Muncy

Stefan Prins’s Piano Hero #1, for midi-keyboard, video, and live electronics, also opens in a way that terrifies the listener. The video–a man dragging pieces of wood and metal across a piano frame–seemed to be skipping and malfunctioning. But as it turns out, the “scratched DVD” sensation is one of the most important elements of Piano Hero’s sonic assault. The piece contains a particularly unsettling moment in which the live camera fixes on pianist Mabel Kwan–so we finally focus on her, rather than the man in the pre-recorded video–but as she continues to play, the keyboard makes no sound. Before our eyes, the performer is silenced by the composer and the system he created. (Indeed, Prins’s website describes the pianist in this piece as “a mere operator in a world of bits and bytes.”) But if the piece was a battle between the performer and the composed system, it appeared that Mabel Kwan eventually won, silencing the muscular video man with a long “game over” buzz while he continued to flicker powerlessly.

Chris Fisher-Lochhead’s Shredhaus is endearingly titled, given its tiny, lean-forward-to-catch-every-moment sound world. I was reminded of an electric guitarist practicing without an amp as I watched Jesse Langen “shred” on his acoustic without the help of his right hand. In the piece’s amazing (anti)climax, Langen’s left hand climbed closer and closer to the guitar’s pegs–the opposite direction of typical guitar heroes. The piece felt like a rock guitar solo turned delightfully inside out.

How far is Ferneyhough from Schubert? In Lemma — Icon — Epigram, Winston Choi played with an elegance and panache that made me feel that they’re closer than ever. How do we reconceive the virtuoso violin showpiece in the 21st century? Austin Wulliman presented the instrument’s brilliant colors and hard edges in Lee Hyla’s Passegiata.

Malin Bang’s Turbid Motion, performed by ensemble dal niente. Photo by Ryan Muncy

Malin Bang’s Turbid Motion, performed by ensemble dal niente. Photo by Ryan Muncy

After more than an hour of solo (and one duo) performance, it was a joy and a relief to see nine members of the ensemble gather onstage together for Malin Bang’s amazingly textured Turbid Motion and Fisher-Lochhead’s fantastic, zany arrangement of Frank Zappa’s The Duke of Prunes. Watching the ensemble interact with each other–smiling, cuing, provoking–was a stark contrast from watching them engage in lonely battles with ultra-challenging scores. It was a testament, I think, to the huge difference between what a solo piece can convey and what music scored for an ensemble can deliver. After a night of intense soliloquy, the evening ended with the sounds of a party.