Category: Headlines

Cenk Ergun makes some adjustments on his new sound installation Panta Rei

Students, the time has come again to shell out exorbitant amounts of cash for esoteric textbooks you’ll never open again by year’s end. As for the rest of you graduates and dropouts, September means back to the concert hall. I know, I know. The weather is way too nice as summer gives way to fall—it verges on cruelty to coop us up indoors. Well, at least one composer has our back. Members of The Knights and soprano Susan Narucki take to the streets to perform the world premiere of Lisa Bielawa’s Chance Encounter (September 28 info). Surprising unsuspecting passersby, the 30-minute work for 12 migrating instrumentalists and vocalist features a series of arias pieced together from texts overheard in public spaces by the composer, her co-conspirator Narucki, and others. Sounds interesting—eavesdropping for artist’s sake!

Also in the great outdoors department we find Cenk Ergun’s sound installation Panta Rei at the Indianapolis Art Center (September 14 info). The San Francisco-based composer is utilizing ICA’s new, get this, Nina Mason Pulliam Sensory Path—hey, at least it’s not the Snapple Sensory Path or the likes—to trigger an ever-changing wash of sounds captured in the surrounding landscape which have been digitally altered. One of these days I’ll be rich enough to have a sensory path named after me. Ah, one can only dream.

MaryClare Brzytwa performs at the 2007 SFEMF

Although housed indoors, another Bay Area resident, Elise Baldwin, is creating a sound installation in the Project Artaud Gallery, but that is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the eighth annual San Francisco Electronic Music Festival (September 5 – 9 info). Covering a broad range of approaches, the festival plays host to David Behrman and Annea Lockwood, both of whom duet with percussionist William Winant, as well as local scenesters like Fred Frith, MaryClare Brzytwa, Zoë Keating, Lesser, Nommo Ogo, and Les Stuck. Other performers from Southern California, Mexico, and Canada will converge, plug in, and make some righteous hums, bleeps, and beats.

Let me squeeze in one more sound installation here: Composer Matthew Levy’s Lament can be heard alongside paintings by Elyce Abrams at Philadelphia’s Bridgette Mayer Gallery (September 4 – 29 info). The piece is an electronically manipulated reworking of a saxophone quartet created in response to Abrams’s visual sensibilities.

Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the concert hall—deh dum, deh dum—eleven venues, eleven Chicago neighborhoods, eleven ICE concerts in one week! (September 22 – 30 info) No details yet, just a little warning for those in the windy city: brace yourselves for impact.

Dominick Farinacci plays the Detroit International Jazz Festival

In Minnesota, pianist Nicola Melville tackles another ambitious project, performing 12 newly commissioned works by Doug Opel, Stephen Paulus, Augusta Read Thomas, Kevin Beavers, Gabriela Frank, Phil Fried, Stacy Garrop, Marc Mellits, Mark Olivieri, Carter Pann, Phillip Rhodes, and Judith Lang Zaimont (September 28 info). Whew. Overwhelming in a completely different way is John Luther Adams’s six-hour sonic epic Veils. A new live-performance version featuring Fred Frith premieres at the Output Festival in Amsterdam (September 28 info). For the full experience show up by 6pm, when the piece starts as a sound installation. Be sure to take a bathroom break before 8:30, that’s when, without interruption, Frith takes the stage. No need to hit one of those, ahem, “coffee shops” beforehand, this gig will be plenty trippy on its own. For yet another way to overwhelm the senses, checkout the Detroit International Jazz Festival featuring big hitters like Regina Carter, Herbie Hancock, Yusef Lateef, the Dave Brubeck Quartet, Medeski Scofield Martin & Wood, and Don Byron’s Junior Walker Project, as well as rising stars like Sachal Vasandani, Chiara Civello, and Dominick Farinacci (August 31 – September 3 info).

Here’s a festival that you’ll really regret isn’t held outdoors, featuring performances of music by Philip Glass and Terry Riley; it’s a little something called the Grand Canyon Music Festival (September 1 – 16 info). Ethel is the ensemble in residence, performing staples from their feisty repertoire and works composed by students of the festival’s Native American Composers Apprentice Project.

Real Quiet

About 500 miles southwest, another festival is slinging concerts by So Percussion and the Calder Quartet. One of the highlights of the Carlsbad Music Festival is a concert by it group Real Quiet performing a brand spanking new piece by festival founder Matt McBane, as well as works by Annie Gosfield, Phil Kline and Marc Mellits (September 24 – 30 info).

I got a festival for whatever suits your fancy… Trumpets: FONT Music (September 16 – 30 info). Guitars: Wall to Wall (September 13 – 15 info). Experimental free improv in John Waters-land: High Zero (September 24 – 30 info). Pretty, pretty music with the potential to sound ugly: Between Thought and Sound—Graphic Notation in Contemporary Music (September 7 – October 20 info). A birthday party: John Cage at 95 (September 5 info). Can’t make up your mind: TBA (September 6 – 16 info) or Wordless Music Series (September 14, 20, 24, 29 info).

Clearly the new music scene has awakened from its summer hibernation, and after the fall equinox, things are just going to start avalanching to that too-many-concerts saturation point. Until then: happy listening.

Image by S.C. Birmaher

Making a go of new music in California, outside the mainstream music centers of San Francisco and Los Angeles, is a risky proposition. Nonetheless, the Sacramento region boasts a unique and vibrant small new music scene where tradition is less important than the spirit of unfettered exploration. In fact, you could say that exploration is its only tradition.

That spirit owes much to the late 1960s when composers John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen taught at the University of California at Davis, a scant 11 miles from downtown Sacramento. Until then, UC Davis was known as primarily an agricultural research university surrounded by sun-dappled rice fields and massive sunflower farms. The roots of a new music scene took hold with sold out performances at Davis of Stockhausen’s Kontakte and Cage’s Atlas Eclipticalis. The region’s new music scene has never been the same since. Today the ghosts of Cage and Stockhausen are but a bare whisper, but the spirit of musical experimentation remains strong.

Mondavi Center

At Davis, that spirit has been taken up by the Empyrean Ensemble. Founded in 1988 by composer/conductor Ross Bauer and now co-directed by composers Laurie San Martin & Kurt Rohde, the ensemble plays a broad range of new music. In addition to its “Fault Line” concert series showcasing a stylistically diverse array of new works by composers from all over California—last season included music by Aaron Einbond, Dan Becker, and Erica Muhl—and an annual program devoted to scores from graduate composers at the university, other programs also mix contemporary music landmarks from the U.S. and beyond. Previous seasons have featured performances of John Adams’s China Gates, Brian Ferneyhough’s Bone Alphabet, Arvo Pärt’s Fratres, Aaron Copland’s Piano Quartet, and even Arnold Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht. Empyrean’s concerts are now performed in the five-year-old confines of the Mondavi Center for the Arts—a facility that is rapidly gaining a reputation for being one of the best acoustically designed halls on the West Coast.

The seven musicians who make up the core of the group all share a strong presence in ensembles, conservatories, and universities spread throughout the Bay Area. This is a defining trait for many musicians and composers in the Sacramento region. With the hotbed musical centers of San Francisco, Oakland, and Berkeley only a 90-minute freeway drive away, it stands to reason that Sacramento’s new music scene would be heavily pollinated by the cities to its west.

One of the oldest new music festivals on the west coast is the Sacramento State University’s Festival of New American Music. This annual November festival, now in its 30th season, has no over-arching theme or dogmas save for an emphasis on contemporary music and presenting it for free. Each year, the festival is anchored by a keynote speaker. Last year that mantle fell to composer Frederick Rzewski, who performed his expansive two-piano and percussion work Bring Them Home, with Elaine Lust. Rzewski also offered a curious and highly didactic master class titled “Non-sequiturs in classical music.”

This year’s festival (November 1-13) will feature composer Pauline Oliveros as its keynote speaker and there will be several performances of her works. The festival will also introduce the Kansas City-based ensemble New Ear to the region, as well as invite the San Francisco-based ensemble Earplay for a concert of Wayne Peterson’s music in honor of his 80th birthday. But the festival is not solely focused on established contemporary music icons. Works by emerging composers also make their way to the Capistrano Hall stage. Unfortunately the festival is still relatively unknown, even in the Bay Area. Like most new music festivals marketing is virtually non-existent.

“We always put whatever money we raise towards bringing in visiting artists,” admits Festival Director Stephen Blumberg.

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Another defining characteristic of the new music scene in Sacramento and the surrounding region is the lack of any overall stylistic identity to any of the new music or its composers. And since Sacramento is rapidly becoming the urban musical center of the Great Central Valley, this means it is an epicenter to a new music scene spanning almost 400 miles of territory. From Bakersfield to Davis, many composers toil in relative obscurity unaware that a great many colleagues are also involved in the pursuits of composing, teaching, and raising funds to present new music.

Kenneth Froehlich

“There are several outstanding composers here in the valley, but with limited performance opportunities and the geographic restrictions, it becomes much harder for a composer to get known and performed,” according to Kenneth Froelich, composition professor California State University, Fresno.

But that is changing thanks to a recent Meet The Composer-supported initiative called “Sonic Bloom” whose goal has been to bring more than 40 composers together on the campus of California State University Stanislaus to forge a geographic bond.

“It’s a process for composers to find ways to work together in a unified way to advance the cause of new music in their region,” says Ed Harsh, incoming President of Meet The Composer, who is particularly gratified that the program “helps these composers help themselves.” That help was evident in the many new works from Central Valley composers that were performed during the “Sonic Bloom” conference held last February.

For composer Deborah Kavasch, chair of the music department at Stanislaus, the initiative seems to be having its intended effect: “I felt that this gathering fostered a real sense of a community of composers of all ages and stages of careers.” Ultimately, however, the hundreds of miles that separate these 40 composers and the need to find the means for securing ongoing funding will prove the biggest challenges to this fledgling group of composers.

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Michael Morgan

Thankfully, the value of new music has not been lost on one of the biggest presenters of classical music in the Central Valley, the Sacramento Philharmonic. Under music director Michael Morgan, the orchestra has fostered the creation of three new works from California composers. The first, Night Thoughts, by one-time Californian André Previn, was commissioned in honor of Sacramento-based painter Wayne Thiebaud. The other two—Gang Situ’s Concerto for Guitar and Orchestra and Jon Jang’s Chinese American Symphony—were part of the orchestra’s “Gold Mountain” project, a commissioning initiative designed to address the Californian Chinese-American immigrant experience.

No assessment of the music scene in Sacramento would be complete without acknowledging the influx of new blood to the scene from composers who have emigrated to the area. One of those is composer and guitarist Derek Keller who recently released his first CD, Impositions and Consequences, on John Zorn’s Tzadik label. Keller’s kinetic works are a bold amalgam of jazz, classical and Zappa-esque rock music whose development was deeply influenced by Roger Reynolds at the University of California at San Diego, where Keller got his doctorate.

The recent arrival of the choir Vox Musica to the Sacramento music scene is also indicative of the talent moving into the area that highly values new music. This eight-woman choir, under the direction of Daniel Paulson, devoted almost half of the programming of its first season to showcasing the work of living composers, both local and international. And next season promises a similar mix.

Nevada City

Sixty miles east, as the crow flies, is the Nevada County Composer’s Cooperative, one of the oldest composer cooperatives in the region. The cooperative, which boasts Terry Riley among its members, debuts new works each June in a “Wet Ink” concert presented during the Music In the Mountains festival, held in the Sierra Nevada foothill town of Nevada City. It is a bourgeoning area that has benefited greatly from the urban flight out of the hyper-expensive housing market of San Francisco.

According to composer Mark Vance, who serves as the NCCC’s executive director, “The Nevada City-Grass Valley area is almost like a 21st-century Vienna or Florence. There seems to be a creative magnet pulling artists here from every discipline who are all attracted to the dark, rich, creative, soil of Nevada County. They are refugees relocating here, seeking solace from the larger metropolitan cacophony.”

As this fast growing region continues to develop, its composers—both natives and transplants—will continue to find ways to disseminate a musical landscape that ranges from solace to cacophony.

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Edward Ortiz is the classical music and opera critic for the Sacramento Bee. Prior to joining the Bee he worked as staff reporter for the Boston Globe and the Providence Journal, and is a contributor to the website San Francisco Classical Voice.

Bee Mask

As the summer heats up, the ratio of softball games to new music concerts is sure to skyrocket. Yes, the official concert season doesn’t kickoff for another month, but there’s no reason to throw in the towel because there are plenty of ear-tickling events going on, even in this most musically arid month we call August. Etymologically speaking, this month should be pretty damn kick-ass, even awe inspiring, but with new music in hibernation we’re going to have to venture out from our usual musical haunts in order to hear something interesting.

A good place to hunt for music is your local museum. Many institutions play host to everything from jazz and chamber groups to DJs and rock bands. The folks at the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland plan to make a really big racket this month by gathering noise bands from across Ohio for an eight-hour extravaganza dubbed We Who Are About To (August 25 info). Expect a lot of loud dissonance by the likes of Jerk, Bee Mask, Emeralds, Jukebox Value, Iron Oxide, KingDom, Black Wolf, Chum, and more. Sounds yummy.

PS1’s Warm Up

Even the Cadillac of art museums, MoMA, adorns its hallowed courtyard with music in the summer. The Soundgarden series features honest-to-goodness new music with chamber pieces by Roberto Sierra, Pablo Ortiz, and Narong Prangcharoen (August 5 info). Over at MoMA’s hipper satellite PS1 in Long Island City, the notorious cross between beach party and nightclub known as Warm Up still manages to pack in scenesters of every stripe. Getting past the velvet rope takes a bit of time, so arrive early—and for good reason: the opening acts are all freaky new music people! Kudos to the folks at PS1 for snatching up Zach Layton for this year’s curatorial team, which means we all get to hear the likes of Dewanatron (August 18 info). Ah, bizarre electronic music under a colorful outdoor art installation with sprinklers. Does it get any better?

I always thought there was something a little romantic about the Hollywood Bowl. The place certainly has an air of nostalgia—the first concert I saw there was the Thompson Twins. (I was, like, 14 or something. Whatever, okay.) For a different brand of reminiscence, the L.A. Philharmonic is performing a program of Bernstein, Copland, and Gershwin (August 2 info). Prepare yourself for some grandstanding with the ever-flashy MTT on the podium. And in the other corner, in the how-weird-is-that category: Musica Elettronica Viva hits Tanglewood (August 2 info). Seriously, I did a full-on Scooby Doo “rhuh?” when I read this. So, let me get this straight, if a group known for yielding power drills can take the stage at Tanglewood, then maybe the powers-that-be really are starting to get over the whole style wars thing—finally. In any case, Ozawa hall will never be the same.

Jennifer Higdon

Another summertime music festival also brings some bona fide new music to the table. The Skaneateles Festival features a whopping five compositions by Kevin Puts, who will be on hand to conduct and perform his work. As the festival runs its course, expect to hear pieces by Samuel Barber, George Gershwin, and Jennifer Higdon along the way (August 8 – September 1 info). Kevin Puts and Jennifer Higdon also make appearances for the world premieres of their Symphony No. 4 and Soprano Sax Concerto, respectively, during the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music (July 30 – August 12 info). They will be joined by eight other composers-in-residence, turning the sleepy surfer town of Santa Cruz a temporary new music Mecca. Geographically closer to the real-life Mecca is Ostrava New Music Days. You don’t need to speak Czech to soak in all 15 events in 7 days (August 26 – September 1 info), but I’ll give you one word that will enhance the experience: pivo.

Over in Santa Fe, new music almost feels like an endangered species this month, but there are some pickings out there to be had. The city’s world famous chamber music festival has invited pianist Alan Feinberg for their Modern Masters series. While Feinberg’s program is heavily European, Nancarrow’s Three Two-Part Studies for Piano gets a listen (August 3 info). I also managed to tracked down a performance of Crumb’s Voice of the Whale sandwiched between some Beethoven and Mendelssohn (August 20 info). On the other hand, modern composition is exploding in the Bay Area. Admittedly, it’s a very tiny explosion, but one that should prove quite interesting. The sfSoundSeries presents a slew of short pieces by Liz Allbee, Mark Applebaum, David Bithell, Christopher Burns, George Cremaschi, Dina Emerson, James Fei, Matthew Goodheart, Matt Ingalls, John Ingle, Marisol Jimenez, Christopher Jones, Jon Leidecker, Hyo-shin Na, Pauline Oliveros, Dan Plonsey, Jon Raskin, Monica Scott, Moe! Staiano, Erik Ulman, Zachary Watkins, to name a few, along with a performance of Webern’s Concerto op.24 (August 26 info). Of course the evening is called Small Packages.

The Car Music Project

If you’re searching for something big, look no further than U.K. premiere of John Adams’s A Flowering Tree (August 10 – 12 info). Rumor has it that a fully-staged performance of the latest Adams opera won’t hit American shores until 2009 at Lincoln Center. And speaking of New York City’s megaplex of the performing arts, even though it’s way too hot outside, it’s time for the Lincoln Center Out of Doors festival. Among the many happenings are a spatial percussion piece by Henry Brant (August 22 info), an interactive work by Pauline Oliveros followed by her EHRES (Extreme High Risk Entertainment System) ensemble (August 21 info), and a memorial tribute to Leroy Jenkins by his former bandmates in the Skymusic Ensemble (August 15 info).

Perhaps the most unusual outdoor event: The Car Music Project. This ensemble led by composer Bill Milbrodt does a drive by in Bethlehem, PA (August 4 info) before parking at Lincoln Center (August 5 info). As you’ve already guessed by now, all the instruments on which they perform are built from car parts. I’m curious to hear how they’ll blend with the din of taxicabs whizzing by on Columbus.