Tag: concert review

String Quartet Smackdown! In Austin

Posted on November 28, 2012 by AndrewSigler - Field Reports, Headlines

How many times during a heated debate about chamber music have you longed for a pair of boxing gloves or perhaps a cricket bat? In the topsy-turvy world of new music, sometimes having a solid piece of wood in your hand can be quite useful. Long gone are the thoughtful, dispassionate discussions of historical significance and the careful dissections of dogma peppered with compromise. These have been replaced by heated accusations, wild ad hominem arguments, and other madness which, if allowed to continue unchecked, will not end well. I say we let the music duke it out and let the audience decide. Via text message. The organizers of Golden Hornet Project’s “String Quartet Smackdown!” clearly agree that the present state of musical debate requires an overhaul. Staid competitions with pedigreed judges be damned! We’ve got smart phones, strong opinions, and a fully stocked bar. Let’s get cracking.

Featuring sixteen quartet compositions chosen anonymously from among over 100 entries, the Smackdown! was held at Austin’s Scottish Rite Theater, home to regular avant jazz shows as well as secretive, Masonic meetings. Set up to run like the last few rounds of the NCAA basketball tournament, the Smackdown! started with a “Sweet Sixteen” round in which the first minute of each quartet was played. Full disclosure: I had a piece in this competition. Its involvement was…brief. This was followed by an “Elite Eight” round with two minutes per piece performed, a “Final Four” with three minutes each, and the Championship in which the last two pieces were played in their entirety. The Tosca String Quartet took on the sizeable task of learning all sixteen string quartets in a few weeks and having each one under their fingers in the event that it reached the final round. One of the entrance requirements was that each piece needed to be right around four minutes (lots of single movements out there), but that’s still over an hour of new music to learn in a relatively short time. Tosca did a fantastic job, not only performing flawlessly but also avoiding having even a single page out of order or any other similar issue which could have easily thrown a monkey wrench into a presentation in which timing and solid performances mean the difference between glory and an early trip to the bar. They also managed to keep straight faces when at the end of each work’s allotted one, two, or three minutes, the gong which signaled “time is up” broke into the flow of the piece, cutting it short as required by the rules. This was funny at first (there used to be this t.v. show…), but after the first few thwacks it started to wear out its welcome. Fortunately, the timers backed off on the hits as the show went on.

Some contests were close!…Some contests were not so close.

Once the gong was struck, the audience was given a few minutes to text their vote and the results came up on a large screen behind Tosca. Watching the real-time “Battle of the Bars” was half the fun, and the audience reactions to contests close and not-so-close were chock full of “oohs” and “aahs.” In the interest of anonymity the quartets were all assigned numbers, one through sixteen, so one would see SQ1 -vs- SQ16 and so on. Unfortunately, I’m not sure that most audience members would be able to “put names to faces” with a given piece, so to speak. For instance, my piece went out in spectacular fashion in the first round, but I suspect that a few of the people who voted for it might have wanted to know who wrote it, and even though the names and titles of each work were included in the program and shown on the screen at the end of the competition, there was no correlation with the numbering system. An industrious audience member (or one with a notebook, pen, email communication with the contest coordinators, and modest research abilities) could probably dig up the facts, but letting people know whose piece was being played at a given time probably wouldn’t have had a huge impact on the voting and would have given said audience member an idea of which composer to check out the next day.

Hopefully the audience took those programs home and checked out all of the composers, because there were a number of wonderful pieces included in the show. The gentle introspection of Jonathan Russell’s …in the fir trees: fireflies, with its slow and quiet rising lines, offered a wonderful contrast to the rhythmic intensity and harmonic crunchiness of David Biedenbender’s Surface Tension. Despite its compelling use of pre-recorded materials slowly overtaken by the strings, Steven Snowden’s Appalachian Polaroids also went out in the first round, so I didn’t feel too bad about getting my card punched before intermission. Ruben Naeff’s Little JACKASS (originally JACKASS written for the JACK Quartet) was another strong work; odd time signatures gave shape to quiet high-register rhythmic figures which descended by and by and were joined by longer lines, still walking in lock-step with those asymmetrical rhythms. But in the end, there could be only one, and the catchy rhythms and strong melodies of Chris Black’s Fifteen Grand in a Paper Sack came out on top.

All in all the Smackdown! was a resounding success. It was well attended, and the diverse audience didn’t look to be new music regulars, which I contend is a good thing. As far as I could tell, no one left during intermission, which is a victory for any show. The fact that the audience played an active role in the proceedings coupled with relatively short pieces made for a presentation that was compelling and easily digestible. Given this, I wonder if at the next Smackdown! we could hear the pieces in their entirety from the get go? No one seemed anxious to leave, and while it would certainly add time to the event it would also let more slowly evolving pieces do their thing. (I’m not referring to my piece. It was pretty evolved by the time it got smacked by Sarah Norris’s Stalin Does The Robot).

I can see the Tosca’s reviewing their contract right now…

Composers, Inc. Introduces San Francisco Opera Brass; Subotnick Revisits Silver Apples

Posted on November 28, 2012 by Sidney Chen - Field Reports, Headlines

Composers, Inc. continued its 29th season of presenting contemporary American music this month with a performance of diverse works for small ensembles as part of the Old First Concerts series in San Francisco. Founded in 1984 by composers Frank La Rocca and Martin Rokeach as an avenue to get their own and their colleagues’ music heard in the Bay Area, Composers, Inc. has remained a composer-driven organization with six composers acting jointly as artistic directors. (La Rocca tells the story of the organization’s genesis here.) Three of the six—La Rocca, Robert Greenberg, and Jeffrey Miller—were represented on the November 13 program.

The San Francisco Opera Brass, conducted by Dennis Doubin, performing Jeffrey Miller’s Sonata à 11.

The program was titled Brass de Deux, a word play combining the title of Wayne Peterson’s Pas de Deux (performed by flutist Tod Brody and percussionist Jack Van Geem) and the featured artists on the second half of the program: members of the San Francisco Opera Orchestra’s brass section performing for the first time as the San Francisco Opera Brass. For the occasion, Miller wrote Sonata à 11, inspired by Gabrieli, and La Rocca transcribed his 1998 a cappella choral work Exaudi for brass choir. Both works received their premiere performances at this concert.

La Rocca’s body of work includes a particular focus on settings of sacred texts for unaccompanied choir. In the original version of Exaudi, La Rocca set sections of four different Psalms, including Psalm 130 (De profundis clamavi, Out of the depths I cry). The choral version was for 12 parts (a perusal score and recording are available here); in transcribing to brass choir, the number of parts was reduced to 11 (3 trumpet, 5 horns, 2 trombones, 1 bass trombone). The vocal writing, full of solemn, extended lines, suspensions, and densely stacked chords, translated well to the unified and rich sound of the San Francisco Opera Brass, which amply filled the church without being overwhelming.

Likewise, Miller’s Sonata à 11 (scored similarly but with a tuba replacing the 5th horn) took advantage of the expansive playing of the San Francisco Opera Brass. As a former trombonist with experience playing Gabrieli’s antiphonal music, Miller wrote for the full and regal quality of the brass choir, placing sustained low brass chords as a bed under more rhythmic trumpet gestures, and horns as a chamber choir embedded in the whole. There was a sense of contained, majestic energy to the San Francisco Opera Brass’s playing in both works that was settled and satisfying.

This was in contrast to two barnburner pieces in the first half of the program, which tapped into a more vigorous and extroverted energy. The evening opened with Greenberg’s Rarified Air (1999) for clarinet, violin, and piano, which takes its title from “that thin, clear high layer of air…known as the stratosphere,” as the composer writes in the program note. The opening and closing movements of this four-movement work, performed with gusto by Rob Bailis (clarinet), Michael Nicholas (violin), and Hadley McCarroll (piano), were dynamic and rhythmically engaging, propelled forward like a train in motion. The more introspective middle movements explored different ranges, establishing a dialogue between the piano and clarinet both in their low registers in the second movement, and placing a clarinet melody and violin obbligato over a mid-range piano chorale with jazz-infused harmonies in the third.

David Biedenbender’s you’ve been talking in your sleep, performed by PRISM Quartet.

The one piece from this program that I’ve since revisited simply for pleasure’s sake is David Biedenbender’s saxophone quartet you’ve been talking in your sleep, performed by the Premiere Saxophone Quartet. (The recording above is by PRISM, for whom the piece was written; a perusal score is available on Biedenbeder’s site if you want to follow along.) In his spoken intro, Biedenbender described one section as being like space alien funk, and indeed the whole single-movement piece explodes into a strange and super groovy late-night sax dance party after some quietly sighing pitch bends in the opening to set the scene. While most of the work is built on complex interlocking rhythmic patterns, there are two homophonic sections that reveal just how precise and virtuosic the performers need to be. (A special shout-out to Aaron Lington, whose nimble baritone sax playing provided an always solid ground for the quartet to work from.) At the end of the piece, Biedenbender sends the soprano sax up into the stratosphere with some screams that were shockingly eyebrow-raising, with pitch bends that echoed the opening but to completely different effect.

you’ve been talking in your sleep was one of two works chosen from 300 entries by Composers, Inc.’s artistic directors for this year’s Suzanne and Lee Ettelson Award, which is open to new chamber works (for up to five musicians) by American composers. The second work selected was Gold Rush for five violins by Indiana University doctoral candidate Ryan Chase (audio here), which will receive a performance at Composers, Inc.’s April 2013 concert. Composers, Inc. is soliciting applications for next year’s award now; the postmark deadline is December 1.

***

Morton Subotnick performs Silver Apples of the Moon

Morton Subotnick, right, performs Silver Apples of the Moon, while SUE-C creates real-time live video imagery.

If my Facebook feed is to be believed, that same evening a big chunk of the Bay Area new music community (myself included) suddenly became aware that at the end of the week Morton Subotnick was coming back to San Francisco, where he had co-founded the San Francisco Tape Music Center, to perform his groundbreaking 1967 work Silver Apples of the Moon live at SFMOMA. Presented in the museum’s Phyllis Wattis Theater on November 15, the performance had Subotnick with a Buchla 200e modular analog synthesizer routed through Ableton Live on one side of the stage and Bay Area video artist SUE-C on the other. Speakers were positioned around the hall, which allowed the opportunity to hear the familiar burbles and tick-tick-ticks moving around in space in quadraphonic sound, rather than the stereo configuration that first made the piece famous.

During the intro and the Q&A afterwards, Subotnick addressed the question of why a work commissioned by a record label (Nonesuch Records), which was inspired by the idea of a new technological paradigm allowing for a new genre of music that exists in a fixed form on recorded media, would need a live performance. His response was two-fold: first, that it allowed for collaboration with another artist, in this case visual artist SUE-C with whom he had worked before at Ars Electronica; and also that it allowed him access to a full palette of sounds while remixing the original work on the spot. For this performance Subotnick utilized elements of Silver Apples, revisiting and transforming them through Ableton, and combined it with A Sky of Cloudless Sulphur from 1978. SUE-C created a parallel and complementary performance, manipulating materials including Mardi Gras beads, a paintbrush, faceted glass from a headlight, and a sheet of brass mesh under the lens of a video camera, and projecting the processed result.

The Buchla 200e: “Select some modules, button them up in a 200e cabinet, and you’re off and running with the most sophisticated analog system ever built.”
Photo by Gina Basso/SFMOMA

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.

Texas Performing Arts and Conspirare: New Season, New Commissions

Posted on October 11, 2012 by AndrewSigler - Field Reports, Headlines

The commissioning of new works is the life blood of contemporary music. Whether large or small, from consortiums, ensembles, foundations, or individuals, these nods to compositional creativity provide practical support for composers as well as career-boosting validation. Texas Performing Arts and Conspirare are two of the strongest players in the music scene in Austin, and their commitment to the commissioning and performing of new works is significant. Recently, both groups commissioned and premiered major new works within only a few days of one another. Fall is always overflowing with great sounds, and this embarrassment of new music riches, coupled with a bit of mercifully cool weather, made for an exciting start to the season.

Dan Welcher

The double string quartet is a bit of a rare avis. If you happen to attend a concert with a new one programmed, you’re also going to hear either the Shostakovich or the Mendelssohn. It’s going to happen. Or you may hear both as bookends to the new work, which is what the audience experienced when the Miró and Shanghai quartets came together to premier Dan Welcher’s new work Museon Polemos. ** The Shostakovich Two Pieces for String Octet, which preceded the Welcher, featured a common setup for the performers which (from stage right) is the standard quartet configuration (vn, vn, vc, va) but doubled. A little weird, like driving an unfamiliar stick shift, but still quite workable. However, Museon Polemos’ antiphonal requirements not only had the quartets set up opposite one another but also had the viola and cello switch their conventional position such that both groups (when viewed from the audience) were mirror images of violin I, violin II, viola, and cello from the front to the back of the stage on a bit of an angle. I imagine that after a few decades you get pretty used to having the viola right there, so doing a shell game shuffle with the seating positions could be, you know, problematic; something like driving in England with the stick in your left hand, the clutch under your right foot, in the rain, caught in one of those endless roundabouts. Yet during this performance, you’d never know anything was unusual, either from what you could see or hear, all of which was dynamic, compelling, and flawlessly performed. Labeled as a “25 minute ballet without dancers,” Museon Polemos pits the two string quartets against one another in an Apollonian/Dionysian contrast of music and mood with the Shanghai quartet as the thoughtful, cool former and the Miró quartet as the visceral, earthy latter. While the forthcoming Rite of Spring centennial is in the near future, Welcher took inspiration primarily from Stravinsky’s later ballets of the ’30s and ’40s when composing his work.

The Shanghai (top) and Miró (bottom, photo by Nathan Russell) Quartets

The work opened with a short, sharp tutti chord which contained the harmonic profile of both groups, combined in one thorny punch. This led to an introduction to the character of each quartet, starting with the Shanghai’s bright, clean lines in the violins bolstered by pizzicato in the viola. The Miró responded with sneering, blocky double-stops, violin I rising against accents in violin II. The sabre rattling took the shape of solos with both groups firing shots over the other’s bow until the movement ended, the matter unresolved, illustrated by another statement of the opening chord. The second movement began with Miró weaving a unison line contrasted by chords performed by Shanghai. A solo broke from the unison line, dramatically contrasting and ultimately dominating the chords in the Shanghai. However, before a death blow could be dealt, a slow, melancholy, barcarolle-like motion emerged from the remains of the chords Shanghai had all but abandoned. Miró joined the procession, the music building inevitably to a climax before both groups returned to their introductory material; a quiet ending which left the conflict of the work still unresolved. For the third movement, Welcher pulled out all the stops including rhythmic elements from “Dance of the Adolescents” from part I of The Rite of Spring, his one nod to the centennial. Following the initial onslaught, a calm section provided a break; a gathering of forces for the final push. A Gregorian chant of sorts developed in the violins, pushing forward and mimicking the inevitability of the barcarolle from the second movement. This gave way to big pizzicato lines traded among the players as trills erupted, both providing tension and effectively freezing the forward motion of the work. A high note traded between both first violins was caught in a web of pizzicato and served to illustrate the two groups locked in combat; a conflict neither side would win. Acknowledgement of this dichotomy came by way of another long held chord by both quartets, now spent, which ended the work.

Conspirare

Conspirare is one of the real gems of the Austin art scene. Their recent release, Samuel Barber: An American Romantic, made its debut at #10 on the Billboard Classical Music charts and is the most recent result of their $1 million dollar expanded recording program with the label Harmonia Mundi. Their Legacy of Sound initiative also provides significant funding for the commissioning of new works, and two of those works, If I Were A Swan and To Touch the Sky by Kevin Puts, were recently premiered by Conspirare with the composer on hand. Conspirare’s focus is always on the music, but their presentation is also compelling. As they have in previous concerts, Conspirare began by entering from the back of the room and populating the aisles for the first work, Rene Clausen’s Tonight Eternity Alone. The work began with gentle minor pentatonic melodies slowly cascading as two sopranos broke through, rising above the texture. As the piece closed, Conspirare continued to the stage to perform Steven Stucky’s O sacrum convivium (in memoriam Thomas Tallis). In marked contrast to the Clausen, the Stucky was rhythmically explosive and tonally ambiguous with symmetrical chords sliding up and down in the propulsive texture.

Kevin Puts

Following the Stucky was the world premiere of the first commission, Puts’s If I Were A Swan. Starting almost imperceptibly, the male and female voices traded staggered entrances, with the women ultimately yielding to rapid sixteenth notes in the male voices on the plosive “puh.” [1] At moments, these sixteenths were (Phillip) Glass-like as they appeared and faded, playing hide and seek as they traded places with other rising and falling lines. An eventual return to the initial texture intimated an ending, but not before the sixteenths reappeared, giving a bright ending to the work. This concert was part of the Conspirare “Signature Series” in which new works are paired with those that have become part of the Conspirare canon [2], so the remaining works on the first half were terrific arrangements of (and new works based on) spirituals. The second half began with the centerpiece of the concert, Puts’s To Touch the Sky. Set in nine movements, the work was described by Puts as his first “mature attempt at writing for unaccompanied chorus.” Based on the concept of the “divine feminine” manifest in many of the world’s religions, Puts found a variety of texts reflective of this phenomenon to use in the work. The smooth polyphony of the first movement, “Annunciation,” acted as a strong counter to the rising chromaticism of the second, “Unbreakable.” The third and fourth movements also had a paired quality, the former driving, pulsing, (recalling the sixteenths from If I Were A Swan) the latter gentle and quite short. The fifth movement was the longest and served as the centerpiece of the work. Initially evocative of early church music, the quasi-modal language and rhythmically simple delivery was quite effective. The 3/4 time signature was largely populated by a half note/quarter note rhythm which anchored the piece as the soprano line broke from the pack, rising as a string of suspensions played out below. Pairings not dissimilar to the opening movements followed, highlights of which were the whispering susurrus of the seventh movement, “Who has seen the wind?” and the high, clean, and pure boys choir quality of the final movement “Most noble evergreen” which, after a few cadential teases, brought the piece to an end.

The final portion of the concert mirrored the collections of spirituals, this time drawing from arrangements of Sondheim and Bernstein as well as folk music icon Woody Guthrie and local favorite Eliza Gilkyson. I attended the show on Sunday, but both Friday’s and Saturday’s performances of To Touch the Sky were recorded by Harmonia Mundi for an upcoming live concert CD. This recording will be produced in collaboration with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra in conjunction with a recording of Puts’s Fourth Symphony under the direction of Marin Alsop.

2011 marked the 30th anniversary of Texas Performing Arts, and this is the 20th anniversary season of Conspirare. Both organizations are shining examples of the world-class art that Austin has to offer; compelling evidence that alongside the spectacular popular music festivals, high-tech industry, amazing food, and dynamic lifestyle, Austin has an art music scene worthy of the world stage.

And these two groups are just hitting their stride.

** Dan Welcher is a professor of composition at the Butler School of Music at UT Austin where I’m a doctoral student.

1. Try it. Puh puh puh puh. It works quite well.

2. Make no mistake; this audience knows its Conspirare canon. The concert program was divided into four sections, some of which had works listed in the program that were not played. For example, the first section had five pieces, of which only three were played. When it was announced that the Tarik O’Regan work I Had No Time To Hate was not to be played, a loud groan rose from the crowd.

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.

Bay Area Alive with Music

Posted on October 4, 2012 by Sidney Chen - Field Reports, Headlines

Oakland Active Orchestra at Soundwave

September was chock-a-block with musical activity in the San Francisco Bay Area. The month ended on Sunday with one of those extraordinarily warm and beautiful days that makes the whole city gloat with pride, and Soundwave had the good fortune of scheduling the final concert of their summer-long festival in an outdoor venue with a clear blue sky overhead. Soundwave is an ambitious and multi-disciplinary biennial series founded by Alan So that has been running since 2004, featuring not just concerts but also exhibitions/installations, panel discussions, and other performance events that merge sound or music with, say, Zen meditation or wilderness exploration. This year’s festival included around 15 events in a variety of indoor and outdoor locations around San Francisco.

Sunday’s event was essentially a straightforward new music concert dropped into the expansive Beaux Arts open-air courtyard of the California Palace of Legion of Honor, steps away from one of the best views of the Golden Gate Bridge. The bass clarinet duo Sqwonk (Jeff Anderle and Jonathan Russell, who are two of the co-founders of the Switchboard Festival) opened the performance by walking on from opposite sides of the courtyard while playing Black, a highly caffeinated piece of nonstop rhythmic patterns by Marc Mellits. (Videos from a different performance of Sqwonk playing Black and Cornelius Boots’ Sojourn of the Face, which they played on Sunday, can be found here.)

Sqwonk (Jonathan Russell, left, and Jeff Anderle

The intermission-less concert also featured 12 members of the Oakland Active Orchestra, a collective of improvisers and musicians/composers founded in 2009, performing member Aram Shelton’s the Days are the Same. This performance included four percussionists, brass, winds, a cello, and a bass, which at times were asked in this episodic work to produce a soft sound bed of non-pitched material, and in other sections to sound more like a jazz big band, playing themes over a harmonic progression.

Oakland Active Orchestra, playing while walking off

The concert finished with two substantial works for unaccompanied chorus sung by the 20-voice new music choir Volti.** The set opened with Volti positioned at a distance on the side of the courtyard, where the sustained harmonies from “Dawn,” the first movement of Stacy Garrop’s Songs of Lowly Life, gently emerged. (A live recording, audio only, from a different performance, can be heard here.) Their performance also included Shawn Crouch’s 16-minute The Garden of Paradise, a setting of poetry by Iraq War veteran Brian Turner alternating with texts by Rumi. In a curious coincidence, during the two quietest moments of the piece, planes flew overhead, lending an unexpected poignancy to Turner’s poem about an Iraqi father trying to comfort his son during a nighttime bombing.

* * *

William Basinski at the SF Electronic Music Festival

Whereas Soundwave was an entirely acoustic event, the month opened with the annual San Francisco Electronic Music Festival (SFEMF), a five-day exploration of electronic and electro-acoustic music and sound art with three concerts at the Brava Theater in the Mission, and a Cage celebration at SFMOMA. Though SFEMF ran from September 5 to 9, I was only able to hear the well-programmed and well-attended September 7 performance at Brava, which presented three contrasting and complementary performances by L.A.-based Damion Romero, Machine Shop from the Bay Area, and New York composer William Basinski.

Karen Stackpole of Machine Shop at SFEMF

Romero opened with an untitled work built with drones and pulsations that began from near-imperceptibility, and gradually grew over 25 minutes into an almost overwhelmingly saturated audio image that was palpably vibrating the seats. The duo Machine Shop worked with a wall of gongs and cymbals of different sizes, which were struck, rubbed, bowed, and manipulated by percussionist Karen Stackpole in every mode imaginable; the sounds were then processed by electronic musician Drew Webster, extending and amplifying the gongs’ vibrations and exploring the harmonics produced. Basinski treated us to two works from 30 years ago, Shortwavemusic and Piano Varations. There was sweet nostalgia to be sure from seeing him gently position analog tape loops in now-antiquated equipment, but I was more taken by the aural beauty of the ambient sound created by the short repeating passages of piano music, as well as the chance to quietly reconnect with the idea that even electronic music can be physical.

* * *
Caution: Actual nudes descending a staircaseIn the middle of the month were two multidisciplinary events in the East Bay that I wasn’t able to get to. At the Berkeley Art Museum on September 14, video artist John Sanborn staged PICO (Performance Indeterminate Cage Opera), a reportedly sold-out happening inspired by John Cage, Marcel Duchamp, and Nam June Paik that included musicians (pianist Sarah Cahill, cellist Theresa Wong, electronic musicians Wobbly and Negativland), dancers, video art, and audience participants (a call went out soliciting people to email if they wanted to “receive a ‘task’ to perform as part of PICO”).

Sarah Cahill at the Art in Nature Festival. Photo by Luciano Chessa

The following weekend, composer/performer Laura Inserra’s wide-ranging Art in Nature: The Nature of Art Festival took place for the third time at the Redwood Regional Park in Oakland. Dozens of musicians, dancers, theater artists, and visual artists gathered for this free six-hour outdoor event along a mile-long trail, organized under Inserra’s principle that not only can art be experienced in conjunction with nature, but that community members should be able to gain insight on the nature of the creation of artistic work.

* * *

Samuel Carl Adams at the San Francisco Symphony. Photo by Kristen Loken

And finally, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the opening of the San Francisco Symphony’s season. Given the concentration of 20th-century and contemporary works last season for the American Mavericks Festival, it’s understandable that this season would reflect a return to more conventional programming. One of the few contemporary works scheduled is the West Coast premiere of Samuel Carl Adams’s Drift and Providence, a 20-minute work for a large orchestra with significant percussion battery and electronics (performed by Adams at the back of the hall). The reception for the Bay Area native’s piece was enthusiastic, particularly in the press—extensive coverage can be found in the San Francisco Chronicle, San Jose Mercury News, and even The New York Times. The Symphony will take the work on tour later this season.

**Disclaimer: I sometimes sing with Volti, though I didn’t perform in this concert, and am the group’s artistic advisor.

19 Pianists, 21.5 Hours, 840 Repetitions: Erik Satie’s Vexations

Posted on September 24, 2012 by Sidney Chen - Field Reports, Headlines

The ubiquitous John Cage centenary tributes continued in the Bay Area this month with a performance of Erik Satie’s Vexations, 49 years after the first performance famously organized by Cage. A free event presented by the Berkeley Arts Festival, it began on the evening of September 8, and was one of two West Coast performances that weekend. (The other was in Santa Monica, presented by Jacaranda Music.)

Ideas are one thing and what happens is another. – John Cage

As many NewMusicBox readers will know, Vexations poses some unusual logistical challenges. The score (presumably intended to be played on piano) consists of a short 18-note melody with two harmonizations, a tempo marking of “Very slow,” and a note that indirectly suggests that the work be played 840 times. In reality this results in a 20-hour performance, give or take, depending on how “Very slow” is interpreted. The performance, organized by Cage on September 9–10, 1963, featured a rotating cast of pianists playing for 20 minutes each. This month’s Berkeley performance had 19 pianists, each playing for an hour, plus some shorter reprise sets in the early morning and at the end to fill the remaining slots.

Hadley McCarroll performing between 7 and 8 p.m.

A couple dozen of us were present when the marathon endeavor got underway, promptly at 6 p.m. The performance took place in a modest, empty commercial space in downtown Berkeley which had been outfitted with a piano and plastic folding chairs. The Berkeley Arts Festival is more of an ongoing concert series than a time-specific festival, and utilizes unoccupied storefronts for their performances. (Their current space is billed, for example, as being “right next to Ace Hardware.”) The large windows looking out on University Avenue allowed for the music to be heard on the street, and for street sounds to enter the performance space in return.

Given the paucity of performance instructions in Satie’s score—there are no dynamic, articulation, or phrasing markings—the interpretive possibilities are limitless, and the first three performers (Jerry Kuderna, Hadley McCarroll, and Joe Lasqo) availed themselves of the broad range of techniques they had at their disposal to differentiate each iteration. Kuderna’s were alternately languorous and insistent, with extreme volume changes and varied use of the sustain pedal. McCarroll worked with variations in articulation and speed; at one point towards the end of her hour, after the sun had set, she played an exaggeratedly elongated version and a very swimmy version where the sustain pedal was engaged throughout. Lasqo took liberties with even the rhythmic values of the written notes, allowing rubato in each phrase and inflecting his performance with a jazz sensibility.

Kelsey Walsh, with the iPad keeping track of how many times the piece had been played.

By the time Kelsey Walsh slid onto the bench at 9 p.m, her straightforward, unvarying approach seemed a surprising and radical choice by comparison. It also allowed for a completely different relationship to the piece from the audience’s perspective. The three performers before her explored as many facets of this tiny gem as they could and, in so doing, explored aspects of their own musical and emotional selves to uncover what they could bring to such a small amount of material. But by not doing any of this excavation, Walsh instead handed the audience a steady point to meditate on, putting the exploratory work into each listener’s hands and showing that the least varied could in some ways be the most rewarding.

The omnipresent timepiece that controlled the hourly changing of the guard

I confess that I had to head home sometime after 10 p.m., to attend to such mundane concerns as flossing and feeding the cats. The space was well populated when I left, with some audience members already making use of the blankets and camping mats that had been set out for those who were in it for the long haul. When I returned around 6:30 a.m., there were about ten bleary-eyed diehards there, several of whom were performers.

It’s useless to play lullabies for those who cannot sleep. – John Cage

Just after daybreak, Joseph Colombo presented a forte version with the sustain pedal engaged that rang out like a carillon. As a morning coffee soundtrack, Vexations is curiously unsettling. A companion who joined me for about 3 hours of the event, on and off, said that at one point he felt himself becoming angry at the performers for continuing to play. And indeed, the tritone-laden Vexations is vexing: on my way to Berkeley that morning, I was disturbed to discover that I wasn’t able to accurately hum the theme despite having listened to several hours of it the night before.

8 a.m. performer Regina Schaffer at the piano, with 1 p.m performer Sarah Cahill holding Schaffer’s newborn.

Pianists continued coming forth throughout the morning and into the early afternoon with their individual offerings: After Colombo’s energized wake-up call, Anton Vishio brought the pulse rate back down and I became aware of the breathing of the other people in the room. Regina Schaffer’s consistent and clear presentation, gently bringing out the theme throughout, made the harmonizations above ring like distant bells. Dominique Leone
seemed to speak without artifice, playing simply while neither layering compositional ideas on top of the piece nor reining himself in.

Roger Rohrbach touching the iPad to register the completion of another iteration.

By the time the final scheduled performer, Sarah Cahill, started her set, it was clear that the 20-hour concert length had been underestimated. The iPad, which was keeping track of the repetition, gradually took on a role of heightened prominence in the room as people started checking the time and doing the math. When Sarah finished at 2 p.m., the iPad counter app (written specially by the 11ers for the performance) hadn’t even reached 800, so the performers who were still around began taking turns playing short sets to keep the counter ticking.

At some point it became clear that our presence was no longer about the performance or the music itself. There wasn’t going to be a grand finale, and whatever theoretical points might be embedded in the work had already been made. Yet around 20 of us stayed until 3:35 p.m. to hear the final, 840th statement played by Patti Deuter, the organizer behind the performance. The piece ended without any flourish and we all applauded the performers’ efforts and determination. But underneath it all was the knowledge that we really had gathered there for this curious 21 1/2-hour ritual in order to pay homage to the inimitable spirit of John Cage.

If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all. –John Cage

Performers not mentioned above: Luciano Chessa, Jacqueline Chew, Jim Jowdy, Ric Louchard, Kanoko Nishi, Melissa Smith, Julie Steinberg, Kelly Walker

The Soundbridge Project: Classical Music Out Of the Halls

Posted on August 30, 2012 by AndrewSigler - Field Reports, Headlines

Look, there are plenty of lovely places to hear folks play their fiddles, trumpets, and Macbooks. Concert halls abound, and many of these have been around fuh-ev-uh. For the most part they are thoughtfully designed and perfectly suited for soaking up all the sonic goodness on display, all from the comfort of a relatively plush chair and with just the right amount of attitude adjustment that a frighteningly overpriced glass of chardonnay has to offer.

So why are we always trying to pry classical music out of those cold, dead hands [1] ?

Probably because there is a large contingent of folks out there who would like to hear these pieces sans just about all the stuff above. I do, on occasion, enjoy putting on a coordinated outfit and drinking from something with a stem prior to my fiddle intake, but for me this is more of a Thanksgiving/Presidents’ Day once-a-year deal than a monthly water bill situation. For my regular listening, I prefer smaller, less formal venues, and fortunately I’m not alone.

P. Kellach Waddle has established himself as a composer, bassist, and local impresario (not necessarily in that order), and over the last few decades he has had a hand in a wide variety of multidisciplinary projects involving all sorts of Austin institutions. Live music with film at the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema, music about wine with Grapevine Market, and Banned Books at Book People are just a few of the projects that Waddle has directed and performed in over the years. His latest is “The Soundbridge Project,” which he developed with flutist Lauryn Gould at Cherrywood Coffeehouse.

The most recent Soundbridge show started with Waddle (Gould could not participate in this particular event) introducing the first of three sets of music. Each set featured something old and something new, and in the case of set one all the new music was written within the last 20 years and some “as recently as eleven days ago.” A few short works for bass were followed by several classical duets for horn performed by Jenni Wieland and Leah Morgan Durrett.

P.K. Waddle and Elaine Martin Barber.

After a short break, Waddle returned to perform music featuring bass and harp. The first work, Waddle’s Abandoning The Edge of The San Antonio Sunrise: Impression-Satz for bass and harp made a somewhat disconnected and blurred impression. Ostinati in the bass would form and disappear quickly, while long gestures in the harp performed by Austin Symphony Principal Harpist Elaine Martin Barber would lead to brief moments of consensus between the instruments before they went their separate ways. The whimsically titled (a descriptor which could describe virtually any Waddle tune; the guy does not simply write “Sonata for Bass”) Cereal Music: Sonatina in Three Movements after K. Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions made a play on serialism/cerealism with very subtle nods towards Arnie’s school in the harmonic content and a few towards Kellogg’s camp in the movement titles. Movement one, “Blueberry Morning,” featured driving arpeggios in the bass trading with bright chords in the harp. The multi-stops in the second movement, “Frosted Flakes,” played nicely against the loping arpeggios in the harp, and the hidden gigue in the third movement, “Lucky Charms,” was quite attractive, though both were hidden at times in the rise and fall of the sounds surrounding the performers. This conflict was an issue from time to time throughout the show. The performance space at Cherrywood is located on one side of a large rectangular room and is separated by a low wall which reads a bit like a long breakfast bar. While this provides a great physical separation for the performance space, it does little to facilitate the separation necessary to hear music with a wide dynamic range; a characteristic that describes most “classical” music. I was torn at times between the charm of the venue and its patrons and the combined volume of the two.

Seetha Shivaswamy, P.K. Waddle, and Rebecca Marie Fairweather Haskins. Photo by Chris Bieter.

The last set for flute, oboe, and bass featured Waddle joined by flutist Seetha Shivaswamy and oboist Rebecca Marie Fairweather Haskins in the world premiere performance of Waddle’s KaffeeTraumen; Dreams of Coffee: Trio in forma di 6 Impression – bagatelles for Flute, Oboe, Bass, an ode to the black stuff, as well as a variety of trio music by L. Mozart, W. A. Mozart , and Stamitz. KaffeTraumen was in six movements, the first moody and shifty with subtle interplay in the winds and with the bass in its traditional role, the second peppered with quasi-neoclassical quirks—rhythmically engaging and harmonically inviting. The fourth movement loosely described the nightmare of a house without coffee and was followed by the relief of coffee returned. In the final movement, Shivaswamy and Fairweather Haskins ran a relay race in slow motion, trading lengthy lines back and forth while Waddle maintained his supporting position.

It was a well portioned show with sets of a length (approximately 15, 30, and 30 minutes respectively) that held the audience’s attention while providing the occasional break. The traditional 60 minute first set, 15-20 minute intermission, and 45 minute second set that you often find in concert settings has never sat well with me. I always feel like the long intermission takes me too far out of the experience. The set organization for this show shared a certain kinship with the pacing of television (gasp!) with the shorter breaks reading more like commercials. I’ve lately been of the opinion that one long set is the way to go, but the shorter multi-set arrangement allows for breaks and shorter concentrated shots of music while also giving the audience an opportunity to show up after the first set or leave before the last set. And while presenters naturally want the audience to stay for the whole show, the multi-set concept does perhaps take the pressure off someone whose dance card might be a bit full that night and who would otherwise have to bow out altogether. Of course, this isn’t really an option in the larger and more opulent halls, but venues like Cherrywood are more flexible. As long as Waddle and Company continue presenting compelling shows that combine music with the character of the venue, I suspect people will keep coming out to check out the performances.

Beer Concerto anyone?

1. Their hands are neither cold nor dead, so lighten up people.

Composer/Performer Cage Match: sfSound and Outsound Presents

Posted on August 9, 2012 by Sidney Chen - Field Reports, Headlines

“From California to the New York island”: Excerpt from Woody Guthrie’s letter to Disc Company of America about their recording of John Cage’s Amores, I & IV for prepared piano, performed by Maro Ajemian (via The Stool Pigeon).

The centenary of Woody Guthrie’s birth on July 14 coincided with one of sfSound’s concerts celebrating the centenary of Guthrie’s almost exact contemporary, John Cage. Part of a year-long festival titled The Music of ChAnGEs, the full 11-concert series is itself conceived as a large-scale realization of Cage’s indeterminate Variations II, with performances taking place in a variety of Bay Area locations. (There are also a number of “unpublicized performances” of 4’33″, concert organizer and performer Matt Ingalls noted during his pre-concert remarks). This most recent concert featured works by Cage spanning over half a century, and included a new Cage-inspired piece by Monica Scott who, like the other members of sfSoundGroup, is both a composer and a performer.

sfSound often performs in the main theater on the ODC Dance Company’s campus in the Mission, but this concert took place in one of the large dance rehearsal studios across the street in the ODC Dance Commons, which opened in 2005. The capacity crowd had nearly filled the 100 or so seats by the time I arrived, and additional chairs had to be brought in.

Matt Ingalls performing Imaginary Landscape No. 1 on an iPad.

The evening’s program alternated between works for small groups or solo player, such as the microtonal Ten (1991) for ten instruments and Imaginary Landscape No. 1 (1939), for muted piano, cymbal, and two variable-speed phono turntables (which were replaced in this performance with an iPad). Particularly memorable was a quietly virtuosic and mesmerizing performance of The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs (1942) by Hadley McCarroll, in which she both sang the simple, three-note, folksong-like vocal line and played the contrasting piano part, which involved tapping out complex rhythms at various places on a closed grand piano.

Hadley McCarroll during a performance of But what about the noise of crumpling paper.

Appropriately for Cage’s centenary, the full ensemble performed a piece Cage had written in honor of Jean Arp’s centenary, But what about the noise of crumpling paper which he used to do in order to paint the series of “Papiers froisses” or tearing up paper to make “Papiers dechires?” Arp was stimulated by water (sea, lake, and flowing waters like rivers), forests (1985). A work for three to ten percussionists who “may be stationed around the audience, or among them, or on stage,” this realization had ten players placed all around the dance space—standing, in chairs, and seated on the floor. Among the “slightly resonant instruments” selected for this performance were a trombone mute, a water cooler container, a coffee cup, and a pleasantly burbling bong. “Other unidentified sounds” came from a set of keys being tossed in the air, a newspaper being rustled, and water being poured from a pitcher. An oddly compelling and unexpected melody occasionally emerged from this amalgam of activity, and the unpredictability of where the next sound would emerge from given the spatial placement added to the effectiveness of the performance.

Reflection in dance studio mirror of sfSound performing But what about the noise of crumpling paper.

The new work on the program, Scott’s (h)ear age:C, was in two movements, scored for six instruments in the first and a separate quartet in the second, with assistance from a corresponding quartet of audience members. Prior to the performance of the work, Scott went out into the audience and handed four people small placards, each with one letter written on it. When the quartet of violin, piano, clarinet, and trumpet emerged for the second movement, each musician was positioned so that one of the placards would be visible to him or her. The premise of the movement was simple: each instrumentalist improvised sounds and noises—putting air through the trumpet without playing notes, for example—until an audience member held up the corresponding placard, which spelled out C–A–G–E. The instrumentalist sustained the note indicated on the placard until the sign went down, and then returned to improvisation. Open fifths and triads revealed themselves from time to time amongst the “unidentified sounds” of the improvisation, and the work proved to be an entertaining and fitting counterpoint to Cage’s But what about the noise.

***

Performance of Benjamin Ethan Tinker’s Seems an Eternity at the Outsound New Music Summit.

The following week, the experimental music collective Outsound Presents, led by founder and saxophonist Rent Romus, took a break from presenting the weekly performance series at the Luggage Store Gallery (tagline: “We don’t sell luggage”) to come to the Mission’s Community Music Center for the annual Outsound New Music Summit. Now in its eleventh year, the festival spans a full week and includes four evening performances, as well as workshops, a symposium, artist discussions, and even a free gear expo for lovers of sound art and sonic exploration. (The full schedule can be found here.)

Jack Wright

I was able to attend most of the final two performances on July 20 and 21, which highlighted percussion music and improvised music, respectively. The evening of improvisation began with eerily plangent, wailing solo works by saxophonist Jack Wright, using a wide array of extended techniques, from vocalizations while playing to pitch bending with the bell of the horn against his thigh and calf. The energy ramped up with increasingly larger ensembles: Dave Bryant’s piano trio, the Vinny Golia Sextet, and concluding with Tony Passarell’s Thin Air Orchestra).

Falkortet, performing Paul Heiman’s What are the odds.

The highlight of the percussion evening for me was a young Oakland-based quartet called Falkortet, who began their set with Why Not Cross the Rubicon, a meditative, ritualistic procession from the courtyard into the hall, using a conch shell and Chinese cymbals to transform the space. The piece was composed by Lydia Martín, one of the members of the group; all of the works they performed were written by either current or former members. The players spoke from the stage about their common ties to percussionist William Winant and their shared aesthetic interest in Lou Harrison, gamelan, and instrument building. Falkortet’s set included solos, duos, and trios, but the most compelling music happened when all four came together: in Paul Heiman’s What are the odds, they all approached one vibraphone as though it were a communal table, each musician playing a melodic fragment on it with a mallet in one hand, and a rhythmic fragment on their own individual drum with the other hand. During the course of the piece, each player individually slowly came into relief, as some sounds came to the fore while others receded, but always present was a sense of the ensemble’s pulse beating in unison.

There are four more concerts in sfSound’s Cage series in the next couple of months; details can be found here. Outsound has weekly performances at the Luggage Store Gallery and a biweekly series at the Musicians Union Hall; the full calendar is at outsound.org.

Sidney Chen

Subscribe to our newsletter and never miss a beat!