Category: Spotlight

Paula Matthusen: Attention to Light

Posted on July 17, 2013 by - Conversations, Spotlight


The work of composer Paula Matthusen draws attention to the way sound and space interact with one another. Her use of light within performance settings plays an important role in focusing the audience’s listening experience, and in creating a sense of space. Whether a composition is realized as an electronic installation or written out in a score for performance by other musicians, the physicality of whatever sounds may be involved—and specifically how they behave within a given context—are always important considerations.

Matthusen’s installation works often involve hand-built electronics in addition to extensive computer programming; she says that she enjoys the sort of “inefficiency” and “Pandora’s box” nature of the results. She likens soldering to knitting, explaining, “I like the repetition of it. I like the heat. I like the smell. It’s fun to see something physical come to life like that.” Her instrumental works, which are specially tailored to the personalities and abilities of the performers for whom they are written, also have a handmade aspect to them.

For portable, eight performers walk around a darkened space wielding flashlights as well as vintage suitcases fitted with radio receivers and transmitters that produce sound based on the location of the performers relative to one another. In nacht nacht nacht nacht nacht nacht nacht, three performers crank away at music boxes while four others strike matches, offering glimpses of the unfurling paper rolls and providing counterpoint to the fragile music box tones.

Given Matthusen’s aesthetic inclinations, she’s the ideal person to teach composition through an experiential approach involving listening, creation, and performance. The Experimental Music class at Wesleyan University (where she is an assistant professor of music) is the very same course that Alvin Lucier taught for over 40 years. (No pressure!) Matthusen actually considers Lucier to be one of her musical heroes. Her 2012 composition for the Bang on a Can All-Stars, the ontology of an echo, features field recordings from inside the Old Croton Aqueduct that were created by re-capturing recordings of the performers in a manner consistent with Lucier’s I am sitting in a room.

Flying in the face of what she calls the “cultural fantasy” of synchronization, the sense of pulse in Matthusen’s music is often irregular and broken. Events line up (or don’t) based on organic structures that are set rolling and allowed to run their course. By stepping aside and allowing the music to unfold naturally, she finds satisfaction in the resulting creative discoveries. “It’s a matter of being open to something that is completely surprising,” she explains, “but then also being aware enough to be able to appreciate when it actually happens.” By reveling in the small details and rough edges of her musical landscapes, she creates musical environments that heighten perceptions of the ephemeral nature of sound, and ensures that surprises can be found at practically every turn.

D. J. Sparr: Playing Well With Others

Posted on June 19, 2013 by - Conversations, Spotlight


Composer and electric guitarist D. J. Sparr draws energy and inspiration from interacting with other musicians. “That’s why I compose,” he says, “to get to the point where I can be actively working with other musicians.” A full schedule of composition commissions, performances of his own music and that of other composers, and educational residencies ensures that he gets his fill of that vitality.

Sparr grew up playing electric guitar (à la Eddie Van Halen), but put down his axe for a time during studies at the Eastman School of Music. Then, inspired by the composer-performer faculty members at the University of Michigan, he started performing again within the realm of classical music. He has since performed the music of Michael Daugherty, Paul Lansky, and others, as well as his own compositions, such as his electric guitar concerto Violet Bond, written for the California Symphony where he currently serves as Young Composer-in-Residence.

Beyond the electric guitar, Sparr has built a varied catalog of works for chamber ensemble, orchestra, and vocal music. His short-form opera Approaching Ali, commissioned and recently premiered by the Washington National Opera, is based on the book The Tao of Mohammed Ali by author Davis Miller, with a libretto by Mark Campbell. It tells the story of a writer at the brink of middle age who visits his boyhood hero in person in an effort to rekindle the spirit and enthusiasm of his youth. This poignant and charming work could serve well as an introduction to opera for people of any age or background.

Educational outreach is a substantial part of the composer’s work with the California Symphony, as it was during his three-year residency with the Richmond Symphony’s Education and Community Engagement Department and while he served as a faculty member at The Walden School. He takes cues from the performance and creativity workshops of Michael Colgrass for his own educational work, employing exercises such as drawing graphic scores and conducting on the spot. “It’s fun to work with kids, and it’s nice to get to know them,” explains Sparr, “and then some of them show up at [my] concerts, so it’s pretty cool.”

Early on in his composing career, Sparr found that what he needed to realize his own artistic goals was not located in Los Angeles, New York, or other large cities, so he left the urban landscape, moving first to the mid-Atlantic coast, and then to Richmond, Virginia to build a life that focused on the more basic needs of, as he puts it, “shelter, food, and writing.” He continues:

The combination of finding the people who support you, writing as much music as you can, and being as nice to everyone you meet as you possibly can, including being happy for their successes—there’s a saying that “A rising tide lifts all boats”—is really the key to making it work. And the composing world looks pretty great right now.

With Approaching Ali under his belt, a new large orchestra composition in the works to wind up his California Symphony residency, and a debut CD of his chamber music works coming out on Centaur Records later this year, it looks as if Sparr is reaching musical high tide. Hopefully his electric guitar case is waterproofed.

Troy Herion: Sonic Imaging

Posted on May 15, 2013 by - Conversations, Spotlight


The concluding work on coLABoratory, the American Composers Orchestra’s April 5 Zankel Hall concert, was an extremely effective symbiosis of music and film called New York: A City Symphony by Troy Herion. Throughout its roughly fifteen-minute duration, audience members occasionally gasped or laughed—not a frequent occurrence at a performance of contemporary classical music. I know I was at the edge of my seat for most of it. And at the end, the audience gave the most resounding applause that I had ever witnessed following an ACO performance. So was that reaction due to the music, or was it because they were watching a movie? Ultimately, it was a little bit of both.

Admittedly, it is not out of the ordinary for films to make us laugh or cry or to keep us completely riveted as we anticipate what will happen next. But often part of what makes the cinematic experience so effective is the musical soundtrack that accompanies the visual images we are watching on the screen. The most celebrated motion picture directors were extremely aware of this and chose the composers they worked with very carefully—think Eisenstein and Prokofiev, Alfred Hitchcock and Bernard Herrmann, or Federico Fellini and Nino Rota. In more recent times, it would be difficult to imagine Stephen Spielberg’s adventures being as quite as epic without John Williams’s exultant orchestrations or David Lynch’s narratives being nearly as creepy without Angelo Badalamenti’s deceptively serene harmonies. Peter Greenaway famously cut his films to the music that Michael Nyman wrote for them and, in that reversal of the usual process, further solidified the painterly quality of his work. Directors from silent era icon Charlie Chaplin to horror filmmaker John Carpenter occasionally created their own music for their films, further heightening how crucial the sonic element was to their particular cinematic visions, and French nouvelle vague pioneer Jean-Luc Godard’s approach to sound in his films has been so idiosyncratic that he has been frequently dubbed a composer in his own right as well.
Troy Herion, however, approaches this creative fusion from the other direction. When we visited him in his Brooklyn apartment, a pair of vintage keyboards immediately caught my attention as did piles of CDs. Other than an extremely well-crafted table, a large provocative painting on the wall, and an art object that was a cross between a camera and a can of soda (a gift from a friend), there was little evidence that this was the pad of someone who made films in addition to making music. Largely self-taught as a filmmaker but heavily trained as a composer (he has an MFA from Princeton and is currently enrolled in the Ph.D. program there), Herion’s interest in making movies grew directly out of making music. It was a way to further extend the possibilities of what music can be:

I definitely think of myself as a composer first. I’m a composer who works with sounds and images. I’m learning the techniques of a filmmaker, but I work 95% with the instincts of a composer….I start with the musical impulse and everything else comes from that, even though they end up affecting one another. If I have a musical impulse that makes me think of an image, then I capture that image and it’s different from what my imagination was. So the real image will then change the music that I originally thought of and it becomes this feedback loop….By doing it myself, things stay in this intuitive state….But I think that music can be really anything. It’s an attention to a certain type of balance, a certain type of consonance and dissonance of material….Anything can be a musical appreciation; it’s how we direct our attention.

The first large-scale manifestation of Herion’s concept of “visual music” is his Baroque Suite, in which a group of dancers filmed in a series of tableaux that evoke Baroque-style paintings is fused with similarly Baroque-inspired music, albeit scored for a band including synths, electric guitar, and drum kit. As a result, although its five movements sport such period titles as “sarabande” and “gavotte” and were derived from these centuries-old dances, the work feels very contemporary, particularly in its sonic kinship to neo-prog rock. A signature device in Herion’s musical language that comes directly from his immersion into filmmaking is to subvert expectations by playing with people’s familiarity with various musical genres.

One of the things I ask myself—I’m critiquing my work as I go forward—is, “Do I care what happens next?” Even though I don’t know what happens next yet. This is something that I think that makes syntax very important. If you’re working in a style, you have an expectation of what will happen next. But if you don’t have any syntax from a previous style that people have already become accustomed to—Baroque music or classical music or rock music or whatever it is you are using—you have to generate your own, generate some sort of momentum so people can predict what’s going to happen next and then you can divert or fulfill that….I’m influenced by cliché almost. I look for opportunities to set up a cliché on purpose. I’ll try to make something almost boring. Boring is when you know what’s going to happen next but it takes too long to get there. I try to find that point right before you tune out, but you have an extremely strong projection of what’s going to happen next. At that point I feel like I have a common experience with the audience, and that’s when I like to twist it. And I think that resembles a joke, but it’s really something that holds your attention.

Despite Herion thinking of himself as a composer who makes films, some of his recent films have featured the music of other composers. He and his girlfriend Elan Bogarin fashioned what could best be described as a music video around the pianist Michael Mizrahi’s recording of Marc Dancigers’s The Bright Motion. The Dark City, a poignant rendering of the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy (also created in collaboration with Bogarin and which was featured in The New York Times’s Metropolitan Diary), used Franz Schubert’s music.

“I’m interested in advocating for music,” Herion explains. “It was really exciting for me to take Marc Dancigers’s music and Michael Mizrahi’s playing and create a film around that that was interpreted by a musician and composer—I felt it was an analysis of the music visually. While I didn’t generate the music, I felt that I was very close to the music and I put on my composer hat [to think] about the deeper meaning of phrases. Those are the details that are often not prioritized by people who are just filmmakers and not musicians.”

New York: A City Symphony is clearly the most ambitious synthesis of his musical and cinematic ideas thus far. For him, the visual and sonic elements form a seamless whole and are really not intended to be experienced independently. Even his use of the term “symphony” is multidisciplinary. Though the term carries significant weight in music history and Herion’s symphony calls to mind such elaborate programmatic works as Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique or—closer to our own time and place—Michael Daugherty’s Metropolis Symphony, Herion is also very mindful of the tradition of “city symphonies” made by filmmakers around the world since the 1920s:

Using a term like symphony I realize is a loaded term. It means a lot of things in the musical world and I sacrificed a little bit of what it means in the music world for what it means in the cinematic world. A city symphony is a whole genre of filmmaking. Why did filmmakers in the 1920s call their films symphonies? Was it for the epic quality of their films, because they were associating that with the term symphony, or was it because they were trying to conjure a musical interpretation?

The other tradition that Herion had to make peace with was New York City itself. Originally from Philadelphia, he’s only been living here for the past three years. At first, being a relatively recent transplant made conveying New York City seem too daunting a task, but eventually his enthusiasm for his adopted home took over and it shows. New York: A City Symphony captures simultaneously the overwhelming grandeur and non-stop energy of this town in ways that only a handful of other pieces of music do—scores by Gershwin and Bernstein, perhaps, or Charles Ives’s Central Park in the Dark.

“I was nervous when I was making the piece,” Herion confesses. “I’d go back between being very confident—that’s a really great shot, I nailed it—and then another part of me would be like, ‘How dare I comment on that! I’ve only been in New York for three years; I don’t have enough New York cred to get into the dirt here.’ But there is a whole culture of New York which is immigrants. Everybody’s an immigrant to some extent. So I focused on the idea that anyone is a New Yorker as soon as they get here. Nobody cares how long you’ve been here. If you’re taking up space, you’re a New Yorker almost. And the other thing I tried to focus on was how impressive New York is when you haven’t lived here so long that it starts to melt into the common experience. It’s spectacular to your senses—the architecture, the sounds, the activity; it’s almost maddening if you pay too much attention to it, so it’s in our interests to tune it out a bit. But I tried to say, ‘Let me keep this heightened awareness for as long as possible.’”

That heightened awareness of visual images as well as sound and how these two sets of sensory information can feed off each other makes Troy Herion’s creations some of the most interesting “music” I’ve heard (and seen) in quite some time.

Marcos Balter: Hyperactive Unity

Posted on April 17, 2013 by - Conversations, Spotlight

There is an arresting, high-voltage energy that often infuses presentations of Marcos Balter’s music, and an obvious fascination on the part of the composer with exploring new sonic possibilities while keeping the human element—the living, breathing performer—center stage. While the roots of these influences are clearly reflected in Balter’s own personality, putting too much emphasis on his Brazilian upbringing and the Portuguese accent that lightly colors his rapid English would be a mistake.

“I’m a Brazilian composer, I’m a gay composer, and people always go for those things as if they are the really crucial, defining elements in my music, when they’re really not,” Balter explains with a mix of understanding and frustration. A composer born and raised in Rio de Janeiro who currently calls Chicago home, he appreciates the American interest in how where you come from shapes the music you write. In his case, however, growing up in a diverse metropolitan city offered him a broad slate of experiences, and the hallmarks of his own music are much more personal.

“As you can probably tell, I’m a very hyperactive person,” Balter concedes with a knowing smile. “I’ve always been very energetic and doing one million things at once, very fast paced in general in life. And when I look at my music, I see that. I see that sense of—unity. It’s that one thing sometimes, but if you look very carefully, it’s one billion things within that one thing.”

As a young conservatory student, his musical passions “were very well behaved,” he admits, with a special affinity for the keyboard composers he was studying as a pianist. Composition was also already a “very natural act to me,” coming almost hand in hand with learning to read and write. In 1996, a piano scholarship to Texas Christian University brought him to the States, though his educational focus was ultimately on composition. Study at Northwestern University followed, and he is currently the director of the music composition program at Columbia College Chicago.

During his first years in the U.S., he found that his music became a little more conservative before he rebelled—a reaction, perhaps, to the education he was receiving, which he found stiflingly dogmatic. “I think that sometimes the least interesting thing about my music is how it’s made,” he clarifies. “If you want to know about that, that’s great, and you can do all kinds of crazy analysis and find out some fun stuff. But to me the most important part of music is still the emotional connection between the composer and the performer, and the performer and the listener. The rest is secondary.”

Considering how closely Balter likes to work with the musicians who play his pieces, that primary consideration carries particular weight. “I really see the act of composing as a collaborative act. Even when you’re composing by yourself, not talking to anyone, you’re still working with that entity, you’re still working for those people.”

In Balter’s case, however, that person often is in the room at certain points in the process, offering feedback and demonstrating possible sounds and techniques. In the case of his extensive work with the musicians of the International Contemporary Ensemble over many years, he’s writing not only for respected colleagues, but also very good and trusted friends.

“That’s why I love working with them. I know that when I walk into a rehearsal, that the rehearsal is still a workshop. We’re still debating ideas; we’re still negotiating things.” And that, he argues, is an essential step in the artistic process that he’d be foolish to overlook. “Things change considerably when they leave the paper and they reach the performer, and for me to not acknowledge that and make that part of the creation of the art work is insane.”

He also counts on that feedback to keep him pushing forward in his own art. In one extreme example, during the creation of his Descent from Parnassus—inspired by Cy Twombly’s painting The First Part of the Return from Parnassus and written for ICE founder and flutist Claire Chase—Balter sent his first sketch of the piece her way. “She called me back, and she said, ‘That’s not it.’ And I was deeply offended! I was mad at her. I’m the composer; you shall not tell me if it is or it isn’t—I’ll know!”

A step back and some reflection offered new perspective, however. “Within four or five hours, the coin dropped, and I looked at this sketch and thought, ‘She’s absolutely right. This is not in any shape or form what this painting is about.’ I called her back and I said, ‘You know what? Let me give it another shot; let me try to process things differently here.’
“Within 72 hours, I had Parnassus.”


That openness to exploring new paths and changing direction on the fly is why Balter considers himself at heart an experimental composer. “I don’t know where I’m going. And I actually think that if I knew, I would have stopped composing a long time ago,” he admits. “So no, I don’t know what’s going to happen to my music next year, I don’t know what’s going to happen next week. And that’s the beauty of it; that’s the excitement of it—it’s the not knowing. If I knew everything, I could write a book about it and be done.”

Katherine Young: Notes of Collaboration

Posted on March 20, 2013 by - Conversations, Spotlight


Composer, improviser, and bassoonist Katherine Young takes an adventurous, creative, and extremely hardworking approach to her career. She seems at home in a variety of musical communities: from the DIY band scene in Brooklyn to the improvised-music scene in Chicago to the academic composition department at Northwestern where she now studies. To help me prepare for our interview, Young handed me an impressive stack of CDs. Most were released on small boutique labels; one cover was beautifully hand-stitched by Young herself. Each of the represented projects—Young as solo bassoonist, her improvising duo project Architeuthis Walks on Land, her rock/experimental quartet Pretty Monsters—has toured in the United States and in Europe.
Young cites Anthony Braxton, with whom she studied at Wesleyan, as a profound influence on how she has developed a body of work. “Working with Anthony was very influential in this ethos of how you see a project through,” she says. “He both demonstrated, and would explicitly say: you write a piece, you get it performed, you make a record, you tour it, and then you’ve done the project. You don’t write a piece, get it performed once, and call it a day. This comes from the idea of being a performer, and getting your music out in the world.”

Young’s approach to the bassoon, which is on fascinating display in her 2009 solo record Further Secret Origins, is as physical as it is conceptual.  With this record, it’s clear that Young’s years of work as an improviser have led to a highly detailed and expressive map of the bassoon’s sonic possibilities. The percussive clacks of the keys, the multiphonic capacities of the reed, the resonance of breath—Young deploys these varied colors like a great orchestrator. Being an active bassoonist not only helps Young “keep [her] feet on the ground,” but also provides a place to experiment with sound. “Developing the sounds that I use on the bassoon, especially with amplification and pedals, is really informing my current interests as a composer,” she explains. “Teasing out these small sounds and making them big. Maintaining an active relationship with an instrument gives you a laboratory to explore sounds very immediately.”

In some of her current work, Young is experimenting with how extra-musical elements—like a collection of photographs, a poetic text, or even the opening scene of Once Upon A Time in the West—can be a “foundational part” of the composition process. In two upcoming large-scale collaborations with violinist Austin Wulliman and artist Deniz Gul, Young is experimenting with how to make these elements “not just this inspirational flash at the beginning of the process of composing, but rather, [something that] informs the whole piece.”

Her collaboration with Gul, a Turkish artist, is allowing Young to explore a long-standing interest in transcription. The piece began with a series of found interviews which Gul then transcribed into a poetic text and then used as the basis for a sculptural installation. Now, the installation will be the inspiration for Young’s improvised sound.

Although Young’s growing profile as a composer means that she is working more within traditional commissioning structures—including upcoming pieces for Northwestern’s Contemporary Music Ensemble, Spektral Quartet, Fonema Consort, and Distractfold—working directly with the musicians she’s writing for continues to be of primary importance for her. “I think the collaborative ethos of being a performer is still incredibly important to my process of composition,” Young explained. “Working closely with other people, involving multiple perspectives—a lot of my current work is very collaborative.”

For a composer like Young, who often allows for improvisation and somewhat open parameters in her work, this relationship is particularly essential. “Part of the goal for me is finding the right balance between specificity and openness, for whatever group it is, whatever the performance practice will be. When you’re working with a group of people, different structures and different specificity will work better than others.” In each project, Young is renegotiating the boundaries between performance and composition. “In some ways,” she says, “it’s just about getting to know people.”

Matthew Burtner: Engaging the Natural World

Posted on February 13, 2013 by - Conversations, Spotlight


The music of composer Matthew Burtner is in large part inspired by his childhood experiences of the Alaskan landscape where he grew up. That influence applies not only to the content of the music, but to the way it is created. At times during his childhood, his family lived in extremely remote locations in the North and managed without electricity or running water. “So now, I really love to be surrounded by electric things!” he admits, laughing. Burtner can be found knee-deep in cables, computers, and electronic gear pretty much wherever he is—whether directing the Interactive Media Research Group at the University of Virginia where he serves as associate professor of composition and computer technologies, working with his organization EcoSono, which seeks to foster connections between the arts, technology, and environmentalism, or presenting solo performances on the metasaxophone, a computer-enhanced saxophone of his own creation.

Much of his compositional work over the past 15 years has focused on a triptych of multimedia operas, each based on one of the three different geographical regions of Alaska where he lived as a child. The third and most ambitious opera is Auksalaq, co-created with media artist Scott Deal, which employs an interdisciplinary team of scientists, media technologists, artists, and musicians to form an interactive, multimedia commentary on the environmental changes taking place in the far north of Alaska, and the long-term, worldwide effect of those shifts. Described as a “telematic opera,” the performance, which involves a combination of instrumental music, computer sound, spoken and sung texts, and extensive video footage of scientific data and dramatic arctic landscapes, takes place in several locations which are connected via the internet. The audience in each venue experiences part of the performance in person, as well as performances from other regions which are projected onto video screens. There is even an app (prompting audience members at a recent Washington, D.C., performance to coin the term “appera”) which allows people at all of the locations to share their reactions to the drama via texts that are rendered into a constantly moving thought cloud on a screen for all to see, and from which the main character, sung by soprano Lisa Edwards-Burrs, chooses words with which to construct her final aria. Everything about Auksalaq is intended to highlight the concepts of remoteness and interconnectivity, which by the end of the work do not seem to conflict in any way.

Working with and—literally—through the environment is an integral part of Burtner’s musical aesthetic, which he calls ecoacoustics. His interest in the perception of sound traveling through natural materials—such as snow, wind, and sand—has resulted in a number of compositions that make the natural world part of the musical ensemble. For example, Syntax of Snow, created for glockenspiels and fresh snow, is ideally performed outside, as is the work Sandprints, for human-computer ensemble, whistling, and sand. It requires microphones to be buried under the sand to amplify the movements of people manipulating the sand above ground, which are in turn manipulated by a series of computational processes to form the musical material. He has created a large umbrella for this methodology by turning ecoacoustics into an entire course of study, part of which is a performing ensemble called MICE (Musical Interactive Computer Ensemble) which has performed Sandprints in the Namibian desert, as well as created and performed numerous other works. He has also founded a non-profit organization called EcoSono with the mission of spreading the integration of experimental sound art with environmentalism through education, engagement, and artistic production.
When questioned about how he reconciles the potential conflict between his passion for technology and for the environment, he is quick to point out that humans have always needed technology to survive in the world; we need clothing to protect us from the elements, we require boats to move across water, snowshoes to travel over arctic terrain. He sees the potential of technology to assist in bringing people closer to nature, rather than separating them from it, and is intent upon exploding those early childhood experiences listening to the sounds of nature into a shared universal perspective. “I see the issue of climate change as the defining issue of the 21st century. As an artist I think the best thing I can do is to try to engage with the public about the issue, and try to activate more and more voices talking and thinking about it.”

Elliot Cole: Hunger for the Opposite

Posted on January 23, 2013 by - Conversations, Spotlight


While digging through Elliot Cole’s catalog of music, it’s easy to get caught up in the role text and stories frequently play in his compositions. Babinagar, for example, is a bewitching song-cycle based on an Afghan folktale, and De Rerum (a “hip hop lecture on the physics of history”) is wedded to wordplay.

But after chatting with him, that image shifts. The words can be vital to his work, definitely, but the core of his inspiration turns out to trace more of a pendulum swing. Cole is most comfortable and feels most productive when he can vary his approach: insider vs. outsider, text-rooted vs. pure sound, composer vs. performer, a musician dipping his toes into a wealth of styles and methods along the way. Rather than a troubadour, it might make more sense to think of Cole as a trapeze artist graced with contagious enthusiasm and seemingly inexhaustible curiosity.

“I use music to explore other things that I’m interested in, as a channel to be curious through,” Cole explains. “One way to divide up what I do is by genre—dramatic work and chamber music and hip hop. But another way to divide it is that I’m trying to deal with music on two different levels. I love composing because it lets me think about music from a really high level of generalization and abstraction, but I can only keep working on music from such a conceptual distance if I’m also as close to it as I can be in some other activity.”

That closeness is something Cole finds in performance, whether playing in bands or presenting his own music. He grew up in the rich musical environment of Austin, Texas, and it rubbed off. Now, he says, “I’m not a stellar performer, but I stay as involved as I can in actually making music. In music school, the role that we adopt a little bit too naturally is putting some performers on the stage to have kind of a bad time playing your music for an audience that is kind of stressed out by the whole experience. And you sit in the back thinking that you’re a genius. It’s just a very different experience when you’re up there doing it.”

After completing his undergraduate work in music and cognitive linguistics at Rice University where he produced “very serious and intellectually grounded” work, he stayed in Houston and wrote other pieces that “felt more real and natural and heartfelt and exciting to me,” works such as Ladies and Gentlemen which was built around a lecture by Borges, the hip hop opera The Rake’s Progress which he wrote with Brad Balliett, and Babinagar, a delicate chamber work scored for harp, contrabass, harmonium, and singers which he toured through living rooms across Texas.

Cole is now a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton, a school he jokes was the only one that would have him. “When I went to look at schools, I got a real clear sense visiting Princeton that they were open to the whole package,” he recalls. “So, I’m there because the work that I was doing, that other places might not find as serious but that I take very seriously, that was a plus for them rather than a minus.”
A big piece of this catalog that Cole feels doesn’t fit so comfortably can once again be traced back to his desire to work at the edges of genre and institutions. “I feel like there’s a real focus and value in contemporary music on being an insider,” he explains. “Being in a territory where everyone is focused on being an insider, I really find it fun and liberating to have something that I’m doing where I’m a total outsider—where I don’t have credibility. For me, that’s hip hop.”

It’s work that he’s exploring together with performer/composers Brad and Doug Balliett under the project name Oracle Hysterical, an organization that Cole characterizes as kind of a band and kind of composer’s collective, but really more of a book club. The group uses text, such as Melville’s Billy Budd (a recent example), and reads and writes their way to a piece of music, motivating and inspiring one another. Writing the metric poetry used in the lyrics is work that Cole finds provides a neat parallel to composition. “It’s really simulating imaginatively because every pair of lines is a puzzle that you have to work out. I really like writing music that is the solving of puzzles because then you’re in a relationship with it where it’s as much a process of discovery as creation.”

Still, sometimes Cole sets the words aside to, again, escape into something else. To scratch that itch last year, he wrote more than an hour of chamber music, including Postludes, a set of eight pieces for four performers on one vibraphone that was written for So Percussion. Cole is also an active computer programmer and has been working to develop an algorithmic composition and deep-listening environment using SuperCollider. He found that being able to think about music from the point of view of computer programming provided some new clarity, which he explains in more detail in the video below.


Admittedly, more tightly integrating all these varied areas of interest might be more productive and efficient, and Cole wonders how his diversification may be preventing him from establishing a clearly identifiable voice. Still, his flexibility is an essential underpinning linking his work—when one project or area becomes frustrating, he has another to move to. This also extends to his compositional methods. He says that he “may begin at the piano and at a point of impasse or frustration, write on paper and see what grows out of that. Or type it into the computer or try to learn it on guitar or sing it. By these processes of translation, I can kind of keep a flow through the writing. It’s an intrinsic part of how I get notes on the page and how I get to the end of the idea.”
Ultimately, his curiosity keeps him from shelving any possibilities. “I’m stupid enough to think that I can still do everything,” he explains with a self-deprecating laugh. “If there’s a chance for two majors, I’ll take it; if I have a chance to write a piece for a group, I’ll write two pieces. I’m always having to fork and do both.”

Beata Moon: Finding Her Own Voice

Posted on December 19, 2012 by - Conversations, Spotlight

For Beata Moon, a North Dakota-born, Indiana-raised Korean-American minister’s daughter who was trained as a pianist but is a completely self-taught composer, being able to create her own music was something of a revelation. It was also a defining moment in her personal identity, even though she had already experienced notable triumphs as a pianist—she was a concerto soloist with the Indianapolis Symphony at the age of eight and has a performance degree from Juilliard, where she studied with the formidable Adele Marcus.

“It was fun and I was able to do it, but I never had an interest of my own,” Moon remarks about her early years studying the piano and what made her turn to composition. “In college everyone around me was so passionate about what they were doing, but I was just there because I was supposed to be there. So I took some time off to figure out what I wanted to do for myself and that’s how I discovered composing. I hadn’t really improvised a single note up until that point. I was never given that liberty or encouragement, so I just played what I was supposed to play. … My teacher came from the old Russian tradition where it’s very domineering, so I didn’t really feel like I had a voice of my own on the piano. I wanted to protect that with composing. I didn’t want to seek other people’s opinions … I’m grateful for the discipline and I still enjoy playing, but now it’s on my own terms.”

Playing on her own terms has meant playing predominantly her own solo compositions or her own original chamber music with her own ensemble. She has, however, also championed the music of other contemporary composers in the series of “Whodunit?” concerts she curated and performed in at the Kennedy Center and elsewhere. For these programs, information about the music—a combination of old and new repertoire—was not revealed until the end of the concert.

That sense of discovery and not quite knowing what to expect that she instilled in the audiences who attended is the same sense that she tries to bring to her students when she teaches, as well as to her own music when she is in the process of composing. But she always guided by a strong desire to communicate. Although she composes almost exclusively at the keyboard, her music sounds completely idiomatic regardless of the instrumentation. Two particularly effective chamber compositions are her 2004 Wind Quintet and the cleverly titled Moonpaths for piano with clarinet and violin from 1998, which, like her numerous solo piano works, marry unbridled tunefulness with odd rhythmic alignments. While she eschews conforming to any particular compositional camp, generous melodicism and unusual metrical patterns have been a hallmark of her music since she began composing. Her earliest solo piano composition, the 1995 Prelude, is extremely pretty though it is predominantly in a peculiar meter with 13 beats per measure. But according to her, this was not really a conscious decision. Rather, she claims with a great amount of humility, it’s a by-product of trying to be completely unselfconscious.

“I know there’s so much I need to learn still and I try to absorb and listen and study, but when I’m composing I don’t want to think like that,” Moon explains. “I think it’s helpful to go back into that childlike state if you can, or just be freer so that hopefully everything that you’ve retained and learned is in there, but you’re not worried or self-conscious about it. I try to apply that in my work so that I’m not judging in that really adult frame of thinking where it can be too critical because of whatever baggage you might have. When you’re a child, you can just be free and creative and you’re not worried about what people are going to think or what camp it’s going to be in.”

Four years ago her life completely changed when she gave birth to her son Oliver. But being a mother has given her an opportunity to connect even more directly with that childlike state on another level. Experiencing her son discovering the world has inevitably taken her in some new compositional directions. Oliver’s passion for toy trains was the inspiration behind a piece she composed earlier this year, The Curious Engine for piano with young audience participation which she wrote for Orli Shaham’s “Baby Got Bach” concert series. And she guarantees that the orchestral piece she hopes to write in the near future will also be inspired by him. However, it has been a complex balancing act between being a mother, teaching young students, and all of the activities that comprise the life of a 21st-century composer: in addition to being the primary initiator of performances of her music (through her own solo playing as well as her own ensemble), she is also self-published. And while she has CDs on Albany Records and Naxos, the newly released Saros—her latest recording and her fourth to date—is on her own label, BiBimBop Records (the name a nod to her Korean heritage). Just being able to carve out time to work on new compositions has taken a great deal of effort. While an upright piano greets visitors at the entranceway to her Forest Hills apartment, an electric keyboard which she can work on at odd hours with headphones when everyone else at home is asleep has become her most frequent go-to instrument. The other tasks have taken a back seat.

“I’ve definitely cut back on the business part and it’s a constant challenge,” Moon acknowledges. “I’m very fortunate that I have a lot of family nearby that can help out with babysitting, but at the same time I want to be there with him. It sets your priorities. Time management is crucial. You learn to get things done in a short amount of time. The balancing can be challenging. I haven’t been to as many concerts as I would like to go to, but it’s O.K. because I have other rewards that take its place.”

Nat Evans: Outward Bound

Posted on November 14, 2012 by - Conversations, Spotlight

Over the past two years in cities throughout the U.S., groups of people have been gathering, digital music players in hand and headphones in place, to watch the sun rise or set. It must be an odd sight for anyone stumbling across these scenes—25 to 50 people all “plugged in,” intently facing in the direction of the sun. They are all listening to the same music (downloaded beforehand) by composer Nat Evans; Sunrise or Blue Hour depending on the time of day. Inspired by both the daily and the seasonal changes of light he has observed during his mediation practice, Evans has created a slowly evolving electroacoustic soundscape of field recordings and orchestral instruments intended to follow the path of the sun during these transitional times of day.

When questioned about bringing people together in order to listen to something through headphones, he is quick to point out that the experiences of gathering beforehand, listening as a group to the same musical content during the observance of a natural event (he even gives everyone a cue to start so that the recordings will be more or less in sync), and the interactions of participants afterwards taken all at once result in a group-oriented occurrence. As he says, it’s easy to declare that earbuds are separating us all, but the truth is that people gather in public places without talking to one another all the time—at a yoga class, at a coffee shop, or at a library, for example. He sees this project as re-purposing earbuds to create a communal experience.

Taking inspiration from elements of his practice of Zen Buddhism and from the natural landscape of the Pacific Northwest, Evans’s music generally contains slow tempo markings and revels in timbral transformation. As a result, the small details found in each note and in every passing sonic moment are highlighted. It’s a continual challenge to convince musicians to perform his music slowly enough, and he finds himself saying, “I realize that I have painted myself into this corner. But still, play it slower!” Often found carrying a portable digital recorder, he is always collecting sounds, largely from nature, that he fluently mixes and matches with acoustic instruments and voice. His prolific rate of composing, and his openness to collaboration combined with a proclivity to take music outside of the standard concert hall setting have resulted in both site-specific and time-specific works, installations, music for dance and video art, as well as the occasional concert work. If it has to happen indoors, his field recordings bring the outside in for the audience.

Evans feels that living in Seattle suits him well as a composer; although the distance to concerts on the West Coast is very long, he says, the distance to nature is very short, and he is grateful to be able to spend so much time outdoors. He feels free to do as he likes musically, without the pressures found in the music scenes of more densely populated areas. At the same time, he has at his disposal the percolating Seattle music world to draw from and be part of.

Evans hopes that his music creates organic, intimate, and—very importantly—interesting listening experiences which are closely related to everyday life for audiences. His goal is to spur listeners from all walks of life to look outside of themselves to discover a deeper appreciation of life’s small moments. When the people participating in his time-specific sunrise and sunset events remove their headphones and head home, his intention is that they experience the rest of the day with a greater sense of richness and depth.

Joseph C. Phillips Jr.: Balancing Act

Posted on October 17, 2012 by - Conversations, Spotlight

Joseph C. Phillips Jr.: Balancing Act from NewMusicBox on Vimeo.

Like most composers these days, Joseph C. Phillips Jr. has to balance creating new music, getting it performed, and surviving. Seeing him on his bicycle returning from the Park Slope school where he teaches music to kindergartners to his Bedford Stuyvesant apartment (where we spoke earlier this month) seemed a very apt visual metaphor for how effectively he navigates through the various parts of his life. It’s a relatively short ride, although admittedly his composition studio in upstate New York, where he does most of his composing on the weekends, is a bit further away.

Phillips has nevertheless been able to accomplish a tremendous amount of work since he first arrived in New York City in 1998. Just two years after relocating here from Seattle, he began conducting his own ensemble, Numinous, as a vehicle for disseminating his own compositions. Within a couple of years after that, he released (on his own label) a CD devoted entirely to his music—Numinous: The Music of Joseph C. Phillips, Jr.—and in 2009, his second disc, Vipassana, was released on Innova. A third (to be released by New Amsterdam Records) will be out next year. Although Numinous—which now comprises 25 musicians, practically a chamber orchestra—has remained the primary performing repository for his music, he has also received commissions to compose works for pianists Simone Dinnerstein and Lara Downes, Face The Music, the University of Maryland Wind Ensemble, and the St. Olaf College Band. And the projects he has embarked on with Numinous frequently contain additional elements. When I spoke to him, he was in the middle of a series of performances of an evening-length work, To Begin The World Over Again, inspired by the writings of Thomas Paine with Edisa Weeks’s dance group, DELIRIOUS Dances. This week, the New York City re-premiere of Ernst Lubitsch’s The Loves of Pharaoh, a 90-year-old silent film which was only rediscovered last year, will feature a newly composed score by Phillips performed live by Numinous at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

Yet musical composition came relatively late to Phillips. A self-described late bloomer, he didn’t start composing until he studied piano while pursuing an undergraduate degree in music education from the University of Maryland, a course of study he didn’t embark on until his junior year. As he explains it:

Originally I was a bio-chem major. I was actually that for two years. But I couldn’t see myself being in a lab coat for the rest of my life, so I took a semester off. Then I thought, “O.K., I want to do music.” That was really my first exposure to most everything: Debussy, all the classical, and even the jazz things. I knew Coltrane before, but it was really in-depth when I started the music program at the University of Maryland. It really got me started because that was the first time I learned to play piano. And as soon as I was in there doing piano, I could do my own thing and I started writing my own things from that point on.

Finding out about his original background in lab science explains some of Phillips’s working methods. Numinous has functioned as an extremely malleable composition laboratory for him, enabling him to explore a wide range of instrumentation as well as performance practices and compositional techniques which range from a Steve Reich-ian pulse-driven minimalism to a keen sense of specific timbre combinations reminiscent of big band composer-arrangers such as Gil Evans or Maria Schneider, to a more amorphous Morton Feldman-esque harmonic ambiguity. While the name Numinous might initially evoke a sense of spirituality (the Merriam-Webster dictionary defines “numinous” as supernatural, mysterious, spiritual, and holy), Phillips remains committed to a more scientific approach:

I read Carl Sagan’s Contact and there was a chapter called “The Numinous.” And I thought, “That’s what I want to do musically!” I’m not religious; I’m probably an atheist. But for me there’s a whole other thing out there that connects us. People use religions to make those connections, but I have a science background. I love Carl Sagan’s “we all come from star stuff”; that, I think, encapsulates the kind of connection that the universe has. I made a decision that I want my music to represent that.

Since Phillips creates music primarily for his own ensemble, his aesthetic shares much in common with the great jazz composer/bandleaders of the 20th and 21st centuries. But while his music sometimes incorporates improvisation and his ensemble features several prominent jazz musicians (past and current members of Numinous include multiple winds players Ben Kono and Ed Xiques, pianists Roberta Piket and Deanna Witkowski, vibraphonist Nick Mancini, guitarist Amanda Monaco, and trumpeter David Smith), Phillips does not consider himself a jazz composer:

I use people who have the experience of not just classical music because there are times that I want them to do something—whether it’s improvise or have a [certain] rhythmic sense. I want something more fluid that you can’t always write. … I don’t have that angst of “What is my music?” I’m just going to do what I want to do. … Part of it comes from a jazz tradition: people form their own groups. When I moved I felt I wasn’t quite sure where I fit in. I came here because of the BMI Jazz Composers Workshop. I tell people that and people naturally think I might be a jazz composer, but my inclinations have always been more toward classical. I felt for me coming in, it’s not going to happen unless I do it. I’d rather do it myself than go to someone and say, “Can you do this for me?” I couldn’t imagine coming in and going to Orpheus or even Bang on a Can and saying, “Hey, I have these things. Would you be interested?” Not that I was writing orchestral music, but if I came to an orchestra and said, “Hey, will you play my music?”—they don’t care; they won’t know who I am necessarily. But I’m not going to let that stop me from doing the things that I want to do. Now everyone has their own groups; it’s a way to get their music out. I love to write for other ensembles and I have been commissioned by ensembles that I have no connection to, but I also want to keep doing Numinous and expanding Numinous.

Joseph C. Phillips Jr’s very clearly 21st-century music—incorporating a broad range of styles while being ultimately beholden to none—might seem somewhat at odds with his two most recent projects: the dance collaboration exploring the ideas of 18th-century political philosopher Thomas Paine and the newly created score for the 1922 Lubitsch film about ancient Egypt. But for Phillips, history can also be honored through a contemporary approach:

Edisa [Weeks] … had been thinking about doing a project about democracy and I had just read something about Thomas Paine so I said, “How about Thomas Paine?” His words are very timely still and … his words have been used by many people for their own purposes. … Edisa had this idea about contradancing which was big then. So I was listening to contradances and when contradances don’t form the twos, the fours, and the eights, they’re called crooked. So, I thought, O.K. I’m just going to make them all crooked. So you can dance to them, they’re very fun and in the period, but underneath there are mixed meters or maybe some weird harmonic thing. … With the Lubitsch film, there was actually a complete score that was already there but Joe Melillo [at Brooklyn Academy of Music] wanted something different. When I first got the film and watched it, I did watch it with the score, but after that I really didn’t listen to the score; I didn’t want those solutions to be in my mind. I’m very conscious about how I would feel if someone years from now took my score and said, “We want to get rid of that; let’s get this new thing going.” But we’ve had all this history since 1922 of how people approach getting into a film by [musically] adding to or going against what’s going on on the screen. And the history of music since 1922—there’s so much more that can be added. I wanted it to be my music married to what Lubitsch was doing as if I was the one he asked to do this. But people who’ve heard my other music will be surprised when they hear the music for the film.