Category: Field Reports

Julia Werntz Photo by Michele Macrakis

The Boston Modern Orchestra Project has gone a long way toward making Boston feel like an important place to be. It’s inspiring to witness, not only an orchestra devoted entirely to contemporary music, but also this fresh paradigm of what an orchestra can be (reflected in the “Project” part of its name). BMOP aims to be an evolving and expanding entity, to have the flexibility of a chamber ensemble, and (like a few other groups) to expand its audience base beyond the typical concertgoers. It has added to its orchestral concert season informal, chamber “Club Concerts” at Boston’s Club Café on Columbus Ave., as well as collaborations with other organizations such as Opera Boston and the Boston CyberArts Festival.

On May 28, to a packed Jordan Hall, the Boston Modern Orchestra Project presented their “Takemitsu Tribute” concert, concluding their eighth season—a season which also featured concerts devoted to minimalism, pieces for solo voice and orchestra, Bernard Rands’s Canti Trilogy, and the annual “Boston Connection” concert, as well as three of the “Club Concerts.” On the first half of the program were Kaze-No-Oka, for biwa, shakuhachi, and orchestra—a BMOP commission and premiere by Japanese-American composer Ken Ueno (who has been making waves in Boston in recent years), and Water Concerto (1998), for percussion and orchestra, by Chinese composer Tan Dun. On the second half were Toru Takemitsu’s very popular and romantic 1957 Requiem, November Steps (the piece for biwa, shakuhachi, and orchestra which won him fame in 1967), and Three Film Scores, a 1994 suite consisting of “Music of Training and Rest” from José Torres (1959), “Funeral Music” from Black Rain (1989), and “Waltz” from The Face of Another (1966). The shakuhachi and biwa in Kaze-No-Oka and November Steps were played by special guests Kifu Mitsuhashi and Yukio Tanaka, from Japan.

The Takemitsu pieces chosen may have been a something of a “greatest hits” selection, and one which—aside from November Steps—seemed to showcase his European rather than his Japanese influences, but then how often do we get to hear any of Takemitsu’s works performed live? The “accessibility” of this selection may have been considered necessary in order to balance things out for the audience after the first half of the concert, which featured heavy, introspective music in Ueno’s piece, and loads of startling novelty in Tan’s. In any case, the music of these two composers reflected more overtly the influence of Takemitsu’s East/West innovations, his attention to sound, and his use of striking juxtapositions.

In Kaze-No-Oka Ueno drew upon the Japanese aesthetic principle of “shawari”—important to Takemitsu, and now to Ueno himself. To put this many-sided concept into a nutshell, “shawari” can translate as “beautiful noise,” “to touch,” or “obstacle,” and for the artist can mean the use of a deliberate “inconvenience,” desired for its creative potential. A relevant example can be heard in the metallic sounds, above the pitches themselves, which emanate from the biwa. Ueno applied this principle to his orchestral writing by combining the instruments in close, sometimes buzzing, microtonal sonorities, and using other instrumental noises—even white noise from the mouths of the players—creating very sensual “artifacts of sound,” as he calls them, with a structural rather than ornamental function. The biwa and shakuhachi duo itself was set against the Western orchestra in a dramatic manner. Unlike November Steps, in which the writing for the two instruments is temporally interspersed with the orchestral writing, in Kaze-No-Oka they appeared only after the orchestral section of the piece had fully concluded, in a cadenza which seemed to last as long as the first part of the piece. This was Ueno’s response to BMOP’s request that the shakuhachi and biwa part be usable as an independent composition, for another concert event. Many composers might shy away from separating these elements so completely, for fear of incongruity. But the tension at the moment of the duo’s entry, the sustained intensity and relatedness of the music despite the sudden drop in density, the surprising length of the cadenza—these things resulted in a piece with its own strong sense of balance and “meaning.”

Juxtaposition in the Water Concerto occurred in a different dimension. “Pure sounds”—a great menagerie of sounds arising from large, closely-miked basins of water with the theatrical use of wooden bowls, plastic cups, tubes, sticks, metal, bare hands—were pitted not only against the special sonorities and general pitch-orientedness of the Western orchestra, but against well-known Western harmonic devices as well. The orchestra at moments imitated the sounds from the percussion, and at other moments provided a familiar “functional harmonic” backdrop. But perhaps more compelling than these sorts of juxtapositions was the percussion writing itself—the setting of the element of water against so many materials—and the evocative sound and rhythm world Tan created. Soloist Robert Schultz, who performed his tremendous, choreographed part as if he’d known it all his life, brought this world to us vividly and with infectious pleasure.

Lindsey Eck

Henna Chou’s strangest collaboration began when she answered an ad on Craigslist for a composer willing to write for toy instruments. Soon she was sucked into the Vortex—Austin’s experimental theater group, though the directors of Holes Before Bedtime resist that term. “We approach it in a very straightforward fashion,” says co-director Matt Hislope. “We approach it as if it were something out of the canon.” The musical, by Dan Basila (whose specialty is plays about babies), is a farce concerning a male pregnancy in the form of testicular cancer. Despite the infantile yet family-unfriendly subject matter, the rigors of a tight repertory production in a small but high-profile urban theater demanded scoring with tightly coordinated rhythm and timing that belied the appearance of daft spontaneity.

Holes Before Bedtime

Holes Before Bedtime began as libretto for an opera, and was staged as such in New York and San Francisco. In Austin, it’s a musical with the lines spoken or chanted as well as sung. Issues of timing, together with the demand that instruments double as the source of sound effects, pose different and perhaps greater challenges as compared with scoring the text as an opera.

“We wanted it to be somewhat sparse,” says co-director Josh Meyer, “because we did a workshop production of this in November, and we had no instrumentation; it was all just singing a capella. And it made the characters seem even more insane…we wanted to hold onto that.” What Meyer calls sparseness translated into a minimalist soundtrack for the live performance from Chou, a label she accepts.

Meyer supplied the vocal lines for the places where chant turns to song; thus he shares writing credits with Chou. What looked like child’s play in performance was actually the result of weeks of rehearsal. Chou only notated a few bars of the score and then the piece grew collaboratively, further honed by listening back to recordings. The result, boasts Meyer, is a show that differs considerably from night to night, yet last Friday’s performance met Chou’s goal of “wanting it to seem deliberate.”

Henna Chou

Chou was required to serve as one-woman band in full view of the audience. With aplomb and a deadpan expression that contrasted with the high silliness onstage, she switched with little in-between time from regular keyboard to the toy xylophone and celesta-thingy (one at each hand) to cello to banjo to percussion and back. Her composure at such a task reflects long classical training via private lessons—12 years on piano, cello from the age of eight, and guitar from twelve, continuing through her undergraduate years at Iowa State. In the last three years she’s played little classical repertoire, focusing on original collaborations with Texas musicians including shows in San Francisco with Houstonian Annie Lin.

The text, even when chanted rather than sung, had the insistent rhythm of Mother Goose rhymes. The effect was oddly reminiscent of Jacobean blank verse—an iambic meter that Chou capitalized on with her continuo passages on the cello—constantly emphasizing the iambic accents on the downbeat and playing against them on the upbeat. The cello served many functions, from a droning, monotonous “rhythm tool,” as she puts it, to a shrieking, squealing sound-effects generator.

Meyer added a narrator or choragus to the original script. When Anthony Megie showed up for the audition, he was wearing tap shoes. Naturally he got the part and a chance to tap, a rhythm which Chou was delighted to use as percussion.

Chou’s next project is to finish up some original songs, but she hopes to write for theater again in the near future. As her first theatrical work, Holes Before Bedtime surely served as a tough baptism by fire, which makes her calm execution all the more admirable.

Roddy Schrock Photo by Hideki Kubota

It seems as though every music organization needs its edge. For every festival produced, a sub-festival is necessitated as a forum for outsider music that is not included as part of the main program but still poses the potential for wider acceptance at some point in the future. These are the smaller and more timidly funded series with titles that tend to imply uncertainty, instability, and possibly even mild psychoses. The Other Minds new music organization of San Francisco is no exception—it now has a dangerous stepchild of a music series called Brink. With a title like this, one is forced to question what kind of brink is being faced. A new frontier? Or are we at the brink of a nervous breakdown?

Analyses of the motivations behind the marketing of art is a slippery slope. So let’s stick to the music. In the case of the second event in the newly christened Brink series, it was an evening of intense contrast between self-knowing irony and beautifully earnest clarity, the former represented by Blevin Blectum, the latter by Christopher Willits. From the early heady days of the irreverent duo Blectum from Blechdom, Blevin and her partner in crime Kevin were making electronic music that dared the listener to take it seriously. Digital signal processing virtuosity was the tool to explore cartoon-electro-cut-up themes creating a fragrant and flagrant potpourri of sound that was full of catchy hooks while still being completely unpredictable. Their music was sneeringly ironic and quite often blatantly hilarious. It’s interesting to note that when listening to either the solo music of Blevin or Kevin, Blectum or Blechdom, they still seem to retain exactly the identity they brought to their duo. One gets the sense that if they were to start the duo all over again today, it would be exactly as it was, each contributing a perfect 50 percent to the final music.

Blectum’s performance was comprised of a pastiche of sounds, each giving no indication of what was to come. She excels at taunting the listener, teasing us with earworms which suddenly disappear never to be heard again. It’s a game that the listener is sure to lose, a postmodern romp through unhinged sounds that retain a vague familiarity, the sources never quite revealed nor completely hidden. In a way her music is maddening, but in the best sense. One is left with the feeling of having taken a great adventure through the terrain of a foreign world which has its own consistency and logic obvious to those in the know. But in a style that draws comparison to a Borges novel, the logic will never be completely revealed to we mere tourists. I hope she keeps it that way.

Willits, on the other hand, wants us to understand. For the record, I don’t think music is a universal language, but if there is anything out there with the potential to function in such a way, I would say Willits comes closest, working in a kind of musical-emotional Esperanto. Where Blectum excelled in information overload Willits drew on sparsity. Where Blectum maked us uncomfortable in just not quite getting the joke, Willits soothed us into a communal sense of melancholic comfort. His music is characterized by fascinating polyrhythms built from digital pops combined with tonal electric guitar material to create intricate and warm architectures of sound. At this concert he seemed to be pushing those boundaries a bit, taking chances with improvisation that paid off in creating a music that seemed terribly abstract while still being touchingly intimate.

Both Willits and Blectum share a conviction that electronic music is a personal form of expression and need not be distant nor machine-like. Neither appears interested in perpetuating the tired glorified myth of man/machine but instead showing how computer music has evolved into being less computer and more music. Programming them both in one evening was a stroke of curatorial genius, as it gave two very clear points on a spectrum of current potential in the medium, both personal and idiosyncratic but still diametrically opposed to one another. One giving us a wink and a nod, the other a warm embrace.

• Brink is held the last Wednesday of every month at the Hemlock Tavern, San Francisco. Tonight’s performance features Celeste Hutchins and Nami Sagara. 
  ***Roddy Schrock is a sound artist who digitally mines everyday sound for the profound and canvasses the glitzy, rough edges of pop for its articulate immediacy. He has lived and worked in Tokyo, The Hague, New York, and San Francisco, with performances in the Czech Republic, Holland, Japan, and North America. He is also an educator, currently teaching at De Anza College (California) and will be giving a summer workshop on Supercollider software at STEIM (Netherlands).

Zachary M. Lewis Photo by Nowell York

As spring stretched out towards summer here in Northeast Ohio, the Cleveland Orchestra presented the world premiere of a new score that mirrored, to an extent, that same natural event.

Susan Botti’s Translucence, first performed in late May by the orchestra under music director Franz Welser-Möst, did exactly what its title suggests it should. It hinted at bright, thin sonorities and melodies without, like the local thermometer, settling on anything firm.

Cleveland weather was probably the last thing on Botti’s mind as she wrote Translucence, but perhaps it wasn’t. Botti, currently the Daniel R. Lewis Young Composer Fellow with the Cleveland Orchestra, grew up here before taking off for schooling in Boston and New York. Furthermore, Translucence was the composer’s second commission from the orchestra, a follow-up to last season’s Impetuosity.

In any case, two things definitely were on Botti’s mind as she wrote the new piece: a poem by Amy Swenson called “The Exchange” and Botti’s own setting of that text for tenor James Gilchrist and harpist Alison Nicholls, premiered in 2003.

Here is the poem:

Now, my body flat, the ground
breathes. I’ll be the grass
Populous and mixed is mind
Earth, take thought. My mind, be moss
Field, go walking. I, a disk
will look down with seeming eye
I will be time, and study to be evening
You, world, be thought
I will stand, a tree, here
Never to know another spot
Wind, be motion. Birds, be passion
Water, invite me to your bed.

According to Botti’s program commentary, the 15 continuous minutes of Translucence, scored for normal orchestra with a few extra woodwinds, comprise two sections, an exploration of the poem’s images followed by a larger recasting of her original song. Neither such divisions nor any visual allusions were readily perceptible after only one hearing, but there were plenty other features of Translucence to latch onto.

Botti, currently an assistant professor at the University of Michigan, is a singer as well as a composer, and her vocal leanings were apparent. Brief, quivering fragments of melodies appeared in the violins, answered elsewhere by sighing phrases for viola, oboe, or horn, or interrupted by punctuating roulades from the upper brass.

And though there were two moments in which the entire orchestra united at pointed dramatic peaks, these occasions were relatively rare. Textures were typically no thicker than a top line and its accompaniment, with the percussion section, notably the marimba, often serving actively in the proceedings.

The long and exposed melodies for alto flute, though, may have been the clearest indication that Translucence has roots in vocal music. Perhaps Botti felt this rather unusual instrument is the closest match to her own voice type, thus establishing a more personal dimension to the entire piece. After all, she did dedicate the work to her mother, whose name, incidentally, is Claire, i.e. “light.”

Welser-Möst and the orchestra nailed the piece, little surprise since the two are often at their best together when interpreting contemporary scores, specifically music in which a shimmering and hermetic atmosphere is paramount.

However, the concert also included a dull account of Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra and Leif Ove Andsnes performing Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 1, which would have been marvelous had he not spent half the time competing with a steady electronic beeping somewhere in Severance Hall. Translucence, with its intentionally ethereal impact, turned out to be the most hard-hitting entry on the program.

Scott Winship Photo by Kathryn Gritt

Ok, so you’ve graduated from college. You’ve left that warm, fuzzy womb of institutional learning. They kicked you out and said, “Go get your music performed elsewhere.” Now what the hell are you supposed to do? Or perhaps you live in an area of the country not well known for its commitment to contemporary music and your local performers snub their noses at your music. Where do you turn? Well, by golly, turn to Accessible Contemporary Music.

Nestled right here in the heart of Chicago, the ACM has been in business for about five years as a performing ensemble dedicated to emerging composers. The ACM’s artistic mission is “to promote the performance and understanding of contemporary music, especially the music of living composers.” They have as their target audience “both those already acquainted with contemporary music and those who may not even realize that there are people still composing concert music today.”

People after my own heart, indeed.

I recently sat down with the co-founder of the ensemble, Seth Boustead, over a few quality pints, to discuss ACM and what they are up to.

My first question: What’s up with the name? Seth’s response, “Yeah, we knew we would alienate folks with the name.” ACM is not necessarily a stylistically driven ensemble mind you. The name reflects more the commitment to bring contemporary music to those that may not yet know of its existence. Currently operating a four-concert series, ACM brings contemporary music into some non-traditional performing venues with the aim of taking “a very direct approach to concert giving, frequently including pre-concert talks and discussion sessions between the audience and the composer. Every concert that we give includes a world premiere or at least one piece, if not several pieces, by composers in the early stages of their careers.” In addition, there’s a much more lighthearted approach to contemporary music performance. “We didn’t want to dress all in black or take it all too seriously,” Seth told me. The goal is to bring audiences into the new music fold.

Growing out of this commitment to composers in the early stages of their careers, ACM took on a wonderful project this year called Weekly Readings in which they recorded a new piece of music from a different undiscovered composer every week. Receiving hundreds of scores through their initial call, ACM weeded through them all and picked pieces based first on the date they arrived and second on whether or not the composer really needed their help. Taking a stand for composers who have had few if any performances of their music, ACM strives to provide a quality (and much coveted) recording for these composers to be used for their own distribution or simply to learn from the experience. With only two hours of rehearsal time (which is generous in most cases), composers can really learn how effective they were in communicating the piece not only to the audience, but also just as vitally to the performers. ACM is providing these recordings not only to the composer, but also to the rest of the world via their website. Each week, a recording is posted on the website and sent out to those who sign up on their email list. The weekly reading sessions are currently on summer break, but ACM plans to bring it back in the fall, so dust off those unperformed scores and send them in!

During their “off” season this summer, ACM isn’t just taking a break, but rather has taken on a couple of collaborative projects. First, ACM will be joining forces with the International Society of Bassists to present Spotlight Double Bass. Music by living composers that feature the double bass, either in ensemble or solo, will be recorded by professional Chicago area bassists and presented on the ACM website from July 1 through August 15. More info can be found here.

Second, ACM is planning to work with composer Jeffrey Hoover. Jeffrey has agreed to write an original composition and have its progress documented, via the web, over an 8-week period. Each week Jeffrey provides ACM with a PDF file of the score and parts. ACM will then perform the piece up to that point. This recording along with the score will be posted on the web. When I asked Seth what his motivations were for the project he responded, “To try something that has never been done before.” Also, to see the process that goes into the evolution of a composition—the editing, retooling, performer recommendations, etc. Jeffrey will also be participating in a discussion on the choices that he made when writing the piece, which will prove to be a wonderful learning experience I’m sure. In my mind, one of the coolest things about the whole project is that at the end of it all you can look back and really witness the creative process, so be sure to check it out and follow along.

Alyssa Timin Photo by Ross Hoffman

The Mendelssohn Club of Philadelphia’s program notes coolly observe that this is its 131st consecutive performance season. After more than a century, the one-hundred-plus member chorus still puts on quite a show. On the evening of Sunday, May 1st, the group presented an intensely beautiful program: opening with Francis Poulenc’s Litanies à la Vierge Noir, the main attraction was Carl Dreyer’s silent film classic, The Passion of Joan of Arc, accompanied by Richard Einhorn’s Voices of Light.

Poulenc’s short work pairs naturally with the feature length film; both pay eerie and passionate homage to female Catholic icons linked specifically to the national history of France. La Vierge Noir (the Black Virgin) is a twelfth-century wooden statue of Mary and Jesus housed at the cliffside shrine of Rocamadour in southern France. Poulenc made a pilgrimage there following the death of his friend and fellow composer, Pierre-Octave Ferroud, and wrote the Litanies only a week after his visit. The text, an extended prayer, addresses the Holy Trinity as well as Mary, and asks, “Queen before whom Saint Louis, on bended knee, asked for the happiness of France, pray for us….Queen, whose banners have won battles, pray for us.” Scored for organ (here played by Alan Morrison) and female voices, the piece pits the dissonant, demonic rumbling of the organ against a choir of angels. The struggle grows, a wide chasm of lament, then ends suddenly. The house lights darken.

Richard Einhorn compares his discovery of Carl Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc to stumbling upon the Taj Mahal. Understandably the 1928 film is extraordinary in both its direction and performance, and comes with a fascinating back-story. After the negative and most of the prints of the film were destroyed in a mysterious warehouse fire, Dreyer reconstructed the entire film from surviving outtake footage. This version was, amazingly, destroyed in a second fire. Corrupt prints of the film circulated for decades, until, in 1981, several film cans from the ’20s were found at the back of a closet in a mental institution in Oslo, Norway. Shipped unopened to the Norwegian Film Institute, the cans turned out to contain a nearly perfect copy of the original version of The Passion of Joan of Arc.

One is tempted not to believe such a thing, and yet there it is in the program. It is even harder to know what to make of the details of the life of Jeanne d’Arc. As an illiterate teenager, she heard voices that charged her with the mission of reuniting France, divided and embattled with England in the Hundred Years’ War. At seventeen, dressed as a man, she made her way to the court of the exiled dauphin, Charles, won an audience with him and convinced him to allow her to try to help lift the siege of Orleans. She and the French army succeeded and continued to succeed for about a year. She worked as a mercenary and befriended soldiers with names like “The Bastard of Orleans” and “La Hire” (The Rage). Ultimately she was captured in battle, sold to the English, and delivered into the hands of the Inquisition.

This is where the film begins. Staging her trial and execution, it compresses seven months of interrogation into a single day. The editing is sharp, almost jagged. The claustrophobic close-ups of androgynously beautiful Renée Falconetti are cut with quick shots of her judges’ complex expressions, her hair scattered on the floor of her cell, birds flying and, in an upside down aerial shot, people running. The script of the film is taken directly from the transcripts of the trial, which contributes poignancy to those moments of white text on black screen. “Respond!” her inquisitors demand, “Are you in a state of grace?” She looks around for help, and the camera looks with her, but nowhere is it to be found. The film’s raw stare continues through the scene of her execution, which shows her figure burning in the fire.

Voices of Light is the merciful counterpoint to The Passion of Joan of Arc‘s brutality, a lyrical work with surprising tenderness despite requiring 150 musicians. The anchor of the piece, Joan’s voice, is a chanted duet sung in this performance by Shari Alise Wilson and Veronica Chapman-Smith. Other solo voices included soprano Laura Heimes, a frequent soloist with Mendelssohn Club and a singer worth singling out, mezzo-soprano Lorie Gratis, tenor Matthew Loyal Smith, and bass-baritone Branch Fields. Conducted with the film by handsomely silver-haired Alan Harler, the piece is divided into fourteen short “chapters” but moves seamlessly.

The text is a nest of Biblical verses, excerpts from Joan’s letters, the writings of other mystics, and even “The Vices of Women,” a 13th century poem. Images of heroism, femaleness, and fire circulate, weaving faith (“Flee, flee the cave of the ancient destroyer and come, coming into the palace of the king”) with despair (“Destroy us not all together”). St. Hildegard of Bingen writes, “Our king is swift to receive the blood of innocents. But over the same blood, the clouds are grieving….Ah! Joan, Joan!” Joan herself, when asked by her jailor, “Et la grande victoire?” responds, “My martyrdom.”

I caught the kick-off concert of Roulette’s annual Mixology (June 16-26) fest last night. Nicolas Collins and Kato Hideki entertained an intimate, enthusiastic crowd skewed far towards the male (which is to say it was a typical new music audience) at the art gallery/performance space Location One in SOHO.

A sophisticated event as far as noise shows go, the long-form improv that opened their set was the most compelling part of the program. Collins framed it in the published program as “a rekindled, unapologetically nostalgic involvement with circuitry (especially from the Victorian era) and feedback.” Visually this roughly translated into a lot of crawling around on the floor among electronic detritus. There were instruments around too, but the set-up had more of the feel of a workshop than a concert stage. The audience was pin-drop quiet, most eyes were shut, and the listening palpably intense. Being myself in an uncharacteristically jovial mood, I couldn’t help but lose myself in more fantastical imaginings, gazing into the sound as if it were a PBS special on the cosmos and moved to translate the aural picture into, among other things:

A hail storm beating on an aluminum awning
Welding sparks (dad in his workshop)
Dentist performing root canal from hell
The world as heard by Alice after shrinking in Wonderland
Snatches of the upstairs neighbor’s answering machine
Very bad TV reception (no one paid the cable bill again)
Intergalactic laser battle (cousins watching Star Wars in the other room for the 65th time)
’79 Volkswagen trying to get enough RPM’s to hit 70 m.p.h. on the Interstate

The bottom line here is that I had a good time, but then I felt guilty. Amusement somehow seems intellectually dishonest in a lot of high art/music contexts, and even though I knew better, I still questioned my very literal, visual reactions, and the enjoyment found in an unexpected evening of spontaneously conjured recollections from my own past. I wonder what my very serious-looking neighbors where thinking.

One of my favorite music industry events of the year has long been the Jazz Journalists Association Awards. In an era when all we ever seem to be talking about is how bad things are in the record business or in arts journalism—both of which are necessary components of a healthy music ecology—this noisy, overcrowded annual June event is always an affirmation that, despite all the undeniable negativity, there’s also a lot to be proud of.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t be there this year. But luckily, the event’s chief organizer, JJA President Howard Mandel, sent me an extremely infectious email which filled in all the details. (He is, after all, a journalist.) It’s a very personal and obviously biased narrative—no one is really without bias anyway—but it probably isn’t all that much different from what I would have written about it had I been there.

—FJO

This week’s Jazz Awards, the 9th annual Jazz Journalists Association celebration of excellence in jazz, jazz journalism and jazz advocacy, altruism and activism, was another smashing success, if I say so myself.

B. B. King’s Blues Club was filled with musicians (in no particular order, and a list woefully incomplete, but to give you some idea): Marian McPartland, Sam Rivers, Howard Johnson, Robin Eubanks, Gary Smulyan, Hamiet Blueitt, Winard Harper, Kevin Mahogany, Kitty Margolis, Jamie Baum, Judi Silvano, Fred Hersh, Bob Stewart, Alex Foster, Craig Handy, Giacomo Gates, Kendra Shank, Jane Ira Bloom, Billy Bang, Jeremy Pelt (winner of Up and Coming Musician of the Year), George Wein, Bobby Sanabria, JJA members and colleagues (way too numerous to mention, but note the attendance of our Portuguese member Jose Duarte and past JJA pres. Art Lange of Chicago), record industry execs (from Concord, Blue Note, High Note, Sunnyside, Telarc, JustinTime, Palmetto—which won Label of the Year—and Revenant (winner for the Albert Ayler box set) but unfortunately not Verve, Columbia, Warner Bros., BMG (which had a winner in its Coleman Hawkins Centennial reissue), jazz educators (for one, Jazz Alliance International’s Suzan Jenkins representing IAJE), aficionado-listeners, presenters from Festival Productions, the Vision Festival, Iridium Jazz Club, Jazzmobile and Jazz at Lincoln Center, and our sponsors including the movers and shakers of BETJazz, HIP Health Plan of New York, Anheuser-Busch, ASCAP, WBGO and Madison Square Garden.

Robert Wisdom, our host, was a cool and calm presence, low-keyed while guiding several dozen performers, winners, and presenters through their stage paces. W. A. Brower, JJA member and pro stage manager, with help from Elise Axelrad, confidently brought in the show’s end five minutes early!

Nnenna Freelon sang a swinging short set including Billie Holiday’s “Now, Baby or Never,” and Jack DeJohnette played a dynamic and coloristic solo. Sy Johnson’s Octet, performing his specially commissioned 75th Birthday Suite, was by turns sweet, sophisticated, and powerful, like the man himself. ASCAP Young Jazz Composer Competition winner Maurice Brown, an exuberant trumpeter, brought the Awards to order with a bugle call in traditional New Orleans style and Chicago renditions (his partner, Texas tenor saxist Quamon Fowler, co-led their quintet as the Music Room filled, while JJA photographer Gene Martin gathered all the nominees, journalists, and musicians in Lucille’s for our annual group photo). ASCAP tenor saxist Bob Reynolds’s Quartet had the unenviable job of ending the entire show, but attendees lingered to listen to the band and schmooze, and eventually had to be hearded out so that the 8 p.m. show at B.B.’s could set up.

The proceedings moved too fast for me to fix on many of the special moments, but here are a few that I caught: Clark Terry’s genuine gratitude for his unexpected win as Trumpeter of the Year, which he credited to Jeff Lindberg’s direction of the Chicago Jazz Orchestra which backed him on recording his version of Gil Evans’s classic arrangements of Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess. Cecil Taylor’s elegant words, upon accepting the first HIP-JJA Lifetime Achievement Award for Hank Jones, who had been refused help getting his suitcase into his limo trunk by a car service driver and so did not come down from Hartwick, New York to the Awards; Cecil spoke of his admiration for Hank, and also of his love of Elvin Jones, with whom he had created astounding duets, and the early encouragement he had enjoyed from Thad Jones, as well. The pride of repeat winners such as Roy Haynes, Andy Bey, and Frank Wess, and the pleasure of first-time winner Luciana Souza in being welcomed to the Jazz Awards. Guest presenter Rupert Holmes’s spot-on introduction to the event, and Maria Schneider’s beatific smile upon sweeping the Awards with wins for arranging, composing, big band, and record of the year.

Maria Schneider lands four JJA Awards Photo by R. Andrew Lepley, courtesy Jazz Journalists Association

There were many equally exciting incidents, happening simultaneously all over the room – including the alcove where the Silent Photo Auction, our best yet, was run by Enid Farber, R. Andrew Lepley, and Lois Mirviss. Wendy Oxenhorn of the Jazz Foundation of America spoke movingly about the JFA’s Musicians Emergency Fund in her introduction of Lauren Roberts, JFA administrative director who is departing for law school, and Douglas Duchak (of Englewood Hospital), both of whom received “A Team” Awards (for Advocates, Altruists, Aiders and Abettors) [Ed. Note: e.g. doctors who treat ailing jazz musicians who have no health insurance, etc.] The JJA needs a spokesman like Wendy to trumpet our mission to promote jazz journalism through education initiatives, including but not limited to the Clarence Atkins Fellowships. (Two of our fellows, Michele Drayton of Tampa, Florida, and Laylah Amatullah Barrayn of Brooklyn, New York, were in attendance; so was VP Willard Jenkins, who filled in admirably presenting Awards to winners who couldn’t attend. Michael Dorf, who started the Jazz Awards with the JJA in ’97, did this too, an almost thankless task…but thanks!). Paxton Baker, the JJA’s main man at BETJazz, graciously gave the Award for Presenter of the Year twice—once when scheduled, and again when the winner, Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Todd Barkan arrived in the house. This will make for much better television, when the Awards show highlights are broadcast by BETJazz in early autumn ’05 (and thanks to Waymer Johnson, director, Rocky Mabrey, and the entire crew videtotaping this event, as well as B.B. King’s efficient staff. Comic actor Joe Piscopo, by the way, did a rousing presentation early in the event, and will be host of the BETJazz show—can’t wait to see that). Thanks also to JALC’s Derek Gordon, who kindly presented Singer of the Year Awards to Mr. Bey and Luciana Souza.

Other A Team Awards recipients: Olga Garay accepting for the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation didn’t stop beaming, James Newcomb of The Boeing Company explained succinctly the visionary corporate philanthropy of the Chicago Jazz Partnership, podiatrist and diabetes specialist Dr. Marc Brenner (www.Icare4YourFeet.com) was visibly honored, as were: A.B. Spellman, poet-author-recently retired NEA Deputy Chairman; the Heath Brothers, Jimmy and Tootie and Percy (posthumously, sad to say); and Martin Mueller, the JJA’s good friend at the New School Jazz Program.

Oh, yeah—the Awards for Jazz Journalism: George Avakian, venerable jazz producer and the man who invented the liner note, the record album, and the reissue, announced Website of the Year (AllAboutJazz.com) and Periodical of the Year (Jazz Times), as well as Label of the Year (Palmetto). Ira Gitler, co-author/editor of The Encyclopedia of Jazz, bestowed the award for Book of the Year upon his good friend Dan Morgenstern. Dan turned around and presented the award for best Newspaper, Magazine and Online Feature writing to The New York Times‘s Ben Ratliff. Gary Giddins nicely introduced all the finalists for Lifetime Achievement in Jazz Journalism, saying that each of the four—Bob Blumenthal, Francis Davis, Mike Zwerin, and me—were bound to get the award at some point, it was just a question of the order in which we received it. Bob Blumenthal was obviously thrilled to be this year’s recipient.

I’m sure there was more, and as the moments crystallize, I’ll try to post them as comments addending to this post, at Jazzhouse.org. ‘Til then, thanks to all the Jazz Awards committee members, to those of you who came to the event and made it so much fun, and to all the non-JJA members who contributed in every which way. We’ll do this again—looking forward to the tenth anniversary—so save a date in early/mid June 2006 for the next Jazz Awards.

—Howard Mandel

Ed. Note: The website Jazzhouse.org also has a complete listing of all of the 2005 Jazz Journalists Association Award Winners.

Julia Werntz Photo by Michele Macrakis

Thanks to the presence of Boston Symphony Orchestra Music Director James Levine and Artistic Administrator Anthony Fogg, it’s finally possible to see a meeting of two remote Boston worlds: the “new music” world and the formerly mostly-old-music BSO world. Among other significant changes since Seiji Ozawa passed the baton, the BSO has begun programming far more works from the 20th and 21st centuries. This activity has included several commissions, as well as many works by Boston composers. Various guest conductors seem to reflect the new spirit in their programming. As a result, not only have Boston-area composers, performers, and other new music connoisseurs begun attending and talking about BSO concerts in noticeably larger numbers, but the BSO’s traditionally conservative audience base is at last being exposed to steady, powerful doses of contemporary music from composers such as Elliott Carter, Milton Babbitt, Thea Musgrave, Kaija Saariaho, György Kurtág, Lukas Foss, and Charles Wuorinen, as well as Boston composers John Harbison, Yehudi Wyner, Osvaldo Golijov, Michael Gandolfi, and Gunther Schuller.

The new programming is causing a stir, which is evident in the heated debates that audience members and columnists have been engaging in on the pages of newspapers like the Boston Globe and Boston Phoenix. For some reason, it’s still old Arnold Schoenberg from the early 20th century who seems to cause the most trouble—probably because many view him as the source of “the problem.” It’s hard to believe that in 2005 the dispute still rages over Schoenberg in particular, and those perceived to be his artistic descendents, such as Babbitt and Carter. Even Edgard Varèse’s Amériques still scandalizes some now as much as it did when it premiered in New York in 1926. People, in Boston at least, can still feel “insulted” and “admonished” by such “hyper-modernistic” “disconcerting noise.” (All quotations from Globe columns and letters.) For some of us, this is a little like reading complaints in the year 2005 about the provocative way Little Richard moves when he performs, or how the Beatles wear their hair too long.

For the sake of the new music virgins in the BSO audience, we can only hope for a positive outcome from all this—for example a new awareness of the diversity of musical styles from the 20th and 21st centuries. With at least seven works by Schoenberg programmed next season (only three of them tonal), Levine does appear to have a mission to give Schoenberg’s music the exposure it has been denied for so long, and to give audiences a chance to finally listen to the music itself rather than to all the talk about the music. Perhaps ears and minds will open to the entire century-old province of music without tonal centers. But if some still fail to find “eternal joy” or “an affirmation of the conscious soul” (what another Globe reader found lacking) in any music from that vast and multi-faceted strain, perhaps along the way they will have discovered it in the music of Tan Dun, Sir Michael Tippett, Thea Musgrave, Osvaldo Golijov, or Michael Gandolfi. Or at the very least become conversant and more sophisticated about the music of our time.

Werntz curently teaches music theory as an adjunct faculty member at universities in the Boston area, and also is Director of the Boston Microtonal Society, together with her former teacher and BMS President, composer and jazz saxophonist Joseph Maneri.

Lindsey Eck

Festival season is in full flower and the University of Houston’s Moore School of Music fills the month of June with its Texas Music Festival. This year, local composers were commissioned to write overtures for full orchestra to be performed as part of four separate festival events. I spoke with a few of them about their pieces.

Rob Smith teaches at Moore and is part of the team that’s putting the festival together, as well as contributing his composition Push. The piece shares a bill titled “Concertos for Orchestra” with works by Bartók and Pieter Lieuwen on Friday, June 10. The entire program repeats the following evening. Push is not a brand new work; an MP3 of a fine performance by the Syracuse University Orchestra is available on his NewMusicJukebox page. Smith based the piece around the verb that became its title. “I was using the word as kind of a catalyst—looking for things that embodied that word.” Though there’s “no specific thing that would sound like pushing,” the concept led him to explore several different melodic motives. Smith says, “I think from the top down—from the big picture down,” yet he also describes starting with thematic material which he then builds into a larger piece. In addition to his official duties at Moore, Smith is also a member, with four other composers, of a new music collective called Musiqa that performs original works by its member-composers and others. Smith and his colleagues have taken it upon themselves to bring contemporary serious music into the schools, reaching 4000 Houston public school students last year and helping to ensure the future of art music in the Bayou City.

Jefferson Todd Frazier‘s We hold these truths… is written for orchestra, violin solo, and tenor, and is inspired by the words of Thomas Jefferson. It is the first movement of a series based on the life of Jefferson and was commissioned by the Texas Music Festival and American Festival for the Arts, of which he is founder and executive director. Frazier sees his tradition as “the American school that looked inside America for inspiration so that their music was tangible and made a personal impact [on] audiences.” In this overture (technically a prelude), the violin “represents the soul of Jefferson. He was a violinist and had the violin with him when writing the Declaration. Additionally, his music library at Monticello was extensive, so he really knew music. The tenor is used as a cantor to introduce the text/musical material. The orchestra then responds to the words.” We hold these truths… premieres Friday, June 24, and is performed again the following evening.

San Antonio-based David Heuser offers A Screaming Comes Across the Sky, its title drawn from the first sentence of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. He says, “It’s perfect for this piece, which is kind of a six-minute scream…loud and aggressive.” He also relates the structure of the piece to the novel’s recurring image of the parabola. “The sort of a low-high-low aspect of the piece, though I don’t want to be too dogmatic about it.” The piece is organized around two principal motives, “a fast figure in all eighth notes that appears most usually in the low instruments,” and “a tune with longer values, I guess more considered a melody, which then occurs in higher instruments.” The piece is “tonal in the large sense, but not ‘officially’ tonal.” The piece, for full orchestra, also employs piano and, as a reformed percussionist, Heuser drew upon the festival orchestra’s wealth of percussionists to write for a “full battery.” A Screaming Comes Across the Sky will premiere as part of the grand finale on Saturday, July 2.

Rounding out the series of four commissioned overtures is Ketchak by Baylor University’s Scott McAllister, which will debut Saturday, June 18.

If a common thread can be seen in the festival’s commissions, it’s an eclecticism that rejects dogmatic systems of composition in favor of influences from popular music as well as the classical and romantic traditions. By asking for “overtures,” the Texas Music Festival left the parameters open for experimentation and free interpretation of a form that imposes few limits. Texans can look forward to works that express the Lone Star State’s unique position within the American musical tradition as the festival continues Houston’s preeminence as a center of new music in the Southwest.