Category: Spotlight

In the midst of this torrent of recent activity, Worden has additionally written and recorded a new set of her own original songs, All Things Will Unwind, released by Asthmatic Kitty Records under the moniker of her chief creative vehicle, the band My Brightest Diamond. But unlike the group’s previous two full-length albums, here Worden eschews the former prominence of the guitar-bass-drums configuration, and instead substitutes overtly rock sonorities with the instrumental colors of indie chamber sextet yMusic.

All Things Will Unwind also finds the virtuosic frontwoman, a classically trained mezzo-soprano, scaling back on the operatic attacks and melismatic phrasing of her previous work in favor of experimentation with timbre and a more active dialogue with the instrumentation. With regard to form, she rejects the notion that this latest collection qualifies as “art song,” citing the presence of repeating choruses and the lack of through-composed structures. “In the first album [Bring Me the Workhorse], I’m committing to rock music and I’m committing to doing a band thing, and then adding strings—that was there,” says Worden. “But [A Thousand] Shark’s Teeth was more like, ‘What does art song look like for me? And do I want to do that?’ And I think the answer for this album was ‘No.’ ”

Like other singer-songwriters whose music is characterized in part by being more than “just pop music,” Shara Worden is hesitant to call herself a composer. Her reluctance is a reaction to a bygone era in which compositional genius was glorified. “What we see now is people doing a lot more things collaboratively. That old archetype of the composer as the be-all, end-all—I think that that period is over,” Worden explains. “We’re not looking for the Schoenbergs…. It’s an incredibly fertile time in art, and also I don’t know that we see those big figures in the same way that we did in the past.”

As for her seemingly countless collaborations, Worden’s motivation is rather philosophical. “I like to say “yes” to the universe, and I figure that it will say “yes” back to you. I think you learn so much from supporting someone else’s work,” she says. “And it always stretches you, makes you uncomfortable because it forces you out of yourself and out of your natural tendencies. For me it’s a really rich artistic life to have.” One such collaboration, in May 2011, found Worden singing in Sarah Small’s large-scale Tableau Vivant of The Delirium Constructions, a multidisciplinary performance art piece combining elements of theater, choreography, chamber music, and visual art in what amounted to a kind of experimental opera. Of working with Small, the singer says:

She demands a kind of emotional presence out of the people that she works with, and in a way she asks you to go so far—which is similar to what Matthew Barney does—by kind of finding the edge, finding a limit of an emotional space. You would think that you would go into melodrama, but in fact you find that the extreme side of an emotion can reveal something very authentic, and I needed to be drawn out of my shell. And I think that that’s what Sarah does—she’s always challenging me to come out and to be generous and to try and to not protect myself so much. You can be brave and be open and have fun.

Along with this openness comes Worden’s willing acknowledgement that while her songs are her creations, they aren’t hers alone. “I think music is a way that I process my life. It’s the way that I make monuments of things that are important to me,” says Worden. “There is a relationship to the music in that it’s important whether or not I’m going to share it. I think if I wasn’t sharing it, a lot of the songs wouldn’t exist, so there’s always a consciousness that the music is also for other people.”

Shara Worden’s conspiring spirit isn’t diminishing anytime soon. On January 17, 2012, she will premiere her original score for Buster Keaton’s silent film Balloonatic as part of the New York Guitar Festival at Merkin Concert Hall. Ten days later, she will perform in the world premiere of a David Lang composition about the death of classical music at Carnegie Hall’s Zankel Hall alongside fellow musicians Nico Muhly, Bryce Dessner, and Owen Pallett.

It’s impossible to predict exactly what other creative endeavors Worden will pursue next, yet there’s little doubt that songs will be central.

The thing that I love to do more than anything is start with nothing and then in a couple hours you end up with a song. There’s nothing more thrilling for me than that creation, and so I think there are a lot of different things that I’d like to do. But at the end of the day, I just want to write songs that are good.

Kleier grew up in Los Angeles, California, and became entranced early on by the electric guitar, immersing himself in a musical landscape that included Captain Beefheart, Jimi Hendrix, Frank Zappa, and King Crimson, among many others. Eventually the influence of friends with record collections and Guitar Player magazine opened up an even wider world of musical possibility that led him to study composition at North Texas State and the University of Southern California, where he began to develop a style that employs extended techniques and digital manipulation. Since then he has played as both side- and front man for an eclectic assortment of musicians and ensembles in the worlds of rock, jazz, and experimental music. His “fringe improv rock band” El Pocho Loco addresses his own perspective as a Mexican-American who grew up in East L.A on the “Hispanic experience” in America.

Kleier’s compositions are richly textured, evocative, and sometimes quirky glimpses into his life and interests. For instance, the work “Sonny’s Song” on the CD Klangenbang is a tribute to jazz guitarist Sonny Sharrock, who helped persuade Kleier to move from L.A. to New York City, while The Juan Cortina Suite, recorded on Deep Night, Deep Autumn, was inspired by the outlaw and military leader. Kleier describes much of his music as deeply personal “diary pieces” that express how he felt about an event, an experience, or a person. His toolbox of performance styles, extended techniques, and guitar preparations provides a myriad of ways to get the work out into the world, which is his primary goal.

“I think my music is about exploring the nooks and crannies of all kinds of Western musics, and attempting to put my own stamp on the whole stew I cook with those ingredients. I’m mainly interested in getting the music out there—whether it’s recording it, on the radio, posting it, or performing concerts. To me that’s what music is. You have to make sound. Air molecules have to move. There has to be something that says, ‘This is music,’ not just the sounds of the buses outside your apartment. You have to do something that creates sound. So that’s what it is for me. It’s like, whatever I’m going to do so that the organized sound I call my music exists in the world. It’s pretty much just that simple.”

Discography
Klangenbang (Rift 18)
Deep Night, Deep Autumn (Starkland 211)
The Night Has Many Hours (Innova 685)

“Exploring the timbres on the marimba and that sound world influences how I write for other instruments,” Robert Paterson explains and emphasizes that, above and beyond writing for any instrument, is the working notion that he is writing for other performers. “I like writing for people and knowing that people are playing these instruments. It’s going to end up sounding better if it’s written for people.”

As for the ensemble and the record company, these both developed slowly over a long period of time, but they evolved from the same fundamental approach he has to composing and performing. Paterson elaborates, “The reason I started an ensemble when I first moved to New York was I wasn’t getting as many chamber performances as I wanted. So I figured if nobody else is playing my music then I’ll just start my own group. A lot of other people have done it! I also wasn’t seeing enough American music being programmed and celebrated the way I wanted it to be. […] And actually I wanted an outlet to play as well, as a percussionist, and also to conduct a little bit, so I figured starting a group would be the perfect way of doing that. And the record company initially started out as a commercial record company where we made classical CDs ‘for the masses’—like a Christmas CD and a wedding CD—and those have done really well. We’re coming out with a divorce CD; it’s a funny CD. And what we do is we take the money from that and we help fund American Modern Recordings which celebrates new American music; and it’s working.”

Part of why it all works is that Robert Paterson hasn’t put all his mallets, so to speak, in one bag. Some of his activities not only help him but also further the entire ecology of new music. While there have been two American Modern Recordings releases thus far devoted exclusively to Paterson’s own compositions, AMR has also issued recordings like Powerhouse Pianists, featuring AME-affiliated pianists Stephen Gosling and Blair McMillen. AME’s concerts have featured an even broader range of repertoire. Paterson is particularly proud of the pieces the ensemble has presented by composers from all over the country—music that might not have otherwise been heard in New York City.

AME’s repertoire is also not biased toward any specific musical style. Despite Robert and Victoria’s use of the word “modern” for both the ensemble and the record company, there isn’t a specifically “modernist” agenda to the music promulgated. Inevitably, however, a lot of what the ensemble plays, as well as what the record label releases, channel Robert’s own compositional proclivities. Some of his music, like the Elegy for two bassoons and piano or the frequently ravishing The Thin Ice of Your Fragile Mind, belie a clear inheritance from the mid-century Americana of composers like Aaron Copland and Virgil Thomson. There’s an almost Ivesian quirkiness to his Crimson Earth, a 1999 concerto for the somewhat improbable combination of violin and symphonic band, as well as a sense of humor worthy of Peter Schickele. On the other hand, works like the other-worldly Star Crossing and the off-kilter Quintus reveal a kinship with later timbre-focused composers like George Crumb and Joseph Schwantner. And while minimalism and post-minimalism do not seem to have had a direct influence on Robert’s own compositional forms, he professes a deep admiration for Steve Reich and a close listen to his own music reveals an undeniable familiarity and affinity with the aesthetics of composers like John Adams in its propulsive and often frenetic rhythmic drive. And, indeed, many of these composers have appeared on AME programs. Robert Paterson’s 2011 composition The Book of Goddesses, a hefty, nearly 40-minute trio for flute, harp, and percussion which has just been released on American Modern Recordings, further ups the ante; it is informed by the musical traditions of India, China, Ireland, Greece, Nigeria, Cuba, and Native Americans. However, at least with AME, Paterson’s focus is exclusively on music being made in the Americas.

“I think our group is open to anything,” exclaims Paterson. “As long as the main focus of it is—for lack of a better phrase—concert music, music that you are supposed to sit for and enjoy. If we feel we’ve gone down the minimalist road for too long, we’ll do something else. There are certain segments we haven’t explored enough; we haven’t done New Complexity that much, if at all. Serial and twelve-tone music we haven’t done a lot of, but there’s time and hopefully we’ll get to that. I’m pretty open to just about anything. The only two divisions we have in the American Modern Ensemble are that we don’t do any European or Asian music. But we will do [music from] Central and South America. I don’t think enough of us know what’s going on in South America […] and we’d like to try to fix that if we can. And we’re not into pop or jazz. That’s really not what we’re about, unless it’s worked into a concert music setting. There are some divisions that are being taken down anyway. Most of the composers out there are writing music where I don’t even know if they’d know what to call it.”

Given his seeming total immersion in the self-sufficient indie world of chamber music, it’s somewhat surprising that Paterson is also very attracted to the orchestra—an ensemble which virtually no one has ever managed to pull off as a DIY endeavor. In the coming days, he will have the opportunity to hear his Dark Mountains, a new composition for orchestra, in a total of eight different locations as part of the Vermont Symphony Orchestra’s “Made in Vermont” tour. These kinds of thematically oriented concert tours involving new music, which are commonplace for chamber groups, are all too rare in the orchestral community, but still it doesn’t come without hitches.

“I was limited to no percussion, only timpani, no brass except horns, a handful of winds and all strings,” admits Paterson. “Although there’s plenty of color you can get out of all those instruments, I felt a little sad about it. But it was O.K. […] There’s a grandness to the orchestra that you’re never going to get out of a chamber group even if it’s amplified. There’s something wonderful about looking at a stage full of people and seeing them all working together and creating these beautiful sounds—there’s nothing that’s going to replace that. I love orchestras; I played in orchestras when I was younger for many, many years. I’ve spent my whole life wanting to do this and it’s been hard, but if I had my way I’d do a lot more of this. I love interacting and collaborating, so I love working with conductors and talking with the performers and figuring things out.”

Paterson will get to do more orchestral writing later this season, also for musicians in Vermont. In May 2012 the Vermont Youth Orchestra and Chorus under the direction of Jeffrey Domoto will premiere a new twenty-minute work by him. So writing another large-scale composition will be yet another activity to work into his busy schedule in the coming months.

“I do feel like my life is a little crazy,” Paterson acknowledges. “I do so many different things, I wear so many hats, that I’m constantly trying to balance everything. So I get up every day and I have to make myself lists. I have a little routine that I do. I check my email for a few minutes and then I’ll go to work and do some stuff for a while. I’ll compose or whatever. I’ll eat lunch and then I’ll compose some more, and then more email for the rest of the day unless it’s a non-composing day—I have some. I wish I had a golden formula; I don’t. Every day is a different set of circumstances.”

“I can’t get enough. Really, I can’t!” Choi admits, acknowledging that this personality trait is a driving force in her career. “People ask me, ‘Why do you do all this stuff? Just say no!’ But the thing is, it’s all music to me and it’s all an experience.”

Choi’s training began traditionally enough, with violin lessons at five and a more serious personal commitment to the instrument at twelve, a turn Choi attributes to the beauty of the concerto repertoire she was playing at the time. Contemporary music was also already within her sightlines, mostly through recordings of other violinists like Maria Bachmann and Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, as well as the generous contemporary programming of her local orchestra, the Oregon Symphony under the direction of James DePreist. But it wasn’t repertoire she necessarily saw herself playing—yet. “The new music pieces are the ones that really drew me, especially the percussion and brass. I was really just blown away by all the different kinds of sounds,” she explains. “But I didn’t know that ‘new music’ is what I would really find a knack for.”

Eventually, however, the fit became clear. The repertoire attracted her both by its variety and its challenges. It wasn’t just music for violin and piano, but for violin and percussion, for violin and celesta. It wasn’t a performing life that involved playing the masterworks with an orchestra most weekends of the year, and that suited her perfectly well.

“I found more anxiety trying to play the Sibelius Concerto as perfectly as possible than exploring this new music,” she says, clarifying that “you do have to bring that same refinement to new music, so the difference would be that it hasn’t been interpreted as many times. There isn’t this comparison factor with new music, and I think that for me that’s been really liberating.”

Despite this attraction to performing on her own terms, Choi didn’t really start working without a net until she began improvising, thanks to an invitation from the composer and percussionist Susie Ibarra. She says that the world of improv was not something she even really understood until after she had finished at Juilliard and started performing professionally.

At first the experience challenged her, but through working with Ibarra and the pianist Craig Taborn, she found her footing and her voice. “Improv is the most amazing thing that any musician could do because here you’re allowed to just play,” Choi says, her enthusiasm audible. “I feel like in improv you’re really digging through your soul.”

Working in all these various genres makes it increasingly difficult for Choi to compartmentalize her various playing styles, though she says she can still pull out “that pristine Lincoln Center violinist” when the situation calls for it. The only thing she seems uninterested in is being only that, which makes her recent appointment as the new violinist with the ETHEL string quartet an especially sweet fit.

“I can’t even listen to a whole piece on the radio, a lot of times,” Choi confesses, laughing. “And that’s why ETHEL is perfect. They play music that you can’t classify so easily. So for me, I think I’ve finally found a space where I can stay for a while. That’s what I’m hoping.”

Composition was not something Redman initially considered as a creative outlet. When he arrived at University of Maryland, Baltimore County in the mid-’90s, the reluctant undergrad was a percussionist and a pen and ink artist, but says he couldn’t read music beyond snare and drum set parts. While under the instruction of Stuart Saunders Smith, he began exploring everything from Berio to late Coltrane, and the worlds of percussion, composition, and improvisation began to lead him towards a music of his own making.

Sample from Study for the beginning of Weight by Will Redman

“You’re already starting to bend the rules for notation” when adapting traditional scoring to percussion, Redman explains, “so it wasn’t anything that I thought was sacred.”

It took him only a couple of experimental tries to find the start of the compositional path he was looking for, but another ten years to get a firm hold on it. “It didn’t take long for me to figure out that the visual aspect of the score was almost as important to me as what I thought it sounded like. And so I’ve become more concerned with, well, I have some idea of what I think this sounds like, but I’m more interested in what the performer thinks this sounds like.”

During that intervening decade he continued to produce scores and earned his Ph.D. at SUNY Buffalo, but it wasn’t until he produced Book, a collection of 98 graphic compositions that is “available for interpretation (however radical) by any performer(s) in any place at any time in any part for any duration” that he felt he had fully realized the music he envisioned when he first set out. “When I get questions, I like to say, ‘I’ve got answers for you or maybe I’ve got suggestions, but I’d rather that you answered it.’ Part of the idea of some of the superimposed notation [in Book] I hope is that it just sends the message to the performer that this notation exists in a space where there aren’t straight answers.”

The composer’s performance score for Book

The interpretive flexibility his scoring offers, indeed demands, of its players lies at the heart of what Redman’s work is all about. It’s a characteristic that working with improvisers like John Dierker first led him towards, when his understanding of various sound worlds made sense in his ears but not on the page. He turned to his own system of “unsystematic notation” both to express his ideas most accurately as well as to allow the performers room to draw on their own skills and preferences as they bring the work to life for an audience. Redman himself has participated in highly rehearsed performances of his work, to which he showed up and added pages to the score that the performers had never seen before to keep those moments of fresh interpretation in the music.

Sample page from Book by Will Redman

Not all of Redman’s scores are so radically notated, but his attraction to dense music makes for a lot of black ink on the page. In the interest of speed and productivity, he has put down his pen and begun using Finale software to produce some of his conventionally notated work, but he says he’s still “a slave to the graphic composition.”

“When the graphic [look of the music] versus the sound does a battle, it’s always in the conventional stuff,” Redman admits. “I guess the unsystematic notation is sort of the answer to that battle. Here’s a way I can have my cake and eat it too because there is no one specific sound of the piece. There are a lot of different manifestations of it.”

Sample from Scroll by Will Redman

That said, she makes no apologies for it. There is a visceral and infectious level of enthusiasm that she brings to her performances and commissioning activities that is also evident in her commitment to her hosting duties at the online new music radio station Q2. “I’m actually not shy about this,” she says matter-of-factly. “I have a weirdly corporate mission statement which I’m comfortable expressing which is that everything I do—and it’s a lot of varied things—is in the service of bringing new music to new audiences.”

As the child of an intensely musical family, the seeds of this commitment were planted early (though the commitment to practicing and doing the work required to support it didn’t come until much later, she fully admits). “There was actually no point in my life when I wasn’t going to be a musician,” she says of her early years. “There was a period of time when I thought I was going to be a composer, a period of time when I thought I was going to be a conductor. I thought I was going to be a singer. I tried to be a pianist for, like, two months when I was five. So there was no point at which I thought I wasn’t going to be a musician, although what kind of musician that would be was sort of up in the air.”

As she cruised into her teenage years, however, the support of a great teacher and the experience of attending the Baltimore School for the Arts helped clarify her musical path, especially when it came to switching from the violin to the viola. The move shifted her musical life from a place where she was “playing all Kreisler, all the time” in order to perfect certain technical acrobatics over to an instrument and course of study that involved “dark, brooding, Hindemith stuff.”

With the viola, she felt at home. “I can actually sing the entire range of my instrument,” Sirota explains, “so there’s something about the viola being in the range that my voice is also in and having that kind of vocal expressive quality to it that I think really, really appeals since that’s the first way that I figured out how to make music.”

Though when chatting with her now it’s hard to imagine this high-octane creative personality spending six years in “a very conservative institution” like Juilliard, she says the training was really good for her. In addition to laying the groundwork for future projects and collaborations, like her long association with the composer Nico Muhly, she was able to test and hone the musician she was to become in a place “where you’re trying to figure out how to be correct and be as ‘good’ as possible, for lack of a better term. You’re striving toward some kind of ideal which is really, really complicated to figure out.” In the process of taking those skills and moving forward into her professional career, however, “I’ve discovered more and more that the reason that people want to work with me or the reason that composers are interested in writing for me is because I don’t play…a sanitized ideal of what the viola is supposed to sound like. I play like I play, and I make phrases the way that I do. And I sort of go over the top a lot of the time and I try to be very communicative and all these kinds of things. I think that’s what makes me an interesting player, honesty, but it took me a while to get there.”

One place she has ended up is deep into fruitful collaborative relationships with composers, a good portrait of which is available on her first solo album, First Things First, which consists of works she commissioned to play herself. It’s a strategy she finds creatively invigorating. “You don’t have the burden of 250 years of performance practice, it’s just whatever I want to do,” Sirota admits. “In a way commissioning all these pieces is very, very selfish, but I love it. And it just means that I feel super free to figure out what I think the music is doing and just try to communicate that as clearly as possible to the audience.”

Like many composers today, Czernowin is not attached to any one place and her trans-nationality informs her outlook more than any specific geographical roots. And in her particular case, as the child of parents who fled the Nazis and a relative of others who were less fortunate, identifying with a specific nationality actually has some extremely unpleasant associations:

Growing up in Israel one is so imprinted with the identity of nationality and being a Jew after the Second World War. When I went with my father to a wedding everybody said, “She looks just like your sister,” who of course was murdered in the Holocaust. When you’re born with such a weight, it’s very natural that when you get to adolescence the last thing you want to hear about is nationality, origin, or anything connected to that. You just want to be a person, an ahistoric individual who believes in individuality. And that’s what I’ve been. It took me a long time to re-connect and to assume the weight of my origin and nationality and get into a more aware dialog with it.

Czernowin’s seeming aloofness from personal roots has led to an unusually omnivorous music, even by today’s standards. While she has written important repertoire for long-established instrumental combinations including her 1995 String Quartet, composed for the Arditti, and the powerful string sextet Dam Sheon Hachol from 1992, she gravitates more often toward extremely unusual combinations as in the extraordinary 1995 composition Die Kreuzung, a trio for alto saxophone, double bass, and u (a Japanese mouth organ with a lower range than the still exotic, but more common sho). Even more typical of her work are compositions like MAIM—a massive work requiring a large orchestra and five soloists (one of which is a tubax of which there are only five in the world), plus live electronics, and non-narrative music theatre works such as the opera Pnima…ins Innere or Adama, a work created to co-exist with but not in any way connect to Mozart’s incomplete Zaïde.

While she admits that the work she creates might in part be the result of having lived all over the world, she is quick to point out that—for example—her interest and subsequent immersion into Japanese music happened long before she ever lived in Japan. As in her stage works, there is no clear trajectory for how her music has evolved or how it should be perceived. And that’s exactly the way she likes it. She does not want her music to be understood immediately and is very wary of the belief that artistic creations should be accessible. But that doesn’t mean that she wants to be hermetically sealed off from audiences either, although she acknowledges that her path is “a strange bridge to go”:

For me accessibility could be redeemed by a different word, maybe an engagement. […] You don’t want to write music that will actually be so covered and so internalized and indecipherable that no one can get in and no one would like to even have the interest to get in. So there are some things in the music that need to call out and say while you’re not getting in now, there are things here that you can hold onto in a second or third listening that will get you in the future, if you will engage.

It seems odd that she would choose to come here given how specialized her music is and the immense support that she has received for it in other places—MAIM, a work that would require a huge commitment from a presenter to be mounted here just once, has already been performed in Donaueschingen, Salzburg, and Berlin. But that seeming greater difficulty in being able to realize her goals was actually a lure to some extent, as was her belief that we are actually now in the beginnings of a contemporary music renaissance in the United States.

I think (especially in composition) we are having a grass roots revolution, or evolution. And almost every day there are really good concerts of new music, very complex music which is very demanding and those players can play it. That was not the case ten years ago; nobody could play this music. Things are [now] really active and growing. We can ride a wave that exists already and we can help it materialize somehow. I never felt that in America before, but now I do.

Indeed, despite her own intentional rootlessness, the new music community in the United States has clearly welcomed her return here. In addition to her stint at Harvard, a series of four extremely fine recordings of her music on Mode plus a portrait concert devoted to her music performed by the Either/Or ensemble at Columbia University’s Miller Theatre earlier this year has shown how devoted Americans are to her unique compositional aesthetic.

“For a long time I said if I didn’t start composing when I did, I would totally have ended up in jail,” Little admits, recalling how he once relied on music as a way to work out his anger and frustration with the world around him. The young composer and drummer kept clear of law enforcement, however, and instead sought out broad exposure to different approaches to music. It was an educational journey that began at Susquehanna University and Tanglewood, and extended on to The University of Michigan and Princeton, where he recently completed his PhD. Academic training took him so far, but as he listened and experimented with sound, he developed the confidence to follow his instincts when it came to his own work, no matter where they led. At a certain point, he says, “I came to a conclusion that I couldn’t really worry if other composers liked what I was doing, that I just had to really believe in it and not worry too much about anything else.” It’s a grounding philosophy that continues to guide his music today.

In addition to Newspeak, Little’s composing and performing outlets continue to diversify. Filling the remaining hours in the day, Little has also taken on the position of executive director of the MATA Festival in New York, a stewardship he shares with the organization’s artistic director, Yotam Haber. Little’s own open ideas about music made the position a particularly good fit, even if it eats in to his already busy composing schedule. There are upcoming premieres of music he is now writing for larger forces: the New World Symphony and the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, as well as a slot on the New York City Opera’s annual VOX festival. Simply fitting all this creative work into the time available has provided Little with a certain clarity. “You don’t have time to lie to yourself about what you think is good or not,” he says, pointing to works like his opera Vinkensport, which—with a nod toward the value of his academic training—he says he was able to write with surprising speed. But it required hard choices made quickly. “I had to be completely open and completely honest about what I was writing or else it would have been impossible.”

He did, however, have teachers who asked hard questions and helped him find his way towards the kind of music he wanted to create, work that is political but not ideological. When William Bolcom challenged that he didn’t need a piece of music to tell him that war is bad, Little went looking for something deeper, “where you’re saying more than that, and you’re getting into something that isn’t obvious. You’re getting into something that isn’t about changing anyone’s mind, but about opening up some sort of dialog.” It’s the kind of work he’s come to refer to as the “politics of bearing witness,” using art as way to ask powerful questions rather than deliver proscribed answers.

“I think now historically it’s easy to erase that things happened—frighteningly so,” Little acknowledges. But it has also become his call to action. “A political role that an artist can inhabit is to counter that.”

The lesson is to be willing to take chances, according to Vrebalov. “My relationship with authority is very different from the people who grew up here and who I went to school with when I moved to San Francisco,” she explains. “I think that relaxed and kind of naïve attitude towards authority led to that relationship with the Kronos Quartet, because I simply mailed my score and said, ‘I’m in San Francisco and I would really love to meet with you.’ They heard a piece and invited me to meet with them. When you’re replanted from your own environment, in a way it becomes simpler.”

Kronos Quartet’s embrace of Vrebalov’s music has resulted in their commissioning a total of five works from her thus far including Pannonica Boundless, a 1998 work that was subsequently published by Boosey & Hawkes in their Kronos Collection, Volume 1, was recorded by both Kronos and the TAJJ Quartet, and was just recently performed in a showcase during the 2011 Chamber Music America by the Voxare Quartet as well. It’s starting to feel like standard repertoire. And two different performances of a more recent work, The Spell III (2008) for violin and live electronics, were released on separate recordings last year, by Ana Milosavljevic on Innova and by Elizabeth Cooney on a disc issued by the Louth Contemporary Music Society in Ireland.

But coming to the USA from Serbia not only jump started Vrebalov’s compositional career early on, it also gave her a whole new context for what it means to be a composer by reshaping her world view about music. As a result of studying in both San Francisco and Ann Arbor and then subsequently moving to New York City, she has a broader understanding of our cultural landscape than most composers who were born here do. During her undergraduate studies in San Francisco, Vrebalov became part of a scene where “everything is possible creatively and that creatively everything is also acceptable.” That complete openness was a sea change from what she had experienced in Serbia where, according to her, there were “very rigid strict rules, or expectations, about what is a piece of music at the end of the 20th century.” Her subsequent graduate work in Ann Arbor put her in a different kind of environment, one which was “so vibrant intellectually […] not only for music but also for cutting edge science and a whole discourse that’s about progress and what we can do together.” But perhaps her greatest artistic epiphanies are happening for her now that she is living in New York City, a place where she is able to experience “all those ideas about worlds merging on all different levels” on a daily basis. In each of these three American cities a firm belief in the viability of multiple stylistic possibilities was reinforced and she now acknowledges jubilantly that she “discovered I like the American kind of pluralism in music.”

As a result, Vrebalov’s own music transformed into a deeply emotional music which, ironically, even though it clearly echoes the centuries-old traditions of her native land, probably would not and could not have been composed if she had stayed there:

I became aware of my roots much more after I moved here. I think it’s a common phenomenon: people realize where they’re from once they leave the place where they’re from. […] Modernism was something that we grew up with and this was the kind of aesthetic that we all supported without questioning it because we were surrounded by that. It’s a matter of exposure. But it’s more complicated than that. In the years I was growing up, the wars started and the wars were initiated by nationalists and I certainly didn’t want to be associated with that. It was really not an option to use any kind of material that would remind you of your own cultural or national background because that meant that you sided with people who used that for political reasons. Even when I came to the States, I realized that the kind of music and the tradition that I am coming from and that I am interested in posed an ethical question: Do I really want to go into that knowing what kinds of things it was used for?

The emotionally painful and violent dissolution of Yugoslavia into six separate sovereign states, which Vrebalov experienced firsthand, reignited a lot of the same kinds of factionalisms that threatened to tear all of Europe apart during the course of two World Wars. In fact, modernism’s eschewing of anything that reeked of nationalist sentiments was born of a direct response to the horrors that nationalism had wrought on Europe. So for Vrebalov to bring it back into her own music, coming from this background, was an incredibly difficult decision. But ultimately it helped her to find her own compositional voice, a voice that has had a tremendous impact on audiences both here and abroad.

It is also music with a tremendous social conscience. In works such as hold me, neighbor, in this storm, the sounds of Serbian Orthodox church bells merge with the Islamic calls to prayer heard in Bosnia-Herzogovina and Kosovo, a collage that transcends national identities and transforms them into larger sonic metaphors for co-existence and mutual understanding. And in her opera, Milena, which will be performed in her home town of Novi Sad, she honors a different kind of potential Serbian national hero, Mileva Maric, the tragic first wife of Albert Einstein who might have had some influence in the formulation of his revolutionary theories but who has largely been forgotten. For Vrebalov, close attention to the traditions of the past—its role models as well as its victims, its tragedies as well as its triumphs—has allowed her to forge an extremely effective music for our own time.