Tag: eighth blackbird

The Blackbird Creative Lab: A Photo Journal

I travelled from Ohio to Ojai to arrive at the Blackbird Creative Lab, an education and mentorship program for composers and performers established by the ensemble Eighth Blackbird. I wasn’t sure what to expect. Just looking at the two names—Ohio and Ojai. They seem pretty similar, don’t they? The Lab couldn’t cause that big of a difference in my life, right?

Wrong.

The Blackbird Creative Lab is held at the Besant Hill School, nestled in the mountains of Ojai. My current home in Ohio is surrounded by a landscape of cornfields, flat as far as the eye can see. The different terrain of Ojai was striking.

8bb Creative Lab

Me being struck by the difference

I am certain that I speak for all members of The Lab when I say that the experience in Ojai connected me with a fount of empowerment, bravery, camaraderie, and creativity.

Every morning at the Blackbird Creative Lab, I took in a breath of inspiration as I opened the door to a dramatic, gorgeous landscape, with hills that morphed and grew with the changing sunlight. Starting the day in this manner led to an open mind that was ready for saturation. The Blackbird Lab quenched this thirst each day.

Cue the mountain montage!

 

Communication was key throughout the two-week residency. We opened up our hearts and minds through rehearsals, performances, the hang, learning from each other in one of the most open environments that I’ve ever experienced.

Guest artists spoke with the community each night, but not in a stuffy lecture format. The salon talks were bona fide times of connection, leading all of us on a rollercoaster of deep inspiration.

Jennifer Higdon, laying down some inspiration

Jennifer Higdon, laying down some inspiration

Fellows rehearsed with members of Eighth Blackbird, working on compositions by other fellows, faculty, and composers who resonate with the contemporary music world. These pieces were performed in a marathon of concerts in the final three days.

What did I garner from this experience? I don’t have the words to describe the magic created at the Lab (thankfully, pictures are worth a thousand). But, I’m going to try to respond as sincerely as possible. First, I was imbued with a renewed sense of artistic direction. The community built around the Blackbird Creative Lab is intensely passionate about their artistry. Their passion is highly contagious, fueled by the Blackbird’s core values of unquestioned quality, pervasive innovation, intense work ethic, genuine informality, and bold openness.

We all garnered tools that can “feed our flame,” as faculty member Jennifer Higdon put it. The community built at the Lab nurtured the potential of each and every member and encouraged us to be the most authentic versions of ourselves.

Nurturing

Nurturing was happening all around campus…

Nurturing

…in shapes and sizes that you might not expect.

There was music that I needed to hear, from musicians who I needed to meet. There were messages that I needed to hear. Sage advice came from all members of the community, and there were particular conversations with Nico Muhly, Shara Nova, Jennifer Higdon, and Lisa Kaplan that I will treasure. But of course, these conversations were just threads of a larger tapestry woven by the entire Blackbird Creative Lab.

Blackbird Creative Lab

Just a sliver of what I needed to hear. To be honest, I needed to hear everyone at this Lab. I was profoundly moved by each and every member of the community, and I can’t thank them enough for sharing their artistry and opening their whole-hearted selves.

Now that I’ve returned from Ojai to Ohio, I can confirm that my life has been positively transformed. I feel like I am part of something larger than myself because of this experience.

The Lab galvanized my artistry. As an example of this, I spent a few weeks tracking new compositions for my upcoming multimedia project, Enter Branch, just before heading to the Lab. This is a project that is about connection and that brings together musicians and artists from communities I hold dear. As I recorded, there were elements of the compositions that still seemed vulnerable, and I wasn’t sure how to feel about that. The Lab drove home a mantra that I’ve lived with for years, but had forgotten recently: If you don’t feel vulnerable when you’re sharing your art, then you might not be connecting in an authentic manner.

So as the sun sets on this iteration of the Blackbird Creative Lab…

sunset

I’d like to leave with a few shots of the magic in action. In the final performance of the festival, we staged a production of works by Cage, Wubbels, and Eastman. Throughout the course of the Lab, we had in-depth discussions on how to honor this situation. In the end, every single member of that ensemble poured their hearts into the performance. At one point, members were performing variations of Cage’s 0’00”, carrying out a disciplined action. For my disciplined action, I took pictures of members of the ensemble, on the stage, performing live as we shared this experience with the audience. Here are those shots. My love and thanks to everyone involved with the Eight Blackbird Creative Lab. Stay on it!

Blackbird Creative Lab

Blackbird Creative Lab

30 Fellows Selected for Inaugural Blackbird Creative Lab

In addition to award winning and boundary breaking, Eighth Blackbird is adding some serious mentoring to their activities. Thirty early-career musicians have been chosen to receive fellowships to the Blackbird Creative Lab, a newly launched two-week summer training program taking place Ojai, California, this June. The selected fellows will focus on the process of creating new work, including “developing a performance aesthetic, nurturing one’s curatorial vision, and building an entrepreneurial foundation,” all of which will culminate in a pair of public concerts, June 23 and 24, at the Besant Hill School’s Zalk Theater.

In addition to Eighth Blackbird ensemble members, the faculty will include composers Jennifer Higdon and Ted Hearne, as well as director/filmmaker Mark DeChiazza. During the session, an array of guest artists will complement the faculty: composer Steve Reich, composer/performer Pamela Z, flutist/composer Ned McGowan, and from the Ojai Music Festival, curator Tom Morris and producer Elaine Martone, who also serves as director of the Blackbird Creative Lab.

More than 200 candidates applied from around the world; the 30 selected will attend tuition-free, inclusive of room and board.

They are:

Justine Aronson, soprano
Erika Boysen, flute
Dan Caputo, composer
Danny Clay, composer
Viet Cuong, composer
Jordan Curcuruto, percussion
Fjóla Evans, composer
Robert Fleitz, piano
Bryan Hayslett, cello
Molly Herron, composer
Invoke, string quartet
Molly Joyce, composer
Matt Keown, percussion
Tamara Kohler, flute
Sammy Lesnick, clarinet
Kaylie Melville, percussion
Benjamin Mitchell, clarinet
Kate Outterbridge, violin
Passepartout Duo, piano + percussion duo
Evan Saddler, percussion
Jeff Stern, percussion
Michiko Theurer, violin
Dylan Ward, saxophone
Aaron Wolff, cello
Phoebe Wu, piano
Jocelyn Zelasko, soprano

Read more about the Blackbird Creative Lab and the inaugural class of fellows here.

Chicago: Enter the Dollhouse—Colombine’s Paradise Theatre


Although I ostensibly attended eighth blackbird’s performance of Colombine’s Paradise Theatre—the new commedia dell’arte-inspired “fantasy” with score by Amy Beth Kirsten and direction by Mark DeChiazza—as a writer and art observer, I could not help absorbing it with the mind of a performer.

A 60-minute tour de force, performed completely from memory and without pause, Colombine’s Paradise Theatre is a stunning display of physical and musical virtuosity on the part of its performers. It is also a testament to eighth blackbird’s commitment to going the extra mile in the creation of new work. Only a mind-boggling amount of labor—memorizing the score and learning elaborate physical staging and choreography—could have produced such a performance.

Colombine demands significant risk-taking and courage from the ensemble. All six players must deliver physical movement and hissing speech parts with panache. Violinist Yvonne Lam, darting and dancing all over the stage as one of the Harlequins, sang frequently and admirably. Pianist Lisa Kaplan, in the role of Colombine, gave an utterly natural, unaffected performance of a cabaret-style song at the piano. Flutist Tim Munro was perhaps pushed furthest, completely abandoning the comfortable mask of the instrumentalist poker-face. He shrieked, sang, sobbed, and hissed his way through the role of Harlequin. When he exited, wailing his final falsetto lines, we had the sense that he had left his soul onstage.

Flutist Tim Munro. (All photographs courtesy of eighth blackbird)

Flutist Tim Munro. (All photographs courtesy of eighth blackbird)

Kirsten’s score evokes diverse environments and moods, from cabaret to Sprechstimme, from witchy incantations to sparse percussion solos. Colombine is quite lyrical at times—particularly in the cello solos, played with great seriousness by Nick Photinos as the Harbinger. Yet the piece is dominated by scherzando whimsy and plenty of humor. Kirsten’s inventive use of doublings keeps the score full and lively at all times. She makes particularly effective use of nonsense syllables and percussive sounds to create spooky rhythmic patterns and textures.

The music is often organized to sound as if characters are inventing the musical material on the spot—repeating it in a testing, probing way, finally landing on a gesture that sticks. It sounds organic and improvisatory, but is completely notated. The pacing of each instrument’s “speech” allows Kirsten to create distinct musical characters in dialogue with each other.
The staging and direction by Mark DeChiazza is one of Colombine’s greatest strengths. It was clear both in the production itself, and in the post-concert discussion, that DeChiazza had generously embraced Kirsten’s inspirations and aesthetic. He has produced a visual and physical world which, while supporting the score, also has complexities and resonances all its own. Particularly ingenious was the way the set allows for a visual imitation of the instruments themselves: percussion setups hanging like chandeliers; metal tubes silently wielded as giant flutes.

While Colombine does not have a clear narrative, it is held together by an interesting set of potential questions. As the protagonist Colombine feels the tug of her various puppet-masters and suitors, we are encouraged to reflect on the power dynamics onstage: Who has agency? Who is excluded? Who has control over another? And what kind of contemporary commentary might the piece be making about commedia dell’arte?

For me, Colombine’s main limitation is that it doesn’t always offer a satisfying perspective on these questions. In particular, the choice to simply reproduce, rather than critically reimagine, the gender dynamics of the stock commedia characters feels like a missed opportunity. Contemporary listeners are quite familiar with the love triangle of two male characters “seducing” their puppet-like female ingenue, and it would have been exciting to experience a more contemporary twist on these patriarchal tropes. The virtuosic, erotic four-hands piano duo between Yvonne Lam and Lisa Kaplan—which helps Colombine pass the proverbial Bechdel test—is a promising moment. But their relationship never becomes thematically important, and in the end, the show doesn’t evince much more gender sophistication than the 16th-century texts that inspired it.

Lam and Kaplan at the piano

Lam and Kaplan at the piano

It might also have been fascinating to see the piece acknowledge—or better yet, dance with—the inevitable historical shadow of Schoenberg. But when asked during the post-concert discussion if she had been influenced by Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, Kirsten seemed surprised. She firmly said no, and mentioned that she had made a point of not listening to the Schoenberg during the creative process of Colombine. Yet with a character named Pierrot, Sprechstimme scenes, a dark and moonlit set, and an almost identical instrumentation, it will be hard for the piece to make its way in the world without evoking Pierrot.

Lisa Kaplan with Matthew Duvall as Pierrot

Lisa Kaplan with Matthew Duvall as Pierrot

With its dazzling visuals, sumptuous score, and stunning performance, Colombine is a game-changer and a standard-bearer for the world of new music and interdisciplinary collaboration. It is sure to inspire an ambitious new crop of staged contemporary chamber music. This is perhaps why I wanted more to chew on theoretically and why I wanted it to be more than a fun, spooky confection. But when audiences enter Colombine’s macabre musical dollhouse—with a sensual surprise in every cobwebbed corner—they will probably, like me, be more than happy to play by her rules for the night.