Category: Field Reports

Mark Gresham Photo by Angela Lee

After a languid late summer, a burst of creativity took place the second week of October in Atlanta, with three unrelated back-to-back days of concerts featuring five world premieres in all by Atlanta composers, plus one by a Bostonian, and an American premiere (second performance world-wide) of a work by an icon of modernism. That two of these concerts involved music for pipe organ is no less remarkable for the city.

The third of these concerts (the subject of this report) perhaps draws the most immediate national attention simply due to the immediately recognizable name of composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, and all the modernist cache that brings among those who like to drop such things in casual but trendy social conversation.

Stockhausen’s Himmelfahrt (Ascension also provided as the English title) concluded the intermissionless concert organized by organist Randall Harlow, an adventurous grad student at Emory University. Harlow’s overall plan for the new music concert at the Schwartz Center for the Performing Arts’ Emerson Concert Hall included, as complements to Stockhausen, world premieres by two Emory-based composition professors, John Anthony Lennon and Steven Everett, written for Harlow and the hall’s new Jaeckel pipe organ.

It’s no less worthy of note that although Harlow’s concert chronologically took place shortly after the formal debut of the fully-voiced Jaeckel, apparently none of the inaugural concerts officially included the new pipes.

Harlow opened the concert with the sounds of the organ by itself in John Anthony Lennon’s Misericordia. Lennon spoke just before it was performed, describing the work as influenced by various rock/pop organists imbibed during his early years in California. But whatever of these were present, they were deeply embedded in the overall Gothic tone of the work, rather than superficially obvious.

The Jaeckel organ’s tonal palette was extended in the subsequent work on the program, Steve Everett’s Vanitas, named after the opening line of Ecclesiastes, “Vanitas vanitatum et omnia vanitas.” The piece used live electronic processing of the organ’s sounds to evoke a sonic version of the visual art genre of memento mori popular among Dutch painters during the Renaissance era. Beginning in the 15th century, still life paintings, referred to as “vanitas” at the time, often included one or more objects representing mortality, whether as obvious as a skull or subtle as a rotting piece of fruit in a gleaming bowl. The electronics, controlled by Everett, hummed, chirped, and gurgled a range of real-time modifications to the sounds emitted by the organ.

The final work was Stockhausen’s Himmelfahrt which is the first essay of his Klang: The 24 Hours of the Day cycle. It was premiered in Milan on May 5, 2005, under the title Erste Stunde (First Hour) to about 2,300 listeners packed into the hall, plus hundreds more outside. The Schwartz’s 800 seats were not filled for this second performance, and the program suggested that the audience seat themselves near the center of the hall to best experience the sonic projections, likewise controlled live by Everett. Harlow, playing a small array of percussion in addition to organ, was joined by two singers, soprano Teresa Hopkin and tenor John Bigham, vocally rendering the ecstatic Christian text in German with a few lines of Latin thrown in for good measure.

Himmelfahrt is an unabashedly fully-serial work, demonstrating that although that stylistic dinosaur is no longer roaring as it did in the ’70s, it is still alive and kicking.

More importantly, for all three composers, it was their first work for pipe organ, and helps demonstrate that it is no endangered species, especially when new works are written for newly finished instruments.

Julia Werntz Photo by Michele Macrakis

Boston new music lovers and visitors, here are some points of interest about the 2005-06 concert season now underway…

Boston Musica Viva, directed by Richard Pittman, opened its season on October 7 with “Cybersonic Adventures”—a concert much more exciting than its title, with Kaija Saariaho’s thrilling Aer, and some other deeply engaging works, such as Peter Child’s Ensemblance for ensemble with live electronics, and Lift, a minimalist collaboration between composer Barbara White and filmmaker Alison Crocetta involving dozens of helium-filled balloons. BMV will continue its season on November 4 with “Boston (Musica Viva) Celtics,” featuring music by composers with an Irish or Scottish and Boston connection. (Too bad we’ll be forced to choose between this and the BMOP concert, and the first concert in the “Extensible Toy Piano Festival” at Clark University, on the same night. See below.) On February 5, BMV hosts its annual family concert, featuring Bernard Hoffer’s ballet Ma Goose, with dancers of the Northeast Youth Ballet, and narrator Bob McGrath, of Sesame Street. (This year I’ll bring my daughter.) Finally, on April 22, BMV will present “Honoring Varèse and the International Composer’s Guild,” with works by composers who had been included in that series, including a new sextet by Chou Wen-Chung. All BMV concerts are held at Boston University’s Tsai Performance Center.

Collage New Music, directed by David Hoose, will give Boston (or formerly of Boston) composers a good showing this season, with works by Curtis Hughes, Marti Epstein, Elliott Gyger, David Rakowski, Gunther Schuller, Peter Child, Martin Brody, Tod Machover, and, in a February 27 memorial concert for Boston’s beloved Edward Cohen, works by Cohen, Seymour Schifrin, and Marjorie Merryman. Hughes is Collage’s composer-in-residence this year, and I’m looking forward very much to the new work he is writing for their spring concert. Many local performers are fans of his music, which is usually a good sign. Collage concerts are all held at Pickman Hall at the Longy School of Music in Cambridge, and the dates are 10/31 (program includes HK Gruber’s Frankenstein!!), 1/30, 2/27, and 3/27.

Boston veteran new music activists Dinosaur Annex, co-directed by composer/conductor Scott Wheeler and flutist Sue-Ellen Hershman-Tcherepnin, opened its season with “Sleeping, Waking, Dreaming,” featuring works by Richard Cornell, Jeff Nichols, Ruth Lomon, Stefan Hakenberg, and Arthur Levering. (Sadly, I missed this one.) DA’s season will continue with the third annual “Salute to Young Composers” on February 12. This festival was created, says Wheeler, when DA realized it “needed to find out more about the new generation of composers” and to “keep its repertoire fresh.” They began by seeking out area graduate-level composers, and the festival has since expanded to include events for composers of high school age and younger. This year’s group of composers includes Montserrat Torras, David Little, Lei Liang, Erik Jorgensen, Richard Beaudoin, and Dominique Schafer. These events are held at Boston’s Community Music Center. DA’s season will end with “American Triple Play” on April 30, featuring works by Fred Lerdahl, Stanislaw Skrowaczewski, and Boston’s John Harbison. All Dinosaur Annex concerts are held at First Church in Boston.

Alea III, directed by composer and conductor Theodore Antoniou, has a long history of supporting young composers with its annual International Composition Competition. The concert featuring this year’s finalists was on October 1, and the winners were American composer Martha Callison Horst and Mario Carro of Spain. On top of that, Alea will hold a “Young Composers’ Workshop” on March 13 with Gunther Schuller conducting works by composers from the U.S., Italy, Albania, Turkey, and, of course, Greece. In addition, on regular Alea concerts, Antoniou has always showcased an international selection of composers, as well as locals. Works by Giya Kanchelli, Witold Lutoslawski, Karel Husa, Varèse, George Tsontakis, George Couroupos, Alexandros Kalogeras, and Antoniou himself, as well as Americans Paul Chihara, John Thow, Jay Reise, Brian Fennelly, Michael Gandolfi, and others, are programmed on this season’s other four concerts (11/16, 12/7, 2/1, 4/9). The April 9 concert will be “Celebrating Alea,” an event “featuring distinguished international artists and speakers” (exactly who, TBA). All Alea III concerts are held at Boston University’s Tsai Performance Center.

The Boston Modern Orchestra Project will open its season on November 4 with the North American premiere of Louis Andriessen’s 1997 Trilogy of the Last Day, featuring members of the Boston Children’s Chorus and Andriessen’s long-time collaborator, pianist Tomoko Mukaiyama, who will sing and play the koto as well. The press release points out that Mukaiyama “has collaborated with artists such as architects and fashion designers in hopes of developing new forms of performance.” Personally, I am looking forward to hearing Andriessen’s much-discussed piece, as well as the music of Julia Wolfe and Boston’s Evan Ziporyn.

BMOP also has scheduled the following: the annual “Boston Connection” concert on January 21, which will include Lee Hyla’s Lives of the Saints (I heard this when it was premiered by Boston Musica Viva, and it’s been a few years since then, but I do remember being mesmerized by the vocal part—be sure to put this one in your date book); a concert devoted to “Concertos for Indigenous Instruments” on March 10 (works by Shirish Korde, Jin Hi Kim, Reza Vali, and Henry Cowell); and, on May 26, a “Big Band” concert, with Gershwin, Bernstein, Milton Babbitt, and the world premiere of William Thomas McKinley’s RAP featuring clarinetist Richard Stoltzman. All four concerts will take place at New England Conservatory’s Jordan Hall.

The Callithumpian Consort, directed by pianist Stephen Drury, will present music of John Luther Adams, Pozzi Escot, Gubbaidulina, Boulez, Xenakis, Rzewski, and others, in concerts in the various halls of the New England Conservatory, on 11/21, 2/1, 3/7, and 3/29. Callithupian’s season opened with a concert devoted to the music of John Luther Adams, which included the premiere of an important new work—a sixty-six minute elegy, For Lou Harrison, for string quartet, two pianos and string ensemble. (Sadly, I missed this one, too! My husband was performing on the same night.)

For a change in ambience, on February 13 the Firebird Ensemble, directed by violist Kate Vincent, will be presenting a “crossover” concert at Somerville barbeque joint Redbones in Davis Square, with arrangements of tunes by Jimi Hendrix, Frank Zappa, and Rage Against the Machine, along with pieces by Ian Clark and Marcin Bela. Firebird’s season also will include a May 9 Jordan Hall concert of premieres by Lee Hyla, Curtis Hughes, and John Mallia (newly added to the New England Conservatory faculty), and a Christmas season performance of Jon Deak’s Passion of Scrooge, which was a big hit last year (date and location still TBA). Firebird prides itself on its eclectic programming and top-notch players. Firebird’s concerts are always interesting and the atmosphere inviting.

Another off-the-beaten-path treasure is pianist Sarah Bob’s New Gallery Concert Series, at Boston’s Community Music Center, which features interactions between musicians and visual artists. On November 10, there will be a performance by the After Quartet, a group known for accompanying silent films. After Quartet percussionist Aaron Trant’s composition and solo performance of music for Chris Marker’s film La Jetée at an earlier New Gallery concert showed a deep involvement with the nuances of the film—a work of love; this show, which includes a new work of his, should be well worth hearing. There will be concerts on 1/26 and 5/11, including premieres of works by Daniel Felsenfeld and Nicholas Vines, in collaboration with painter Christina Memoli.

On November 4 and 5, Clark University in Worcester, will present the very exciting “Extensible Toy Piano Festival” at the Traina Center for the Arts. Co-directed by composers Matt Malsky and David Claman, the festival features pianists Phyllis Chen and John McDonald, as well as improvisations by the Callithumpian Consort. Events include the following: two symposia on “Composing/Performing” and “Listening”; a key-note address, “The Toy Piano in the Post-Prohibitive Age” by composer and critic Kyle Gann; concerts on both nights, with premieres of pieces involving the toy piano, by Malsky, Claman, Jeff Morris, Thanos Chysakis, James Bohn, Atsushi Yoshinaka, Adrian Pertout, John McDonald, Frank J. Oteri, and Howard Kenty, as well as works by Phyllis Chen, Kyle Gann, Matthew Sansom, and Rhodri Divies. As if that weren’t enough, a sound installation by John Mallia will be on view during the festival.

As for the Boston Symphony Orchestra, there’s too much happening to begin to cover here. A sampling of composers represented this season: Tippett, Saariaho, Golijov, Perle, Henze, Carter, Tan, Lieberson, Foss, Dawe, Schuller…

Happy listening.

Alyssa Timin Photo by Ross Hoffman

The Philadelphia Live Arts Festival and its more rough-and-tumble twin, the Philly Fringe, took over the city’s posh Old City district for two weeks at the beginning of September. One is hard pressed to find a show in these chronically edgy festivals that is not interdisciplinary, but Cynthia Hopkins’s Accidental Nostalgia: An operetta about the pros and cons of nostalgia fared better than most between those assaulted boundaries.

Accidental Nostalgia is a tour de force for this maybe 5’2″ powerhouse performer, who carried the show with an evening’s worth of song and dance about the dark underbelly of memory. The operetta is framed as a book-tour lecture by a neurologist who’s promoting How to Change Your Mind, a book she’s written following discoveries about her own past. She has selective amnesia. She does a song on “How I Became My Own Experimental Subject.” There’s PowerPoint involved.

The mystery at the heart of the show, and at the heart of the neurologist’s memory loss, is a possible patricide after possible incest. Darkly themed and certainly mature, the show is balanced by Hopkins’s deadpan humor, her steely confidence, and her curling country voice. The music is at turns playful and emotional, the choreography sexy and ironic. Though she’s alone onstage much of the time with a great big video screen, Hopkins is also occasionally joined by her tech guys and back-up singers, who look like they should be riding Harleys.

The show contains a great deal of this visual subversion, though it’s done subtly. Hopkins’s costumes are sort of butch, sort of femme, adjusted and angled suits that complicate their own purpose, reveal the unexpected. Where lesser material might rely on the edgy or provocative for effect, Hopkins’s piece, in my estimation, actually needs these tactics. On my reading, this musical theater work is really an allegory about taking ownership of the body and mind, transcending a pitiful past in the endless opportunity of appropriation and creation. This interdisciplinary operetta is about maturity, about the future, and it owns the video camera as equally as it owns the blues.

The Blue Note in New York is not a regular stop on my music route—the $35 music surcharge on top of the food and drink minimum being generally beyond this music fan’s budget. But when the announcement came through that Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra was in town supporting their new release Not In Our Name, I felt both musically and politically compelled to be there. The roughly hour-long set in album track order was a reminder of what it’s like to spend a warm night in the company of secure musicians, confident in their voices.

The evening got off to a solidly played but unsurprising, wallpapery start. By the end of the second piece, the orchestra was ready to go on to Carla Bley’s Blue Anthem, and its depth began to truly shine through, producing music that felt less like “watch me,” take-a-solo jazz, and more like a dialogue among the musical equals on stage. Wedged as I was behind the piano, I could only catch the occasional glimpse of the rest of the band in the back wall mirror, and so missed actually seeing most of performance. I did have an intimate view of Bley, however, who tapped at the piano bench with her left hand when she wasn’t playing and stood to give the occasional start and stop cue.

America The Beautiful, here a medley of tunes lifted from “America The Beautiful,” “Lift Every Voice And Sing, “and “Skies Of America,” was perhaps the most overt statement of the evening and the most effective piece of music on the program. Off-key notes and limping rhythms offered political commentary as biting as any offered up by Jon Stewart.

A couple of old standards also got a dusting off. “Amazing Grace” was given a bluesy treatment, and Barber’s Adagio For Strings was arranged for the brass in the band under the direction of Bley’s rudimentary conducting. The work was oddly touching in these new timbres, though the climax was not fully exploited dynamically and the ensemble re-entrance was shaky enough to smudge the effect.

Overall, it was an evening light on the stage banter and thick on the music, music that didn’t force the ear so much as content itself to give it a satisfying yogic stretch.

Joan Tower Photo by Noah Sheldon

While much of the new music community was looking west over the weekend anxiously waiting for the first impressions of Dr. Atomic to waft out of San Francisco, the small city of Glens Falls, New York, was launching a major premiere of their own. Largely absent the media glare, Joan Tower’s Made in America received the first of at least 80 scheduled performances yesterday afternoon for some 1,200 concertgoers in a packed high school auditorium.

Such a grass-roots beginning was especially appropriate for a piece and a project designed to rethink new music and its audience. Born out of a desire to give small-budget and community orchestras the opportunity to commission a major composer by pooling resources, Made in America ends the paradigm that important new premieres are strictly the purview of the big-budget orchestras of major cities.

Even before the premiere, 65 orchestras had signed onto the project, guaranteeing repeat performances in all 50 states over the next two seasons. In addition, the consortium of orchestras, working with the American Symphony Orchestra League and Meet the Composer, raised significant funding from the Ford Motor Company Fund and the NEA to create educational and publicity materials, including a project website and an extensive DVD presentation featuring Tower, assuring that organizations with exceptionally small and largely volunteer staffs would have the resources they needed to support the work. What Glens Falls Symphony Orchestra Executive Director Robert Rosoff termed “a big, hairy, audacious goal” conceived of in 2001, has been realized, an idea with the further potential to trigger a nation-wide shift in the relationship between composers, orchestras, and their audiences.

Tower was an ideal choice, both for her talent and her personality (see this month’s Cover feature on Tower). Always ready with a joke, she warmed up the concert hall crowd with the wit and timing of a standup comedian and thanked them for making a 67-year-old composer feel like a rock star. The rock star comparison was apt, as she had been feted with dinners and parties all week, and the Sunday paper included a huge feature on her visit to the community.

For those working in the somewhat protective cocoon of new music communities in major markets, watching a group of people outside of that insular world giving so much of themselves (the volunteer committee that put together the activities surrounding Tower’s visit to Glens Falls had been working for 18-months) and taking such pride in participating in the birth of a new piece was inspiring. The orchestra’s charismatic music director, Charles Peltz, summed up the learning experience that everyone took away from the weekend—that even though Glens Falls was a small city, with a small orchestra, it was still important to “make music like this, for people like us, right here. We deserve it.” The scope of the Ford Made in America project assures that 64 more communities will have the opportunity to feel exactly the same way.

Composer Kenji Bunch

On September 17, Double Talk: A Conversation for Marimba, Trumpet, and Orchestra by Kenji Bunch had its world premiere in Tyler, Texas. The 20-minute work was performed by the East Texas Symphony Orchestra led by its Music Director and Conductor Per Brevig, with the soloists Makoto Nakura, an internationally recognized marimbist, and James Sims, principal trumpeter of the East Texas Symphony.

The Portland-born Kenji Bunch, a former Young Concert Artists’ composer-in-residence, has had a flurry of recent commissions and premieres. In 2004, Bunch’s Symphony No. 1, “Lichtenstein Triptych,” was premiered by the Santa Rosa Symphony, earning critical praise for its zesty energy and diverse influences, from Bernard Herrmann—who wrote film scores for Alfred Hitchcock—to Carl Stalling, composer of music for Warner Brothers cartoons.

Double Talk benefited from equally varied influences. During a phone chat a few days before the work’s world premiere, Bunch explained that he was especially influenced by the jazzy irony of Shostakovich’s Piano Concerto No. 1 for piano, trumpet, and strings.

Bunch wrote the new piece expressly for Nakura, the fourth work he has written over the past six years for the virtuoso. “Before meeting [Nakura] I never thought of the [marimba],” Bunch admitted. “But he makes a strong case for it as a solo and orchestral instrument. I love its color and rhythmic vitality. There’s a roundness to the tone and I have a sensibility for that, since I’m a violist. The marimba is the viola of the percussion world, with a mellowness and versatility that can remind you of a gamelan orchestra or the sounds of nature.”

Bunch didn’t find there to be any special challenges in orchestrating a work for marimba and trumpet. He explained that the two instruments “offer a delightful counterpoint” and the trumpet does not drown out the marimba since “the marimba can be really loud—you’d be surprised! The balance is quite nice between the two—the trumpet doesn’t feel he has to play on eggshells.”

Bunch said that he chose to write for a scaled-down classical-sized orchestra, defying the trend in contemporary music, including Bunch’s own, to include a battery of percussion driving an entire work. Instead, he opted for a work that was “really about the soloists and the orchestra as characters in the piece, not to overwhelm one with another.”

Bunch’s new work, which was performed alongside works by English composers like Handel, Britten, and Elgar, had an appropriately British-like wit. As Bunch stated to me, “I’ll never be British, but I do think [Double Talk] will fit in because it has a certain neo-classic sensibility which I find a lot in Britten, who is a composer hero of mine.”

Marimbist Makoto Nakura Photo by Emi Hatsugai

Bunch composes music with the pleasure principle firmly in view, and in this sense Per Brevig was the ideal conductor for the occasion, as he seemed able to inspire his Texan musicians to play as if for the sheer enjoyment of it, a very rare quality among conductors. Double Talk was notable for its Stravinsky-like bright rhythms and blithe, Poulenc-style melodies. Nakura, dressed in a saffron-colored silk shirt, played with exuberant, urban zest, with some of the acrobatic humor of Danny Kaye—light years away from the humorless playing of Japanese kodo drummers. Sims displayed plenty of burnished tone, although some of the ironic razzing in Shostakovich’s works for trumpet might have also been welcome in this context.

Dispite the work’s title, the marimba and trumpet do not really converse, but like a long-married couple, they carry on two separate monologues, sometimes simultaneously. The real conversation seems to be as much between the composer and his marimbist as between the two soloists. While the writing for trumpet is plush and glamorous, at times close to European jazz-influenced compositions like those of Claude Bolling, the challenging marimba part is more often in earnest.

In the slow second movement (Double Talk follows the three-movement form of the classical concerto) the marimba seems to express a series of interrogations about unfulfilled love. As a solo instrument, its limited range, even when played as exquisitely as Nakura does, creates a certain isolation onstage compared to the rest of the orchestra. The marimba might almost be a sort of soon-to-be-extinct bird or other endangered species, telegraphing solo taps like an SOS message doomed to remain unanswered.

Although Double Talk ends with a spirited conga like an orchestral dance composed by Leonard Bernstein, it leaves a lingering impression of the sheer virtuosity of Nakura’s playing. There is a sense not just of a showcase for a brilliant player, but an emotional portrait of the abilities and personality of a soloist. When writing a concerto, any young composer might take heed of Bunch’s evident awareness of the performer he is writing for, both as a musician and as a person.

This intimate knowledge became especially clear when Nakura played a solo encore in response to the audience’s ovation, the surefire dazzler Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Flight of the Bumblebee” arranged for marimba. Yet although played with brisk perfection, the work seemed generic, and even cutesy, compared to what Bunch had written with the same soloist expressly in mind.

Double Talk: A Conversation for Marimba, Trumpet, and Orchestra will receive two more performances on November 17 and 19 by the Stockton Symphony conducted by Peter Jaffe with the soloists Makoto Nakura (marimba) and Brian Anderson (trumpet).

Though there are no immediate plans to record Double Talk, Makoto Nakura’s performance Bunch’s Triple Jump for solo marimba (2001) is available on his recent disc out on Kleos Classics

Ian Moss

Earlier this month, several hundred musicians, industry representatives, and lawyers descended upon George Washington University’s Lisner Auditorium for the Future of Music Coalition’s 5th Annual Policy Summit. FMC was founded by rocker Jenny Toomey in 2000 as an advocacy organization purporting to represent artists’ interests in the face of the rapid evolution of digital technology and the laws and policies governing intellectual property. Not surprisingly, those issues dominated the three-day conference, which featured appearances by FCC Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein, RIAA Chairman and CEO Mitch Bainwol, CDBaby.com founder Derek Sivers, REM bassist Mike Mills, Senator Maria Cantwell (D-WA), Public Enemy co-founder Hank Shocklee, and legendary funkmaster George Clinton, among many others.

Here’s a quick summary of impressions from this composer who was in attendance:

• While even the RIAA’s Mitch Bainwol acknowledged that piracy on peer-to-peer networks is never going to go away, there does seem to be a definite trend toward “legitimizing” digital downloads, spearheaded by the success of the iTunes Music Store and affirmed by the recent 9-0 Supreme Court decision in the so-called “Grokster case.” The current intellectual property battles center around three issues: 1) how best to monetize the existing avenues for distributing music online and what the appropriate price point should be; 2) whether digital downloads qualify as a “performance” and are thus subject to licensing by performing rights organizations, particularly in the context of podcasts; 3) whether there should be a compulsory performance license for sampling purposes, the same way that there is for recordings.
• Did you know that classical is the third-best selling genre on iTunes? This tidbit came form Magnatune founder John Buckman, whose own small online record label features classical as the number-one selling genre. (Of course, in the case of Magnatune, “classical” means mostly Renaissance- and baroque-era music on period instruments, but we’ll take what we can get.)
• One issue that came up but was never really thoroughly discussed was the subject of how the current system of collecting fees for intellectual property can be a burden on musical genres and communities that do not enjoy mass-market appeal. An afternoon session on how best to utilize the PROs (ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC) quickly turned into a referendum on this very topic, with an attendee from the Folk Alliance claiming that several well-respected venues were recently forced to shut down in part because they could not afford the appropriate licensing fees. It raises the question of how artists, composers, and PROs can do more to be sensitive to the larger ecology of niche music markets. 
• A recurring theme throughout the conference was that there is simply not much money to be made in selling CDs, even for big-name artists. Most musicians make their living from their live shows and their merchandise. That’s news to me, as a composer/musician who has routinely taken in $20 or less from the door at gigs that were better attended than some of the shows I see in New York, but I guess I’ll take their word for it. One avenue for substantial income that many composers may not have considered is licensing one’s existing music for use in films and television programs.
• The final panel, “The ‘Unheard’ Music,” was of most direct interest to the new music community, with representation from pianist Matthew Shipp as well as Meet The Composer head honcho Heather Hitchens and IAJE President Suzan Jenkins. It was an interesting gambit on the part of the FMC organizers to pair the abovementioned three panelists with representatives from Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, djDIY.com (a site focusing on electronica artists), Just Plain Folks, and XM Satellite Radio’s “Unsigned” channel. The implication, of course, was that all genres of music marginalized within the industry are essentially in the same boat, a concept that I think is very important for the classical and jazz communities to embrace. Case in point: Billy Zero, program director of XM’s “Unsigned,” reported that he receives approximately 350 CDs a week, of which 80-90 percent qualify as some variety of indie rock. Yet Zero claims that he is open to playing any genre of music, including classical, if the opportunity were to present itself. A quick browse through the “classical” section of indie music darling myspace.com (also known as the most-visited website in the galaxy) turns up major-label artists Kronos Quartet and Hilary Hahn, a small handful of under-30 composers, and a whole bunch of classical guitarists. Composers would do well to become hip to the methods that unsigned rock bands and underground rappers, among others, are using to level the playing field and hustle for attention. I suspect we may find the mainstream more accepting of what we have to offer than we might expect.

Kudos to the kind folks at Future of Music Coalition for confronting these issues head-on and for reaching out to the classical and jazz communities for inclusion in these events. Hopefully classical and jazz musicians will reach back and attend next year’s policy summit, ’cause they sure were few and far between at this one! Luckily, you can go back in time and relive some of the highlights by visiting the summit’s website–click on the “Audio” or “Video” buttons to experience the discussions firsthand.

Recommended viewing/listening:

• Panel 02: New Label/No Label Models
• Panel 04: State of the Union
• Special interview with George Clinton and Hank Shocklee
• Panel 08: IP in a post-Grokster World
• Music by avant-garde jazz pianist Matthew Shipp
• Panel 11: The “Unheard” Music

Scott Winship Photo by Kathryn Gritt

With students heading back to the classroom, it becomes more and more clear that summer has come to an end. And to be honest (and I never thought I would utter these words), I’m a little grateful. It has been one hell of a hot summer here in Chicago and with cooling temperatures comes the rebirth of the classical concert season.

It seems that most cities of any size tend to offer up a summer concert series of one thing or another—the local community band, a pick-up pops orchestra, etc.—to play at the Fourth of July picnic or summer evening events. Chicago is no different in this respect, although I would have to argue that Chicago offers a rare treat in the land of summer orchestra performances, beyond Sousa and John Williams to that of new American music.

For those of you not in the know, I am referring to the Grant Park Orchestra and the Grant Park Music Festival. Operating for 70 years, the GPMF offers “the nation’s only remaining free, municipally-supported, outdoor classical music series.” Initially performing in a makeshift band shell in Grant Park, one of Chicago’s great parks right on the lake front, the GPMF recently moved across the street to take up residence in the state-of-the-art (and visually stunning) Jay Pritzker Pavilion, deep in the heart of Mayor Daley’s biggest pet project, Millennium Park. Calling the Pritzker Pavilion state-of-the-art is a total understatement. You should see this thing. Designed by the renowned architect Frank Gehry, the Pavilion features an ultra high-end sound system created by the Talaske Group, Inc. which boasts digitally processed “virtual architecture” and an open-air acoustical canopy. Designed to provide a “concert hall” quality sound to an outdoor concert, the pavilion is constructed with a trellis of steel and sound speakers that crisscross the outdoor lawn seating, so whether you’re in the first row or on a blanket in the back of the lawn with a picnic basket you get the best quality sound. The pavilion holds 4,000 fixed seats and can accomodate an additional 7,000 people on the lawn under the trellis.

The GPMF’s commitment to new music is stunning for any orchestra series, let alone a “free municipally-support classical music series” operating during the summer. In this season alone 8 of 21 concerts prominently feature new music from home and abroad. Concerts titles such as Baltic Voices (new choral music by Pärt, Sisask, Schnittke, Nørgard, Kreek), Modern Masters (Corigliano, Harbison, Martinu), American Romantics (Hailstork, Barber, Hanson, Gershwin), and Bernstein to Adams (Corigliano, Bernstein, Adams) including the odd sprinkling of Copland and others throughout, show the obvious commitment to new music.

My girlfriend and I decided one lovely night to spend the evening on a blanket on the lawn underneath this trellis of speakers and steel to take in the “Bernstein to Adams” concert. The first thing that we noticed, and were quite taken aback by it, was that when we arrived the majority of the permanent seats were filled near the stage. And it appeared that the entire lawn was filled with a huge mix of children, blankets, couples, lawn chairs, families, coolers, and the elderly all settled in to listen to new American music. I was overjoyed to see thousands of people on this lovely evening sitting to enjoy the concert, including all of the people strolling by as they were enjoying the rest of Millennium Park. Could anything be more wonderful? It was so crowded that we were forced to sit to the side of the official “lawn” seating section with several other listeners. But not to worry, thanks to the sound system, we were able to hear perfectly well even if we couldn’t really see all that much.

The concert consisted of John Corigliano’s Fern Hill, Bernstein’s Arias and Barcaroles and the piece that I really came to hear, John Adams’s On the Transmigration of Souls. Corigliano has had a long-standing tradition with the GPMF, receiving several performances each summer including a performance of his Midsummer Fanfare earlier this season. I was concerned that, in an outdoor environment, Adams’s subtle and poignant Transmigration might get lost. And it did to some degree for us out in left field, but it still held a powerful voice. It truly was a great thing to see families of all shapes and sizes enjoying this music in such a beautiful setting. I am really looking forward to spending much more of next summer under the trellis in the open air listening to quality new American music…I’ll just remember to get there early.

Mark Gresham Photo by Angela Lee

Cellist and new music activist Craig Hultgren brought his “2005 Hultgren Solo Cello Works Biennial” program to Atlanta on September 13th. It was presented at Georgia State University’s Kopleff Recital Hall, hosted by GSU’s neoPhonia. This fourth installment of Hultgren’s recital-cum-competition of new works for solo cello, unaccompanied or with electronics, was on its second leg of a three city mini-tour; the first installment held on August 28th in Birmingham, Alabama, the final one to take place in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, on September 20th.

The program featured works by seven composers chosen as finalists in the composition contest, winnowed down from a total of 115 submissions from 27 countries. Hultgren, who is a member of the Alabama Symphony and active participant in BAMA (Birmingham Art Music Association), said from the stage that the competition panel, which consisted of himself and senior members of BAMA, chose the finalists based on three simple criteria: that the music be “idiomatic,” “forward-looking,” and “good composition.”

But the next step, awarding cash prizes at each of the concerts, was up to the audiences, which votes by ballot at the end of the program for the winning work of the night—$1000 prizes awarded at each show in Birmingham and Atlanta, and a $500 prize to be awarded at Tuscaloosa.

The composers’ ages ranged between 30 and 44, with the exception of Stephen Gard of Australia, by default the elder statesman of the group at a mature 54. Besides Gard, the other composers who made it to the finals were Vincent Chee-Yung Ho, Nickitas Demos, Michael Angell, Robert Percy, Katy Abbott, and Carlo Forlevisi.

Hultgren read all of the evening’s music not from paper scores, but from the digital screen of a Music Pad, from which a number of the scores were also projected on a screen for the audience to see and follow. Hultgren played a total of four cellos during the evening: three standard acoustic instruments, two set up with alternative tunings, plus a solid-body electric cello.

Ho’s Stigmata opened the program with a sighing, wailing reflectiveness expressed in pitch bends integrated into the thematic material.

Hultgren then switched to the electric cello for Atlanta-based Demo’s Tonoi IV with its driving, aggressive machine-gun rhythms and arching, ascending arpeggios, making use of digital echo in the middle section then a brief spate of fuzz-box filtering in a later portion.

Demos was one of only two American composers represented on the program, the other being Birmingham’s Michael Angell, whose Sonata for Cello and Tape (with a brief video montage) concluded the first half of the concert. Hultgren was back on the acoustic cello with which he began the concert. The five movements incorporated a busy, “old school” electronic character accompanying a cello part replete with long slides on the strings and taps on the instrument’s body.

After a brief intermission, Hultgren picked up one of the cellos with altered tuning to play Percy’s Everything is Permitted. Opening with eerie harmonics, the piece then took up a mostly pizzicato texture, evolving to a mostly bowed texture as it progressed, including some fretboard slaps along the way. It was followed by the shortest piece on the program, Abbott’s Break Out (on the cello with standard tuning), a one-and-a-half minute miniature unaccompanied tour-de-force.

The most “traditionally melodic” music of the evening was Gard’s Voices from the Gorge, with an artful video collage by the composer. The rather polyphonic score included not only electronic and sampled sounds, but also multiple recorded cello tracks that were in lyrical ensemble with the live cello. All elements were rhythmically interactive in one section—a jazzy pizzicato with clever highlighting of linear objects in the video.

The program concluded with Forlivesi’s Più mesto—the title underscoring the work’s overall feeling of desolation. Utilizing his remaining cello with altered tuning, Hultgren played with two cello bows at once, one in each hand. The score is written on a grand staff, one staff typically for the right hand, the other for the left. The slow tempo and some of the manner of performance was inspired by the biwa, a traditional Japanese instrument.

At the end of the show, audience members checked off their choice for the evening’s prize-winning composer, who was announced at the post-concert reception after a quick count of ballots: hometown Atlanta composer Nickitas Demos.

Justin Schell

The contemporary dance group Danceworks introduced a new collaborative endeavor to Milwaukee last month with “Art to Art,” premiering new works from local emerging artists. Six choreographers—Kelly Anderson, Monica Rodero, Sofi Askenazi, Liz Hildebrandt, Diana LeMense, and Dan Schuchart—were randomly paired with six composers—Michael O’Day, Peter Pearson, Amanda Schoofs, Allen Russell, Eric Meyer, and Riles Walsh—in connections facilitated by Kevin Stalheim, director of Milwaukee’s Present Music. According to Sarah Wilbur, artistic director of Danceworks, the project is “a venue for exploration” that “expands the network of performing artists that live in Milwaukee.” Each of the twelve artists brought their own ideas to their works, though most agreed it was a unified process throughout, necessitating experimentation and compromise. The project thus gave each artist an opportunity to explore the dynamic relationship of cross-media artistic creation.

Kelly Anderson and Kelly Zwiers performing one might hear a feather or see a pin drop Photo by Keith Knox

Michael O’Day, who has previously written music for the Milwaukee Ballet, expressed this in recounting the genesis of the piece one might hear a feather or see a pin drop, choreographed and danced by Kelly Anderson. “Kelly’s first response to me was that she liked classical music, especially strings and arias,” he said. O’Day, who decided beforehand on an electronic piece utilizing granular synthesis, thus had to unify “a very broad, somewhat contradictory, palette of ideas.” As O’Day’s music subsumed ethereally human voices under digital debris, Anderson’s choreography worked in tandem to blur the line between human and non-human. Anderson writhed on the ground like a malfunctioning automaton, ceasing only when stilled by dancer Kelly Zwiers. As the work concluded with them lying on two blocks, Zwiers silently put Anderson to rest for the final time.

The other pairs had a similar story in their work’s creation, but with very different results. Monica Rodero and Allen Russell structured sotto voce as a conversational duet. Rodero crafted a dialogue between dancers Dan Schuchart and Liz Hildebrandt while Russell’s piece played violin and piano lines off each other. The work, like every conversation, traversed various emotional states, from sweeping legato themes when the dancers were joyfully entangled, to caustically percussive writing as the pair’s discontent and separation grew. The closeness of all four artists, however, produced a remarkably palpable sense of entwined intimacy.

Liz Hildebrandt, Karley Hetebrueg, and Dan Schuchart performing bound.struggle.release Photo by Keith Knox

Amanda Schoofs and Liz Hildebrandt produced bound.struggle.release, danced by Hildebrandt, Schuchart, and Karley Hetebrueg. Schoofs’s electronic composition utilized massive sound blocks that often rang like the largest gongs of a Javanese gamelan. The piece also possessed a spatial dimension, sounding different depending on an audience member’s location. Responding with violent outbursts of movement, the three dancers seemed caught in a web of struggle for superiority, hurling each other to the ground and crawling over the wreckage. Schuchart ended the work by simply dumping the two women on the ground, yet the look of dejection on Schuchart’s face, combined with the silence that accompanied his final steps, assured the audience that it was a Pyrrhic victory at best.

Here Again, the work of Diana LeMense and Eric Meyer, seemed to explore varieties of uniformity. Five dancers elegantly moved in LeMense’s staggered patterns to Meyer’s Wardances. Scored for clarinet, trumpet, bass, a variety of keyboards, and sampled percussion, the piece moved through a series of fractured grooves. The piece hinted at, but never quite achieved a steady beat, resulting in multiple pulses sounding simultaneously. Such an effect did compliment the movements, yet the components only briefly aligned, when each dancer performed a brief solo to a series of piano cadenzas. This was also the case with Divide, the work of Riles Walsh and Sofi Askenazi. Walsh’s “digital/analog mish mash” mined the words of Andy Warhol and samples from “The Velvet Underground and Nico,” resulting in a vivid sonic trope on the history of multimedia. Dancer Kelsey Heida moved through a series of strings stretched across the room, but unfortunately there was little visible connection between the music and the choreography, resulting in a disjointed and underdeveloped work.

Persephone’s Descent Photo by Keith Knox

Persephone’s Descent, created by Dan Schuchart and Peter Pearson added a further visual dimension with projections by filmmaker Brian Perkins. The dancers moved smoothly throughout the work, often imitating each other in what Schuchart called a “visual echo,” in order to “create a shifting world where perceptions are changed through different view points.” Schuchart’s employment of a large canvas screen added a striking combination of form and function. When wheeled across the stage, it became a billowing sail; when still, it served as the backdrop for Perkins’s silhouettes of flowers and video of leaves, adding further mystery by distorting the dancing shadows.

Pearson’s music, a single movement string quartet, not only fit Schuchart’s ideas, but enhanced the aesthetic experience. By displacing small pentatonic modules, Pearson achieved a constant pulse of ever-changing and polyrhythmic echoes. It was not, however, overpowering or aggressive. “I think the piece as a whole has a slight pastoral quality to it, somewhat akin to driving through Wisconsin,” the composer said, an idea which meshed well with Schuchart’s choreography, the wind from the open road filling the sails through the slow yet ever-changing world of perception.

Danceworks will continue to explore new collaborations across disciplines as “Art to Art” will be part of their annual summer series. Next summer, the group plans on pairing choreographers with visual artists. Those composers and choreographers that worked together this summer, however, learned something best articulated by Schuchart: “We made something more than any one of us could have done alone.”