Tag: American music abroad

The old town center of Wrocław at night.

Although it has been established as an important urban center for more than 1000 years, Wrocław remains somewhat off the beaten path. There are few direct flights, not even from most places in Europe. Yet its history connects it to at least five different countries. Celtic tribes settled there in the 4th century B.C.E. although Poland is its earliest recorded claimant (a diocese having been established in the then-named town of Wrotizlava in the year 1000 C.E.). It was ceded to Bohemia (from 1336 to 1526) and then Austria (until 1741). A land grab by Frederick the Great made it part of Prussia and then Germany where under the name of Breslau it became the third largest German city. It was one of the last Nazi strongholds to surrender, but has been part of Poland again since 1945, hence its current name: think “wrought suave”… well, sort of. The President of the City (which is what they call the mayor there) claims that the correct pronunciation is “wroughts love” although that might just be an attempt at clever tourist sloganism on his part.

Given Wrocław’s history as a crossroads filled with conflict while nowadays being somewhat under the radar, it was a particular fitting host city for the 2014 World Music Days (WMD), the annual new music festival of the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM). ISCM is an organization with an almost equally complex history, albeit one that goes back only a mere 91 years. Although WMD is the oldest continuous contemporary music festival (it has taken place in a different city every year since 1923 with only one period of hiatus—between 1940 and 1945—because of the Second World War), it too has been somewhat under the radar in recent years. This is surprising considering that 86 official editions of WMD have taken place on a total of four continents thus far and that the world premieres of several very significant compositions have occurred under its auspices—to name just a few: Béla Bartók’s First Piano Concerto (featuring the composer at the piano), Anton Webern’s choral work Das Augenlicht, Alban Berg’s Violin Concerto (a year after the composer’s death), and Pierre Boulez’s song cycle Le marteau sans maître. George Perle’s Six Etudes for Piano received its first performance during the first and only time thus far that this marathon event was officially held in the United States—in Boston in 1976. (There were supposedly “unofficial” WMDs in New York in 1940 and San Francisco in 1941, but attempting to track down any details on those two convenings is akin to searching for El Dorado.)

A sculpture of a ballerina wearing a globe of the earth as a skirt on one of the main streets in Wrocław was a nice visual metaphor for the World Music Days festival taking place in the city.

The way WMD is programmed is unique among music festivals. Repertoire is chosen by the host festival in tandem with a jury of internationally-known composers which selects works submitted by the various national “sections” of the ISCM which represent some 50 countries on six continents. (Most of these sections put out a call for scores in their home countries which are then also culled through a jury process.) If a “section” submits a total of six works in four different categories (a category being a specific instrumental combination that the host is able to provide), at least one of the submissions is guaranteed a performance. In addition, the host is responsible for covering the full cost of up to a seven-day hotel stay for a delegate from every section. It’s an expensive proposition. This year’s WMD cost well over a million euros. But it’s a remarkable paradigm, one that results in an overwhelming amount of music in a relatively short period of time—this year over the course of 10 days more than 60 different concerts were presented. Given this variety and generosity, finding a way to attend the World Music Days ought to be the equivalent to going on the hajj for new music aficionados.

But the reality of WMD and ISCM has sometimes been somewhat less transformative. The selection process from year to year is completely different; some years with seemingly no POV and other years with too pointed a stylistic bias at the expense of all others. While the 2011 WMD, which was hosted by the Zabreb Biennale, felt like a feast of sonic possibility; the 2013 WMD—which was co-presented by new music festivals in Košice, Bratislava, and Vienna—tended to veer mostly toward modernist aesthetics. And that’s when everyone plays according to the rules. Sometimes they don’t. Some of the delegates who attended this year’s general assemblies, the official business meetings of the membership held in the morning prior to each day’s glut of concerts, were still grumbling about the notorious 2006 WMD in Stuttgart during which most of the ISCM’s submissions were completely ignored.

While the 2014 WMD was much closer in spirit to Zagreb than Košice-Bratislava-Vienna, the feast sometimes felt more gourmand than gourmet. Most of the 2014 concerts lasted more than 2 ½ hours despite concerts in venues scattered across the city often being paced two hours apart from one another. This meant that it was impossible to hear everything. According to one of this year’s festival’s principal coordinators, Izabela Duchnowska from the Department of Culture of the Municipality of Wrocław, most of the works that had been submitted were much longer than they claimed to be. Never completely trust composers!

To further overload an already overloaded schedule, the ISCM concerts and general assemblies were concurrent with the 2014 Conference of the International Association of Music Information Centres (IAMIC). Although some events were coordinated for the attendees of both convenings, many were not.

Motorcyclists awaiting the start of the Motorcycle Symphony.

Still, there were many amazing sonic experiences for those intrepid enough to wade through it all. There were stagings of two important Polish operas—Krzysztof Penderecki’s Paradise Lost (a U.S. bicentennial commission originally staged at the Chicago Lyric Opera) and Zygmunt Krauze’s 2011 Pułapka (inspired by the life of Franz Kafka)—as well as Peter Eötvös’s 2004 Angels in America based on the 1993 Pulitzer Prize-winning two-part play by American playwright Tony Kushner. Two outdoor music events were particularly noteworthy. The first was Siren Chants, a mesmerizing collaboration between Christof Schläger and Marjon Smit involving 100 ship horns that stretched across a square mile along the embankment; the second, perhaps even wilder, was Sławomir Kupczak’s Symphony No. 2 for 100 motorcycles and rock band. It was pretty loud. There was even a late night concert by dance pop icon Peaches although admittedly her repertoire did not include any ISCM submissions.

There was a particularly fascinating concert that took place in the fabulously-named Sanatorium of Culture near the Old Town Hall featuring a group called Maly Instrumenty which performs on a broad range of “small instruments”—computer gear, various homemade contraptions, plus a wide range of toys including rubber ducks. One of the pieces on that program was composed especially for them by Paul Preusser, a Denver-born experimental composer who has been living in Wrocław for nearly a decade.

Another concert, held in the historic 1894 Wrocław Puppet Theatre combined a fascinating array of works for soloists employing electronics. By intention, the pieces on the second half of the program ran together without a break thus making it impossible to determine when one piece ended and another began. Before intermission, however, a remarkably self-contained piece for electric guitar and electronics composed and performed by Boston-based Mike Frengel blurred the lines between contemporary music and progressive rock.

(Note: This video is from a 2011 performance in Boston, not from the 2014 WMD in Wrocław.)

There was an entire concert devoted to string orchestra music in another curiously-named venue—a place called NOT—and another of wind band works performed by the Orchestra of the Polish Air Force, which featured the music of composers based on four continents including Fuse by Rob Smith from Houston, Texas.

Another American, Northern California-based Sam Nichols, had a string quartet performed by the Lutosławski Quartet in Wrocław University’s Oratorium Marianum, the site of the premiere of Johannes Brahms’s Academic Festival Overture. This was an occurrence that was not lost on him when he attended rehearsals.

Since 2002, ISCM has also given a Young Composer Award that is adjudicated during the WMD by an international jury comprised of ISCM delegates who assign an award to a composer under the age of 35 whose work is performed in the festival. The winner gets a money prize and a commission for a new piece to be performed in a future edition of the ISCM World Music Days. Previous recipients of this award include Thomas Adès, Helena Tulve, Diana Rotaru, and Eric Nathan. This year’s winner was Flemish composer Stefan Prins for his 2011-12 Piano Hero #1 for MIDI keyboard, video, and electronics. (Malgorzata Walentynowicz’s extremely exciting performance of that athletic work opened the aforementioned Puppet Theatre concert which also featured Mike Frengel.) Honorable mentions for the 2014 ISCM Young Composer Award were Hannes Dufek (Austria), Yair Klartag (Israel), and Dmitry Timofeev (Russia). The judges for the 2014 award were Stephen Lias (ISCM USA Associate Member, Stephen F. Austin State University, Texas, chair), Tomoko Fukui (ISCM Japan Section), Javier Hagen (ISCM Switzerland Section), and Eva Irene Lopszyc (ISCM Argentina Section). The award is supported by Music on Main in Vancouver.

It was clear that the ISCM World Music Days was really an important event in Wrocław. Even some of the trams sported the festival logo and colors. Now the question is how to make this annual festival equally important every year wherever it takes place.

Events like all of these make the ISCM and its World Music Days international treasures. But there’s still a long way to go. Perhaps there is some comfort in knowing that the debates that currently rage among its membership are all par for the course. According to the ISCM entry in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians:

From its inception the ISCM was plagued by internal disputes concerning its purpose and operation. There was conflict between those countries that felt that it should promote avant-garde music (principally Germany before 1933 and Austria and Czechoslovakia before 1938) and those that considered any contemporary music to be worthy of the society’s interest (principally France, England, and the USA).

Then again, if this is the way things always were and still often are, how does this bode for the future? As a contemporary music festival, the future is—of course—what should be first and foremost on everyone’s minds.

One of the most eye-catching art installations in this city filled with extraordinary public art is Jerzy Kalina’s Przejście which consists of 14 life-size human sculptures, some of which are sunken into the sidewalk while others seem to rise out of it, spread across two sides of a busy pedestrian crossing. It is a testimony to the pro-democracy movement in Poland which, after many years, ultimately triumphed over martial law. But it is also tempting to reinterpret it as yet another apt visual metaphor for the transformative role that new music can have in our society if only we can find a way for it to reach as many people as possible and that people pay attention to it once we do.

If I might be permitted to adulterate a bit of Emily Dickinson, the 2013 edition of the Ostrava Days festival opened twice before its opening. (In addition to hosting a weeklong institute for student composers and two other evenings of composition and improvisation, all before the official Philharmonic Hall opening night.) The intense biennial in the Eastern end of the Czech Republic has long been known for stretching into long nights across August. But this year seemed especially expansive with an unofficial opening night featuring a four-hour Philip Glass performance on August 16 and a presentation, one week later, of Petr Kotik’s nearly six-hour Many Many Women.

The Philip Glass Ensemble in mid performance of Glass’s Music in 12 Parts. Photo courtesy Ostrava Days.

Glass and his Ensemble performed his Music in 12 Parts (composed 1971-1974) in the Gong, a massive sphere that was an underground gas tank before being raised last year and renovated into an impressive auditorium, nicely finished without trying to hide its former life. Kotik booked Glass and company after seeing them play at New York’s Park Avenue Armory in February 2012, and it was far and away the most popular concert of the festival, with a good 80% of the theater’s 1,500 seats filled. The spiraling repetitions of the music—presented with three intermissions—were remarkable inside the big globe, the changes fluid, always present yet often imperceptible (with the exception of some surprise dissonance at the beginning of the seventh part).

A full week later, Kotik (the festival founder, artistic director, and leader of the resident chamber ensemble Ostravská Banda, as well as New York City’s S.E.M. Ensemble) presented Many, Many Women, his setting of a Gertrude Stein text which (like the Glass) calls to question the use of the phrase “evening length” to denote a work of a mere two hours. But where Glass for the most part had all his musicians going all the time, Kotik worked in strict rotation and augmentation amongst the paired singers, flutes, trumpets, and trombones; instrumental combinations changed every three to five minutes. It’s an active piece, creating a sensation of ever-shifting and interlocking elements, as if it were a jigsaw puzzle with pieces that morphed as they were fitted together—duos, quartets, up to a tentet at times, and finally a full dozen at 75 minutes in, although not for long before the basses dropped out. But it didn’t mark the culmination of a cycle; it’s not as easy as that. The score is linear and it’s scripted from beginning to end, but the pairs of players are free to enter each of their sections when they choose. It is also quite arguably the most effective musical setting of Stein to have been attempted, and that includes Virgil Thomson! To read her texts on the page is (as with any great writer) a rich and deeply private experience. To hear it read aloud is exhilarating, as the hypnotized mind can wander without leading the text astray. But music courses many channels, and Kotik better than anyone has realized the poetics of her repetitions in a layered, auditory setting.

Kotik’s Nine + 1 (composed this year and presented later in the week) was a piano and drum kit boxing match with pizzicato strings finding their way into the gaps and brass and winds yelling from the sidelines until the strings demanded some romance. Eventually they too were pulled into the fray. A lush piano interlude played by the stunning Daan Vaandewalle pulled the factions together and then a second, unaccompanied piano section ended the piece mid-stream. Kotik’s string quartet Torso (2011-12), played by the OBSQ (Ostrava Banda String Quartet), opened in lovely unison then pushed into quick density then pulled back the fast lines and crossfaded into another elegiac passage, with brisk arpeggios occasionally returning ever so quietly in the violin. Krulik also played institute resident Kristina Wolfe’s Planctus that same night, a dense and lovely six minutes of incongruous lines and scratchy cello that at some points felt quite formal and at others left the impression of turntable mixing.

Kotik was represented once again during the festival in Bernhard Lang’s 2011 work Monadologie XVII [SheWasOne – For Petr Kotik] played by the resident chamber ensemble Ostravská Banda conducted by the dedicatee. Kotik introduced it by repeating a segment from his Many Many Women, which was the basis of Lang’s piece. Monadologie echoed the Kotik-by-way-of-Stein overlaid phrases with 13 musicians, including Kubera on piano and synthesizer, but perhaps this time with a stammer: muted piano strings struggled against the violin, viola, cello, and bass, locked in a loop while insistent rhythms were set by percussion and reeds. Lang’s Monadologie XX … For Franz was played the following night by the German ensemble elole-Klaviertrio. It was a mechanistic re-envisioning of Franz Schubert’s Trio in E Flat Major, op. 100. Despite the conceit, and even with the use of extended technique to create a sort of fractal echoing, powerful feelings of urgency and, later, lament came through.

The stellar elole also played Italian composer Salvatore Sciarrino’s ghostly Trio No. 2 (1987), with whispering strings bowed on the bridge, the piano sounding only several minutes. While it was hushed, it wasn’t all so quiet; and for hushed music, it was quite fast and full. Sciarrino clearly loves and fully inhabits his sound world, but a lot of things happen there even if he tends to stay within his own boundaries. Such is the case with his 1984 Lohengrin Azione invisible for soloist, instruments, and voices—an hour-long “short story” (based on the Wagner opera, though Sciarrino himself avoids the word “opera”) which, for me, was far and away the highpoint of the festival. Scripted from the point of view of Elsa, Lohengrin’s bride, who is accused of losing her virginity before the wedding, the operetta was performed by the Ostravská Banda under Roland Klutting and sung with an elusive pathos by Marianne Pousseur (who was anchored to a sort of tombstone podium). Pousseur played the part as a child in a wedding gown, a large balloon above her head. The ensemble, which included three male singers who accompanied her vocal lines—which combined singing, guttural whispers, gnashing, crying, exaggerated exhalations, and chomping of teeth—was never more than incidental and yet supremely dramatic.

Although not present at the festival, Sciarrino tied Kotik for most-played composer after the last-minute addition of his brief Capriccio No. 4 (1975-6) by the staggering violinist Hana Kotková. Sciarrino may also be the Ostrava patron saint of hushed tones: light bowing and blowing was pervasive, especially among student pieces, so much so that it almost came to feel like it was a given. That said, when Daniel Lo Ting-cheung’s nine-minute Rude Awakening for an 80-piece orchestra built to an onslaught of five percussionists hitting hard with the full contingent punctuating, it was truly exciting. The Iranian composer Idin Samimi Mofakham’s Mirage nicely melded the near silent strings with Chris Nappi playing percussion on the surface of a container of water (even if it seemed less cunning during the second half of its 25 minutes, making it one of the longer student pieces played).
Also before the titular “Opening Night” was a concert of improvisations and small ensemble compositions at an old coal mine which featured works by Alvin Lucier, Christian Wolff, and Jon Gibson, whose Down the Road (played by Joseph Kubera on piano and Chris Nappi on percussion) was the standout, with Gibson’s spirited soprano saxophone injecting an energy into the tightly constructed yet lightly swinging piece. The evening also included a spirited improvisation by Gibson and Wolff with past and present institute students.

The final events before the proper opening on August 25 were an homage to Luigi Russolo (author of The Art of Noise and arguably the first person to build something with no function other than to make “nonmusical” noise) followed by a concert by the New York violin duo String Noise, both held in an institutional building converted into an art gallery. Highlights of the afternoon noise fest included a set by vocalist Amelia Cuni (whose interpretation of Cage’s ragas, the Solo for Voice No. 58 from his Songbooks released on CD by Other Minds is well worth seeking out) and instrumentalist Werner Durand. Acoustic sound samples emanating from (and being molded by) the electronics were pitted against some unusual vocal techniques such as singing into a pie tin (which resembles the sound of radio interference) and more often using a megaphone than a microphone. While employing reeds and a variety of tubes, Durand also pushed electronics waves of tambura into the wash. Also of interest was Pavel Z. and the Opening Performance Orchestra, who collaged train sounds and video with four laptops, three of Russolo’s intonarumori, and narrator. String Noise played a bold set of duets composed for them and, in the case of Robert Constable’s Vicious Cycles, the pair with backing tape. The set culminated in a matrimonial humoresque by Eric Lyon entitled The Book of Strange Positions, and they encored with Lyon’s arrangement of L.A. punk band the Germs’ “Lexicon Devil.” It was not just a nicely irreverent program during a fairly formal festival; it proved to be a formidable display of virtuosity.

Amelia Cuni (left) working the megaphone. Photo courtesy Ostrava Days.

It should, of course, go without saying that a part of such a festival is (or had better be) musicianship at an absolutely stellar level, and yet letting it go at “it goes without saying” would seem a shame. An evening under the banner “Into the Night” included a remarkable succession of string solos, which began with Hana Kotková’s aforementioned delivery of the Sciarrino capriccio. Niolaus Schlierf then deftly played Berio’s 1967 solo viola workout Sequenza VI followed by Conrad Harris effortlessly tackling the first four of Cage’s infamously difficult Freeman Etudes. Harris also gave a staggering reading of Iannis Xenakis’s 1991 Dox-Orkh for orchestra and soloist. Opening with a strangely dissonant fanfare of reeds and horn and an off-kilter violin, the full regimen then came in in profoundly out-of-time unison figures, all doing a wonderful job—ironically perhaps—at sounding as though the whole thing were poorly performed except for the violin soloist who was put in the best possible light. It was in that sense almost funny but it was also breathtaking, its dissonance coming to feel, over 20 minutes’ time, like the way of the world. The full outfit of strings sounded like a very old organ that was panting for breath. Harris, on the other hand, was lithe and on task, coming off as more precise against the orchestrated quagmire. It was, in short, fascinating, and ultimately resolved with the orchestra fully in time and on cue.

Later in the evening of solo string pieces, Pauline Kim Harris approached John Zorn’s 2011 solo Passagen (a work which she premiered and recorded) with supreme confidence. Joseph Kubera, a fixture of the festival, beautifully played Julius Eastman’s 1986 Piano 2, an unusually lovely and nebulous solo. And Kotková boldly shone again in Kaija Saariaho’s 1994 Graal théâtre on the opening night with the Janáčkova filharmonie Ostrava. Its eerie themes and amazing soloing darted about underneath the orchestral blanket which at the same time worked a stereo field between the piano and the bass viols at the opposite end of the assembly.

The opening night proper, then, at Philharmonic Hall, featured an orchestra of more than 50 players, including five contrabasses and a harp. Carola Bauckholt’s Helicopter, written in 2001-02 for the amazing vocal interpreter Jaap Blonk was built from, very literally, the sounds of a helicopter. But unlike a helicopter, it was fairly quiet and traveled over the course of its 20 minutes from something fairly soft to begin with into a pronounced whisper from Blonk as well as the strings: It never took off, but doing so didn’t seem the point. Christian Wolff’s half-hour individuals, collective received its European premiere on the opening night, following its world premiere at Kotik’s Beyond Cage festival in New York last year. It was an amalgam of starts and fits in small groupings across the orchestra with complimentary sections seemingly placed end-to-end and interspersed with occasional fragmented fanfares. As the piece built, the voices found congruity with each other, a mysterious commonality as the groupings—and what they voiced—never seemed to repeat. It was at once akin to and very different from Bauckholt’s Helicopter, which was more unified but also refused to build to a conclusion. It was full of anticipation, a dynamic in which Wolff excels. The following night featured Wolff’s 2012 work Trust (played by the Ostravská Banda). Immediately before conducting the piece, Kotik remarked that it was “very similar” to individuals, collective. It was much smaller, employing only nine instruments and lasting just ten minutes, but it too dealt in parsed phrases and toyed with resolution. Sandwiched between the Bauckholt and the Wolff was an enticing work by institute resident Ravi Kittappa titled exordium, four minutes of pulse and counterpoint moving extremely quickly like flies on a pond surface, one ripple starting as the last died off.

Charlemagne Palestine (left) with Lucie Vitková (middle), James Ilgenfritz (right) and teddy bears (beneath the piano).
Photo by Kurt Gottschalk.

Charlemagne Palestine was not unannounced but was still a surprise guest at the festival, his long, improvised meditations being a bit out of step with the composed orchestral works that usually dominate the programs here. But he played a wonderful piece to which he gave the title Schlingen Schängen for Ostrava. It opened, as per his usual, with the placement of teddy bears around the piano and organ and the ringing of a brandy snifter. He then took a seat at the piano and began a repeated figure over a drone provided by James Ilgenfritz’s bass and Lucie Vitková’s accordion. They were soon joined by Renāte Stivriņa at Philharmonic Hall’s massive pipe organ. Stivriņa put weights on keys and primarily played the stops, avoiding the bass pedals until 20 minutes in. One huge, snowballing chord drenched the room. After closing the long arc of the piece, Palestine said to institute resident Rita Ueda, “Come play the bells – hard.”

Kotik leading the S.E.M. Ensemble at St. Wenceslas Church. Photo by Kurt Gottschalk.

A concert at the 13th-century St. Wenceslas Church included a gorgeous performance of Feldman’s Rothko Chapel featuring vocalists Kamala Sankaram and Silvie Jensen which filled the sunlit chapel. Belgian pianist Daan Vanderwalle, another Ostrava Days virtuoso cornerstone, performed Galina Ustvolskaya’s Composition No. 2 “Dies Irae” (1972-73) with S.E.M. Ensemble. It is a pounding lament, quite literally, with the heavy piano lines abetted by an octet of basses and a wooden box being hammered away at by Chris Nappi. Those two works, plus a number of student pieces, somehow made a perfect frame for Ligeti’s 1982 Trio played by Vanderwalle, Conrad Harris, and Daniel Costello on French horn. There is probably no context where Ligeti isn’t refreshing—amidst minimalists, after a car chase, during a break in the evening news. His music is fresh, thoughtful, and digestible, and his compelling trio made for an enjoyable respite during the intensity of the church concert; it seemed like a reward after hard work until it grew fragmented. Short lyrical lines began to discontinue, shared statements fell apart, the equanimity among the three began to unravel and each guarded his own corner, only to go positively baroque, then thoughtful, then profound. It ultimately made for an unerring joy ride.

A new choreography by Daniel Squire for Cage’s Concert for Orchestra (e.g. a piano-less performance of his Concert for Piano and Orchestra), Aria, and Fontana Mix (played concurrently, naturally) was presented at the large Jiří Myron Theater. It was impossible not to think of Merce Cunningham during all of this, especially since Squire’s approach was not entirely dissimilar: dancers existed in their own cells but occasionally moved with a common physical language. Eventually the company of close to 20 took the stage en masse and spun their way off again. Sankaram gave the vocal solo an animated read. She was jazzy at times but more often slid between operatic vibrato and childlike, gleeful yells. The electronics of Fontana Mix were slow to come, but eventually overtook the room.

The final day included a matinee of resident compositions followed by an evening that proved a perfect finale for a headspinning couple of weeks. Highlights from the afternoon concert included New Yorker James Ilgenfritz’s Burnham’s Folly, a piece inspired by the famous Flatiron Building in Midtown Manhattan. It started with a jazzy chaos then found a peace, then bits of quiet noise, and ended in an unexpected congruity—perhaps like traffic patterns on 23rd Street. Michal Indrák’s Standing Wave was a hypnotic piece of counterpoint between wind and mixed ensemble. While it wore its structure on its sleeve (the two sections grew slower and increasingly out of sync with each other), it was great to hear the process work its way through and to contemplate just how slow it might get, which by the end was nearly a snail’s BPM. Nissim Schaul’s Hell Study for two percussionists, blocky prepared piano, bowed violin, cello, flute, and trombone came off as cinematic, but there were several movies playing at the same time. The work was actually rooted in Schaul’s impressions of Bosch and in the sound of the hurdy gurdy, although there wasn’t one present. Instead, cello and bass clarinet swapped off providing drones and the impression of keyed strings. Lörinc Muntag’s 18,8, scored for piano, cello, and two percussionists, began with several minutes of beautiful stillness, nothing but sustained muted cello notes, before the other instruments entered making the cello seem like a clothesline onto which sounds were very occasionally hung. The music’s approach to space would have made Feldman proud.

The final concert featured orchestral works by two more institute residents (both from New York) and one esteemed recent graduate, as well as two remarkable works by composers outside the institute. The first half was quite daring, with three similar pieces—or at least three similar concepts—executed rather differently. Jack Callahan’s If You Cannot Ignore the Response – Delay It was one of the more successful of several exercises in sustained tone over the course of the festival, moving pulses held for 5 to 15 seconds across the orchestra, each one varied by shape and attack. Other events were gradually introduced, at the forefront a very quiet bass drum in uneven time and eventually breaking down into individual tones guided by the oboe.

The final piece made for a rather perfect ten-minute festival finale. Is it possible that in 1921 Edgard Varèse touched on everything heard over two weeks in 2013 with his Offrandes? Well, no, but with the expansiveness of the orchestra and given enormous voice by soprano Sandra Rosales, it still seemed to presage in reverse everything heard in Ostrava Days 2013—if not in stasis, at least in velocity.