Tag: piano

Music and The Body

Posted on May 12, 2014 by Andy Costello - Columns

Costello performing Aperghis in Montréal, January of 2013. Photo by Fredrik Gran.

Take a deep breath in. Breathe out.

I cannot tell you how many times I’ve been given these directions in a musical score.

It’s a reminder. It’s the composer’s way of saying, “Don’t forget, my friend, you are a body.”

People should start saying, instead of “I want to be somebody,” simply, “I want to be a body.”

I think embodiment is profoundly important to music. One of the seminal books to my artistic practice was David Borgo’s writing on embodiment in Sync or Swarm: Improvising Music in a Complex Age. He speaks of the “embodied mind”—this notion nearly drove me into the field of musicology, and away from the realm of performance. I was ready to give up embodiment in practice for embodiment through the mind. A demented notion, I know.

Although I’m sure I would be happy either way, I’m thrilled that instrumental performance is my primary professional activity.
I began serious piano study as a practical necessity—and in a sense, a rite of passage—to becoming a composer. Most music schools, even if you intended to major in something else, required an entrance audition on an instrument.

In undergrad, I quickly realized that I cared more for doers than for thinkers. Thought is beautiful and powerful, but only in its implicit relationship to action. I believed (and still do) that written and spoken thought is only re-actionary, and can never usurp the action to which it refers. To pay tribute to the late, brilliant Colombian writer, Gabriel García Márquez, “Lo único mejor que la música es hablar de música.” (“The only thing better than music is to talk about music.”) I couldn’t disagree more with this sentiment.

These are the terms under which I have become involved in theatrical repertoire on the contemporary music scene. I have become a self-proclaimed “speaking pianist”—a pianist who, in addition to playing the instrument, recites text and embodies characters at the piano—and have commissioned and performed works for the body and voice, even, at times, entirely away from the piano.

(This is not to say that I am the only “oddball” on this front—and far from the best!—as contemporary music in the U.S. can only be characterized by exceptions to the rule. Notables in this arena that come to mind are the NYC-based collective ThingNY and Aiyun Huang in Montréal.)

In recital, I find myself wanting to speak off-the-cuff to the audience. To me, the entire tradition of an untouchable, superhuman performer is antiquated. As soon as I take that initial bow to that willing, clapping, smiling audience, I think to myself, “I owe at least this to them—to present myself as a person.”

What does this have to do with The Body? The body, and the use of it, in this particular setting, is the only way to dismantle those lofty ideals of immortality created by superhuman virtuosity. The body is our reminder—to both performer and audience alike—of mortality.

I play arguably the easiest musical instrument upon which to produce complex sound—the piano. Packed with centuries of innovation, the modern concert grand is the Frankenstein of the concert hall; it is a cumulative technological invention of which to be very proud. Kudos to those working hard there.

However, this technician’s pride should never override our will to seek out the instrument’s visceral qualities. The ghost in the machine is not a ghost at all—rather, a living, breathing, speaking, moving person.

Superhuman strength is a man-made creation—a form of machinery.

As a speaking pianist, I have, on several occasions, turned 90 degrees to the right, to face the audience directly. I am always thrilled by this moment. The action swiftly effaces my noble pianist profile—the Romantic façade of a hero. No longer is one staring at another, but rather, we are now looking at one other. I occasionally see sheepishness in the faces (does that make me a shepherd?), exhibiting an awkwardness you may feel when your eyes accidentally meet those of a stranger you had been watching without their knowledge.

The most fundamental aspect of classical music performance practice is voyeurism. The audience may stare upon the performer, and the performer must act as if they are unaware, looking either at their instrument, at their sheet music, at the conductor, at other instrumentalists, or the least-but-still-acceptable choice, playing with their eyes closed—essentially, anything but the eyes of the audience. Turning to the audience changes everything—it shifts the experience from voyeuristic to collaborative. And what a glorious shift that is.

Pianist Nobuyuki Tsujii.
(Credit: Wikipedia, Wikicommons)

Let me shift your attention to Nobuyuki Tsuji, the 2009 Gold Medalist of the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition. A blind musician, Tsujii often “looks” directly to the audience, as if reaching out in a deeply vulnerable way. The theatrical effect is quite tangible in his performance of Chopin’s Berceuse.

An audience can be nothing but voyeuristic when watching Tsujii perform. His condition awarded him the ability to look wherever he pleases without reprimand.
For me, I go to live concerts to directly interact. If I feel like not interacting with other bodies, I’ll stay at home and listen to a recording. (Of course, there’s nothing wrong with that either.) The use of the body in a concert setting offers an accessible and dynamic alternative to the long-standing performer-as-deity ideal. I’m not interested in watching a superhuman compete in a human challenge. No one likes a rigged game.

***

The most outstanding theatrical performances are those that embody, not those that transcend. In theatre, super-human actors are useless. What makes them any more valuable in music? The purest musical virtuosity convinces us that even the most physically transcendent feats are commonplace and human. The etymology of “virtuoso” suggests excellence and mastery, not deification. Descriptors like “god-like” and “superhuman” are hyperbolic.

The in-the-moment magic is what I crave as a spectator, not the aforementioned descriptors. As performers, we should do our best to preserve that aspect, and to preserve it virtuosically. The Body—and with it, the visual, the theatrical, and the voice—is essential to my artistic practice as a musician. The Body is all we’ve got and embodiment is all we can do, and no composition or performance in the world can transcend this.

Join me next week as I write to you a third time, using body parts to discuss body parts: Music and The Heart.

Vicki Ray Reflects on 20 Years of Piano Spheres

Posted on March 17, 2014 by Isaac Schankler - Field Reports, Headlines

Vicki Ray

“I believe in composers,” Vicki Ray tells me. This is exactly the kind of thing that could sound like an empty platitude, but she says it with undeniable conviction—and with the track record to back it up, too. Along with Gloria Cheng, Mark Robson, and Susan Svercek, Ray is one of four pianists involved with the Piano Spheres concert series, a Los Angeles institution that is now celebrating its 20th anniversary. Over the years, Piano Spheres has presented 73 premieres (48 of them world premieres), and commissioned 19 pieces through the Leonard Stein Memorial Fund. According to Ray, however, the actual number of commissions associated with the series is harder to pin down, since “sometimes other institutions like CalArts help out, and sometimes I just pay for it out of my own pocket.” (Because she believes in composers.)

Of course Piano Spheres programs older music, too—that is, contemporary music that is no longer contemporary, until we have a better term for this kind of thing. Mark Robson’s recent concert on February 11 covered a remarkable swath of music from the 20th and 21st centuries, including everything from extremely delicate pieces by Beat Furrer, Toru Takemitsu, and Olivier Messiaen, to thorny fingerbusters by Charles Ives and Thomas Adès, whose Concert Paraphrase on “Powder Her Face” sounded something like a diabolical tango buried under layers of dense counterpoint and Lisztian shrapnel.

Mark Robson in performance

Ray’s upcoming program on March 18, by contrast, is solely grounded in the present. She will play several recent works by living composers, including Hoyt-Schermerhorn by Invisible Cities composer Christopher Cerrone, Six Settings for Solo Piano by local composer and LA Phil percussionist Joseph Pereira, and Donnacha Dennehy’s Stainless Staining. She’s particularly excited to play Dennehy’s music, which doesn’t get a lot of performances on the West Coast, she says.

Ray will also play the winning piece from their spring 2013 audience poll, a new initiative created for Piano Spheres’ 20th season. This poll allowed the audience to vote for one piece from a shortlist of pieces from the last twenty years for each pianist to perform again. When the audience voted for Ray’s own composition, The Waking, her reaction was one of incredulity. “I was shocked, stunned… I swear I didn’t stuff the ballot box!”

This modesty carries over into Ray’s account of how she first became involved in Piano Spheres, the brainchild of musicologist and pianist Leonard Stein. “I had just finished my doctorate, and Leonard just called me up one day and asked me to be a part of it.” She attributes much of Piano Spheres’ early success to the respect and “street cred” that Stein carried within the new music community. (At the time, Stein was also the music director of the Arnold Schoenberg Institute at USC, which did much to promote Schoenberg’s music and legacy in Los Angeles.)

Ray with Morton Subotnick and Leonard Stein.

But even with Stein’s participation, Piano Spheres was a risky proposition at first, with the LA new music community being much smaller in those days. Ray vividly describes how things have changed in the past 20 years:

Back then, it was basically the [California] EAR Unit and Xtet in town, and those were the two main new music groups, and then there was the [LA Phil’s] Green Umbrella series, but there wasn’t that much going on, certainly not the unbelievable plethora of small venues that you see here everywhere today. There are so many new groups right now—for example, there’s Gnarwhallaby, and What’s Next Ensemble, and the Hear Now Festival, and all the stuff at Monk Space, and People Inside Electronics, and DC8—and that’s just a drop in the bucket. It just feels like the community’s grown, and it’s more vibrant, and it’s less dependent on big venues and established theories. There’s a lot more self-producing going on.

Part of that vibrancy is certainly due to pioneering groups like Piano Spheres, which started out with a similar DIY spirit. “When we first started out we didn’t have a board, we were just licking stamps and self-producing our own concerts,” Ray recalls. The series started out at the Neighborhood Unitarian Universalist Church of Pasadena, but their audiences quickly outgrew the space, and they soon moved to the Colburn School’s Zipper Hall, where they continue to host concerts today.

Piano Spheres (l to r) Mark Robson, Gloria Cheng, Leonard Stein, Vicki Ray, and Susan Svercek.
Photo by Betty Freeman.

Stein passed away in 2004, just before the series’ 10th anniversary, but by then it had enough structure and momentum to sustain itself. “As word got out, we started to get a lot of solicitations from pianists from all over the world, because there’s really no other series like this.” This allowed the series to host a rotating cast of guest artists from all over the world, a long list that includes Thomas Adès, Kathleen Supové, Christopher O’Riley, Ursula Oppens, Eric Huebner, Joanne Pearce Martin, and Liam Viney.
But as Ray says, “Leonard’s original mission was to showcase pianists from Los Angeles, so that has always been part of the mission. Our main new venture we’re starting is this Satellite Series, where we’re showcasing four younger pianists also from the Los Angeles area. We feel like we want to pass on the legacy that Leonard left us to the next generation.” The inaugural run of the Satellite Series will commence in 2015 with Steven Vanhauwaert, Richard Valitutto, Aron Kallay, and Nic Gerpe as the featured performers.

As for Ray, she has an eclectic range of things to keep her busy in the meantime. Her other performances in the past month have included a gig with jazz composer-improviser Wadada Leo Smith in Mexico City, and a performance with Aron Kallay as the Ray-Kallay Duo at the MicroFest Records Release Party, celebrating the album release of John Cage’s Ten Thousand Things, which earned Ray a Grammy nomination this past year.

When she goes on sabbatical from teaching at CalArts next year, Ray has a few other ideas for things in the works—“I can’t seem to stop starting projects,” she admits. She wants to get back into composing more, and dreams of commissioning a prepared piano concerto from John Luther Adams. She also hopes to start a new local concert series for art song, which would bring her closer to her classical roots as a performer, which she feels often gets overlooked:

You do get pigeonholed…I used to do tons of lieder recitals and traditional chamber music, but people tend to think of you one way, and what can you do? But they inform each other, so you want to keep your traditional sensibility, and your historical link to the past. When I was a student I did standard rep all the time. Now I think if it’s a great piece and I want to play it, I don’t care when it was written.

Sounds Heard: In the Mood for a Melody (Piano Person Edition)

Posted on August 20, 2013 by Molly Sheridan - Albums, Listen

Perhaps it is the drama surrounding the Steinway sale that has put me in a piano state of mind (my last Billy Joel allusion, I promise), but this week three unique keyboard albums caught my attention.

At the top of the pile was Little Things featuring the toy piano talents of Phyllis Chen. While of miniaturized stature, the instrument’s impact under Chen’s fingers is full-sized; any misapprehension that this music is simply a novelty exercise on a child’s plaything is quickly curbed. The disc’s seven compositions—some concentrating on the instrument alone, others incorporating electronics, recorded vocals, and/or additional percussive sounds—span a compelling range of sonic worlds that dazzle with their creative use of the toy piano’s unique timbre, the distinctly audible key strokes, and variously employed extended techniques. While often playful, to my ears each piece avoided any coy winks at cuteness that the instrument might encourage. Angélica Negrón’s The Little Things, with its expanded palette of additional instruments and electronics, is a particular disc stand out.

Concentrated from another angle, Cold Blue’s release of Jim Fox’s Black Water as a CD single allows listener attention to cleanly focus on his 18-minute work for three pianos (each part covered here by Bryan Pezzone). Borrowing its title from a collection of short stories Fox was reading at the time of its composition, the work tracks a nearly relentless shimmering movement that explores the full range of the keyboard. When the lines do linger a bit in a particular area of tranquility, the mood easily turns reflective, but the bulk of Pezzone’s work across the three piano parts keeps ears pulled forward, the notes a school of silvery fish rapidly outpacing any ominous predators floating in the shadows.

Bonus points: Where thoughtfully curated collections are fascinating, hodgepodge albums with no clear through line often frustrate my listening enjoyment. I found that this singular presentation significantly strengthened my engagement with the work and easily encouraged repeat listens.

Rounding out this case of innovative ivory pressing is Timo Andres’s album Home Stretch, a three-work collection of pieces that allow the listener to view the pianist/composer’s musical mind from several intriguing and overlapping angles. In performance with the Metropolis Ensemble under the direction of Andrew Cyr, the disc opens with Andres’s own Home Stretch, a piece that embraces a colorful intricacy in the piano line rather than flashy showmanship and encourages a joyful interplay with the orchestra. Andres’s Paraphrase on Themes of Brian Eno and his completion/recomposition of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 26 (Coronation) both showcase musical dialog of a slightly different ilk. His take on the Mozart in particular really held me up by the lapels. As the disc’s liner notes illuminate, here Mozart gave himself plenty of room to improvise in the original score (and neglected to specifically notate much of the left-hand part). Andres fills in with materials of his own invention, stretching the paths this way and that and inviting in his own ideas and influences with one hand, while holding Mozart’s in his other.

Admittedly, the exercise may not be for everyone—one friend called it “the ultimate act of hubris”—but adore it or despise it, at the very least it’s likely to fuel some animated post-listening thinking.

Mozart / Timothy Andres: Piano Concerto No. 26 “Coronation” – 1st Movement.
Movements 2 and 3, plus Paraphrase on Themes of Brian Eno, are also available on the Metropolis Ensemble’s Vimeo channel.

In the Bay Area: Cahill at the Piano and Music@Menlo

Posted on August 8, 2013 by Sidney Chen - Field Reports, Headlines

Pianist Sarah Cahill’s engaging solo recital last Friday, presented by Old First Concerts, included an advance look at a program that Cahill is planning to perform at San Quentin State Prison next month of music by Henry Cowell. Also included were pieces by three other composers who were either born or now live in the San Francisco Bay Area, and several works by the late Canadian composer Ann Southam. In a hall filled with familiar faces, Cahill introduced Piano Step by Samuel Carl Adams (composer John Adams’s son) by saying “most of you have probably known him since he was little.” Similarly, Cahill and Shinji Eshima, whose Delta 88 was given its premiere performance, have a friendship dating back 40 years, and John Kennedy, who moved to the Bay Area from Santa Fe only a year ago, has already established a regular local presence.

Sarah Cahill, using her forearm to play clusters in Henry Cowell’s High Color

Cahill played two works by Cowell on this program, Rhythmicana and High Color, which were both written in 1938, during the four-year period when Cowell was incarcerated on a morals charge at San Quentin in Marin County, north of the Golden Gate Bridge. (A recording of Cahill playing High Color is available on New Albion Records’ document of the 1997 Henry Cowell Piano Festival in Berkeley, which coincidentally is when Cahill first met Kennedy.) Cahill’s upcoming project is a performance at the prison on September 20 of music that Cowell wrote while imprisoned. In addition to works for piano, Cahill hopes to accompany a few of the inmates in Cowell’s songs from this period and to enlist other musicians to perform Cowell’s United string quartet and other works. (The prison has a history of arts advocacy; the Marin Shakespeare Festival has been working with inmates annually to present a Shakespeare play, alongside works written by the incarcerated reflecting Shakespeare’s themes.)

Delta 88 by Shinji Eshima, a longtime bassist with the San Francisco Opera and San Francisco Ballet orchestras, was constructed with the idea of using each key across the full range of the piano once, with the sustain pedal held throughout the two-and-a-half minute work. The metaphor, Eshima writes, is of “the many things we experience but once in our lives.” As such, Eshima moves through some of the notes very quickly using fast arpeggiations up the keyboard, but other pitches are slowed down and observed more carefully, like the final three which settle at the lowest and highest ends of instrument.

John Kennedy’s Naturali Periclitati (“Endangered Natures”) was written in 2007 for a program that Santa Fe pianist Marthanne Verbit was preparing on the deteriorating state of the environment. (Her recording was released on Albany Records’ Endangered.) An evocative 15-minute piece in three movements, Kennedy uses large register separation between voices throughout the work, creating an unsettled sense of multiple realities coexisting uneasily. Piano Step (2010), written for Lisa Moore by Samuel Carl Adams when he was 25, is constructed on an 11-chord passacaglia that begins its eight-minute journey as an oddly mixed-metered homophonic hymn. Along the way it breaks apart into different registrations, dissolves into stuttering single notes, and gets interrupted by occasional interjections, before settling into an unexpected, quiet and simple statement in the distance right at the end.

Richard Friedman introduces work by Ann Southam

While Eshima and Kennedy were both on hand to speak about their pieces (Brooklyn-based Adams was not able to attend), Cahill asked Richard Friedman, who has a weekly program on KALW called Music from Other Minds, to introduce the works by Ann Southam—Glass Houses No. 7 and Rivers, Series II, No. 2. (Cahill also hosts a new music program on KALW, recently renamed Revolutions Per Minute.) The infectious enthusiasm with which Friedman spoke about coming across Southam’s music for the first time is probably familiar to all NewMusicBox readers who have at one time said, “OMG, I just heard this great thing and I have to play it for you right now!” Indeed, this delight in discovery pervaded the entire concert, which had the feeling of a small group of friends taking pleasure in sharing some nice things they found.

Cahill’s performance of Southam’s fluid, minimalist works—Glass Houses No. 7 has a rolling nine-note pattern in the left hand that repeats throughout; Rivers a gentle rocking pattern in the right hand—were mesmerizing and organic. In his introduction, Friedman said that while many composers write music about water, Southam’s music “sounds like water,” and in fact, as the left hand melody crossed and flowed through the repeating right hand figure in Rivers, the line picked up and subsumed the notes of the ostinato like pebbles carried along by the current.

Cahill closed the program with a spirited delivery of Cowell’s High Color, which evokes the “dazzling gold” in the hills of Ireland. Cowell overlays an Irish jig tune with forearm clusters, which results in a joyous cacophony that Cahill confidently delivered with her refreshing lack of unnecessary showmanship and pretense. The concert was greeted with a rousing standing ovation, which yielded a final work by Southam, also from the Rivers series—a quiet and reflective send-off into the evening.

***

Christopher Froh, Ian Rosenbaum, and Ayano Kataoka (from left) performing Part One of Reich’s Drumming
Photo courtesy of Music@Menlo

The small rural outpost that Henry Cowell was born in bears little resemblance to the Menlo Park of today. Located in the midst of Silicon Valley, Menlo Park is now home to Facebook and numerous venture capital firms, as well as the Music@Menlo summer chamber music series, which was founded 11 seasons ago by New York-based artistic directors David Finckel and Wu Han, who also head the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. Though nearly all of the festival’s programming is traditionally in the Bach/Beethoven/Brahms vein—especially this season, which is titled From Bach—one concert on this year’s Carte Blanche recital series stood out for its programming of Nancarrow, Cage, Reich, and other 20th-century composers, featuring percussionists Christopher Froh, Ayano Kataoka, and Ian Rosenbaum.

Menlo-Atherton High School’s Center for Performing Arts

Held in the 500-seat theater at the Center for Performing Arts on the campus of the Menlo-Atherton High School, this shrewdly chosen program of solos, duets, and trios drawn from international contemporary percussion repertoire was an unadulterated delight for the audience throughout. More than once during the intermission I overheard people say with pleasure, “That was really fun!” and “This is not what I expected!” (The only work from earlier than 1948 was Kataoka’s transcription for solo marimba of the first three movements of Bach’s Violin Partita No. 3, which she played with such grace and flair that audience members applauded heartily after each movement.)

Kataoka and Froh perform Kagel’s “Railroad Drama” from Rrrrrr…
Photo courtesy of Music@Menlo

The three percussionists, who do not perform regularly as a trio—Froh is based in the Bay Area, while Kataoka and Rosenbaum are from the East Coast, both having been members of CMS Two—collectively demonstrated an interest in theatricality, employing lighting designs for several of the works and programming Thierry de Mey’s Table Music, performed with virtuosic verve and occasional moments of hamminess, and two movements from Mauricio Kagel’s Rrrrrrr…. The three gathered around one bass drum for Nebojsa Zivkovic’s wild and wildly entertaining Trio per uno, and followed that with the highlight of the program for me, Rosenbaum’s supremely elegant and meditative reading of John Cage’s In a Landscape adapted for solo marimba.

Trio per uno by Nebojsa Zivkovic
To conclude the program, four pairs of bongo drums were arranged in a T (instead of a straight line) for the three musicians to play Part One of Steve Reich’s Drumming, written for four percussionists but reconfigured to be possible for three. The Music@Menlo crowd, which had never before been offered an all-percussion concert at this festival, gave the musicians an enthusiastic and well-deserved ovation, showing yet again that with compelling programming and a charismatic performance, even an audience used to a steady diet of the European classical canon will respond to an excellent concert filled with music new to their ears.

Table Music by Thierry de Mey

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

Posted on June 24, 2013 by Alexv Rolfe - 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.

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

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?.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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

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)

Sounds Heard: Amy Williams—Crossings: Music for Piano and Strings

Posted on June 18, 2013 by Molly Sheridan - Albums, Listen

Being a Suzuki-trained violinist myself, it’s rare that music listening inspires me to reach for a score, but that’s what I found myself wishing for while unpacking the layers of sound that comprise Amy Williams’s Richter Textures (2011). (I soon discovered that the composer has helpfully posted it to her website, and so I was able to explore the piece’s construction in more detail.) In this opening composition on her new Albany CD of chamber music, Williams conjures in sound the character of seven Richter paintings and the JACK Quartet brings them to remarkable life. The seven-movement work proceeds without pause, which further heightens the impact of the assured passing game the quartet members run throughout the piece. No examination extends longer than four and a half minutes, but each movement builds up a translation of Richter’s visual medium ranging from frozen to frantic. Williams employs a full bag of colorful string techniques to accomplish this, but none that show any evidence of pushing the players beyond their comfort.

In total, the music included on the disc spans some ten years of compositional activity, and Williams’s experience as a pianist and her work in The Bugallo-Williams Piano Duo has likely contributed to her sensitivity and skill when it comes to composing chamber music. Williams’s comments in the brief booklet notes highlight her interest in using points of inspiration not as material for quotation but as “a structural model, abstract reference or starting point for a particular compositional process.” (A sentiment which somewhat harkens back to Arlene Sierra’s comments on her own working methods.)

In some instances, her influences are seemingly audible, as in Brigid’s Flame (2009), a solo piano work composed in memory of Williams’s late father-in-law. The piece features a number of dense running piano lines which easily link up with the images of flickering firelight suggested by the title. The Brian Philip Katz poem that inspired the composition of Falling (2012) written for Ursula Oppens is reprinted in the booklet, but the sonic connections Williams draws out are arguably less directly presented and instead perhaps more personally infused into the slow drift of the music. Both brief works are performed on this recording by the composer herself. From here, the emotional tone of the album takes a sharp left as Jeffrey Jacob launches into the intricate, rapid-fire keywork required in Astoria (2004), a piece rooted in Astor Piazzolla’s Movimiento Continuo (Williams cites its structure, harmonic progressions, and rhythmic patterns as points of intersection) without being terribly obvious about it. It’s an addictive little gem of a piece.
The Bugallo-Williams Piano Duo performs the two remaining piano-focused works, the genesis of both traceable to the music of other composers. According to Williams, Crossings (2009) reaches back to Bach and Abstracted Art (2001-02) to the music of Art Tatum, but the leash of influence seems long and I suspect listeners would be hard pressed to make the associations if the composer hadn’t pointed them out herself. Crossings for four hands unspools along deliberately plotted steps, the exploration keeping largely to the upper register until well past the halfway point and the density only gaining serious weight in the work’s final minutes, Williams’s dynamic finally reaching the bolded and underlined stage. Despite its serious sounding title, Abstracted Art has a lot more play in the lines and isn’t shy about flashing the sass it has to offer.

Arriving at the closing bookend, the JACK is joined by Williams at the piano for Cineshape 2 (2007), one in a series of works inspired by films–in this case the split screen experiment Timecode. The instrumentalists work through the music, sometimes in a kind of soliloquy among the other players and sometimes in conversation with them, the development of various thematic areas punctuated by some startling moments of auditory aggression.

Across the disc, this collection of music stands in dialog with other creative work, whether in the form of stories, images, text, or other music. It is an intimate look inside Williams’s artistic influences, a portrait of what she has seen there and what she has taken away.

Sounds Heard: Dennis Johnson–November

Posted on April 2, 2013 by Isaac Schankler - Albums, Listen

I’ll admit it: I was doing other things while listening to November. This important work of early minimalism (from 1959!) by Dennis Johnson had until recently fallen into obscurity. While Johnson himself turned away from music not long after its composition, LaMonte Young–one of the fathers of minimalism–credits this piece as a direct inspiration for his influential The Well-Tuned Piano. But November was not performed for decades until, in 2009, Kyle Gann reconstructed the score using an old cassette recording and notes provided by Johnson for reference:

[T]he complete “score,” if that is the correct term [,] consists of “motifs” plus rules of which motifs can follow each given motif – at least that is what it should be, but I’m afraid that it isn’t made entirely clear. Items 1-15 were written around 1970-1971. Pages A + B are, I think, an attempt to make the transitions more explicit – or possibly to write down the transitions as they occur in the recording, but it was never finished, so the recording must stand as the primary definition example of the piece. The piece was not meant to be entirely fixed, but somewhat improvisatory, with the given transitions as the rules for the improvisation. No rules were implied about the times spent on any of the motifs, nor on the number of recurrences/recycles of any motif – they do recur in the tape.

Now, more than 50 years after its premiere, the composition has finally been recorded in its entirety by pianist R. Andrew Lee and released as a 4-CD set and digital download by Irritable Hedgehog.

At five hours, November is at the extreme outer limits of the average attention span, but its lengthy duration isn’t unique. Aside from The Well-Tuned Piano, Morton Feldman’s String Quartet No. 2 comes to mind, for example, or the 24-hour version of Erik Satie’s Vexations. The particular performance rituals that have sprung up around these pieces have created a certain accepted context and etiquette for extra-long compositions. Concertgoers are not necessarily expected to be there for the entire performance, and may come and go as they please.

But November doesn’t quite fit in with those pieces, despite its placid ambiance and patient unfolding. Five hours is a length of time that means you could, conceivably, listen to the whole thing in one sitting. So instead of falling into the existing context, the piece asks you to do something slightly more radical, especially in its recorded form: it asks you to invent your own context. Do you listen to the whole thing in one sitting, alone, in the dark? Do you listen to a disc or two at a time while you do the dishes or fold laundry? Or, as I did, do you listen to the entire piece on a long road trip, accompanied by the dull roar of the freeway, with occasional intermissions at rest stops and gas stations?

<a href="https://recordings.irritablehedgehog.com/album/dennis-johnson-november-2">Dennis Johnson: November by R. Andrew Lee</a>

What is unusual, even startling, is how the piece both demands and defies attention in practically any listening environment. Mechanically, it’s nothing more than a series of piano chords (and occasional single notes), given ample time to resonate and decay. Nonetheless, there is an unmistakable sense of progression. The first couple hours of the work, based on a transcription of an incomplete recording from 1962, are quite linear and structured, even teleological, though the material moves forward at a very unhurried pace. Lee’s thoughtful, plangent chord voicings catch the ear here—kind of like Thelonious Monk, if you slowed him down about 800%.

Somewhere in the middle of the second disc, however, a change occurs. Here, the performer is asked to improvise around small cells of musical material. It’s a subtle transition, and it’s hard to pinpoint exactly when it happens, but the music does become noticeably more static. There are many ways this kind of improvisation could go astray, but Lee’s sense of pacing is impeccable. He might spend several minutes lingering on an idea, exploring its many permutations, or he might breeze through a passage in a fleeting and ephemeral way, but the way Lee manages to keep a sense of direction going throughout this material is truly impressive. The overall effect on the listener is something like exploring pools of liquid connected by tiny canals.

It was so absorbing, in fact, that I was about halfway through the Angeles National Forest when I realized I was almost out of gas and about 25 miles from the nearest town. Thankfully I did not become stranded in the San Gabriel Mountains, but if I had it would have been strangely fitting, being indefinitely suspended in a gorgeous landscape between a forgotten origin and a nebulous destination.

Verdict: November is captivating and highly recommended, but avoid operating heavy machinery while listening.

Isaac Schankler

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