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Justin Schell

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mark Gresham Photo by Angela Lee

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alyssa Timin Photo by Ross Hoffman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Julia Werntz Photo by Michele Macrakis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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