Tag: concert review

New England’s Prospect: The Long, Long Trailer

Remember us in your wills, and enjoy the noise.

—Stephen Drury, SICPP artistic director, kicking off the 2012 Iditarod

Leave it to technology, that indifferent god, to make even John Cage seem sentimental. Cage’s Cartridge Music, which opened last Saturday’s final, marathon concert of the Summer Institute for Contemporary Performance Practice (SICPP), is classic Cagean find-the-beauty noise, but as Zachary Hale, Simon Hanes, Ariane Miyasaki, and electronic music faculty John Mallia scraped and caressed a table full of electrified phonograph needles and old stereo wiring, at least this pre-digital vintage listener felt a wave of nostalgia: the familiar, anticipatory scratches and pops preceding a record’s opening track, stretched out into their own blessed plot.

The SICPP's Cage Centennial t-shirt. Designed by Aaron Dana.

The SICPP’s Cage Centennial t-shirt. Designed by Aaron Dana.

As it happened, Cartridge Music was just about a proportional lead-in to the LP of the 2012 Iditarod, as the SICPP (“Sick Puppy”) finale has come to be called; this year’s trek clocked in at more than eleven hours—the longest since I’ve been going. As with the whole of this year’s Institute—taking over New England Conservatory for a week of workshops, masterclasses, and concerts (the first of which I reviewed here—Cage, in his centenary year, was a particular focus of the Iditarod (seven works), as was composer-in-residence Christian Wolff (six works). It seemed to give this Iditarod a more free-form, laid-back ambience than in years past.

Wolff’s music was a big part of that, a mix of old and new (from 1957’s Sonata for Three Pianos to 2000’s Berlin Exercises) all using his characteristic, loosely coordinated heterophony, centripetal motion restrained by a subterranean network of connections. The most compelling was 1993’s Merce, for eight percussionists under the direction of Scott Deal, in which an almost formal intrada evolves into scattered signaling between players, a rousing entrance to what proves a meditative game with mysterious rules. Berlin Exercises, its German text spoken and sung (by Sara Perez) while an instrumental septet comments, seemed to alternate between riffing on the Austro-German common-practice inheritance and pulling away its veneer to reveal an abyss. The inheritance echoed in other works, too: three of the Exercises (1973-74) (performed here by a trio of pianists—Aki Otake, Karl Larson, and David O’Dette—along with flutist Forrest Ransberg and violist Benjamin Wu) mixed prominent triadic arpeggios into its passed-around vocabulary; so did Tilbury Pieces, from 1970 (another three pianists—Ingrid Lee, Eugene Kim, and Monika Haar, along with harpist Adrienne Bassett), with its tonal echoes scattered throughout the score like recognizable bits of rubble; and the melodic cells passed around a mixed quartet in Pieces for Julius (1995) were almost Straussian. (Flutist Laura Cocks, Neil Godwin on horn, Ethan Wood on viola, and cellist Helen Newby made the rounds.)

Strauss himself turned up in George Crumb’s Vox Balaenae, grandly blatant Also Sprach Zarathustra quotations boiled down to three players (Ransburg, Newby, and pianist Kathryn Norring). Given SICPP’s heavy contingent of percussion and piano—those instruments made up more than half of this year’s regular and guest faculty—Crumb, with his multitude of theatrical opportunities for those instruments, is one of the composers who turn up year after year, parallel-universe warhorses. (There were also a couple movements from Makrokosmos, Vol. III: Music for a Summer Evening, pianists Karl Larson and David O’Dette and percussionists Tyler Cameron Bragg and Jeffrey Kolega handling the stop-and-go scintillation; and book IV of the Madrigals, with soprano Farah Lewis fronting the finely etched opulence.)

Morton Feldman is another constant—this year, it was False Relationships and the Extended Ending, three pianos (Kristin Elgersma, Kathryn Norring, and Adrienne Varner), three instruments (violinist Charlotte Munn-Wood, cellist David Wasilko, and trombonist Christopher Moore) gently exhaling in response to Nick Tolle’s chimes. The Iditarod also has a more recent pattern of including a large-scale Steve Reich opus; on Saturday, it was one of Reich’s most genial, Drumming, with its third-act glockenspiel-and-whistling rolling in like a Wagnerian ice cream truck.

The Cage programming tilted early, with a deep selection of his music from the 1940s. She Is Asleep, from 1943, combined a percussion quartet (Evan Bowen, Bragg, Hale, and guest Jeffrey Means, one of a number of Callithumpian Consort ringers joining the student performers)—which, coming right after Drumming, sounded an awful lot like Reich in between phases—with a duet between Lewis and Shen Bing, rapping on the piano lid like a woodblock, circling through constricted but ever-more-decorated phrases. Forever and Sunsmell (1942) forewent the piano altogether, just Perez singing and Kolega and Cassandra McClellan drumming, a pentatonic ritual. Experiences I, for un-prepared pianos (Varner and Laura Ventemiglia), was also in that invented folklore vein, a kind of southwestern pavane. It was the prepared piano piece, part II of A Book of Music, that felt both the most abstract and the most cosmopolitan, its angled ostinati brittle, jazzy, Stravinskian, a flight of a bumblebee through a machine shop. (Performances throughout the Iditarod were never less than solid, but this one was a standout for me, Aaron Likness and Daniel Walden coursing through with effortless elegance.)

Crumb, Cage, Feldman, and Wolff made for a lot of quiet, sparse, long-spun chunks of experience. Composers in the SICPP New Works Program provided a measure of variety. Even those works that at least nominally could be grouped in with that quartet varied the diet—Daniel Lewis’s Things Were Heightened, for alto flute (Cocks), viola (Benjamin Wu), and bass (Anthony D’Amico), Feldman-like dovetailed whispers, but arranged less intuitively, more formally, deterministically; Ryan Krause’s Current Affairs, for clarinet (Amy Advocat) and tuba (Beth McDonald), Wolff-like in its approximate back-and-forth, but adapted into a more explicit, Ives-ish argumentative program; or Alex Pozniak’s Tower of Erosion, in which piano (Likness) and drums (Tolle) don’t so much duet as reinforce each other into a single instrument, like Crumb, if Crumb had a prog-rock sensibility.

There was neo-Romanticism, both Benjamin Irwin’s Strange Alchemy, an accomplished and polished mercurial, cadenza-like essay for violin (Ethan Wood) and piano (Elgersma), and Seunghee Lee’s Nostromo, for piano trio (violinist Stephanie Skor, cellist Michael Unterman, and pianist Tanya Blaich), a memorial for a Conrad-scholar uncle, appropriately grim, oracular, and lovely. Scott Scharf’s clairaudience, a long string of rocking dyads for voice (Lewis) and flute (Emily McPherson), was quietly obsessive; tress/burl, a sextet by Marek Poliks, played its obsessions loud, making its single point with the harsh, entertainingly maddening insistence of a conspiracy theorist.

Kevin Church’s …Poetically, Man Dwells… decorated slow-harmony lyricism with percussion effects (from Laura Jordan) and extended techniques (from Walden and bass clarinetist Medina). Robert Wolk’s Petrichor Will Pass Fireflies Virga by Blue Summer (Ransburg on flute, Christian Smith on vibraphone, glockenspiel, and gongs) tangled its lyricism into an atonal blur. That combination—solo instrument plus percussion—was a popular one: there was also Jason Huffman’s Ear, Nose and Throat, for clarinet (Rane Moore) and percussion (Sean Dowgray) worked in tight, efficient, deliberately limited vocabularies; Haley Shaw’s Diva, for flute (Leia Slosburg) and percussion duo (David Tarantino and Chia-Ying Wu), felt more like a free-range catalog of found sounds, metallic scrapes, drumhead growls, and a two-woodblock simulacrum of a Dr. Beat metronome. D. Edward Davis made room for electronics—the slowed down warble of an ultrasonic deer repellant—among violin (Kaitlin Moreno), viola (Karina Fox), and cello (Benjamin Schwartz) in deer, a study in soft keeining. And Sid Richardson’s Synergie seemed to try it all, tied together timbrally (Munn-Wood’s violin and Wasilko’s cello matched by Phillipp Stäudlin’s soprano sax) but seeming to change styles and even eras as if via remote control. (Nicholas Vines, director of the New Works Program, was represented by two movements from his guitar suite Les Effaceurs, a razor-wire collection of prepared guitar bells, scurrying runs, and virtuosic excursions that guitarist Maarten Stragier realized with uncanny ease.)

SICPP’s Electonic Workshop produced new works of its own: Digital Landscapes (Études for the Internet), a separate-room installation by Elizabeth Aubert (which I missed, stupidly, leaving it until later in the evening, forgetting that Iditarod intermissions gradually shrink as the marathon wears on); Ariane Miyasaki’s The House My Grandfather Built, for violin (Wood), percussion (Means), and electronics, which flipped the usual instrument/computer relationship on its head, Miyasaki beginning with recorded, ambient nature sounds which the live instruments then pushed into something more mechanical and manufactured; and a terrific collaborative effort, Dead Ringers, with Hale on percussion and McClellan on handbells, their sounds processed and recombined by Miyasaki and Simon Hanes, each layer of sound transformed into a backdrop for a subsequent idea, like infinite, ringing mirrors within mirrors.

Hanes’s solo piece was the evening’s most unapologetic nod to performance art: the punningly titled I Reckon, in which Hanes wired an acoustic guitar for high-gain quadrophonic amplification, then proceeded to destroy it, crunching and cracking and snapping strings in surround sound close-up. As music, it was hit-and-miss; as theater, it was grand. (It’s hard to go wrong with a performance that begins with the performer donning safety goggles.) Electronic music performance can sometimes feel like eavesdropping on Mission Control, but Hanes worked his laptops with the showy flair of a 19th-century virtuoso, also teaming with Hale on percussion for Per Bloland’s Solis-EA, a combination of gongs, real-time processing, and some nice old-school synth sounds. (“Tangerine Dream run down by a train,” my notes say.)

And what else? Linda Dusman’s aphoristic Magnificat 1 (with flutist Cocks, clarinetist Medina, and marimbist Bowen, in a more decorous version of Crumb’s extended technique constellations); Lee Hyla’s brooding, jazzy Neruda setting House of Flowers (mezzo P. Lucy McVeigh, with Benjamin Irwin, this time as clarinetist, D’Amico on bass, and pianist Sid Samberg); a pair of works by John Zorn (the fiercely bouncy Music for Children, Moreno, Kim and Smith in grim hijinks; and Amour fou, which, the best efforts of Skor, Schwartz, and Haar and a dollop of ’70s soundtrack notwithstanding, wore out its welcome, the sort of piece that spends two minutes showing you around the room and fifteen minutes looking for the exit.) Luciano Berio’s piano-percussion quartet Linea (pianists Bing and Otake, percussionists Jordan and Wu) kicked off the seventh and final section of the concert, starting off in Wolff’s lair—fluctuating subdivisions and in-and-out ensemble—before moving into Berio’s more customary fistfuls of exuberance.

Is that everything? The SICPP Iditarod might be a challenge more of tabulation than endurance. Because, in the end, eleven hours wasn’t all that bad—the sheer bulk of time encouraging a get-comfortable attitude that made every piece feel a little more generous than it might on a regular concert. (Though I would not be surprised if logistics forced a change in the schedule for next year—throughout most of the last two hours, farewells could be observed in between pieces, as students were forced to catch planes and trains.) Well into Sunday morning came the finale, Cage’s Concert for Piano and Orchestra, with Samberg at the keyboard and McVeigh taking the clock-hands place on the podium, with the simultaneous addition of Cage’s Aria (a terrific, committedly absurd rendition by Perez), like a hidden track tucked away at the end of side two. In a way, it’s preaching to the choir—SICPP and its audience is, by definition, a like-minded bunch on at least a basic musical level. But, as in Cage’s music, and Wolff’s music, and the Iditarod itself, it’s the chaos of agreement that’s so much fun.

Don’t Miss a Beat: Adventures with the Berkeley Symphony

The big news stepping into Berkeley Symphony’s final mainstage concert of the season on April 26 was that Joana Carneiro, the orchestra’s music director since 2009, had just seriously injured her shoulder and needed two months recuperation time. That this was one of the orchestra’s four concerts in the 2000-seat Zellerbach Hall on the UC Berkeley campus would have caused concern enough, but the centerpiece of the program was the world premiere of Holy Sisters, a Berkeley Symphony commission from Gabriela Lena Frank, for orchestra, soprano Jessica Rivera, and the San Francisco Girls Chorus. This set the scene for the last-minute arrival from Chicago of conductor Edwin Outwater, who tweeted obliquely the morning before the concert:

 

The Berkeley Symphony, which was founded in 1969, became known under three decades of Kent Nagano’s leadership for its commitment to contemporary music; in the last ten seasons they have received ASCAP Adventurous Programming Awards eight times. The orchestra has continued in this direction under Carneiro, announcing on Wednesday four commissions—by Steven Stucky, Dylan Mattingly, Andreia Pinto-Correia, and Paul Dresher—scheduled for the 2012/13 season.

There was a particularly personal connection for Carneiro, Rivera, and Frank behind the commission of Holy Sisters. One transcendently lovely section had initially been written by Frank and sung by Rivera as a secret gift at Carneiro’s wedding. Frank, who is an East Bay native and currently serves as the orchestra’s creative advisor, gave a spoken introduction to the 20-minute work with her characteristic ebullience by telling the personal stories behind the commission and the selection of texts about five Biblical women: Mary Magdalene, Rachel, Sarah, Miriam, and Hannah. (Jesse Hamlin wrote a nice preview piece featuring interviews with Carneiro, Frank, and Rivera for San Francisco Classical Voice in which the depth of their relationship comes through.) Frank also spoke about how the portion that was being premiered was the first part of what will eventually become a larger work, with the second half, Holy Daughters, scheduled to be premiered in May 2013 as part of the San Francisco Girls Chorus’ season.

 

Frank juggles limes (Warning: This video features squealing)
Given Frank’s personal introduction, the audience was made even more appreciative of Outwater’s effort, stepping into a premiere performance with two days’ notice, having studied the scores on his iPad. (Bartók’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta and Kodály’s Dances of Galánta filled out the program.) To Outwater’s credit, the orchestra—a combination of professionals and clearly very skilled community musicians—played remarkably well, especially under a conductor whom they had only just met the day before the concert. The San Francisco Girls Chorus, impeccably prepared, as always, provided a backdrop and commentary to Rivera’s lyrical and committed delivery. I am looking forward to hearing what direction Frank will take the music in the work’s second half next season. (If you can’t wait all the way until then to hear what’s already been written, this concert will be broadcast on KALW on September 16, 2012.)

Carneiro’s injury also necessitated a substitution for another Berkeley Symphony concert a few days later, for their second Under Construction concert of the season. The Under Construction Composers Program, open to composers in the San Francisco Bay Area, began as a public reading series but has recently evolved into a more developed mentorship program, where selected composers work for a year with Frank on the creation of a new orchestral work. There was an initial public session in January (which I wasn’t able to attend) where sketches were presented and read; on April 29 the completed works were performed, publicly rehearsed, and performed again.

Paul Dresher introducing the Under Construction concert

Paul Dresher introducing the Under Construction concert

The three composers selected for this season were Nils Bultmann, Evelyn Ficarra and Noah Luna. Each wrote a piece of about ten minutes in length, which the full orchestra performed under the direction of Ming Luke, the orchestra’s education director and associate conductor. Paul Dresher, a fellow Bay Area composer who is being commissioned for next season, was on hand to introduce the event at St. John’s Presbyterian Church, where, he added, he had produced Lou Harrison’s 60th birthday concert in 1977. (A recording of that historic performance can be heard via the Other Minds Audio Archive.)

Noah Luna addressing the orchestra during the open rehearsal

Noah Luna addressing the orchestra during the open rehearsal

Dresher mentioned that the Under Construction program was an opportunity he wishes he had had himself, and one could immediately hear why. The orchestra gave surprisingly and commendably clean performances of these three works—again, under someone other than Carneiro’s direction and just three days after the Holy Sisters premiere. The three works were contrasting and complementary. Luna took full advantage of the large orchestra to write a lush and layered tone poem. Ficarra explored colors and textures by having, for example, the string instruments tapped with fingertips and then moving to fingernails, and having multiple wind players put air through their instruments audibly without playing notes. Bultmann chose to write a more virtuosic, tonal piece that focused on rhythmic play. The symphony is accepting applications for next season’s program; the deadline is June 1 (PDF application).

***

Amy X Neuburg at BAM/PFA

Amy X Neuburg at BAM/PFA

Speaking of Lou Harrison, I am sorely disappointed that I will be out of town for a performance of Harrison’s La Koro Sutro at the Berkeley Art Museum on Friday, May 25, as part of the L@TE: Friday Nights at BAM/PFA series, programmed by Sarah Cahill. The last performance on this series I went to on April 13 was Amy X Neuburg’s Spaces Out with guest Moe! Staiano and a 30-voice chorus. Both Neuburg and Staiano had written new pieces for the chorus (Inbred Kisses and Having Never Written A Vocal Piece, respectively) that made use of the unusual space and its multiple performance levels. But ultimately Neuburg’s wonderfully witty and captivating solo pieces like Every Little Stain and Finally Black (some of her “greatest hits” for those who have been following her for a while), in which she samples and loops herself live and lets loose her amazing range and tonal flexibility, were the most memorable works of the evening.

New England’s Prospect: Yard Work

Image courtesy Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, Duke University

Image courtesy Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, Duke University

Fair Harvard! we join in thy Jubilee throng,
And with blessings surrender thee o’er
By these festival rites, from the age that is past,
To the age that is waiting before.

Harvard University is inextricably associated with the Boston Area, yet is also just a bit oblique to it, like a secular Vatican City maintaining its sovereignty within a Hub version of Rome. The musical orthodoxies it hands down at a roughly generational pace, too, manage to track compositional trends while still standing apart from them, be it the idiosyncratically academic modernism of Mario Davidovsky et al.; or the European-designed but American-built neo-Classicism passed on from Walter Piston to a clutch of unusually gifted students; or the common-practice-in-excelsis scrupulousness of Archibald T. Davison, the traditional proprieties given a particularly Crimsonian refinement.

The latest school spirit, to judge from the May 12 Fromm Concert featuring the work of Harvard graduate student composers, is noise, the sound at the boundary between musical pitch and the physical effort needed to produce it. The composer biographies in the program book included mentions of “the spectrum of dynamics, movements, and contradictive forces” and “tactile sound” and “underlying impulses in the grain of everyday events” and “the microscopic but violent space between a finger and a string,” among other evocations; all six works on the program spun variations on that theme. (It’s a stylistic proclivity that can be heard in the music of current composition faculty: Chaya Czernowin—whom Frank J. Oteri interviewed for this magazine last year—and Hans Tutschku, who helped curate the Sound in SPACE festival I reviewed last November.)

Harvard being its affluent self, the performers were not students, but rather a nine-person delegation of the excellent Cologne-based Ensemble musikFabrik. (Because of a schedule conflict—see below—the group was kind enough to let me listen to their dress rehearsal on Saturday afternoon.) Being a former graduate composition student who can still not-so-fondly remember mad scrambles for sometimes unenthusiastic players, I indulged in some well-earned envy, and had fun imagining a crack professional new music ensemble being tasked with the sort of thrown-together sorts of things I recalled composition students being liable to produce when faced with a deadline.

And, by gum, someone was willing to make that image real, in the guise of Ian Power’s “For every human being who looks up at the moon will know”—a defiantly odd combination of sound sketchbook and spoken-word performance art. The text drew on political speechmaking about the American space program in the 1960s—from JFK’s “put a man on the moon” provocation to the alternate-draft statement prepared for Richard Nixon just in case Neil and Buzz didn’t make it back. The players switched between reading out these excerpts and providing them with a somewhat severe, stop-and-go underscore, starting with a spectral-ish deconstruction of a single note and building from there.

In actuality, the piece didn’t work terribly well—it was hard to hear the text, the musical content wasn’t compelling enough to stand on its own, and the recitation never really amplified the weird poetry of either boilerplate political rhetoric or—in the streams of budgetary numbers and timetables—bureaucratese at its most potent. Still, there were a couple of memorable sections: at one point, pianist Benjamin Kobler broke into rolling octaves of Romantic bravado as clarinetist Carl Rosman upped the ante from recitation to some pretty good sung, faux-operatic grandeur; that section was followed by a nifty bit of undulating sprechstimme, the entire ensemble sending off the Apollo astronauts with comically spooky glissando voices. If, in the end, the piece came off as something between a first draft and a lark, those moments at least made one hopeful for a revision.

The rest of the pieces were certainly accomplished, if less gonzo. Justin Hoke’s Pantomime-Aria was an edge-of-audibility exercise (breath sounds, key clicks, the rustle of bow hair) which attractively settled into hints of very faraway grooves. Timothy McCormack’s Nous-Apparatus was the sonic opposite: dense, loud, and harsh, thick, glinting layers bleeding into one another. The sound was great, like living inside a giant, creaky hinge; but the piece went on far too long.

Sivan Cohen-Elias’s Where Is There—mini creature no. I was the most front-and-center with the physicality of performance, using both sound (Kobler and percussionist Dirk Rothbrust working the resonant thunk of piano and vibraphone pedals, respectively, for instance) and choreography (the players all prescribed with stiff, jerky movements—conductor Yordan Kamdzhalov included—an animatronic layer of visual form added to the music). Covering the vibraphone with bubble wrap proved a mostly visual effect as well, despite the amplification of every sound. Sabrina Schroeder’s Spuler combined sparseness with a kind of grim, almost drone-ish atmosphere (here, Kobler and Rothbrust kept piano strings and drums in continuous buzz using pen-sized vibrators) and the result was harsh and meditative at the same time. And both Where Is There and Spuler displayed the virtue of a sure sense of timing, both in their unfolding and their confidently compact dimensions.

Given the similarities in idea and sound world—Hoke, Cohen-Elias, and Schroeder all used slow bowed-near-the-bridge string glissandi to signal formal boundaries at one point or another, and the soft-noise aesthetic was so prevalent that I swear flutist Helen Bledsoe ended up producing more puffs and whistles and key-clicks than actual notes—it was indicative of the composers’ talent and technique that their personalities remained at least somewhat distinct. The finale, Edgar Barroso’s Over-Proximity, worked the far ends of the room: saturated, boisterous bustle, keyed by Bruce Collings’s trombone and Christine Chapman’s horn, giving way to the familiar desaturated rustles, empty air, barely there sounds, Rothbrust tickling the snares of his drum (the piece verged on a mini-concerto for snare drum) while Kobler ran a credit card up and down the keys. Barroso seemed to gather up the concert’s strands into a single, all-or-nothing shebang.

***

While musikFabrik was abetting the latest generation of Harvard students, the Cantata Singers and director David Hoose were at Jordan Hall, saluting an older Harvard cohort and their musical progeny, composers fueled, directly or indirectly, by Walter Piston’s years of tutelage. Like most such categorizations, the exact roster of the resulting “Boston School” was always a little bit vague—still, the general outlines of the style remain recognizable: an essentially triadic harmony bouncing through chromatic blocks of keys, a taut, jazzy-but-not-jazz rhythmic sense, a Stravinskian neo-Classicism pared down into something a little more immediately exoteric.

It wasn’t the only kind of music going on in Boston at the time, but it was, perhaps, the music that best matched the city’s cultural reputation, the sort of thing summed up as early as 1726, in the words of minister (and witch-hunter) Cotton Mather, Harvard class of 1678:

There is a way of writing wherein the author endeavors that the reader may have something to the purpose in every paragraph. There is not only a vigor sensible in every sentence, but the paragraph is embellished with profitable references, even to something beyond what is directly spoken. Formal and painful quotations are not studied, yet all that could be learnt from them is insinuated.

For sure, the concert’s most pure expression of the Boston School, Harold Shapero’s 1941 Sonata for Piano Four Hands, written while the composer was himself a Harvard undergraduate, fit Mather’s recommendations to a tee. Shapero out-Stravinskys Stravinsky and out-Coplands Copland, but still throws in enough precise quirks of harmony and rhythm to make the Sonata sound less like an imitation and more like a piquantly clear distillation of the various and sometimes competing energies of modernism, populism, and intellectualism swirling about at the time. (The performance, by David Kopp and Rodney Lister, was superbly sympathetic, though more genial than driving. Shapero, 92, was there to receive enthusiastic applause.)

The bulk of the program was, of course, choral music, and most of it, not surprisingly, sounded great—the basis of the Boston School, even among those second- and third-generation adherents with increasingly indirect connections to Harvard, was always the Harvard style, and the Harvard style always had a substantial choral foundation. (A. T. Davison, after all, was also the director of the Glee Club.) The concert opened with Charles Fussell’s 1996 Invocation, arranged by Hoose for chorus and two pianos (Kopp and Lister again). Setting a May Sarton poem, Fussell’s music was tonally rich but also crisp, Romanticism with the excess burned away. Florid textures in the accompaniment were always quickly subsumed into choral straightforwardness; full-harmony drama was frequently translated into more austere two-part counterpoint, shifting trenchantly between major and minor intervals. Lister’s own W. H. Auden setting, The Annunciation, had a similar harmonic cast, making efficient use of the implications of enharmonic changes from sharps to flats, a venerable trick in the British pastoral tradition (Holst was a master of it), but here filed into sharper angles. The result was lean, lithe, and exceptionally lovely.

Two works by Earl Kim, the late Harvard professor, leaned to both sides of the tricky line his music often walked. The basis of Kim’s harmonic language was even more unabashedly Romantic and old-fashioned, but in the best of his works, his meditative intensity could transform the old tropes into something startlingly unfamiliar. Some Thoughts on Keats and Coleridge, an a capella anthology dating from 1990, rather erred on the side of pastiche (though very skillful pastiche, in an Elgar/Finzi manner); it was only in the final movement, a fragment of Keats’s “To Autumn,” that Kim’s own quirkiness began to peek through, the altos rocking sweetly and ominously between ti and do in the midst of the gnats “bourne aloft / Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies,” the chorus reprising the entire movement, and then circling around for another pass at its opening.

It was the other piece, Scenes from a Movie, Part 3: The Twenty-Sixth Dream, that presented Kim at his most characteristic. Composed in 1995, the work sets a long Rilke story for baritone (Mark-Andrew Cleveland), chorus, and piano duo in a lush, peripatetic style, a kind of continuous arioso in which flowing melody is constantly undermined by quick shifts of harmony, elegant and disconnected at the same time. Kim was drawing not only on 19th-century practice, but the translation of that practice into golden-age Hollywood; but the emotive gestures of film scoring are boiled down to the point where the straighforwardness of the emotional signaling is itself artifice, a distant theatrical relative of the way the phrase “to be perfectly frank” is a sure sign that what’s to follow will hardly be frank at all. It’s mysterious, a little bit silly, a little bit unsettling, a prime late example of Kim’s love-it-or-hate-it musical dramaturgy. Me, I love it—and the performance was superb.

The concert closed with Aaron Copland’s In the Beginning, that composer’s only extended a cappella work, written for Harvard to boot. (It was specially commissioned for a conference on music criticism, of all things.) Both mezzo-soprano soloist Janna Baty (who sounded somewhat under the weather, but still communicated the music’s exhortatory mien) and the chorus gave their full-blooded all—and nothing fires up Hoose like an interpretive challenge—but, in the end, In the Beginning is a piece mannered in its formality, the clanging, oracular harmonies never quite ringing the way they naturally would on a piano or in an orchestra. In the Beginning might be most successful as an object lesson for a foolproof if impractical method of ensuring a long life for a piece of middling choral music: 1) be a world-famous composer, and 2) compose little if any other music for choir. Translating the style was better left to the likes of Leonard Bernstein and Irving Fine—probably not coincidentally, Harvard men both. Old Archibald Davison would be proud.

Fast Forward Austin II: The Reckoning

When you do a sequel, you can either do Empire Strikes Back or Ghostbusters II.

Which is to say, when you have a hit on your hands, you can take some risks and possibly alienate the fan base that made you worthy of a sequel in the first place, or you can play it safe, give them the same show warmed-over, and collect your pay. Ian Dicke, Robert Honstein, and Steven Snowden upped the ante at this year’s Fast Forward Austin festival by tripling the call for scores winners, bringing in a headliner, and moving to a big, multilevel venue near downtown complete with a bar, soundman, and a dude who stamps your hand.

Precipice perform Coming Together Photo by Elisa Ferrari

Precipice perform Coming Together. Photo by Elisa Ferrari

Precipice, a mixed chamber ensemble from up the road in Waco, started things off. Snowden described them as a group who do “things with lots of stuff”; truer words have never been spoken. They began their set with the first call for scores winner of the day, Shawn Allison’s Towards the Flame, a four-movement work for violin, flute, cello, and percussion. Based on a variety of moth species, Allison’s piece began with flourishes and broken lines before moving to unison gestures in the second movement. The third movement featured extended techniques on the flute while percussion patter coalesced to a rock groove. Daniel Webbon’s[*] string trio For thee, oh Absalom, my son in three movements was an attractive, somber, and contemplative work that served well as a last minute replacement on the program. Precipice finished their set with a powerful rendition of Frederick Rzewski’s Coming Together.

Katherine Hodges and Leanne Zacharias

Katherine Hodges and Leanne Zacharias. Photo by Elisa Ferrari.

When I returned after the set change, I found that the chairs in the venue had been resituated around a piano bench surrounded by three music stands and backlit, pastel tulle. Cellist Leanne Zacharias and dancer Katherine Hodges‘s set of four works was bookended by the first and fourth movements from Cage’s Etudes Boreales. They began the performance as the house lights dimmed, each performer seated on the piano bench but facing away from one another. As Zacharias began playing, Hodges sat motionless, moving slowly around the space only after several minutes of music. Delicate glissando and harmonics complimented the slight, intimate shifting as Hodges made her way through the tulle. Zacharias turned 90 degrees to perform Event Horizon by Nicole Lizee. Pizzicato scale-fragment ostinato, percussive sections reminiscent of heavy metal palm muting, and pre-recorded material (originally for violin, cello, and bass, but here recorded entirely on the cello by Zacharias) were woven with a dance that foreshadowed the slurred cello of the final section. Eugen Friesen’s Pizzicato Etude had elements straight out of guitar technique, complete with arpeggios and syncopated, ascending, slurred groups of three. The final work mirrored the first both in musical character and in presentation, as cellist and dancer came full circle, ending where the other had begun.

Spank Dance Company returned to FFA with another engaging butoh performance, followed by composer and bassist P. Kellach Waddle performing a series of his works for bass alone, ranging from the ’80s through last week. A member of the Austin Symphony Orchestra for over two decades, Waddle is a prolific composer, passionate performer, and consummate businessman, and his production company PKWproductions, through its long time association with Strait Music, supplied the piano for the festival. His works were romantic and dramatic, hair flying as slow melancholy melodies in the lower register were countered by virtuosic runs in the upper, a quasi-improvisatory character running throughout.

Baylor Percussion Group

Baylor Percussion Group. Photo by Elisa Ferrari.

After a brief set change, Baylor Percussion Group performed Peaux from Xenakis’s Pleadis, which—thanks to my Louisiana heritage—I can pronounce with uncanny accuracy. Peaux is what all guys in drum circles think they sound like, all big and unison and cathartic, and BPG delivered the goods from the second floor loft. BGP moved to the stage for the second movement of Lang’s so-called laws of nature. This quartet features identical instrumentation for all players, including three floor toms, bass drum (with foot pedals), and metal pipes which at first glance resembled re-purposed chimes, but in fact were cut to specific lengths to yield specific pitches. With each performer facing stage-right, the movement began slowly on the pipes and added the toms and bass which eventually take over, developing into a huge pulsing texture far removed from the pitch elements of the initial gestures. The athleticism of the second movement was contrasted by the meditative delicacy of the third. The teacup, crotales, and guiro instrumentation were coupled with pedal-like figures, occasional notes popping up from the tea cup tremolo. The program described an extended diminuendo and ended with applause recalling the volume of the first piece.

Bel Cuore

Bel Cuore. Photo by Elisa Ferrari.

Bel Cuore Sax Quartet performed Snowden’s Speed Studies, a work that opened slowly, moving to a series of declamatory statements in the high register. Key slaps and other rhythmic effects in the tenor and bari played hide and seek with rips in soprano and alto leading to a funky groove and a slamming ending topped of by the declamatory statement. Matthew Ricketts’s[*] Summerline was quiet and pensive. Thoughtful use of combination tones by Ricketts and careful phrasing by Bel Cuore made for a wonderful tension throughout the work. David Biedenbender’s you’ve been talking in your sleep was the second call for scores winner. The sighing, sleeping, and breathing that opened the piece were sideswiped by a honking Morse code in the bari, which in turn morphed into full-blown syncopation among the players, culminating in complete tutti madness. Finally, Life and Afterlife by Nick Sibicky closed Bel Cuore’s set. A narrative work in two movements, the piece started with bright pulsing rhythms and moved to more solemn lines. In the second section, BCSQ took a seat and took up rainsticks, shakers, and the errant drum to the delight of a number of kids who sat wide-eyed in the front.

Graham Reynolds and Austin Soundwaves

Graham Reynolds and Austin Soundwaves. Photo by Elisa Ferrari.

FFA continued its support of non-profit music education for underserved groups this year with Austin Soundwaves, a new program based on Venezuela’s El Sistema program. An orchestra of about 30 students from the burgeoning program was led by Graham Reynolds in providing music and sound effects to a Felix the Cat film. After their short, charming set, Reynolds was joined by several local pros with whom he’d been working on an upcoming commission. The tunes were built from a funky mix of genres and, after several songs, Vicky Chow and Owen Weaver joined Reynolds on stage. Chow and Reynolds banged out several tunes on the keys, and when I say “banged out” I could not mean that more literally. That piano was rode hard and put up wet, and this became particularly clear later in the evening when Chow did her solo set.

Owen Weaver’s set began with Christopher Cerrone’s Memory Palace. Crickets and other sounds of the early evening were joined by Weaver plucking inside the piano and, as the piece progressed, a background of late night sounds played behind Weaver’s delicate performance. The second movement featured Weaver playing a custom mallet percussion instrument. Made of five or six wooden planks and sounding a bit like a muffled set of woodblocks, the instrument was played with two mallets per hand, one mallet above and one below the planks so that Weaver could provide an extended tremolo that made my arms ache to watch. The tremolo was complimented by electronics that picked up and amplified the natural resonance of the bars. Ian Dicke’s 808 featured loops from the classic Roland 808 drum machine along with real-time manipulation (via MAX/MSP) of cymbals, tambourine, cowbell, and bells, among other percussion instruments. I’ve heard this one several times, and each time it’s a slightly different experience. The use of the crash cymbal in conjunction with the electronics is particularly compelling, giving the impression that the sound not only emanates from the cymbal and through the electronics, but also at times returns to the cymbal from the electronics like a genie returning to the bottle. Vicky Chow joined Weaver for Daniel Wohl’s Pixellated. Beginning with a trill on bells and slaps on piano, Pixellated is initially all fits and starts. A rapid, descending trichord entered the fray adding body to the texture which continued to go all herky-jerky on us like breaking news. Strummed chords in the piano further broadened this texture which eventually broke apart like a fading radio signal.

Vicky Chow, Christoper Cerrone, and Owen Weaver

Vicky Chow, Christoper Cerrone, and Owen Weaver. Photo by Elisa Ferrari.

Vicky Chow took the stage before an eager audience and began with a collection of miniatures, of which Digital Sustain by Ryan Francis was a standout. Chords held out by the una corda pedal made a bed for rapid, staccato, player-piano-like figures. Christopher Cerrone’s Hoyt-Schermerhorn for piano and electronics was the final call for scores winner. A spare texture of slowly played and largely consonant chords served to describe the experience of waiting for the train at the piece’s namesake subway stop in Brooklyn. The chords split into a counterpoint between the hands, accented by the single tones as a chordal passacaglia of sorts developed in the left hand. I’m hesitant (as Cerrone was in describing the piece at the show) to go into much detail about the electronics except to say that they show up towards the end of the piece and are really quite effective. Daniel Wohl’s Aorta for piano and electronics, all syncopation in the piano coupled and textural electronic elements, and Andy Akiho’s vick(I/y) for prepared piano brought Chow’s set to a satisfying close. But we weren’t done. Joining Chow on stage for a grand finale performance of Louis Andriessen’s Workers Union were several of the festival’s performers. The combination of approximate pitch and exacting tutti rhythms among the players was an absolutely fantastic visceral experience, and could not have made for a more definitive end to the evening.

Fast Forward Austin built on the strong foundation laid last year at their inaugural festival. A blend of local, regional, and national acts along with a sense of community purpose made for a day that was as intellectually stimulating as it was warm and inviting. As my penguin hand-stamp fades, I can reflect on the events of the day while looking forward to next year’s festival, confident that it will be more Search for Spock than Phantom Menace. Of course, I’d be happy to watch Vicky Chow go all two-fisted Workers Union on Jar Jar, but perhaps that’s a whole different festival altogether.


*The composer of For thee, O Absalom, my son is Daniel Webbon, not David Webern, and the composer of Summer Line is Matthew Ricketts, not Matthew Prickett, as were originally reported. We regret the errors.