Category: Field Reports

Zachary M. Lewis Photo by Nowell York

Contemporary music by the boatload, performances sizzling with vitality, and a fervent commitment to education: You might say the Cleveland-based Cavani Quartet is on track to be the next Kronos Quartet. Further evidence that the Cavanis are super cool arrived late last month when the all-female group presented a concert of new and recent music by American women, including a piece by Merry Peckham, the group’s cellist. Annie Fullard and Mari Sato are the group’s violinists, and Kirsten Doctor is its violist.

The concert, titled “Confluence,” took place at the Cleveland Institute of Music, where the Cavanis have been artists-in-residence since 1988. In addition to music by Joan Tower, Margaret Brouwer, and Kathleen Ginther, it featured a dash of visual art and even a live poetry reading.

Breakfast at the Ibis, for string quartet and reader, was the evening’s briefest and most distinctive entry. Peckham wrote the piece in 1997, setting to music a poem by Mwatabu Okantah, a Pan-African studies professor at nearby Kent State University. It was, Peckham said, her “first original thought” and reflected the disparate musical influences of Jimi Hendrix and late Beethoven.

Cavani Quartet Photo by Christian Steiner

Okantah was present that night to read his own poem, a short, fragmented tale contrasting a chance romantic encounter at a luxurious European hotel with poverty and hunger, the rule outside it. The poet held a small drum. After each stanza he would strike it repeatedly like a bongo, but using a mallet. The musicians, too, employed unusual tools—miniature bows for their full-size string instruments. But these didn’t stay out long. No matter. The music, quiet and thin, was of secondary importance, anyway.

Joan Tower, writing in 1994, must have taken some of her material for Night Fields from Shostakovich’s Eighth String Quartet. The famous D-S-C-H theme is omnipresent in the work, if in splintered, distended versions. Unlike Shostakovich’s quartet, though, Night Fields heats to a boil extremely rapidly and includes a longish section in a major key.

Kathleen Ginther is an active composer and teacher at Southern Illinois University. Rather than perform one of her recent works, however, the Cavanis looked further back into her oeuvre to perform Blue and Green Music, a string quartet from 1983. Doing so allowed them to incorporate an element of visual art into the concert. Because Ginther thought about a Georgia O’Keefe painting when she composed the second movement of Blue and Green Music, the Cavanis felt a visual aid was in order and displayed a slide of the abstract painting on a screen next to them.

It was an inspired move. While the first movement, “Confluence,” was fragmented and percussive in nature, with squeaky individual parts swirling around each other, it was helpful to view the curved, gently rippling lines in the painting while listening to the second movement. Long melodies for violin and viola often rose to the forefront but the background was often just as rich, with groupings of short, high-pitched slurs, like baby ghosts just learning how to haunt.

By way of truly brand-new music, the Cavanis unveiled a Quintet for Clarinet and String Quartet by their colleague Margaret Brouwer, head of the composition department at CIM. Daniel Silver, the University of Colorado professor who commissioned the work, was the guest clarinetist.

The highlight of the work was easily its second movement, an adagio called “My white tears broken in the seas.” The title comes from a poem by David Adams called “An Angel’s Song” and describes a angel’s lament for the woes of humanity. The image of a crying angel is compelling in its own right, but Brouwer’s musical portrayal of it is even more entrancing. A long, legato passage in the clarinet hangs above slow, questioning phrases in the strings. The effect is an otherworldly calm, like something ancient being unearthed, a long-forgotten score by Hildegard of Bingen, perhaps. The impression transforms at the end of the piece as the score begins to suggest the thick, closely harmonized music of a modern-day mystic, Arvo Pärt. Singled out from the rest of the Quintet, “My white tears” seems destined for a long life, longer even than the hopefully never-ending career of the Cavani Quartet.

Justin Schell

The Twin Cities are no stranger to new music. Home not only to the Walker Art Center’s concert series (which has hosted Argentinean singer Juana Molina as well as noise-makers Black Dice in recent months), but also to Zeitgeist and the Intergalactic Contemporary Ensemble, two resident ensembles dedicated to new music. In the fall of 2004, Stanley Rothrock, a choral conducting DMA student at the University of Minnesota, added another voice to the Cities’ already generous new music scene, founding the Renegade Ensemble.

“What sets the Renegade Ensemble apart from both Zeitgeist and ICE,” Rothrock says, “is the inclusion of the non-professional musician into the ensemble.” The ensemble fills its ranks mainly with Minnesota graduates and undergraduates, as well as amateur musicians, as Rothrock seeks to “expose and involve those on the periphery of the contemporary music scene who wish to do more.”

Such an inclusionary motto only seems to propel the ambition of Rothrock and the other members of the ensemble in performing challenging repertoire. Programs have included Steve Reich’s Clapping Music, Pauline Oliveros’s Sonic Meditation XVI, John Cage’s Living Room Music, and Meredith Monk’s “Astronaut Anthem” and “Panda Chant II,” the latter from The Games. Further, at least one work on each concert can be performed by any instrument or voice type. The group has performed Frederic Rzewski’s Coming Together, Louis Andriessen’s Workers Union, and that stalwart of contemporary music ensembles, Terry Riley’s In C. Rothrock was especially pleased with the Ensemble’s instrumentation of Riley’s work. “Our performance of In C even had an accordion!” he points out.

The Renegade Ensemble also performs the newest of new music, premiering works on each of the three concerts the group has offered. They have performed student composer Amanda Albrecht’s The Stand, as well as the U.S. premieres of Peter Billiam’s Tres Casidas del Divan de Tamarit, a setting of three poems from Federico García Lorca’s final collection of poems, as well as the Irish composer Linda Buckley’s Libera Me.

The centerpieces of the Ensemble’s most recent concert, held last month, were Philip Glass’s Music in 5ths and Steve Reich’s Sextet. Two flutes, two clarinets, two pianos, two players on a marimba, two synthesizers, and double bass made up the instrumentation for the Glass. The relentless motion and intensity of the piece sometimes got the best of the ensemble, as players scrambled to find their place or, for the non-circular breathing wind players, snatch a gulp of air.

Percussionists Andrew Martin, David Birrow, Brian Duffy, and James Price deftly executed the Sextet’s interlocking patterns, as well as the ethereal harmonics of the bowed vibraphone, undergirded by synthesizer and piano ostinatos. The piece slowly builds through its five movements to its conclusion, generating the piece’s only moments of excitement. The group ably performed a piece that is generally not a favorite among Reich’s work; to my ears it is often plodding and lacking the rhythmic interest of a piece like Eight Lines.For me, seeing the Sextet live made a stronger case for the piece than the 1986 Nonesuch recording

The populist performance aesthetic of the Renegade Ensemble extends to the audience as well. “My goal is to expose people to new music,” Rothrock concluded, which is not only achieved through the inclusion of new players, but also “by filling the concert hall seats with new bodies.” The concert of Glass and Reich was well-attended by a very appreciative audience, seemingly fulfilling Rothrock’s goal. Hopefully the enthusiasm for new music displayed at this concert will carry over to the Renegade Ensemble’s next concert, a performance of George Antheil’s Ballet Mécanique in April of 2006.

Mark Gresham Photo by Angela Lee

For most composers, a significant career goal (and hurdle) is getting new works premiered by skilled orchestras, especially in these days where paid commissions are few or non-existent for a composer not already on the symphonic “hot list” of established names.

Even more difficult is breaking into the “big leagues” with a premiere on the subscription series of a reputable major orchestra. But at an Atlanta Symphony Orchestra concert in early in November, composer/conductor Robert Pound had such an opportunity, thanks to guest conductor Michael Morgan, music director of the Oakland East Bay Symphony.

Despite the ASO’s reputation for performing new music, one fact loomed large: No commission money for this particular endeavor. Undaunted, Pound produced the nine-minute concert opener Irrational Exuberance for Morgan and the ASO entirely free of charge.

Morgan has built a reputation for introducing little-known composers to the orchestral circuit, and with this ASO engagement found what he thought was the perfect opportunity to showcase a new work by Pound, born and raised in Columbus, Georgia, who in traditional Southern fashion “went off elsewhere and did good” and is currently on the faculty of Dickinson College in Pennsylvania.

The day before the premiere, Pound and Morgan were videotaped by the ASO in an interview to be shown at the concert—a customary practice of the ASO when performing a work by a visiting living composer. Immediately afterwards, as the lights and cameras were being packed away, we talked about the circumstances surrounding the request.

Pound’s response regarding the absence of commission money was simple and direct. “Well, one has to get one’s foot in the door somehow,” he says.

Morgan agrees, vowing “major orchestras are not going to commission you sight unseen or unheard.” He goes on to explain, “I’m only a guest conductor [here]. With the music director, they might do a commission, but with a guest conductor they certainly aren’t going commission a new work. I’m always encouraging my composer friends to come up with pieces that can be an introduction to various major orchestras. This was more logical than most because of all the Georgia connections.”

That comment struck a chord with this writer, knowing as I do people at certain major orchestras who avoid deliberately seeking out local composers to commission or perform because they “don’t select new music geographically.” Perhaps they fear that performing local composers would be being seen as being “too parochial” by board and patrons at a time when the orchestra is trying to project a more national or international reputation?

Robert Pound and Michael Morgan in front of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra’s cameras

But Morgan disagrees with that tack. “I think being rooted in the geography of the place is really, really important, so the people right around you understand that they have a connection to the orchestra,” he explains. “We get a lot of credit in Oakland for all the new music that we do, but also for the fact that we do Bay Area composers. That’s for a lot of reasons. Also the audience understands these [composers] are not people who descend from Mars—it’s the person down the street who writes music.”

A strong, long-term professional relationship between the conductor and composer was a major factor in the request. “I’ve known Robert about 12 years,” says Morgan. “In fact, the first time I ever came to the Atlanta Symphony as a guest conductor, Robert was traveling with me that week as my assistant.”

And Morgan had already premiered another work by Pound a decade ago, even though Pound freely admits that first piece didn’t go so well. “I was a young composer and made a lot of mistakes,” acknowledges Pound. “Over time, it’s good to see that, in spite of that, you have someone who trusts in you, has worked with you, and knows you better, and will try that again.”

Neither downplays the importance of such direct professional relationships. “The contact with conductors and other performers is really the key thing,” explains Morgan. “You write things for your friends to perform. Your friends go out and perform your music, and maybe somebody else hears about you, and you build up a reputation.”

Pound adds that composers should also know their audience. “All of our favorite canonic composers, Beethoven [for example], wrote for a particular audience whether they were writing piano music to be played at home or string quartets for experts.”

All in all, both agree that attention to the unique localized aspects of this mix of composers, performers, audience, and context is ultimately good for the cause of new music today.

“First of all you need new music everywhere, all the time,” says Morgan. “Even to feel better about the old music you need new music to compare it to, to show we’re in an ongoing stream here, not just looking over our shoulders all the time.”

The following evening, after a screening of the videotaped interview, the premiere of Pound’s Irrational Exuberance opened with flurries of woodwinds. The five contiguous sections of the piece took the listener through a quasi-“irrational” (though compositionally planned) journey through different aspects of “exuberance,” including brashness (particularly sudden riffs in combined bass instruments), nostalgia, celebration, and whimsy—often unexpectedly. Musical ideas and tempi were interwoven and overlapped in a continuous fabric of shifting line and color, with occasional moments that reminded one of orchestral palettes of Sibelius or Mahler. The piece concluded with a duo tremolo between glockenspiel and triangle that was finally punctuated and capped off by a tutti stinger.

Alyssa Timin Photo by Ross Hoffman

Chamber Music Now kicked off its fourth season of eccentric, do-it-yourself presenting with Odd Appetite, a cello and percussion duo recently expatriated to the Netherlands. Held at the Ethical Society of Philadelphia, a secular humanist landmark on the south side of Rittenhouse Square, the concert itself opened with DJ Starkey (lifting a convention from the pop world), who offered a laptop work specially composed for the evening. The music moved fast, favoring metallic clangs and wooden creaks, big dynamic shifts cuing changes in attention. He bobbed his head and wriggled his shoulders as if dancing in the DJ booth.

Cellist Ha-Yang Kim and percussionist Nathan Davis, also both composers, kept the energy extremely high, though time stretched between their pieces. “Almost every piece on the program has a different tuning,” Kim explained. Several of these pieces, Folklore, by Yannis Kyriakides, Kebyar Untai, by Davis, and Oon, by Kim, stressed influences of non-Western and folk traditions. For Kebyar Untai, Davis transposed a raga and used elements of Balinese gamelan, and paired the cello with a hammered dulcimer. Oon also used Balinese and Carnatic music as points of reference.

The program also included the furious Workers Union by Louis Andriessen, a galvanizing work that had Davis stomping the pedal of a kick drum rigged behind him, rocking it hard on its stand, and banging aluminum cans. Kim’s hair and bowstrings were flying. For David Laganella’s Moths in the Closet, the duo kept their eyes locked on each other, calling and responding. What’s on the page? I wondered.

The performance concluded with Matt Tierney’s Cant, the title of which “signifies the attempt to deviate from a vertical or horizontal plane or surface, a thrust or motion that creates a slanted or oblique surface, a unified form to extreme juxtapositions.” The two lower strings of Kim’s cello were tuned down a half step each, and Davis worked with a set of microtonally-tuned cowbells and aluminum pipes. Certainly, if your taste was for brainy, gutsy playing, Odd Appetite satisfied.

There was an intimate little performance at the Issue Project Room in Brooklyn on Saturday of new work by Cornelius Dufallo (the violinist replacing Todd Reynolds in the Ethel quartet) and Michael Spassov, plus George Crumb’s Black Angels. As it turned out, it was the best of times, it was the worst of times…er, concerts.

The best: About 50 people settled into folding chairs as Dufallo kicked off the evening with a piece he had written just that morning for solo violin with effects. As Spassov’s work unfolded, I looked around and thought, wow, this feels so…relaxed. The band (Dufallo and Ariana Kim violins; Kenji Bunch viola; Leigh Stuart cello) was clearly enjoying putting on a show. Their performance was not technically brilliant (but hey, you try bowing a violin, wine glasses, and a gong all in the same piece), but it felt warm and genuine—as if really talented friends were sitting in our living room. I was hit with the thought that here was that rare thing—a truly intimate chamber music experience just as it must have felt at court back in the day, but updated for this 21st-century crowd (and available for the $15 price of admission, rather than at the invitation of a Viceroy). As the concluding notes of Black Angels faded away, I also suddenly grasped the appeal of having the same Beethoven symphony on the program year after year—here was a piece I knew in and out, could contemplate as it compared to recordings and reminisce about the half dozen other live performances I’d heard. The audience offered a warm round of applause then ran downstairs to pick up a drink before the next part, which leads me to…

The worst: Christopher Zimmermann, the artistic director of Project One (the name under which this event was put on, though no direct relation to the Project Room that I know of), had planned what sounded like a great concept on paper: a post-performance discussion on the role of technology in music. Somehow, once the assembled performer/composer panel got situated, all that positive energy fostered by the performance took a nosedive. Whether it was due to naiveté or unintentional arrogance, Zimmermann set up a perspective that was interpreted by more than one audience member as an ill-informed hostility to the uses of cutting edge technology in music today. He stressed that it was a “tool” but seemed reluctant to put it on par with other methods or instruments used to express what he termed “serious” musical thought. Several ill-advised generalizations about “pop” music later, it became apparent that the audience likely had way more experience in this area than Zimmermann. This left the evening’s sound engineer, Stephan Moore (who also happens to be the sound supervisor for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company) to make some particularly compelling points about computer music. He pointed to a regular opportunity to experience the very latest in computer-driven music at the weekly Share meet-up in the East Village and tried to lead the discussion to a more positive and productive place. The whole experience drove home the point that there can be a major knowledge divide when it comes to developing technologies, even in a room full of people under forty. And considering the demographics of the audience, this was probably not the most provocative topic to jumpstart a dialogue, anyway.

Mat Maneri and Randy Peterson had originally been on the bill to perform after the talk, but an illness forced them to cancel. Tony Malaby (tenor sax), Russ Lossing (electric piano), and Randy Peterson (drums) stepped up last minute to fill the slot, so the crowd was not left jonesing for an improv set.

This show at Issue was Zimmermann’s third such production in New York and based on what I saw here the format appears to have promise—casual vibe, great venue, nice draw, and dedicated musicians—but his presentation still needs a bit of polishing.

Julia Werntz Photo by Michele Macrakis

On November 13th, composers Curtis Hughes and David Little presented their second “National Insecurity” concert—a program of compositions with political themes—at MIT’s Killian Hall in Cambridge, Massachusetts. (The first concert was last spring.) Performances were by the percussion and saxophone duo Non Zero (Tim Feeney and Brian Sacawa), as well as the NOW Ensemble and Newspeak, whose appearance here was also the final stop on an East Coast tour entitled “Free Speech Zone.” Compositions were by Hughes, Little, Sophocles Papavasilopoulos, Dennis DeSantis, Vinko Globokar, Missy Mazzoli, John Halle, Judd Greenstein, and Fred Rzewski.

Despite a few logistical glitches, the concert was a successful political event, as well as a very thought-provoking musical event. The participants (organizers, composers, and performers) demonstrated that classical musicians don’t always have to sit sequestered in their studios and concert halls—that they can show how they, too, are people who care about non-musical matters. As for the specific politics of this concert—the dominant theme being outrage over this nightmare presidency, the sorry state of American democracy, and the war in Iraq—it was a cinch for me. I’m right there with all of them—Hughes, Little, and the rest—and admire them for their activism.

On the musical front, it also showcased the variety of means by which composers may combine the potentially disparate worlds of music and politics. This problem of disparity doesn’t come up with music that is traditionally overtly political—such as much of hip hop, ’60s rock, punk, and some of the work of the Art Ensemble of Chicago or Max Roach (e.g. Freedom Now Suite). In most of this music, there seems to be no separation of musical and political ideals; somehow we can simultaneously absorb both the music and its message. Sometimes this may be because the musical language itself has been shaped from the beginning by sentiments like defiance. Sometimes it may be because the composers and musicians themselves have lived the issues they are protesting—e.g. racism or classism—and therefore it won’t take effort to get the sentiment into their music. (Lester Bowie spoke about being able to use his “entire experience” in playing.) However, for composers and performers coming from the classical tradition, it may in fact require some effort to reconcile the inner world of their musical minds—shaped by their very conformist classical training—with the feelings they have for matters that are, nonetheless, remote from their lives. After all, no one present was tortured at Guantanamo, or mentioned having relatives or friends in Iraq, or even having been arrested at an anti-Bush rally.

There seemed to be three basic approaches. One was to keep the literal thinking of audience members active using written documents. I missed Rzewski’s Coming Together. (Saving a heavy piece like this for last on the program is a great idea, unless the concert runs beyond three hours, as this one did, and people are obliged to leave, as I was.) However, from the little I know about this piece, the text—a prison letter by ’60s activist Sam Melville written shortly before his death during a prison uprising—is deeply integrated with the music; the detached, minimalist compositional method of reciting key phrases and fragments from Melville’s defiant but upbeat letter repeatedly, as through a tape loop, allows the listener to appreciate the sad irony of his death. In Greenstein’s and Halle’s pieces, however, the music was clearly in a subordinate role to the content of the text, juxtaposed to it rather than embodying it. During Greenstein’s Free Speech Zone, written in collaboration with filmmakers Alice Lovejoy and Jeff Reichert and performed by the NOW Ensemble, quotations of President George Bush attempting to justify the war flashed by on a screen in front of us. Appropriately, I cringed at Bush’s words, and I laughed at the absurdity of the fenced-in “free speech zones” for anti-Bush protesters, described in the account of activist Bell Neel. What I remember of the accompanying music—I was supposed to be focusing on the loaded words on the screen, wasn’t I?—was a simple, melancholy, modal backdrop which projected sad irony (i.e. commentary) onto the President and Neel’s words. In Halle’s Apology to Younger Americans, sarcasm was the tone. A letter by journalist and author Sam Smith “apologizing” on behalf of his generation, in the off-hand manner of a convicted “power broker,” for things such as the Bhopal disaster and global warming, was set to a deliberately light, unassuming diatonic melody with instrumental accompaniment, delivered frankly by mezzo-soprano Bo Chang and the NOW Ensemble. Music in both pieces was more or less a matter of mood projected onto the facts. In all three text-oriented pieces, the very concrete political message was effectively conveyed, which we can safely assume is mainly what the composers wanted. Perhaps these pieces avoided the disparity of purpose I mentioned above, since ideas and music had been intentionally separated and juxtaposed, or explicit emotion intentionally avoided.

Another, contrasting approach (remembering that we were meant to be kept aware of the political component at this themed concert) was working the appropriate emotions into the music—emotions of anger, sadness, and anxiety. (“Hope” was also used, if that can be considered an emotion.) Notice, I wrote: “working the appropriate emotions into the music.” Without text to spell things out in these works—but with the need remaining to convey the designated sentiments unambiguously—gestures of “anger” and “sadness” took center stage. How many ways are there to convey anger, instrumentally? Loudness, multiphonics, and distortion are obvious choices. (Think Jimi Hendrix playing “Star-Spangled Banner.”) Frantically animated rhythms are another means, as well as that old stand-by, “dissonance.” All of these featured prominently in several works. (As I watched a group of people leaving in annoyance at the first intermission, I felt the urge to call after them: “OK! But just as long as you know: this wasn’t the alienating dissonance of contemporary concert music you’ve heard so much about! This was outrage over social injustice! See you at the next new music concert, right?!!!”) I won’t get more specific than to say I wasn’t nearly as convinced by the use of these devices in some of the works, when emotions felt calculated and clichéd, rather than genuine (like Jimi).

On the other hand, Globokar’s ? Corporel, performed by Tim Feeney, was by far the most visceral and direct statement on the program and was decisive in making this concert feel like a potent statement of protest. This was a piece for solo percussionist in which the shirtless and barefooted player pounds his own body—head, chest, thighs—with his palms and fists, slams his teeth together, ruffles his hair, moans, and otherwise brings the sound of bodily violence directly to us, with rhythmic riffs propelling the whole thing forward. Here was a complete uniting of percussive technique, the body, music, and the message. Even without the benefit of program notes for this piece, there was no doubt in my mind that this performance of it, in any case, was a tribute to victims of torture. Whether the victims in mind are in Guantanamo, Iraq, Afghanistan, the secret CIA prisons overseas, or your next-door neighbor’s living room may not be important. Midway through, a statement was muttered about the hopelessness of mankind. Feeney held nothing back. To execute this piece, I can only imagine he reached out and “channeled” something (the victims’ experience?) via who knows what means—method acting, compared to some of the stylized emotions of other works. The effect was that of a true homage.

A third approach was symbolism, as in Hughes’s Two-Faced, for alto saxophone and percussion, performed by Non Zero, and possibly also in other works without explanatory program notes, such as Still Life With Karl: An American Psalm, by Sophocles Papavasilopoulos and Patriot Act by Dennis DeSantis. Obviously program notes and titles came in handy for most of these pieces, as well as some of the emotion-based ones—either to explain the symbolism or simply to remind us where specifically the sentiments in the music came from. In Hughes’s notes for Two-Faced, a few possible analogies were offered, having to do with the “dilemma” of opposing musical urges and the hypocrisy of today’s politicians, and in Mazzoli’s notes for her melancholic In Spite of All This, she wrote: “I sought to describe not only the vulnerability and anger but the compassion, optimism and renewal that marks these otherwise destructive times.” (“Brutality,” “Assimilation,” and “Defying” were among the movement titles in Little’s Electric Proletariat.) Really, I wanted to listen without program notes, to see if I would “get” all this on my own. Out of the context of this concert, I would, of course, have perceived the opposed forces in Hughes’s piece, and the melancholy of Mazzoli’s piece, but would it have occurred to me that these things had anything to do with world affairs? In Hughes’s case, he may not care so much how exactly we interpret intellectually what happens musically, as long as we’re thinking. He wrote to me: “I’ve started to title some of my pieces in politically suggestive ways more as an invitation to the listener’s imagination than as an attempt to dictate what unilateral ‘meaning’ should be read into the music.”

It was interesting to see how, amid the urgency of political purpose, the unpolitical part of the composers’ minds were, out of necessity, still busy with that emotionless thing called “technique” (structure, counterpoint, tonality). I was admiring the technique of Hughes and Papavasilopoulos and others—not to mention the excellent performances of Feeney and Sacawa—but it felt almost inappropriate to do so at this type of concert.

Speaking to the audience, David Little recalled moments of doubt he’s experienced recently; with so much to worry about, such as essential matters of human rights, to be sitting and composing abstract concert music can feel pretty insignificant. I certainly have experienced these types of doubts. How can we reconcile these concerns (music and politics) in our lives? His (their) logical answer is to get busy writing politically themed music and holding politically themed concerts. Of course, there are those who believe that all art is political. American expatriate composer Gerard Pape pointed out to me last year that simply being a composer in this age—devoting your life to a musical world that is so very far off the commercial radar screen—is itself an act of non-conformity, even defiance. Maybe I should feel defiant, rather than alienated, whenever I try to explain to non-musicians that my profession (composing) is something that will never earn me a living, and that for a living I teach more people to do this thing that will never earn them a living. As for more pressing political issues, I don’t think I have the ability to portray the political in my music, and may have to be satisfied keeping those worlds separate and unreconciled, as long as I stay active in both.

Lindsey Eck

The Austin performance of Orion by the Philip Glass Ensemble last month was unquestionably a success. That’s both good news and bad news for those worried about a crisis in classical music. Good news, because it shows how a mid-size provincial city can make use of its arts infrastructure to attract a broad audience to contemporary art music. Bad news, because at Glass’s current stage of evolution his œuvre is anything but classical.

Despite the relatively high ticket prices, an attentive and appreciative audience nearly filled the University of Texas’ capacious Bass Concert Hall. From chatting with various audience members, I gathered that an interview with Glass and other Ensemble members the day before on John Aielli’s Eklektikos, a daily program of arts music on <http://www.kut.org>KUT-FM, had attracted many to the Glass performance. KUT, whose connection with the university is pretty much limited to having its studios housed on campus, is a National Public Radio station that persists in offering a broad range of music in between news programming, unlike other NPR outlets that have gone all-news. As a result, KUT has eclipsed other Austin stations to become the city’s top-rated in any format.

Glass, with most of the Ensemble, also delighted a small but enthusiastic group who met at the concert hall for a brown-bag lunch and discussion of Orion on performance day. After a round-robin introduction in which each Ensemble member spoke of his or her contributions to the collaborative work, most of the session was devoted to a question-and-answer period in which Glass exhibited his usual intelligence, graciousness, and spirituality.

Much of the discussion focused on the mechanics of integrating Western notated music of the conservatory tradition in which Glass received his early training with non-notated, improvisational styles such as the Mandingo tradition of Foday Musa Suso or alternate notations and scales such as those used in Ravi Shankar’s contribution to Orion (executed at this performance by long-time Shankar student Kartik Seshadri).

In response to questions, Glass spoke of misinterpreting Suso’s improvisational CD, which he had forgotten by the time they came together for Orion, as a fixed piece the griot intended to execute. He recalled his first encounter with Suso in 1987, in which he convinced the Gambian to tune to a Western scale (against his tradition). When he had established that a particular note on Suso’s kora was equivalent to our G, and Suso said, “That’s the first note,” Glass played an A and asked what that note was called. Suso replied, “that’s the next note.” As this continued, Glass realized that in the Mandingo tradition, the notes had no names, an insight which he experienced as the floor falling out from under him. “The ground I walked on had disappeared,” he said.

Philip Glass’s Orion

In his collaboration with Ravi Shankar, Glass again got the master to assimilate to the Western scale; Glass was able to teach him solfège in five minutes. But Orion shows how far Glass, too, has been forced to loosen the strictures of notated music and classical praxis to accommodate others’ notions of invention, rhythm, and periodicity. What remains of the Euro-American tradition has more to do with rock and pop than classicism or romanticism, let alone modernity.

In both its form and execution, Orion recalls the similarly international confections of Béla Fleck and the Flecktones. And it is odd that a conservatory grad like Glass and a Nashville bluegrasser like Fleck could end up with similar ideas about coordinating music from around the globe. Or maybe not so odd. Bluegrass is—flashy soloing aside—rather minimalist in its restricted tonality and droning instruments, and Fleck evolved through arranging Bach for banjo to the international mix of today’s Flecktones.

The ensemble that gave us Orion on Friday night included three electronic keyboards (with Glass at one), four woodwinds, and two percussionists throughout the piece, with appearances by soloists Mark Atkins (didgeridoo), Wu Man (pipa), Ashley MacIsaac (fiddle), Foday Musa Suso (kora), Kartik Seshadri (sitar), Uakti (a Brazilian trio with one flautist and two percussionists who specialize in PVC creations), and Eleftheria Arvanitikaki (soprano). By dividing the work into movements focused on one or two soloists, and only bringing the whole orchestra together at the end, the composition lived up to Glass’s goal: “not to boil it down into a sort of Esperanto, but to find commonalities.” However, these foreign traditions may have more in common with Euro-American popular and folk music than with its classical corpus.

To put together this suite—nearly two hours in length, incorporating multiple improvised sections, and created in collaboration—required “music minus one” recordings by the ensemble, worldwide CD exchanges, followed by an intensive regimen of live rehearsal. The result was a performance that kept interest through the slow, meditative sections and never flagged rhythmically during the uptempo solos. Much of the problem with the performance of non-canonical “classical” works may be the simple lack of rehearsal time prior to their execution. Orchestras typically are allowed a couple of run-throughs for a new and challenging work that demands weeks of practice to pull off adequately. The audience can tell, and a lot of popular hostility to new repertoire likely represents a negative reaction to sloppy performance rather than deficiencies in the works themselves. As Charles Rosen wrote in this month’s issue of New York Review of Books,”With radical changes of style, it takes more than a decade for performing musicians to catch up and find an adequate way of rendering the new.” In the case of putting together Orion, Glass said, “If I had had to solve these problems in a year it wouldn’t have been possible.” Of learning to assimilate international music traditions to create a “music without borders,” said Glass, “It’s taken the rest of my life, and I’m not finished yet.”

Because Orion is a collaboration with Glass as first among equals, because of the way in which it was rehearsed (through CD exchanges plus exhaustive live rehearsals), and because of its incorporation of improvised sections, the excellence in performance achieved in the Austin show was more a matter of what jazz and rock musicians call tightness rather than the bravura one expects from a philharmonic orchestra. The near lack of bowed strings (MacIsaac’s Cape Breton fiddling the sole exception) and the absence of a conductor add to the similarities with popular entertainment—all to the good. The colorful costumes, the willingness of performers to stand up and move around, and the novel instruments all work to free the piece from the stuffiness of so many concert hall experiences, while the gathering of the entire troupe at the conclusion instantiates global harmony, which after all is the Olympic theme Glass was commissioned to commemorate.

Though Orion allows for virtuosity in the form of solos by international performers, much of the piece continues the traits that got his early work labeled minimalist, especially the primitive tonality. Indeed, the drone quality of the sitar with its sympathetic strings, and the didgeridoo with its single fundamental note, only encourage Glass to avoid deviation from a tonal center.

With its radical instrumentation, its approach to rehearsal, its collaborative approach, its eschewing of the conductor as patriarch, Orion shows a widespread abrogation of European classical methods and intentions. The integration of ancient ideas from other parts of the world into a new whole cannot serve as a “way forward” for any music that deserves the label “classical.” But that’s not a criticism of Glass. Indeed, in its achievement of drama without tension (as in the best works of Mozart), its meditative calm without ennui, and its musical excellence without pyrotechnics, Orion ranks among his very best works, regardless of its implications for the European tradition from which Glass has traveled farther and farther away.

Meredith Monk

I’m relatively new to the visual art world, and so, lacking many historical touchstones, I tend to get really excited wandering through a single artist’s retrospective and watching the work evolve in time-lapse. It’s rare to get such a crash-course in a composer’s output unless you’re putting in some quality hours with their new box set. Last Sunday at Carnegie’s Zankel Hall, however, a capacity crowd turned off their cell phones and settled in for just such a live marathon concert—a celebration of Meredith Monk’s 40 years on the city’s Downtown scene.

The nature of the beast meant that, even with judicious highlights selected and most work presented in excerpted form, the afternoon still ran past the four and a half hour mark. No one appeared to be eyeing the exits, however, which spoke principally to the power of Monk’s work, but also to the amazing line-up of talent on hand and a really tight running crew working behind the scenes.

Whether a long-time fan or new to Monk’s repertoire, it would have been difficult not to be seduced by the impish little figure in a Tibetan-inspired top and red skirt who took the stage. Monk sang the brief Porch (1965) to open the show, and the cheers of support that greeted her jump-started an energy in the hall that carried through the afternoon. The Pacific Mozart Ensemble performed selections from ATLAS (1985), and Monk and Vocal Ensemble presented excerpts from Impermanence (2005) and mercy (2001), and then selections from The Games (1983) and Acts from Under and Above (1986) with the Bang On A Can All-Stars. Fellow Downtown luminaries John Zorn and Kenny Wollesen (Dungeon, 1970), also made an appearance, as well as The Roches (Quarry Weave 1, 1976), DJ Spooky with his own Meditations on Meredith live remix, and a double threat in the form of Ursula Oppens and Bruce Brubaker performed Three Waltzes for Piano (’81, ’89, and ’93). WNYC radio host John Schaefer covered for some extended stage setting with insightful on-the-spot interviews with Monk and fellow performers. And that was all before intermission.

After a quick sip of reception-quality wine in the buzzing lobby—Aren’t you so glad you’re here? Weren’t Oppens and Brubaker amazing? I just love Meredith—the crowd headed back into the hall for round two. Already seated on stage was a full contingent of performers—Alarm Will Sound, the Monk Vocal Ensemble and assorted guests—for a concert (or rather what Monk termed her “dream come true”) version of Night (1996, 2005). Monk kept strictly to her composer role here and was not a part of the performance. The tear-down after this was particularly time-consuming, which only added to the tension in the room knowing that Björk’s appearance with harpist Zena Parkins was next on the bill. It was difficult not to be a little star-struck when the petite Icelandic pop icon bounced her way to center stage in a vintage pink dress, neck wrapped in strands of rhinestone, and sporting a bizarre (even for her) hairdo, for a very brief rendition of Gotham Lullaby (1975), a work she has made very much her own.

Björk retired to the balcony and attention turned to the stage for the final stretch. Monk was joined by five fellow members of the Vocal Ensemble for an inspired (and really funny) performance of her career defining Dolmen Music (1979). Wendy Sutter, Bang on a Can’s normally reserved cellist, even got into the singing and dancing spirit of things. At the conclusion, a handful of the afternoon’s performers gathered on stage to top off the show with a group performance of Panda Chant II.

Bernard Holland’s 450-word review of the performance (NYTimes, 11/8/05) was vaguely appreciative with an undercurrent of dismissiveness for a music he found overall to encapsulate “a gentleness that prodded the imagination without overtaxing it.” For those who would like to make an appraisal of their own, there’s still a free follow-up as part of WNYC’s New Sounds Live program inside the WFC’s Winter Garden on November 16 here in New York, and a host of other performances internationally as Monk’s two-season long celebration draws to a close.

Zachary M. Lewis Photo by Nowell York

The Cleveland Orchestra Youth Orchestra’s new music pipeline is short and steady. It runs from Severance Hall a few blocks down the street to Margaret Brouwer, the resident composer at the Cleveland Institute of Music.

The COYO commissions and performs a new score from one of its students every year. Last year, it was Dan Visconti. This year, they tapped Casey Hale, a second-year graduate composition student, and he responded with a 10-minute piece for full orchestra called Pax in Nomine Domini.

Hale received the commission from the COYO last May and had to be finished by August—a true compositional challenge. “I knew how I’d be spending my summer,” he recalls. “This is by far the largest orchestra I’ve ever had a chance to work with. Writing for full orchestra is always kind of a monster no matter what you do. But it was an incredible honor.”

Music director (and outgoing assistant conductor of the Cleveland Orchestra) James Gaffigan explains the choice. “Casey’s style is very appropriate for us, not too crazy difficult but not simply sight-readable, either. He knows what he’s doing. He’s a real talented guy who knows exactly what he wants.”

Pax in Nomine Domini is slated for its world premiere this Sunday afternoon during the youth orchestra’s 20th anniversary season-opening concert. It’s on a program with Prokofiev, Bernstein, and Joseph Jongen.

Occasions on which new music appears often draw at least some measure of perfunctory attention but this particular piece might actually cause a minor stir. That’s because Hale infused the work with an ironic anti-war spirit some are apt to find relevant to modern times.

Inspired by a recent course in medieval music, Hale derived the primary motif for Pax from a song by the 12th-century troubadour Marcabru, but not just any song. Ostensibly a rallying cry for piece, Abru’s text is in fact an exhortation to engage in righteous battle in the Crusades.

“In essence, there’s an ironic relationship between the title and the actual text,” Hale says. “My intention was to dramatize that juxtaposition and to explore how that message gets disseminated and how it turns into propaganda. The way I’ve dressed it up is complex but I think the idea does come across to the orchestra on a fairly basic level. I think the idea resonates with at least some of them.”

Pax begins relatively calmly—”from a point of restraint,” in Hale’s words—and builds through repetition and variation into a huge, climactic statement. Hale describes his musical language as neither tonal nor atonal but modal with a 21st-century flair, incorporating serial techniques but not defined by them.

“He varies the theme in so many ways,” Gaffigan says, “to the point where it’s almost unrecognizable because he’s broken it down to the rhythmic level exclusively. It’s supposed to sound crass and bizarre in spots, too, and then there’s this romantic ending that just melts away. It’s been hard for student players who’ve been learning how to make beautiful sounds their whole lives to go back to doing what they did when they first picked up their instruments.”

Hale hesitates to affix any rigid agenda to Pax because he doesn’t want listeners to focus their attention too closely on extra-musical matters. He himself claims to have set aside all such issues during composition. Still, he says it should be clear after the performance that he comes down on the side of actual peace even if Abru doesn’t.

Speaking from the perspective of the orchestra, Gaffigan says the 105 young musicians who comprise it have been responding favorably to hearing directly from Hale about what was going through his mind as he wrote the music now sitting on their stands as the final rehearsals are underway.

“They love being let in on the secret,” he says. “They just suck it up. Plus, they love working with a living composer. You don’t know how much they’d love to call up Mahler and ask him a few questions. I think the most important aspect here is not our commission of a new work or a composer getting a premiere, but young musicians getting to work with a living composer.”

The Cleveland Orchestra Youth Orchestra’s 20th anniversary season-opening concert takes place 3 p.m. November 13th at Severance Hall.

Justin Schell

The trailer for the sixth annual Sound Unseen film festival imagines a world perceived not visually, but sonically: people wear glasses with speakered lenses and visit cinemas with a ragtag collage of amplifiers in place of a white screen. One would be hard-pressed to find a better metaphor for what has become a staple of the Minneapolis arts scene. Over 40 films documented multiple worlds of music, resulting in a heady mix of the populist and the esoteric, the globally iconic and the locally underground. Nas, Jeff Buckley, “Wild Man” Fischer, ethnomusicological film archives, and Cuban hip-hop were just a few of the myriad subjects represented. Films with subject matter generally placed towards the “art” side of music also manifested within this diversity.

Films about Arvo Pärt and Philip Glass document the ways a composer responds to success. Structured as a series of vignettes, Arvo Pärt: 24 Preludes for a Fugue (2002) provides an illuminating portrayal of the reclusive composer. The short vignettes range from rehearsals of Fratres and Cecilia, Vergine Romana, to more intimate moments, when Pärt is shown kneeling in prayer, deep in thought. Judging from Dorian Supin’s film, popular recognition seems to have had little effect on the composer. Creating a resonant whole out of divergent parts, Supin captures Pärt’s gentle and unassuming mannerisms, revealing a human composer yearning to reach the musically divine.

Diametrically opposed to Pärt is Eric Darmon’s Looking Glass (2003), which follows the globe-trotting contemporary life of Philip Glass. It is clear from the film that Glass’s music has become secondary to the business of his music. Looking Glass Studios is referred to as “the office” and few moments pass without Glass on the phone about an upcoming gig or working on a current project. While the film contains a tantalizing snippet from an archival performance of Music with Changing Parts, past works garner little attention. Instead, Darmon chooses to focus on what can easily be thought of as “Glass, Inc.”

Two of the festival’s “marquee” events featured artists at opposite ends of the turntable. DJ Spooky performed his Re-Birth of a Nation, while Christian Marclay, as part of his year-long residency at the Walker Arts Center, organized a mini-festival entitled Sound Art Cinema.

In Re-Birth, Spooky transfers the DJ’s focus from sound to film by scissoring and looping D.W. Griffiths’s racistly revisionist history of the Reconstruction-era South, Birth of A Nation. His live video-editing skills aside, the fundamental lack of Re-Birth is that Spooky’s re-presentation of the film fails to extract any further cultural resonance. Spooky’s soundtrack, which ranged from Glass-inspired minimalist textures to drum ‘n’ bass, was rather unfulfilling, except for the periodic thumping hip-hop beat.

Shown over two full days, the fifteen films chosen by Marclay, a well-established turntablist in his own right, microcosmically represented the festival’s diversity: I can think of few other festivals where Walt Disney would share space with Michael Snow. Loosely organized around the idea of “musical performance becoming theatrical,” most of the films, perhaps predictably, focused on Fluxus. Four films of Mauricio Kagel, Match (1966), Solo (1967), Ludwig van (1969), and Unter Strom (1970), made manifest the effect of Fluxus in Germany. Ludwig van is the composer’s provocative protest against Beethoven’s deification.

For New York’s Fluxus scene, Marclay chose Peter Moore’s Stockhausen’s Originale: Doubletakes (1964-94), a sensory-overloading aesthetic romp that features most of the 1960s New York avant-garde luminaries, from James Tenney scampering around in a feral costume to Alvin Lucier emphatically conducting a chorus of newspaper declaimers. Finally, in an attempt to construct a legacy of Fluxus, Marclay showed Sonic Youth’s performance of George Maciunas’s Piano Piece #13 (Carpenter’s Piece for Nam June Paik), the members of the group hammering nails into the keys of an unfortunate spinet with malicious enjoyment.

One of the highlights of Sound Unseen was Thomas Reichman’s Mingus (1968). This rarely-screened film captures a taut slice of the bassist’s life. Filming Mingus in his apartment, from which he was soon to be evicted, Reichman captures the bassist’s improvised invectives on black nationalism, the American education system, armed revolution, and, of course, music. He extracts his bass from the rubble to pluck some notes or examine a crumbling sheet of music.

As much as Reichman tries to “normalize” Mingus, his mental instability is obvious: he enacts a mock whipping and hanging ceremony with his young daughter Carolyn. Her presence amplifies his increasingly paranoid outlook and when Mingus says, “my wife keeps me away from my daughter,” it is easy to understand why. In the end, he is led away in tears by police on suspicion of heroin possession, leaving all his belongings, including his bass, on the street. Seething with the political ethos of 1968, the bassist’s anger, sadness, and paranoia are palpable in his words: “I hope the Communists blow you people up.”

These films were only a few examples of how Sound Unseen attempts to see different worlds through hearing music. Unfortunately, very few people actually saw these films. While venues were nearly full for Mingus and Re-Birth, other films were woefully under-attended. Perhaps a bit more publicity is needed for next year’s festival. Those who did see these films, some rarely screened anywhere outside New York or the metropolitan centers of Europe, were treated to a dynamic fusion of music and film festival.