Tag: percussion

The Role Of College Teaching In The Life of A Creative Musician

Posted on September 10, 2014 by - Articles, Commentary

The Grass is Greener

Photo by Scot Woodman on Flickr

“There’s no way I could come to your university and perform with your students. Academic institutions suck all the creative life out of me. I hate them. I try to avoid them as much as possible.”
“But William Paterson University is a creative place,” I responded. “We have a great New Music Series and an amazing jazz program and we do a lot of commissioning and improvising out there. I think you’d like the vibe.”
“Nope,” he said. “I appreciate your offer, but my experience with schools is that they are creativity killers. They’re just so conservative and backwards thinking. Thanks but no thanks.”

Sigh. Once again I found myself trying in vain to defend the profession of teaching music at the university level and the academic institutions that support it. I had offered this prominent New York City composer/performer a good fee, a nice sushi dinner, and the opportunity to have his piece performed by a dedicated group of students and faculty who would put months of preparation into it, but I was getting nowhere. I let it go and we talked about other things.

This musician’s attitude was particularly intense, but it wasn’t the first time I had encountered such resistance to academic institutions. Over the years, many of my friends and colleagues across the U.S. who are freelance musicians and specialize in contemporary music have told me that they dislike schools of any sort and they want nothing to do with them. They’ve either implied or stated outright that if I were really good at what I do then I would be able to make it as a freelancer and I wouldn’t need to teach. They believe the old adage of “Those who can, do, and those who can’t, teach.”

At first I just shrugged this off as arrogant first-world thinking. I thought that in the interest of enhancing their street credibility, they could afford to discredit the system that helped them develop their skills, because in the end there was still plenty of money and work to go around. But after considering it more carefully I came to the conclusion that the issue is more complicated and subtle and deserves exploration. I’ll explain, but first, some background.

WHY I CHOSE COLLEGE TEACHING

I’ve been teaching at the tenure-track college level for thirteen years. Even before I had my DMA from the Eastman School of Music in hand at twenty-six years old, I had landed a tenure-track job at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh. I taught ethnomusicology and percussion there for three years (2001–2004) and then landed my current position at William Paterson University (WP) in Wayne, New Jersey, twenty miles west of New York City. At WP I teach percussion, contemporary music, Indian classical music, and improvisation. I was tenured in 2009 and am currently at the rank of Associate Professor.
I set my sights on a college teaching job when I was a freshman during my undergraduate years at the University of Michigan. I knew by then that my options were fairly limited in terms of making a living in the U.S. as a composer and percussionist. Most of my colleagues in the percussion area were trying to land jobs with orchestras. I’ve never found orchestral percussion playing particularly interesting, so I scratched that option off the list right away. The other possibility was a job playing percussion with a military band, but it was still basically an orchestral gig, so I scratched that one off the list too.

That basically left freelance work or college teaching. For me, college teaching was a better choice. To start, I’ve always enjoyed teaching. Secondly, I knew that it would take some time to find the right job and that I would have to jump through some hoops to tailor the job to what I wanted, but I also knew that when I got things where I wanted them I would have a stable income, good health insurance, and a solid retirement package. But here’s the salient point: those things really only mattered to me because they would give me the freedom to perform and compose the music I wanted.

Freelancing as a composer/performer never appealed to me for one simple reason: I’ve never wanted to play or write music that I don’t believe in. I knew that as a freelance percussionist I would need to play any and all gigs to survive—especially for the first decade or so I was in a city—which would likely include playing in bands for corporate gigs and bars, musical theatre shows, commercial recording sessions, and orchestral percussion gigs. As a composer I would likely need to write commercial music. I did all those things in the first few years I was working, but I did them knowing that it was just to round out my musical experience to make me a better teacher. I didn’t want to be doing them in the later part of my life.

Of course, I would never criticize anyone who has taken that path. Many of my colleagues have an agnostic attitude towards music. So long as they’re playing drums (or violin or whatever), they are happy, no matter what the style or situation. The same goes for many of my composer friends. I respect them greatly. After all, it’s very difficult to survive as a freelancer anywhere in the world. But I’ve always felt that it wasn’t the right path for me, and many others feel the same. My burning passion has always been experimental music and world music. [1] What I needed was complete freedom to pursue any musical direction I want, no matter the commercial value.

Of course, there are other ways to go about this. America has a long history of composers and performers working jobs unrelated to the music field in order to pay the bills. Charles Ives working in the insurance business, Philip Glass driving a taxi and working as a plumber in the early part of his career, and John Cage working a variety of jobs until he was nearly fifty years old are but a few famous examples. I also considered that option, but I couldn’t get the math to work out, both in terms of finances and time. If I worked just a few hours a day at Starbucks or another entry-level job I’d have the time and mental space I needed to pursue my artistic vision, but not the money. Everything I earned would get sucked into paying bills and I’d have nothing left over to invest in hiring good players to perform my music, make recordings, buy equipment, build press materials, etc.—the basic things you need to form a career. This is especially true in big cities like New York where the basic minimum wage has fallen far behind the cost of living over the last forty years. Steve Reich could drive a cab in the early 1970s and rent an apartment for $50 a month and save a bit of money to pay his ensemble members and release recordings, but that’s much more difficult now.
If I got involved with a more serious career like selling insurance or working as a lawyer I would have the money I needed, but not the time. I’m an incredibly energetic guy, but even I have my limits. Fifty hours a week at the office wouldn’t leave much mental space or physical energy for composing sessions, long rehearsals, and touring.

College teaching seemed like the perfect answer because the hours are generally much lower but the pay is reasonable. Most weeks I’m up at the University about three to four days. One of those days is quite long, from about 7:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m., but the other days are shorter. On average I’d say my time teaching and attending to various administrative duties is about twenty to thirty hours a week, for about eight months a year.

There are two things about those hours that make them special, however. First, they are flexible. I tour many weeks each semester and it’s very easy for me to rearrange rehearsals, classes, and lessons. Second, I’m immersed in fascinating, quality music during those hours and I have the freedom to choose good repertoire. I pick the pieces I’ll conduct, I organize my classes how I like, and when working with students one on one in percussion or composition lessons I help them select the repertoire. I also have a laboratory at my fingertips to help develop my own music. That all gives me a lot of job satisfaction because I have some degree of creative control; I’m not just taking orders from someone.

However, lest you might be getting ready to write a letter to the Governor of New Jersey expressing your anger at lazy professors who only work twenty to thirty hours a week and enjoy a fat salary, let me put those hours in perspective. Those are only the hours I spend at the university. When you add in my composing time each day, my practicing, and several hours a day on email and the phone for hustling the various business aspects of my career outside the university (as well as the university administrative work), the hours top out closer to sixty or seventy, sometimes more.

Of course, college teaching jobs are hard to get. When my freelance musician friends make disparaging statements to me about college teachers being second-rate players or composers, I gently remind them that based on one’s performance recital and interview, getting a job usually means someone has beat out well over 100 applicants for a position—most of whom are freelancers. And being a successful university professor requires more than just teaching and playing skills. One must know how to interact with Deans and Presidents, apply for grants, and navigate the various administrative and political aspects of working in a large organization. Maintaining this balance is more difficult than it may seem and many people don’t have the knack for it.
There is something else many freelancers don’t know: being successful at a university gig and climbing the academic ladder has more to do with what you do outside the university than what you do inside. Once in a great while someone will be denied tenure because his or her teaching is bad, but usually someone is fired at the university because he or she didn’t have the ambition and vision to build a successful career outside the confines of the academic institution. This is a great boon to serious musicians who teach, as it justifies spending time away from the university while on tour or making plenty of room in one’s schedule for composing.

There are three basic criteria that promotion and tenure committees look at when evaluating a candidate. First, the quality of their teaching as measured through student and faculty peer evaluations. Second, the quality and quantity of a candidate’s professional life outside the university, and third is service to the university (committees, panels, etc). There are a few universities who bill themselves as “teaching” universities in which the teaching is the most important criteria and professional work doesn’t matter, but in general there is no question that one’s professional activity is what guarantees employment. “Publish or perish.” That is why most college professors are excellent players and composers. They have to be or they’ll lose their jobs.

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN CONFORMITY AND DISCIPLINE

But what about what that prominent NYC composer/performer said? Are university music programs conservative places that have little use for truly creative thinking?
Yes, sometimes they are!

I’ve spent hundreds of hours of my life sitting through faculty meetings and serving on various committees and in my experience university music departments are often risk-adverse. There are two reasons for this.
First, frequently updating curriculum (or simply letting students design their own with guidance from a professor, which is what I advocate) requires flexibility from the faculty. One must be willing to teach something different every semester and take on the role of adviser and collaborator rather than top-down mentor. However, many faculty are unwilling to do this, mostly out of ennui. Once many professors have become comfortable teaching something, they are unwilling to investigate new ways to apply their knowledge to a rapidly-changing art form. Unfortunately the classic image of the professor wearing the dandruff-covered sweater jacket, peering over reading glasses at ancient notes that he or she made decades ago (on paper no doubt) is all too alive and well.

There is little the students or other faculty can do about this. Unless a tenured professor does something illegal, the unions hold so much power it is nearly impossible to fire him or her. Indeed, this is the primary criticism people have leveled against the tenure system: that it fosters stagnation and only serves the professors. This is a fair criticism and one I’ve expressed many times (and I’m a tenured professor). But getting rid of tenure entirely would be very dangerous. That would put the employment of the faculty at the whims of higher administrators, most of who know virtually nothing about the field of music and are often quick to fire and hire people to serve their own career interests.

The solution is to keep the tenure system, but never guarantee life-long employment. Rather, one should be able to earn increasingly longer sentences of job security. So, for example, one could come up for review after one year, then two years, then four years, then perhaps every six or eight years for the rest of one’s career at a given institution. The reviews should have teeth and no matter how long someone has been at an institution he or she should sweat at the conclusion of each block, even if they’ve been there thirty years. This would force faculty to stay professionally active and keep refining their teaching and answering the challenge of working in a dynamic musical culture. This structure would be fairer to the students—who deserve professors who are professionally active—and it’s fairer to the majority of the faculty at any given institution who are burning the candle at both ends.

The other reason most university music departments are so risk adverse is because the canon takes on too much weight over time. The great composers of the past wrote so much great music and it takes so much time to get through even a fraction of it that it can be difficult for professors to figure out ways to balance a thorough education in the old masterpieces with more modern skill sets (e.g., music software literacy or world music awareness). Some schools have responded to this challenge by throwing out the old masterpieces all together and letting the students study whatever they want, which usually means pop music. This often falls under the guise of postmodernism. “Down with The Man!” “No more letting dead males dictate our aesthetics!”

However, those dead males wrote a lot of great music. Although I’d like to see more flexibility in curriculums, there is no question that working through the standard repertoire develops one’s technique better than anything else, and technique is important. One thing I’ve noticed after thirteen years of professional work with the best contemporary classical and jazz musicians in America is that without exception, the most creative players have a thorough grounding in the classics. A handful of them got it outside of school, but almost all of them procured it during their high school and university years. Indeed, I frequently hear “new music” by young composers who have eschewed the classic studies of counterpoint, orchestration, and harmony because it’s too “conformist” or some other such response. The results are dreadful and predictable: poorly orchestrated tunes that lack coherence. Even worse is the performer who has refused to grapple with the standard repertoire and has developed their “own thing.” Sloppy tuning, bad rhythm, and lousy tone are the primary results.

A basic working knowledge of the canon also gives one a key into a fraternity of professional musicians. It is basic musical literacy. For example, if you are a classical musician and you don’t know anything about the music of Palestrina or Stravinsky and you don’t know who Yo-Yo Ma is you won’t be able to communicate effectively with the best classical musicians working today. (And more importantly, you’ll have deprived yourself of some of the greatest music ever written and performed.)
One must be careful not to confuse conformity with discipline. Even though university music programs need to find more creative and dynamic ways to balance the study of the canon with the diverse skill sets needed to negotiate the modern musical landscape, studying the canon and developing a highly refined technique are still paramount. You can’t escape it. Studying the classical masterpieces of the past only fosters conformity if the professor insists that his or her students blindly imitate that music or interpretations of that music. (In the case of jazz this would take the form of stopping with the Abersold method. That is, getting to a point where you can imitate the great jazz musicians of the past, but can’t go any further.)

However, good teachers do much more than that. They open students’ ears and souls to the creative spirit underlying all great music and thus enable the transference of that creativity from one generation to another. What that New York City composer/performer that I quoted at the beginning of this article failed to understand is that at William Paterson University (and other quality music schools) we focus on the classics because that is the best framework for a young musician to gain the skills needed to perform all manner of modern music. That doesn’t make our institution uncreative or conformist. Quite the opposite: our dedication to creative music requires us to focus on the canon. Indeed, what we want for our students is for them to become the most creative musicians of their generation, but first they need some chops.

What music schools and departments need is balance, and I think art departments do it better than we do. Art majors start creating art from their very first day, in different mediums, while simultaneously studying the great classics through their art history courses. There’s no reason we can’t do this in music departments. Every music student in America should be composing, improvising, and learning music software as part of their university education, all the while studying Beethoven symphonies and Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue. As I said at the beginning of this section, this can be done in a way that maximizes each student’s individual interests and talents by letting them design their own curriculum under the guidance of a supportive mentor. It might take a bit more effort on the part of the professors, but the result would be a much more dynamic and relevant experience for everyone.

TEACHING MUSIC IS MORE THAN TEACHING TECHNIQUE

The big point that critics of college teaching fail to understand is that teaching music is more than just teaching music. Yes, of course a teacher has to teach a student how to hold a bow, or how to realize second-species counterpoint, or how to play a double-stroke roll, but it’s more than that. A good teacher connects the great musicians and musical works of the past with the present, while paving the road for the future. This doesn’t just mean technique, rather, it means connecting with the wildly creative spirits that flowed through each and every great musician of the past. This is one of the things I love about teaching: I regularly come into contact with wonderful music and by figuring out how to help other people plumb the depths of these sonic wonders I am refreshed. My passion for creative music is renewed time and again.

I also see people change. Over the course of four or five years my students become more sensitive, intelligent, and creative because of their contact with great music. Ultimately, it is these deeply spiritual experiences that motivate my teaching, not financial stability.

Each of us is a link in a chain that extends outwards to infinity in either direction. None of us were hatched from eggs yesterday (to borrow a phrase from J.M. Coetzee). We all owe a huge debt to those people who spent the extra hours with us to make our performing and composing that much better, and opened our ears and hearts and minds to the masterpieces of the past. Our teachers didn’t just give us employable skills, they deeply enriched our lives. We can repay this debt in many ways, but one of the most powerful is by doing the same for others. It’s a massive challenge, but ultimately a musical one.
Undoubtedly my attitude in this regard comes partly from my deep involvement with North Indian Hindustani classical music. In India teaching is held in high regard and even the most commercially successful performers (e.g., Zakir Hussain) make time in their lives for teaching. My gurus, the renowned Dhrupad masters the Gundecha Brothers, regularly bring their top students on tour with them. The students join them on stage and play the tanpura (the drone instrument) and often sing backup vocals. Teaching actually happens on stage, even for major concerts. When the show is over it is common for the teachers to quiz the students on what they just heard and for the students to ask questions about the performance, even very specific technical ones. Thus the teaching and the performing are seamlessly intertwined. The past, present, and future connected as one.
Of course, some people have no talent for teaching or interest in it. But their deficiencies or attitudes shouldn’t be twisted into virtues. As with most things in life, the reality is highly contextual and subtle, much more than the crude distinctions many people make between “teachers” and “freelancers.” Yes, there are some bad teachers out there, but there are also many wonderful teachers who are highly accomplished performers and composers outside of the academy. And yes, many college music programs are procrustean and need improvement, but they still serve an important basic function to give our future generations the basic skills they need to participate in creative music making at the highest levels.

There is nothing more important to the future of creative music than passionate and talented teachers. Let us all reevaluate the role of teaching in the realm of creative contemporary music, and let us be glad that many of us college professors are working tirelessly to inspire creative music-making in future generations.

*

1. I realize that I’m drawing somewhat of a line here between “commercial” music and “experimental” music, and I admit that that line is quite fuzzy and often doesn’t exist clearly at all. All music has both elements to it, but it is a matter of degree. There is quite a difference in intent—and I would say artistic effect—between the music of, say, Justin Bieber and Charles Wuorinen. No matter how clever one is in trying to erase that line and intellectualize the supposed similarities between Mr. Bieber and Mr. Wuorinen, the fact is that the audiences are different, the venues are different, composing and learning and performing the music is different, and the emotional experience of hearing the music is quite different. No disrespect to Mr. Bieber, but I much prefer Mr. Wuorinen’s music, or Mr. Cage’s music, or Mr. Reich’s music, or Ravi Shankar’s music, and it is that music and music that is created in that spirit to which I have devoted my life.

***

Payton MacDonald
Payton MacDonald is a composer/percussionist/singer/improviser/administrator/educator. He has created a unique body of work that draws upon his extensive experience with East Indian tabla drumming and Dhrupad singing, Jazz, European classical music, and the American experimental tradition. MacDonald was educated at the University of Michigan and Eastman School of music. He has toured the world as a performer and composed music for many different ensembles.

Todd Lerew Wins the 2014 ACF National Composition Contest

Posted on August 6, 2014 by - Headlines, Ledes

Todd Lerew - credit Nedda Atassi

Todd Lerew
Photo by Nedda Atassi

The American Composers Forum has named CalArts student Todd Lerew the winner of the 2014 National Composition Contest for his work flagging entrainment of ultradian rhythms and the consequences thereof. Lerew has been awarded a cash prize of $2,000 and his piece will be toured by So Percussion in future seasons. The piece was commissioned by ACF along with the works of two other competition finalists–Michael Laurello and Kristina Warren–which were workshopped by So Percussion as part of the the group’s Summer Institute at Princeton University and premiered on July 20.


Based in Los Angeles, Lerew (b. 1986) works with invented acoustic instruments, repurposed found objects, and unique preparations of traditional instruments. He is the inventor of the Quartz Cantabile, which uses a principle of thermoacoustics to convert heat into sound, and has presented the instrument at Stanford’s CCRMA, the American Musical Instrument Society annual conference, the Guthman Musical Instrument Competition at Georgia Tech, and Machine Project in Los Angeles. He is the founder and curator of Telephone Music, a collaborative music and memory project based on the children’s game of Telephone, the last round of which was released as an exclusive download to subscribers of music magazine The Wire. His solo piece for e-bowed gu zheng, entitled Lithic Fragments, is available on cassette on the Brunch Groupe label. His pieces have been performed by members of the San Francisco Symphony Chorus, the Wet Ink Ensemble (New York), the Now Hear Ensemble (Santa Barbara), and the Canticum Ostrava choir (Czech Republic).

flagging entrainment of ultradian rhythms and the consequences t

Sample page from Lerew’s flagging entrainment of ultradian rhythms and the consequences thereof.

Composer and vocalist Kristina Warren holds a bachelor’s in music composition from Duke University and is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in composition and computer technologies from the University of Virginia.

Sample page from Warren's score for Choose.

Sample page from Warren’s score for Choose.

Composer and pianist Michael Laurello is an artist diploma candidate in composition at the Yale School of Music. He earned an master’s in composition from Tufts University and a bachelor’s in music synthesis (electronic production and design) from Berklee College of Music.

Sample page from Michael Laurello's Overwhelming Capacity.

Sample page from Laurello’s Overwhelming Capacity.

The National Composition Contest is open to composers currently enrolled in graduate and undergraduate institutions in the United States; this year’s installment drew more than 250 applicants from 39 states. Each finalist received an award of $1,000 plus an additional stipend of $750 to help defray expenses associated with attending the workshop and studio performance.
The competition began during the 2010-11 season as the Finale National Composition Contest, partnering with the group eighth blackbird. JACK Quartet was the ensemble for 2011-12. The competition went on hiatus last season, returning in September 2013 under its new name, the American Composers Forum National Composition Contest.

(from the press release)

Sounds Heard: Adventures Far and Wide

Posted on April 15, 2014 by - Albums, Listen

Sounds Heard: Adventures Far and Wide
Glenn Kotche: Adventureland
Cantaloupe

Eight years after his first composer-centric album Mobile, percussionist/composer Glenn Kotche (of Wilco fame) has released a second recording featuring a selection of chamber pieces all under the heading Adventureland. With some of the very finest musicians of the new music world in tow—including Kronos Quartet and members of eighth blackbird—he has created an engaging, sometimes playful/sometimes eerie, percussion-based landscape with twists and turns that are well worth exploring.

The most substantial piece on Adventureland is Anomaly, a work whose seven movements are sprinkled throughout the disc and serve as musical connective tissue. Originally premiered with Kronos Quartet at the 25th Anniversary San Francisco Jazz Festival in 2007, this recording is a richly layered journey through forests of strings, electronics, and percussion instruments—a landscape that will continue revealing details with further listens. In Anomaly Kotche reveals a knack for spinning a melody, and the piece demonstrates a satisfying weaving of musical lines and integration of larger thematic elements. The other multi-movement work, The Haunted, for two pianos and percussion, sports jagged rhythms and repeating patterns that smack a bit of literal translation from drum set playing. Nevertheless, the unique textures of each movement unfold in delightfully unexpected ways, as do the two single-movement pieces, The Traveling Turtle and Triple Fantasy.
Buy:


Nils Bultmann: Troubadour Blue
Innova
While “viola duets” might not normally inspire a ton of listening excitement, think again: The ten duets on Nils Bultmann’s album Troubadour Blues are quite ravishing. Assembled over a period of years from bits and pieces of solo improvisations, they are performed by the composer and Kronos violist Hank Dutt. Scattered about the album, they range in tone from somber to frenetic; here’s to hoping that violists everywhere embrace these lovely little pieces.

In From the Depths, viola meets didjeridu in a four-movement work that compellingly explores the timbral relationship between the two instruments. (People, there should be more pieces for this instrument pairing!) The final work on the album is Suite for Solo Cello, performed by Parry Karp and quite clearly inspired (even without information from the liner notes) by the Bach Cello Suite #1 in G Major.
Buy:


Man Forever: Ryonen (with So Percussion)
Thrill Jockey

Percussionist John Colpitts has yet another name in addition to his Kid Millions moniker—Man Forever, which is his experimental percussion persona. For his new LP Ryonen, he has teamed up with So Percussion to create a drumming smorgasbord of chaotic gratification. It’s tough not to think immediately of joyfully spastic Sunday drumming-in-the-park gatherings while listening to The Clear Realization and Ryonen, the two works on this album. The Clear Realization is a polyrhythmic study performed on two drum sets, bongos, and assorted other percussion with voice—a propulsive and exciting affair. The title track piles layer upon layer of percussion onto the more focused material of the first track, as if a huge group of people just joined in the drumming after a topsy-turvy drinking spree. Rhythmic patterns pop through the busy surface texture, and the resonance of the drums, especially the persistent bass drum played with soft beaters, creates a drone element that floats around the percolations.

It would without a doubt be an excellent thing to hear these pieces performed live—much better than Sunday park drumming, really—and you lucky New York people will be able to do just that next week at Le Poisson Rouge.
Buy:

Sounds Heard: Things You Already Know

Posted on February 25, 2014 by - Albums, Listen

It’s always exciting to find a “new” favorite piece of music or music maker, and when a genre’s emphasis is on the innovative, that perhaps lays the foundations for a particularly blinkered focus. I almost passed up the three discs below for that reason, because while they were new, I had covered these artists in some measure before and felt obliged to keep my ears moving. But then I heard Kamala Sakaram in her interview this month suggesting that there is so much to be gained by digging past the premiere, and I decided to apply that to my listening.

Once this idea slapped me in the face, Chris Campbell‘s Things You Already Know (poetically appropriate, no?) metaphorically hit the other cheek. In this case this was not music I already knew but rather Campbell playing around (as he explains in his CD or vinyl-accompanying note to the listener) with dialog across his own internal and external realities. While much music might be traced in one way or another to a similar root motivation, here the work wears its intention on its CD sleeve and it led me to consume the tracks as a sort of tour though the composer’s aural memory palace, several doors left temptingly unlocked and the drawers open for ready snooping. With the assistance of musicians drawn from various genre specialties in the Twin Cities and a colorful collection of unusual and/or processed instrumental timbres, it’s a rewarding journey—particularly Water Variations, with its exotic string instrument collection. Campbell himself sits at the piano at key points offering reflective commentary until the listener is beckoned to peek behind the next swaying curtain.


Buy:
David T. Little’s Haunt of Last Nightfall was stuck in my head for nearly a month after our Spotlight interview, and it has taken up residence there yet again in anticipation of the commercial release of a recording on New Amsterdam (out today!). It’s not always comfortable sonic material to host in one’s ear. The history which Little explores through the music—the massacre at El Mozote, El Salvador in December 1981—draws on a full palette of extreme content stretching from horror to prayer. What particularly impresses me about this piece, however, is how rich and gripping an emotional experience Little, Third Coast Percussion, and guest musicians Eileen Mack, Mellissa Hughes, Andrew McKenna Lee, and Toby Driver are able to conjure—particularly in the percussion-only sections the work offers. A visceral reaction to a driving electric guitar is perhaps not an experience to brush aside, but it’s the timbral interplay of the various percussion sounds that bring a remarkable exploration of the events to light and one that won’t easily be shaken even after the last sounds fade.


Buy:
Saxophonist Aaron Irwin is a bandleader whose projects sometimes catch my ear even before I realize his name is attached, but they tend to stick around in the rotation long enough for me to do my liner note research and get my credits straight. His latest release, Ordinary Lives, is sure to take up similar residence. In addition to Irwin on alto, this outing features Danny Fox (piano, Fender Rhodes), Sebastian Noelle (guitar), Thomson Kneeland (bass), and Greg Ritchie (drums), and the men are clearly well at home in one another’s company. The tracks are filled with too-easy-to-eat hooks, seductive gestures, and, well, regular injections of joyful lick playing that neatly keep things from getting tedious and ruining the party. It’s a warm and welcoming recording that quickly rewards attention.


Buy:

An Expanding Paradigm

Posted on January 20, 2014 by - Columns

steel drums

Photo by Sasithon Pooviriyakul (2010)

When So Percussion started out, we had three prohibitions:  no improvisation, no playing our own music, and no hand drums. Initially, the impetus for these boundaries was an attempt to define ourselves as a hardcore new music group made up of virtuosi.  We’ve since violated all of those rules in spades, although we work hard to perpetuate that original mission.

It wasn’t that we didn’t respect these categories. Actually, we established the hand drum rule specifically because we had so much respect for expert players of congas, tabla, and djembe. We felt that there would be no reason for anybody to come out to hear us pretend to play instruments that other performers had so thoroughly mastered.

The restrictions on composing and improvising had a similar genesis: other musicians spent many years on these crafts, just as we hunkered down honing our chamber music skills. We had an urgent need and desire to be among the best at what we did.  I think these early rules were actually helpful, because we needed a lot of time to devote to chamber music with scores.  We were trying to build a new vocabulary of interaction, a way of listening and rehearsing that took years to dial in.

Eventually, as school days morphed into the beginnings of a professional career, these restrictions made less and less sense.  The hand drum rule fell away quickly, and it is this peculiar prohibition that sparked my thoughts for this article. Almost every instrument we play as percussionists is borrowed from another culture, so one has to either find a way forward in playing them that feels good, or else give up completely.  We came to believe that it’s largely a matter of taste, that the context in which they appear is paramount.

I asked my colleague Josh Quillen, who studied steel drums both in Trinidad and in the United States, how he grapples with including those instruments in So Percussion’s music. His reply:

I rarely reference my cultural knowledge of Trinidad when playing steel drums within So Percussion. It actually helps me to avoid any baggage in that context (and mainly assumptions put on the instrument by others) and to help push me past what I know about the instrument.  Instead, I rely solely on what I learned about how to play the instrument.
With that said, if you’re going to use the instruments in a traditional manner, I say go for it, but that’s where you need to have some background in it in order to do so with any sort of credibility.  I feel good about teaching a steel band and recording traditional calypsos because I have a background in it, and I still work closely with people who are steeped in the culture, and are still teaching me about the instrument and its background.

Here’s a quick sample of the second movement of Steve Mackey’s It Is Time, written for So Percussion in 2009.  Steve and Josh worked hard together to capture the essence of the steel drums, while never letting the music descend into cultural parody.


As Josh mentions, another way to reconcile incorporating an instrument into your music is to find a way to use its sound and quality as an abstract resource, stripping it of most stylistic references.  Many European modernists such as Xenakis discovered new qualities in borrowed instruments, such as the thumping yet warm sonorities of congas and bongos played with sticks in the “Peaux” movement of his massive sextet Pleiades.  In this case, the instruments are incorporated with many other kinds of drums into a new composite instrument, and the manner in which they are played bears little resemblance to their original context.
I feel that as long as we are not pretending to play the specific kind of music that those hand drums were originally used in, or casually mimicking that music, there is nothing wrong with incorporating the sounds of the instruments into the already messy and diverse palate of the percussion ensemble.

As Josh also outlines, one of the most effective ways to feel at ease about knowing how to include an instrument or a tradition into your music is to study it!  If you’ve ever spent time getting your butt kicked by a Balinese Gamelan master who is requiring you to memorize extremely long melodies by ear, or exposing yourself to the fathomless depths of complexity embodied in the talas of Hindustani music, or playing with 120 other steel drummers at Panorama in Trinidad, it is nearly impossible for you to condescend to that music, or to incorporate it carelessly into your own music.

The issue of cross-cultural dialogue isn’t only relevant to crossing geographical boundaries.  Sometimes even collaborating within sub-cultures has its own negotiations, where effort is required to find common ground and articulate mutual expectations.
In 2005, we struck up a relationship with the duo Matmos, who have been steady collaborators ever since.  In the broader sense of culture, we had a lot in common: we spoke the same language, had all grown up in and been educated in the same country, etc.  We diverged in one key area, which was that Drew and Martin of Matmos had not had any formal training in classical music.
But their music was fascinating!  They bowed rat cages, made tracks out of liposuction sounds, and somehow blended the curiosity of musique concrète (which they are extremely aware of) with a smile-inducing and infectious feel for making great beats.  We loved the conceptuality and natural musicianship of their music, which we first got to know through their work on Bjork’s Vespertine album.


Their musical culture has its own rules and expectations, some of which they purposely break.  I quickly realized that I knew very little about that culture, just as they didn’t know much about the endless Beethoven and Monteverdi that I was listening to in order to prepare for my doctoral exams at Yale.

I distinctly remember talking to Martin about some of their favorite music, as I was genuinely curious.  He rattled off so many names I had never heard of that I just asked him to boil it down to the Matmos influence essentials, the first five things I should listen to.

He said, “You mean, like Kraftwerk?”
I said, “Who is Kraftwerk?”

He looked at me like I had just landed on planet Earth.  He might as well have said to me, “Who is Mozart?”
Martin and Drew’s instrument layout in performance reads like a time capsule of the past 30 years of electronic music.  They hang on to reliable instruments that they love, refusing to clean the slate every time a new technological update is available.  Over years of conversation and experimentation with them, we have started to incorporate some of those instruments in our music as well.  Without their influence and knowledge, I’m not sure we would have felt comfortable with the baggage of a Korg or V-Synth suddenly appearing in our percussion ensemble.

There is an organic process in bringing cultural perspective to what you do.  No rule or blanket theory is going to address everything that’s possible:  we have too many interweaving contexts to sort out a unified approach.    As a young group, So Percussion sought a concrete definition of what made us a new music group, and an answer to why that category mattered. It seemed to us that jumping into all of these other ponds would be confusing or messy.  In truth, it probably has been.  And it has not always been successful!

But it has been worth it, at least to us. Here’s a performance of Water, a piece that we wrote together with Matmos.  It incorporates both Matmos’ electronic elements and Josh’s steel drum playing.

Sounds Heard: Some American Albums

Posted on January 14, 2014 by - Albums, Listen

In the wake of the many “Best of 2013” lists floating around, I wanted to highlight some recent album releases worthy of your time and attention. I didn’t select them for this reason, but it occurs to me that they each say something interesting and distinct about what it means to make American music right now.
William Winant—Five American Percussion Pieces (Poon Village Records)


Buy:
Winant has been a champion of contemporary percussion music for decades and can boast a personal connection to most of the composers represented on this album—Lou Harrison, Michael Byron, Alvin Curran, and James Tenney. This is a fascinating snapshot of mid-to-late 20th-century American percussion music, including pieces as early as Harrison’s Song of Quetzalcoatl (1941) and as recent as Curran’s Bang Zoom (1995), with works from the 1970s by Byron and Tenney filling in the gaps. The recordings themselves span many years, too—Byron’s Tracking I was recorded in 1976, while Tenney’s Never Having Written a Note for Percussion was recorded earlier this year. Taken together, these works lend the album the feeling of a retrospective in miniature, spanning most of Winant’s prolific career as a performer.

Song of Queztacoatl is the lone ensemble piece, and a curiously strident one for Harrison. It alternates between aggressive sections driven by unpitched percussion—tom-toms, bass drum, an insistent snare drum—and more melodious passages inhabited by bell-like muted brake drums, glasses, and cowbells. The Willie Winant Percussion Group (Todd Manley, David Rosenthal, Daniel Kennedy, and Winant) really captures the feverish energy here, and they play with an astonishing unity of purpose—if not for the many layers going on, you might be forgiven for mistaking this for a solo work.

Byron’s Trackings I for four metallophones toys with density; clangorous textures elide into skittering runs and back again. Curran’s Bang Zoom for 13 tuned cowbells immediately conjures up Balinese gamelan music, but without the frantic pace and tempo shifts. Winant maintains a steady, resolute tempo here, bringing out the emergent melodic patterns with incredible clarity.
Tenney’s Never Having Written a Note for Percussion is a bit of an anomaly here, consisting of a single tam-tam roll that crescendoes and diminuendos over the course of nine minutes. Again, Winant’s patience and precision gives the piece a magnificent arc, as disparate layers of sound from the tam-tam emerge and recede one by one.

The record concludes with another Lou Harrison piece, Solo to Anthony Cirone for tenor bells. It is understated, tantalizingly brief, and a perfect epigram for the album as a whole. One striking thing about the entire collection is its strong focus on melodic writing (with the exception of the Tenney). Running counter to prevailing stereotypes, it makes a strong case for melody as a central concern of 20th century percussion music, and Winant is an ideal ambassador for this message here.

Scott Worthington—Even the Light Itself Falls (Populist Records)


Scott Worthington’s Even the Light Itself Falls also looks back to the 20th century in a way, recalling the sparse, gentle textures of Morton Feldman’s music. Scored for clarinet, percussion, and double bass, Worthington’s piece unfolds at a remarkably patient pace—the bass does not even enter until several minutes in. The ensemble et cetera (Curt Miller, clarinet; Dustin Donahue, percussion; Worthington, double bass) plays with noteworthy restraint and control here. Miller’s playing is the most immediately ear-catching, with plaintive yet precise variations in vibrato. Nearly an hour and a half long, it is tempting to put this album on as background music, but the rewards for active listening are plentiful as well.

Various Artists – Rounds (the wulf. records)
Rounds
Purchase directly from the wulf. records
There have been countless free concerts of experimental music at the wulf., a local Los Angeles venue. Rounds is the first release on the organization’s recently launched recording label, and it’s a very interesting choice for a first album. As the title implies, each composition is in fact a round, a melody that overlaps with itself. Of course, this immediately conjures up memories of nursery rhymes, but while many of these pieces do trade on a certain childlike simplicity, the composers also find diversity and depth in these limitations. Most tracks are a capella, though occasionally an instrument or two will double a line for extra support. There are bluesy inflections in Daniel Corral’s Your Storm, raucous nonsense syllables in Eric KM Clark’s Rhythmic Round, clever numerology in Jessica Catron’s Four 3 And, ominous chromaticism in Larry Polansky’s Scarlet Tanager, and so on.


The performances feature a beautifully heterogenous mix of trained and untrained voices, giving individual lines a timbral uniqueness that adds both clarity and character. It also connects the experimental tradition to folk music traditions—in particular, it reminds me of the Sacred Harp tradition of choral singing in the American South in its rawness and realness.

Double Trio: line upon line and Konk Pack

Posted on October 24, 2013 by - Field Reports, Headlines

Funky warehouses are being cleaned up and repurposed at a record pace here in Austin. As the city grows and its rents rise, many artists have found their way to the outskirts of town to utilize spaces in various states of renovation and renewal. Among the most recent additions is Canopy, which houses a variety of sleek spaces for artists of all stripes. I headed over there to check out line upon line percussion’s most recent Austin show, a showcase that featured two new premiers, one classic hit, and one golden oldie. I strolled past several units in which painters and other visual artists were holding court, some actively working on new pieces while others chatted about existing work with patrons. At the end of a line of such units, I found the venue; a large open space with groups of instruments around the perimeter. The setup made for a series of little vignettes, and the audience was invited to grab folding chairs and place them wherever they liked (and move them as they pleased) to experience each piece.

line upon line percussion

line upon line percussion

In recent years, line upon line has been on a real commissioning tear, and their list of upcoming projects is long, stretching over the next few years. This show started with a last-minute addition of one of their earliest commissions, Steve Snowden’s A Man with a Gun Lives Here. I have seen them perform this piece many times, and each performance is spirited, alive, and as full of wonder and humor as the work itself. The three players surround the bass drum and their interaction during the performance goes beyond the simply musical and becomes somewhat theatrical. Brush swoops, stick exchanges, and the passing of a bag of buckshot all serve to visually illustrate the music.  This rendition was no different and these dynamic elements played well with audience members young and old. Following the Snowden was Kate Soper’s In the Reign of Harad IV, commissioned with the support of Chamber Music America. In three movements with no pause, the work featured a sort of fractured speech stuttered among the three players. Each performer engaged their particular kit in fits and starts with each instrumental grouping popping in and out in musical chunks reminiscent of tape splits.

The three-station setup for Kate Soper’s In the Reign of Harad IV

The three-station setup for Kate Soper’s In the Reign of Harad IV

While specific words and phrases were difficult to discern, the small figurations developed their own syntax; some declamatory, others questioning, and all part of a conversation that was at once familiar and foreign. Contrasting the large setup for the Soper, Ben Issacs’s Several Inflections called for each performer to have only the top octave (give or take) of the vibraphone removed and placed on a small stand, arranged on top of a bit of curled rubber tubing. This arrangement allowed for all the attack normally associated with the vibraphone but none of the resonance. The piece was described by line upon line member Adam Bedell (he actually recounted a description from a friend who attended a rehearsal) as “sounding like wind chimes,” which might initially bring to mind a simple, wandering texture, but my impression (while positive!) was anything but relaxed. Fragile, nervous, and anxious were all terms that came to mind, not only because of the aural impression but also because of the performance requirements. An overall extremely quiet dynamic profile (we waited until the AC was shut off before they began the work) coupled with a rapid texture that, while measured, often felt (and occasionally looked) like various overlapping nervous tremolos all made for a very intimate and slightly anxious experience; like chopsticks on tiny deconstructed chimes. It didn’t sound like Scirrano, but there was that “approaching the edge of silence” element that kept me on the edge of my seat.

Ben Issacs’s <i>Several Inflections</i>

Ben Issacs’s Several Inflections

The work can last anywhere from six minutes to two hours, but in this case was closer to the ten-minute mark. The score was highly detailed and specific, and the lengths to which any ensemble would need to go to prepare and present the work are substantial. The show wrapped up with a fantastic rendition of Xenakis’s Okho. Written for three djembes but realized here on three connected drum sets that included tom-toms, congas, and a shared bass drum, Ohko could not have struck more of a contrast to the Isaacs, and the dynamic release coupled with the performers’ physicality felt like cliff-diving after meditation. You know you’ve got a concert on your hands when the Xenakis is the palate cleanser, and the polyrhythms running around that room had heads bobbing and people fully engaged, including a few munchkins outside.

*

The second stop on my reclaimed warehouse chamber music tour was the Museum of Human Achievement to see the German improv trio Konk Pack presented by Epistrophy Arts. The trio includes analog synthesist Thomas Lehn, drummer Roger Turner, and Tim Hodgkinson of Henry Cow fame whose work with co-founder Fred Frith left an indelible impression on progressive rock of the late ’70s. I’ve seen many improv groups play over the years, but very few exhibited the level of communication on display at the MOHA. Gone were the rounded edges and long transformations often associated with free improv and in their place were crisp transitions, precise timbral choices, and telekinetic, turn-on-a-dime shifts in the music. Particularly impressive in this embarrassment of riches was the impressive exchange of timbre and rhythm between Lehn’s synth and Turner’s drums. Granted, the analog synths have a visceral nature and connection to the primary elements of music in much the same way drums do, but it takes deft manipulation by both parties to connect the two so seamlessly that at times I wasn’t sure who was playing what. It’s worth noting that Turner was not amplified, so everything he played was purely acoustic.

Konk Pack at the Museum of Human Achievement

Konk Pack at the Museum of Human Achievement

Not to be left out, Hodgkinson’s work on the lap steel guitar melded similarly with the synth, especially in the high registers. And while the lappy was not without modest processing, the lion’s share of the sound was coming from his hands, not from stompboxes or other devices. Plucking behind the nut, staccato punctuations, and karate chops to the midsection of the neck resulted in gorgeous reverberations, like gongs rich with overtones. Many of these sounds and textures sat squarely in the same timbral wheelhouse as the analog synth, and I had several, “Where did that come from?” moments listening to the guitar/synth pairing as well. It was less like a typical improv show and more like a concept album that developed right in front of you. One “piece” started with Lehn’s synth chugging along in the lower register, skirting the line between pitch and rhythm. This was picked up by Turner rhythmically in the bass and toms and “melodically” by taking a dowel, striking it against the rim of one of the toms and drawing it towards himself as it rapidly rebounded,  creating a tremolo that had distinct, rising pitch characteristics. As those pitches ascended, Hodgkinson took the cue, coaxing similar pitch and motion from the lap steel. This material developed in a strikingly linear way, with little of the wandering and tangential characteristics of your less experienced improv teams. The term “sound world” is thrown around quite a bit to denote the particular style of a given composer or work, but Konk Pack was able to create several shifting sound worlds, all connected, but each with their own distinct characteristics as well.

*

I love chamber music. I love the intimacy between audience and performers. I never thought it odd to hear a string quartet in a seven-hundred seat hall, but when I started going to smaller shows I began to see (and hear) things differently. The irony of intimacy found in a giant old warehouse is not lost on me, but the cordoning off of spaces within these huge buildings makes for a very personal and connected experience. (The only tricky part is that I feel a little awkward taking pictures during these shows, but I suppose that speaks to the nature of what we’re experiencing as a smaller audience and performing group.) Whether it’s at a brand new space like Canopy or a somewhat more funky room like MOHA, the chance to sit up close to performers as they work their magic is what chamber music is all about, and I’m glad to see that opportunities like this in Austin are on the rise.

Wearing Two Hats: Stewart Copeland on Playing and Composing

Posted on July 10, 2013 by - Field Reports, Headlines

Since the The Police disbanded in the mid-1980s, drummer Stewart Copeland has composed soundtracks for numerous films and television shows and has had works performed by such acclaimed ensembles as the Dallas Symphony Orchestra and Cleveland Orchestra. In May 2013, Copeland’s Edgar Allan Poe-inspired chamber opera, The Tell-Tale Heart, was performed by the Long Beach Opera, and in May 2014, the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra will premiere his new percussion concerto. I reached Copeland at his home studio, the Sacred Grove—where he’s been recording jam sessions with a host of accomplished artists and uploading videos to YouTube—to talk about his approach to composition.

– DB

Stewart Copeland in his home recording studio, the Sacred Grove

Stewart Copeland in his home recording studio, the Sacred Grove.
Photo courtesy Stewart Copeland.

David Brensilver: Your drumming strikes me as rather impulsive. So I’m curious as to how necessarily different your approach to composition is, and whether you tend to capture and develop ideas. Or is your approach more systematic?

Stewart Copeland: Very different. Two different guys. Two different parts of the brain—almost unrelated to each other, although there is probably a connection somewhere.

DB: What about from commission to commission. I mean, do film soundtrack commissions come with specific parameters in terms of mood or attitude?

SC: Oh, absolutely. That’s why decades spent as a working-stiff film composer, I think, is the best education I ever had. Unlike an artist with a capital “A,” you are forced to learn things and go places that you would never go on your own accord. The professional film composer has had to deal with more types of music, more kinds of orchestration, a wider range of emotion, period, than any serious composer—than any serious Artist composer. And by the way, having had that education, I’m not in the film-score business anymore.

DB: Do you make a habit of revisiting and revising music after it’s been performed, like The Tell-Tale Heart?

SC: I’ll probably get around to fixing the score the next time it goes up. I’ll immediately reach for the score and fix a couple things—mainly, removal of percussion. I got a little carried away, because when I was writing it, I was playing it, to make sure it was playable. And the percussionists (would) look at me and say, “Well, of course you can play it.”

DB: You’ve been commissioned by the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic to write a percussion concerto, and I imagine this feels a bit like a mad scientist being handed the keys to a well-appointed laboratory. Was there instrumentation requested or suggested?

SC: Well, yes. As a matter of fact, my last percussion concerto [Gamelan D’Drum] was for gamelan and orchestra. It was a gigantic piece with five percussionists who are actually an ensemble [D’Drum] and they do all kinds of cool stuff—they’ve got not just their Indonesian bells—[both] Balinese and Javanese—but also African stuff, South American stuff, just a really wide array of cool shit that they do. And so, next commission comes up, “O.K., guys, Liverpool, what do you guys do?” “Well, not traps.” “O.K., that’s fine.” “No improvised solos,” like I can’t just write, “Take it away, Bob.” They play the classic, orchestral percussion instruments. Actually, that’s a good thing. Limitations are so often—or, in fact, problems are so often—the seed of great inspiration. So many great ideas are the result of solving a problem. And, by the way, imposing these limitations makes the piece more of a square peg for a square hole as far as other orchestras are concerned. It’s just easier to program if I don’t call for exotic instruments.

DB: Is it fair to say that the “genres”—and that’s in quotation marks—that you work in are really dictated by the commissioning entity and the desired instrumentation, and really not coming from you so much?

SC: Well, it depends what you’re talking about. If it’s a film score, you’re absolutely right. That’s why I don’t do film scores anymore.

DB: But in other words, it doesn’t seem like you’re actively trying to adhere to stylistic traditions.

Stewart Copeland on tour with The Police

Stewart Copeland on tour with The Police. Photo by Lara Clifford, courtesy Stewart Copeland.

SC: Oh, absolutely not. And forms of music that demand that are just tempting for me to just trample all over. Reggae, for instance, absolutely does not demand adherence to its rules. You know, reggae musicians are the most accepting and nonjudgmental of all, I think. I learned that [by] playing with a complete reggae rip-off band called The Police. All the reggae guys really embraced us and were really welcoming. Whereas if, say, instead of reggae The Police had had a strong flavor of any other genre—country, jazz, or punk, for that matter—the other practitioners of that genre would be saying, “No, that’s not the real thing.” Whereas reggae guys just don’t have that attitude.

DB: Do you compose on a particular instrument?

SC: Yeah, it’s called a computer. For composing, it’s all about Digital Performer.

Stewart Copeland in his home recording studio, the Sacred Grove

Stewart Copeland in his home recording studio, the Sacred Grove.
Photo courtesy Stewart Copeland.

DB: Are there moments from the Sacred Grove sessions [1] that you take note of for potential future composition projects?

SC: Not really. The original material that I work with—[it’s] wildly inspiring, really cool, but rarely has there been like a tune or a theme or something. But I do rob myself a lot. A curious discovery is that when you work too hard and too fast, the work is actually better. I learned this on episodic TV, where you have a new show every week, for 24 weeks. Or doing a game, you know, Spyro the Dragon, where for the gig I’ve got to write basically a double album worth of backing tracks. And so you just get your game on and turn on the computer and get working. And I’ve found that some of the themes and melodies and chord progressions that come out of those seat-of-the-pants composing sessions, those are some of the strongest ones. And I tend to go back to those. And when I’m looking to write a big orchestral piece or a really important piece of music, I’m really drawn to that little three-note trick that I came up with on this television series or that.

DB: Are you usually working on commission?

SC: Yeah, I do work on commission, that’s my day job.

DB: So there are no ensemble pieces that you’re writing just for the sake of writing, in other words?

SC: No. I sometimes get a hint of a commission, or even a real commission, and, like I say, I don’t wait around. By the time they’ve sent the contract for signing, I’ve pretty much written the piece. One time I had a huge piece that I was working on and the person who commissioned it was fired, the new person just wiped the slate clean to bring in their own agenda, and before the contract arrived for signing it was over. And so I’ve got this piece sitting in the cookie jar.

DB: What about working with, let’s say, orchestral musicians versus the artists who work with you in Orchestralli [2] or the guys who come over and play at the Sacred Grove? I mean when you went to do The Tell-Tale Heart or when you did Gamelan D’Drum, is there a different sort of working style that the musicians have, in your experience?

SC: Absolutely. The Sacred Grove players are one category of musician, and The Tell-Tale Heart or Dallas Symphony or Cleveland Orchestra players are an entirely different category of musician. Separated at birth, these two enormous and richly varied families are completely distinct: readers and players. Players experience their instrument through their ears and their fingers. Readers, they get their music through their eyes, and the connection goes straight from the page to their fingers—using the brain to interpret the page, but basically it goes from ink to fingers, and that’s basically where the music comes from. All the musicality comes from expressing that ink and really interpreting it, and the ethos is worship of the composer’s intention.

DB: What are a few things that you’re working on now, in terms of compositions and commissions?

SC: Well, I’ve got the Liverpool piece, which I’ve pretty much written—I’ve got the music, I’m just working on the score, which takes me longer than writing the music, by far, but I’m getting faster at it as I do it more. When I was film composing, I had arrangers. But when I got out of that business, and there wasn’t that time pressure, I got into orchestrating myself. And since I haven’t done as much of it, it just takes me longer. But I’m getting faster.

 

Stewart Copeland behind the drums

Stewart Copeland behind the drums
Photo by Jean Carter Wilson, courtesy Stewart Copeland.

DB: What about performance indications?

SC: Oh, well that’s where all the fun is. That’s exactly the reason why I’m orchestrating myself now.

DB: So that when you get somewhere, it’s fairly all spelled out for people and there’s not a whole lot of ambiguity.

SC: No, no. As little as possible.

DB: And so rehearsals, I imagine, are—

SC: Much easier than band rehearsals. [Laughs] A band will take two weeks to get an hour set together. An orchestra will take one rehearsal or two.

DB: When you go back to playing the rock stuff, is all the work you’ve done in terms of writing—whether it’s film scores or orchestra commissions or what have you—do you find that you’re much more efficient and is it frustrating to be around people who aren’t working that way, especially after you’ve been doing so much of that?

SC: No, because that’s what you expect. When I’m hanging with my buddies and we’re rocking out, I have an expectation of what they’re good at and not good at. There are many things that they’re good at that I’m so thankful of, such as they groove, they play by instinct, and we can talk in a language that we each understand. And you can ask things that you just can’t ask an orchestral player, such as, “Give me a 16-bar solo,” or, “Just improvise this” But the upside of the orchestral experience is: two rehearsals and you’ve got it. But it is sometimes frustrating. It was frustrating to go back to The Police environment, which was sort of like a harsh combination of the worst aspects of both, but [with] rewards that transcend both. The music is sacred, the songs, which means that you can’t just make it up as you go along, because you’ve got to deliver what folks spent too much money on tickets to hear. And it’s very formal, The Police creative environment. Whereas when I’m jamming with my rock buddies, usually it’s very informal. And when I’m working with an orchestra there’s no debate at all, there’s no compromise, there’s no negotiation, it’s on the page. There it is, count it in.

Full interview audio:


1. Copeland invites musician friends to jam sessions (at his home studio, the Sacred Grove), which he records, produces, and posts to his YouTube page. Musicians who’ve jammed at the Sacred Grove include Neil Peart, Stanley Clarke, Ben Harper, members of Primus, Andy Summers, and Snoop Dogg, to name a few.

2. An ensemble with which Copeland has performed arrangements of his music.

hoto by Cheryl Albaine

Photo by Cheryl Albaine

David Brensilver is the editor of The Arts Paper (a monthly publication of the Arts Council of Greater New Haven, in Connecticut) and has contributed to a diverse collection of publications. He is a percussionist with performance degrees from The Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University and The Juilliard School.

Interdisciplinary Musicians: Reflecting on the 2013 nief-norf Summer Festival

Posted on June 24, 2013 by - Field Reports, Headlines

As I returned to the nief-norf Summer Festival (nnSF) in Greenville, South Carolina, for a third year this summer, I was asked by many friends why I chose to continue to participate in this festival, rather than others. There are certainly plenty of options in the United States for a festival of the same duration and within the same price range if your interests are centered on new music. My answer revolves around the intersection between performance, composition, and research, and the amazing people who perform those interrelated tasks.

This festival is not focused on simply workshopping classic solo and ensemble pieces for performance, nor is it focused on teaching composers how to write eloquently in chamber settings, nor is it a meeting of scholars in isolation from the rest of the music community. Rather, what nnSF Artistic Director Andrew Bliss seeks to accomplish is a merger of these three disciplines. In effect, nnSF pushes performers, composers, and researchers into the same room and locks the door. What may sound like a chaotic situation, however, is far from it; the effects are outstanding, invigorating, and inspiring.

Omar Carmenates, Andrew Bliss, Mike Truesdell, Kerry O'Brien (left to right) performing Strange and Sacred Noise by John Luther Adams.

Omar Carmenates, Andrew Bliss, Mike Truesdell, Kerry O’Brien (left to right) performing Strange and Sacred Noise by John Luther Adams.

The ten-day festival—hosted by Omar Carmenates at Furman University—revolves around a core series of concerts involving both the participants and the faculty. Originally only focusing on percussion music, the proceedings have expanded in the past two years to include a composition track, as well as cello and piano performance fellows. The first concert took place on the evening of May 28 and featured four of the faculty performing John Luther Adams’s evening-length percussion quartet Strange and Sacred Noise. Ominously hovering above the stage, projected onto the back wall, was a quotation by Jacques Attali that serves as an epigraph to Adams’s score:

Nothing essential happens in the absence of noise…in most cultures, the theme of noise lies at the origin of the religious idea…Music, then, constitutes communication with this primordial, threatening noise—prayer.

–Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music

While serving as a thoughtful prologue to the music, this quotation also effectively set the tone for the festival. Music functions as a means of communication but also, as Attali suggests, as a means to reach beyond our own sphere of understanding. Music occurs not in isolation, but through a communal effort in which potentially great things are achieved.

Andy Bliss, Kerry O’Brien, Omar Carmenates, and Mike Truesdell took to the stage and calmly delivered a precise performance of the mammoth piece. Strange and Sacred Noise is 75 minutes of carefully crafted process and was complimented by projections of each movement’s title, along with visual images and texts corresponding to each movement.

The following day, the performance fellows were tossed straight into rehearsals to prepare for the first of three chamber music concerts. Fellows are assigned and sent music before the festival begins, which allows for rehearsals to pick up at the late stages of preparation. In the three years that I’ve attended nnSF, the performance fellows are always class acts, arriving with their music prepared–their parts pasted into puzzle-box-like contraptions of poster board and tape in order to facilitate page turns–and often bringing fresh and exciting ideas for the pieces that allow for rich interpretations despite the compressed rehearsal period. The rehearsals function as an exciting dialogue between the young professionals and the faculty, and the results are always fantastic.
That evening, everyone gathered at Horizon Records in downtown Greenville for the participants’ cabaret concert. If you ever have the pleasure of visiting the beautiful city of Greenville, South Carolina, I highly recommend stopping at Horizon Records. Gene Berger’s shop houses thousands of amazing records and CDs—both new and old—and he and his staff create a welcoming atmosphere.

The cabaret concert is an opportunity for performers to bring solo pieces to share, and this year a huge range of works were performed, including pieces combining theater and percussion, the inevitable classics, and the increasingly popular Postludes for Bowed Vibraphone by Elliot Cole. Cello faculty member Ashley Walters performed Andrew McIntosh’s Another Secular Calvinist Creed, a piece that required the cello to be tuned according to just intonation and that fully exploited Walters’s steady virtuosity. We all sat mesmerized as her hands calmly leapt up and down the fingerboard and summoned eerie, captivating tones.

Cellist Ashley Walters Performing Andrew McIntosh’s Another Secular Calvinist Creed at Horizon Records

Cellist Ashley Walters performing Andrew McIntosh’s Another Secular Calvinist Creed at Horizon Records

The following two days consisted mostly of rehearsing for the first of the participants’ chamber concerts. Two of the four Call for Scores winners’ works were to be featured on this concert, and those composers (Bryan Christian and Travis Alford) gave presentations on their pieces that morning. In the evening these new works were performed alongside compositions by John Luther Adams, Steve Reich, Kate Neal, John Cage, and Mark Applebaum. The combination of the quality of the music and the momentum of such a fast preparation period led to an exciting night of music making. The audience, consisting mostly of locals from Greenville, also contained many of the scholars who would be presenting at the nief-norf Research Summit the following morning.

Alexv Rolfe performing Kate Neal's What Hath II?.

Alexv Rolfe performing Kate Neal’s What Hath II?.

I haven’t attended any research summits or conferences outside of my experience with nnSF and have often found academic musical analysis to be bewildering and unapproachable. This has been a hurdle I have been able to scale, thanks in part to attending the research summits hosted by nnSF in 2012 and 2013. Performers rarely get to engage with this sort of academic work, and it can be difficult to convince us that it’s important or interesting in the first place. Kerry O’Brien, who organized the Research Summit this year, did a good job persuading everyone, however. Early on, she made the point that it is exceedingly rare for scholars to attend a concert as audience members one night, only to take the “stage” the following day to present their most recent research to a room full of performers, composers, and fellow scholars. The performers and composers participated actively, often raising interesting questions and continuing discussions outside of the lecture hall, well into that evening’s “group hang” at a local bar in downtown Greenville. The research summit really takes the cake, in my mind, and makes nnSF such a unique and rewarding experience. Being confronted with scholarship (and the scholars themselves) really urges you to examine your own approach to the music you play or compose. It’s a healthy reminder that our music is traveling out into the world, and that people are receiving, considering, and responding to it.

Research Summit - Kevin O'Connor, David Luidens, Robby Bowen, Kerry O'Brien (left to right).

Research Summit–Kevin O’Connor, David Luidens, Robby Bowen, Kerry O’Brien (left to right).

This year, the focus of the summit was on music and technology (post-1945) and the presentations stretched out beyond chamber music to cover much broader topics. In addition to presentations by musicologists and theorists, performers and composers also gave a wide variety of papers. After dinner, the entire festival gathered to attend an evening concert featuring the keynote speaker, Scott Deal. Deal is professor of music and the director of the Donald Louis Tavel Arts and Technology Research Center at Indiana University Purdue University of Indianapolis (IUPUI), and his recital featured a full evening of fascinating works involving interactive and fixed media components that expanded the already full stage into a completely unique sound world. Often joining Deal onstage were harpist Erzsébet Gaal Rinne and laptop musician Michael Drews.

Scott Deal and Michael Drews.

Scott Deal and Michael Drews.

The following morning we began rehearsals for the Composer Fellows’ Concert, which would feature six different world premieres of pieces written by the six composition fellows attending nnSF. Percussion is often fairly daunting for composers who do not play percussion themselves or personally know a percussionist. The chance then to be surrounded by percussion music, instruments, and live percussionists for an extended period of time is an opportunity for composers to get a foothold on an otherwise steep slope. Similarly, time spent hashing out the more esoteric extended techniques of the cello proved valuable, and many of the effects made their way into the compositions.

Christopher Adler working with composition fellow Young-jin Jeon.

Christopher Adler working with composition fellow Young-jin Jeon.

Under the expert eye of Christopher Adler, the nnSF composition director, the six composition fellows experimented with various sound combinations, while seeing the performers physically engage with the instruments and having the opportunity to talk extensively about notation, sound production, and any other facets of percussion playing that piqued their curiosity. Throughout the week the composers worked with the performers assigned to their compositions, tweaking and refining notational plans and often making considerable adjustments to instrumentation on the fly. For the performers, working so closely with composers helped us to learn how to clearly communicate our own limitations and expectations and, more often, to find creative ways to accomplish what was being asked of us.

Following the Composer Fellows’ Concert, the push for the third and final evening’s concert began, but before the race commenced, piano faculty R. Andrew Lee presented Dennis Johnson’s 1959 composition November, a five-hour minimalist work for solo piano.

R. Andrew Lee performing Dennis Johnson's November.

R. Andrew Lee Performing Dennis Johnson’s November.

With couches pushed onto the stage and the audience invited to come and go as they pleased, to lay down if they wished (but to please not snore), Lee began the piece. He bathed us in a fragile sound world of expansive proportions that urged listeners to examine their relationship to harmony, pitch, and eventually to sound itself. About two hours into the performance, it began to rain, initiating an achingly beautiful soundscape: soft echoes of the raindrops filled the hall, serving as a perfect compliment to the music’s own delicate patter.

The last concert featured composer-in-residence Evan Ziporyn’s Where Was I? (for cello, percussion, and piano), works by two Call for Scores winners (Nicholas Deyoe and Lewis Nielson), and a realization of Earle Brown’s graphic work December 1952. Being confronted with considerably more difficult music, the intensity of the rehearsals heightened, although the atmosphere never became tense or discouraging. As the performance fellows took the stage for the final time, the feeling was somehow different. In ten short days, the ceaseless rehearsal schedule combined with the long discussions into the night, shared meals, and walks around Furman’s beautiful campus had created a strong sense of camaraderie between us. Instead of performing these works with strangers, I was on stage with my colleagues and new life-long friends.

Final Concert - Lewis Nielson's Tocsin

Final Concert – Lewis Nielson’s Tocsin

As we began the final piece, Lewis Nielsen’s vast Tocsin for six percussionists, I recalled another passage I had found in Attali’s Noise:

“We must learn to judge a society more by its sounds, by its art, and by its festivals…”
If we take Attali’s criteria to heart, festivals like this one—festivals that celebrate and encourage amazing art, amazing research, spurred and promulgated by amazing people—are gems to our society.

*

Alexv Rolfe is a percussionist currently residing in Dekalb, IL, where he is a candidate in the M.M. program at Northern Illinois University. In addition to writing and reading about music, Alexv enjoys performing in different western and non-western traditions and is also a budding amateur cook.
(All photography by Live Well Photography)

Sticks and Strings: Houston’s Liminal Space

Posted on June 20, 2013 by - Field Reports, Headlines

In the new(ish) world of bootstrap new music development, big things can come from the smallest of starts. In contrast to (or perhaps in response to) the slow-to-change, large-scale organizations that are dodging strikes, lockouts, and other potential extinction events, smaller, more nimble groups that are able to hide from the nuclear winter of dried-up funding, atrophied audience, and fracturing infrastructure are thriving. In contrast to the large institution model which involves the performance of largely 18th- and 19th-century warhorses to an audience whose average age is moving steadily upward, ensembles like San Antonio’s SOLI and Houston’s Musiqua have combined smaller forces and adventurous programming to engage with audiences old and new. Emerging from the rubble, these groups find new life in new forms, and though the Pierrot ensemble has emerged as one of the leading configurations, other families are taking shape as well. While the Pierrot is comprised of traditional instruments, the catch-all potential of the “plus percussion” option is quite compelling and has played a significant role in the development of music for the ensemble. When the percussion is taken out of this traditional context and placed alongside another primarily 20th-century chameleon, the guitar [1], a potent new pairing is created. A few months after seeing the potential of this duo during the Living Earth Show this past spring, I stopped in to hear Houston’s Liminal Space (guitarist George Heathco and percussionist Luke Hubley) present a concert that included two commissioned premieres.

Liminal Space at Frenetic Theater Photo by Nicholas Leh Baker

Liminal Space at Frenetic Theater
Photo by Nicholas Leh Baker

I arrived at the Frenetic Theater just outside of downtown Houston about twenty minutes prior to the show and had a chance to survey the facility and the crowd. The multi-use venue geared towards dance and theater held a good-sized Sunday night crowd. Spread out in the 100-seat theater, some patrons had taken their chairs while others stood chatting, and it was in this relaxed setting and with little fanfare that Liminal Space walked onstage to start the show.

Originally written in 2008 for two bass clarinets, Mark Mellits’s Black has since been rearranged for a variety of duos and lent itself well to the guitar and marimba incarnation. Rolling lines and punchy riffs which brought to mind a mid-’80s King Crimson were couched in symmetrical phrases and sections, their rock and roll roots showing. Both players were all in for the bulk of the work, and Heathco’s clean guitar tone with just a hint of overdrive for body [2] complimented the mellow tone of the marimba.
The evening’s concert was the closer of the inaugural season, and Hubley took a minute to describe the genesis of the group, which made its debut with a John Cage centenary concert last September. Among their goals is the regular commissioning of new music for the ensemble, and to that end Liminal Space has commissioned nine composers in the Houston area to compose new works for guitar and percussion. The next piece on the evening’s program, Apparatus by Mark Buller, was the second of two world premieres of work written for Liminal Space as part of their 2013 New Music Initiative. Apparatus started with a simple additive process played in unison, the two slowly expanding lines diverged recalling Reich’s Piano Phase, only to eventually return to their original position. The second movement began with pulsing dyads outlined in crescendos and decrescendos, hairpins rising and falling while an initial symmetry gave way to odd groupings and smaller divisions. This lead to a clearer separation of the parts as arpeggios in the marimba formed a framework for leaping octaves in the guitar. A recollection of the first movement had the guy behind me tapping (a bit loudly…) his feet and bopping his head, though it was funny to hear him lose the rhythm as the patterns began to phase once again.

Taking a quick break from the duo action and a modest step back in time, Heathco performed the solo plus tape version of Reich’s Electric Counterpoint. The work holds up well 30+ years later, and the relative ease with which an enterprising guitarist can record and playback the parts on a laptop should allow for more performances than ever before. Hubley then took his moment in the spotlight to perform Cage’s In a Landscape. Written for dancer Louise Lippold in 1948, its modest range and bifurcated octaves give the work a controlled and harmonically segmented sensibility. A pleasant, quasi-pentatonic sound resulted as scales rose and fell in comfortable mid-tempo eighth notes, every one taking its place from a list of dance counts provided to Cage by Lippold.
The closer for the evening was the second NMI world premiere of the night, Eric Martin’s You didn’t build that!, which was a nod to some of the rhetoric of the last presidential election cycle. A guitar intro which begged to be joined by drum kit [3] was interrupted abruptly by the marimba, part of the concept of the piece in which each instrument attempts to one-up the other. This led to a more traditional back and forth of sorts, with the guitar backing the marimba for a time and the marimba returning the favor. Harmonically straddling the modal/white-note world, the two instruments morphed comfortably from foreground to background before reaching the work’s conclusion.
Liminal Space put on a terrific show for a clearly enthusiastic audience. The guitar/percussion combo is quite approachable and particularly versatile, and while the idea that the use of these more familiar instruments will make inroads with those outside the new music community is debatable, it can’t hurt. When a traditional string trio or brass quintet takes the stage, adventurous new music converts may be inclined to check out before the first note. However the familiarity of the guitar (or the laptop) has the potential to bring something from an audience member’s world into the one they are about to experience, and who doesn’t like watching someone beat on things with sticks? [4] Regardless, the music on tap that evening was certainly as rich and involved as any one might hear from more traditional instruments, and with the 2013-2014 season lined up, Liminal Space is in a great position to be at the vanguard of a whole new ensemble movement.

***


1. In another life, I was a classical guitarist and am well aware of the rich pre-20th century repertoire for the instrument. I’m also aware that a few guitarists out there read that sentence and immediately began harrumphing all over the place, so just relax.


2. It’s a tone I’ve always associated with jazz, but given that I’ve listened to and played very little jazz, you can take my evaluation of this “jazz tone” with a big old grain of salt. Heathco was playing a gorgeous red hollow body, and it’s certainly possible that the hint of overdrive was just a result of the pickups coloring the sound. Or aliens.


3. I’ve played in approximately a million rock bands, so you can take this estimation to the bank.


4. It’s been brought to my attention that there is more to percussion than this.