Tag: Boston

New England’s Prospect: Polytropos

Posted on May 23, 2013 by Matthew Guerrieri - Field Reports, Headlines

Tell me, O Muse, of the generation of many devices, who wandered full many ways. I come to generalize about an entire cohort of composers, based solely—sample size be damned—on the Boston Modern Orchestra Project’s May 17 concert at Jordan Hall. A foolhardy and even dangerous venture, surely? Well, consider it, in part, payback for making me type “Gen OrcXstrated,” which is what BMOP named the program, a collision of letters that I am still not quite sure how to pronounce. (And, yes, I am fully cognizant of the irony of bitching about unorthodox orthography in a publication called NewMusicBox.) But also consider it—the generalization, not the orthography—a tribute to the curation by BMOP and Artistic Director Gil Rose, who came up with three pieces that managed to be both stylistically divergent and yet similar in enough crucial ways to make the venture worthwhile.
It should be mentioned, though, that the whole “Gen X” thing was a bit of a contrivance, given that the three composers programmed—Mason Bates (b. 1977), Huang Ruo (b. 1976), and Andrew Norman (b. 1979)—were all very much from the tail end of Generation X, and that Generation X itself—roughly defined as post-Baby Boom to 1980 or so—was always a pretty fishy confederation to begin with. It might be more useful, if only slightly, to define the concert’s composers in terms of the internet: the World Wide Web came online just as they were hitting adolescence. As it turns out, that makes for a more intriguing connection, maybe not as immediately apparent, but, in the end, more of a generational statement than birth date or musical vocabulary.

***

Mason Bates
Photo by Ryan Schude

The communication was awfully fluent. All three pieces were full of what Rose and BMOP do best: color and energy. The performances combined go-for-broke commitment with a groovy confidence; the pieces themselves were never boring. (The audience, however, was surprisingly thin, a symptom, perhaps, of Boston’s annual end-of-term exodus.)

Bates’s 2011 Sea-Blue Circuitry—given its New England premiere—put a lot of computer technology imagery front and center. It’s multi-platform, to begin with: originally premiered as a wind ensemble piece, here performed in full and expertly tailored orchestral costume. The posited trajectory is machine-to-nature-to-machine—a middle slow movement takes as its inspiration “Marine Snow,” the slow descent of dead organic matter to the sea floor—but the whole thing felt pretty automated. I would guess that most people only casually familiar with the term “post-minimalism” would associate it with something like Sea-Blue Circuitry: bright, looping, triadically colored thumping rhythms, in which the thump is more important than the loop. Jazz and pop references were stylized into occasional blues-scale touches; a movie music sheen was omnipresent.

Huang Ruo

Huang’s Path of Echoes: Chamber Symphony No. 1 (from 2006, another Boston premiere) couldn’t have been more different, on the surface anyway. It’s a riot of effects and extended techniques: a movement of glissandi followed by a movement of repeated notes and tremolos, a long toccata for timpani (Craig McNutt) and metallic things (Robert Schulz) leading into a finale of parts, flute and clarinet detaching and whistling through their headstocks. The collection of sounds is meant to echo across sections, sometimes closely, sometimes distantly, but the feel was of a collage, a cut-up structure, the section-based orchestration—winds and strings each moving en masse, brass and percussion punching in highlights—organized as non-stop montage.

Norman’s Play, a world premiere, dwarfed the other two in length (a forty-five-minute expanse) and ambition. (The work is the culmination of Norman’s term as BMOP’s composer-in-residence.) The title and conceit refer to computer games—the piece’s movements are labeled “Level 1,” “Level 2,” and “Level 3”—but the actual games were both organizational and semiotic in nature. It’s a front-loaded piece: the first movement a fiercely dense scrum of ideas and signals then given more stretched-out treatment in the last two sections. One idea—a slapstick crack that turns on a furious solo from a back-bench string player—proved particularly important, both in seeding the work’s formal rules (percussion punctuation spurring a sudden change in texture or idea from the rest of the ensemble) and in the finale, in which the wedge structure of the third movement is reduced to a compound ascending-descending scale portioned out, note by note, by single string players across the orchestra.

Andrew Norman

Play, for all its activity, is essentially ruminative; the first movement almost functions as a surfeit of climaxes to make up for the lack of such catharsis in the rest of the piece. “Level 2” emerged out of borderline pitch, tapped bows, fingers hammered on the fingerboard, brass players smacking their mouthpieces. It built up to an echo of the first movement (a save point, maybe), then got lost in the game: a tangle of wind counterpoint and a cloud of string glissandi, clicked on and off by the percussion. This settled into a very long string of elegiac string chords, bows inching ever closer to bridges, before another round of percussion Red Light/Green Light froze into a grand pause. “Level 3” started soft as well, with a host of those back-desk string solos, then embarked on another build, this time to a buzz of diatonic imitation (if the string chords of “Level 2” were like Morton Feldman rifling through Ralph Vaughan Williams’s effects, this came off as Aaron Copland on a caffeine bender), but, again, the music disintegrated into sparseness. The music seemed to embody something of digital life—crowded but empty. But it’s in the congruence with the other two works that one can hear just how much of its time Play really is.

***

So what are the common threads? In the first place, there’s not much melody. There’s melodic material, of course, but the lack of a really strong melodic theme among the works was notable. Bates came the closest, in the middle “Marine Snow” movement of Sea-Blue Circuitry, but what theme there was only assembled a couple of times, and what development there was consisted of disassembling it again, the better to slip back into the churn of rhythm. The rest was mainly the trading of two or three notes at a time, occasionally four. Play was similar—even when the wedge theme of the final movement emerged in extended, monophonic form, the feel was much more that of a concluding formal schematic than of a melodic line with a tension and release of its own. Path of Echoes had instances of melody—a short brass call in its central movement combined with the violins to make a divertingly woozy call to arms—but, tellingly, when it came back as an echo, it had been translated into semi-pitched percussion. It’s indicative of the continuing reign of musical process that started with serialism and continued through minimalism: the manipulation of the content is as important, if not more important, than the content itself. The long-line melodic foreground is gone; the quick-fire interplay of melodic cells is prevalent.

That kind of local interaction stretched and manipulated into chunks of music speaks to what seems a strong influence on all the music: that of the soundtrack, be it film, television, or video game. It’s not so much the style—though Sea-Blue Circuitry definitely displays a certain John Williams tinta—but rather the construction: a given musical mood filling up a given stretch of time. In every piece, the sense of boxes, of solid-color shapes, of timestamps was strong. The large-scale organization is by block and module.

Combine those two features—the atomization of melody and the modular approach to musical time—and there’s an implication about form that really gets at how the pieces all work. The formal surface of all three pieces tends toward simple trajectories, one texture gradually giving way to another texture, sometimes by incremental change, more often by a crescendo-decrescendo of cross-cutting. All musical forms do something like this, but the difference is in the amount of dramatic space required. Compare good old sonata-allegro form, for instance: because the formal components are self-contained themes and (relatively, at least) closely related tonal centers, the formal dialectic can play out over a much more circumscribed space and style—long-line melodies, for instance, can be easily distinguished from each other even without a lot of variation in mood, speed, or tonality. But if the melodic material remains largely at the cell level, the larger units, the ones that will act out the dialectic, need more variation to be perceived as formal components. In order for their formal ideas to unfold in an intelligible way, the blocks that Bates, Huang, and Norman build up out of fragments—the segments of time they fill up—have to be highly contrasted. Which they are: in all three pieces, the contrasts were stark: fast and slow, bright and dark, loud and soft, dense and sparse, active and static.
And, suddenly, there it is: life in the early 21st century—in which the act of filling ever-longer stretches of time with ever-smaller bits of information creates ever-greater polarization. That is a shift in the discourse, one more significant than styles or schools or generational demographics. For all their variance, both within and without, the three composers on Friday’s concert, wittingly or not, have taken that shift and made music out of it. It’s music for a world of blocks and divisions, of memes and samples, of the machinery of spin centrifugating to extremes. It’s the soundtrack of a society that never makes it home, but instead just keeps sailing back and forth between Scylla and Charybdis.

New England’s Prospect: Pulvis et Umbra

Posted on March 26, 2013 by Matthew Guerrieri - Field Reports, Headlines

Mohammed Fairouz’s oratorio Anything Can Happen is a serious piece of music. No, that doesn’t work—“serious” has become far too slippery a word in music, referring in various proportions to tone, or ambition, or size, or merely in opposition to “popular.” (Never mind that plenty of popular music has also become serious, in all its different guises.) So try this: Mohammed Fairouz’s Anything Can Happen—which was given its Boston premiere on March 17 by the Back Bay Chorale, one of the work’s co-commissioners—is a piece of music in which multiple strategies for communicating connotations of seriousness are utilized with unusual skill.

Mohammed Fairouz Photo by Samantha West

That’s a little unwieldy, but it gets at the effect of Anything Can Happen, and also its effectiveness as a serious piece now, in 2013, when most corners of culture have become permeated with seriousness’s prodigal sibling, irony. I am not criticizing irony: I think that, over the past century or so, ironic cultural responses have acquired ever-increasing validity. But it does mean that there are a lot of contexts in which seriousness can no longer be taken for granted. It is now incumbent on composers to somehow signal to their audiences the absence of any sort of wink, however rueful. Fairouz, a composer with a penchant for seriousness, has developed one of the more interesting toolboxes in that regard.

It was especially apparent in comparison with the other piece on Sunday’s program, that paragon of classical seriousness, Mozart’s Requiem (in Franz Süssmayr’s completed edition, itself a musicological funhouse of serious intent). Start with the text: the very opening of Mozart’s opus would have been enough to create a serious aura. (No one was writing ironic requiems in Mozart’s day.) The framework of Anything Can Happen, by comparison, is a trio of poems by Seamus Heaney, leading up to the title poem, an evocation of the 9/11 attacks. Even that is not enough to create an automatically serious framework: Heaney’s imagery is oblique, distancing, playing with metaphor in a way that could plausibly be interpreted in an ironic manner as well. Two of the poems are portents: “In Iowa” wrests unease from the sight of a mowing machine, abandoned in the field after the harvest, covered with snow; “Höfn” surveys a melting glacier with strings of hyphenated compounds, Hopkins-esque streams of description flooding the meter. The title poem, too, is layers upon layers. It is a loose translation of a Horatian Ode, number 34 in Book I:

namque Diespiter
igni corusco nubila diuidens
plerumque, per purum tonantis
egit equos volucremque currum

In Heaney’s version:

You know how Jupiter
Will mostly wait for clouds to gather head
Before he hurls the lightning? Well just now
He galloped his thunder cart and his horses
Across a clear blue sky…

The connection to 9/11 is made explicit (“Anything can happen, the tallest towers / Be overturned”), but that’s balanced by the connection to antiquity, the name-checking of the Roman god, the gap between Horace’s Latin and Heaney’s deliberately colloquial English—one mediation after another. Even the source is tricky: Horace’s original is a seeming conversion story, the clear-sky thunder (“per purum tonantis”) jolting Horace into jettisoning his Epicurean ideals in favor of piety; but scholars have argued for two thousand years about whether the ode is sincere or not, whether the literal bolt from the blue is meant to be a warning or an irony.

Fairouz’s frame works multiple angles to banish any ironic ambiguity. The first is textual: he buttresses Heaney’s poems with a pair of passages from the Injeel, the Muslim version of the gospel story. “In Iowa” is answered by the moment of Jesus’s death, the veil of the temple torn in two; “Höfn” by the image of a deluge unleashed by a Lucifer-like dragon. This yokes the poems back into an apocalyptically sacred space. That translates into the music as well. The choral writing might best be described as ritualistic: chant-like, largely homophonic, slow and declamatory. Mozart’s Requiem is thick with imitation—the fugue of the Kyrie, the clipped echoes of the Confutatis. But in 2013, such contrapuntal play is possibly too pleasurably ingenious for a serious atmosphere; Fairouz’s excursions into counterpoint are brief and, one suspects, only to better set up the next massed block of sound.

Mozart’s orchestra is big, colorful, flexible, the work’s seriousness embodied in added trombones and timpani; a full quartet of solo singers is on hand for coloratura commentary. Fairouz, though, augments the chorus with only a single solo viola (Roger Tapping, in this performance), and a solo bass-baritone (David Kravitz). The viola writing is not the long-line melodic thread of Romantic practice, but more motoric, at times a kind of implacable tabulation, be it the cross-string arpeggios of the opening movement, or the winding five-note ostinato that binds the fourth movement. The bass soloist functions more as a cantor or a preacher than as a virtuosic extension of the chorus. (Indeed, much of the soloist’s material is accompanied by choral drones.) Part of this is practical, of course, lowering the barriers, logistical and financial, to performance, but it also felt like a posited alternative to older orchestral luxury—a luxury, perhaps, too well hijacked by film, television, and pop-song aspirations to grandeur.

The major-minor axis, too, is more purposefully blurred than in the Mozart, where a simple D-minor triad is enough to establish the work’s thematic weight. Fairouz is more interested in accent and atmosphere. The melodic material often borrows from Arabic sources, while the harmonic material is more traditionally European—there’s a neat premonitory move that Fairouz uses, particularly in the opening “In Iowa” setting, in which the major-minor inflections in the scale seem to prompt major-to-minor shifts in the harmony. But the tonality is grey, brooding, only intermittently cathartic.

It’s that color that is the work’s most obvious banner of seriousness. The sound of Anything Can Happen is sometimes gentle, sometimes forceful, the depth of sound changing as it goes; but the sound is never bright, never sparkling. Even at its grandest, there’s an overcast quality to everything. A lot of this is in the way Fairouz treats the choral parts—where Mozart might put his widest intervals on the bottom, giving the upper voices clearer overtones to sing into, Fairouz reverses that, most often putting hollow fourths and fifths up top, while the lower voices trouble the waters with more closely spaced parts. (This can be tricky for a chorus to pull off, but the 120-voice Back Bay Chorale, under the direction of Scott Allen Jarrett, was confident and precise, every texture dropping into place on cue.) Everything is dark metal and clouds—I thought of the famous description that opens William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer, of the sky “the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.”

The brief of Anything Can Happen is not an easy one: sustain a consistently grim mood, dreadful in the older sense of the word, while still maintaining enough textural interest to carry a half-hour of music. But it works: angry and reflective all at the same time, the piece doesn’t merely assert its seriousness, it explores it, comes at it—like Heaney’s poetry—from various angles. But it also makes plain the qualities necessary to conjure this type of seriousness in an era in which seriousness needs to be conjured, and the qualities are austerity and bleakness.

Horace, in general, regarded the vagaries of life and death with more wryness than despair. Still, every once in a while, he turns serious—and when he does, the colors he draws are those of Anything Can Happen, stark and grey, the imagery of serious intent, then and now. Nowhere is the contrast more acute that in the seventh Ode of Book IV. Horace pays homage to spring, to its warmth and renewal—only, it turns out, to contrast it with the inevitability of death. The “swift moons,” the passage of the seasons, will always make good the losses of winter, but when we descend to the underworld, all that we leave behind is pulvis et umbra: dust and shadow.

New England’s Prospect: Naming Rights

Posted on March 18, 2013 by Matthew Guerrieri - Field Reports, Headlines

A “green card” programming reference sheet for the IBM 360 series mainframe computer. (Via.)

Founded in 1996, the Boston Modern Orchestra Project is, nowadays, probably the most powerful new-music brand in Boston. Beyond the four orchestra concerts they mount every season, there’s the record label, the collaborations, and the Club Concerts—BMOP was one of the first organizations in Boston to present new music in nightclub settings. After some concerts in Club Café’s less-than-amenable Napoleon Room, on March 12, BMOP was once again in the larger Moonshine Room—a much better, though still not perfect space. (Halfway through the concert, Trivia Night started up in the main bar, with enough volume that I had to compel my ADHD brain to stop answering the questions.) If the room’s branding is decorative—really, far more classical-music venues should have a sparkly floor—the music’s was technological. “Electroacoustic/Acousmatic,” curated by composer Derek Hurst, featured some electronic manipulation in every piece. It also showed that those categories—those brands—are not as fixed as they perhaps once were.

I always had some ambivalence about the term acousmatic—on the one hand, it seemed like a slightly fussy and not-necessarily-necessary subcategory, on the other hand, it seemed like the sort of word Raymond Scott might have come up with on a good day, which is a bonus. This program, though, raised the question of whether, from a practical, listening standpoint, the category even exists. It used to refer almost exclusively to musique concrete; then it became any concert experience where the sound was all mediated through a loudspeaker. Rick Snow’s 2010 Labyrinth, the one specifically acousmatic work on the program, certainly demonstrated how the latter has trumped the former. Labyrinth takes as its source material a metronome-like clicking, then speeds it up and slows it down and runs it through filters and envelopes to create a long, loosely-knotted weave of ebbing and flowing clatter—a chorus of Aristophanic frogs, maybe, bre-ke-ke-kexing away. But the manipulation is so constant and digitally frictionless that any dividing line between musique concrete‘s found-sound ethos and pure electronic synthesis seemed practically nominal.

What was interesting was how the more obvious dividing line—between whether or not the work incorporated a live-performer component or not—has also been significantly blurred. Three of the program’s works used live performance as ignition for computerized sounds and distortions. In Joshua Fineberg’s The Texture of Time, it was Sarah Brady’s flute doing the prompting, her extended techniques amplified, via software, into extended-extended techniques, the whole swirled into hard-edged shadows, a drawn-out clang. Elainie Lillios’s Among Fireflies also featured Brady, this time on alto flute, and also was full of extended techniques—breath and key-clicks turning into a flitting swarm, tremolos mutated into a propeller’s flutter. Hurst’s Libretto used bass clarinet—played by Rane Moore—but, again, pushed the instrument into unorthodox sounds: long, microtonal wavers, accenting blowing and overblowing, all electronically layered into great, reedy growls.

All three pieces were accomplished and entertaining in their own way. But they also all took a similar approach to their acoustic end: the instrumental language seemed designed completely around what would trigger interesting electronic effects. Flute and clarinet were shorn of a lot of their conventional expressivity, and instead optimized as input devices for digital expressivity. And the thing is, I’m not sure that any of the pieces would have been any less compelling if the live portion had simply been recorded as well. The mediation of the live sound was thorough enough that, if you closed your eyes, the categorical line between Snow’s acousmatic music and the others’ electroacoustic music was a pretty fine one indeed.

The musical results were still engagingly musical, but it does indicate a strange position that electroacoustic music is in right now, the technology always seeming to be just ahead of the aesthetic. (On this occasion, just ahead of the practitioners, too—minor technical glitches seemed to abound.) None of those electroacoustic pieces really were leveraging the experience of live performance in such a way that made live performance a necessary condition, as it were.

The two other works on the program, though, hinged on that live energy. Rudolf Rojahn’s Ghosts of Her (a premiere, commissioned and played by Moore, again on bass clarinet, and violinist Gabriela Diaz) limited its electronics to a heavy blanket of reverb, spread over halting, lurching, needle-sharp deconstructions of 50s pop: “Earth Angel” (very well-disguised) and “Sea of Love” (more recognizable). The instruments took the lead; the filtering was just enough to produce a sonic version of memory’s conflicting haze, both comfortingly vague and unsettlingly disintegrated.

The brightest highlight was John Melby’s 1979 Concerto for Violin and Computer, an utterly fantastic piece. (It was a product of the Experimental Music Studio at the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana, one of the most solid electronic-music brands of the era.) The craft is formidable; the violin writing is superb, one of the best examples of 1970s neo-Romantic/late-modernist atonal lyricism I’ve ever heard, every phrase beautifully shaped. The computerized sounds—a souvenir of the IBM 360/75 computer—are a far cry from the seamlessness and depth of current electroacoustic tools (there’s a real metallic, science-fiction BBC Radiophonic Workshop vibe to everything), but it’s turned to formal advantage, using the discrepancy in naturalism to channel venerable concerto-as-contest power. Given the comparative recalcitrance of his electronic materials, Melby clearly thought hard about what exactly those materials should be, what they should do, and how they should interact—or not interact—with the violin. As a result, the Concerto is one of the few electronic pieces I’ve heard in recent years where I actually stopped paying attention to the technology.

Diaz was a big part of that, giving an absolutely assured reading. Brady and Moore, too, made it all seem easy and fluent. But BMOP, in whatever guise, always seems to present excellent players in excellent performances, never less than solid, frequently dazzling. Good brands know the value of maintaining quality.

***
One of the barometers of new-music status in Boston—anywhere, really, but especially here—is whether a group’s concerts feel as much like networking events as performances. BMOP is in that strata; the Boston Composers’ Coalition is, as of yet, not. The crowd at their March 5 concert at MIT’s Killian Hall was much more family and friends (myself—full disclosure—included). There’s a network there—like many of the smaller new-music groups in town, the primary connections are academic: Boston University degrees and Boston University Tanglewood Institute experience are a frequent common denominator.
And it’s not as if networking isn’t happening; it’s just mostly happening on stage. The BCC’s hook is that all the music is written especially for each concert. The group partners with a performer, or an ensemble, and then all the composers write a short piece specifically for that instrumentation. It’s a neat little symbiosis—performers need gigs, composers need performers—and the all-premiere aspect of the resulting concert creates a kind of tiny, temporary pop-up new-music community.

The one-size-fits-all instrumentation—this concert featured flutist Orlando Cela, violinist Annegret Klaua, and harpist Franziska Huhn, all members of the relatively new Ensemble 451—is balanced by the fact that the composers themselves are all over the stylistic map. Ramon Castillo’s Artifice (for harp solo, the only piece not to use the full trio) would have been at home on BMOP’s electroacoustic bill, with isolated sounds and effects (près de la table thunks, the buzzing rattle of string against string) digitally manipulated into and evocation of old-school tape and delay effects. Imagined triggers of road rage inspired Andrew Smith’s Instigator II, which used amplification and reverb to programmatic effect—over escalating harp runs, the other two instruments’ wisps of key clicks and sul ponticello turned aggressive, small things made suddenly large. (Jeremy Van Buskirk, another BCC composer who works primarily with electronics, didn’t have a piece on the program. I reviewed some other music of his a couple years ago.)

Heather Gilligan’s Mourning Dew had a kind of stylistic respiration: flowing impressionism pared down to pentatonic counterpoint, then gradually enriched again. The comfort of common-practice tonality also infused Brett Abigaña’s “Lullaby,” an unapologetically sweet piece with some intriguingly striking orchestration—lots of close-packed, high harp brocade, and an inverted hierarchy that often found the harp and violin harmonizing over the flute’s melody. Joy Blanchard, a student at BU Academy high school—the BCC also invite a pre-college student to write for each concert, which is all kinds of fun—contributed On a Breeze, which slipped from tableau to tableau via some gently foggy harmonies before finishing in a lovely, deft tangle of diatonic melody.

Justin Casinghino, the BCC’s director, went for stylistic homage in A Place I’ve Never Been, a rumination on the disturbance-in-the-force mood that resulted from the sale of Charles Ives’ house last year. The familiar plays were there: collage, quotation (an elegiac coda cheekily mixed “Yankee Doodle” with “Amazing Grace”), competing time-streams, cage-match standoffs between chromatic dissonance and 19th-century tonality. But, on the fine line between Ivesian and echt-Ives, A Place I’ve Never Been stayed on the side of the angels.

The program closed with PoChun Wang’s Yellow in Gray, which worked some stylized hints of Chinese instruments into fractious ostinati that coursed with chunky energy. Alone among the pieces, it ended big, which might be why it ended up as the finale. Indeed, a lot of passages among the concert’s works still felt like sketches, or experimental drafts. But the atmosphere makes that into a bit of a virtue—the constraints and the deadlines are part of the conceit, so the more notional moments feel just as generous. If brands are all about knowing what you’re getting, then the BCC’s mark might be those passing glimpses inside the workshop.

New England’s Prospect: Movietone

Posted on February 7, 2013 by Matthew Guerrieri - Field Reports, Headlines

Students of the New England Conservatory Contemporary Improvisation department in “Brando Noir,” January 29, 2013.

Near the beginning of The Wild One, biker gang leader Johnny Strabler (played by Marlon Brando) pays a visit to Wrightsville’s local diner, where Kathie (played by Mary Murphy) is working behind the counter. If you’ve ever wondered what the big deal about Brando was—if, for instance, you only know him from some of the more baroque extravagances of his late career—this little scene will get you up to speed. Brando lays down a rhythmic track of amazing fluidity: he swerves, he swaggers, he dances; his dialogue has laconic syncopation; he uses props—gloves, money—to provide his own punctuation, his own percussive fills. Everything he does—the way he swirls the chairs, the way he glides away from the bar, even the way he uncurls his fingers after digging in his pocket for jukebox change—is insistently musical. He’s a bit of jazz dressed in leather and moving through space.
I suppose that’s why “Brando Noir,” the concert mounted on January 29 by the New England Conservatory’s Contemporary Improvisation department, seemed so promising on paper. But that scene—one of the few from the concert’s anthology of Brando moments that was screened with its original soundtrack—had what about half the music on the program, as fine as much of it was, lacked: a sense of engaging with the music and cadence that’s already present in a film. The evening bounced in and out of sync with the cinematic dynamic.

The concert, produced by Boston jazz hero (and co-founder of the Contemporary Improvisation department) Ran Blake and Aaron Hartley, took the form of a four-act suite. After opening remarks by current department chair Hankus Netsky (which I missed—thanks, Boston parking) and NEC President Tony Woodcock, selected scenes from four Brando films—The Wild One, the World War II drama The Young Lions, the method Western The Appaloosa, and the kidnapping thriller The Night of the Following Day—were projected on a screen at the back of the Jordan Hall stage while various collections, large and small, of student musicians played live accompaniment.

The Wild One opened at the source: Leith Stevens’s original score, in a brawny arrangement by Ken Schaphorst, conducting a performance by the NEC Jazz Orchestra that hung just out of swinging focus. A later cue, Schaphorst again arranging Stevens’s music for a sequence where the gang ominously yet balletically circles Murphy’s character, was tighter. And—especially in that second scene—it scaffolded the mood and action better than the contributions of Full Tang, a student quartet (Eric Lane, Ryan Dugre, Adam Clark, and Danilo Henriquez) that provided blocks of genre: a jazz-funk ostinato and a stylized ’50s-rock beat that, while confidently done, mostly sat alongside the images for a while. But for the vigilante-mob action sequence that sends the film to its final denouement, violinist Yasmine Azaiez and accordionist Cory Pesaturo went to the opposite extreme: free improvisation, both instruments distorted and amplified, the music shadowing the action—sometimes a bit too closely, but fully engaged with the movie’s own rhythm, not trying to impose a rhythm from outside.

The sequence of scenes from The Young Lions, stylistically varied, was the most consistently solid. Survivors Breakfast, a 16-player improvisation loosely directed by Anthony Coleman, started out promising—an out-of-focus Biedermeier dance band—then turned to soft clouds of extended techniques that tracked dialogue between Barbara Rush’s American tourist and Brando’s German ski instructor (later to become an ambivalent Wehrmacht soldier). Tim Leinhard, conducting vocalist Sara Serpa and an 11-piece ensemble, scored a couple scenes with the most conventional film music of the night, but did it with skill: dark, romantic, vaguely jazzy, with a sweep calibrated to the movie’s shifting moods. Two other sequences, one with percussionist Jeremy Barnett, the other a duet between Jussi Reijonen (on bass) and Nima Jannmohammadi (on kamancheh), went back to avant-garde improvisation, layering austere unease over the film while following its contours.

The second half of the concert had moments like that, but also a number of incongruous set pieces. After an opening vocal solo by Serpa that set the mood but failed to shift into storytelling, Dylan McKinstry and Robin Lohrey offered a similarly moody mandolin-and-piano piece of songwriting that nevertheless ignored the slippery shifts of power and mood in their scene from The Appaloosa—a bit of witty, treacherous byplay between Brando’s wandering cowboy and John Saxon’s deliciously villainous pistolere chieftain. And while a bluesy cue from Ilya Portonov, Anna Patton, Daniel Pencer, and Andria Nicodemou pleasantly set up another confrontation between the two characters, the confrontation itself took place alongside a Spanish/English version of “What a Difference a Day Makes” that (however nicely sung by Natalie Cadet and Greta DiGiorgio) grew more ill-matched as it went. (It was partially redeemed by a showdown scored—by Nedelka Prescod, Amir Milstein, Brad Barrett, and Jerry Peake—with understatedly fractious ruminations, Leake clouding the scene with a haze of soft cymbals and bells.)

The Night of the Following Day had the full gamut of the concert’s ups and downs. It opened with a lovely, deft piece of pure illustration: Rachel Panitch, Abigale Reisman, Valerie Thompson, and Vessela Stoyanova followed a landing airliner with a baleful pizzicato-and-vibraphone aleatory, then shifted into a Parisian cafe waltz, foreshadowing the establishment shot of the Orly airport, and then—just when one was starting to wonder how earnest or satirical such a musical cliché was meant to be—swiftly, ruthlessly deconstructed it as the kidnapping plot kicked into gear. The movie’s other, most improvisatory accompaniments were similarly effective: Hui Weng, on guzheng, producing a host of strumming effects for varied punctuation; Tal Zilber with a lurking piano, overlaid with electronic processing that neatly traced the dramatic thread.

But those were interspersed with sequences that seemed more like blind dates. Deepti Navaratna and Sonny Lalchandani chaperoned a bad guy exposition scene with lovely voice-and-sitar ragas, but it felt like a disconnected notion. Eden MacAdam-Somer, on voice and violin, was accompanied by Netsky on piano in a charming, accomplished original cabaret tune, “Cocktails at 4,” but the ironic distance was simply too far from the violence of their scene to register even as commentary. In fact, it was a double distraction—the music pulling attention away from the film while the film pulled attention away from the music. That figured in the finale, too, the film’s beachfront standoff scored by the Sail Away Ladies (MacAdam-Somer, Mia Friedman, Sarah Jarosz, and Ari Friedman) with a bewitching cover of Joanna Newsom’s “The Book of Right-On” that nevertheless seemed to cancel out the on-screen suspense. (The ironic record-collection curation technique of a Kubrick or a Tarantino is harder than it looks—and requires a director willing to relinquish the cinematic rhythm to the music.)

Film music is weird and alchemical, no matter how it’s produced. The familiar tradition is through-composed, precise, timed, the vein that Leinhard effectively mined for The Young Lions. But otherwise, it was the groups that hewed to an older tradition, the silent-movie tradition of organists and pianists in every theatre—improvising—that best served the films, using the structure and flow of film to spark unexpected sounds that, in turn, sparked a different perception of the filmed image. That was Brando’s method, anyway, at his best: distilling the energy of a scene or a film and then amplifying it into something a little more outlandish, a little more subtle, a little more dangerous.

New England’s Prospect: Object Oriented

Posted on January 31, 2013 by Matthew Guerrieri - Field Reports, Headlines

Karl Rudolf Koenig’s Compound Wave-Siren, used to investigate beat- and difference-tones? (From Silvanius P. Thompson, The Physical Foundation of Music, 1890)

Music which does not paint is nothing but noise.

—Jean d’Alembert

True absolute music, however, stands precisely in opposition to form. It has the God-given attribute of floating on air and being free of all material conditions.

—Ferruccio Busoni

They’re both wrong, of course. Even putting aside the new musicology staple that all music is programmatic in that it portrays the societal and political hierarchy out of which it emerges, there’s the whole complication of sound, which is both noise and part of the material world. Then again, we’re largely past the whole absolute/programmatic debate that so consumed the classical music world of a century ago. We can bat around the terms, but we don’t use them as critical or even moral cudgels anymore.

But that doesn’t mean the terms are null and void. One of the passing revelations of the Callithumpian Consort‘s concert in Jordan Hall on Saturday, January 26, was that exactly where along the absolute/programmatic continuum a piece is situated can, in fact, make or break the piece. It was two pieces on the concert in particular; and they were similar in certain ways: both deliberately limited in their sound world, both formally simple, both situated somewhere beyond the usual musical discourse of melody and accompaniment, tension and release. And yet I thought one piece marvelous, while the other, for me anyway, didn’t work at all. That very probably is as much about me as a listener as it is about the pieces themselves. But it all had to do with sound: it turns out that, in music that might plausibly be loosely gathered under the umbrella of post-serial experimentalism, music that deliberately wanders the no man’s land between musical sound and noise, the relationship between programmatic intent and sonic (and aesthetic) effect is actually pretty tricky.

* * *

The sound of tress/burl, a sextet by Marek Poliks, is, basically, harsh. A string trio (violinist Gabriela Diaz, violist Ethan Wood, and cellist Benjamin Schwartz) lets loose with bursts of forcefully edgy sounds: grinding double- and triple-stops, high whines, all heavily bowed near the bridge. They go on for a while—the stanzas never quite the same, but made up of the same elements—except for a sudden grand pause in the middle of their course. The entire thing (grand pause included) is then recapitulated, but translated into a different trio: piccolo (Jesse Rozinski), contrabass clarinet (Alexis Lanz), and piano (Elaine Rombola).
This was the second time I had heard the piece. At last summer’s SICPP Iditarod, tress/burl had seemed to me both intriguingly obsessive and, perhaps, too long—a contradictory impression, the more I think about it. In the context of this concert, though, even the intrigue was absent. I often enjoy purposefully harsh sounds, but it was almost as if the sounds weren’t harsh enough, or maybe not interesting enough in their harshness: I didn’t feel any invitation to consider what it is that makes a sound harsh or extreme, or any sense that these were even to be considered as sounds, in time, in a physical space.
Poliks writes this:

tress/burl was conceived negatively (anti-god, anti-sexism, anti-populism, anti-modern), but it ossified into something constructive (the paranoia and weakness of normative masculinity, aimlessly romanticizing itself in the face of its own obsolescence).

That’s a mouthful, and more than a little bit of jargon, but I respect the effort. There are a lot of pieces—including a lot of my favorites—that might be said to encompass some sense of romanticizing an obsolescent masculinity. One could plausibly argue that Ravel’s La Valse has something of that, or certain of Shostakovich’s more nominally propaganda-driven symphonies. One could argue that Richard Wagner was never not writing about the romanticization of an obsolescent masculinity.
But the program here was a barrier. Why? It comes back to the sound—an idea crystallized by another piece on the program.

* * *

Alvin Lucier wrote Braid for the Callithumpian Consort in 2012. The process is in the foreground: a string quartet (violinists Diamanda La Berge Dramm and Ryan Shannon, violist Danielle Rebecca Wiebe, and cellist Hsaio-Hsuan Sharen Chang) spend the entire piece winding through overlapping slow glissandi—the “braid” of the title. Against it, flute, clarinet, and English horn (Rosinski and Lanz joined by Elizabeth England) play sustained chords, designed to dovetail with the glissandi and then produce beating effects as the strings slide away.

Braid is one of the most ingeniously perfect pieces I’ve heard in a while. It strikes an exact balance between consistency and variety: the strings are constantly in motion, the winds never play the same harmony twice, but the meshing of the two always comes back to those same beating effects. The sound is completely mutable; the intent is completely uniform.

But why did Braid work so well for me, when tress/burl didn’t? In a way, they’re similarly extreme, hermetic, even obstinate. But the pieces fall on crucially distinct points on the absolute/programmatic continuum. Braid, for all its abstract quality, has a program, too, but it’s a program about sound, about illustrating something about the nature of physical sound in a musical context. Doesn’t all music do this though? Well, no—a lot of music takes the nature of physical sound for granted, or at least allows the listener to take it for granted, because the intent is something lurking a few interpretive layers removed from the sound itself: something about the theoretical grammar, something about the drama or theatricality of performance, or (the most traditional programmatic intent) something literary or otherwise extra-musical. This is why the experimental tradition that Lucier—and Poliks—are working in can be considered something distinct.

It would be a cliché to say that Lucier loves sound, and communicates that in his music. I realized that what’s really going on is this: the program/agenda/intent (choose your favorite term) behind Braid is one that reinforces compositional decisions that make what Lucier appreciates about the sounds what the listener appreciates as well—whereas the program behind tress/burl reinforces decisions that work against that. In fact, everything I didn’t like about tress/burl—the lack of sonic variety, the distancing nature of the sound itself, the didactic lack of formal surprise—could be justified as part of the program, an illustration of the brutalization of that romanticized masculinity. (Though I would consider that an incomplete illustration: if you don’t acknowledge the seductive nature of such romanticizations, you fail to completely understand them.) If a piece’s program is actually making the piece less effective as a sonic object, does that invalidate the program? Not necessarily. But when it’s being applied to a style where the nature of the sound is so central to the effect of the piece, it certainly doesn’t help.

* * *

The rest of the concert dealt with such concerns in a more glancing, implicit way. Edmund Caballero’s What is time, please? Convergences III, a world premiere, started off in a conceptually limited way: pianist Yukiko Takagi reiterating a fundamental pitch in all octaves and articulations while Caballero overlaid the notes with metallically reverberant electronic processing. After a few minutes, however, the piano part suddenly lets in handfuls of glassy, higher overtones, and the piece picks up significant steam, eventually turning into a computer-amplified evocation of the not inconsiderable glee of holding the sustain pedal down and keeping as many of the piano’s strings in play as possible: almost drowning in the instrument.

The finale was a classic, John Cage’s 1950 String Quartet in Four Parts, given a dazzlingly contemplative reading by Diaz, Wood, Schwartz, and violist Karina Fox. Here, the program (the four seasons as interpreted in Indian philosophy) and the process (mostly tonal harmonies rendered non-functional through random ordering) don’t so much mesh as provide a source and a medium for replication, a meditation on sounds that functions as a kind of stand-in for a meditation on nature. The opener was, on the surface, a complete contrast: Earle Brown’s 1965 String Quartet, performed by Diaz, Wodd Schwartz, and violist Mary Ferrillo, a rerun from last week’s Earle Brown Symposium. The form was rationally symmetrical, the sounds very much those of mid-century atonal modernism (though with twists here and there, as when, at the very center of the structure, a dissonant drone slides into the open strings of the instruments). What’s interesting about the Quartet is the way it both borrows something of the technique of film montage but flips it on its head: as the music switches between its textural modules, it’s the edits themselves that become the focus of attention, the point where the shots join taking on more importance than the shots themselves. It was diverting compositional aikido: musical decisions that make the decisions themselves the musical experience.

Cross-Sections and Scholarly Fields: Earle Brown Symposium in Boston

Posted on January 24, 2013 by Robert Kirzinger - Field Reports, Headlines

After performing a four-hands version of Earle Brown’s seminal December ’52 at Calderwood Hall in Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, pianists Steven Drury and Steffen Schleiermacher flipped the score 180 degrees and started from the top (which had been the bottom). They also switched places at the keyboard. A facsimile of this early graphic score was projected on a large screen for all to see. That theatrical moment, which took place Friday afternoon, January 18, toward the end of the first day of a vast Earle Brown symposium in Boston, exemplified one aspect of this important mini-festival—its embrace of openness and possibility.

An early associate of John Cage, Morton Feldman, and Christian Wolff, Earle Brown was most famous for his development of and commitment to the idea of open form in music beginning in the early 1950s. It’s often textbook images of his scores for these early works, rather than all-too-rare performances of the music itself, that form the basis of his reputation for many musicians. It was the goal of the Earle Brown: Beyond Notation seminar to rectify this situation and expand the understanding and status of this great American composer and conductor.

Susan Sollins-Brown Photo by Anthony De Ritis

Susan Sollins-Brown, president of the Earle Brown Music Foundation
Photo by Anthony De Ritis

Sponsored by Northeastern University and organized by Northeastern and the Earle Brown Music Foundation with the cooperation of the Gardner Museum, the idea for the symposium had its beginnings when Anthony De Ritis, head of Northeastern’s music department, heard about Brown’s death in the summer of 2002. Brown, a native of Lunenburg, Massachusetts, was a student of mathematics and engineering at Northeastern in the mid-1940s before joining the Army Air Corps, and later went on to study at Schillinger House, which became Boston’s Berklee College of Music in the 1960s. De Ritis got in touch with various of Brown’s colleagues and scholars of his music; meanwhile since the composer’s death these same colleagues and scholars had been unearthing and organizing a wealth of information and source material. Three years ago, Northeastern brought musicologist Rebecca Kim on board expressly to organize the events that took place January 18 and 19. Among her main collaborators were Thomas Fichter, director of the Earle Brown Music Foundation; Susan Sollins-Brown, president of the Foundation; Anthony De Ritis; and Steven Drury, pianist and director of the Callithumpian Consort, a new music ensemble based at the New England Conservatory (but made up of freelance musicians). Other participants included pianist Steffen Schleiermacher, a longtime Brown advocate, as well as numerous composers and scholars with various perspectives on the composer’s life and work. (Since I won’t be touching on every one of the many papers, I direct the curious to the symposium website.) Fichter suggests that the last ten years of research and organization have made this just the right time for this endeavor, and going forward the Earle Brown Music Foundation hopes to provide unprecedented access to the archives. (In a panel on Friday, Fichter discussed the former and present status of Brown’s scores and materials.)

Symposium principals (l-r) Thomas Fichter, Susan Sollins-Brown, Rebecca Kim, Stephen Drury, Carloyn Brown, and Anthony De Ritis
Photo by Sara Haefeli

In addition to the presentation of a number of papers, the two-day symposium featured several performances of Brown’s music, culminating at the end of both days with a full-length concert of his work, juxtaposed with music by composers allied with or influenced by him. These events took place in Northeastern’s Blackman Auditorium; the converted church concert space of the university’s Fenway Center, and in the Gardner Museum’s unusual, Renzo Piano-designed Calderwood Hall, which opened a year ago in January 2012. Due to other commitments, I was unable to attend all of the presentations over the course of the two days, but Northeastern was kind enough to provide audio transcripts for those papers I didn’t hear in person; thus I was able to create my own “available form” of the festival by hearing the papers in a different order. I also had a chance to talk to several of the participants to get an insider’s take on the proceedings. Rebecca Kim, Anthony De Ritis, Carolyn Brown, and Susan Sollins-Brown helped put things in perspective for me.

Without performances of Brown’s music in the immediate context, many of the ideas explored in the informative, and in some cases illuminating, papers would remain in the abstract. In addition to Friday afternoon’s piano four-hands performance of December ’52, Steffen Schleiermacher also gave a single-piano performance of the composer’s 25 pages in Calderwood Hall during that same session, which featured papers on the influence of visual art in Brown’s work. “Workshop” sessions the following morning had Drury and (in a separate presentation) flutist Shanna Gutiérrez playing open-form works with consideration of aesthetic and performative issues.

In the early afternoon on the first day, during one of the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s semi-regular Friday afternoon chamber music concerts at the Fenway Center, BSO cellist Mickey Katz and pianist Aaron Likness performed Brown’s Music for Cello and Piano (1955) on a concert with Verdi’s String Quartet and music by William Grant Still and André Previn. The full-length concert Friday night included performances by the musicians of the Callithumpian Consort (one of few ensembles experienced in performances of this music) of the composer’s String Quartet (1965) and Times Five (1963). Schleiermacher performed Folio (1952-54), followed immediately by Stockhausen’s open-form Klavierstück XI. The Callithumpians also performed Christian Wolff’s recent, open-instrumentation Microexercises and Lee Weisert’s New England Drift. The concert opened with Brown’s brief tape piece Octet I, realized during his work with Cage on the “Project for Magnetic Tape.” Although a later mixed-down version of this piece has long been known, it was only recently that Octet I’s eight individual tracks, allowing for octophonic projection, were discovered. (Volker Straebel discussed the composition of this piece in his Saturday paper.)

Available Forms
Photo by Robert Kirzinger

Saturday night’s concert began with Schleiermacher’s performance of Pierre Boulez’s Constellation-Miroir from Sonata No. 3 and continued with Schleiermacher, Drury, and Yukiko Takagi’s performance of Brown’s three-piano Corroboree. The Callithumpians, led by Drury and featuring violin soloist Ethan Wood, performed the latest of the Brown pieces in these concerts, Centering—a wonderful example of the supple and colorful, and very musical, textures and harmonies of his post-1950s music. Substantiating this attractive later style was Sign Sounds (1972), which ended the concert, and of which Drury and the Callithumpians gave two very different performances, our sole (and very valuable) opportunity to hear how different from one another two performances of Brown’s open-form ensemble works could sound. Also on the program were John Zorn’s cut-up piece For Your Eyes Only and Brown’s Available Forms I (a central touchstone in Richard Toop’s Saturday-morning keynote paper read by Rebecca Kim).

Kyle Gann’s Friday morning keynote talk, which delved a little into technical musicology, also succinctly made one of the big points of the festival. Gann said, “I look forward this weekend to rescuing Earle Brown from this ‘New York School’ limbo that he seems to have fallen into…. He came into the 1950s New York with his own set of ideas and it is high time we completed the story of where those ideas uniquely led. Let this weekend mark the point at which musicologists quit talking about ‘Earle Brown, one of the composers of the New York School,’ and start talking about ‘Earle Brown.’ Full stop.” This view was seconded in Rebecca Kim’s paper later in the day, in which, after creating a distance between Brown and the New York School, she spoke of Brown’s influences outside of the Cage sphere, such as the surrealism of Max Ernst and the mobiles of Calder, along with providing an overview of the early Brown musical biography. This also offered context for some of the other presentations. Kim’s talk also provided a useful connection to the installation in Northeastern’s Gallery 360, which featured a number of historic images Kim had unearthed from the Lunenburg Historical Society, along with materials from Brown’s archive. The audio aspect of the installation was Brown’s Music for Galerie Stadler in its first U.S. hearing.

Kyle Gann and Carolyn Brown
Photo by Anthony De Ritis

The most delightful presentations were by Earle Brown’s first wife, the dancer Carolyn Brown, and his second wife, Susan Sollins-Brown, an art historian and producer. Carolyn (who refers affectionately to Sollins-Brown as her “wife-in-law”) gave an entirely biographical talk about Earle Brown’s early years around Lunenburg, where he was virtually an additional member of her family. Her mother was a dance teacher; Carolyn later became a key member of Merce Cunningham’s company, and the physicality of dance in combination with the activity of jazz without question deeply informed the composer’s music. Susan Sollins-Brown, along with an incidental debunking of the idea that Brown and Morton Feldman maintained lifelong animosity from the early 1960s onward, presented some twenty minutes of her unfinished, ongoing film on the composer, created from new interviews and archival footage. (Sollins-Brown is the executive director of PBS’s valuable Art21 series of artist documentaries.)
Brown’s interest in the visual arts was the crux of papers by David Ryan and by art historian Natilee Harren, whose illumination of direct connections between Brown’s music and the Fluxus artists was particularly revelatory (especially given the Fluxus group’s ties to Cage). Both were richly accompanied by visuals of the art being discussed. (These were appropriately presented at the Gardner Museum.)

Among the more musicologically oriented papers were Louis Pine’s somewhat technical illustrations of Brown’s applications of the Schillinger technique, which he applied from his earliest important works and throughout his career. (Unstated in Pine’s presentation but arguably salient to this discussion was Brown’s connection through this technique to commercial and jazz composers including Gershwin and Benny Goodman; although it was touched upon, little was made in any of these papers of Brown’s relationship to jazz from an early age, except anecdotally.) Richard Toop was unable to attend due to ongoing treatment for cancer, but following his pre-recorded preamble his rather warm and personal reminiscence, Saturday’s keynote talk, was read by Rebecca Kim. The subject was Brown’s relationship to European composers of the 1960s era, with a rundown of the remarkable number of prestigious commissions (“all-star gigs,” Toop calls them) he received during this period. So many works we just don’t hear! Drury spoke to Brown’s longtime colleague Christian Wolff about the milieu in which the New York School composers worked, as well as suggesting a view of performance of their works today. Several other papers on Saturday also touched on musicological aspects of open-form and process in Brown’s music, as well as the composer as a teacher and colleague.

Stephen Drury and Christian Wolff
Photo by Anthony De Ritis

It was perhaps inevitable that consideration of Earle Brown’s music still canted toward the early works, since that’s where his innovations took root and were most clearly presented; nonetheless it’s a pity that not many of the later works were discussed in depth (in lieu of more general principles). It’s a great shame that resources were not available for performances of any of the larger orchestral works. Still, the Earle Brown: Beyond Notation symposium provided a fine foundation for the hopes of all involved that Brown and his music will be the subjects of much future research and, more importantly, that there will be renewed U.S. interest in performances of his works.

***

Composer and writer Robert Kirzinger is on the staff of the Boston Symphony Orchestra as a writer, editor, and speaker. He is the program annotator for the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, works with several Boston ensembles, and teaches occasionally at Northeastern University.

Sounds Heard: Ehnahre—Old Earth

Posted on January 22, 2013 by Matthew Guerrieri - Albums, Listen

Arnold Schoenberg famously preached the liberation of dissonance, but left implicit the symmetric relation in that statement: that dissonance can, in and of itself, be pretty liberating. Ehnahre, the Boston-based experimental metal group, has a knack for dissonance, amplified into bone-crushing clouts of familiar overdrive distortion. But the real, dark fun of Old Earth (Crucial Blast) is the way the music, fueled by dissonance, constantly slips free of such genre expectations.

For the group’s third full-length album, Ryan McGuire (bass), John Carchia (guitars), and Ricardo Donoso (percussion and electronics) stretch out in full experimental sweep; laid out as a continuous, four-part track, Old Earth covers a lot of ground. (The album represents something of a swan song for the group, at least this iteration of it: Donoso has moved on to focus more on electronic music; McGuire and Carchia, having recruited three more musicians (Brandon Terzakis, Rich Chowenhill, and Jared Redmond), are about to start touring with the new lineup.)

Schoenberg is a particular and acknowledged inspiration for Ehnahre; 12-note techniques lie at the heart of much of their material. Serialism has been hanging around the edges of various heavy metal subgenres for a while, especially technical metal, with its pursuit of ever-increasing noise and virtuosity. But Ehnahre goes further, borrowing not just the theory, but something of the aesthetic as well: a thoroughly expressionist fascination with death and decay, aiming for nothing so much as the venerable sensation of the uncanny, the intersection of terror and clarity. The group has a poetic streak, too—their previous album, Taming the Cannibals, found lyrical inspiration in such writers as Whitman, Jeffers, and Trakl. Old Earth turns to none other than Samuel Beckett, adapting his “Fizzle 6.” Not that it’s entirely intelligible translated into a full, guttural doom-metal howl—but the mood translates surprisingly well, precise but fugitive glimpses of nature’s brutal indifference.

There’s metal to be had, of course—the third part, in particular, is a crunching, asymmetrical pummeling to be reckoned with. But much of the album unfolds in heavy, slow-moving clouds of sound. A long, musique concrète-tinged prelude; dark chimes from Carchia’s guitar; a moody arco double-bass solo from McGuire—at times, Old Earth feels more like a free-jazz album, albeit one with all the knobs turned to ten. The group draws forth the extreme quality of metal but also pushes it in different directions: extreme restiveness, but also extreme stasis, extreme haziness. Switching between shadowy warmth and carpet-bomb assault, Old Earth envelops the ear in harsh and gleeful hair-trigger possibilities.

New England’s Prospect: Takeoff and Landing

Posted on November 13, 2012 by Matthew Guerrieri - Field Reports, Headlines

There’s a certain phase in the career of a composer when a commission or a request for a piece of music reverses time and causality: what seems like a hire actually ends up feeling more like a job interview. Depending on a given composer’s ideal community or level of entrepreneurial spirit, the phase can be short or long. But I think almost all composers have been faced with writing a piece in which there was also the pressure to prove oneself, to work in a complete survey of the composer’s skill set.

What often results might be called “portfolio pieces,” pieces in which one of the compositional goals is to, along the way, show what the composer can do. This is not necessarily a bad thing—take Hector Berlioz, for instance, who wrote pieces (which I love) in which he seems to feel the need to demonstrate everything he knows about every eight bars or so. But such pieces tend to be best appreciated in isolation. That, at least, was one of the lessons of the 10th Annual Young Composers Concert presented by Dinosaur Annex on October 28. Out of six works by six composers “on the cusp of their professional lives,” it was the ones that did the least that ended up making the strongest impressions.

I’ll start with the two busiest: Narrow Apogee, by James Borchers (a Dinosaur Annex commission) was both formidably dense and the kind of piece that seemed to erase its presence as it went along. For much of it, Sue-Ellen Hershman-Tcherepnin (on flute and alto flute) and Anne Black (on viola) overlapped tremolos that precisely waxed and waned around a hidden beat. The intervals and meter were being constantly, fluidly manipulated, but in a way that meant they were also constantly effaced. Joseph Tydings Mannarino’s Petrichor (a premiere) had a similar forest-vs.-trees, profuse quality. A solo viola piece (Black again), it aimed for a montage between austere double-stops reminiscent of Renaissance ritual and a web of extended-technique noise: creaking bow pressure, microtonal growling. But then each of those aspects was in turn further dissected; the fast cutting, instead of building to a climax, seemed instead to dissolve into a quick-fire slideshow of random snapshots. Mannarino’s resourcefulness in wringing sounds from the instrument was notable, but it felt more like a tour of the workshop than a finished object.

Wang Jie’s Shadow occupied some middle ground. A violin-cello-piano trio (Gabriela Diaz, Tony Rymer, and Donald Berman, respectively), its portraiture (“[dramatizing] the inner life of an autistic child,” according to the program notes) came in the form of juxtapositions, presenting an idea only to drop it and pick up another. But the ideas fell into clear categories—tightly wound chromatic scribbling alternating with rocking, sing-song thirds and fourths—and the overall sound, glossy and brittle with high piano and pizzicato, was distinctive. The sound of Roger Zare’s Geometries (which added Katherine Matasy’s clarinet to the trio) was familiar: Copland redux, la-do-sol motives and subdominant implications in a smooth weave. The first movement, “Fractals,” worked up a host of mensuration canons, the outlines of which were sometimes obscured by the general pandiatonic cast. The finale, “Tangents,” was clearer, spooling out busy moto-perpetuo counterpoint that would then become the background for soaring melodies: a simple but handy trope.

The evening’s second commission was Dan VanHassel’s Alter Ego, for an occasion-specific octet: Hershman-Tcherepnin, Matasy, Rymer, and Berman were paired off with a quartet of high-school musicians, mirroring the same instrumentation (Tal Scully, Colin Roshak, Sea-Jay Van der Ploeg, and Bryan McGuiggen, respectively). VanHassel tasked the younger players with the harmonic mise en scène, the texture that of percolating minimalism, but the harmonic shifts more impulsive. The professionals overlaid that with sound effects: overblown accents, multiphonics, muted piano—mad-scientist art-pop. Gradual diminutions of the harmonic rhythm reached a nifty coda of dovetailed accelerandi. Alter Ego put its ideas, both borrowed and unconventional, in the foreground with bright efficiency.

Even more straightforward was Carolyn O’Brien’s Conveyance, in which tandem alto flute tongue pizzicato and bass clarinet flutters gradually disappeared into a bright haze of stained glass piano chords. (Hershman-Tcherepnin, Matasy, and Berman were the performers.) That’s all it was: a simple trajectory, but executed with sure-footed style, and yielding unassumingly rich returns.

One other thing to note about the concert: the prospect of professional success for “young” composers seems to be as temporally receding as it’s ever been. Mannarino, at 22, was the outlier—the rest all ranged from late 20s to early 40s. A life in composition continues to be a matter largely of persistence, a game of chicken with the financial and social pressures of adulthood. Dinosaur Annex’s Young Composers Concerts sit at the intersection of that fact of life and the particular make-up of the organization itself. It started out in 1975 as the house ensemble for the now-defunct New England Dinosaur Dance Theater, but, even on its own, the name fits. In terms of repertoire and administration, the group has always seemed an extra room built onto Boston’s main classical-music house; somewhat unusually for Boston new music groups, it’s always had composers leading the artistic side of things—Hershman-Tcherepnin and composer Yu-Hui Chang (who also showed a deft hand conducting Alter Ego, with its tricky tempo shifts and accumulating phrasing) currently share the artistic direction duties. And composers know what composers need: opportunities for good performances in front of interested audiences. Dinosaur Annex delivers on both counts. You can forgive those on the program for wanting to take as much advantage as possible.

***

Still, as Emily Dickinson warned:

Fame is a bee.
It has a song—
It has a sting—
Ah, too, it has a wing

—and sometimes it’s nice not to have to chase recognition. On November 5, Dickinson’s poem sat at the center of “November Buzz,” a concert at Tufts University in which most of the music was bee-related. There’s a venerable jape about avant-garde music, the most complex of the complex, that it’s nothing but composers writing for other composers; but, in my experience, anyway, it’s when composers—especially student composers—know they’re playing to their peers that they often relax the most. That was the case here: in front of a tiny crowd (of which I may very well have been the only outsider), the composers on the program offered musical sketches at their most easygoing.

Dickinson and her poem were featured guests in John McDonald’s Bee Group, in which soprano Jennifer Ashe and pianist Sarah Bob circled the text multiple times in the group’s outer movements, “Bee Poem Almost Six Times” and “More on That Same Bee Poem.” The settings were quick variations, almost acting exercises, each bringing out a different aspect of the poem: longing, danger, the sting itself (complete with Bob howling in annoyed pain). McDonald, the concert’s lone faculty representative, has a style ideal for these sorts of miniatures, sharply energetic, essentially tonal but free-ranging through keys, lapidary, and polished. Two middle movements—a setting of David Ignatow’s “Praise the Worker Bees” and a cello solo (played by Katherine Kayaian), “Music for Big Bees, Only Louder”—put fast-chugging passagework and arcs of melody in dialectic alternation.

The rest of the concert presented student works. A pair of pieces by Christopher Marinuzzi avoided the hive: Prelude-Variations, for piano (played by the composer), mapped a glassy, dissonant chorale onto different voicings and registers; Two Chants (this one for Ashe, Bob, and Kayaian) stalked texts by Yeats and Beckett in a deliberate manner, the music circling a handful of stark craggy ideas. Jeanette Chechile’s piano solo Music for the Bee (performed by McDonald) was short, sweet, and Debussyesque, lazy bumblebee topples of cloudy harmony interspersed with short, darting runs. Logan Wright’s The Bumble Bee and the Orchid (played by Bob and Kayaian) also ran along a Debussy/Scriabin axis, and was also brief, an opening mix of cello tremolando and crystalline piano leading into a compact lyric excursion.

Meng Tian’s Provocations (again performed by McDonald) used its lightly prepared piano—especially the apian buzz of paper on the strings—to punctuate tight, teletype gestures of repeated notes. Mike Laurello’s Oscillations mixed in some electronics—the composer, at the piano, and a computerized double swirled through a succinct series of post-minimalist, pastel-shaded phases.

Most of the music felt occasional, but the programmatic background also seemed to have inspired a directness to the pieces that is not always easy to generate on larger canvases. The sweep of a larger canvas was absent as well, but, taken as a whole, the concert proved a rather effective divertimento. Instead of a career day, it was more like a day off.

New England’s Prospect: Reactor Corps

Posted on October 15, 2012 by Matthew Guerrieri - Field Reports, Headlines

“Can you dig it?” That was the refrain of the Second Line Social Aid Society Brass Band, kicking off the Sunday night blow-out marathon culmination of the 2012 HONK! Festival. The Somerville-based horde was the prime mover of the first festival, back in 2006, when they invited a few like-minded ensembles up to Massachusetts for a weekend of wind-and-drum rabble-rousing; at this, the gathering’s seventh annual installment, the rabble was over thirty bands strong, housed and fed by volunteers, parading through the environs, taking over public spaces, and, finally, welcomed into Harvard’s Sanders Theatre with Second Line’s blast of enthusiastic groove.

The Forward! Marching Band at the HONK! Festival, Sanders Theatre, October 7, 2012.
Photo by Lucy Kim.

HONK! identifies itself as a festival of “activist street bands,” and while some participants still fit squarely in that category—preaching revolution, buoying the oppressed, putting the call-and-response of political protest to a drumline beat—others seemed fired up less by demonstration than by musical immoderation: the sheer multiple-forte thrill of brass and percussion with the leash off, or the welcome-all-comers triumph of volume over precision. And yet the sense of community was inescapable, the line between performers and audience constantly blurred, bands feeding off each others’ energies, cheering each other on, occupying the hall’s Gilded-Age opulence with unrestrained enthusiasm. The HONK! Festival seemed to be asking: how much can a mere choice of instrumentation be considered a political act?

***

The more politically straightforward bands were similar in attitude—facets of the venerable, unruly, sometimes quaintly utopian but ever-persistent working-class left: updated Wobblies, with a streak of anarchism and, courtesy of the 2008 financial meltdown, a fresh charge of indignation. Their tactics, though, varied. New York’s Himalayas put the band’s sheer collective nature up front: their ecological protest (”We don’t want to live on the pipeline!”) came out as a defiantly unschooled, percussion-heavy Portsmouth Sinfonia-style happening. That anything-goes attitude was prominent, but most of the bands funneled it into more disciplined musical cadres. The sousaphone player for Montreal’s Chaotic Insurrection Ensemble stenciled the priorities onto the bell of her instrument—“Beauty is not power”—but the band’s power came through with a precision in contrast with their name, a heavy swing to gather the masses.

The Leftist Marching Band (from another Portsmouth, in New Hampshire) also gave a more solid, Famous Flames backing to their chants, and also risked solemnity, playing a mournful “When Johnny Comes Marching Home” in tribute to the Civil War dead the hall commemorates. More local history was channeled by the Quebec City-based tint(A)nar, remembering the 1912 Lawrence, Massachusetts, textile strike with its famous theme, “Bread and Roses.”

Didactic theater was the aim of the Forward! Marching Band, from Madison, Wisconsin, amplifying “Who Stole the Kishka?” into a full pantomime, complete with Victorian-capitalist weasel. Resplendent in red-and-black, socialist-Devo jumpsuits, The Brass Balagan, from Vermont, spoke in klezmer as well, laying down a nice hora-freilach pairing.

The political message was broad, vague—partially by translation into the admittedly blunt instrument of a street band, but also partially by intent. The general mood seemed to be one of recruiting into the cause. The join-up approach could be found in between the lines of the Brass Balagan’s self-description:

[T]he Balagan performs mainly for anti-imperialist causes, but is also available for birthday parties, bar mitzvahs, shopping mall ribbon-cutting ceremonies, corporate functions, and gun shows[.]

The bigger the coalition the better, dissonance be damned. Still, given both the festival’s overall troublemaking cast and the radical proclivities of much of the participants (even in the People’s Republic of Cambridge, one can’t imagine too many other Sanders Theatre crowds hardcore enough to turn “Bread and Roses” into a sing-along), it was more notable how many bands presented an at least nominally apolitical front. And the reason for that, I think, can be traced to the rise of that other autonomous, self-contained revolutionary musical unit: the rock band.

The HONK! Festival’s history, after all, roughly parallels indie rock’s progress toward larger and larger ensembles and collectives; it was only a matter of time before grandiose-punch horn sections ventured out on their own. And punch they do. The What Cheer? Brigade, from Providence, Rhode Island, was punishingly, exhilaratingly loud, a rock-and-roll steam hammer. Santa Rosa’s Church Marching Band, unimpeachably tight, offered precision-machined jabs with surf-rock overtones. The New Orleans-based Young Fellaz Brass Band (a crowd favorite) stretched their swing-funk beat wide with confidence, and at a volume level deafeningly efficient for an eight-piece group. With this kind of power, who needs a Marshall stack? (The drums, too, made their escape via the Loyd Family Ensemble, an Oakland-based outfit that whomped the audience into carnival-parade ecstasy with an impeccable eight-percussionist assault.)

Within the din, bands drew stylistic lines, fine but definite. One category was the punk-cabaret demented circus parade: Vancouver’s Carnival Band, gothic heft laced with a touch of Bacharach-style pop, or Emperor Norton’s Stationary Marching Band, Boston favorites, bringing a touch of steampunk grit to their ragged jam-band excess. (True to form, emcee John Bell had to fairly hound them offstage.) Even outside of the musical style, a lot of bands brought along some circus-like component: dancers, costumes, banners. It reached a culmination with Chicago’s Environmental Encroachment, their ragged, thronged blues rumble accompanied by cheerleaders, a juggler, a flag bearer, and various members of the horde stripping down to their underwear. The one true circus band, the Bread & Puppet Band, normally found in Vermont providing accompaniment for puppetry-based pageants, dispatched a rousing, polka-like march with veteran expertise.

The punk-to-party band axis was a useful reference point. Seattle’s Chaotic Noise Marching Corps (an offspring of HONK! Festivals past) epitomized the former, hard-edged and brash; Austin’s Minor Mishap wreaked havoc somewhere in the middle, weaving touches of Balkan stomping and Desi-Arnaz-style Latin big band into their solid, heavy-metal suave sound; at the good-time far end was Providence’s Extraordinary Rendition Players, a cheerful anti-establishment rave. Another Boston group, the six-piece Dirty Water Brass Band with trombonist Todd Page firing up the audience like a hyperactive pied piper, swore allegiance to the old Boston soul/R&B virtues. Especially danceable was the festival’s lone European delegate, the Pink Puffers, a Roman bloc dedicated to rigorous, Prince-style funk workouts, turning the place into their own discotheque, as statues of James Otis and Josiah Quincy looked on in stony, equanimous silence.

A handful of groups ventured into more unusual waters. The interesting murkiness of soft, low brass fueled Pittsburgh’s Lungs Face Feet, a rare subdued set, atmospheric and moody. Brass Messenger, out of Minneapolis, was saturated with the cooler tint of jazz-rock, getting the crowd to clap along with a tricky, nifty 8+9 groove. Avant-garde jazz emerged out of a one-time gathering, the festival’s collected trombones (and a few sousaphones) united under the direction of Sebastian Isler for a riff-based, freeform jam, like a cluster-filled, aleatoric cop-show anthem.

Isler’s own group, New York City’s Hungry March Band, was a pep band gone bad, the fight songs furious jazz-funk, the cheerleaders moonlighting go-go dancers. They were one of a number of ensembles that, through costume and choreography, upended the conformist order of a high school marching band into something mutinous, as if to retroactively unleash the full power of teenaged id. The Seed and Feed Marching Abominable, from Atlanta, had a similar feel, an outlaw halftime show, the music extravagantly syncopated, the formations anarchic. There was some tapping into the unintentional irony of marching-band arrangements of pop and rock as well, especially by the Hill Stompers, out of Los Alamos, who coupled a Jewish-wedding jam with a gleefully indelicate transcription of Ozzy Osbourne’s “Crazy Train.” Clad in black and gold glitter, the Detroit Party Marching Band pummeled hard-hitting hard-rock accents, creating the sense of a homecoming parade float hijacked by KISS. Again and again, bands created a satiric mirror of the drum and bugle corps, a traditional symbol of order and small-town pride and martial regimen turned into an absurdist horde.

***

Presence was the one constant. For all their discrete political vectors, the bands embodied the first step of any insurrection: showing up. The Brass Liberation Orchestra, from San Francisco, made the connection explicit; after an opening chant, exhorting a big-tent cast of societal categories to “rise up,” the music, a looping, layered collection of riffs, made no political reference at all. It didn’t have to: just being there, joined together, holding stage and attention in all their multicultural, LGBT glory, was a political statement in itself. Such was the activism of the HONK! Festival, as much implicit as explicit, both the inescapable volume and the go-anywhere-anytime logistical freedom of the brass band analogues of the insistence and action of protest.

Is it enough? It was easy to get caught up in the festival’s enthusiasm, but just as easy to consider the world outside the theatre—rampant inequality, an election season and agenda driven by corporate power—and regard the spirit inside as quaint, or naïve, or a substitute outlet for more concrete action. The HONK! Festival places a lot of faith in merely getting together.

On the other hand, it’s better than never getting together at all. Sunday’s concert closed with the Rude Mechanical Orchestra, and a return to sloganeering: a pro-education chant, a couple choruses of “Which Side Are You On?,” and a formidable Tower-of-Power-like groove mashed into a joyously unlikely whole. They introduced themselves with a mission statement: “to create more noise; to create more movement; to create more revolution.” By that formula, every band in the house was at least a third of the way there.

New England’s Prospect: Talking Cures

Posted on October 9, 2012 by Matthew Guerrieri - Field Reports, Headlines

For the various malcontents and hypochondriacs in Corey Dargel’s Thirteen Near-Death Experiences, nearness is in the eye of the beholder; it felt appropriate, then, that it was this work that finally got Dargel across the comparatively short distance but seeming aesthetic gulf between Brooklyn and Boston and its environs, arriving at Cambridge’s Longy School of Music on September 30 for a Sunday-night performance with Collage New Music and conductor David Hoose. The Boston area teems with new music, of a stylistic variety to belie the town’s reputation as a fish-farm of academic modernism, but the sort of lyrically grooving, pop-and-minimalism-influenced music that’s been coming out of New York and (especially) Brooklyn over the past decade or so has only rarely made it here.

Dargel has been an exemplar of the style, his quasi-theater-piece song cycles—swimming in pop conventions, inseparable (so far) from Dargel’s own lean, crooning-ghost singing voice— unapologetically specific in their influences while, at the same time, practically courting the “unclassifiable” tag that seems to follow Dargel wherever he goes. Thirteen Near-Death Experiences combines that AM-radio inheritance with one of the most venerable new-music set ups around, the flute/clarinet/violin/cello/piano/percussion collective better known in composition jargon as “Pierrot-plus.” On the one hand, the results are familiar, bright, bouncy pocket symphonies reminiscent of, say, Van Dyke Parks—but Dargel twists his pop progressions in Möbius bands, and his rhythms are refracted and glitchy (an effect amplified by having percussionist Craig McNutt spend most of his time with an electronic drum pad).

Corey Dargel performs Thirteen Near-Death Experiences with Collage New Music.
Photo by Dr. PC Ning

Formally, Dargel sticks to the pop-song template—repeated verse-chorus modules, with the ensemble varying more through slow build-ups than wholesale variation—but he takes a more classical approach to the overall cyclical structure, symmetries in mood and technique making a traditional Schumann-esque arc across the movements. Take for instance, the balanced extended-percussion glosses in the third and tenth movements, a repeated drumstick count-off forever re-triggering “Sometimes a Migraine is Just a Migraine” echoing the ensemble hand-clap punctuation in “Ritalin,” the clapping herded into an 11/8 ostinato at the end, like a round of applause tamped into conformity.

Pre-concert talk with composers Eric Nathan, Corey Dargel, and Music Director David Hoose.
Photo by Dr. PC Ning

Dargel’s lyrics tend toward the plainspoken, and often feel to be in deliberately awkward relationship to the accompaniment, laid over the music, with it but not of it. It works dramatically, a perfect analogy for Dargel’s characters, eccentrically flawed but craving acknowledgement, each one seeming to commandeer the music, roping the ensemble into being an unwitting accomplice in the musical number the characters imagine for themselves. It’s the sort of thing that makes me think that Dargel is less unclassifiable as in a very specific class, a member in good standing of that company of songwriters that use the limits of style as a resource for characterization.

The one comparison that kept springing to mind was Marc Blitzstein—and not just because, whether by design or coincidence, the fifth of the Near-Death Experiences, “What Will It Be for Me,” shares a title with one of Blitzstein’s most lyrical creations, Alexandra’s aria from the opera Regina. Like Blitzstein, Dargel portrays his characters’ yearning through the impression that the best way the characters know how to communicate—through the vernacular of popular song—is still inadequate to the power of their feelings, the charge of each song arising out of the tension that comes from running up against the limits of the musical vocabulary. Blitzstein’s vernacular was art song and Broadway, Dargel’s is that of looping minimalism, power pop, MIDI computer playback; but they share an undercurrent of melancholy, frustrations observed with equal parts insistence and wonder.

The group played extremely well, but, then again, Collage tends to play everything extremely well. Along with the likes of Boston Musica Viva (who also kicked off their season last week) and Dinosaur Annex, Collage is a product of that 1970s, modernist new-music era—this marks their 42nd season—that, through thick and thin, nevertheless keeps going at a predictably high level. Collage’s season announcements have been coming later and later—this year’s emerged only a week before their first concert—but the concert itself sounded anything but thrown together. Eric Nathan’s 2009 Walls of Light was given a splashy reading; the piece itself was all texture, lots of colors, lots of well-engineered clustered scurrying and swirling, more shape than line. (One thing that was interesting was the way the piece, in its second movement, took a very post-minimalist idea—repeated rising scales, not unlike the opening of Nixon in China—and fully integrated it into a very post-serial, motive-and-gesture-driven contemporary-classical framework.)

There followed Elliott Carter at his most deliciously fractious, the edgy, fasten-your-seatbelts soirée that is Triple Duo. Hoose introduced the work from the stage, going beyond the usual brief program note into a full-blown behind-the-scenes featurette, complete with musical examples. (I normally cringe when conductors start talking, but Hoose does it far better than most.) What really sold the piece, though, was the performance: sharp, full of character, hurtling through Carter’s repartee with lethal snap and ebullience.

The critical temptation with such programming is to try and demonstrate that Carter and Dargel are, for all their differences, musical siblings under the skin. That might be too much—they are awfully different—but if there’s one thing they have in common, it’s making a virtue of musical disruption, showing that the most interesting narratives don’t necessarily project well onto music of smoothness and ease. The characters might vary—Carter’s voluble and acerbic, Dargel’s defiantly damaged—but both dramas spring from the same conviction: that the get-together only starts to be really interesting once things get broken.

Matthew Guerrieri

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