Tag: Boston

Boston: Caroline Shaw’s Common Cause

"Your Second or Permanent Teeth" (anatomical diagram)

From Harrison Wader Ferguson, D.D.S., A Child’s Book of the Teeth (1922).

In his 1547 treatise Dodecachordon, Heinrich Glarean, having lionized the likes of Obrecht, Ockeghem, and Josquin (especially Josquin), made sure—like you do—to despair that the younger generation was ruining everything. To be sure, even Josquin had his infelicitous moments: “in some places in his songs he did not fully and properly restrain his impetuous talent, although this ordinary fault may be condoned because of his otherwise incomparable gifts.” Those coming after Josquin, however, made this exception the rule, as Glarean complained:

The art now displays such unrestraint that learned men are nearly sick of it. This has many causes, but mostly it is because composers are ashamed to follow in the footsteps of predecessors who observed the relation of modes exactly; we have fallen into another, distorted style of song which is in no way pleasing—it is only new.

It was probably coincidental that, for the May 10 and 11 premiere performances of Caroline Shaw’s Music in Common Time, the vocal group Roomful of Teeth and the string ensemble A Far Cry preceded the piece with Josquin at his most elegantly, explicitly generational: his “Déploration” on the death of his elder colleague Johannes Ockeghem (in an arrangement by Shaw). But, then again, after winning the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for her Partita (the youngest composer to ever receive the honor), Shaw came in for a share of Glarean-like grief courtesy of John Adams, who implicitly held Shaw up as an example of “extremely simplistic, user-friendly, lightweight” music: “People are winning Pulitzer Prizes writing this stuff now.” He went on:

If you read a lot of history, which I do, you see that civilizations produce periods of high culture, and then they can fall into periods of absolute mediocrity that can go on for generation after generation.

So to have the “Déploration” on the program, that road from Ockeghem to Josquin to implied musical perdition, was a nice reminder that, if you read even a little history, you see that these sorts of bumpy transitions are nothing new. Music in Common Time is, among other things, a border stone marking one of those most porous yet most impassible of barriers: a proximate, parapatric stylistic divide.

* * *

A Far Cry, seven seasons old, has, since 2010, been the in residence at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (where I heard this program on May 11). They are a conductorless gang of energetic fashion. (Their standard-repertoire contribution to the program, Mahler’s string-orchestra arrangement of Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden” Quartet (D. 810), was incessantly high-contrast and bracing.) Roomful of Teeth charts a line between musical polish and enthusiasm. Their singing in the Josquin, for instance, channeled the precision of an early music outfit but eschewed the homogeneity: individual voices could still be heard amidst the collective. Both groups are cut from similar cloth: younger-skewing ensembles proficient enough to slip into the churn of the classical-music performance business, and idiosyncratic enough to create the sense that they’re reprogramming the machine. An additional layer of professional and personal connections between the two groups (which Shaw hinted at in a breezy program note) made for a natural collaboration; Shaw’s new piece—somewhat mind-bendingly, her first formal commission—provided the occasion.

Music in Common Time is not quite a concerto, although the eight voices tend to move more as a unified group than the string orchestra, which is frequently divided into distinct factions. An opening stretch—a staggered, rising, arpeggiated triad (D major, picking up where Partita left off)—shifts into the sturdiest of diatonic progressions, then gives way to a vocal break, one of two sections with text: “Over the roads,” the voices sing, in a tongue-twisting interlude of traveling music. (That dialectic, one ensemble gently interrupting the other, happens throughout.) After a bit of folk-tinged, almost Holst-like atmosphere, the opening section returns, only to be undercut by thickets of snap-pizzicato, becoming a conventionally plucked accompaniment, over which the voices embark on a short study in portamento, sliding up and down into pure harmonies.

The center of the piece was engrossing, a negotiation between a perpetually rising sequence of secondary dominants in the strings and faster, descending parallel chords in the voices, occasionally meeting up for chance cadences. It was chased with a brief dose of ringing-partial throat-singing—one of the piece’s few congruences with Partita’s more exuberant kitchen sink of vocal techniques. That led to the final section: first the voices introduced another bit of sentimentally elusive text (“years ago, I forget; years to come, just let them”) set as a sweetly unsteady shape-note sing; then a tranquil standoff of a coda, half the strings staying put while the other half, along with the voices, moved to a different key center.

The overall effect is that of a linked chain, a point-to-point sojourn. Arrivals are based less on contrapuntal resolution and more on the satisfying effect of a particular sonority. (The sound of a widely spaced triad—roots, thirds, and fifths saturating the overtone spectrum—is a recurring component; it also featured in Shaw’s Josquin arrangement, suboctaves from the double basses trundling in to give crucial harmonies a boost of widescreen warmth.)

But what’s most interesting about Music in Common Time is its relationship to style. Current usage of the term “post-minimalist” can be a little squishy, but in a way that goes beyond historical chronology (and to a more immediately apparent extent than Partita), Music in Common Time is truly post-minimalist, at least in the lower-case sense: the structure and gist are not minimalist, but almost all of its building blocks are minimalist signifiers, tropes and gestures that evolved along with minimalist practice. The triad as object; overlapping consonance as a stretched canvas; the chord-to-chord movement of basic progressions turned into scene and act breaks; variation via altered phrase length rather than elaborated melody—all of these figure into Shaw’s rhetoric, but in a way far removed from minimalism’s deliberate, patient process.

The tropes become objects of recognition at least as much as objects of exploration; the garnishes—the Bartók pizzicato, the more exotic vocal excursions, the polytonality—play off of expectations of what we might be accustomed to hearing those other ideas do in a minimalist context. In other words, Shaw is most definitely not observing the relation of modes exactly, at least by the lights of her elders. Which is as it should be. Music always does this, always has done this, always will do this. Music in Common Time is only unusual in the genial straightforwardness with which it repurposes inherited goods.

It reminded me of my favorite piece of curmudgeonly compositional grumbling, coming a century after Heinrich Glarean, when the Baroque era was just getting traction, but was far enough along for Samuel Scheidt to complain about where things were headed:

I am astonished at the foolish music written in these times…. It certainly must be a remarkably elevated art when a pile of consonances are thrown together any which way.

This is both supremely sarcastic and basically true. It is a remarkably elevated art that is so incapable of settling down, constantly inspiring its practitioners to use the output of one set of rules as the input for a completely different set of rules. Musical style is a moving target. It certainly must be.

Boston: Practice Sessions

Conductor Robert Spano and pianist Jonathan Biss perform Bernard Rands' Concerto for Piano and Orchestra with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, April 3, 2014. Photo by Stu Rosner.

Conductor Robert Spano and pianist Jonathan Biss perform Bernard Rands’s Concerto for Piano and Orchestra with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, April 3, 2014. Photo by Stu Rosner.

In the ever-futile quest to match up language with the experience of music, “meditative” is a useful shorthand, able to hint at a calm surface, a reflective cast, and an eloquent stillness all at once. (I’ve used it that way, certainly.) It is also, in the strictly literal sense, wrong. Keeril Makan’s Letting Time Circle Through Us really is meditative, in that, intentionally or not, it is true to the experience of meditation. It is a process and a journey, not a fixed state. And the journey isn’t always smooth.

Makan’s piece was performed by the New York-based ensemble Either/Or at MIT’s Killian Hall on April 5. It was the premiere of the full score. (The group introduced a 12-minute excerpt of the piece in Pittsburgh last fall.) Commissioned for the group through Meet The Composer (one of the last such commissions before the Meet The Composer/American Music Center merger), the work utilizes an unusual and somewhat distinct ensemble: cimbalom (David Shively), guitar (Dan Lippel), crotales and glockenspiel (Russell Greenberg), violin (Jennifer Choi), cello (Wendy Law), and piano (Taka Kigawa). It’s a sound world both ringing and atomized.

Letting Time Circle Through Us stretches a 50-minute canvas, broken up in a rondo-like way. The ritornello—almost ceremonially repetitious, marked by a rising major-second motive, a repeated, irregular inhalation—is repeatedly, sometimes suddenly interrupted by ideas that amass weight and shadow. The contrasting sections provide as much obstruction as variety, like formal parallels to the hindrances the Buddha warned about:

[T]here are these five obstructions, hindrances, corruptions of the mind, weakeners of wisdom. What five? Sensual desire is an obstruction, a hindrance, a corruption of the mind, a weakener of wisdom. Ill will is an obstruction … Sloth and torpor are an obstruction … Restlessness and remorse are an obstruction … Doubt is an obstruction … a weakener of wisdom. These are the five obstructions, hindrances, corruptions of the mind, weakeners of wisdom.

The practice of meditation is all about overcoming those hindrances—not by ignoring them, but instead by acknowledging them, examining them, because, to this way of thinking, by combining something bad (a hindrance) with something good (mindfulness), the good wins out.

That’s not to say Letting Time Circle Through Us is a triumphant piece. Its examination of its interruptions is dark and moody. Even the quieter contrasts are continually off balance: a 3/4+7/8 cimbalom pattern (later taken over by the piano) seeds a guitar line that upends the usual major/minor implications of the overtone series; a seemingly limpid piano loop is at hemiola odds with a string melody; a gentle gymnopedie is gradually encrusted with dense harmonies. The ostinati, more often than not, are inexact, almost-but-not-quite interlocking. (Points of arrival are less about dissonance and consonance than about a set of patterns finally settling, even into a clashing texture.) But there is a thread of optimism—that opening major second is constantly recontextualized, from a brooding, minor-scale la-ti to a hopeful, major-scale re-mi at the work’s climax.

And Letting Time Circle Through Us does, perhaps, embody the modest goal of any given meditation, that you end up a little farther along the path than when you started. Throughout the piece, the unusual instrumentation is used to constantly reimagine and translate timbres. The cimbalom’s buzz becomes a combination of guitar and pizzicato cello; piano and crotales trade their fraternal twin attack-and-decay sounds. During that gymnopedie section, Choi kept repeating the same note, but fingered on different strings. At the outset and the close of the piece, Shively and Lippell briefly utilized E-bows, an almost incorporeally delicate sound on cimbalom or acoustic guitar: in the beginning, an inchoate element, but by the end, a brief glimpse of, maybe, the instruments’ deeper natures. The way Letting Time Circle Through Us prompts and sustains that awareness is a considerable musical achievement.

***

The same weekend (I heard the April 8 concert), the Boston Symphony Orchestra was performing the second of its two world premieres this season, Bernard Rands’s Concerto for Piano and Orchestra, with pianist Jonathan Biss and conductor Robert Spano. (Marc Neikrug’s Bassoon Concerto was premiered last November; the BSO also gave the American premiere of Mark-Anthony Turnage’s Speranza, which it co-commissioned, in October.) The “Piano and Orchestra” is deliberate; soloist and ensemble are much more complementary than combative. A lot of the piece finds Rands reassigning traditionally “idiomatic” material to its instrumental opposites. The first movement of the concerto (“Fantasia”) opens with the orchestra pealing out bell tones of no little pianistic quality; the piano answers by taking over the orchestra’s usual function of providing sweep and saturation, filling in the spaces with ribbony flourishes of fast notes and crushed-ice chords, a bright, pixelated simulation of orchestral color. The movement’s ending—which ended up being the concerto’s biggest, most aggressive moment—punctuates a steady crescendo of volume and activity with an abrupt thump, as if piano and orchestra finally meet up just where hammer meets strings.

The slow movement uses the “Aubade” from Rands’s Three Pieces for Piano (also written for Biss), working it into a thoroughly Impressionist exploration of orchestral sustain and pianistic decay. Spano and the BSO had primed this movement well by opening the concert with the “Nuages” and “Fêtes” movements of Debussy’s Nocturnes, and Rands seemed to drop the concert back into that soundworld, right down to period details: melodies etched by doubled winds and harps; distant, buzzy muted-brass calls; catharsis via increased orchestral lushness rather than harmonic resolution. The scaffolding, though, carries hints of serialism, everything permuting out from a four-note motive that, in different guises, keeps inaugurating tentative, crystalline explorations on the part of the piano. The climax here, too, does a reversal, short brass stings giving way to the piano’s pedaled resonance. A challenge of touch and balance more than virtuosity, the movement was the beneficiary of a delicately precise performance.

The finale was built around another concept that has turned up before in Rands’s work, the sometimes paradoxical layers of time that can coexist in music. Here, the multiple layers are condensed into a single, near-ubiquitous idea: tremolos, across gradually expanding intervals, a texture that, all by itself, manages to be fast and slow at the same time. Trills were passed back and forth from soloist to orchestra, from high to low, from timbre to timbre, while bits of rhythmic cadence bounced across the stage. There was an almost insouciantly traditional cadenza—ideas from throughout the piece brought back for one last cameo—before the concerto, like Debussy’s party, seemed to drift away into the pre-dawn light.

A lot of the personality of the piece came from Biss’s particular style at the keyboard—crisp, impeccably controlled, fastidious to the point that it transcends stuffiness. But the concerto is already reticent in its grandeur. Rands, who just celebrated his 80th birthday, is still at least an honorary musical Bostonian, having spent over a decade at Boston University and then Harvard back in the ’80s and ’90s. But this piece called to mind a different civic cultural strain, the American Impressionist painters that flourished in and around New England in the early part of the 20th century—Childe Hassam, J. Alden Weir, Frank Benson, Edmund Tarbell—more concerned with capturing subtleties of light and shadow than monumental effect. The struggle and victory of the Romantic concerto were nowhere to be heard. In its place was something that, despite a wildly different vocabulary, was rather like Makan’s moods: a voyage, a passage, a span of time given significance just through the act of noticing.

New England’s Prospect: Beyond the Sea

Lining out Matthew Ritchie's Monstrance/Remonstrance, ICA/Boston, March 28, 2014.

Lining out Matthew Ritchie’s Monstrance/Remonstrance, ICA/Boston, March 28, 2014.

Introducing his collaborative piece Monstrance/Remonstrance at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston on March 28, Matthew Ritchie—currently in the midst of an 18-month stint as the ICA’s artist-in-residence—gave a whirlwind, 30-second history of the philosophical object. His endpoint was deliberately unfathomable: the object-oriented ontology of Graham Harman. In Harman’s view, the ingrained philosophical habit of considering objects only inasmuch as they are used or encountered by human consciousness is forever incomplete: in addition to perceived and idealized objects, there are real objects, with their own ontology, existing whether we sense them or not. “[The] real world,” Harman writes, “is made up of individual objects that are withdrawn from all theoretical, practical, and even causal access.”
Harman’s philosophy isn’t much concerned with aesthetics, but one can see why an artist might love it. It’s full of sentences

 The interplay of dust and cinder blocks and shafts of sunlight is haunted by the drama of presence and withdrawal no less than are language or lurid human moods

—that could easily double as mission statements for any number of post-modern conceptual art installations. If you were looking for them, you could see Harman’s real objects as a recurring feature of Monstrance/Remonstrance. They also were, in the end, something else: an alibi.

***

See and hear: music was an integral part of the piece. Ritchie had recruited an impressive group of collaborators, drawing heavily from what might be called the Parenthetical Parallel Résumé wing of the new music establishment: vocalist Shara Worden (My Brightest Diamond), guitarist Bryce Dessner (The National), clarinetist Evan Ziporyn (ex-Bang on a Can All-Star), sound designer David Sheppard (Sound Intermedia). The performance started in the ICA lobby, site of the ICA’s art wall, turned over to chosen artists on a regular basis for large-scale murals. Ritchie’s mural sprawls across the wall and into the adjacent glass facade. The imagery—spiraling lines, jagged, vectorized tendrils, vaguely organic circles—is congruent with his mural, Remanence: Salt and Light, currently covering a large wall in nearby Dewey Square (itself, not so long ago, the site of Occupy Boston); the mural recycles elements from Ritchie’s painting The Salt Pit, on display elsewhere in the ICA. Ritchie further echoed the imagery in the foam pads scattered across the floor in place of traditional seating.

David Sheppard (center) under the art wall, ICA/Boston, March 28, 2014.

David Sheppard (center) under the art wall, ICA/Boston, March 28, 2014.

The music for this portion was Propolis, devised by Dessner, Ziporyn, and Sheppard, first performed in 2008 as part of The Morning Line, a Ritchie installation in Seville, Spain. It is a framework for improvisation, though this performance had documentary specificity, being filmed and recorded for subsequent incorporation into the space, via playback and smartphone-accessible video. It started with Dessner and bassist Blake Newman slowly layering over a mulching electronic background, with Sheppard hovering nearby, manipulating the sound from a tablet computer. Then violinist Shaw Pong Liu began to weave through the crowd, soon joined by trombonist Randy Pingray, and then Ziporyn. Everybody was amplified; the conversation—or, maybe, competition—between local and global perception was constant.

The piece itself fell into four large sections: an opening in which the overlay of electronic noise predominated; an industrial breakdown (the “three minutes of excruciating pain” Ritchie warned the audience about, though it was actually pretty inviting in its head-banging way—a chunky, asymmetrical stretch of metallic thrashing); collective commentary over a pleasantly bumpy bass clarinet loop; and then a long coda settling into rich, Ligeti-like clusters. The improvisation had a tendency to default to a particular style—bursts of extended-technique scribbling over minimalist grooves—a little of which, for me at least, goes a long way. But the slower sections, where the players had an expanse of resonance to play into, built up into shimmering walls of sound.
The physical interaction between the players was minimal, ending in an apt tableau in which Pingray, Ziporyn, and Liu faced the wall, away from the audience and each other, while continuing to play. (Dessner had already left the space by this point.) The performance seemed to occupy the interstice between a group improvisation and five people improvising. Maybe you could call it a symbol of the gap between the perceived object and the real object.

***

Monstrance/Remonstrance then moved out of the museum, along the pier, and across the street, to the Our Lady of Good Voyage Chapel, for the second part of the piece: a screening of Ritchie’s film Remonstrance, to the live accompaniment of Dessner’s To the Sea. This, too, was a revival, having been premiered at the short-lived L&M Arts gallery in Los Angeles (though, like all of Ritchie’s works, it’s been continually tweaked and altered). Remonstrance was already playing as the audience was herded into the chapel. The film mixes sea imagery, computer animation, and allegorical ideas, all filtered through a sepia-toned, painterly filter of video processing. A drone flies over a beach; we see the pilings of a pier and a decaying bridge. (Harman: “The reality of the bridge is not to be found in its amalgam of asphalt and cable, but in the geographic fact of ‘traversable gorge.’ The bridge is a bridge-effect; the tool is a force that generates a world, one in which the canyon is no longer an obstacle.”) The whole is invaded by protozoa-like spheres, again recapitulating visual elements from painting and mural.

Worden and her on-film doppelgänger then made their entrances. (The film incorporates footage from an earlier, 2011 version of the piece, which included an installation/performance component that took place on Venice Beach.) In the chapel, Worden processed up the aisle with a model boat—a carvel-built, 17th-century English-style vessel, by the looks of it, appropriate for a pilgrimage—while on-screen Worden summoned seaweed-clad golems from the Pacific. Her costume made, perhaps, Harman-esque commentary: geometric patterns that evoked both fishnets and the harmony of the spheres, a carapace-like mask made of interlocking iterations of those jagged tendrils.

She was singing all the while, long, keening lines buoyed by Dessner and three trombones (Pingrey, Ian Maser, and Christopher Moore) and organ (Elaine Rombola) and Ziporyn, who turned up at the end. Perhaps this is reading too much into Dessner’s instrument of choice, but To the Sea seemed to derive its sound-world from a paradigm of guitar feedback: overtones and layers of pitch and noise built up into a shiny, grainy harmonic edifice. The basic progression was simple—a grim, lush circle of minor chords—but the musical surface (once again amplified and processed) was rich with constantly shifting texture. (One casualty of that texture was the text: Worden’s crystalline tone soared, but the actual words were largely a wash.) At the climax, Dessner veered into some marvelous big, dissonant, Messiaen-like chords: wide-angle, saturated luminosity.

***

I was kind of half-waiting for all of the disparate parts of Monstrance/Remonstrance to click into place, to come together in some summation, but they never do. Ideas mill around the same conceptual space, images are mirrored and echoed. It’s a series of partial glimpses of some theoretical, larger whole. I’m sure that’s intentional, but it kept running up against the notion that the piece was site-specific; the sites were more specific than the piece was, which sometimes made for an odd imbalance. It also brought to the fore how music is automatically site-specific in a way that visual arts have to work at.

Our Lady of Good Voyage, for example, is a utilitarian box of a building; apart from a couple of statues, some stained glass, and appropriately uncomfortable pews, there is not much in the architecture to suggest religious transcendence or mystery. Which is, one could say, part of the ontology of the place, a chapel for working sailors and fishermen whose required divine grace is of an unapologetically practical form: safety, security, survival. The way Remonstrance evoked the elemental nature of the sea, by way of mythology, was a little bit dissonant with such a practical place. I kept thinking of that most powerful of New England seafaring myths—Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick—and how its literary summoning of the sea’s power is inseparable from its exhaustive, anthropological detailing of the rituals and rules of shipboard life and the equipment and techniques of 19th-century whaling.
Of course, this was where the invocation of Harman’s real objects could answer any such quibbles. The performance’s disconnection from the place could, after all, reflect our inherent disconnection from the world of objects. The seeming jumble of images and ideas could, possibly, be taken as a shadow of a web of meaning beyond our perception. But Melville is dealing with real objects, too—he’s just doing it by describing, cataloging, narrating as much as he can, up to the limits of language, and in the process making you realize that it’s still not enough.

In press materials for the show, the ICA proposed that “the performance connects Boston’s seafaring history with its new identity as a hub of technology and innovation.” I could see a few connections in retrospect—that drone flying around at the beginning of Remonstrance, for instance—but, then again, you can see those connections just by walking around the neighborhood: building and development is going on all around the ICA. (Our Lady of Good Voyage, situated on prime real estate, is about to be moved.) Would I have been primed to think about those connections without the experience of Monstrance/Remonstrance? Probably not—in that sense, Ritchie’s project was a success. But I wonder if the connections would have been more immediate, more powerful, if it had been just the music—if we had heard the snaggy machinery of Propolis with only the view of the girders and excavators in the ICA’s parking lot, if we had heard the deep currents of To the Sea with the chapel as the main visual component, rather than just a box to be filled.

But what does it matter what I wonder? According to object-oriented ontology, none of it, not the sea, not the buildings, not the bulldozers, not the instruments or the loudspeakers, not the paintings and sculptures and rolls of film, not even my eyes and ears, none of it needs my consciousness in order to have presence and withdrawal and biographies and philosophical actuality. Maybe that’s the ultimate point of Ritchie’s work, that art, or anything we make or do, turns to music, essentially, as soon as its made or done: in the world, apart from us, beyond our sway or even comprehension. What is art? In multiple senses: it’s out of our hands.

New England’s Prospect: The Agnosticism of Boston’s Equilibrium Concert Series

Boston's Equilibrium Concert Series

Waiting for the show, February 21, 2014.

Boston’s Equilibrium Concert Series, which started in 2011, has made entire seasons—not to mention an entire new music community—out of that most alchemical of compositional tricks: establishing a connection between two ideas simply by putting them next to each other. The organization opportunistically shifts its identity between composer collective and presenter, at times putting together made-to-measure programs of premieres, at times turning over the reins to friendly performers and groups who bring in their own repertoire and connections. Instead of a unified aesthetic, they end up with a multitude of enthusiasms. The idea that 21st-century new music is stylistically agnostic might be somewhere between a truism and an extrapolation, but EQ actually comes pretty close to that ideal.

Their concert on February 21—at the Central Square YMCA Theater in Cambridge, one of the area’s more elegantly ramshackle spaces—featured Boston Modern Brass. (The group also made an appearance on EQ’s 2012-13 season.) The program was spiked with examples of the group’s spoke-by-spoke connectivity. One of the performers—trumpeter Jason Huffman—is also one of EQ’s core organizers; three others—trumpeter Jonah Kappraff, hornist Yoni Kahn, and tubist Beth McDonald—also lend their talents to the EQ Ensemble, an as-big-as-it-needs-to-be group that gathers for the more composer-centric concerts. (Trombonist Paul Fleming rounds out the quintet.) Another EQ organizer, Aaron Jay Myers, had a piece premiered on the concert, which also included a contribution from Kahn.

The rest of the program had something of a throwback feel, built around a trio of old-school modernist works combining mixed-meter angles with chunky dissonances and nervous energy. What was interesting was how much the program’s 21st-century pieces seemed to channel similar vibes; it was almost as if the sheer choice of instrumentation allowed some atavistic, brass-based form of American once-upon-a-time-new music to again express itself. Coincidental or not, it was a reminder of how much fizz is still in that style—it might be retro, but the best of it never gets old.

And the old stuff was pretty good indeed. William Mayer’s 1965 Brass Quintet was the busiest, a dense hubbub of teletype Neoclassicism. Mayer’s catalog has ranged far and wide, stylistically speaking; the Quintet is tonal, but just barely, with an efficient use of effect. (The third movement, a toccata-scherzo in which the players seem determined to sabotage any hint of heroic brass—with mutes, with fluttertongued raspberries, with speed-bump rhythmic shifts—was especially fluent in that regard.)

The music of John Huggler, who died in 1993, seems ripe for rediscovery. I was surprised to find he doesn’t even rate a Grove entry. For years a professor at UMass-Boston, he spent a couple seasons in the ’60s as that rarest of birds, the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s composer-in-residence. (One fruit of that has made it online.) Huggler’s Quintet for Brass Instruments, from 1963, was a real beauty, sinuous and austere: an opening movement that made compelling use of long tones in fast rhythms, an almost-fugue marked by stark unison passages, a “Mysterioso” wonderfully cast with a high tuba solo, a closing clutch of tight, cubist fanfares.

In between came Ralph Shapey’s marvelous grit: his Fanfares, composed in 1981, is three minutes of pure, unadulterated crunch. Shapey’s penchant for massiveness was out in full force—it’s kind of amazing how he could make the quintet sound so much bigger than it is, as if filming it from an extremely low angle—but so was his restless imagination: the clashes and clusters are refracted through all manner of mutes and voicings.

The concert opened with Counterpoint, a 2003 piece by Kahn —his first completed work, according to the program notes. It was an interesting mediation between busy modernism and easygoing post-minimalism. Its somewhat slow harmonic rhythm was translated into a density of attack: drones and pedal tones reiterated into an agitated stutter of short notes. Individual lines were overlaid with cross-traffic accents. Dissonant intervals came on a steady bed of fourths and fifths.

The one brand-new piece, Aaron Jay Myers’s FLUX, was, much of the time, an exploration of different kinds of homophony: first a series of repeated chords, then a division of the quintet into two factions (horn, trombone, and tuba in slow, moody cahoots, while the trumpets offer muted chatter), then a fluid lock-step chorale, then a return of the opening idea. (Myers’s program note linked the structure to a personal struggle and recovery; one could, in that light, hear those opening jitters transformed, lemons-to-lemonade style, into crackling positive energy behind the chorale’s cushion.)

The program’s one apparent outlier, Hans Abrahamsen’s Rundt Og Imellem (“Round and In-Between,” finished in 1976) seemed to visit from another concert, in both its European origin and its in-your-face simplicity and triadic tonality. Still, its rhythmic ideas were congenial to the program, its squared phrasing trimmed to odd numbers of beats, lending an off-kilter surrealism to its deliberate genericism. A cheery brass band marches through an Escher print; a bright fanfare drifts out of step with itself; a soft-edged legato turns more loping than lyrical. The piece makes the most of the most basic of formal contrasts, juxtaposed jump-cut style: that marching band tune interrupted by tuplet outbursts, those fanfares undercut with dark, droning pedals. Trumpet and horn pick up a triangle and bells, respectively, at the end, a pastoral touch genial and jarring at the same time. In fact, Myers’s currents and Abrahamsen’s clockwork formed a complement that, rhythmically speaking, encompassed the whole program. Where Abrahamsen’s mixed meters were subtractive, looping around faster than you might expect, Myers’s were more additive, which created its own layer of lacunae: the stop-and-go rhythms really did stop, noticeably, putting each phrase in its own frame.
Equilibrium’s mixed-meter programming gives every new music style its chance to have its say. The next few EQ concerts are like some kind of eclecticist’s fever dream: a solo glockenspiel concert from Trevor Saint; the debut concert of Trio Okho, three Boston new music percussion stars (Nick Tolle, Jeffrey Means, and Mike Williams) performing Xenakis, a new piece by Victoria Cheah, and Rick Burkhardt’s amazing Great Hymn of Thanksgiving; and a string quartet concert featuring a premiere from EQ organizer Stephanie Lubkowski alongside music by Zorn and Górecki. That’s a montage to make Eisenstein proud. Equilibrium Concert Series finds balance in variation.

New England’s Prospect: Boston Symphony Chamber Players Celebrate 50 Years

Boston Symphony Chamber Players, Randall Hodgkinson, piano

Boston Symphony Chamber Players, Randall Hodgkinson, piano
Photo by Hilary Scott

Musical institutions have the amnesiac pleasure of getting themselves birthday presents and still being surprised. On February 9, the Boston Symphony Chamber Players unwrapped the bulk of their 50th-anniversary loot: four commissioned pieces, premiered en masse. (Another commission, Sebastian Currier’s Parallel Worlds, will have its premiere in Arizona before coming to Boston in April.) That nearly doubles the group’s commissioned repertoire all at once; up until this year, only seven other pieces (going by the handy list of repertoire included in Sunday’s program) had been written for them. Then again, I suppose 50 is a plausibly sitcom-ish age for suddenly realizing that you’ve always wanted a lot of new toys.

And, then again, the Chamber Players have always been institutionally unusual. They were founded (as I learned from Jeremy Eichler) as a side effect of Tanglewood’s long flirtation with the automobile; Erich Leinsdorf wanted prelude concerts to give patrons an extra hour to deal with traffic and recruited some of the BSO’s principals to fill the bill. (The members are all still principals, with the exception of cellist Jules Eskin, the lone veteran of that 1964 lineup.) Those commissions are technically BSO commissions, funded by the same pool that keeps the orchestra intermittently current. So the birthday party is both a calendrical observation and a confirmation of the Players’ success—five commissions is a strong commitment from the parent company.
The four new pieces on Sunday’s concert were deliberately local—a couple of old familiar Bostonians (Gunther Schuller and Yehudi Wyner), and a couple of newer connections (Kati Agócs, who teaches at the New England Conservatory, and Hannah Lash, who graduated from Harvard). Agócs’s contribution, Devotion, for horn, harp, and string quintet, hovered in an area somewhere between chamber and orchestral music—one could imagine the strings, at times, blown up to a full symphonic complement. (It did warrant a conductor, outgoing BSO assistant Andris Poga.) The harp (Jessica Zhou) primes the piece with a healthy dose of glitter, a kind of harmonic respiration between diatonic and synthetic scales, under which the strings (Malcolm Lowe, Haldan Martinson, Steven Ansell, Eskin, and Ed Barker) provide a cushion; over it all, the horn (James Sommerville) sweeps and soars, much of it haute-contre high. The middle section was a contrast in almost every way, triggered by Sommerville shifting from the highest part of the horn’s range to the lowest, one snarling pedal tone after another; the viola tiptoes around a melody; the violins and cello stalk soft chords; harp and double-bass keep a hesitant tick-tock. The horn rises back up to the top of its range, an A-section recapitulation, and a wheels-on-the-tarmac unison ending.

Boston Symphony Chamber Players perform Hannah Lash's Three Shades Without Angles

Boston Symphony Chamber Players perform Hannah Lash’s Three Shades Without Angles
Photograph by Hilary Scott

Lash’s Three Shades Without Angles also put Zhou’s harp front and center, flanked by Debussyian flute (Elizabeth Rowe) and viola (Ansell). The harp part started as an exercise in stamina, a moto perpetuo ride the other instruments hopped onto, all mixed meters and crossed accents; the effect was something like the world’s most dreamy and delicate action movie. Then the harp abruptly turned taciturn, offering occasional punctuation for flute and viola recitatives, before laying down arpeggios over which the other two strung a loping, wide-interval melody, hopping from stone to stone across a flowing stream. Like Devotion, Three Shades had that 21st-century sense of moving flats and bright outlines—sharp and deliberate section breaks, a constantly churning counterpoint that, however, keeps stirring through a seemingly single harmonic color (in this case, a higher-overtone, dominant-seventh plus sharp-9 and 11 sort of shimmer). Both pieces had an almost Vermeer-like polish: tightly framed, smoothly varnished vignettes of carefully modulated luminosity.

Where Agócs and Lash used controlled brushwork, Schuller and Wyner opted for more freewheeling lines. Schuller, 88, is a more frail presence than he used to be, but his music—on Sunday, it was Games, a compact divertimento for wind and string quintets—keeps doubling down on musical and intellectual energy. UNESCO has a program where they periodically designate a certain craft or tradition as (and I love this phrase) an Intangible Culture Heritage; if I was in charge of making that list, I would be sorely tempted to include Gunther Schuller’s late-period gonzo stream-of-consciousness style. Every piece of his I’ve heard over the past few years—his Four Vignettes, the Piano Trio No. 3, Dreamscape—is the product of a deep, singular, and probably inimitable reserve of skills and experiences being rummaged through with a compulsively entertaining raconteur’s disdain for restraint or the unities. Games is dense, mutable fun. The opening, a chattering overlap of conflicting tuplets, soon gives way to an entire midway of ideas: a Stravinskian ostinato stuck in its own groove; a burlesque quote of Ravel (the Valses Nobles et Sentimentales, transformed into something gleefully ignoble and unsentimental), whisked away behind some disjointed pointillism; a slashing, slapstick ending swiped from Mozart’s Musical Joke. Along the way, Schuller has a lot of fun with the sheer timbre of dissonance, odd combinations of instruments, and intervals that, on at least a half-dozen occasions, had me half out of my seat, trying to parse what strange alchemy had created such an unexpected sonority. Games was about half the length of any of the other new pieces, but it contained at least twice as much music. (Oboist John Ferrillo, clarinetist William Hudgins, and bassoonist Richard Svoboda joined the crowd; Poga again conducted.)

Boston Symphony Chamber Players perform Gunther Schuller's Games

Boston Symphony Chamber Players perform Gunther Schuller’s Games
Photo by Hilary Scott

Wyner’s piece was nowhere near as manic as Schuller’s bag of tricks, but it, too, ended up covering a significant amount of ground. Into the Evening Air put a traditional ensemble (a wind quintet) into a traditional mood (nocturnal, in both susurrant and serene varieties), but deviated from the path just enough to keep the ear continually attuned. Both the busy, twittering opening and the languid dissonance it turned into nodded toward other staples of the repertoire (Samuel Barber’s Summer Music came to mind more than once), but only from a distance. In an analogous way, Wyner paid heed to customary quintet allegiances—flute and oboe, horn and bassoon, clarinet as a free agent—but then, in a section of passed-around solos, used some deft play with range to expand and shift those alliances: horn and bassoon going up into their higher notes to let low flute join in, oboe going down to its lowest tones to make common cause with the horn and bassoon, the flute and bassoon suddenly stalking about in wide-spaced octaves, the other three instruments slipping into the gap. Into the Evening Air moves from idea to idea with a kind of diaristic nonchalance. The conversation slows almost to a frozen stasis before Wyner turns one last nifty corner: a soft chord that fades into a single clarinet note, which then dovetails into a quietly questioning call from the flute.

Boston Symphony Chamber Players perform Yehudi Wyner's Into the Evening Air

Boston Symphony Chamber Players perform Yehudi Wyner’s Into the Evening Air
Photo by Hilary Scott

The group surrounded their bounty of novelty with a pair of turn-of-the-last-century works that extended the locavore theme—more New England composers—but also encompassed the program’s contrasts: mood and structure, formal and feisty, male and female. Ansell, Ferrillo and pianist Randall Hodgkinson opened the show with a lush and equable mezzotint reading of Charles Loeffler’s Two Rhapsodies. Hodgkinson was back, joined by Rowe, Martinson, Ansell, and Eskin, for the finale, Amy Beach’s brawny op. 67 Piano Quintet, in a performance that made a pretty good nomination for the Quintet’s admission to the Academy of the Underrated. (The Quintet’s Adagio espressivo movement, certainly, is a stretch of late-Romantic mastery that can take its place alongside anything at all.) Give the Boston Symphony Chamber Players their due as hosts and hostesses: the party favors were as good as the presents.

New England’s Prospect: The Second Hand Unwinds—A 45th Season for Boston Musica Viva

Boston Musica Viva

Boston Musica Viva
Photo by Robert Harding Pittman

It is a bit of a tightrope for a new music group to celebrate an anniversary, if you believe Henri Bergson. The French philosopher located the source of much of the philosophical angst surrounding free will and causality at the difference point between experienced duration and measured time. “Sometimes we think particularly of the regular succession of physical phenomena and of the kind of inner effort by which one becomes another,” he wrote, “sometimes we fix our mind on the absolute regularity of these phenomena, and from the idea of regularity we pass by imperceptible steps to that of mathematical necessity, which excludes duration understood in the first way.” In other words: sometimes we intuitively sense a progression of events through time, sometimes we measure it with a clock. “And we do not see any harm in letting these two conceptions blend into one another, and in assigning greater importance to the one or the other according as we are more or less concerned with the interests of science.” But the clock’s precision distorts: “to apply the principle of causality, in this ambiguous form, to the succession of conscious states, is uselessly and wantonly to run into inextricable difficulties.”

Boston Musica Viva, the city’s oldest new music group, is marking its 45th season with, it would seem, a somewhat Bergsonian regard for the arbitrariness of that round-ish number. The group might have been tempted to, say, recapitulate its first concert (from February 1970: Bolcom’s Session III, Huber’s Askese, the Webern Pierrot-ensemble arrangement of Schonberg’s op. 9 Chamber Symphony, and Foss’s Time Cycle). But even institutions can’t claim absolute regularity—indeed, conductor Richard Pittman is the only performer remaining from that 1970 edition of the group. So instead, the year’s concerts are filled with relatively recent music, with a premiere for each—the kind of inner effort, one might say, by which new music stays new.
Their concert on November 16, at the Longy School of Music, had an added layer of temporal consideration. Charles Zoll’s Bailes encima del escritorio de nuestra juventúd (“Dances atop the school desk of our youth”) was the winner of this year’s Rapido! composition contest (started by the Atlanta Chamber Players and administered by a consortium that includes BMV, Fifth House Ensemble, Voices of Change, and the Left Coast Ensemble). The rules are all about speed: composers get a theme (dance, this time around), an ensemble (oboe, violin, cello, piano), and two weeks to deliver a score. The results might be predicted from the parameters: Zoll’s piece, in five movements, had lots of ostinati, lots of instruments imitating other instruments (cello as string bass, oboe as clarinet, and so on), lots of filled-out ABA forms.

The Bailes were unremittingly pleasant, though almost frictionlessly so; a busy-but-circumscribed bit of flamenco, a moody-but-smooth tango, a bit of awfully well-behaved jazz, even with Geoffrey Burleson working the inside of the piano with a couple of mallets. The performance (Burleson with violinist Jae Young Cosmos Lee, cellist Jan Müller-Szeraws, and oboist Miri Kudo), skittish at first, settled into a groove of such easiness that the only real drama was a page-turning snafu (which warmed my heart). I had heard some of the other Rapido! entries in a preliminary round; I can’t really say that Zoll’s winner (of which the first two movements formed his original entry) was more striking than any of those other pieces, just perhaps more finished—a tribute to the virtues of watching the clock.

The world premiere on Saturday’s concert, Fabrication 15: Amplification by Andy Vores, was a more discursive roam through the temporal workshop. Eventually, there will be 32 Fabrications, for a variety of forces, each built around a particular notion or metaphor; Fabrication 15 is all about speeding up and slowing down, alternately emphasizing the local and the global from both a performing and listening standpoint. At its center is an older Vores piece, Slow Peacherine Rag, a Scott Joplin deconstruction inspired by his overhearing such music being practiced at half-speed on a hot, half-speed-ish sort of day: the bouncy rhythms and cadences are stretched out, sliced up, interspersed with longueurs and languors. The Rag takes its place at the center of Fabrications 15, arranged for the instrumental sextet—Lee, Müller-Szeraws, and Burleson joined by Lisa Hennessy (flutes), William Kirkley (clarinets), and Robert Schulz (percussion)—but the frame, a riot of clockworks in and out of sync with each other—imperceptible steps to mathematical necessity, maybe—grows into a thick, busy impasto. The constant here is the sense of curiosity, the way Vores so manifestly loves his sounds: the piano’s decay, the clang of metallic percussion, the possibilities of fast, running flute lines and needle-nosed altissimo clarinet. Vores has a knack for music that feels determined without feeling deterministic.

The concert’s nod to retrospection only went back to 2000 and Thea Musgrave’s one man, one act opera The Mocking-Bird (an adaptation of Ambrose Bierce’s short story) originally commissioned by BMV. During the Civil War, Private Grayrock (baritone David Kravitz) strays behind enemy lines; firing his rifle out of fear, he unwittingly precipitates a skirmish, causing him to muse bitterly on the incompetence of his officers, the vagaries of his life, his long-lost brother—the dividing lines of class and conflict and the vagaries of causality. The music (scored for the same ensemble as the Vores) is both romantically old-fashioned and modernistically fluid. Musgrave is not afraid of obvious symbolisms, be they illustrative (snare drums and piccolo reveilles) or structural (minor-key present versus major-key memories, flatted sixth and seventh scale degrees constantly weighing down the tonality, dragging it away from resolution and a tonicized home). And what little plot there is is both conspicuously exposited and eminently predictable.

But, like all ghost stories (and The Mocking-Bird is a ghost story, the specter of the past forever haunting Grayrock’s present), the juice is in the telling, and this performance’s telling was big, straightforward, sincere. (Kravitz was especially good, surmounting the part’s wordiness and unabashed expressive escalations with conviction.) Musgrave gives the proceedings a formal richness and efficiency that don’t so much plumb the drama of the story as amplify the insistent necessity of its reiteration. If humanity is determined wantonly to run into the same old inextricable difficulties, Musgrave’s opera hints, the same old stories will never see their time pass.

New England’s Prospect: Celebrating Ned Rorem @ 90 in Boston

I am the key to my simplicities, but the lock’s painted over.
—Ned Rorem, The Final Diary 1961-1972

The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston is, at the moment, hosting a reminder that what you look at and what you see are not necessarily the same thing. The reminder concerns the museum’s great unhealed rift: the theft, in 1990, of thirteen works of art, including paintings by Vermeer, Rembrandt, and Manet. Because of the terms of Mrs. Gardner’s will—which puts strict limitations on altering her original collection, even down to the gallery arrangements—the stolen items still maintain an absent presence: the walls and displays formerly occupied by the works are left blank and bare. The larger paintings still hang as empty frames: visitors sit at a desk to look at the spot where Vermeer’s The Concert once resided or stand in front of what used to be Rembrandt’s The Storm on the Sea of Galilee and see an expanse of damask wallpaper bound by a gilded rectangle.

On the other side of the museum, in the Gardner’s newer, modern expansion, French artist Sophie Calle’s 1991 installation Last Seen, which is being paired with a new, smaller sequel called What Do You See?, combines large-scale photographs of those empty spaces with textual accompaniment, derived from interviews with museum staff and visitors about the stolen works. It is, on the one hand, a memory piece, but also a piece slyly poking at the question of just what it is we look at when we look at art. Visitors, after all, still go to the Dutch Room just to see the empty frames.

An empty frame in the Dutch Room of the Gardner Museum

An empty frame in the Dutch Room of the Gardner Museum, where Rembrandt’s The Storm on the Sea of Galilee and A Lady and Gentleman in Black once hung.
Image via FBI.gov

On November 3, across the way from Calle’s installation, the New York Festival of Song visited the museum’s Calderwood Hall with a program celebrating Ned Rorem’s 90th birthday. (It was something of an out-of-town tryout for a November 5 concert at New York’s Merkin Hall.) Mixing Rorem’s songs with repertoire by contemporaries—both friends and rivals—the idea was to present a sketch of a composer and his influences. The outlines, both in the selection and Steven Blier’s program notes, made for a familiar image of Rorem, the brash individualist breezily sailing against prevailing winds, be it in his vocabulary (tonal), his musical accent (French), or even his life (that of an uninhibited and unapologetic gay man). But as the songs unfolded, those outlines began to blur and shift. By the end, the portrait of Rorem was, perhaps unwittingly, more true to the subject’s complexity, more like the charged, eloquent lacunae that Calle was investigating down the hall. The frame—the tonality, the lyricism, the elegant hedonism—is obvious; but what’s contained within the frame, what is and isn’t there, is something considerably more elusive.

Never mind that Rorem, in song and diary, has seemed to cultivate a persona of almost compulsive indiscretion. It is a gambit, a strategem. “The undisciplined first-person involuntarily inclines more to disguise than a novelist does,” the man once remarked. “I am Rose and when I sing / I am Rose like anything,” Gertrude Stein wrote, words that Rorem set with almost bald-faced cheer and lucidity—but words that also hint at a mutability of identity. Pianist Michael Barrett introduced the song by quoting from an interview:

[Rorem]: “I Am Rose,” on a darling poem of Gertrude Stein’s, is short, about ten seconds long. There are as many ways to sing it as there are singers, and it can go fast or slow or in between. It’s my masterpiece.
[Interviewer]: Oh?
[Rorem]: I’m being cute.

The thing is, in Rorem’s music, “being cute”—that dance between admission and retraction, between candidness and concealment—is serious business.

Much was made, in the concert, of Rorem’s Francophile tendencies, but there is one decidedly Germanic streak in his songs, and that is the idea of continuous variation, the idea that Schoenberg analyzed out of Brahms as a justification for his own perpetual permutations. The context might be worlds away, but the technique is the same: Rorem’s ideas almost always return in slightly different guise, a musical nod to the quiet churn of even the most benign emotion. In a way that seems to bow to both Heraclitus and Sondheim, Rorem never does anything twice.

That was especially apparent when the songs were contrasted with strophic counterparts. The distance between Marc Blitzstein’s “Emily” (from his Airborne Symphony)—a World War II bombardier writing a letter to his sweetheart before a flight—and Rorem’s “A specimen case,” from his cycle War Scenes—a Walt Whitman portrait of a dying Civil War soldier—was striking: Blitzstein hewing to verse and chorus in serene tension, Rorem letting the musical expression overrun the form. Even in gentler songs, “Full of life now,” say (a lushly Impressionist Whitman setting from 1989) or “Come In,” a Robert Frost poem included in the 1997 cycle Evidence of Things Not Seen, Rorem never quite returns to where he began, the vantage point continually on the move, the seemingly unguarded style nonetheless staying a step out of reach.

The concert, then, had both a plausible feel of being a true portrait of Rorem and a strong sense that it was only one of many possible such portraits. It was painted with skill: Blier and Barrett divided the piano duties, with unimpeachable style; the singers were quite fine, baritone Andrew Garland all polished stentorian brawn, mezzo-soprano Kate Lindsey more mercurially expressive and playful with the text (though also, at times, more distractingly mannered, in a breathy-straight-tone-cabaret way). Rorem’s familiar hits were there: “The Lordly Hudson,” “Alleluia” (reimagined as a bright, anything-you-can-do competition between Garland and Lindsay), and “Early in the Morning” (an encore, sung in unison by a group of New England Conservatory students, turning Rorem’s delicate Parisian sojourn into something more like the crush of a tour group), The groupings were smart—not only the Blitzstein and “A specimen case,” but Francis Poulenc’s “C” flowing alongside “The Lordly Hudson,” for instance. The angles, though, were carefully chosen.

The between-number narration, drawn from Rorem’s writings and interviews, tended toward the witty and wicked—how could it not? But the music told an additional, parallel story. Near the program’s end came Rorem’s 1949 setting of Elinor Wylie’s “Little Elegy.” It starts off with an almost in-your-face expression of confident naïveté: a diatonic scale, up and down, simply harmonized, over which the voice weaves its way. But the harmonies start to shift, the piano’s lower register slips in and troubles the waters ever so slightly, the camera turns off center and toward the shadows. Rorem’s frames are so prominent and unmistakable that it’s easy to miss how much he has shifted the image inside them, how much the picture is a moving one. What do you see?

From the Shed to the Stars: Reflections on the Boston University Tanglewood Institute

I acquired my first orchestral scores in the Tanglewood gift shop, at the age of seventeen. A student at the Boston University Tanglewood Institute, I purchased the last copy of the Brahms symphonies the day before the Boston Symphony Orchestra launched a Brahms cycle under James Levine at Tanglewood’s legendary Koussevitsky Shed. A geek-cellist friend, alarmed at the prospect of listening without a score, offered me $200 for it; I declined. This was a new experience, a worth attached to music that I had not encountered before.

Many a college essay, I’m sure, has included a variation on a similar anecdote: “Gazing up at the stars while listening to [insert canonic symphony here], I realized that music was my true calling.”

Mine certainly did. NewMusicBox readers can probably recall similarly seminal, early memories of summer music festivals in high school or college, experiences of communing with nature and other young musicians that helped drive them to be the composers or performers they are today. But beyond the pat clichés of staring at the stars while listening to Brahms—for me at least—there was something more powerful at work: an expansion of musical consciousness and igniting of an intellectual curiosity that made me want to study music for the rest of my life.

I attended BUTI—affectionately known as “booty”—in the summers of 2005 and 2006; I played saxophone in the wind ensemble, a four-week program that ran alongside similar programs for high school-age composers, vocalists, pianists, and orchestral musicians. Those eight weeks are powerfully etched into my memory.

Sam Almaguer (clarinet), Molly Yeh (percussion), Nathan von Trotha (percussion), and Chris Pell (clarinet) before their last orchestra concert in the summer of 2007.

Sam Almaguer (clarinet), Molly Yeh (percussion), Nathan von Trotha (percussion), and Chris Pell (clarinet) before their last orchestra concert in the summer of 2007.
Photo courtesy Molly Yeh

Today, that program is in a certain amount of danger, and thus this article; I write less from a “Save Our Classical Music Institution” perspective but rather out of an obligation that is both personal and historic. The stories of young musicians at BUTI are stories that are crucial to the narrative of music in the past half-century. Cutting BUTI or relocating it from its current campus would be a sad erasure of a rich legacy that stretches back forty-five years and encompasses the early careers of many prominent musicians.

Earlier this month, the Berkshire Eagle reported a few of the issues at hand with the future of the BUTI program, which is run by Boston University (unlike the Tanglewood Music Center fellows program, which is facilitated by Tanglewood and the Boston Symphony). BU is currently reviewing their financial stake in the program and its future—both as part of the larger university and as directly connected to Tanglewood itself.

Sam Solomon—a percussionist who participated in BUTI in high school and today teaches at BU and BUTI—has recently begun to speak out publicly about the issues in order to draw attention to the dangers of altering the program. I communicated with Phyllis Hoffman—a professor of voice at BU and the executive and artistic director of BUTI—who let me know that the BUTI and BU administration are working closely together to offset the budget problems; she wrote to me that “there is a strong recognition of the excellence and importance of BUTI.”

That said, the current facilities—located on the beautiful West Campus, within walking distance of Tanglewood’s main grounds—are in need of overhaul and can’t currently accommodate all of the programs that BUTI offers. Fortunately, the Eagle recently confirmed that BUTI will definitely continue next summer. But serious investment is required, and BU is reportedly considering moving the program from Lenox to Boston.

Nathan von Trotha practicing the cymbals outside at BUTI

Nathan von Trotha practicing the cymbals outside at BUTI
Photo courtesy Molly Yeh

That would be a huge mistake. In her study The Sounds of Place: Music and the American Cultural Landscape, Denise von Glahn writes of the particularly American relationship between music and place, the “unique way in which music of the cultivated tradition expresses, defines, and celebrates place.” Tanglewood has already been similarly inscribed into American musical history. Nico Muhly, a BUTI alum, has written It Remains To Be Seen, a lovely, loving orchestral work that pays tribute to his wistful nighttime walk from the Tanglewood main grounds back to West Campus following a concert. Osvaldo Golijov’s cello concerto Azul was inspired by the composer’s memories of hearing the Boston Symphony play outdoors when he was a Tanglewood fellow (though not in BUTI). The Tanglewood experience has become part of this grand American tradition of tonalizing space, a place-based muse.

I asked several prominent alums of BUTI to help paint a broader picture of what BUTI, the program and the place, meant for them, and how their early experiences as high school fellows made them the musicians they are today.
Nico Muhly, composer

It was just amazing…For me the West Street campus is just so romantic and lovely, and site specific, and being that close to the grounds is amazing, and walking to the grounds is amazing….There’s nowhere else like that.

It’s that sense of continuity. For instance, one of my other friends I met that first summer, Dan Bauch, went on to the Tanglewood Music Center and went on to be a timpanist in the BSO. You can hear the same music by someone who, when you were a sixteen-year-old, you sat on the lawn and listened to The Firebird with; [he’s now] playing it with that orchestra 15 years later—it’s such a magical thing.

One of the things that people talk about, even just on the BSO side of it, is that it’s not just great music-making—it’s the whole culture of being there and the whole intergenerational chilled-ness. It’s so important for young musicians to see that. It connects to people, but it also connects to the idea of musical community.

This last summer I volunteered for a week and did master classes and taught lessons. I did the same thing two years ago. I go up as much as I can.  If I can volunteer at BUTI, it literally makes my summer. For me it’s not a summer unless you go to Tanglewood, and I’ve done crazy shit, like a couple years ago I flew back from, like, Singapore or something just to go. It’s not just fun, I think it’s vital

Molly Yeh, percussionist and food blogger

An earth shattering Mahler 5, a terrifying but triumphant Copland 3…While my love for music led me to BUTI, it was my time at BUTI that made me love the music world and desperately want to be a part of it. It was there where I met many of my very best friends, where I learned how to change a timpani head and work with composers on new works, and where I got to know Tanglewood as one of my most favorite places on earth. My BUTI summers were the first flaps of the butterfly’s wings in my career as a percussionist.

My bonds with my peers at BUTI, both professional and personal, still hold tight today, however it is also important to mention that my interactions with the Tanglewood Music Center percussionists also had a profoundly enriching effect. To this day, I consider a few of them to be my most valuable mentors. With their encouragement and support, I had extra confidence in my college auditions, and I’ve since had the opportunity to play with them in orchestras around the world. Having the TMC percussionists as role models during my years at BUTI was a unique and unforgettable experience that I would not have gotten at any other music camp.

Forgive me for being dramatic, but when I’m old and crusty and dying, the montage of my adult life will open with Mahler’s Adagietto playing to a memory where I’m dancing with my three best friends, barefoot on the Tanglewood grounds. Laughing, frolicking…and then taceting in tears until the next movement. Without a doubt, these were some of the happiest moments of my life.

Sam Solomon, percussionist and faculty member at BU and BUTI

I’ve been fortunate to be a part of BUTI for 13 years: three as a student, and now ten as a faculty member. In and of itself, it is a top-notch program with top-notch faculty, but what sets it apart from other great summer festivals is the location. The students are provided an unparalleled education on top of that offered by the Institute because of their access to Tanglewood concerts, rehearsals, and masterclasses, as well as the community of musicians that spend their summers there. All of the Boston Symphony, Tanglewood Music Center, and visiting artist concerts expose these young minds to dozens of conductors, composers, and performers.

For me it was revelatory. I was a BUTI student nearly 20 years ago, and every musical experience I have had since is filtered through the education I received there. I am still in close contact with many of the students that were with me those summers, all of whom are at the top of their fields, playing in, composing for, soloing with, or conducting major orchestras, touring with successful chamber ensembles, teaching at top-tier music schools, and even in high-level music administration positions.

Nadia Sirota, violist and daughter of Robert Sirota, who taught composition at BUTI (Nadia did not herself attend the program)

Hanging around BUTI and Tanglewood laid the single most-impactiful groundwork for my becoming a musician. Without a doubt. There was a true respect for music-making that pervaded the place, not music-making as industry but as art. There was a joy to the program. I remember all of my dad’s little composition students hanging out at our house and having barbecues. Composers, performers, and audience members are all thrown together in this little town. Everything feels vital. Also, musicians that are 16 years old get to consort with musicians who are 23 and musicians who are 63. The whole musical ecosystem is temporarily housed in one zone. It’s like a terrarium.

Judd Greenstein, composer and co-founder of New Amsterdam Records

Having friends who, like me, knew they were composers, that they had already discovered their passion and were pursuing it at a high level, was extremely encouraging and gave me a sense of being part of a supportive community even before we all wound up in New York together, years later. The other important experience was getting to interact with really great older composers. That’s where I first met David Lang, and Sofia Gubaidulina visited, which was incredible, even in translation. I remember her talking about silence. It was one of the most profoundly important musical education experiences of my life, as was David’s talk. Especially so because I was with Nico [Muhly] and we could talk all day about what they said, as teenagers, when you really are learning so much.

It’s really my relationship with Nico that has meant the most to me. When you have a good friend in a challenging creative field who you’ve known for a long time, whom you meet at such a young age, it gives you a lot of confidence. Like, whatever else people may say, I know that we get each other and what we’re trying to do. I recently found some letters that we sent to each other where I was basically complaining about all the things that I wound up trying to address in the world of music, later on, with NOW Ensemble and New Amsterdam and Ecstatic, and which I’m still trying to address. Having friends with whom you can share those thoughts, and who agree, and where you’re supporting each other, is invaluable. Now I have many of those friends, of course, but Nico was the first, and BUTI is the avenue that made it happen.

Logan K. Young, editor-in-chief, Classicalite

Growing up in a small Southern town, attending the Boston University Tanglewood Institute was my first real, extended exposure to a world-class symphony orchestra, with every attendant benefit therein. I was 18 years old, freshly graduated from high school with an even fresher beard. Sure, I had been to Spoleto. I had studied trumpet at the Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities, as well as the Brevard Music Center, and I had just finished a week at the Conductors Institute of South Carolina. But BUTI truly was a different experience in an altogether different land. (I never will forget the 24-hour-plus Greyhound ride from Georgetown, South Carolina, to Lenox, Massachusetts!) I had no formal training in composition beforehand, but as soon as I got off that bus, I was thrust into hard lessons with Richard Cornell and Julian Wachner, intense classes with Steve Mackey and the late Lukas Foss. Of course, the Festival of Contemporary Music was its own great teacher, too. If I’d never heard Copland or Bernstein performed live by anything other than a per-service orchestra, I certainly had never heard any Leon Kirchner in person, much less a thing like Satie’s Socrate. And when I bought a double-CD of Tod Machover’s Valis at the gift shop on the grounds of Tanglewood proper, well, it’s no hyperbole to say that my life was changed forever. Come college, I would go on to summer at places like Banglewood and, stranger still, the Stockhausen Courses in Kürten, but none of those would have been possible were it not for the invaluable training in the most solid fundamentals which I received at BUTI. Granted, I write more about new music now, but again, if BUTI didn’t exist back then, my life would sound a lot more dull. I’m a better musician, writer, and overall person for having taken that Greyhound to Lenox; I sincerely hope the brass don’t shut the place down.

Jeffrey Beecher, principal bass, Toronto Symphony Orchestra, and member of The Silk Road Ensemble

I attended the Boston University Tanglewood Institute as a 14-year-old in 1997.   While I had some experience at other music programs under my belt, I remember feeling a little scared when I arrived in Lenox, not knowing what I was in store for.  From the moment I arrived at BUTI, I knew I had found a very special place.  I was immediately struck by the impressive level of talent and dedication coming from the other students.
I was inspired to meet young musicians who not only excelled at their instruments, but passionately debated the best recordings of Mahler symphonies, were floored to rehearse and perform the great orchestral masterworks (Nielsen 4!!), and who eagerly attended the Boston Symphony’s Shed concerts like rock shows.

All of this was greatly influenced by the location on the Boston University campus.   To be that close to the Tanglewood grounds afforded me unparalleled access to the pros.  It also inspired the dream of a long journey: with hard work, I might one day be a fellow at the Tanglewood Music Center.   And with even more hard work, I might get the chance to play in a professional orchestra?!

I am extremely grateful to say that I am living that 14-year-old’s dream—I perform as professional musician in a phenomenal orchestra and a world music ensemble.  As a teacher, I get to pass on the traditions and generosity of spirit I learned at BUTI to today’s aspiring young musicians.

In August 2010, my relationship to BUTI came full circle when I performed with the Silk Road Ensemble and Yo-Yo Ma at the Tanglewood Shed.  Feeling nostalgic, I gave a quick shout-out to the BUTI students in attendance.  As a youthful cheer exploded from beyond stage left, I was thrilled to observe that the vitality and passion of those students was just as impressive as it had been to me thirteen years earlier.

Missy Mazzoli, composer

It was vital to me to see as much music as possible.  I saw two or three concerts a day, plus rehearsals.  I remember seeing Peter Serkin in a rehearsal with the BSO, Anonymous Four, Van Cliburn, and John Williams conducting the premiere of a new orchestral work, among many others.  I was only seventeen but managed to meet Mauricio Kagel, Elliott Carter, Joan Tower, Bright Sheng, John Harbison, and Aaron Kernis that summer as well.  These were among the first living composers I met, believe it or not.

The location near the Tanglewood campus is absolutely essential to the power of the program.  Many of the best experiences I mentioned had to do with the fact that for the first time in my life I felt that I was being treated as a professional.  The ability to walk on the same grounds as the BSO and the chance to meet the top contemporary composers made me feel that I was on my way to having a life as a musician.  For a girl from small-town Pennsylvania, this was absolutely essential to my feeling that I could go on as a composer.

Timothy Andres, composer

I didn’t know a lot of kids my age who were interested in the same things I was. That first summer at BUTI was the first time I could meet other 14-year-olds who were obsessed with Ravel; no longer a social disease, my obsession made me popular. It wasn’t an education so much as a combination of osmosis and moral support. It confirmed my desperate need to be part of this thing—to be a musician was a real possibility, and if not exactly attainable, at least conceivable. And it was the beginning of my attachment to a place that would continue through college (when I returned for the Tanglewood Music Center) and my professional career (we recorded Home Stretch in Ozawa Hall).
It’s an integral part of Tanglewood and the larger music world, and its survival is vitally important to young musicians.

Craig Hubbard (French horn) and Yeh, frolicking on the Tanglewood grounds in 2007.

Craig Hubbard (French horn) and Molly Yeh, frolicking on the Tanglewood grounds in 2007.
Photo courtesy Molly Yeh

I myself have many memories of great performances, but perhaps more importantly, many memories of the value that my peers placed on those performances; thus, the $200 offered for that Brahms score! That value was in part a kind of cultural cold war that I engaged in with my fellow high schoolers, a battle over knowledge of the canon. I was a classical saxophonist with a very light schooling in the orchestral rep, and phrases like “Bruckner Four” and “the Meistersinger Prelude,” tossed off with such ease by other musicians (well, let’s be honest, brass players) endowed me with a peculiar kind of inferiority complex.
I tried to catch up, learning as much as I could as fast as I could. Following my first BUTI summer in 2005, I spent my senior year of high school fastidiously reading Wikipedia pages and biographies of the great composers. I returned in 2006 with the lingo, knowledge, and constant quest for new information about music that undergirds my research today. At age seventeen, it felt very good to know who Brahms was and why it was so special to hear Levine lead a full cycle of his symphonies. (New music, I should say, remained a bafflingly unknown element; I wish I had taken advantage of the offerings at the contemporary festival. And to this day, I regret most of all opting out of hearing the famous performance of Histoire du Soldat narrated by Babbitt, Carter, and Harbison.)

I could list the many concerts that inspired and overwhelmed me. But it was the overall sense of the environment and the coming-together of several generations of musicians—from high schoolers to college-age Tanglewood Music Center players to tenured members of the Boston Symphony—in a single place that was unique. With immense pride, I watched close friends rise through the ranks each summer, ascending the professional ladder amid the pines. A percussionist, Kyle Brightwell, was an early star in my first BUTI summer. By the next summer, he was already subbing with the TMC orchestra. This past August, I visited Tanglewood and saw Kyle pound away at the big drum in The Rite of Spring, as a tenured member of the Boston Symphony’s percussion section.

That sense of lineage, and the opportunity to forge an early relationship with musicians that will be maintained over the course of a lifetime, cannot be underestimated. Sitting outside the Shed and listening to Brahms, I can gaze up at those same stars today—as can Muhly, Andres, Mazzoli, Beecher, Young, Sirota, Yeh, and Solomon—and imagine a musical past and a continuity extending into a bright future.

The Mush Race of Boston: The SICPP 2013 Iditarod

How do you prepare for a concert presentation of over eight nearly continuous hours of new music? As a listener, it helps to read about the music, nap in advance, plan to get some fresh air, and pack a few good snacks. If you’re a performer, and the event is the Iditarod at the Summer Institute for Contemporary Performance Practice, it involves nine intensive days of practice, rehearsal, workshopping, and bonding with other musicians. SICPP (pronounced “sick puppy”) takes place every summer at the New England Conservatory. As you may already know, the Iditarod, from which SICPP’s closing event borrows its name, is an annual sled dog race held over several weeks and many different types of terrain in Alaska. It is, I am sure, a test of commitment, knowledge, stamina, and concentration. It also involves teamwork and adjustment to shifting conditions, which makes it a more apt name than the more usual “marathon” for what we experienced last Saturday.

The closing piece of the whole event was an incredibly beautiful performance of Berio's Folk Songs, featuring soprano Lucy Fitz Gibbon

The closing piece of the whole event was a performance of Berio’s Folk Songs, featuring soprano Lucy Fitz Gibbon.

But SICPP includes a lot more than just the culminating Iditarod. This year’s institute began on June 14th and ran through the 22nd, dipping half an hour into the 23rd. There were concerts every evening from the 16th onward, primarily featuring faculty and guests until the Iditarod, which was student-centered but frequently involved faculty in the chamber groups. Concurrent with the Iditarod was a set of installation pieces, which I unfortunately missed due to a planning error. There were also lunchtime concerts at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum’s Calderwood Hall, a co-presentation with Boston GuitarFest on Thursday afternoon, and an Electronic Workshop Concert on Friday afternoon. I attended the Friday and Saturday events. The Friday events, especially the evening concert, had an atmosphere more like a summer camp or a sporting event than—I think it’s safe to say—any other new music event I’ve experienced. There was a great deal of enthusiasm about the music and the performances, and it was evident that many new friendships among the players had formed over the preceding week. But the atmosphere on Saturday, though still friendly, was far from casual. All of the students were playing or having their works played that evening, and while there was still plenty of enthusiasm, it was tempered by a palpable sense of concentration.

Three performances during the Iditarod were remarkable in the artistry that the musicians brought to the pieces. At no moment did these feel like student performances. They were impeccably prepared, and transcended the requisite technical demands. Greg Jukes, percussion, Ryan McCullough, piano, and Jing Li, cello, played Rand Steiger’s Trio in Memoriam with a level of confidence and surety that allowed its emotional scope to come through with stunning clarity. McCullough was also part of the ensemble for Ives’s Piano Trio, along with Gabby Diaz, violin, and Stephen Marotto, cello. It was a full-on performance, richly conveying the wildness of the second movement and the unholy explosion of vibrant noise in the third. The closing piece of the whole event was an incredibly beautiful performance of Berio’s Folk Songs, featuring soprano Lucy Fitz Gibbon, who switched seemingly effortlessly into an entirely different vocal delivery for the closing “Azerbaijan Love Song.”

Not all of the pieces called for or allowed such a no-holds-barred approach. Many of them required one very specific type of intensity. The driving pulses of Steve Reich’s Tehillim were a test of stamina that was very successfully met across the ensemble for over half an hour. In Feldman’s 2 pieces for 3 pianos, the holds were effectively, and appropriately, barred. Beth Karp, Valerie Ross, and Kyle Johnson brought great coolness, discipline, and rigor to the work.

That was also true of the two Feldman performances at the Friday lunchtime concert at the Gardner Museum: Voice, Violin and Piano by soprano Nina Guo, violinist Gabby Diaz, and pianist Angelique Po, and of Why Patterns? by flutist Jessi Rosinski, pianist Amy O’Dell, and Caleb Herron on glockenspiel. Xenakis’s Dikhthas, played with real vigor and commitment by pianist Mari Kawamura and violinist Micah Ringham, was an unrelenting volcanic eruption. Later at the Friday evening concert, Alan Sentman’s Patchwork provoked quite a lot of laughter, particularly in the third section, as Stuart Gerber very cleverly made use of the improvisational freedoms provided by the composer. Immediately after this piece he dove into the visceral discipline and tremendous energy demanded by Xenakis’s Rebonds. Adam Roberts’s Anakhtara was poised in a strange and beautiful stillness and distance, elegantly conveyed by its dedicatee, cellist Benjamin Schwartz. Schwartz followed with Ulrich Kreppein’s mysterious, oblique, and understated Abendlich auf schattenbegleiteten wegen. Xenakis’s Okho was a great closer, with its tight ensemble playing in the exploration of traditional and non-traditional djembe techniques. Mathias Spahlinger’s musica impura was the one piece to be performed both by faculty on Friday evening (Jen Ashe, soprano, Maarten Stragier, guitar, Nick Tolle, percussion) and then again during the Iditarod by student participants (Dino Georgeton, percussion, Katrina Leshan, guitar, Susanna Su, soprano). This piece presented ironically disjunct sections of material, which were both technically and aesthetically demanding. It’s to be expected that the faculty performance would be more assured. What I didn’t anticipate was that I would feel a greater interest in the piece following the student performance. It was a less performative, less extroverted performance, but the honest engagement with the problems presented by the work was invigorating.
In the Electronic Workshop Concert on Friday, Susanna Su, soprano, with Ian Headley, electronics, gave a deeply felt and richly evocative performance of Kaija Saariaho’s Lohn. Headley’s composition, Two Rules, for percussionist John Andress and live electronics by the composer, had a strikingly visceral, three-dimensional quality. David Stenson’s untitled alternated effectively between static and liquid states, while Ariane Miyasaki’s Hindsight used the electronics to sonically put the audience inside of Beth McDonald’s tuba. Asha Tamirisa’s Clark continued in this line of using electronics to reveal, rather than obscure, the physical impacts of John Andress’s performance. The concert closed with a collaboration by the participants in the Electronic Workshop and Susanna Su on Benjamin Bacon’s d’chromeo, described by Bacon as a framework for improvisation, in which dynamic shapes are given but other parameters are free.


Returning to the Iditarod performances, Scott Deal’s Goldstream Variations opened the event, with a maximal, inclusive style that provided a great set of playing opportunities for the whole ensemble. Roger Miller’s Vines for Music was an immediate stylistic contrast, and the musicians proved themselves totally ready for this pared down aesthetic. While Miller nods to Cage in the program notes because of the use of prepared piano, there is a more implicit resonance with Lucier and a piece like Still Lives in the use of shapes found around the house (in Miller’s case, vines attached to the garage door) as pitch contour. The transparent quality of the slow string glissandi and careful inside-the-piano work demanded a special kind of concentration from the players, which was beautifully met. In Rand Steiger’s 13 LOOPS, the strength of the ensemble playing continued, revealing itself as a very welcome theme of the evening. Originally dedicated to Dorothy Stone, the original flutist of the California E.A.R. Unit, in this performance the piece was a great vehicle for flutist Sarah Pyle, who really shone in this role. Taylor Long and Robin Hirshberg, percussion, and Angelique Po and Raquel Gorgojo (amplified pianos) carried the individual characters of each of the pieces of George Crumb’s Makrokosmos III. This performance was not about the many extended techniques involved, but about the states they evoked. These techniques were understood as resources, not as showcases in themselves.

Among the works by student composers (who are mostly, if not all, working at the graduate level), 27 also showed a real sensitivity in its use of extended techniques, both from the composer, Julio Zúñiga, and from Eve Boltax, viola, and Nicolas Loh, piano. It was an understated performance, deriving real intensity from the smallest actions. Later in that set, Ethan Braun’s Mud Doll displayed a far more overt intensity. In what Braun calls the “emotional centerpiece” of his chamber opera, soprano Amy Foote and saxophonist Phillipp Staeudlin invaded the stratosphere in one wonderfully terrible, indelible moment. Earlier in the evening, Clifton Ingram’s Thought Memory juxtaposed memory, represented by a tabletop guitar, with thought, articulated on a second, more conventionally held instrument. Both guitars were played by Katrina Leshan, who gave this piece a highly nuanced performance in all its dimensions. The diversity of these student works stretched in other directions, from the barely voiced and sometimes unvoiced ckifi/kn by Justin Murphy-Mancini, to the vibrant points of stasis and pulsations within a narrow band of Katherine Young’s The Life You Save May Be Your Own, to the active pitch, rhythmic, and timbral cycles of Alex Huddleston’s Parallax, projected with masterly assurance by flutist Jessi Rosinski. In the next set, Onur Yildirim’s Mûş-ı Zamân II, influenced by the study of the physics of time, was rich with instrumental color and ornamental activity. José Manuel Serrano’s Breve was a work of a very different nature, made up of a series of inconclusive, yet very rich musical gestures. Aaron Jay Myers found an effective advocate for Leg and Skull in percussionist Taylor Long, who set the air ringing throughout the hall in these musical evocations of decay. The final student work of the evening was Emily Koh’s cycrotations for percussion quartet, which I remember for its haunting, ghostly, spacious quality.

Taken together, these ten works are a useful snapshot of the aesthetic diversity of composition occurring these days at the student level. In combination with Rand Steiger’s residency and the numerous other programmed works, participants and audience members, including myself, got a great view of the overwhelming breadth of this field. Most of all, it’s truly invigorating to see such capable musicians taking on the many demands of contemporary music with commitment.

One question was stirred for me in the wake of this event, however. With very few exceptions, the pieces performed by the students at SICPP were either by composers who were present or who are well established in the canon. Feldman, Berio, Xenakis, etc., are not names that a musician with an active interest in new music can (or should) miss. But there are any number of composers who might be of significant interest to performers who are neither canonized nor part of their academic institutions or local scenes. This is not so much a criticism of SICPP—I couldn’t imagine that one more piece could have been fit into those nine days—but more a question to performers such as the participants in SICPP, whose involvement in the program is proof of an active interest in new music. How do you go about finding the contemporary music that is not handed to you, either by peers, by faculty, or as recognized important literature? The argument could be made that there has never been such a promising time as the present to make your own musical maps, as you discover the work for which you can advocate the most effectively, and which brings you the most joy. So much of that joy came through during the two days of performance that I witnessed, and there is no good reason that it can’t continue to spin itself out with new musical discoveries, through the summer and into the years ahead.

New England’s Prospect: Twistin’ the Night Away

Folio from Jâmi al-Siyar by Mohammad Tahir Suhravardî, illustrating the meeting of Mavlana and Molla Shams al-Din in Konya

Folio from Jâmi al-Siyar by Mohammad Tahir Suhravardî, illustrating the meeting of Mavlana and Molla Shams al-Din in Konya
Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

If operas are rituals, Guerrilla Opera gives the rituals a good old-fashioned Boston tryout. Adam Roberts’s Giver of Light, given its first performance on May 23 at the Boston Conservatory’s Zack Box Theater, is the eighth opera the group has commissioned and premiered since 2008. The offerings—compact-sized repertoire, small casts, chamber-sized orchestration, intimate dimensions—are an interesting intersection of scrappy and polished: consistently excellent singing and playing in an atmosphere that often seems to emphasize little theater, “Let’s put on a show!” qualities. The group (led by percussionist Mike Williams and composer Rudolf Rojahn) is all about getting new operas into the world, conscientious productions with cheap tickets (and, as of recently—and of particular benefit to a reviewer who arrived late because of Red Sox traffic—streaming broadcasts over the internet). Guerrilla Opera’s own ritual is one of DIY empowerment. New opera? Just do it.
It was a nice parallel, then, that Giver of Light put ritual itself at its center, and, perhaps, that was the reason that the ritual was the most compelling part of the work. The opera presents a modern translation of the relationship between the Sufi scholar Rumi and Shams-i-Tabrīzī; Rumi’s meeting with Shams led to a short but intense relationship that inspired Rumi’s turn towards poetry and ascetic mysticism. In Roberts’s libretto, Rumi becomes John (Johan Budris), enrolled in the American Dream quadrivium of house, wife (Aliana de la Guardia), kid (Jennifer Ashe), and job; Shams becomes Darren (Brian Church), the new school bus driver, who becomes John’s unlikely/inevitable soulmate. (Whether or not the relationship has a sexual component is—much like Rumi’s own writings and the historical record—left vague, though the suspicion is explicitly mentioned.)

The setting was “the American Midwest”—and it was quite clearly not an actual American Midwest, be that Wichita or Chicago or any of the region’s other strikingly particular locales, but the great symbolic Midwest that has become one of the go-to stand-ins for suburban ennui. Roberts, whose biography traverses a host of American landmarks (Eastman, Harvard, Tanglewood) but who is currently based in Istanbul, is out to delete the story’s historical and geographic distance. “We are more ‘connected’ than ever before and perhaps more lonely,” Roberts writes about his opera. “I can only imagine that people today must relate to Rumi’s longing for intensity.”

Sure enough, Giver of Light was most compelling at its most intense, when Darren, and then Darren and John, meditate themselves into ecstasy. An undercurrent of electronics (realized by Anıl Çamcı and manned by Rojahn) opens out into a landscape of overtone singing, as clarinet (Amy Advocat), saxophone (Kent O’Doherty), cello (Javier Caballero), and percussion (Williams) pile their lines into appropriately dervish-like whirls. Gloriously weird and sonically rich, these scenes tapped into opera at its most transporting, when the liturgy leaves behind any justification of its unrealism and simply takes off into pure musical spectacle.

The rest was diverting, but, in an odd way, almost too schematic for its own good. The characters were all archetypes, as Roberts admitted, “general enough that we may see our own reflections in them,” he wrote, but his bright outlines weren’t quite fully filled in. Roberts’s division, musically and textually, between inner and outer life—Darren and John’s rapture vs. suspiciously uncomprehending family and society—was effectively drawn but not really bridged. Shifts from one world to the other, especially as the drama telescoped and scenes commenced at an immediately heightened pitch, were jarring. Part of the point, perhaps, but it had the effect of making the non-mystic characters seem more brittle and less sympathetic. One of opera’s great magic acts is its ability to have melodrama and ritual, the worldly and the sacred, provocatively intermingle; Giver of Light achieves something of that in its first half, but then amplifies the melodrama into opposition.

There was still a lot to like: Roberts’s busy, burbling music, his clarity with vocal writing, his flexibility in changing his text setting to match the drama (the way angry characters’ words break down into stuttering, fractured babbling, for instance). Andrew Eggert’s direction told the story with a minimum of fuss; Tláloc López-Watermann’s lighting was both splashy and evocative; Julia Noulin-Mérat’s set made efficient use of pop art tropes and a great, psychedelic reveal, Rumi’s texts in black light radiance. The quartet of singers was excellent: de la Guardia an energetic, dramatic clarion, Ashe bright and clear, Budris pouring out lyrical warmth, Church giving Darren an inviting but also unsettling resonance.

Mostly, I liked the piece’s sheer risk: Giver of Light takes chances, and if not all of them pay out, still, it’s a lot better than cautiously going through the motions. It’s the sort of piece that Guerrilla Opera is made for: original and a little bit speculative, in need of realization to hone in on its identity. Opera is hard: its pace, its tone, a libretto perched between dialogue and poetry, characters that read quickly but still have texture. Composers and, in a way, the works themselves learn by doing, in production and in performance. The path to operatic enlightenment is, in both the ritualistic and utilitarian senses, practice.