Category: Spotlight

Bora Yoon: The Weight of Magic

Posted on June 18, 2014 by Alexandra Gardner - Conversations, Spotlight

Although composers are always constructing new sonic worlds, Bora Yoon is super-charging that idea through her multimedia and site-specific works. She performs using her voice, her violin, an array of sound-making objects of assorted shapes and sizes, and live electronics, as well as with video projections to create immersive environments that, as she puts it, “transport people somewhere, and return them, hopefully changed from the experience.”

Her latest project, Sunken Cathedral, is not site-specific in the traditional sense, but rather involves the creation of a multi-dimensional artistic structure in a four-part, year-long rollout process from blueprint (audio CD) to finished structure in the form of a fully staged multimedia production that will premiere in January 2015 at the Prototype Festival. In between those two bookends are planned releases of a vinyl double album on the Innova label, created as a limited edition fine art piece, and a trilogy of interactive music videos designed for the iPad in collaboration with the Gralbum Collective. The idea is that each form of media will build upon the previous one, adding additional sensory input and engaging listeners and audience members in a different context, providing specific views of the project that can be experienced individually, or as a whole, in the same way that one might stroll around a space to take in different aspects of a performance. Sonically, Sunken Cathedral references a vast range of musical styles, from early music to industrial electronic to music concrète, speaking both to Yoon’s diverse musical identity and to the quickly shifting time we live in.

Yoon wanted to use the title Sunken Cathedral—already famously employed by Debussy, as well as by graphic artist M. C. Escher—because, like those other works, she says, “It offers the language to speak about the invisible—the architectural context, the idea of reflections in a binary world. That there are the actual things of reality, and there are the things that lie beneath the surface…and the idea of how we separate our worlds in that way, whether it’s day and night, or conscious and subconscious, or the physical world and the metaphysical world…and what happens when you explore the full circle of that.”

Yoon comes by her fascination with architectural sonic experience and cathedrals through direct personal exposure; since 2007 she has been a member of the choir at The Church of Ascension in New York City, and she cites her time spent singing in that space as a primary force of inspiration. “The more I sang at Ascension,” she explains, “the more I started to look up, and to realize that the church really is a metaphor for the body. That the arches are the rib cage, and the swells of the organ are lungs, and the idea that the invisible that we don’t see in the church, the Holy Spirit, is the idea of breath that’s inside us.” The sense of transport created with the combined horizontal and vertical nature of choral music, and the sense of ritual imbued in music intended for particular purposes and/or times of day and night, are concepts that have deeply affected her creative process.

The interdependence of conscious and subconscious is always on Yoon’s mind as she creates her musical worlds. She is entranced by sonic associations and triggers, often questioning why exactly a sound is interesting to her, what associations it might evoke, both for herself and for others, and the effects of layering sonic material from disparate contexts and of varying tempos. Her performances employ a large array of sound-making objects—in addition to violin and keyboard—such as bowls and assorted kitchen utensils, pieces of glass, small drums, glockenspiel, and cell phones. She feels strongly that as part of the performance experience the audience should be able to see where exactly the sound they are hearing is coming from and how it is being made, in order to take in the full sensory impression of the moment at hand. During performances, Yoon moves around the space, triggering sounds that are then sustained by looping electronics; starting a record player, kneeling to strike a metal bowl, reaching for an old flip phone that she amplifies through her vocal mic, all while singing melodies that build upon one another into a layered chorus atop cyclical musical twinkles, scratches, and violin tones.

“It does mean that I carry around the kitchen sink,” she admits, laughing at the image. “But I do feel that for as much as that is a huge pain in the ass, that’s also the same measure of how it will be magical, and why it will be otherworldly, and something people will remember. So I always tell myself when I am dragging around 400 pounds of gear, ‘This is the weight of magic!'”
Indeed, through her insightful working process and captivating performances, Bora Yoon is building a world of her own, one that speaks clearly to her identity, but that also invites others in to discover what they will. She creates an overarching sense of both the personal and the universal through the transformation of a space, and through the sensation of time spent within it.

Aaron Parks: Make Me Believe a Melody

Posted on April 16, 2014 by Frank J. Oteri - Conversations, Spotlight

Video presentation and photography by Alexandra Gardner
I first became aware of Aaron Parks when he was still a teenager. His mother handed me a CD featuring his trio at a gathering of the Jazz Journalists Association. Called The Promise, the disc featured two originals and a bunch of jazz standards. Although listening to the recording was hardly a life-changing experience, Parks’s piano playing was already extraordinarily sensitive and his improvisations had a remarkable fluidity that sounded as if he had a lifelong immersion in this music. This seemed odd given that he hadn’t lived that long up until that point and that he grew up outside of Seattle in the final decade of the 20^th century, a time when most of his contemporaries were into grunge rather than straight-ahead jazz.

But Aaron Parks, who recently turned 30, was not a typical kid. He was playing both jazz piano and classical bassoon by age 10. At age 14, he skipped high school to enroll at the University of Washington and, by the age of 17, he was named a National Merit Scholar and a Presidential Scholar in the Arts. Soon after that, he transferred to the Manhattan School of Music, where he studied with legendary pianist Kenny Barron and continued to record albums with groups he led, one a year. Before his 20^th birthday, he had released a total of four CDs, the most impressive of which was The Wizard, which consisted exclusively of original material performed by a trumpet/alto sax/piano/bass/drums quintet.

“There are a few of the songs from that record which I still really like,” said Parks when I spoke to him last month at his Brooklyn apartment. “In particular I really like ‘Planting Flowers’; that’s even in my current repertoire. I just pulled it out to give it a go again. [Ed. note: It was part of the quartet set he played at the NYC jazz club Smalls on April 2 and 3.] I feel mostly disconnected [to that music], but I look back every now and then. I smile to myself listening to those old records. … In retrospect, sometimes I feel a little bit goofy about having all of those records out there. The whole child prodigy thing can be dangerous. When everybody around you is sort of telling you [that] you’re special, you’re like, ‘Oh, well, maybe I need to be special.’ It makes you feel like you can’t just be. You can’t just be a person. You need to live up to this idea of the story others have been telling you.”
So despite his very clear abilities and his artistic drive, he decided to sit in the back seat for a while after the fourth of these albums, Shadows (2002), which included a cover of the Radiohead song “Knives Out.” “I knew that I wasn’t ready,” Parks admitted. “I knew that I wanted to get some real experience. I could have kept on going and doing stuff as ‘the young piano guy,’ but I knew that I needed some more depth.”

What wound up happening is the stuff of legend. Trumpeter and composer Terence Blanchard, whom Parks had met only briefly a year earlier, called him up and invited him to attend a live XM radio show moderated by Wynton Marsalis on which Blanchard was scheduled to perform with a group that also featured pianist Chick Corea. Parks skipped his Afro-Cuban Big Band rehearsal at MSM and rushed downtown. It turned out that Corea couldn’t make the gig, so Blanchard asked Parks to play with the group. He wound up being Blanchard’s pianist for five years, touring the world and releasing three albums on Blue Note, among them the 2008 Grammy Award-winning A Tale of God’s Will (A Requiem for Katrina). Although he remained a sideman, each of these albums featured one of his own compositions.

“Terence was really interested in compositions from all the band members,” Parks remembered. “That became one of the hallmarks of that band. Most of the guys wrote music for it, carrying on the tradition of Art Blakey mentoring young musicians. That’s a trip because Terence is such a heavy composer.”

A pensive Aaron Parks at the piano.

One of the pieces Parks contributed to the repertoire of Blanchard’s group was “Harvesting Dance,” an unusual tune largely derived from the harmonies of Arvo Pärt Fratres. “I like these chords so I think I’ll take them,” Parks acknowledged. “I love Arvo Pärt; he’s one of the deepest. I listen to whatever crosses my path and whatever I feel some sort of connection to. I don’t really make distinctions between genres.”

That open-mindedness has led Parks to participate in a wide array of musical endeavors in the years since he left Blanchard’s outfit, working in groups led by musicians as diverse as guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel, drummer Kendrick Scott, saxophonist Justin Vasquez, vocalist Gretchen Parlato, and Danish bassist Anders Christensen in whose trio he played alongside the late Paul Motian. Parks even appears on the indie rock album Dreams Come True, the debut studio recording by CANT, a group fronted by Grizzly Bear member Chris Taylor. But perhaps the most unusual project Parks has been involved with thus far is a collaboration with South Korean-born vocalist Yeahwon Shin and accordionist Rob Curto combining traditional Korean melodies and free improv; they are about to embark on a nationwide tour in support of their debut album Lua ya, which was released last November on ECM. Almost anything is fair game:

I like music and I like songs and I like sounds. … I like to put myself in situations where I’m a little bit out of my comfort zone. I do also want to have some sort of entry point to the music, though. I want to be challenged all the time, but I don’t want to only be challenged in my head. So music which is purely cerebral, or feels that way to me, I don’t tend to have quite as much of an attraction towards. But if it’s cerebral and I can dance to it, or it makes me feel something, there’s more of a chance.

All of these projects have also fed back into his own creations as a composer and bandleader in his own right. Shortly after leaving Blanchard, Parks recorded an album of all originals for Blue Note called Invisible Cinema for which he assembled a quartet of guitar, bass, and drums in addition to himself (here not only on piano, but also on glockenspiel and mellotron). “Harvesting Dance,” the aforementioned Pärt-inspired piece, made a re-appearance here but in a completely new guise. Another one of the album’s tracks, “Nemesis,” showed how deeply he had internalized the ambiguous harmonic language of Radiohead by that point. All in all, this first album as a leader in six years (since the last of his four youthful efforts) was worlds away from the mostly straight-ahead approach of his teens.

“I was pretty consciously trying to make something that didn’t have traditional jazz rhythms,” Parks explained. “I wanted to try to find some sort of rhythm of our time. At the time I was making that record, I had been scouring blogs for tracks by indie rock bands and was hearing all these new textures and different ways of structuring songs aside from a typical jazz thing. People had been doing that for a long time in the [jazz] scene, but for me it was pretty much brand new and I was just discovering it.”
It would be another five years before an additional two albums got released under his name, two albums that are almost polar opposites. One, Alive in Japan, was simply a lo-fi recording of a December 2012 trio date at a club in Japan combining originals and standards that harken back to his roots. He has made it available for free download on Bandcamp where he states, “If for some reason you feel compelled to contribute something, consider donating to a charity in Japan (or elsewhere in the world), or buying someone else’s record with the money you didn’t spend on this one.” The other, Arborescence, is an introspective series of solo piano improvisations recorded in the extremely resonant Mechanics Hall in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 2011 and released two years later on ECM, a label treasured by audiophiles for its pristine sound.

“I was recording it with a friend of mine just to see what happened,” Parks acknowledged. “They were just things that happened. We had the recording equipment up and we were there for a few days. I did all sorts of stuff while I was there: I played some of my pieces, I played standards, and I played a bunch of these improvisations—listening back to it, those were the things that felt the most as if they were being inhabited, like I was fully present for them.”

For Parks, being present in the moment of performance is ultimately more important than creating a great original melody or playing it back perfectly. It’s something he tries to do in whatever context he is put in. And it’s something he wishes more musicians would be given the opportunity to focus on in today’s overextended working environment:

One of the problems with the scene today is everybody is so busy doing so many different things. Most people are pretty proficient at doing a lot of things; you can give somebody some music and they’ll read all of the notes and it’ll be great. But then they’re onto the next gig. I don’t want music to just be information like that. … There’s a focus on being an individual; you’ve got to do your own thing at all costs, being original so to speak. But they focus on that one particular side of what original means. Originality is not only creating something new, it’s also having authentic presence—being fully present in the interpretation of what you’re doing. … I want people who can play a part—inhabiting it fully—and make me believe a melody. I don’t want you to play the melody; I want you to sing it to me. That’s a rare thing.

Joel Puckett: Real Life Inspiration

Posted on March 19, 2014 by Alexandra Gardner - Conversations, Spotlight

“Write what you know” is a commonly heard piece for advice for artists, but composer Joel Puckett has taken to heart a slightly different version of this sentiment, which could be stated, “Write what you live.” He finds inspiration for his compositions from events in his own life, and is refreshingly open about the motivations for his pieces, which are often highly emotional. For instance, his work The Shadow of Sirius, a concerto for flute, flute choir, and wind ensemble, is about losing a child through a miscarriage that his wife and he experienced, and he says the process of “getting those emotions out in the music” helped him heal.

“It has to be about the things I’m feeling,” Puckett says of his musical output. “The music I write is a time capsule of how I was feeling while I was working on it. I wouldn’t have it any other way. I really can listen to these pieces and remember in some cases things like what I had for breakfast that day, a conversation my wife and I had… for me, the moments are right there on the surface.”

Those moments are most often created for large ensembles such as orchestra and symphonic wind ensemble, to which Puckett has always gravitated, generally preferring the “big crayon box” as a means to recreate the multi-layered textures he hears in his imagination. His background as a singer also informs his composing process, and recording his own vocal improvisations is the primary method he uses for generating musical material. During a three-year residency with the Chicago Youth Symphony Orchestra he composed Concerto Duo for brothers Demarre and Anthony McGill, on flute and clarinet respectively, which featured all the ensembles under the CYSO umbrella (that’s six different orchestras) on one stage. But while he loves creating beautiful sustained textures and webs of counterpoint through the natural reverberation of large instrument groups, he is also highly attuned to the individuals within those groups, and the practicality of what he is asking them to play.

Not a whole lot of people talk about the physical demands that are being placed on the individual—not the instrument—the individual who happens to be putting the instrument to their face. If you’re not thinking about the person, then the parts are just paint by numbers/Connect Four…. It’s not real music until you’re thinking about the individual. And if you’re thinking about the individual, you’re thinking about the fact that they have to breathe; how much air does it take to play this note? How much velocity does it take to do this? Am I really taking care of their arm, or their physicality in this passage if they’ve been doing four-string cross string arpeggiation patterns for eight minutes before that? It’s not a question of can they do it. Of course they can do it. But is it going to put them in the best position possible to succeed?

Puckett’s sense of practicality also extends to the business side of his musical life. He says the question he is asked most often is how he gets so many performances—hundreds each year—and he says that it’s essentially about making real connections with people who share similar musical interests and values. He has a firm grip on what he is doing, what he wants to do in the future, and those clear perceptions allow him to find the people and organizations that are a good fit for him and his creative work. His goal is to gather a community of people who believe in his work—and vice versa—that will enable him to continue to write the best music he possibly can, and to continue growing as an artist for years to come.

Kamala Sankaram: Being One with the Performance

Posted on February 19, 2014 by Frank J. Oteri - Conversations, Spotlight

Video footage filmed by Spencer McCormick, edited by Molly Sheridan.
Like many music makers of her generation, Kamala Sankaram creates and performs work which is an amalgamation of a wide range of musical traditions. But at the root of everything she does, there is usually a strong sense of drama. This narrative tendency has taken a variety of forms: it could be a chamber music piece that includes a theatrical component, like her flute and violin duo Slam or Bruja-Ha! for horns, strings and drumkit, a wonderfully loopy score for Signe Baumane’s award-winning animated film Dentist, or cabaret-style indie-pop meets Yma Sumac gigs in clubs with her band Bombay Rickey in which the individual songs’ narrative arcs are exploited for maximum impact.

Most recently, she took on the most vaunted form of “dramma per musica”—opera—with Thumbprint, which was one of the highlights of the 2014 Prototype Festival. But both Sankaram and her collaborator, librettist Susan Yankowitz, wanted to create an opera which countered the ubiquitous female stereotypes within the genre—femme fatales or women who are ruined and ultimately die. Musicologist Carolyn Abbate’s 1991 book Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Century had a profound impact on Sankaram when she first read it as did the real life story of a Pakistani woman named Mukhtar Ma’i. Mukhtar survived a gang rape and was the first such victim to file charges against her assailants; traditionally women so assaulted became outcasts, but she went on to found a school for women and is now an internationally prominent human rights activist. In Mukhtar’s inspirational transformation, Sankaram found the ideal fit for a new gender paradigm for opera:

We celebrate the submissive woman in opera. The tendency is that if the woman’s voice is too strong, we have to quiet it. Lulu has to die. Medea has to die. So it was really important for Susan and for me to show this woman who becomes very powerful in the classic sense of the operatic tradition. In the beginning of the show, her vocal part is contained to just the middle of the voice. It isn’t until she makes her decision [to report the rape] that she starts singing the more coloratura passages with higher notes; that was very deliberate.

Sankaram, however, is quick to point out that Thumbprint is about much more than that gang rape and despite the media’s recent focus on similar horrific incidents throughout the Indian subcontinent, that part of the world does not have a monopoly on violence toward women.

All of the Indian and Pakistani people who saw it thanked me first of all for being culturally sensitive but also for telling the story in a way that was moving for them and accessible to them. But this is not a piece about Pakistan, or a piece about Muslims or even, at its heart, a piece about rape. This is about Mukhtar’s experience and how it transforms her from someone who doesn’t have a voice to someone who has become a global force for women’s rights. That was something that was really important to me, that if people from that part of the world came to the show that they would not feel that I was wagging a finger at them or that Susan and I were saying, “Oh, this is a problem only among illiterate Muslims.” If you look at America, we’re not that different. Colleges don’t tend to go after football stars who have been accused of rape until after they have graduated and are no longer useful. So you have all of these girls who are doing everything they’re supposed to do: they do the rape kit, they go to the police. And still, nothing happens. So it’s not that we’re so different from India and Pakistan; we have our own culture that needs to have the silence broken around it.

Sankaram is clearly extremely aware of the power of opera to relate socially conscious stories to an audience and in Thumbprint she harnessed that power for maximum emotional impact. While she was initially more inclined toward writing for musical theatre, that medium’s reliance on transitioning between songs and spoken dialogue began to feel somewhat formulaic and artistically constricted. Opera, on the other hand, seemed a more open-ended format. However, she is fully aware that the works she wants to create rely on “being able to shift genre very quickly,” something which does not exactly sit comfortably with most opera companies and the singers who perform the canonical operatic works of the standard repertoire.

Kamala Sankaram, photo by Spencer McCormick.

In fact, finding singers who are willing to take Sankaram’s idiosyncratic musical journey has not always been easy. In her earlier, less conventionally operatic music theatre pieces, she has usually performed the lead role herself since she loves performing and can easily navigate between pop, jazz, rock, world music, and even Western classical singing techniques. When people who have heard her perform with her band Bombay Rickey ask if she’s classically trained, she shrugs her shoulders and points out “how else could I get those high Fs?” While Thumbprint didn’t require the same amount of musical multitasking as some of her other projects, since she wanted to have an entirely South Asian cast and the singers must navigate some Indian classical vocal techniques as well as Western ones, she found herself in the lead once again. As she puts it, Thumbprint is “still not ‘opera-y opera.’ I think of opera-y opera as something that is very straight-forwardly in the Western classical tradition and doesn’t really waver from that technique of singing.”

At the same time that she is immersed in her own multifaceted creative projects, Kamala Sankaram actively sings music by other composers as well—among them Anthony Braxton, Corey Dargel, Philip Glass, Fred Ho, Phil Kline, David T. Little, Matthew Marks, Tristan Perich, and John Zorn—effortlessly navigating material that could be completely notated, completely improvised, and anything in between. But she acknowledges something that is particularly satisfying about performing her own work:

There is something really satisfying about performing your own music, particularly when you’re singing, because it’s embodied on a kind of molecular level and so you’re one with the performance in a way that you’re not always when you’re singing someone else’s music. It can become like that over time, but unfortunately in new music we don’t often get the chance to perform things enough for it to really evolve to that place.

Eric Nathan: Making It as Clear as Possible

Posted on January 15, 2014 by Frank J. Oteri - Conversations, Spotlight

“I just try to write the music that I want to write, and I’m glad the people seem to like it,” modestly claims Eric Nathan. It is a remarkable understatement. In a relatively short amount of time, the composer (who just turned 30 this past December) has already garnered the ASCAP Foundation Rudolf Nissim Prize (2011), the BMI William Schuman Prize (2008), the first prize in SCI’s National Student Commission Competition (2008), Aspen Music Festival’s Jacob Druckman Prize (2010), and a Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (also in 2010). He has additionally been the recipient of a Leonard Bernstein Fellowship to the Tanglewood Music Center, was one of five composers selected for the American Composers Orchestra’s 2009 Underwood New Music Readings, and is currently the 2013-14 Frederic A. Juilliard/Walter Damrosch Rome Prize Fellow in composition at the American Academy in Rome. When we met up with him, he was in Bratislava, Slovakia, for a performance of a large chamber ensemble composition at the 2013 ISCM World New Music Days festival, a commissioned work that was the result of his winning the 2012 ISCM/IAMIC Composer Award.

While Nathan doesn’t have a secret strategy for garnering all those accolades, he is extremely pragmatic. According to him, “[What is] important is making the score as clear as possible. If there’s nothing that’s in the score that could be dismissed, you get more of a chance to be looked at on the music.” But Nathan’s music is not just a by-product of honing his compositional skills and being extremely accurate about what he wants to convey on the page. There’s also something of an element of whimsy that fuels his creative process:

Whenever I start a new piece, I open an iPhoto album and put images there. It could be of the place that I’m inspired by, like the piece I wrote for the [ISCM] festival, Paestum, which is a place in Southern Italy that is a site of Greek ruins. But also, for ensembles, I put pictures of conductors that I’m inspired by or orchestras and when I look at the pictures I hear sound in my head.

Because ocular cues have been such an important muse for him, it is no surprise that Nathan is a deep admirer of visual artwork. Details he has observed in his encounters with specific paintings and sculptures have directly helped shape pieces of his music, but in a way that’s more personal than technical. The impetus for the form, as well as some of the melodic shapes and timbres Nathan used in his sextet Onement (2007), came from the “fiery zip down the middle” of Barnett Newman’s seminal 1948 abstract expressionist painting Onement I. Icarus Dreamt, his attention-grabbing 2008 orchestral work, had a couple of equally important stimuli: the “broad lyrical gestures” of Henri Matisse’s paper cut-out “The Flight of Icarus” from his famous book, Jazz combined with the “fluttering and clattering of the gears” of contemporary American sculptor Arthur Ganson’s kinetic contraption Machine with 23 Scraps of Paper. The textures of Julie Mehretu’s 2009 ink and acrylic drawing Berliner Plätze are the source of the pitches that emerge out of trills in his 2010 brass quintet Spires.

In all of these works, Nathan’s deep affection for shapes and colors also has a direct correlation with his music’s meticulous attentiveness to orchestration. But his precision in crafting specific instrumental combinations has not prevented him from being open to multiple ways of exploring the same musical material. Last year, Nathan reworked Spires for wind quintet, and he believes that both versions are equally definitive.

Nathan’s combination of practicality with an openness and curiosity toward new experiences is ultimately why he has been so successful thus far. He sees himself not as a maverick composer but as the inheritor of a great tradition to which he hopes to add his own contributions:

I think of my music as a river. Everything that I hear is just adding to the river and makes it broader. I may choose to sail down one part of the river, but it’s not my goal to make a new river.

Paul Rudy: Life Improvisations

Posted on December 19, 2013 by Alexandra Gardner - Conversations, Spotlight

Composer Paul Rudy takes to heart the idea that “nature’s wisdom follows the path of least resistance.” Although he knew this intuitively in his early “pre-composer” days as a self-described “mountaineer, carpenter, and vagabond,” it took time and plenty of experimentation in order to integrate the concept into his artistic life. But despite what many may consider a very late start (he did not compose his first piece until he was 26 years old), once he found his stride, he has more than compensated for lost time with a large and ever-expanding catalog of electronic, electroacoustic, and instrumental works that have earned him numerous composer golden eggs such as the Rome Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He currently holds the position of Curator’s Professor at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, where he has taught since 1999.

After years of wrestling with his composing process, Rudy had a breakthrough with the piece Degrees of Separation, for amplified cactus. (Yes, you read that right—cactus.) Realizing the folly of attempting to notate musical directions for a cactus, he threw away his score paper and created a graphic text score that left ample room for improvisation, and he considers it one of his most successful pieces. Two years later, during a residency at the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico, he had a transformative experience composing In lake’ch, a long-form electronic composition, which took shape quickly and without the struggle he had become accustomed to, as a result of taking a fully improvisational approach to the composing process. He remembers, “All along I had this information that was whispering, ‘Do this. Try this. Work this way.’ And when I did that, it was being affirmed by the world… If I don’t hear something, it’s because I’m not listening, because I’m not paying attention. I’m not attending to what’s going on around me.”

A page from Seven Spiritual Laws of Life: Guided solo or group meditations for any instruments or voices and fixed media by Paul Rudy. Used with permission.

And he is walking his talk; active listening and intuition play vital roles not only in his composing process, but also in his work as an educator and performer. One of the courses Rudy teaches at UMKC is a mandatory improvisation for composers class that emphasizes listening skills and hones the ability to perform spontaneously within a group setting. After sitting in on two sessions, I can say for a fact that the performances I heard—which were primarily by undergraduate students—were some of the most nuanced, and sonically compelling improvisations that I’ve heard by any musicians in a long time. Rudy is also passionate about exploring the healing power of sound, and his performances now incorporate his own overtone singing, as well as improvisational material that delves into the meditative and therapeutic qualities of sound.

Following intuition has served Rudy well, and he continues to follow those quiet whisperings. He has started a monthly sound healing circle in Kansas City. He is particularly excited about the new quartz singing bowls that he plans to include in those events and in his own performances. He is completing a film score that will be premiered in the spring of 2014. When he is not teaching composition and electronic arts at UMKC, he can be found on his farm outside Kansas City. He might be hunkered in his electronic music studio, or chopping wood outside, but regardless, he’s always committed to listening.

Jamie Baum: Jazz Diplomacy

Posted on November 13, 2013 by Alexandra Gardner - Conversations, Spotlight

For flutist Jamie Baum, the formula for what she calls a “complete musician” consists of three parts: performing, composing, and improvising. In her mind, these three activities combine in an organic way to create a rich, full musical life, and she does it all—and more—in spades. Since the 1990s, she has been composing music for her own ensemble, playing with top-notch musicians such as Paul Motian, Randy Brecker, and Fred Hersch, leading workshops on a number of topics including improvisation for classical musicians, and presenting her music to audiences around the globe.

Much of Baum’s work has been inspired by elements of 20th-century classical, Indian, and Afro-Latin music, worlds between which she nimbly moves as a performer. Her 2004 album Moving Forward Standing Still takes musical cues from Stravinsky, Ives, and Bartok, all composers who were important for her during her early composition training at the New England Conservatory. The music on her most recent release, In This Life, is deeply influenced by a tour through South Asia, and specifically by the music of Qawwali singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. In both cases she deftly weaves elements from diverse musical sources through her own prodigious artistic imagination to create compositions that sound highly distinct yet perfectly natural at the same time. Her ensemble, the Jamie Baum Septet, is comprised of flute, piano, trumpet, French horn, alto sax doubling bass clarinet, drums, and bass, and expands with the additions of guitar and hand percussion such as congas and tabla to form the Jamie Baum Septet +.

Baum says that one of her musical goals has always been to make the flute a primary ensemble instrument, rather than simply an instrument for doubling or a secondary textural element as it is sometimes viewed within a jazz music context. The somewhat unusual instrumentation of her group is intended to help give the flute more weight within the ensemble texture and to provide different musical coloring options than the standard grouping of trumpet, alto, tenor, and baritone sax or trombone. However, never having been one to save all the big soloing opportunities for the leader of the band, she is happy for the flute to become an inner voice and allow other instruments plenty of creative freedom when it comes time to solo. No doubt this sense of openness and her willingness to collaborate is part of what has kept the membership of her group stable for over 14 years.
In addition to a bustling composing and performing schedule, Baum also leads a variety of intriguing musical workshops centered upon improvisation and fostering creativity, including ones entitled “A fear-free approach to improvisation for the classically trained musician” and “Jazz flute technique is not an oxymoron,” intended to teach classical flute and double reed players techniques appropriate for jazz performance.

Through the practice of her own “complete musicianship” Baum has become an integral player in the jazz tradition, without becoming confined by it; she keeps her ears and mind open to whatever external influences might play a role in expanding her writing, performing, and composing.

Van-Anh Vanessa Vo: Old Sounds / New Music

Posted on October 23, 2013 by Molly Sheridan - Conversations, Spotlight

A 19th-century French composition and an 18th-century Vietnamese traditional instrument can create a strikingly engaging current musical story together, and as Van-Anh Vo (who often goes by Vanessa in the States) performed Gnossienne No. 3 on the dan bau, playing up the instrument’s haunting moans, the audience sat transfixed. Satie’s well-worn melody suddenly pulsed with fresh life.

Vo speaks with moving passion about the impact of American diversity on the evolution of her musical voice since she emigrated from Vietnam in the late 1990s. An award-winning traditional performer and educator in her native country, Vo has found a particular freedom in the myriad genres and styles of music that surround her here—an influence that has filtered into both her musical ideas and the instruments and techniques she uses to communicate them. “I think I find great opportunity as a musician and composer here,” Vo explains. “I can do what I want. I can follow my inner voice—what I hear in my mind and what I feel I need to express.”

On the heels of the release of Three-Mountain Pass, a recent collection of her compositions and arrangements, Vo traveled across the country from her current home in the Bay Area to present many of the tracks during a performance on the Millennium Stage at the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C. Out of a suitcase and a few modestly sized bags, she set up a small orchestra of traditional Vietnamese instruments (the dan tranh, dan bau, and dan t’rung) plus the hang, a modern piece of Swiss percussion. She moved easily from one to the next during her set, explaining to the gathered audience the folktale references and classic Vietnamese poetry that often inspire her compositions.

Vo performing at the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C.

Indeed, Vo’s energy and enthusiasm for musical creativity seems to transcend any particular instrument and instead feed off a fundamental sonic curiosity, as well as a desire to reflect on her cultural heritage and share those sounds with new ears. It’s a dialog that has led her to collaborations with musical neighbors such as the Kronos Quartet. “I see how things can be done and they help me to open even wider,” Vo says, noting the confidence such collaborations have given her to try new extended techniques such as using a violin bow on her single-string dan bau or plucking very close to the bridge of the dan tranh—a forbidden zone in traditional playing. In return, she has also passed on some of the non-notatable slide and phrasing aspects of Vietnamese music as Kronos worked on her Green River Delta. The project was a success; in the end, she says, her teachers back in Vietnam suggested that perhaps she had swapped these four American guys with native players.

This spirit of collaboration has also led her to work with instrument makers to redesign the dan tranh to allow for faster and more flexible retuning during performances, but the modifications also meant she had to readjust everything about her playing. She admits that it “was really challenging, but you learn to conquer it. That’s the best thing maybe to happen to me.”
Interestingly, Vo draws strong connections between American jazz and the improvisation involved in traditional Vietnamese music—at least to a point. In other ways, however, musical life in Vietnam felt very conservative. Vo also recalls feeling censored by what the government felt was appropriate to play in concert.

Ultimately the distance has allowed Vo to appreciate the culture and history of her native country with a deeper awareness. “It is very important that you know who you are and where you come from, so I know that my roots are in Vietnam,” Vo acknowledges. “But the tree has to adjust to the new environment and bear the new fruit, otherwise it will die.”

Kenneth Kirschner: Pirate This Music

Posted on September 18, 2013 by Molly Sheridan - Conversations, Spotlight

Before Napster was even an idea living in Shawn Fanning’s dorm room, composer Kenneth Kirschner saw something idealistic and beautiful in the notion of sending his music out into the world in a way that was freely accessible to everyone.
“I’m not telling you to copy other things,” Kirschner clarifies. “But I am telling you to pirate my music because I think it’s important.”

When you visit Kirschner’s über-minimalist single-page website, you get a clearer sense of how central this outlook is to his work. Since its launch in late 2002, new pieces have been posted upon completion (older works have also been added, rounding out the breadth of the catalog) and all are freely downloadable (as MP3s and, since 2010, FLACs). Each work carries a date in a hazy cornflower blue font as its sole identifier—it’s the date that the piece’s concept “crystalized” for Kirschner, a filing system that he characterizes as “a disaster that I love.” The track’s total running time is the only other detail listed. No program notes are offered, no composer bio included. Scroll all the way down the page past the last (which is to say the first) track, May 19, 1988, and you get the only information on the music’s creator on offer here: you can email him, follow him on twitter, or sign up for the mailing list.
The lack of explanatory material about his music on his website is quite intentional. Kirschner wants listeners to focus on the end result and is uninterested in seducing them with detailed notes about his compositional process because “if you don’t like what you’re hearing, the methods have already failed.”

Considering all he’s keeping under his hat, the fact that all the work is available at no cost suits Kirschner. “If you can download it freely, then you can take a risk with it,” he points out. “And I think, being an experimental composer, it’s about encouraging a listener to take risks.” This obviously begs some personal financial questions, and Kirschner is very forthcoming on this point, explaining that he works part-time in an unrelated field as a freelance copy editor. “I basically do just enough work to get by and support my music while giving myself the maximum amount of time and freedom. It’s a tricky balance, and there are definitely tradeoffs.”

To source the building blocks for his compositions, Kirschner works with live instrumentalists, coaching and recording sounds with them. He’s also comfortable enough at the piano to produce what he needs, and isn’t afraid to knock out some of his own percussion as well. Field recordings and sample libraries round out his sound palette. From there, it’s a process of improvisation and chance procedures to build up musical material, and then a lot of editing at a desk in his Brooklyn home until the final piece takes shape.

What electronic music gives you the ability to do is to obsessively edit everything. You have more control than you ever should have. And you can take chaos and take chance and take unexpected events and capture them and let them become an essential part of a composition. So you’re not composing intentionally a lot of the time, you’re reacting to what’s happening with the technology and what’s happening with the parameters that you’ve set up.

When that obsessive editing is complete, the file is posted to Kirschner’s website. A few record labels, including 12k, have put out collections of his work, though the CD covers often carry the printed suggestion that “this music may be freely copied.” While he does occasionally perform live, Kirschner is adamant that the recording is the work. He doesn’t create scores in the traditional sense, associating printed music with a certain anxiety. “I’ve always felt I had some very basic form of musical dyslexia,” he explains. “Notation was very intimidating to me. It was something I could never connect with and I could never have become a musician in any sort of serious sense if I had to go that path.”
Coming of age at a time when synthesizers and drum machines and four-track recorders were at hand, however, meant that he could create music in a way that worked for him and he wasn’t blocked by tools that he just couldn’t use.

I’ve always known this is what I wanted to do. I was fortunately very clear on this since I was twelve or thirteen: that I want to do this kind of music, I want to do it in a certain sort of way, present it in a certain way, distribute it in a certain way, have it philosophically structured in a certain way. And I’ve stuck to that program.

In many ways, Kirschner sees it all as a grand experiment in objectless, abstract music. “I think it’s a cool thing to try and see if it works.”
“And by ‘trying it’,” he concedes, his laugh filling the room, “I mean my entire life.”

Caleb Burhans: Inner Voices

Posted on August 14, 2013 by Frank J. Oteri - Conversations, Spotlight

It might seem surprising—given all of Caleb Burhans’s accomplishments within multiple musical scenes as well as his notoriety—that it would take so long for a disc devoted exclusively to the musical compositions to be released. Yet when we spoke with him in late July, it was on the very day that Evensong, the first CD to have his name on the spine, was released on Cantaloupe Records. It was also just a few days after his daughter Fiona was born: “It’s rather insane; they’re obviously the two hugest things in my life thus far.” That’s saying a lot for someone who has appeared on stages ranging from Carnegie Hall to Madison Square Garden, has had works performed at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall as well as the Darmstadt International Music Institute, and was the subject of a New York Times profile nearly five years ago.

But after our conversation, it became clear that Burhans does not particularly seek the limelight, preferring to be—as he put it—“a cog in the machine” rather than “standing out front.” This attitude informs his approach to being a performer (he’d “rather play second violin or viola than first fiddle for the most part”) as well as how he creates material for most of his more popular music-oriented endeavors, such as itsnotyouitsme, his ambient indie rock duo with guitarist Grey Mcmurray, which has released three albums thus far. But the rarified world of notation-based music is inherently a non-collaborative process and its denizens expect compositions to come from a singular auteur. Yet while others might feel that writing a fixed score for other musicians to play is a very different process from creating music with others either in real time or in a recording studio, Burhans doesn’t draw distinctions between these modalities and is able to make music effortlessly in each of them. At the same time, however, the lessons he learned from his immersion into so many different kinds of musical experiences have also made him extremely meticulous about the material he puts out into the world, whatever the genre. So for him Evensong had to be far more than merely a collection of music works he composed over the past decade; it had to cohere and flow from track to track as an album.
While being open to such a broad range of stylistic aesthetics, both as a co-creator and as an interpreter could have yielded a compositional voice that is all over the map, Burhans’s approach to the music he commits to the page is remarkably singular and almost austere in its sonic purity:

“I made a conscious decision when I was in my early 20s to write the music I write now. … Because I have so many different outlets for playing different styles of music, I decided that at the end of the day I want to go home and write music that I want to listen to and create on my own. Because I do get to play some really thorny contemporary music and free jazz, when I go to write I want it to be very pristine and very simple.”

Simple, however, is something of a misnomer. Admittedly—compared with a great deal of contemporary music—a typical Burhans score looks relatively straight-forward on the page and a performance of it sounds relatively simple, but appearances can be deceptive. While pieces like his 2005 Iceman Stole The Sun or oh ye of little faith (2008), both scored for chamber orchestra, are largely created from cycles of repeated phrases, the musicians often stress different beats from one another and the various phrases frequently begin in different parts of the measure resulting in an ambiguous sense of downbeat. (See score sample below.) While in his Magnificat and Nunc Dittimus, both for treble voices and organ (2004), the voices mostly move in parallel motion with one another (in Nunc Dittimus they’re actually mostly in unison!), they often go against the rhythmic flow of what is being played on the organ. And then there are the glissandos that permeate all of Burhans’s music and give it a heightened sense of instability. When musicians pull it off it comes across as otherworldly, but doing so requires a high level of concentration as well as musicianship—an attention to subtle details, particularly pitch and rhythmic clarity:

“I’m very, very specific about everything. One of my pet peeves is that people think of glissandi as portamentos and so they do them at the last second; a glissando should last the entire duration of a pitch it’s coming from. I used to write much more dense microtonal music, but I got fed up with having to play pitches for people and say, ‘This is a sixth tone.’ I found that very inaccurate; it would never be the same across the board from player to player. But I found that if I say glissando from this note to this note within this duration, that’s the only way you can actually control that. … I’m very rigorous about keeping things precise…
“It can kind of put me in a bad position with some new music ensembles. When they have a million pieces to learn, they’ll see my piece and think, ‘Oh, It’s in D major and in 6/8—all right, fine; we’ll play through it once.’ Then they get to the concert and totally mess it up, either play it out of tune or forget a repeat. I get that; I’ve been there before. It looks simple, but it takes a different type of focus.”

One of the things that has helped Burhans get what he wants from performers who play his music is that he is so active as a performer himself, so there’s a lot of mutual empathy. As he acknowledges, “Being on the same page with someone else can really open things up not just in terms of execution but also in terms of interpretation.”

But it goes much deeper than that. Three of the seven tracks on Evensong feature Alarm Will Sound, a group he helped found and which he remains very much a part of. Another three feature the Trinity Wall Street Choir, a group he sang with when he first moved to New York City and in which his wife—soprano Martha Cluver—still sings. In fact, the only group featured on the present CD with which Burhans does not have an almost familial relationship is the Tarab Cello Ensemble, who commissioned his lush The Things Left Unsaid which they perform on the disc. But, of course, as an active violinist and violist (plus he also played cello as a teen), Burhans is completely in his element working with string players.

The week we spoke with him was definitely an auspicious one, but the best is undoubtedly yet to come. Aside from a series of eight caprices for electric guitar he created espressly for Mcmurray more than a decade ago that clock in at approximately 90 minutes in total, Burhans’s compositions have tended to be smaller scale. Most of his pieces hover between 5 and 15 minutes. But given his love for the Anglican choral music tradition and his adeptness at writing for voices, a large scale work for chorus seems inevitable at some point in the not-too-distant future. He also expressed interest in writing a full length concerto for itsnotyouitsme and orchestra, an activity that would bring some of the disparate parts of his musical universe even closer together. It will certainly be worth the wait.

oh ye of little faith... (do you know where your children are?), page 7

Page 7 of the score of Caleb Burhans’s oh ye of little faith… (do you know where your children are?)
© 2008 Burning Hands Publishing (ASCAP). Reprinted with permission of Caleb Burhans and Good Child Music.

Frank J. Oteri

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