Category: Field Reports

Annual Mavericks: Other Minds Festival 17

“The San Francisco Symphony does ‘Mavericks’ every ten years; we do it every year,” joked Artistic Director Charles Amirkhanian at this year’s Other Minds Festival of new Music, the Bay Area new music community’s annual three-day get together. This was the 17th iteration of the festival, which has been running regularly with only a few skipped years since 1993. Each year a group of eight to twelve composers is featured in three concerts, several composers per night, with sets focusing on each composer in turn.

OM 17 composers with Charles Amirkhanian (far right), photo from <a href="http://www.henceforthrecords.com/2012/03/other-minds-festival-of-new-music-2012-day-2/">Henceforth Records</a>

OM 17 composers with Charles Amirkhanian (far right), photo from Henceforth Records.

This year’s event (March 1–3) included a characteristically diverse group of nine composers, including 75-year-old Harold Budd and 31-year-old Tyshawn Sorey; Berkeley-based Ken Ueno and Lotta Wennäkoski from Finland; and glissando virtuoso Gloria Coates and laptop improviser Ikue Mori. Also featured were John Kennedy, Simon Steen-Andersen and Øyvind Torvund—a multiplicity of compositional voices, from various locations, by composers at different stages in their artistic careers. In a separate fourth performance on February 29, the festival also highlighted work by four younger American composers who had been named OM Fellows, a program now in its second year.

“Community” is frequently used these days by arts organizations as a buzzword, but OM concerts truly have the feel of a gathering of a certain community within the Bay Area. The sense of familiarity among those in attendance is immediately noticeable: people seem to be greeting old friends and colleagues constantly from the moment they arrive at the hall. Board members are publicly acknowledged for appreciation during the show. The announcements are informal and there’s a notable lack of pretense—when the raffle winners were announced, one was greeted from the stage by Amirkhanian with a homey “Oh, hey, Tony, nice to see you. Glad you could make it.”

Djerassi

The Djerassi property. Photo by Richard Friedman via Kyle Gann.

This sense of community building extends to the festival composers and Fellows as well, who spend five days together at the Djerassi Resident Artists Program on a rural ranch about an hour south of San Francisco prior to the concerts. (Here are some charming and bucolic photos from previous years by Kyle Gann and Richard Friedman.) In fact, although the festival concerts are the most publicly visible component of Other Minds’ work, they are only a detail of a bigger picture in which international and intergenerational dialogue is encouraged among individual artistic creators.

I attended the second and third concerts this year, as well as the performance featuring the four Fellows’ work. (The first concert, with works by Torvund and Steen-Andersen performed by the Norwegian ensemble asamisimasa, I unfortunately had to miss due to illness.) Some sets were performed by the composers themselves (Budd, Mori, Sorey); others by the San Francisco-based Del Sol String Quartet, mainstays of the festival, and by members of the Magik*Magik Orchestra, a young, malleable instrumental ensemble with roots in the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.

The works presented were as wide-ranging as OM audiences have come to expect. (A full list of repertoire can be found here.) Concert 2 featured Coates’ Fifth String Quartet (two movements of which were composed almost exclusively using glissandi); a quiet, spare and introspective work by Budd for piano and bass; and almost overwhelmingly aggressive simultaneous improvisations by Mori on her laptop, Sorey on drums, and Ueno on vocals that included overtone throat-singing, death metal growls, and extreme high-register squeals. Concert 3 had Magik*Magik in different configurations, ranging from a percussion duo playing Kennedy’s First Deconstruction (in Plastic) on upturned Glidden paint buckets to a 12-person chamber orchestra configuration with string quartet plus bass and winds/brass. That was followed by improvisations by Sorey solo, first on a drum kit and then on piano, and the world premiere of Ueno’s Peradam for string quartet (who are asked not just to sing, but throat-sing).

Coates-DSSQ

Del Sol String Quartet with Gloria Coates (center). Photo by Charles Amirkhanian.

Though Other Minds has apparently cultivated an audience that knows that they are coming to hear something unexpected—attendance in the 410-seat Kanbar Hall at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco was very respectable at the concerts I attended—the format of the concerts makes certain demands of the concert-goers. Because each composer is represented by a set that is approximately a half-hour long and often there are dramatically contrasting compositional approaches, there is sometimes a disjointed quality to the festival’s performances. In addition, the performing forces change from set to set, so the added time for changeovers and announcements affects the pacing of the performances significantly. For the listener, the result can be disorienting, and during Concert 2 especially I wished there were more of a sense of journey and connectedness throughout the evening.

rootstock

Rootstock Percussion performing Jen Wang’s Renderings of Things We Couldn’t Take Home at The LAB.

In that sense, the most satisfying performance event of the festival for me was actually the Composer Fellowship Concert, which was held at a small, 100-seat visual art space in the Mission called The LAB. Rootstock Percussion, a Bay Area trio, performed all the works on the program, which featured one work by each of the four Fellows—D. Edward Davis, Peter Swendsen, John P. Hastings, and Jen Wang—framed by pieces by John Cage. Having the instrumentation limited to percussion allowed each composer’s identity to come into relief in relation to the others’. While Swendsen’s Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is for bass drum solo and electronics (controlled by the composer via iPad at the back of the hall) took inspiration from the sounds of weather and seasonal transitions in Norway, Hastings created numbered grids for Terce that provided guidelines for the three percussionists to construct the work by playing wine glasses like bells and by bowing Styrofoam and large metal springs. Cage opened and closed each half, ending the program with Amores, Parts II and III—the only obviously pulse-driven pieces in an evening of percussion music.

cactus

Cactus awaiting its star turn in Cage’s Child of Tree.

The Other Minds Foundation is in the process of digitizing its audio archive, and the results can be accessed for free online at RadiOM.org. Recordings of many past festival concerts and panel discussions are available, and the current festival recordings should be added soon. The site also includes a trove of archival material from KPFA-FM in Berkeley, where Amirkhanian was music director for over two decades.

SXSW 2012 Postmortem

You can feel SXSW approaching about two weeks before Austin’s population doubles and everybody and their grandmother has a keg and a band in the backyard. The locals can be divided into two categories: those who have made travel plans, and those who haven’t and are preparing like the Mayans got it right. For those in the latter group, supplies are purchased and thoughtful itineraries are carefully outlined. Friends are flown in, stationed on couches, given keys, and told where to get breakfast tacos; specifically where to get them at 3 a.m. Bars, venues, coffee shops, food trucks, transportation, wristbands, multi-level passes, and wardrobe (always tricky with the sketchy weather) are all prepped.

Everything is possible.

And then you end up doing a fraction of what you had planned, you lose your phone, your wristband turns out to be fake (happened to a friend, tragic) and the highlight of your Thursday was the time you spent east of I-35 watching a band from Iceland play chip tune music on rewired Game Boys….

And it’s still a blast.

What strikes me about my SXSW experiences in the twelve years I’ve been here (and what I typically hear from friends and acquaintances) is that some of the best parts were not vaguely planned. What they stumbled upon as they made their way around downtown Austin and the surrounding area is what made their festival experience fun and unique. I, too, have stumbled around downtown Austin (SXSW notwithstanding), and this year found a few shows that I’d planned to see, and a few that just showed up.

Owen Weaver - Photo by Elisa Ferrari

Owen Weaver – Photo by Elisa Ferrari

SXSW 2012 was a cloudy, overcast affair. The festival that starts and ends with music is nonetheless dominated by its technology-focused interactive festival which takes place at the start of SXSW and is indoors by and large; a situation that played out well this year. “Yeast By Sweet Beast“ (my stumble-in) is a three-day experimental improvisation and “outsider music” festival founded in 2000 by poet, musician, and film maker Anne Heller. Inspired by Andy Warhol’s “Exploding Plastic Inevitable” happenings, these showcases of sound artists were accompanied by installations by video artists Paul Baker, Katie Rose Pipkin, and Laurel Barickman, creating a thoroughly hypnotic vibe.  Held at a number of venues including Skinny’s Ballroom, Trophy’s, and Headhunters, the festival featured a tremendous variety of artists and styles. Highlights included the scattered vocal improvs of Bosco Stravinsky, Futureblondes, the “pop with big beats” of Ichi Ni San Shi, the rhythmic noise trance of Daze of Heaven, and Austin favorites Matt Burnett and Rebecca Ramirez.

The “They Used to Call it Classical” panel was held at the Austin Convention Center and featured Ed Ward, Justin Kantor, Alex Ross, Janet Cowperthwaite, and Carl Stone discussing the classical crossover trend that got its start decades ago but has since become the “It Girl” of new music discussion. The modest crowd heard a number of stories and insights, including Kantor’s take on keeping the doors open on a venue that features different styles nightly, Cowperthwaite’s discussion of the Kronos Quartet’s long-term commissioning project, and Alex Ross’s historical perspective on crossover. This should be required listening, and I hope that there is a repeat/update for next year.

Peter Gregson - Photo by Elisa Ferrari

Peter Gregson – Photo by Elisa Ferrari

Nonclassical and Fast Forward Austin curated a showcase downtown on the last weekend of the festival. Steve Snowden’s live remixes of music from the Nonclassical catalogue providing a great beginning to the show while offering a buffer for those filtering in a little late. Solo bass performances by P Kellach Waddle of his own compositions were followed by the Bel Coure sax quartet which performed music by Rob Honstein, Jennifer Higdon, and Nick Sibicky, resulting in an enthusiastic standing ovation. Cellist Peter Gregson brought a minimalist vibe to the room with pieces by Reich, and Nonclassical’s Gabriel Prokofiev and percussionist Owen Weaver performed a “sculpture piece” providing one of the more captivating visual performances of the evening. The Aiana String Quartet gave stellar performances of music by Piazzolla, Gabriel Prokofiev, and Bartok’s First String Quartet, the last of which was clearly the “classical” music of the night. Finally, Line Upon Line closed the show with pieces by Snowden, Ethan Greene, and a killer performance of Xenakis’ Okho. Well aware of the time limit imposed on the show (they run a tight ship at the Hilton, folks) LUL performed ninja-like set changes between pieces, a bit of ballet all by itself.

The Innova Records showcase the following night was held in the same “is this really a conference room?” venue as the FFA/NC show the previous evening.  Kicking off the showcase was Prester John  sounding every bit like the Presidents of the United States of America, if they were locked in a room for several years with a metronome, a monster work ethic, and a penchant for scales. I can only imagine that the phrase “quirky pop” is used from time to time in describing these guys, but it doesn’t do them justice. From fun tunes like “Fireman’s Drive Inn,” to the Zappa “Black Page“-esque (at least the intro) of “The Library Thief (with The Half Speed Cakewalk),” Prester John managed to maintain a sense of humor while displaying impressive chops. Sxip Shirey came on stage guns blazing, bearing train whistles, harmonica, prepared guitar, and an effects set up that sounded at times like trains in the distance (his description) and at others like the solo from “Owner of a Lonely Heart (my take, which I think is very cool btw…check 2:35). The Golden Hornet Project dusted off their Prokofiev (Sergei this time) arrangements (among the first pieces the group worked on when they formed) and dropped them, early Mr. Bungle-style, on the crowd. Their hyperkinetic mini big-band stylings, complete with pounding piano and killer horns, would have fit seamlessly into nearly any venue in town.

During the set change, Hall and Oates’ “Rich Girl” was playing over the P.A. and man, there was a lot of whistling and humming going on in that room. Just sayin’….

Todd Reynolds’s set was, for me, the highlight of an evening full of great performers and composers. His performance of Michael Lowenstern’s Crossroads was absolutely thrilling and had the audience positively grooving. Val-Inc’s Afro-electronica set included field recordings mixed with beats and a theremin-like control interface which made for a compelling show both visually and aurally. Finally Grant Cutler along with Innova’s own Chris Campbell laid a bit of an ambient mix on the audience, a fitting come-down to a very stimulating evening.

Owen Weaver and Adam Bedell – Observations by Tristan Perich (excerpt) from Fast>>Forward>>Austin.

 

Now that the town has released its seasonal population to the four winds, I can take a moment to reflect on another South By Gone By. Bookended by the weird and freaky YBSB at the front and the somewhat more formal but nonetheless funky showcases at the end, this year’s festival had a lot to offer those who are looking for something other than the usual fare. If there is anything that the audiences at these shows have in common with audiences at the traditional SXSW venues, it’s the fact that it’s hard for anyone to get out and see everything they want to see, especially if your tastes are varied. An embarrassment of riches such as SXSW demands that some shows go unseen, and that’s a bummer. However, the shows I made it out to this year were all pretty fantastic, and that gives me hope that (assuming the Mayans blew it) next year will be even better.

New England’s Prospect: The Real World

Ken Ueno works the Napoleon Room, March 5, 2012

Ken Ueno works the Napoleon Room, March 5, 2012

Up until last week, I hadn’t yet made it to a Boston Modern Orchestra Project concert this season, a lapse that wanted correction. BMOP might be the most agnostic new music group in town, game for whatever style or school or angle they can get an audience for, or get a grant for, or even just get a hankering for. They were also early practitioners of that staple of new music coolness, staging concerts in clubs.

For a long time, BMOP’s chamber-sized Club Concerts were at Club Café, a large Back Bay gay club and restaurant. Lately, BMOP had moved into Oberon, the happy product of an odd circumstance—a brand-new nightclub in the middle of Harvard Square, created as a venue for the American Repertory Theatre’s Midsummer-Night’s-Dream-meets-Studio-54 extravaganza The Donkey Show, and subsequently filled on off nights by a whole range of fringe, cabaret, and jazz acts. But Oberon was otherwise occupied, so BMOP was back at Club Café on March 5 for a Japanese-themed concert curated by composer Ken Ueno.

It was terrible. Not the music—the music was brilliant. But the venue, frankly, stunk. BMOP was in the Napoleon Room, a tiny cabaret space to the side of the club. It was, not surprisingly, jammed. (Ueno, a Bostonian for a while before moving west, joked how proud he was that his one-time home could sell out a house with new music.) Kitchen sounds and waiters were constantly interrupting the presentation. And the glass wall that separates the room from the rest of the club proved a uselessly permeable barrier to ambient noise. From my seat, the deep, delicate, shifting white-noise landscape of Joji Yuasa’s 1967 tape piece Icon was pretty much drowned out by the exuberant insistence of a bar patron that the first season of the Lynda Carter “Wonder Woman” T.V. series was by far the best. I mean, sure, the writing became far less clever once they moved the setting from ’40s to the ’70s, and what was up with that whole “Steve Trevor, Jr.” business, and oh yes PLEASE SHUT UP BECAUSE I AM TRYING TO LISTEN TO THIS CONCERT.

It was too bad, because Ueno had come up with an excellent program, a remarkably efficient exploration of the Japanese dance between pitch, noise, and silence. There were two richly virtuosic solo pieces by Toshio Hosokawa: Winter Bird (played with acrobatic precision by violinist Gabriela Diaz), in which jeté and pizzicato avian sounds give way to a nifty continuous-glissando double-stop section, like a calligraphy brush splitting into different hairs and then coming back together as you drag it across the paper; and Vertical Song I (pulled off with equal energy by flutist Jessie Rosinski), which worked a similar trick via playing and singing at the same time. There were some hardcore avant-garde tape pieces, not only Yuasa’s Icon, but also Toru Takemitsu’s 1960 Water Music, a stunningly assured manipulation of water sounds, drips and splashes (which, in the context, made the place sound like a dank storeroom in hell’s speakeasy).

Ueno’s own divertingly Beckett-esque piano solo Disabitato, inspired by Roman ruins, still fit the program’s emphasis on the placement of—and space between—sonic events, its small catalog of stony sounds circling each other in an arena of sustain-pedal resonance. (Sarah Bob was the superb pianist.) For a finale, Diaz, Bob, and cellist Jing Li played Bruce Reiprich’s Chozubachi, a Takemitsu homage that evoked that composer’s most cinematic, Messiaen-jazz moods with unapologetic lushness. The performance was terrific. What I could hear of it, anyway.

***

Audibility isn’t much of a problem for the Bang on a Can All-Stars, who performed at MIT’s Kresge Auditorium on March 10, part of an ongoing three-year residency organized by MIT professor (and All-Star) Evan Ziporyn. Both the All-Stars and the Bang on a Can composers—Julia Wolfe, Michael Gordon, and David Lang—work with nearly omnipresent amplification. But what struck me at this concert was how much the group works with authenticity—the authenticity of expression that was such a concern to the existentialists, the authenticity of tradition that’s such a concern in cultural contexts, and the way that, for the better part of a century, musicians have been blurring the line between the two.

The great innovation of Bang on a Can, I think, is the realization that the ways composers and performers signal various forms of musical authenticity could be rich musical source material in and of itself—that the “authentic” is to the late 20th and early 21st century what the “sublime” was to the 19th. BoaC plays this game along with everyone else—part of the authenticity being claimed by this concert was that of celebrity, not only their own, but also the advertised appearances of cult-hero pop-collagist Nick Zammuto (formerly of The Books, as PR materials consistently reminded) and the Elijah of minimalism, Steve Reich. (It worked: Kresge Auditorium, not small, was packed.) But the group also plays with the game, a self-aware acknowledgement and exploration of how and why we like to declare musical heritages.

One of the main draws, besides Reich himself, was the Boston premiere of Reich’s 2×5, written for the Bang on a Can All-Stars in 2008. The instrumentation is a high-class garage-band: Mark Stewart and guest Derek Johnson on electric guitars, Robert Black on electric bass, David Cossin on drums, Vicky Chow and (usually-clarinetist) Ziporyn on two pianos. “2×5 is chamber music for rock instruments,” Reich explained in his program note. “We’re living at a time when the worlds of concert music and popular music have resumed their normal dialogue after a brief pause during the 12 tone/serial period.”

Sure, because no one’s ever tried that with serialism. (Don’t even get me started on the subtext of the word “normal.”) But that’s been Reich’s claim to authenticity almost from the start: the voice crying in the wilderness, calling music back from a hermetic detour onto the straight and narrow. And if that’s what has driven and continues to drive him, the music is beautiful, more often than not.

2×5, though, kept its distance from me, one of that group of Reich pieces that, for me at least, tips over from “bright and insistent” to “irritatingly aggressive.” (I had the same reaction the last time I heard Music for a Large Ensemble. I look forward to your letters.) It wasn’t so much the volume, although it was pretty gloriously loud. It was more, I think, because I tend to hone in on anything resembling a harmonic progression, and 2×5 felt harmonically abrupt, arbitrary, even clunky in places, common-tone and mediant juxtapositions piled on with diminishing returns. Three sections from the end, the piece briefly settled into a bewitching set of changes, Stewart and Johnson chiming accents over a repeated string of chords, to lovely effect. For the rest, it had all the volume of rock but not much of its formal satisfaction.

The other Reich selections were impeccable. Stewart gave a crisp and gorgeous account of Electric Counterpoint, Reich’s layered escapements polished to an irresistible ’80s pastel-and-chrome gloss. And Reich himself was joined by Cossin for Clapping Music, still a small miracle: idea, technique, process, and means in perfect, transparent balance. The contrast between performers was interesting: Cossin swaying and grooving, advertising the music’s affinity with pop, but Reich calm, centered, locked in. The best music doesn’t need special pleading.

***

The first half of the concert featured a preview performance (the official premiere is on March 20, in London) of Field Recordings, a nine-composer anthology commissioned for the BoaC All-Stars, marking BoaC’s 25th anniversary. (Cellist Ashley Bathgate, left out of 2×5, returned to her usual place in the sextet.) It really was an old-fashioned preview, still working out kinks—video cues weren’t always punctual, the sound mix wasn’t always optimal—but the overall spirit of the piece was apparent, and the spirit of the piece puts authenticity front-and-center. The concept is found footage, each composer building a movement around the pre-existing audio or video of his or her choice. And, of course, that choice revealed each composer’s attitude and approach to musical authenticity.

Julia Wolfe’s “Reeling,” for instance, opted for the imprimatur of folk music, starting with a Lomax-esque record of an energetic, wordless vocal—Appalachian scat-singing, maybe—and then amplifying it through live ensemble imitation into a wall of sound. (One particularly nice effect: sharp inhalations on the recording producing gusts of thick noise from the instruments.) That authenticity of celebrity—new-music celebrity, anyway—was the backbone of Florent Ghys’s “An Open Cage,” a recording of John Cage reading from his diary transformed, Different Trains-style, into modal, easygoing word jazz. Mira Calix’s “meeting you seemed so easy” went the ambient route, with a nod to Brian Eno’s Music for Airports: the burble of an airplane cabin, a fog of transience for some melancholy, circling fragments of melody to cut through.

There was a programmatic bent to David Lang’s “unused swan,” the sound of sharpening knives combined with a gloomy melody and Cossin dropping and swirling metal chains into the bowl of an amplified gong. I thought it didn’t go much beyond the set-up, though, to be fair, other people around me thought it the best of the movements. For me, the more transformative the approach, the more the music reworked, recontextualized, or otherwise messed with the original signal, the more I liked it. Ziporyn’s “Wargasari,” for instance: to start with a scratchy old recording of Balinese singing was probably inevitable for Ziporyn—never far from his gamelan expertise—but the result was awesome, a neither-here-nor-there fusion, the source pushing the ensemble into odd, asymmetrical rhythms, the ensemble turning the recording into a shiny, dissonant, globalized artifact.

Michael Gordon’s “gene takes a drink” showcased a video by Bill Morrison (of Decasia fame), a P.O.V. etude created by putting the camera on the collar of a cat and then turning it loose in a garden. The result was both witty and compelling, given unusual gravity by Gordon’s rippling, limpid minimalism: a cat-video Koyaanisqatsi. Christian Marclay took the notion of “found” footage to its limit in “Fade to Slide,” the ensemble romping through an onomatopoeic soundtrack to a montage of film clips, as cleverly and intricately curated as Marclay’s other cinematic installations. The authenticity here was the grammar of Hollywood—all the rhythm but none of the content of film narrative, the conditioning of pop culture revealed in its Pavlovian glory.

Tyondai Braxton worked a not unrelated vein with his “Casino Trem,” the source here the electronic jangle of slot machines and other casino enticements; through sampling, imitation, and drive, the ensemble turned the sounds into a primary-color, in-your-face symphony, a Beethovenian hard sell as reworked by Scott Bradley. “Casino Trem” was listed last, but the order was flipped so Zammuto’s “Real Beauty Turns” could be the finale, with Zammuto joining the group on guitar and vocals. The music was busy, head-bopping prog-rock; the found footage was collected television advertising footage featuring beauty products, their hopeful/skeptical customers, their before-and-after effects.

The original order might have been better. After Braxton, Zammuto’s conceit, as fun as it was, seemed almost too easy, both in the softness of its comic target (what’s the deal with infomercials?) and in the way its claim to authenticity was the result of a stacked deck—I mean, just about anybody looks cool next to someone enthusiastically demonstrating a motorized hairbrush. Braxton hadn’t let us off the hook that easily, instead taking the sound of one of the most manufactured, “fake” places imaginable and rendering it so ominously ebullient and saturated that one was roped into its siren song without being able to help it. Not the least delicious part of Braxton’s casino extravaganza was the cheer with which he dared to call authenticity’s bluff. In American life, Braxton seemed to be pointing out, the one truly authentic constant is money, the wheel of fortune, winning and losing.

New England’s Prospect: Alma Mater Studiorum

Full disclosure: Edward Cohen once gave me a job. This does not make me particularly special, actually. The number of grad and post-grad composers and pianists who have made rent teaching keyboard harmony in MIT’s room 4-070—a grid of digital pianos, tucked in a corner of the basement of Building 4, down a long hallway of fabrication labs—is not small. When I signed on, several careers ago, Cohen, longtime MIT senior lecturer (and before that, longtime faculty member at Brandeis), was the gatekeeper.

Edward Cohen

Edward Cohen

Cohen died ten years ago, at the age of 61, composing right up until the end—having, it was reported, outfitted his hospital room with an electric piano. In the intervening decade, opportunities to hear the results have been rare, so the February 18 memorial concert presented by MIT and the Radius Ensemble was not only an appropriate commemoration, but at least a small correction as well.

The concert wasn’t only Cohen’s music. There was a 2009 piano trio, Echo, by Cohen’s widow, Marjorie Merryman—a deceptively simple remembrance, E-D-C motives woven into lots of lyrical octave violin-cello lines punctuated by pianistic comment, but the music sneaks up on you; by the time it winds down into its unorthodox horn-call cadence (think Monk playing Les Adieux, an apt evocation of Cohen’s redoubtable jazz piano skills), Echo achieves unassuming, captivating poise. (Violinist Charles Dimmick, cellist Miriam Bolkosky, and pianist Sarah Bob gave the music a clear account.)

There was also a commissioned premiere, MIT alumnus Andrew McPherson’s After the Rains, for mixed sextet (flutist Sarah Brady, clarinetist Rane Moore, and percussionist Aaron Trant joining the trio’s players). The title and the piece are a take-off on Cohen’s own Acid Rain, for percussion ensemble, in which Cohen ventured into minimalist waters in his own idiosyncratic way. After the Rains wasn’t very minimalistic, but rather aimed for long builds and splashes of color. The trajectory had a stronger profile than the melodic material; everything ended up sounding like the introduction for a big theme that never quite materialized.

But it was Cohen’s compositions that provided the program’s impetus and lion’s share: a Suite for solo flute, a Capriccio for solo piano, and one of his major statements, his Quintet for Clarinet and Strings.

Cohen’s music has not traveled much beyond Cambridge. (Only two of his works—Acid Rain and the Clarinet Quintet—are available on recordings; I never heard any of his music until I moved east.) That it is not better known is both a crime and frustratingly understandable. The music, plausibly (but also misleadingly) characterized as academic, is not flashy or easily packaged—even his deep knowledge of jazz tends to be sensed only fleetingly, indirectly. As the euphemism goes, it requires close listening. But that close listening is constantly, generously rewarded.

He was a virtuoso of the varied repeat, rotating short motives into illusions of depth and dimension. The first movement of the Clarinet Quintet revels in such tiny shifts of intervallic demeanor, gently curt phrases that turn unexpected corners. Towards the end of the movement, the clarinet reassembles all the motives into a single, long, angular line, a seeming culmination, But no, it’s merely the end of a long development, and a brief recapitulation of the opening rounds the essay off with disorienting grace. To pull off such Haydnesque misdirection in a fully chromatic context takes real technique; Cohen made it seem easy. (The performance, with Dimmick and Bolkosky joined by clarinetist Eran Egozy, violinist Katherine Winterstein, and violist Noriko Herndon, was a little rough around the edges but captured the music’s sustained, long arc.)

The programmed pieces showed a penchant for non-sequitur endings that nevertheless recast everything that’s come before. (A Poulenc-esque token of his Francophilia, perhaps.) The Flute Suite (played by Brady) has a barbed “Finale” that slowly winds down, only to finish in a whiffling burst of notes, the tape suddenly spinning in furious rewind. The Capriccio (Sarah Bob giving the evening’s most confident and fluid performance) turns suddenly oracular in its last bars, the wit giving way to a serious backbone; something similar happens in the Quintet’s second movement, a scherzo that dissolves into a slow, muted finish, the melancholy lurking behind the joke.

The essence of Cohen’s craft is, I think, staying just one step ahead of the listener. The Suite works a daisy-chain of ideas: an increasingly complex compound melody in the Prelude sets up the monophonic counterpoint of the Fugue; the fugue subject’s two-note, stepwise motive turns into a hangdog glissando in the Pastorale. But as soon as the listener begins to perceive that movement-to-movement process, the music moves away from it to a counterpoint of mood; the “Song” turns out to be an ersatz fife tune that dissolves into dissonant qualifiers, the “Finale” sums everything up with oblique contrast. The closing Andante of the Clarinet Quintet works this vein, too, seeming to set up a sharp dialogue between contrasting materials—consonant-but-disjunct vs. dissonant-but-smooth—but again, as soon as the rules of the game become perceptible, the game changes, the boundaries begin to blur, the harmonies turn rich and ambiguous.

It would be a pity if such music only turned up on periodic memorials like this one. But composers, through their work, get to leave their own monuments, and Cohen’s music is a discriminating bequest—smart, dry of wit, precise about even modest moods, not afraid to be oblique and understated, but, then again, not afraid to be suddenly exquisite, either. Nice work if you can get it, really.

***

On February 28, Alvin Curran gave the annual Louis C. Elson lecture at Harvard University, a talk called “The New Common Practice—A Life in Unpopular Music.” Curran is a composer of compulsive eclecticism, and his talk was largely a celebration of that; “The New Common Practice,” an idea he has been playing with since 1994 (and which Benjamin Piekut explored on this site back in 2004). If the old common practice, the system of tonality and counterpoint and form bequeathed by the last millennium’s European tradition, represents “the entrenched models of the past,” as Curran put it, his ideal new common practice is an exuberant anarchism—”no common practice,” the field of musical research expanding to include “walls of noise and… its near-total absence,” the boundaries between high and low “all but wiped out.”

On the one hand, the “growing omnidirectionality” of music Curran sensed back in 1994 has only accelerated, the explosion of digital information and access shrinking distance (both geographical and temporal), flattening hierarchies. (In digital fashion, Curran dropped long lists into his talk like drum breaks, not only the contradictory census of styles and tendencies that opened his original 1994 essay, but also similarly catholic tallies of qualities and composers, like reveling in the streaming results of a broad, general web search.) But there was a kind of cheerful tension between that and Curran’s acknowledgement of his own personal history as a practical source. He opened by recognizing his indirect Harvard connections, from teachers (Elliott Carter, Harvard ’32) and partners-in-crime (Frederic Rzewski, Harvard ’58), to visits—Curran told of playing at Harvard Stadium as part of the Brown University Band then having the Harvard Band impress him as a horde of “spectral Vikings.”

Curran opened with a curio, a recording of him playing trombone in the 1958 edition of The Brunotes, a Brown dixieland group. “Essentially, you have everything right there,” he joked, “I’ve been making that sort of music ever since.” Or maybe he wasn’t joking: he followed with an excerpt from Erat Verbum John, an electronic fantasy on a recording of John Cage laughing (as brilliant a concept as I’ve run into lately), and, in the context, it did sound a lot like Dixieland: a snippet of laugh looped into a little trap-set pattern, another snippet sped up to a clarinet-like squeal, another snippet slowed down and sliding around the bass like a trombone.

The longest excerpt Curran played was a series of video clips from his 2006 Oh Brass on the Grass Alas, a grand, outdoor fantasia for multiple marching bands, moving all the way from aleatoric, process-driven clusters and wandering field formations to a final, Ivesian use of Bach’s “Es ist genug” chorale—as giddy an example imaginable of the “theme park” aspect Curran posits as part of the New Common Practice. It hearkened back to Curran’s own college day memories; it also emphasized the political thinking behind much of his music. At its premiere, at the Donaueschinger Musiktage, it was played by a host of local, amateur bands: not only breaching the walls of the professional festival, but bringing together groups that “normally only play against each other” in competitions, Curran pointed out. “It was a social and political success.”

In every piece Curran played, one could sense a discipline, an order that kept the seeming chaos from turning truly and boringly chaotic. It’s the relationship between form and rhetoric; no matter the sound-world—minimalist or maximalist, melodic or noisy, instrumentally compact or musique-concrète anything-goes—you always know at any given moment whether the music is on its way somewhere or already arrived. Where does that skill come from? Can you develop it without a grounding in some sort of common practice? The question provocatively percolated beneath the manifesto. At one point, Curran spoke of “the endless remix of all time and space—the fusion of memory and amnesia.” Do you keep all of musical history in play, or let the contradictory forces cancel each other, and everything, out? Curran would probably say “both” and then generate an idea for a piece from it.

It’s captivating to surrender to Curran’s creativity, his enthusiasm—and frankly, his ear for sheer beauty. But I also still had Ed Cohen’s exacting consistency in my ear. Curran’s music was, on the surface, the opposite of Cohen’s, but the effectiveness of both composers’ works springs from their relationship to the common practice, to rules, to limitations: Cohen was exhilarated by the challenge of staying within boundaries, Curran is exhilarated by tossing them aside.

Elson's Pocket Music Doctionary

There was one final irony, left unspoken. Louis C. Elson, the lecture’s namesake, was a codifier of the common practice, the author of Elson’s Pocket Music Dictionary. (“For practical and immediate use in the class-room,” Elson wrote of his effort, “I believe that the little volume will be found sufficient to the needs of the teacher.”) Elson also had a regular column in The Etude, answering readers’ questions about music; the first of the columns (from the May 1910 issue) had a question on that eternal bane of common-practice voice-leading students—parallel fifths. “[G]reat composers use them when desired,” Elson allowed. “Puccini has a whole series of them in the beginning of the third act of ‘La Boheme.’ But the young composer will do well to avoid them, at least until he has won as much fame as Puccini.”

Ensemble Parallèle Tackles Harbison’s Great Gatsby

John Harbison’s grand opera The Great Gatsby, which premiered at the Metropolitan Opera in 1999, received its first production in a decade in a new chamber version created for San Francisco’s Ensemble Parallèle. Though founded by Nicole Paiement nearly 20 years ago, the ensemble has only recently turned its full attention to chamber productions of contemporary opera, filling a niche that Bay Area audiences are apparently very happy to explore.

This well-attended production of Gatsby, staged over three nights on the main stage at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, featured a slightly abridged version of the score (approximately half an hour was cut) in a newly commissioned re-orchestration by Jacques Desjardins. The original 80-piece orchestra was reduced to 30, including a stage band for party scenes. Before authorizing the chamber orchestration request, Harbison had asked Desjardins first to try his hand at scoring one of the large parties set at Gatsby’s estate.

Though only a short while ago I might have described Ensemble Parallèle as plucky, right now they’re actually flat-out audacious. Never mind their tight budgets and bare-bones administrative structure; somehow their productions have quickly become known as must-see events in town. In just the past two years, they have presented fully staged productions of Philip Glass’s Orphée with circus artists, a new chamber orchestration of Alban Berg’s Wozzeck, and Virgil Thomson’s Four Saints in Three Acts (in the abridged version) paired with a new composition by Luciano Chessa as a prelude. Prior to that, they presented the world premiere of Lou Harrison’s Young Caesar; just announced for next season is Mark Adamo’s Lysistrata.

At the core of the ensemble are Paiement, a Bay Area new music dynamo who is the group’s conductor and artistic director, and her husband Brian Staufenbiel, who designs the productions and is the stage director. The casts are mostly drawn from singers with strong ties to the Bay Area, and while Ensemble Parallèle is not a repertory company, certain voices and faces become familiar from production to production. The company is a resident ensemble at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, where Paiement is director of the New Music Ensemble and of BluePrint, a new music series sponsored by the school.

Principals

L-R: Marco Panuccio (Gatsby), Susannah Biller (Daisy), Julienne Walker (Jordan), Jason Detwiler (Nick), Daniel Snyder (Tom)

It is explicitly part of Ensemble Parallèle’s goals to promote chamber opera as a way to make the opera-going experience more intimate, and also to give large-scale, large-budget works another life that remains true to the original intent but in a more easily presentable form. On these points, their new version of Gatsby was certainly successful. It wasn’t nearly as opulent as the original version I saw at the Met in 1999, but I didn’t feel that we lost out in this “translation,” as Desjardins says. The substantial and straightforward sets by Staufenbiel and scenic designer Matthew Antaky were enhanced by Austin Forbord’s video design, which included the Eckleburg billboard at the top of this post, watching over the proceedings.

Hearing and watching this music performed in a 700-seat hall naturally made for a more intimate experience than the Met, yet the music was still well-served. Though the performances were solid across the whole cast, special notice can be given to Susannah Biller, whose portrayal of Daisy Buchanan was expressively sung with gleaming, youthful energy.

Shirts

“Such beautiful shirts!”

Nevertheless, the cast had to struggle with the challenges that are inherent in Harbison’s theatrical adaptation. The principal characters are not people we find sympathetic: in Act Two, when Gatsby and Tom push Daisy to the point of publicly rebuking her husband, shrieking, “You’re reVOLting!”, one can’t help but agree with her, and unfortunately his companions do not elicit much more warmth from the audience either. And while Harbison’s music often ingeniously evokes the Jazz Age without slipping into a feeling of pastiche, to my ears it interacts awkwardly with the libretto, in the setting of the text as well as the choice of texts that are musically emphasized.

Even so, I am grateful to Ensemble Parallèle for finding a novel way to bring this music to San Francisco’s ears and for allowing me a chance to revisit what I remembered of the opera from a dozen years ago. For those who are interested in hearing the work, the Met has released the recording of the January 2000 broadcast as a 3-CD set.

Fast Forward

This March features an explosion of new music activity in the Bay Area, starting with the 17th annual Other Minds Festival, three nights of concerts at the SF JCC’s Kanbar Hall that are already underway (March 1-3). Concurrent with that is BluePrint’s concert Anosmia at the Conservatory on March 3, as well as new-music choir Volti’s series of performances March 2–4. The San Francisco Symphony launches its American Mavericks Festival with five programs in Davies Symphony Hall on March 8, before taking it on tour to Ann Arbor and New York.

Back at the Conservatory, the Hot Air Music Festival (March 4), an eight-hour marathon concert in its third year, features one of two SF performances of David Lang’s Little Match Girl Passion this month; on March 23-25, San Francisco Lyric Opera teams up with Butoh-based physical theatre troupe Bad Unkl Sista to dramatize the story at ODC Dance Theatre.

ODC Dance Company is also premiering new music in the first program of their season, with composer/cellist Zoë Keating performing live with members of the Magik*Magik Orchestra (5 performances, starting March 15). And the Kronos Quartet continues its three-year residency at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts with Fragile, an installation piece created with movement artists Eiko & Koma, also starting March 15.

Disclosure: I will be performing at the American Mavericks Festival, am the Artistic Advisor and often sing with Volti (though not in these concerts), and am employed by the Kronos Quartet. Gatsby production photos by Steve DiBartolomeo.

Reverberant Celebration of Sofia Gubaidulina

As Sofia Gubaidulina joins the ranks of octogenarian composers, ensembles find themselves with a wealth of compositions to choose from when celebrating her irresistibly transcendent body of music—a catalog that promises to leave an indelible impression for generations to come.  Gubaidulina’s international renown, accolades, and concert celebrations are well deserved.  Chicago’s contribution toward applauding this Russian composer came in the form of an honorary degree from the University of Chicago and an evening of her music performed by the Contempo Ensemble at the Harris Theater for Music and Dance.  While Contempo was unable to present a new collaborative piece by the composer due to health and time constraints, the three works offered on the program presented a glimpse into an oeuvre of devastatingly beautiful works that speak to both a profound sense of humanity and spiritual aspirations.

The celebration continued Contempo’s 46-year tradition of performing works by living composers at a high level of excellence.  The University of Chicago-based ensemble is regarded as one of the anchors of the new music community in Chicago and one of the premier ensembles in the country.  Their love and dedication to both the emotional and cerebral qualities of Gubaidulina’s music was on full display for their celebration concert.  The spoken introductions before each piece spanned a range of personal anecdotes and brief academic presentations were a thoughtful and heartfelt match to the brilliant aesthetic that reverberated within the composed works that were performed from the same stage.  The passion that Gubaidulina inspires was communicated along multiple levels over the course of the evening and it was easy to recognize why her music is so inspiring.

Tim Munro (flute), Alison Attar (harp), and Masumi Per Rostad (viola)

Tim Munro (flute), Alison Attar (harp), and Masumi Per Rostad (viola)

Garden of Joy and Sorrow (1980) is a work that scales toward the heavens upon the pitches of the harmonic series.  The wispy appearances of that “natural” sequence of intervals found itself balanced delicately against a dissonant field of minor seconds.  It achieves its resonance through sparse textures and a brilliant use of restraint.  Composed for viola, harp, and flute as a single-movement work, it is a clear expression of the balance between formal structure and intuitive detail that is found in much of Gubaidulina’s music.  The harp often takes on the qualities of a koto, suggesting a balance between Eastern and Western sensibilities in this music as well.

Stanislav Venglevski (bayan)

Stanislav Venglevski (bayan)

In Croce (1979) is a startling synthesis of multiple compositional impulses found in 20th-century composition.  This duet for cello and bayan (a Russian accordion) makes use of a singular sense of form through process, while leaving plenty of space for unexpected details in its realization.  The piece begins with the Bayan playing a tremolo of notes at its highest register over drones from the cello at its lowest register and eventually works toward a reversal of these two roles between the instruments, forming a study of crossing registers.  Like Garden of Joy and Sorrow, there is a striking clarity of the intervallic content that allows the listener to trace its harmonic logic throughout.  The way the music moves seamlessly between notated material and structured improvisation using graphic notation is a testament to both its compositional polish and the considerable talent cellist Brandon Vamos and bayanist Stanislav Venglevski brought to its performance.  These were further enhanced by the soaring crescendos that highlighted the timbral interplay between these two instruments. In Croce shows off one of Gubaidulina’s most startling qualities with the range of textural diversity found within the relatively narrow constraints of its formal structure.   The way it shifts between moments of contemplative meditation and moments of explosive energy maintains a sense of unpredictability within a clear formal shape, offering up a compelling coexistence of intuition and system within a single work of music.  Sofia Gubaidulina makes use of deft brush strokes along her canvas with an ear for sublime contrasts.

Tony Arnold (soprano), Masumi Per Rostad (viola), Yvonne Lam (viola), and Ricardo Rivera (baritone)

Tony Arnold (soprano), Masumi Per Rostad (viola), Yvonne Lam (viola), and Ricardo Rivera (baritone)

The highlight of the evening was Perception (1983), a large-scale work for soprano, baritone, and strings featuring poetry by Francisco Tanzer and excerpts from the Psalms.  Again, this piece showcased Gubaidulina’s sense of textural variation with music that could shift from glassy to dramatic in an instant while maintaining a strong sense of compositional continuity.  With the larger ensemble, she expands this technique to allow for dramatic shifts between instrument combinations and exposed vocal solos.  The textural qualities of the piece were even further enhanced by the addition of pre-recorded materials performed by the same ensemble to emphasize the work’s sense of expansiveness.  These were used sparingly toward the end of the work with the relatively dry reverberation of the recorded material contrasting noticeably with the spatial presence of the live ensemble on stage.  Another striking moment was the pizzicato movement that featured the full string ensemble strumming their instruments to rich harmonic effect.  Perception was a tour de force of extended string techniques combined with exquisite Sprechstimme in the soprano and baritone parts.  It is a complex work that requires extensive concentration by the performers.  It was well rehearsed and beautifully performed.

As a celebration, this concert made a powerful argument for Sofia Gubaidulina’s significant contributions to new music with just a small sample of her works.  Each piece of hers that reaches these ears has reinforced that impression.  Concerts such as this suggest that entire festivals of Gubaidulina’s music would still leave listeners craving more.  Let us hope that there are many more celebrations in store to recognize this fantastic composer.

L@TE at BAM/PFA: A Tribute to Julius Eastman

Julius Eastman

Julius Eastman, photographer unknown, from Mary Jane Leach’s collection.

Until now my knowledge of Julius Eastman (1940–1990) came almost entirely through recordings and articles. I was first introduced to Eastman’s commanding singing voice through the classic recording of Meredith Monk’s Dolmen Music, and my immediate impression based on the sound of his vital and seemingly bottomless bass was of a super-sized, uncontainable personality. The bass part in Dolmen Music was created and crafted for him, and when I later had the opportunity to learn and perform his part, I distinctly recall having the sense of a very large space to fill.

The first opportunity I had to hear Eastman’s compositional voice was in 2005 with the release of Unjust Malaise, the three-CD set that was the result of Mary Jane Leach’s Herculean efforts in researching his recordings. But I had never heard any of his music live until this month’s tribute to Eastman and his compositions at the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive (BAM/PFA), programmed by Sarah Cahill and Luciano Chessa for the L@TE: Friday Nights series.

Hexagon

The strange and sobering story of Eastman’s life and early death has been told most notably by Kyle Gann, first in the obituary he wrote for the Village Voice and then his liner notes (PDF) for Unjust Malaise. Mary Jane Leach also wrote an article for NewMusicBox detailing her extraordinary experiences chasing down all the recordings and scores she could find of Eastman’s work. In short, for those who aren’t already familiar with him, this exceptionally gifted composer/singer/pianist suffered a number of setbacks in his life – some situational, some arguably self-created—and he died without attracting any attention in the musical community for eight months, until Gann published his obituary. Most of his scores are now lost, in no small part due to an eviction from his apartment, and the few recordings that exist have taken Leach years of work to recover.

The tribute performance in Berkeley consisted of two vocal compositions and two works for multiple pianos, set in the spacious concrete atrium of the Modernist museum, where the ramps provided the audience with aerial vantage points on the hexagon of upright pianos.

Ramps

The evening opened with an invocation and plea titled “Our Father” for two male voices, written during the last year of Eastman’s life:

O God, my God,
Our Father, Holy Spirit, great God
Holy Ghost, spirit of truth, great God
All-knowing God
[…]
O Lord, forgive me
Thy will is always done
O God, my God, have mercy
Your servants are weak
Our Father, who art in heaven
Hallowed be thy name

Bass Richard Mix and tenor Kevin Baum emerged from the audience, which was variously sprawled out on an installation by Thom Faulders, to sing the score (downloadable from Leach’s site). The short, linear work, built almost entirely on homophonic open fifths, was clearly written for Eastman to sing: when Mix descended to the lowest point of the work—an E-flat on “My [God]”—it was easy to imagine Eastman’s sepulchral voice filling the hall. Likewise when Mix declaimed the Prelude to the Holy Presence of Joan d’Arc (text transcription as PDF), a 12-minute unaccompanied solo in which a litany of saints passionately exhort Joan to “speak boldly,” I had a visceral sense of Eastman’s presence. From a singer’s perspective, there is a peculiar feeling when performing a work that was clearly written for a specific person’s voice: you’re obligated to inhabit that person’s body in a sense, finding the resonances that were individual to that person and exploring his particular strengths and tendencies. Hearing Mix’s voice channeling a work that Eastman had made for his own brought Eastman into the space in an almost physical way.

Mix Joan

Richard Mix performing Prelude to the Holy Presence of Joan d’Arc

The Prelude Mix sang was indeed written as an opening to another work, a larger piece for multiple cellos which was not performed at this concert. But the format of using multiples of the same instrument was one that Eastman explored in other works, including the pieces for multiple pianos on this program titled Evil Nigger and Gay Guerrilla. Eastman was African-American and gay, and Unjust Malaise includes a spoken intro that he gave at a concert explaining his intent behind the titles. For him, “nigger” meant a person with a “basic-ness or a fundamental-ness”; one who “eschews that which is superficial.” He saw “guerrilla” as a term implying strength, so the title Gay Guerrilla expressed his hope that “gaydom,” himself included, would be strong if called upon to fight for a cause.

Whereas the two vocal works were intensely personal statements from Eastman as an individual, these pieces—written for any number of instruments, performed here on six pianos—showed a community moving in concert. Both pieces are structured as a progression through timed modules, and the six pianists (Chessa, Cahill, Chris Brown, Joseph M. Colombo, Dominique Leone, and Regina Schaffer) kept their synchronized iPhone timers in sight throughout. A cursory glance at the scores showed, for example, a page marked 18:00-18:30, with a number of lines that each performer could choose from within that module.

EvilN iPhone

Sarah Cahill performing Evil Nigger

Evil Nigger is potent and incessant, a 20-minute emotional tour de force full of unbridled energy—supersized, uncontainable. Like Terry Riley’s In C, clouds of harmonies appeared and shifted as the performers moved through the modules. Dramatic register shifts appeared and crossfaded; bright pulsations gave way to impressionistic clusters. Gay Guerrilla initially revealed a more quiet and meditative aspect of his compositional voice, with very slow builds and large waves. But it also provided the most unexpected compositional moment of the night, when about two-thirds into the half-hour work, the Lutheran hymn “Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott” (“A Mighty Fortress is Our God”) emerged from the texture—a behemoth appearing through communal action, full of strength, ready to do battle for a great cause.

This intermission-less tribute gave us an opportunity to take a concentrated look at the work of an artist who was almost allowed to disappear into history. Eastman’s huge voice was ringing loudly in that space, and hopefully the reconstruction work that these performers did so dutifully (most notably Colombo, who created a legible, computerized score for Evil Nigger) will help others to bring his music to life again in the future.

L@TE: Friday Nights at BAM/PFA has programs every Friday for $7. Some upcoming events programmed by Sarah Cahill include a concert of Edmund Campion’s music (March 9), Amy X Neuburg (April 13), and a performance of Lou Harrison’s La Koro Sutro in May.

BAMscape

New England’s Prospect: Storyboarding

New music seemed to explode out of the ground around Boston in the beginning of February like the tripods in the Spielberg remake of War of the Worlds. Something like this happens the same time most years, a sign, maybe, of how deep the academic calendar has wormed its way into the city’s general pace: it all feels like the natural life cycle of projects too complex to face in the rush of the new school year, so it has to happen now, now that everybody’s back from winter break, but before everybody gets sucked into the accelerating crunch of second semester.

So in the first two weeks of February, one was faced with, among other things,

—An Alea III concert featuring Boston University faculty composers, as well as a concert by Time’s Arrow, BU’s student new music group

—John Cage celebrations from piano students at New England Conservatory and So Percussion at Longy

—Cellist Matt Haimovitz and pianist Christopher O’Riley playing their “Shuffle.Play.Listen.” anything-goes repertoire at Regattabar

—A Collage New Music concert featuring four world premieres

—A chamber music Club Concert by the Boston Modern Orchestra Project at Oberon

—A recital by NEC composer and pianist Anthony Coleman

—A collaboration between pianist Vijay Iyer and George Lewis’s “Voyager” digital improvisation system at Wellesley College

Boston Lyric Opera’s production of Peter Maxwell Davies’s The Lighthouse

Reader, I missed them. Thanks to an out-of-town venture, an all-day choral festival, the usual demands of part-time church and teaching and writing jobs, and a spousal demand that I watch the Super Bowl, I did not catch a single one of these events. I hang my head in new music shame.

***

Georg Friedrich Haas

Georg Friedrich Haas – Photo by Philippe Gontier

In my defense, I did manage to get myself to a couple of unusually interesting concerts. The first was one of the more anticipated dates on the local new music calendar this season: the Boston premiere of Georg Friedrich Haas’s in vain, performed by the group Sound Icon at the Institute of Contemporary Art on Groundhog Day.

Haas’s hour-plus opus, composed in 2000, is already on a lot of people’s short list for the first great masterpiece of the millenium, and it’s not hard to see why. It’s technically impressive, a spectral-like microtonal vocabulary handled with absolute assurance, both harmonically and orchestrationally. (Among in vain’s 23 instruments is an accordion; as someone who, in my former composer life, often tried to integrate the accordion into ensembles large and small, the subtlety and seamlessness with which Haas does it was particularly jealousy-inducing.) It is a Serious Piece, with a serious theme (it was written in response to a resurgence of right-wing nationalism in Haas’s native Austria), and serious length and breadth. And it has a great existential hook: the lights in the hall fade in and out throughout the piece, and there’s a long stretch near the end that takes place in total darkness.

Sound Icon (I previously wrote about the group back in November) did what is becoming their customarily magisterial job, conductor Jeffrey Means keeping everything balanced and lively, the group’s stamina admirable. And the setting was terrific—the ICA’s sharp, uncluttered auditorium provided a space to match the music’s drama. (The ICA has only rarely programmed avant-garde music, turning over much of their performance calendar to the more mainstream presentations of World Music/CRASHarts, but their Public Programs Coordinator, John Andress, is also a percussionist and a new music stalwart, so maybe more hardcore repertoire might be coming to the place. It really is a great venue for it.)

Still, there was something about in vain that kept its distance. The main material is almost deliberately naïve, scales winding down in seeming perpetual motion, lush chorales, gong strikes of deafening, claustrophobic volume. A lot of the impact of in vain is in its length—it seems to justify the demands it makes on your time and concentration by making those demands.

When it works, it’s marvelous. In the final section, Haas brings back those opening scales, gradually getting faster, then looping back around to the original speed, only to begin the process again. The first time, it was deeply satisfying; when he did it a second time, it got to be a little annoying. But it was the third time through that sold it, the expected ending and the avoided ending somehow coming together in convincing ambiguity.

Other repetitions in the piece delivered far more diminishing returns—those gongs, for instance, so thrilling on first strike, drifted into a white-noise barrier; and a strobe-like flash illumination, detonating away the darkness, was similarly potent the first couple times, but as it came back again and again, the shock wore off, and its use as a coordinating device became distractingly apparent.

Then again, maybe all that was intentional; the music does seem intent on cultivating the gray area between process and expression. The most interesting thing about in vain, at least for me (and, really, the experience of in vain is a highly personal thing, a by-product of so much alone-in-the-dark listening), was how little of the music stayed with me. As it is happening, the piece is often overwhelming in the insistent way it envelops the ear; and yet, once it ends, so much of it seems to just vanish, a practically tangible dream-world dissolved in the light.

In mood and ambition, its boldfaced effects and sensual bleakness, in vain has something of the same tenor—if not the political implications—of the art of Anselm Kiefer, another virtuoso of grim landscapes. I thought of Kiefer’s artist’s books in particular: Cauterization of the Rural District of Buchen, for instance, a bound volume of the charred remains of painted canvases, or his massive sculptural books with pages of lead. But where Kiefer hints at a Hegelian view of historical progress—the past burned away, or sunk into the ground, so something new can grow from the wreckage—in vain posits something more cyclical, those descending scales forever chasing each other down, each acceleration encasing a glacial seed of its own repetition: light and darkness, in perpetual orbit, palpable and unremitting, yet transient and equivocal.

***

On February 11, I made it to a free-jazz improv show at the Lily Pad in Cambridge, performed by a group of local players: David G. Haas (piano), Jeff Platz (guitar), Scott Getchell (trumpet), Kit Demos (bass), and Luther Gray (drums). The Lily Pad doesn’t seem like much: a tiny storefront (late-arriving concertgoers can fill the entire place with their open-door draft), a few chairs, a shoebox stage space surrounded by hanging carpets. But the sound is excellent, and the disposition is adventurous.

Platz has fronted various groups—a band called Skull Session, which also featured Gray, as well as another band called Bright Light Group, featuring Getchell and Demos—and all four have recorded for Germany-based Skycap Records. Haas was nominally the outsider, but he had played with the late, great Joe Maneri for a time, and in the Boston improv/free-jazz world, a connection with Maneri is pretty much congruous with a connection to the scene.

And the quintet settled into musical conversation like they’d been doing it forever. Here’s a sequence I particularly liked, from their first set: Demos (by far the most far-out of the group, never meeting an extended technique he didn’t like) set up a strange ostinato, slapping his bass with dull thumps while bending the pitch with a whammy pedal; Platz layered some keening electric guitar sustain over it. With Gray and Getchell having temporarily dropped out, Haas added some whimsical percussion, tapping on the piano lid and music rack, John Cage-style. As Haas shifted back to the keys, tossing off bright sparks up high, Platz took over the percussive tapping, stopping the strings at the high end of the neck. This led into a full-band free-for-all, Getchell uncorking tight wails, Gray’s scattered attacks drifting in and out of a solid beat—which then morphed into fast, driving swing. Getchell then took over with a skittering solo—Gray’s energetic ride cymbal seemingly translated into trumpet terms, while Gray pulled back to sparse, ominous tom-toms.

For the next number, Demos moved over to modular synthesizer—a homebrew MFOS Ultimate—and, for a while, the rest of the band simply took in the resulting old-school analog chirrups and yowls with bemused interest. When they did start playing, I wasn’t sure what to expect; but the result was a surprisingly coherent Art-Ensemble-of-Chicago-meets-Doctor-Who vibe. That improv eventually returned to where the first one started, a moody, modal, minor-key ballad atmosphere.

The group’s second set was at once more mercurial—new tempos and rhythms and textures seeming to take off out of nowhere—and more straight-ahead, an anthology of more familiar jazz styles. But this one, too, arrived at exotic locales, winding up with a long colloquy between Demos and Platz that managed to feel both serene and cheekily stubborn (especially since the crowd for the next show was already filtering in).

In his book Primacy of the Ear, local jazz legend Ran Blake talks about “storyboarding” solos or interpretations or reinterpretations of repertoire:

I find a version of storyboarding to be a useful tool in composing or recomposing a piece as I prepare it for performance. It is a way to move beyond the spine of a piece without simply abandoning it, and it is a creative alternative to a sketch based simply on theory or abstract motivic development.

This quintet seemed to have that sense of scene, of musical setting; as the texture and mood would shift, everybody was quick and perceptive enough to lock into the new surroundings and start working with the scenery, and loose enough to immediately be casting an eye towards the next possible edit. It was provocative to compare this storyboard—fluid, moving, shifting the spotlight, lighting on details—with the storyboard for in vain, all long, carefully composed, slow-changing landscapes. It pointed up, for one thing, how much the construction of in vain is engineered for grandeur, even as the saturnine cast undermines it. The quintet’s improvisations were, by nature, closer to a road trip, the landscapes glimpsed from a moving vehicle. But sometimes, a glimpse can be as mesmerizing as a full immersion.

Seldoms in Space

Marc Riordan (piano), Jeff Kimmel (bass clarinet), and Lilianna Zofia Wosko (cello)

Marc Riordan (piano), Jeff Kimmel (bass clarinet), and Lilianna Zofia Wosko (cello)

Dance is a medium that inherently deals with space—the spatial relationships between dancers and the physical movement of bodies on stage.  The Chicago-based contemporary dance company known as the Seldoms took the parameter of space to a higher level in their first performance at the Harris Theater in Chicago.  The venue itself took on a starring role as the audience moved through the space.  Tim Daisy composed the original score for this exploration of site-specific dance with music tightly customized for the wide variations in the vignettes and environments. The audience became participants by mere virtue of sharing tight spaces with performers.  And ushers became tour guides charged with keeping people in the right places at the right times.

The printed program for the Seldoms’ performance was broken into multiple cards that were gradually dealt out one at a time before each vignette.  The first card set an appropriate tone:

This is not a dance concert.  This is an anniversary dance party.  This is a promenade.  This is a backstage pass.  This is a mile marker.  This is a reflection.  This is a record of actual comments.  This is a subversive act.  This is our debut at the Harris Theater.  This is an endurance event.  This is a thank you to our Chicago audience.  This is a nod to all the moving parts of live performance.  This is the starting block for our second decade of art-making.  Runners to your mark.

As part of this debut performance, they offered a tour-as-performance of the structural layout of a unique theater design that places the balconies and performance stage at the same level as the underground parking.  Even the balconies are located a couple of floors below the main entrance.

At the beginning of the evening the audience was broken up into smaller groups and instructed to line up at different doors.  This allowed for relatively small groups of people to move quickly between different stations.  It also meant that each team experienced a different sequence of vignettes leading up to the finale during which the full contingent of musicians, dancers, and audience occupied the main stage itself.  The choreography of funneling attendees into lines for the anticipated spectacle ahead gave the early part of the performance the feeling of a crowded theme park with long lines leading toward the roller coaster.  The act of moving between different acts gave a sense of active participation to an audience that spent much of the evening standing, walking, and coming into close contact with a different combination of dancers and musicians at each station.  It was a thrill ride along aesthetic dimensions.

Paul Giallorenzo (piano) and Jeb Bishop (trombone)

Paul Giallorenzo (piano) and Jeb Bishop (trombone)

The spatial variation was noteworthy on multiple levels. The quality of the dance performances varied a great deal between stations; it was the consistent qualities of the music compositions that gave the experience its cohesion and cut through the substantial differences in acoustics found throughout the building.  Tim Daisy’s music was closely matched to the location and sense of playfulness found in each vignette.  The echo-rich environments of the lobbies were accentuated by drums and pianos to match the range of motion explored along the stairs and benches, while the less reverberant areas around and behind the main stage featured wind instruments to match the story telling that marked the dances in those areas.  Finding a fresh, new combination of so many of Chicago’s great improvisers at each station added to the sense of discovery.

The most satisfying vignette of the evening was performed in the back stage area.  A duo of male dancers put on costumes while elevating themselves on a pair of aerial work platforms before settling into a whimsical story of professional jealousy and one-upmanship.  This was accompanied by the inspired instrumental combination of Jaimie Branch on trumpet, Katherine Young on bassoon, and Anton Hatwich on bass.  The rhythmic contours of the music brilliantly suited both the slapstick elements of the dance and the acoustics of the concrete-enclosed setting.

Jaimie Branch (trumpet), Anton Hatwich (bass), and Katherine Young (bassoon)

Jaimie Branch (trumpet), Anton Hatwich (bass), and Katherine Young (bassoon)

The vignette performed in the seating area of the main stage offered another dose of whimsy as a trio of dancers emulated the jostling and struggle to settle into one’s seat typical of audience members attending a formal performance.  The exaggerated rustling of programs, coughs, and constant standing and sitting to allow people to pass through narrow rows played upon the movements of a typical audience.  The accompaniment for this action was another strong trio featuring Tim Daisy on marimba and percussion, James Falzone on clarinet, and Jennifer Clare Paulson on viola.  The physical coexistence of dancers and musicians was further emphasized with Daisy stepping onto the stage while playing percussion as a deliberate element of movement among the dance troupe.  Another creative layer that spoke to the careful timing and choreography of having multiple vignettes running simultaneously in different locations was the appearance of a dancer on the catwalk who had just stepped away from his active role in one of the lobby performances.

The lobby of the Harris Theater exists on multiple levels connected by stairs.  Two vignettes performed on two of those levels simultaneously posed particular issues for the music, as there was considerable sonic bleed through between the two ensembles playing within such an acoustically live space.  With the dancers moving metal benches around, dancing along the stairways, and quoting various Yelp reviews of the Harris Theater, the music and action occasionally drowned out their verbal contributions.  While the music wasn’t as clear as one would hope, the visuals were striking..  They even danced their way into the bathrooms as they quoted reviews of the bathrooms themselves.  The relatively small spaces of the lobbies did allow for close observation of the musicians and dancers and did feature some of the strongest ensemble interactions and costumes of the evening.  It was also a space enhanced by the unique lighting of the Harris Theater lobbies, as each vertical level of the lobby is illuminated by contrasting hues of florescent lights.

The Seldoms performing in one of the lobbies of the Harris Theater.

The Seldoms performing in one of the lobbies of the Harris Theater.

The finale on the main stage brought the full contingent of dancers and musicians together.  Hearing the complete ensemble playing together provided a great punctuation mark to the musical side of this event.  Tim Daisy wisely composed a score with this specific set of improvising musicians in mind and his music hit an excellent balance of compositional structure and improvised detail.  The dance itself didn’t quite hit that same sense of full ensemble as the Seldoms continued to muse upon earlier themes that maintained the small ensemble feel even with the extra bodies on stage.

But the true exhilaration of the experience was rooted in the audience’s participation through movement—passing through areas of the back stage and break rooms once shielded from audience view and discovering the previously unknown connections between cat walks and lobby exits all while anticipating unexpected usage of space, not knowing if one was standing in a place that would shortly become the center of the action.  In this respect, the layering of music and movement into an experience that shatters the fourth wall made for a well thought out dance party that appealed to many senses.