Category: Field Reports

Alyssa Timin Photo by Ross Hoffman

Ars Nova Workshop, a presenter of improvisational music helmed by the young Mark Christman, is doing well for itself. Crowned Best Jazz Series in 2000, 2001, 2002, and 2005 by the Philadelphia City Paper, Ars Nova has been responsible for more than 200 avant-garde performances since its inception.

Primarily, Ars Nova presents its concerts on the western edge of the University of Pennsylvania campus at alternative venues including the Slought Foundation, a gallery for conceptual and experimental art, and International House Philadelphia, which includes a large concert hall that plays host to Ars Nova’s “Ancient to the Future” series celebrating several “elder statesmen” of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, Inc. (AACM). In November, the Anthony Braxton Sextet packed in an audience of 380. In this neighborhood, concerts draw avid listeners from both the international intellectual scene at UPenn and the West Philly natives who remember, or whose parents remember, when jazz clubs used to line the streets of the city.

On the evening of January 19, I decided to check out a free Ars Nova event at the Rotunda, a classically-inspired space clearly battered by years of use by groups apt to scrawl and tag all over the basement where I went in search of the ladies’ room. On offer was the Arthur Doyle Electric-Acoustic Ensemble.

Doyle, a saxophonist, flutist, and singer born in Birmingham in 1944, describes himself as performing “free jazz soul.” In the ’60s, he spent time playing with percussionist Milford Graves, Pharoah Sanders, and the Sun Ra Arkestra. An unfortunate stint in Paris followed, during which Doyle spent five years in prison “horn-less,” but writing “prolifically nonetheless, producing the first compositions for his songbook: a massive, 300-piece aural memoir.” The work appeared on the albums Plays and Sings from the Songbook, Vol. 1 (1992), The Songwriter (1994), and Do the Breakdown (1997). In the ’90s, Doyle worked with, among others, bassist Wilber Morris and Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore.

Thursday night, Doyle came onstage alone in a day-glow orange cap with shoulder length dreads and an African-print shirt. He sat down and started to free-scat, a rapid-fire mumble and shout. His drummer, Ed Wilcox, joined in soon after, breathing quietly into a harmonica. Next came the rest of the ensemble, Daniel Carter (saxophones/trumpet), Vinnie Paternostro (electronics), and Dave Cross (turntables).

Wilcox worked hard to keep the group in motion. He claims to have “steered” his own group, Temple of Bon Matin, “on a 15-year tightrope between free jazz and heavy metal.” Pretty soon his shirt was off, and he was all over his kit, building a palette of sound. Doyle played his sax hard when he could but rested a few times, breathing heavily, nodding in his chair.

Carter, Paternostro, and Cross watched him closely. The electronics hummed, sang like a bird, whined. They sampled Doyle’s screeches and honks, looped them, processed his scats and yells. Their expressions conveyed that they weren’t sure where Doyle was going next, but maybe they were fine with that. Doyle’s performance was ideally grizzled for the technology his band mates dropped over him. He was raw. When Doyle spoke to the audience, we strained to understand: “Amen bye bye, I’ll see you all later, bye,” I think I caught in his farewell.

Mark Gresham Photo by Angela Lee

Every now and then, composers and performer-composers can use a tall glass of cultural reality check.

As these words are being written, we are approaching Mozart’s 250th birthday this Friday. It’s worth recognizing the degree of public popularity Mozart achieved over two centuries ago. One could hardly think that Mozart, as a composer or a performer, would deliberately avoid finding the broadest popular audience he could.

It need not be re-hashed here how “serious” composers had increasingly distanced themselves from the public ear and its immediate cultural environment over a good part of the late 20th century, including distancing themselves from song—meaning popular song. Would one think that Mozart would avoid the idioms in popular song if he were alive today? One could credibly conclude that he might take the attitude of rock violinist Bobby Yang.

A 27-year-old protégé of Paul Kantor (then at the University of Michigan), Yang followed his mentor to the Aspen Music Festival camp each summer for extended study but honed his rock chops playing at clubs five nights a week. After settling in Aspen for a while, Yang moved to Atlanta in 2003 in search of a larger market, creating original string tracks locally for acts like Avril Lavigne and Collective Soul. He has recently done the same for producer Ron Saint Germain at The Shed in New York.

In November of last year, and again this January 6, Yang came out from behind the studio to perform as a headliner at Eddie’s Attic in Decatur backed by his Unrivaled Players—Clay Cook (guitar), Rob Henson (bass), and Mark Cobb (drums). The repertoire: instrumental transformations of classic rock songs made famous by Led Zepplin, Smashing Pumpkins, Guns N’ Roses, Eddie Van Halen, Jimi Hendrix, et al. Yang’s “not exactly covers” deploy the full-on energy and fun of rock without the sheer volume of arena bands using only amplified acoustic instruments. Yang refuses to play an electric violin, amplifying his number one ax (made in the same year Mozart was born) with a mic strapped on with a No.3 rubber band. The performance and Yang’s energy thoroughly engaged the mixed-generation audience, which joined in a sing-along during Def Leppard’s “Pour Some Sugar on Me.”

Bobby Yang Photo by Melissa M. Bugg

What does this have to do with “serious” composing today? Everything, suggests Yang, who can play Mozart concerti or Paganini caprices with equal facility as he does rock and pop classics.

“So many times I hear people diss pop music as being just three chords. It really isn’t. It’s three chords that can rock 150,000 people at Wembley [Stadium]. I challenge [composers] to do that in their own way. It’s really not about the theories of music, it’s about the passion and the energy you put into it.”

In performance, Yang plays an amalgamation of lead guitar and vocal parts, but not slavishly—instead, with a good dose of improvisatory freedom. “I was taught a clean, pure sound,” says Yang. For rock, he found a different way. To do it, he starts conceptually from that “white canvas” of pure classical sound, which he describes as driving from three elements of bowing:

• 1) Bowing direction. For purest timbre, the bow remains perpendicular to the strings. “This requires the arm roll outward as the bow is pulled,” says Yang.

• 2) The amount of bow hair contacting the strings. “The frog is heavier than the tip, so the bow is rotated for less hair at the frog, more at the tip,” he says, to achieve evenness of volume.

• 3) The point where the bow contacts the string. “The middle of the string is where you get the most torque—too much. [The normal] contact point is about 1″ off the bridge, but the sweet spot varies about 1.5 centimeters [overall among] the different strings.”

“I think it’s a big mistake to work on vibrato until the bow is mastered,” says Yang of playing rock idioms. He jokes that the left hand is over rated, but is adamant about the importance of bowing to style. “If the bowing isn’t right, no amount of effects (like wide vibrato or slides) will cover for you.”

“The classical goal is to imitate a pure-voiced opera singer,” he says. “But to take it beyond that is where I come from. I actually hold back [on velocity] so I can sound like singers on the radio, who don’t sound like Cecilia Bartoli. I focus on intonation, on the ‘breath,’ and little idiosyncrasies. I’ve developed a personality in my bowing, like the little hiccup before Michael Jackson starts a phrase.”

“I’ve watched Ron Saint Germain mix, and you know what he’s listening for? The breath in a singer. He makes sure you can hear it. And that’s what makes his mixes [work for] all these huge, huge bands. There’s something subliminal there, subconscious, that makes them sound like they’re in the car with you.”

“From a composer’s standpoint, I would listen to libraries of popular groups today, find out what textures, what instruments I wouldn’t use,” he insists, avoiding some that are common in classical scoring. “Maybe more collaboration, maybe between someone like Bono and a contemporary composer would completely launch that [composer’s] career.”

Surely Mozart would have liked the idea. After all, his three most successful Italian operas were the product of a close collaboration with librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte. Who knows? Had they written Don Giovanni today, the opera might well have included a song like “Pour Some Sugar on Me”—I mean “Versimi un Certo Zucchero.”

Photo by Richard Termine

We here in NYC have been arm wrestling each other for the last of the tickets to Osvaldo Golijov’s “opera” Ainadamar (“Fountain of Tears”). Tonight is the final performance of the three-nights-only production at Lincoln Center—put up as part of a month-long festival celebrating the composer—and at this point it seems that unless you are so bold as to trip a patron and snatch her ticket out of her hand, you’ll probably have to wait till next time. For the less aggressive Golijov fan and those living elsewhere, fret not: rumor has it that there is a Deutsche Grammophon recording in the pipeline.

Despite the fact that this production was packaged with Peter Sellars’s staging and L.A.-based artist Gronk’s faux fin-de-siècle expressionistic backdrop, a recording necessarily shed of these elements will be worth looking forward to, especially if some of the orchestra-vs.-voice balance issues I heard on Tuesday are resolved in the mix. I’m not always a fan of multi-culti scores, but this celebrated Argentinian-American has shown he knows how to work it, probably because he’s lived it. Working here with a libretto by David Henry Hwang, electronic and orchestral sounds are colored with snatches of more traditional Spanish inflection. The voices deliver their lines with a pure, clean pitch—the music itself offering ornamentation enough.

The libretto conjures aspects of the life and death of Federico Garcia Lorca and his friend and champion, the actress Margarita Xirgu. Dressed in simple black gowns, Dawn Upshaw (Xirgu) and a chorus of young women took the stage to begin what turned out to be less an opera and more an evening-length lament. Kelley O’Connor, the mezzo playing Lorca, exuded enough stage presence and charisma to command the necessary attention, even up against Upshaw, who was as striking as ever. Unfortunately O’Connor’s lower-register sound was almost completely buried at stretches by the Orchestra of St. Luke’s under the baton of Miguel Harth-Bedoya. Jessica Rivera’s clear soprano voice (in the role of Xirgu’s student) and Upshaw struggled less, and seemed generally to shoot straight to the ear. Speakers overhead handled the samples.

Photo by Richard Termine

All of the principals were required to pull off acting moves that could have easily turned into a sick sort of parody of the tragic plotline if not handled well, but they did so with notable grace, especially Upshaw who had to project while lying on the floor and pace herself through a death scene that must have accounted for at least 10 minutes of the piece. Some of Sellars’s directorial choices could not be saved by the players, however, especially when it came to the soldiers wandering around in fatigues pointing machine guns at the singers and most unforgivably the execution of Lorca, with the death shot delivered over and over again in a cycle that eventually just made you stare at your shoes until it was finished.

It’s a wrenching storyline, but the music channels the higher passions of the characters rather than the morose circumstances of their deaths. And though I’m not sure if the term “opera” is a very accurate moniker to slap on this 75-minute work, I was struck while listening that it would be my answer to what sort of piece 21st-century audiences disinclined to lose themselves in traditional operatic productions might be hunting for. The show was put up in Rose Hall, part of the Jazz at Lincoln Center megaplex in the Time Warner building (Barry Manilow was upstairs doing his thing the night I went), and I left the theater perfectly content to have forgone the Met pomposity and the three-hour run time. All the intellectual heft was there, just absent the trappings.

Amy D. Rubin

Seattle claims Trimpin (who uses only his last name) as its own, but the sculptor, instrument builder, composer, and sound artist has only been a local resident since 1980. Born in Istein, Germany, in 1951, he began his creative tinkering at an early age under the tutelage of his grandfather and dad. A master recycler and transformer of found objects into striking innovations, he left his homeland to occupy a place which would furnish him with more useful materials to manipulate. In his own words, “I moved to the United States to have access to junk.” Trimpin: Archival Investigations, housed through February 24 at the Jack Straw New Media Gallery, shows just what he did with all that junk. It’s a retrospective view of some of his best known pieces from the 1970s and ’80s which mark him as a master mixer of computers and traditional acoustic instruments. His work is frequently whimsical, and in the case of the Player Piano Rolls, both archival and practical. The show includes:

Balancing Clown Playback Device

• (1978): “Four clowns rigged with small amplifiers, speakers, and playback heads salvaged from thrift store tape recorders. They originally ran on wires taken from old wire recordings found at a flea market; a mechanical wheel would tilt the wire up and down, causing the clowns to roll back and forth, playing the sound recorded on the wires.”

Turntables and Pecking Chicken Controllers

• (1980): “The liquid in the glass chickens is heated up by small light bulbs, causing it to rise to the birds’ heads and tilt them forward: the reflectors on their heads bounce light into the phone sensors. This apparatus functions as a random number generator, which can control a variety of electromechanical devices—in this case, turntables made from pottery wheels and the tone arms from old phonographs. These turntables can also be controlled with a MIDI keyboard or other device to manipulate speed and direction.”

Player Piano Roll Reader

(1981): “This was specifically designed to convert all of Colon Noncarrow’s hand-punched player piano rolls into a computer database which could then be played back on any MIDI-controlled instrument. The score can also be printed out from the database for editing or other functions.”

Early multitrack set up with tape recorders

Trimpin’s gallery talk on January 12 was a humorous and personal account of pieces and processes from his past as well as speculations about current ideas waiting in the wings. He mused about his childhood and evolution. While others his age were kicking balls after school, the young Trimpin dismantled radios and reconfigured them to pick up short wave stations. Trumpet was his instrument, and he wondered why it needed to be limited to playing one pitch at a time, and why that pitch had to fit into the system of conventional tuning. These questions led to his construction of the electric trumpet with two bells designed for microtonal polyphony. Mastery of this instrument required vigilant hours of practice with a slow learning curve, and over time Trimpin’s lips gave out.

Trimpin beside his Turntables and Pecking Chicken Controllers Photo by Amy Rubin

At this early juncture adversity became the hand of fortune, and the boy with lips too swollen to play turned to the visual art world. As a self-described kind of “sublimation and compensation,” he began to teach himself to draw and, as more opportunities presented themselves, his technique grew to accommodate them. The former brass player became the set designer for Samuel Becket’s Endgame, a production directed by the playwright. Over time things visual and things sonic began to come together. Today he continues to wonder about the potential of making sound visual for those without the ability to hear.

During the Q and A we heard about obstacles to Trimpin’s creative progress here in the United States: lack of funding for new work, lack of fees for presentation, and a lack of respect for artists. We also learned that while he occasionally has student helpers, he functions more like a one-man band without any support from a university engineering or music department. On the brighter side, his work is being presented by a consortium of ten arts institutions over the next two years including Seattle’s Henry Art Gallery, the Frye Art Museum, Consolidated Works, Suyama Space, the Missoula Art Museum, the Vancouver Jazz Festival, and the Tacoma Art Museum.

For me, the evening was inspiring. I saw and heard a man of many talents and limitless imagination. His own actions encourage others to think without boundaries and borders. It’s no wonder that his musical inspirations include Harry Partch, Anthony Braxton, and Cecil Taylor, because like them, his thoughts are large and loose enough to accommodate things nebulous, complex, and challenging.

Trimpin’s current commission for the Kronos Quartet has been under development for a few years. Each player will have a screen showing streaming information (such as seismographic readings regarding the location and magnitude of earthquakes) which will be converted into musical output by the live performers, linking the continuous data to various parameters of sound. In addition, Trimpin will add his motorized bowing wheel into the equation, enabling all the instruments to be bowed perpetually without alternating bowing directions.

I raised my hand and asked, “How will the streaming and transformation take place? How will the real-time decision making occur? How will you work with the players?” My thought was that even after hours of rehearsal, it takes a lot for four people to agree on the interpretation of a Beethoven string quartet. How would he get them to agree on interpreting something this abstract and unfamiliar? Trimpin smiled playfully and with a shrug answered, “I don’t know. I’m still learning.”

Zachary M. Lewis Photo by Nowell York

The new year started off brilliantly for James Gaffigan, assistant conductor of the Cleveland Orchestra. With Music Director Franz Welser-Möst in Europe nursing an ear infection, Gaffigan got to preside over one of the highest profile concerts of the season, one that featured Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and a U.S. premiere.

The latter was a captivating new piano concerto by Marc-Andre Dalbavie, the French-American who held the Cleveland Orchestra’s first composer residency a few years back. His orchestral and chamber music is about as well known here as any living composer’s can be.

Even so, Cleveland can stake only partial claim to the new work. Dalbavie’s commission involved both the BBC Symphony Orchestra, which gave the world premiere last August under Jukka-Pekka Saraste, and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, which will perform the work next month. Norwegian pianist Leif Ove Andsnes has been its gifted champion all along and is giving life to a work that deserves to be heard beyond these three occasions.

Dalbavie’s output for piano is relatively slim to date. Not only does this 25-minute concerto make a significant contribution to the modern concerto repertoire, it also represents his first major work for the instrument. It also leads off a cycle slated to include a piano solo, a trio with horn, and a quintet with winds.

Because Gaffigan stepped in relatively last minute, there was a change in the program: Debussy’s Printemps replaced Berg’s Lulu Suite. It proved to be an inspired decision. Although the Berg would have been nice, the concerto and the Debussy proved to have much in common, especially in terms of orchestration.

In designing the concerto’s structure, Dalbavie says William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury was a major influence, in particular the way the author tells the same story in different ways. In a pre-concert talk, Dalbavie also referred to clouds and our tendency to see shapes in them that aren’t really there, saying he wished to create a musical equivalent.

One shape, at least, is definitely there: the downward arc. The pattern reappears numerous times in each of the three interconnected movements. It comes in various guises, too, from dense, crashing chords to smooth, descending scales and arpeggios. The force of musical gravity is so strong in the third movement, it sounds like the orchestra is tumbling off a cliff. At other times, the arc pattern flattens out and the orchestra drives the piano onward with a chugging rhythm reminiscent of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. Indeed, the work comes to a halt on a violent thump.

Overall, though, the concerto is actually fairly temperate, and the calmer, quieter material comprises this work’s best side. Twice in the first movement the pianist pauses for a cool, questioning rumination, while the second movement starts off with a long solo section occupied mostly by airy single notes. These give way to a giant, colorfully orchestrated surge mimicking some of what the piano had done earlier and would do again.

Chicago is in for a treat. Gaffigan, meanwhile, goes down in history as having introduced the U.S. to a great new concerto for the 21st century.

Marin Alsop

Much has been made about Marin Alsop’s appointment as the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra’s new music director—a post she’ll assume from out-going director Yuri Temirkanov beginning in the 2007-08 season. There’s the fact that she’s the first woman to hold a position with a major U.S. orchestra. And there’s also the fact that her appointment generated a lot of controversy, especially considering that nearly 90 percent of the orchestra’s musicians criticized the search process heavily, arguing that their input wasn’t given serious consideration. Be that as it may, the process is over, hopefully any bitterness has been put aside—she actually held a meeting with the musicians to talk about the search process and their feelings—and Maestra Alsop will lead the BSO full time, like it or not. Last Thursday, Baltimore got a glimpse of the maestra in action as she led the orchestra in a program featuring Christopher Rouse’s Symphony No. 1, Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 12 in A Major, K. 414 with pianist Leon Fleisher filling in at the last minute for Piotr Anderszewski, who cancelled due to “an over-commitment of performance engagements in the coming weeks,” and Dvorák’s Symphony No. 7, op. 70.

To say the least, Alsop’s appointment marks an immense change at the helm for the BSO. Gender aside, she’s relatively young, is largely American-trained, and is known for giving new music more than a fair shot. The former was evident from the get-go as the program—and her tenure with the orchestra, as far as Baltimore seemed concerned from the incredible welcoming standing ovation she received—began with Baltimore-native Chris Rouse’s one-movement Symphony No. 1. Speaking to the audience from stage before beginning the work, she expressed her excitement about being there and gave the audience a glimpse into the work, explaining how Rouse built the piece around the pitches B-A-C-H and using the orchestra to illustrate her words sonically. I liked this. She wasn’t “dumbing down” for the crowd, and her use of a little humor—”In the middle of the work, Mr. Rouse used the initials of many people he didn’t like,” which was followed by a cacophony of dissonance—was tasteful, effective, and right for the moment.

Alsop’s address to the audience stirred memories of another charismatic former BSO music director—David Zinman. I used to love Zinman’s programs with the BSO, the way he blended new American works with “old favorites.” But not only that, he frequently spoke to the audience from stage, which I think makes everyone feel a little more comfortable, especially those that might be wary of a new piece of music—or a piece of new music. It’s an interesting switch to have swung from one extreme (Zinman) to another (Temirkanov) and back now with Alsop.

I’ve noted before that the criticism often slung at Temirkanov might not entirely be a result of his own doing. There was a whiff of that last Thursday. During the Rouse, the orchestra really seemed to be defying Alsop’s ictus. At times her hands would go down, come up, and start back down before the orchestra produced any sound. While there’s usually a degree of conductor-orchestra lag time, this seemed so incredible that I had to take note of it. Despite this, the orchestra sounded fabulous all night long—the sound was warm, coordination was excellent, and the intonation was very close to perfect—although I thought I detected a drop in energy somewhere in the middle of the Dvorák, which, by the way, she conducted from memory.

Walking out of the Meyerhoff after the show was interesting as I tried my best to eavesdrop on as many conversations as possible. As you might expect, everyone was buzzing about the maestra. Actually, there was a lot of buzz both before and after the concert, something the review in the Sun captures well. (Interesting that the article doesn’t speak a lick about the program, her conducting, or the performance.) Many of the comments I heard, and of course I could only hear a small sample, sounded slightly disappointed, like she might not have lived up to the hype that the BSO had created. “Well, she is the first woman conductor of a major orchestra in the United States.” “It wasn’t really what I was expecting.” “She’s different than I thought.”

It’s understandable that people might have been slightly disappointed. First of all, the program wasn’t all that flashy. In contrast to Temirkanov’s programs, which featured many a warhorse, there weren’t any truly recognizable works on Alsop’s program that Baltimore concert goers might be able to sing in the shower the next morning. Second, she’s got kind of a strange style. It’s not flamboyant. It’s not grandiose. She doesn’t get up there and put on a show. But that’s the thing, there are conductors who don’t put on a show but still exhibit a certain power over an audience. I hope I don’t get struck by lightning by saying that her conducting style isn’t all that special. It’s a little tight. She tends to lurch at the orchestra bent over slightly most of the time. And another thing that might have contributed to an audience member’s disappointment last night given the grandness with which her appointment was announced, is that she is a rather diminutive presence on stage—physically, not musically. Hey, although I’m pretty sure her height didn’t affect my opinion of her performance, I’m just saying…

I hope Baltimore embraces Alsop. And I hope she puts a little spice into the orchestra. If anything, her commitment to new music should be applauded and welcomed. Her track record indicates an interest in fresh, inventive programming—something Baltimore hasn’t had much of in a while. If she isn’t the second coming of Christ, who cares?

Scott Winship Photo by Kathryn Gritt

I didn’t hear a thing, I heard everything…well, at least in the eyes of John Cage, that is. Nothing and everything was happening at the Chicago Composers Forum’s Chicago premiere of John Cage’s multitudinous Musicircus at the Museum of Contemporary Art.

Even though it received its premiere in 1967 just down the street at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champlain, Musicircus has never been performed in Chicago. The ideas of Cage’s Musicircus exist mainly in various writings—Cage never actually wrote or published a score. As David Patterson puts it in the program notes to the performance, the idea of Musicircus brings together “the expression of several of Cage’s fundamental ideas about artistic creation and execution.” In a letter dated June 6, 1973, Cage wrote about Musicircus:

“You simply bring together under one roof as much music (as many musical groups and soloists) as practical under the circumstances. It should last longer than ordinary concerts, starting at 7 or 8 in the evening, and continuing, say, to midnight. Arrange performers on platforms or within roped-off areas. There must be plenty of space for the audience to walk around. If you have more groups than places, make a schedule….There should be food on sale and drinks (as at a circus). Dancers and acrobats.”

Well, as much as I wanted there to be elephants walking around at the Museum of Contemporary Art, that was not the case. There were, however, clowns (the Environmental Encroachment marching band), “Siamese” twins (a violin duet of young identical twins), and instead of a bearded lady, there was a mustached lady performing as Salvador Dali, providing mustaches and free Dali-esque portraits on Post-it^® notes for the audience. All that and a DJ named Jesus, men in dresses, a guy in a wolf suit chasing a man in underwear with a deer hoof as a phallus, a ninja band, and way too many things to list in this article.

After attending so many new music concerts, I now realize that those that have the special ability to reduce me to the mindset of a giddy 5-year-old, such as this concert did, have been too few and far between. I was telling everyone (even strangers) that they needed to go just to see what could possibly happen. How many times do you get to see musicians, performance artists, dancers, and ordinary people all thrown into a blender and served up for a good solid four hours? The CCF performance was the brainchild of its current president, Christopher Preissing who, while working on his Ph.D. dissertation in multimedia, coincidentally at UI-UC, got more involved with the works of Cage and decided to bring this one to fruition in Chicago. As Preissing put it to me, Musicircus was a great vehicle to “build awareness” about the CCF, create a “very welcoming and opening kind of event” (not only for the audience, but for the performers as well), “and bring together the music community in Chicago.”

And bring it together they did. From my recollection, every new music ensemble operating in Chicago was represented and then some: a Suzuki guitar class performing “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” in a room next to male performers dressed in drag; performers dressed up in painters outfits (complete with respirators) being cheered on by cheerleaders as they chant; more traditional ensembles such as a full choir with piano accompaniment, brass quartet, or percussion ensemble, next to multiple radios and performers realizing Cage’s Imaginary Landscapes No. 4; and while using the men’s room, those of us at the urinals were treated to a performance art piece by young women sitting in the stalls having a conversation (reading passages to each other). True to Cage’s aesthetic, no bias was made and all told there were about 100 different ensembles and over 500 performers.

Spread across all three floors (indoors and out) of the MCA there were so many things going on that by the time you went from bottom to top and back again the ensembles had changed and you could start fresh again.

One of the things that really surprised me was the fact that so many ensembles decided to use this opportunity to perform many of Cage’s other works. Although this was never part of the design of the event, several groups choose to do this, which provided a wonderful opportunity to actually hear many of his works (a large amount of which I had never heard performed live).

The event proved to be a huge success with between 4,000 and 5,000 people attending. The MCA was so pleased that they are hoping to have the CCF do the event again next year. I’m keeping my fingers crossed for some musical elephants the next time around.

Roddy Schrock Photo by Hideki Kubota

It was another concert of difficult modern music and the seats were packed. At this rate, one might be led to believe this stuff is actually becoming popular in San Francisco. Maybe it was due to the marketing brilliance of Other Minds presenting the day’s marathon three concerts under the moniker of a New Music Séance. And really, what is a concert besides a reconnection with the ghosts of ideas past.

Inside the mystical atmosphere of the Arts and Crafts-style Swedenborgian Church, the ghost that haunted the final concert of the day was that of Henry Cowell. His sound, that of a particularly West Coast experimentalism, was the link that held the puzzle of the evening’s program together. From John Cage up to Mamoru Fujieda, one could hear the ring of Cowell’s piano the whole way through. This aesthetic trajectory is one of rugged yet sensitive individualism, a gritty determination to express an idea in the most direct but sweet language possible, sort of like the cowboys in Brokeback Mountain.

The program began, appropriately enough, with Alexander Scriabin’s Vers la Flamme, positing the direction the evening was to take. Sarah Cahill then performed Dissonant Counterpoint 5, 7, & 8 by the relatively little-known Johanna Magdalena Beyer, a composer active in the circle around Cowell in the ’20s and ’30s. The piece was intensely intimate and, as one might expect, dissonant.

Cahill continued with a playful work by Lou Harrison, A Summerfeld Set. Following was a piece by the Bay Area composer Daniel David Feinsmith, called Self, for speaking pianist. This is admittedly the first work of his I have heard. The piece was energetic, built on a richly rewarding rhythmic and tonal framework. However the gimmick, the pianist playing while reciting a text by Ralph Waldo Emerson, was dull. Watching Cahill perform on piano and speak the text in rhythm was something like watching a tightrope walker attempting to sing an aria: the quality of both the aria and the tightrope walking seem diminished by combining the two.

One of the standout pieces of the evening was the highly virtuosic and deeply communicative performance by the duo of Kate Stenberg and Eva-Maria Zimmerman of Trois Regards, for violin and piano, by Ronald Bruce Smith. It is a contemporary piece that looks to the past, full of quartertones and passacaglias. The duo knocked it out of the park, giving a startlingly powered interpretation, full of character and presence.

In the second half, Cahill really came into her own, giving performances with directness, subtle detail, and richly personal interpretation. This was put to full effect in her presentation of Mamoru Fujieda’s Patterns of Plants, a work I have had a fondness for since I first heard it in Tokyo years ago. Though the original Tzadik recording sounded somewhat distanced, Cahill’s reading was very warm. Whether or not one is actually able to understand the relationship between flora growth patterns and musical patterns isn’t the point—in as much as one is challenged to imagine the precise process of moving towards a flame in the Scriabin piece. Patterns of Plants stands on its own as an important piece of late-20th-century piano writing, simultaneously humble and strikingly beautiful.

The evening was rounded out by Cowell, Cage, Adams, and a couple of piano rags. Taken as a whole, the program was inspired, marking a clear introduction to a strand of new music that is still vital. This line, from Scriabin to present-day ultra-modernists and post-minimalists is a refreshing one, clearing away much of the intellectual phlegm of many other trends and reminding the listener that music can be a sublimely atmospheric experience and maybe sometimes even spiritual.

Alyssa Timin Photo by Ross Hoffman

Unsilent Night has been around for a while now, not only in New York, but also in Philadelphia, where the new music ensemble Relâche—which has also been around for a while—plays host to the event. This year, the promo postcards branded the event Relâche and the Holidays, signaling both the ensemble’s drive to renew its public profile, as well as the warm and fuzzy patina that’s attached to the downtown ritual.

While most new music events in the city draw fewer than 100 attendees, I was delighted to discover a crowd of what looked to be more than twice that waiting on the southwest end of Rittenhouse Square, just before 7pm on December 19. They’d already run out of boomboxes by 6:30pm. Several elementary school students appeared to have beaten the rush—a number of boomboxes were in small, mitten-clad hands. Fun for the whole family.

It had been a while since I’d participated in a public spectacle. As the parade of gently pulsing, ethereal harmonies processed down Walnut Street—one of the city’s major commercial thoroughfares—the confused and entertained appraisals by onlookers were unavoidable. Digital cameras seemed to appear from the pocket of every bystander. Cell phones captured scraps of sound for someone somewhere else. The sharply-dressed saleswomen in the United Colors of Benetton stood with their arms crossed and their hips out, watching the crowd march bravely through red lights. Drivers honked and stopped; rolling down the window, they asked what was going on: “Unsilent Night!” we shouted, as though it explained anything.

Walnut Street is the street where I work. I couldn’t shake the feeling of being inside a dream: that slightly shifted, deconstructed version of the day. Last night I was walking down Walnut, and you were there, and we were in this huge crowd of people, all carrying boomboxes…No, nothing really happened. Everyone just smiling and carrying boomboxes. The hypnotic, decentralized soundtrack combined with the familiar strip of asphalt and the—still—somehow sacred space of the holiday season convinced me, just a little, that I’d wandered with a few hundred strangers into the surreal.

Down Broad Street, back up Locust, following a side street detour and several disgruntled motorists, the group gathered back in the middle of Rittenhouse, under the pleasantly gaudy colored lights hung from the park’s trees. Unsilent Night and its dream world ended with cheers and a reception at the Ethical Society.

Mark Gresham Photo by Angela Lee

Athens, Georgia, is probably best known as having been a hotbed of new wave and other alternative rock music during the 1980s and ’90s—the origin and home of such bands as R.E.M. and the B-52s. But this capital of “Dawg Country,” greatly centered upon the University of Georgia and its football culture, has also been a cultivator of the artistically curious and unconventional in many ways.

Athens composer-performer Erik Hinds is one of its creative independents and an occasional visitor to Atlanta’s own alternative spaces, such as Eyedrum. But this December 1, Hinds appeared at one of the city’s smallest musical venues, A Cappella Books, at the behest of staff member Chad Radford. Located in the in-town counterculture neighborhood of Little Five Points, the tiny bookstore occasionally hosts informal musical appearances at the back of its retail space, in a cozy empty area that can accommodate maybe a dozen or so people at most, seated and standing combined. As such, it’s actually an ideal, quiet space for an intimate appraisal of solo music from Hinds’s “H’arpeggione,” a unique instrument with aspects found in guitar, cello, and some other real and imaginable stringed instruments.

“The H’arpeggione is an instrument built for me by Fred Carlson of Santa Cruz, California,” explains Hinds. “I came up with the name, a combination of Hardanger fiddle (a sympathetic stringed violin from Norway) and arpeggione (a bowed guitar from Schubert’s era). The instrument design was a collaborative effort and built as an expanded range (pitch-wise and timbrally) guitar departure.” An acoustic, upright, quartertone-fretted, 6-string instrument, tuned from a contrabass Ab up to Eb (half-step below the high E on a guitar), the H’arpeggione also has 12 resonating sympathetic strings which run through the neck, emerge over the body, and to a separate “buzzing” bridge. The body, made of black walnut with a belly made of recycled redwood, is larger than an acoustic guitar but smaller than a cello. It features an arched fingerboard and bridge, so it can be plucked or bowed, played across the lap like a guitar or, thanks to a supportive endpin, in upright playing position. “I use a piezo pickup to amplify it through two amps [at the same time], one clean, one a little fuzzy,” says Hinds.

Erik Hinds with his H’arpeggione Photo by Delene Porter

Hinds’s performance for the evening was almost entirely improvised, the exceptions being a unique cover of Slayer’s “Angel of Death” and his own “Koité,” an original instrumental song dedicated to Habib Koité, a singer/guitarist from Bamako, Mali. Yes, all on solo amplified H’arpeggione. (Hinds’s live recording of “Koité” includes drums along with unamplified H’arpeggione.)

Despite the quartertone fretting of the instrument, Hinds’s music is hardly the kind that focuses upon rigidly-organized machinations of pitch. Instead, his improvisations draw more attention to variety in timbre and articulation, almost reminiscent of speech, with an undercurrent of driving pulse, whether Hinds is playing with guitar-like technique (which he does most frequently) or in his rare use of the bow which allows him to call forth cyclic drones of color that wail and throb meditatively.

It’s not difficult to pick up on the inspirations. Hinds cites African influences on the one hand, including his personal encounter in 2001 with the highest maleem (master) of Gnawa music, Mahmoud Ghania (or Gania). On the other hand, in the past few years Hinds says he has also consistently been moving away from composed or “pre-determined” music back to his roots as an improviser, a process of getting back to a “natural self” and a “spontaneous” music.

“I began as an improvisational musician when I was 12 years old,” says Hinds. “I feel like, intrinsically, I was instantly able to make music that wasn’t necessarily dependant on genre, time signature, anything like that; almost naturally side-stepping a lot of the hallmarks of what we consider appropriate or acceptable Western music. But I learned quickly that if I wanted to play with other people, I would need to figure out some of [those] specifics, like deliberate pitch and rhythm. So this has been a long process. What I’ve finally been able to do is to shed my music of some of the devices that made my music ‘coherent,’ some of the obvious trappings, so I’m left with underpinnings that still reference what was happening naturally when I was young.”

And his personal use of the quartertone tuning of the H’arpeggione actually falls into that philosophy of avoiding structural conventions of pitch. “That’s something people have talked about,” says Hinds, “and they say, ‘oh you must have some system you’ve developed with the quartertones and certain scales,’ and other things like that. But my approach, with or without the quartertone option, is generally seeking to have a focal or pivot pitch and rotate around that freely. So I’m not thinking in terms of modes or scales, but in terms of a kind of a drone setting.

“One of the things I’m really interested in is taking a single string, and if I play it, whether I pluck it or bow it, you might be able to say, ‘Oh, that’s a C#’—and it might very well be. But what I hear in addition to a fundamental or fixed pitch are a lot of other things. I listen for the scrape of the nail, the whirr of the bow, an overtone or [imperfect] frequencies. And I try to exploit those complexities.”