Category: Field Reports

Improvising Conversation: No Idea Festival

Posted on February 10, 2012 by AndrewSigler - Field Reports, Headlines

Poster artist: Noel Waggener

To the uninitiated, free improvisation can often seem formless and confusing. Unlike theater or comedy, the lack of text to provide a narrative can leave an audience member lost in a world of sounds, rhythms, and gestures that may be difficult to reconcile as a whole. The “free” in free improvisation can give the impression that anything goes, and while there may be a kernel of truth in that, those for whom improvisation is a regular and important part (or the whole) of their musical experience know that the real freedom in improvisation is working within the initial constraints that often come in the opening moments of a performance. Listening, communicating, and moving towards a cohesive realization is no less than real-time composition, and to do it well requires experience, patience, and perhaps most importantly, restraint.

The No Idea Festival recently celebrated its ninth year with seven days of concerts in Austin, Houston, and San Antonio. An international roster of artists participated in workshops and performances in spaces large and small and, as a run up to the festival, the No Idea Sunday Series featured four performances from local and regional improvisers. Each performance was preceded by screenings of Derek Bailey’s documentary On The Edge: Improvisation In Music, a series of four 55-minute films broadcast in the UK in early 1992. The Austin NIF shows took place at The Broken Neck, a venue in east Austin that has not forgotten that a warehouse is supposed to be a huge unrefined space. Nods to acoustics were evident, but by and large this was a space that could in no time return to its storage or manufacturing roots. AV equipment was ubiquitous, not just for use by the performers but in service of archiving the event and at times the two sets of equipment seemed to overlap. NIF was sponsored by some of the usual suspects, including the Texas Commission on the Arts and Meet The Composer (its logo now amended to reflect the New Music USA transformation), as well as a few local heroes like Ruby’s Barbecue (Austin) and St. Arnold’s Brewery (Houston) which supplied a great spread (gratis!) and a keg respectively, with beers available for a modest donation.

Andrea Neumann and Bonnie Jones

The first set featured Andrea Neumann from Berlin and Bonnie Jones from Baltimore. Both artists were set up behind large custom-made electronic kits attached to boards approximately three feet square, replete with hard and soft-wired elements. Neumann’s board also featured the miniaturized guts of a piano which she was able to manipulate both physically and electronically during the performance. As Neumann began generating a low frequency, Jones slowly played bells that recalled the sound of an analog phone. Neumann’s frequencies slowly opened up, though still remaining in the low range, while Jones began to create light static in a rhythmic pattern, the pulsing beats panning across the stereo field. Jones used her fingers to create and break connections on the board, causing small, pointed moments to occur slowly and without pattern, like rain dripping from a tree long after a storm. Neumann began to work with the “piano,” physically playing a few notes while the electronics transformed the sound, the last note of which became the only controlled and sustained feedback of the set. While the feedback echoed in the space, Jones manipulated a number of stompboxes and other custom equipment, at one point dragging one piece around the board, using the sounds of the analog contacts connecting and disconnecting within the device to create a counterpoint to the feedback and a reimagining of the previous patternless rain music.

Maggie Bennett

Maggie Bennett’s dance set began as the audience returned to their seats following a brief set change. Attached to the wall was a tremendous paper construction, like a waterfall pouring from the wall and flowing ten feet across the floor. Bennett’s performance was an exercise in control, her movements mostly small and subtle, at one moment seeming to fall asleep and the next moment waking up on the large paper wave. It was a compelling and direct translation of movement into sound, so much so that late in the set when she moved away from the paper, I experienced a bit of cognitive dissonance in that it was odd to see her move without hearing the sound of the paper. It struck me that in conventional dance the sound of the dancer’s feet slamming into the marley flooring is always distracting. It’s a sound that I’d rather not hear if possible, but here the secondary sound was developed, celebrated, and made a strong follower to Bennett’s lead.

Bhob Rainey, Greg Kelley, and Jason Lescalleet

Sound artist Jason Lescalleet was joined by his nmperign collaborators Bhob Rainey (saxophone) and Greg Kelley (trumpet) for the third set of the evening. Lescalleet used a variety of reel-to-reel and hand-held tape machines to create organic textures. He began by placing a reel-to-reel unit at the front of the performance space and setting in motion a length of analog tape which went through and then out of the machine, made a circular trip several feet around a microphone, and returned to its origin. A broken ostinato slowly formed from this circuit and remained for the first few minutes, establishing itself as a static framework. Rainey joined the ostinato, his sax sounding long tones like a sine wave mixed with breathing through the instrument that recalled the broken static of the original signal. Lescalleet moved almost constantly around the stage and behind his own electronic setup at the back, manipulating various pieces of equipment including smaller tape decks that were placed on the side of the stage. Kelley removed the mouthpiece from his muted trumpet while he and Rainey complimented the spare tape textures with long, quiet, subtle quarter-tone lines and more breathing and blowing through the instruments. As the piece developed, Lescalleet removed tape from one machine, spliced and taped it on the fly, and fed it into the main machine at the front of the stage. While he held the tape, minute changes in the timbres could be heard as the tape machine motors worked to keep the mail moving through the system. Low aquatic sounds shared space with more breath effects from Rainey and Kelley, leading to pops and crackles from the reassembled tape. Finally, Lescalleet disconnected each of the machines, bringing the performance to a close.

Bryan Eubanks, Chris Cogburn, and Vic Rawlings performing as LUCRE

The fourth set featured Chris Cogburn, Bryan Eubanks, and Vic Rawlings on percussion, electronics, and cello respectively, performing as LUCRE. Though Eubanks’s contribution was primarily electronic, both Cogburn and Rawlings had their own electronic setups as well which they used during the set. The performance began with Cogburn creating resonance on a snare drum (snares off) by dragging rubber beaters and other materials across the head of the drum. With cymbals placed on a tom tom, Cogburn used a long thin dowel and did his best fire-starter impression, using both hands to create vibrations in the stick that drove both cymbal and drum. Eubanks created a slight white noise texture that extended for several minutes while Rawlings drew clicking sweeps from the cello, the sound further altered electronically to sound a bit like the ocean from very far away. Most of the performance (and this was true of all the performances) utilized primarily old school analog electronics, with instruments and sounds largely derived from older hardware, but this section also featured the odd contemporary digital moment, adding a welcome trace of “reverse anachronism” to an otherwise earthy and visceral show.

It was impressive that in these chamber performances the members of the ensembles spent as much time (or more) listening as they did playing. Thoughtful, well-paced conversations and occasionally conventional forms with fairly clear beginnings, middles, and ends (as opposed to more open-ended jams in which less formally connected smaller moments and motives might play a larger role) were evident in each set. Among Cogburn’s goals for this yearly festival is to provide a forum for performers to improvise together multiple times, not just within a given festival but over the course of several meetings over many festivals. These relationships change and grow over time, and it’s a treat for performers and audience members alike to experience the results of that growth.

Every Sound Is Consequential

Posted on February 6, 2012 by Sidney Chen - Field Reports, Headlines

Sidney Chen
Ed. Note: Over the past few months, NewMusicBox readers have been introduced to a new team of regional editors stationed in cities across the country. These contributors have been our eyes and ears on the ground, surveying the new music landscape in their areas and delivering regular coverage.
It is my pleasure to welcome yet another voice to this dialog, Sidney Chen of San Francisco, California.—MS

I Was Sitting in a Room: SF Tape Music Festival

A friend who’s a record collector has always said that she wishes all concerts could take place in a completely darkened room so that audiences might train their focus entirely on the music. She seems to have some kindred spirits in the folks at the San Francisco Tape Music Festival, who presented three nights of fixed-media audio compositions with all the lights off at the newly renovated ODC Theater in the Mission in San Francisco (which, ironically, is primarily used for dance, where good lighting is a positive character trait).

Lights up

Presented by the San Francisco Tape Music Collective and the ever-intrepid sfSound, led by Matt Ingalls, the annual festival has been running since 2002. Works by 25 composers were chosen to be diffused through the 16+ speakers that surrounded the dedicated and attentive audience that comfortably filled the 175-seat hall the two nights I attended (January 20 and 22). I say dedicated because the festival happened to fall on the stormiest night of the season so far, and attentive because I’ve never heard such a quiet, coughless audience in winter.

Lights down, EXIT sign excepted

Each night’s performance began with short mid-19th century phonautograms—primitive sound recordings by Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville that had no playback method when they were created and which predate Edison’s phonograph recordings by two decades. The phonautograms, explained in detail in the Studio 360 story below, were realized at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley by First Sounds, a collaborative group of audio historians and recording engineers.

These brief glimpses of another time via some of the world’s earliest sound recording technologies were a curiously and charmingly crude introduction to the densely layered, complex, and diverse selection of compositions that followed. In addition to the tape assemblages and new realizations of John Cage’s work that the festival presenters programmed to celebrate the centenary of Cage’s birth, they took care to present a wide variety of compositional approaches and source material among the other artists represented. Some used voices speaking; others, voices singing; many others, no voices at all. Some referenced acoustic instruments while others eschewed them altogether in favor of electronics. Works that employed entirely abstract sounds were juxtaposed with ones constructed from clearly identifiable ones.

Two works of particular interest in the latter category were by Matthew Barnard and Adam Basanta. Barnard’s The Piano Makers was constructed from recordings made at a piano factory; inspired by a book by David Wainwright of the same title that points out that “the frame and strings of a fully strung grand piano must withstand the pressure of about 20 tonnes,” Barnard’s piece is an unusual and dramatic portrait of a piano, filled with a palpable sense of tension using the sound of taut metal strings being tightened, among other things. In a glass is not a glass, Basanta narrows his focus to the sounds created from a wine glass—through striking, rubbing, bowing, clinking, and smashing. Some sounds are manipulated and abstracted, and Basanta explores (as did other composers) the effect of small sounds writ unnaturally large.

One thing that makes a festival of fixed-media music different from most other new music performances is that you can hear much of the music again immediately on the web—Barnard’s work is embedded above, and Basanta’s can be downloaded in its entirety from his website—but it can’t be denied that the works are transformed by the immersive environment provided by the Tape Music Festival. I am no audiophile, but I was nonetheless astonished by the impact that the fidelity and the enormous dynamic range of the sound had on my experience of these pieces. Of course everyone loves the high-volume viscera-shaking bass frequencies that make us feel all funny in those special places—Rubber (0) Cement’s “The Hydrogen Affair” Tritum fast talks the Szilard simpletons elicited a particularly male YEEEAAAAAAAAAHHHH! from a gentleman seated nearby—but more often I was struck by the effect of a crystal clear audio image of a small event, an unexpected high frequency, that unsettling silence that is only possible in a studio-like environment. The soft splash of footsteps in the water that concluded Orestis Karamanlis’s Στέρφος (Sterfos) were particularly memorable, especially when mixed with the sound of the pouring rain that had started outside.

***RE:COMPOSITION at SoEx

I missed out on the second night of the festival and went instead to Southern Exposure, another Mission venue a few blocks away that’s used more for visual arts than music. We got a respite that night from the storm but not the cold, and in an unheated, high-ceilinged concrete gallery space with large uncovered windows, a hardy crowd blew into their cupped hands for RE:COMPOSITION, a program curated by Julie Lazar. Using John Cage again as a touchstone, the evening’s program featured four works. A performance installation aptly titled Still Movement by Croatian visual artist Sandro Đukić opened the evening, with the audience standing while Đukić walked methodically and glacially among black pillars in a red-lighted space. The program closed with JD Beltran’s electronic, beat-driven music synchronized with Marc Barritte’s digital film of shifting shapes and colors.

The two more memorable works of the evening were sandwiched in between. It was the first public outing for Bar Hopping, a music and video project collaboratively created by cellists Joan Jeanrenaud and Paul de Jong (one half of The Books). Jeanrenaud performed the work solo with pre-recorded music and video—as of this performance, the two creators hadn’t yet met in person. The seven movements moved from lyrical melodies to melancholic viol consorts to martial ricochets, paired with video that reflected historic and contemporary visions of California. Several of the movements have been posted on de Jong’s Vimeo page; here’s the Intro:

The other work that has stayed with me was not “music” per se, but of course it was: poet Joan Retallack’s INTERRUPTUS: a Procedural Lecture for Two Voices, in homage to John Cage. Retallack, who teaches poetry at Bard and has published on Cage, constructed the piece using chance operations to determine the time structure of the performance, which consisted of her and writer Michael Ives simply sitting at a table with little clocks in front of them, reading prepared texts for specific periods of time—sometimes alternating, sometimes simultaneously, sometimes not at all.

Joan Retallack and Michael Ives perform INTERRUPTUS: a Procedural Lecture for Two Voices

Retallack was professorial, discussing Anarchic Harmony and poethics as they apply to Cage’s work; by contrast, Ives was, well, absurdly unhinged in a way that was at times reminiscent of Artaud. Together they were thought-provoking and hilarious, occasionally both at the same time. At one point in Retallack’s lecture, she offered the thought that “every word is equally consequential”—an idea that put me back into the crystalline clarity of the ODC Theater where every sound, whether they were coming from the speakers, the audience, or the world outside, was indeed consequential.

“Matrices and Entropy” from the Austin Museum of Digital Art

Posted on February 1, 2012 by AndrewSigler - Field Reports, Headlines

This past Saturday, the Austin Museum of Digital Art presented “Matrices and Entropy,” the most recent concert in their performance series focused on experimental music and digital performance art. AMODA has presented a variety of series over the years, including educational presentations, electronic concert music, and live interactive exhibitions. Though AMODA has no physical address (and really, isn’t that what you’d expect from a purely digital outfit?), their presence has been felt throughout the Austin area, and I was anxious to see what they had in store.

The show opened with Sam Pluta’s multimedia presentation data structures/monoliths ii (for chion)[*] which featured a variety of clips (with their original audio attached) from popular mainstream films manipulated in real time via Supercollider. Presented initially in short, two- to three-second bursts, the clips eventually began to take their place as structural elements of the piece despite their familiar origin. Patterns began to develop as the work progressed, though it was difficult to say whether these were intended or simply my brain trying to get its head around all the disparate input. The clips began to fly by more and more rapidly, leading to a climactic moment before slowing down and becoming arranged in such a way that their relative volume levels also decreased. This was followed by an extended (and thrice repeated) scene from the opening montage of the film Carrie which was, shall we say, somewhat calming relative to the hyperkinetic rapidity of the first section. Additionally, the Pino Donaggio music which accompanied this particular scene, all strings and slowly plucked guitar, was quite a “puppies and rainbows” setup for the deluge that followed. Fortunately, I’ve seen Carrie, so when the final iteration ended and gave way to a faster, louder, and more violent series of clips, I at least was able to keep my composure. This fugal section continued without respite, save for one clip featuring a man reaching for an electrical panel from which electricity was arching. This particularly calming image was the respite. Fortunately, the piece screeched to a halt before the guy blew up.

Line Upon Line performs Anders Vinjar’s +/-. Photo by Craig Washburn.

Percussion trio Line Upon Line performed Anders Vinjar’s +/- for assorted percussion and multichannel tape. The piece began with sparse offerings from non-pitched instruments that gave the impression of call and response or birdsong. Slowly, more clearly organized rhythms emerged from the spare texture, coalescing in short unified patterns and phrases and even the occasional pulse. This section came to a close after which the members pulled out sticks and went to work on the heads and sides of snares, timbales, and bongos. Grooves developed, stated even more clearly than before as smaller hand percussion was folded into the larger drum figures, recalling the introductory material and heralding one of the few instances when the pre-recorded audio gained prominence. Following the large, low frequency recorded bit, a section featuring cymbal scrapes and other metallic elements built to a climactic ending involving virtually every drum on the stage.

(from left) Steve Parker and Sam Pluta. Photo by Craig Washburn.

Steve Parker joined Pluta for an improv set featuring trombone and electronics. Following a prolonged silence, Parker began working for a living. Breath effects, short riffs, and flutter tongue were immediately processed through a variety of effects, from common delays and reverbs to stuttered bit-crushing in what became a canonic tit for tat between the two performers. Parker took the trombone apart, played with mutes, removed the bell and created suction with the slide (with his thumb over the tube) to create high pitched, pinched squealing effects. Most notable in this performance was Parker’s ability to go blow for blow with modern technology on a bunch of twisted tubes that are a few hundred years old.

Line Upon Line returned to the stage to perform Cage’s Variations II, which falls squarely into his “meditative/contemplative” category. As much about the silence as the sounds that punctuate it, Variations II allows the listener to become so focused on the silence that when the metal slabs are stroked, struck, or slammed, the sounds serve as markers or borders for that silence. The only downside of the experience was the air conditioner which droned on throughout the work, about which I imagine Cage would have been profoundly indifferent.

Line Upon Line and Sam Pluta. Photo by Craig Washburn.

The closing work was Pluta’s Matrices featuring Line Upon Line flanked by two televisions. These were the regular old 4:3 CRT monitors (as opposed to the ubiquitous 16:9 flatscreens) tuned to a static channel. With Pluta on laptop, the piece began with loud, piercing oscillations bursting from the speakers, sounding somewhat like the scratchy static from dirty guitar pots. The screens responded to the audio output, horizontal lines dancing up and down, forming, disappearing, and breaking into snowy static as the percussionists and Pluta performed. Each of the percussionists faced microphones and had different instruments to use. These were (from left to right, respectively) two handheld fans, the blades of which were allowed to slap against the mic, a balloon and a paper bag, and a bowed flexatone. In an alternating quasi-rondo form, the music basically alternated between two sections, the first featuring the above instruments played furiously by Line Upon Line and processed by Pluta , the second, shorter, featuring piercing rolls on two blocks of purple heart wood. The dichotomy of the jumpy action of the first section versus the short uniformity of the second was echoed in the juxtaposition of Line Upon Line’s physicality and Pluta’s immobile figure behind the laptop. Further, the piece followed the form of the concert in general, as it was in like a lion and out like a lamb.

AMODA held its concert in the Mexican American Cultural Center, its performance space a relative newcomer to the scene. It was a large “white box” of sorts with a backstage area separated by a delicately curved wall that seemed more like a spot to hang art than a dividing object. The crowd of around fifty was quite diverse, though the average age skewed a bit high, perhaps due to the eight to ten p.m. Saturday night time slot. The show ran straight through with no intermission and little in the way of formalities, short of a brief introduction. It was clean, neat, and well played sir, well played.

* The first piece performed was actually data structures/monoliths ii (for chion), not American Tokyo Daydream I (Calypso Sunrise), as was indicated in the printed program. The swap was brought to our attention after the post of this report, and we have updated it to reflect that change.

We Sing Life: Conspirare

Posted on January 26, 2012 by AndrewSigler - Field Reports, Headlines

Since its founding in 1991, vocal ensemble Conspirare has become not only part of the firmament of the Austin music landscape but also part of the national and international scene. Led by founder Craig Hella Johnson, Conspirare has recorded a number of CDs and DVDs on the Harmonia Mundi label and has received awards and media recognition, including the PBS television special “A Company of Voices: Conspirare in Concert,” an Edison award (Dutch Grammys), and five Grammy nominations. Among the highlights of last season were “Renaissance & Response: Polyphony Then and Now,” a weekend-long festival featuring works by Josquin Des Prez, Orlandus Lassus, Tomás Luis de Victoria, and J.S. Bach in four distinct programs, each featuring a world premiere by series composer-in-residence Robert Kyr. The ensemble’s out-of-town engagements included three performances in New York under the auspices of the Weill Music Institute of Carnegie Hall. This year is shaping up to be similarly busy, and Conspirare has wasted no time in presenting two concerts of new music multiple times over the past few days.

Conspirare led by Craig Hella Johnson. Photo by Karen Sachar

The first concert featured the world premier of Peter Scott Lewis’s The Changing Light, a co-commission between Conspirare and the Sanford Dole Ensemble. On either side of the Lewis were a number of pieces by Eric Whitacre, including Five Hebrew Love Songs and the U.S. premiers of Whitacre’s Oculi Omnium and Alleluia. Conspirare opened the afternoon concert with Whitacre’s With a Lily in Your Hand, a light but driving movement in 7/8 in which faster figures were contrasted with longer, less rhythmic segments. Right off the bat, it became clear that this was a seasoned group of musicians performing at an extremely high level; singers who could probably sing the phone book and sound fantastic. Part of me noticed the nuts and bolts elements, such as communication among the members and the strong direction of Johnson, but another part of me was just floored by the sound both in terms of quality and quantity. The twenty-four singers produced truly impressive volume at one moment, and were able to draw in the audience with the lightest pianissimo the next.

Five Hebrew Love Songs on poems of Hila Plitman was distinctly different from the other Whitacre offerings, partly because of the addition of string quartet and partly because of the structural elements both within each movement as well as in the larger form outlined by the five movements. The second and fourth movements, “Kala kalla (Light Bride)” and “Eyze Sheleg! (What snow!)” were haiku-like in their length and syllabic structure. “Kala kalla,” with its tambourine and 3-3-2-2 contrasting sections had a compelling forward movement throughout before coming to something of an unresolved cadence. The final movement, “Rakut” (Tenderness), began with a “bum-bum-bum” vocalization which changed to what was virtually a speaking part complimented by string harmonics. The effect was a captured texture (I hesitate to say “frozen” here as the immobility was not cold, but static string harmonics can certainly have that effect) which began to move forward via rising tenor lines, their pitches circled by the strings. Alleluia was presented as a tribute to UT Professor of Organ Gerre Hancock, who had passed away earlier in the day. An arrangement of an earlier work for band, “alleluia” was the primary text of the piece, driving the sopranos higher and higher until an “amen” ending closed the work.

The Changing Light by Peter Scott Lewis on text by Lawrence Ferlinghetti and scored for string quartet, vibes, marimba, and choir in four movements was the centerpiece of the concert. The three poems (the second, “Big Sur Light,” was divided into two parts to create the middle movements) describe the light of the sun in various locales and times in California. In “Big Sur Night,” a steady opening pulse gave way to more animated movement, as soprano and tenor wound their way through the text. Throughout, the string quartet mostly followed and supported the choir until the instrumental and vocal roles came together when the pulse returned at the end. “The Moon Stayed Full Last Night” began with an instrumental introduction followed by a warm, lyrical accompaniment. An interlude into which the pulse seemed to disappear was followed by a gentle ending, hints of pulse returning as the final notes echoed through the space.

Conspirare in rehearsal. Photo by Karen Sachar.

The second concert featured Joby Talbot’s Path of Miracles. On text by Robert Dickinson, Path of Miracles is an a capella oratorio of sorts which describes four of the main stops along the route from France to the cathedral shrine of Santiago de Compostela. Commissioned in 2005 by Nigel Short’s Tennebrae ensemble, the piece features 17 separate vocal parts as well as a crotale here and there. The first movement, “Roncesvalles,” began with a bit of theatricality. An altar lit with red light remained empty for several minutes, allowing the audience to settle into the space in what felt like a brief meditative state. If that seems like a short amount of time to meditate, try to sit quietly for two minutes while bathed in red light.

Slowly and deliberately mimicking stylized pilgrims, the basses and tenors entered from the back of the church, and when they had made their way to the front they continued pacing in a circle for a short period. Eventually they turned to face the audience, the basses singing quite low in their range and developing a slowly rising glissando that culminated in a tremendous climax. They were joined in this climax by the female voices hidden in the choir loft above us. A decrescendo followed as the sopranos and altos came down and took up antiphonal positions along the length of the church. Long, vaguely Arabic motives were traded back and forth for a time as the women transitioned from the sides of the church to their places on stage. A fugal section gave way to declamatory phrases as the basses took the melody from the sopranos. A largely 6/8 section peppered by hemiola provided tension as piercing crotales cut through the texture. All this built to a climax which quickly dwindled to a solo bass ending the movement.

The second movement illustrated the drudgery of pilgrimage through a reflective, slow ostinato topped by various individual lines rising mirage-like over the top. A fever dream staccato tutti emerged from this texture and lead ultimately to a quieter, unsettled harmony, overtones pulsing against one another. Slowly and in turn, the vocal parts dwindled, leaving the basses alone at the end.

The third movement saw previous motives return in ostinato patterns sung by the tenors and basses. In a return to the antiphony of the first movement, the chorus took up a flanking position while the basses spread through the center aisle. Johnson turned to face the audience (and conduct his group) and during these moments it was difficult not to see the music on his face as clearly as you could hear it in the room. Conductors need no excuse to be emotional and effusive, but it seemed less like Johnson was conducting the music and more like the music was passing through him. It was something I’ve witnessed in a handful of experiences with performers, but very rarely with a conductor and it was, quite frankly, a powerful thing to see. The tumultuous motion of the piece culminated in a truly gorgeous arrival, moved briefly to the minor mode, and ended in a preparation for the final movement.

The final movement depicts the arrival at Santiago and starts with the initial motif of the piece. Overlapping entries played like stretti writ large, each voice gently entering in what seemed like an isorythmic treatment of the material. This gentle music moved to a declamatory tutti section, the men joined by the women as staccato major mode 5/4 figures transformed to 6/4. The piece ended reflectively with the members of the choir moving, one by one, out of the room in a reversal of the initial entrances. The wonderful difference was that instead of leaving the audience alone in silence, the singers continued to sing as they walked further and further from the space, which sounded (to listeners of a certain vintage) not unlike the fade-out on any number of albums, though one that lasted several minutes. The effect was tremendous and the audience responded strongly, applauding for some time after the piece ended.

Vocal music has the advantage of text to connect to the listener, but I’m not sure that it’s simply the narrative that keeps an audience connected to a piece like Path of Miracles. The power of the human voice directed and shaped by a significant musical mind like Johnson’s has the power to do nearly anything, including connecting with incredibly diverse audiences like the one at St. Martin’s church in Austin this past Saturday.

New England’s Prospect: The Haunted Mansion

Posted on January 20, 2012 by Matthew Guerrieri - Field Reports, Headlines

Allow me to walk between the tall pillars
And find the beginning of one vine leaf there,
Though I arrive too late for the last spring
—James Wright, “Entering the Temple in Nîmes”

Symphony Hall in Boston is a temple, and proud of it, from the plaster casts of Greek and Roman statuary keeping classical watch to the cold-comfort design of the seats. But, like many temples, Symphony Hall is now part sacred space, part museum, harboring gods both potent and obsolete. At its best, John Harbison’s Symphony No. 6, the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s only world premiere this season, also captured something of that dance between the spark of immediacy and the accumulation of history.

Diana of Versailles – Photo by Peter Vanderwarker

The performances last week (I went Saturday night, January 14) were conducted by David Zinman, one-time music director in Baltimore, now settled in Zurich, but there was another conductor palpably absent: James Levine, the symphony’s dedicatee, and, as Harbison indicated in interviews, in many ways its subject. Levine has always been one of Harbison’s champions; the symphony was commissioned on his watch (as was Harbison’s 5th) and he would have conducted it had not health problems forced him from the BSO podium last year. But apart from its portrait of Levine, Harbison’s 6th also seems to be a reflection on the symphony itself, the form, and the idea of writing one, adding to a considerable, even burdensome repertoire.

It was the culmination of a two-season survey of Harbison’s symphonies. “The hardest thing to win back for the big genres of symphony and string quartet,” Harbison wrote in the program book, “is some kind of naturalness, some escape from the self-consciousness of our artistic time.” But consciousness of time was present in this Sixth from the start. It opened with a setting of James Wright’s poem “Entering the Temple in Nîmes” for mezzo-soprano (Paula Murrihy, in rich, sharp-faceted voice). The Temple of Diana becomes the focal point for a multitude of eras and traditions, as Wright, from his modern vantage, regards the “young Romans”:

Though they learned her name from the dark rock,
Among bearded Greeks,
It was here in the South of Gaul they found her true
To her own solitude.

That’s a lot of transfers on one ticket. Harbison’s setting oriented the traffic around the voice, starting with a leaping, unaccompanied mezzo line; the leap became the seed of much of the symphony’s motivic grillwork. The voice turned more recitative-like as the orchestra moved in, the focus shifting to the architecture of the temple. The shift was punctuated by an interloper, a cimbalom, whose jangle Harbison would return to throughout the symphony, rounding off passages while, sonically, remaining outside them.

The second movement was built around a long string line. The line itself, winding, full of angular leaps and variable speeds, was almost reminiscent of Elliott Carter, but the musical habitat was more traditionally Mahlerian—where Carter might playfully interrupt and jump-cut his way along such a wire, Harbison gradually added orchestral and harmonic mass in a way that started to feel dutiful, like a debater affirming the possibility of the Great American Symphony with ever more orotund rhetoric.

The last two movements, though, struck out into intriguing backcountry. Both started off with material strongly echoing (consciously or subconsciously, I don’t know) the one inarguably Great American Symphony, Copland’s Third, but both played off standard ideas of symphonic greatness as much as they pursued them. The scherzo-like third movement began by carving a grid of triplets into all manner of off-kilter syncopation, but in the middle, things got seriously interesting, contrasting implications coexisting—straight rhythms vs. swing, busy contrapuntal chatter vs. glacial background-radiation harmonies—as Harbison divided the ensemble into ever-more-unorthodox chamber combinations. (A sudden garnish of stately harmonics from two solo violas—later reprised by two cellos—was particularly bewitching, like a shape-note echo.)

The fourth movement was more imposing, the sound in large blocks. (Much of it was in a particular vein that Harbison has mined before: imagine isolating the tallest, most dissonant harmonies from a big band chart and then quilting them together.) But here, too, the music seemed to surprise even itself. At one point, the granitic procession shuddered to a stop, suddenly seeming to backtrack, retracing its steps, looking for the path. The ending, too, was more an abreaction than a catharsis, ruminating to a halt rather than emphatically sending itself off; the cimbalom came back, but as part of a final inventory, the music taking one last look around the house before closing the door.

Harbison is, on the one hand, a composer of symphonies with a technique to match: the bend-but-don’t-break tonality, the chain-of-custody working out of ideas, the cultivation of a monumental austerity in his orchestration. But he also seemed, in this symphony, to be more comfortable weighing musical options than flat-out asserting them. Those points in the symphony that seemed to spin off into a kind of considered ambivalence were not only the most engaging, but also cast the rest of the piece in a more fertile light. Maybe it was a reflection of the overwhelming sense of unfinished business surrounding Levine’s tenure and departure, or maybe of something in the composer’s own temperament, but Harbison’s Sixth was hard to put a finger on in a most interesting way.

Zinman, throughout the concert, projected structure more than mood. Having suffered through enough concerts where that calculus was inverted, I can’t say it was a bad thing; still, there was a cut-and-dried sense to the whole evening. Carl Maria von Weber’s Euryanthe Overture was bracing and chipper. Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 1, with pianist Leif Ove Andsnes, was similarly clean and straightforward; Andsnes’s firm clarity of touch was commendable, and it was nice to hear a Beethoven interpretation unburdened with a need to foreshadow the entire Romantic era, but the overall temperature stayed low.

The performance of the Harbison was solid and admirable, but the ghost at the banquet loomed; Levine would probably have stretched those ambiguities out to wondrous effect. The concert closed with Richard Strauss’s Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks, where Zinman’s direct approach yielded the fewest dividends, countless delicious details of the piece subsumed. The ensemble and virtuosity were impeccable, but the pranks themselves had the slapstick energy of a news report.

***

The previous week’s BSO concerts were to have been the subscription series coming-out party for conductor Andris Nelsons, the odds-on favorite to take over Levine’s music directorship. Nelsons instead begged off to stay at home with his wife and newborn daughter, and BSO Assistant Conductor Marcelo Lehninger stepped in to lead the concerts. (I heard the January 7 performance.)

The original program largely remained, though, including the American premiere of Mark-Anthony Turnage’s From the Wreckage, a trumpet concerto written for Håkan Hardenberger, who was the soloist for these performances. (Nelsons started out as a trumpeter as well, hence the programming.) Why it took seven years for From the Wreckage to make it across the Atlantic, I’m not sure—the piece turned out to be a fine entertainment.

Turnage’s jazz influences are apparent, but it’s the space between influence and appropriation where the action really happens in his music. At its best, Turnage’s music is more like a still life of jazz, pinned and painted with full memento mori overtones, decay and spoil rendered with exuberant brushwork. From the Wreckage, jump-started by string harmonics and Hardenberger’s het-up flugelhorn, unfolded in waves of noir alternatives: sultry and suspicious, then grim, brittle, and Brechtian, then a fractious, Rite of Spring-style assault. Even the piece’s gimmicks paid off, whether it was having Hardenberger move from flugelhorn to trumpet to piccolo trumpet over the course of the concerto, or scattering four percussionists among the orchestra in order to pass around clockwork ticks, a surround-sound time bomb. From the Wreckage was rich, dark fun.

Lehninger (who stepped in at the last minute to conduct the premiere of Harrison Birtwistle’s Violin Concerto last season) was awfully impressive, though he started slow: the opener—Haydn’s Symphony No. 88, swapped in for the originally scheduled No. 90—was secure but one-dimensional, full of the sort of high-contrast subito-this-and-that engendered by Haydn’s reputation for humor, the elbows to the ribs outnumbering the actual witticisms. But the rest of the concert was superb. The Turnage was bold and lush. And the finale, a stop-pulling tour of Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra, was terrific, cogently argued, sweepingly grand, big-boned and brash.

I had a great time, but, then again, I am an incurable Richard Strauss fan. But it was the sort of performance that recalled how far-out Strauss’s music really was and is, a facet dulled by his post-Schoenberg last-Romantic reputation, his political dealings, and, perhaps, his personal diffidence. Lehninger and the BSO, though, got it, how confrontational, how unapologetic, how punk the tone poems are, and how good performances of them depend on pushing those aspects to the fore, wallowing in the attitude. Put it this way: it is a credit to conductor and orchestra that those in the audience who aren’t Richard Strauss fans must have been absolutely miserable.

That might be wishful thinking, but this season at the BSO, one has had to take any such line-in-the-sand musical verve where one can get it; the spark of novelty has been in short supply. Living composers can be counted on one hand; the only piece left on the slate that Boston hasn’t already heard is Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Violin Concerto (scheduled to be conducted by him in April). It’s been a long time since the BSO was a hothouse of new music, and whatever energy James Levine was able to inject in that regard is petering out. The temple is feeling ancient.

Narrative Before Music

Posted on January 19, 2012 by Devin Hurd - Field Reports, Headlines

Fifth House Ensemble deserves credit for the careful preparation and forethought that went into the multimedia “#thisrocks” installment of their In Transit series. So much of the experience was tailored to mirror our contemporary reality—lives overflowing with Facebook updates, Tweets, and an intense quantity of media that competes for our attention at any given time. With two video screens, a writer, director, media consultant, voice over artist, and sound engineer involved with “#thisrocks”—all in addition the piano trio at the heart of the production—there were plenty of competing focal points created for the performance itself.

5th House Ensemble: Andrew Williams (violin); Herine Coetzee Koschak (cello); Adam Marks (piano)

The printed program took the form of a small deck of postcards wrapped in an “In Transit #thisrocks” paper band. One card detailed the three pieces featured on the program, one card featured the program notes, one card listed the players and producers of the event, and three cards were devoted to acknowledging the event’s many sponsors.

During #thisrocks, storytelling and live music operated along parallel tracks as a larger commentary on the nature of music itself and its ability to provide an anchor during life’s turbulent times. The fictional character of Miranda Rodriguez supplied the narrative thread—a young, aspiring concert cellist living in New York City as her early commitment and passion for playing cello (with the stated goal of sharing a stage with Yo-Yo Ma) is tested by a turbulent adolescence and an unsupportive home life.

The visual content projected onto two screens on either side of the stage was inventive, well-crafted, and easily visible to the audience. It consisted of a montage of social media updates, family photographs, written letters and emails, as well as spoken narration placed between the musical movements. Each element was carefully timed to give the eyes and ears every chance to follow the personalities and an unfolding narrative layered with the music. It was designed to keep the experience engaging at multiple levels.

The regular appearance of letters written to Yo-Yo Ma at various points along the young musician’s life provide a sense of the role models and aspirations behind Rodriguez’s drive to realize her dream. The story develops a powerful emotional arc that portrays music as something that literally saves the young woman’s life as she makes the difficult transition toward an adulthood that fulfills her dreams. The style of storytelling allows for a great deal of tension to form from the exposure of deeply personal details. This is particularly the case as the account works its way through a dangerous period of teenage rebellion and the tragic loss of a close friend to a drug overdose that triggers in Rodriguez a renewed commitment to her music studies. The pacing, presentation, and writing were extremely effective at producing a resonant experience. The final movement of the evening was accompanied by live Tweets from the audience responding to what they had just seen. The end result was an aggressively updated, multimedia approach toward a chamber music experience. The live music served as more than a soundtrack to the story. It was more like the narrative was providing an independent track to accompany the music. The performance maintained the thematic consistency and tone of our technologically saturated world while also inviting a real-time glimpse into the perceptions of an audience that plays a participating role in the production.

5th House Ensemble: Andrew Williams (violin); Herine Coetzee Koschak (cello); Adam Marks (piano)

The music at the center of this experience consisted of three trios by three completely different generations of composers, brilliantly performed by Andrew Williams on violin, Herine Coetzee Koschak on cello, and Adam Marks on piano. The music was well-rehearsed and the players effectively negotiated several physically demanding movements while hardly breaking a sweat. They were a solid presence within a complicated presentation of fleeting parts.

Piano Trio no. 1 in d minor (1839) by Felix Mendelssohn provided a stylistic grounding in the Classical/Romantic music conservatory world of the protagonist. It is a beautiful piece that was beautifully executed by the trio. At the same time, it was the piece that felt most out of place within the swirling multimedia saturation that surrounded it. The initial experience of projected social media statements over the top of this music was jarring at the onset of the concert.

One piece that fit the modern sensibilities of juxtaposition like a glove was Nivea Hair Care Styling Mousse (1999) by contemporary Dutch composer Jacob TV. It is a churning, groove-heavy piece that acted as a welcome foil to the deeply sentimental qualities of the unfolding narrative.

David T. Little’s Brooklyn Alloy (2003-2004) was the 21st-century contribution to the program. It is a fiercely aggressive, rhythmic piece with musical parts that lock together at unusual angles and junctions, with textures that move freely between wide variations of independence and synchronicity between the instrumental parts. The materials were nicely sequenced into an intricate yet deeply satisfying sound.

While the performances of these pieces were nearly flawless, the decision to shuffle the individual movements of all three works was difficult to reconcile. The first movement of the Mendelssohn was followed by the first movement of the Jacob TV, then a movement by Little and then into a mad scramble between three profoundly different works. While this emulated the “shuffle” function of personal music players and matched the ethos of the overall experience, I felt that the formal integrity of these individual works suffered as a result. It was odd to feel that one had the detailed experience of the movements of these works played live while not ever having the chance to grasp the compositional form that unfolds when heard un-shuffled.

The order of movements was not a “random” shuffle, however. The sequence was clearly restructured in the service of the narrative. To this end, the emotional arc of the story was well served—it was a compromise that gave the linear story the most impact. It is the kind of musical manipulation that we have come to accept in film, but as a live performance this manipulation felt a little heavy-handed and transparent. I suspect that the narrative would have been compromised had the sequential integrity of the music been left intact.

Fifth House Ensemble deserves enormous credit for making this kind of multimedia presentation incredibly appealing to a broad audience in a memorable way that opens ears to new music. I hope those same ears may one day become attuned to forms that defy the fragmentation of contemporary life and offer a reprieve from the everyday experience.

Austin Music 2012: New Year Evolution

Posted on January 5, 2012 by AndrewSigler - Field Reports, Headlines

The Top Five Shows to See Before The Sun Comes Out In Austin
1. No Idea Festival – February 2, 3, 4 in Austin, February 5 in Houston, and February 6 in San Antonio: Solo and ensemble improvisation.
2. Austin New Music Co-op’s 10th anniversary party-concert – March 23 and 24: Music by NMC composers as well as Feldman, Lucier, Dreyblatt, Cage, Cardew, and more. Also featuring inventions and ephemera from a decade of new music in Austin.
3. Revel – March 30: Piano trio performs contemporary chamber works
4. Fast Forward Austin – April 15 (yes, Tax Day): Second annual festival featuring regional and national performers and composers.
5. Fusebox Festival – April 25 through May 5: Innovative works of art across a variety of different mediums.

I wrapped up my last article with a comment about new music coexisting with the music Austin is most well known for; namely the blues, Americana, indie rock, and country twang that have filled the bars and clubs of Austin since forever. Venues like Antones, Armadillo World Headquarters, Continental Club, and the juggernaut festivals South by Southwest [1] and the Austin City Limits Festival (not to mention the original Austin City Limits show) have served to spread the sound and style of Austin music, as well as the general vibe of the place; one built on organic growth that was equal parts cheap rent, cheap beer, complete indifference to upward mobility, and an odd hippie/cowboy dichotomy that Austin’s favorite son, Willie Nelson, helped foment in the mid-seventies.

While these venues, styles, and festivals have garnered the lion’s share of interest and publicity, a lower profile and largely behind-the-scenes group of composers, performers, and curators have quietly developed a burgeoning independent new music scene amid the glitz and glamour of the national players–and in some cases these new folks have infiltrated the national scenes. In particular, the last decade has seen a number of significant groups, festivals, and events pop up here in town that share little with their popular cousins except a zip code, and my plan for 2012 is to feature these groups in and around Austin as they ply their wares.

Fusebox “End of Year” 2011 from Fusebox Festival on Vimeo.

Among these is the Austin New Music Coop, a group of musicians dedicated to bringing new music to a different and diverse audience. Since forming in 2001, ANMC has featured dozens of premiers and hundreds of new works, including “a commission of a program-length work by Berlin-based American composer Arnold Dreyblatt, a realization of John Cage’s Songbooks, music for the extinct instruments of Luigi Russolo, Pauline Oliveros’s Four Meditations for Orchestra (with the composer in attendance), a three-day series of the works of the New York School, and Ellen Fullman’s Long String Instrument Performance at Seaholm Power Plant.” A multi-day performance (and detailed audio and video recording) of the late British composer Cornelius Cardew’s The Great Learning is ANMC’s most recent large-scale undertaking, and it will be featured in an upcoming podcast by yours truly.

Austin New Music Co-op rehearses Arnold Dreyblatt’s Kinship Collapse from Fast>>Forward>>Austin on Vimeo.

Ten Pounds To The Sound and the No Idea Festival (both curated by Chris Cogburn) have created an environment for improvisation to flourish in and around Austin, as well as nationally and internationally. Featuring a variety of group, solo, acoustic, and electric performances, their concerts display a wide range of improvisational styles and voices, and have fostered fruitful long term relationships among the participants. The ninth annual No Idea Festival promises to be the biggest ever with an international roster of artists and shows and workshops in Austin, Houston, and San Antonio.

Remi Alvarez / Ingebrigt Håker Flaten / Stefan Gonzalez from no idea festival on Vimeo.

The Golden Hornet Project has its roots in the Golden Arm Trio and Brown Whorenet groups that came together around the end of the 1990s. Initially featuring post-punk and free improvisation in a number of haunts on Red River Street, Graham Reynolds and Peter Stopschinski (of the two groups, respectively) eventually joined forces and have since made a significant mark on the Austin music landscape, in the area of new music and otherwise. Live performance, film music (live and recorded), orchestral, chamber, jazz, dance, opera, and a number of cross-over varieties have been part of the ground covered by this group. The recent Symphony VI concert (the sixth of a sorta-annual orchestral show) was named “Best Symphonic Performance of the Year” by the Austin Critics Table, beating out performances by the Austin and University of Texas symphony orchestras. This is “new music notable” in that both sold-out shows were organized, rehearsed, and performed without the typically large and long established infrastructure normally required for such undertakings.

New music groups across the nation and around the world will celebrate John Cage’s centenary this September 5. In Austin, “Happy Birthday Mr. Cage” will continue its second decade with another evening-length program of Cage’s works curated by the Austin Chamber Music Center’s Michelle Schumann. This event has become an Austin favorite, partly because of Cage’s notoriety outside of musical circles (which is to say that a similar concert of Partch might be of interest to a smaller and more music-centric community given Cage and Partch’s relative blips on the cultural radar) and partly because Austin cottons to the unusual. When 4’33” is performed, it’s funny to watch a few of those “in the know” roll their eyes at the performance of Cage’s “hit.” It’s not because of the content or concept of the piece, mind you. It’s because these people want the deep cuts, and Schumann delivers.

Not everyone got their start during the last administration. Newcomers Revel came on the scene in 2009, and since then they’ve produced dozens of concerts as well as a CD of early 20th-century works. Based primarily in Austin (with occasional performances in New Mexico and points in between), Revel’s mission is to provide an audience experience disconnected from the formality of traditional concerts.

Fast Forward Austin will celebrate its second anniversary this spring with another day-long festival featuring local and national performers, including headliner Vicky Chow of Bang on a Can All-Stars fame. Last year’s inaugural festival was a huge success and featured a wide variety of music, improvisation, and dance.

Bel Cuore performs two *Bagatelles* by Gyorgy Ligeti from Fast>>Forward>>Austin on Vimeo.

Very few of these shows will be held in conventional venues and none of them will be targeted at traditional audiences. There won’t be many ties, clasped hands, or perfectly motionless audience members. There will be lots of people who don’t know what they’re in for, and that’s why most of them will have bought their ticket. They want something new, and they’ll find it here in Austin.

1. One of my favorite parts of SXSW is walking through downtown a month or so after the festival. Here you’ll find recently relocated hipsters (who have made the move to town based on the generally epic spring weather in Austin) sweating through their skinny jeans as the Big Sun takes up its six-month residency

I Hear the Gongs Singing—Percussive Adventures in Chicago

Posted on December 21, 2011 by Devin Hurd - Field Reports, Headlines

Tatsuya Nakatani is the very picture of dedication to his music and the carefully constructed sound world that he fully inhabits. His stage incorporates an expansive collection of gongs, mallets, bows, and drums that he loads and unloads from the van he drives, touring for months at a time in order to bring his immersive percussive sound to an assortment of ears in towns and cities across the country. He builds his own bows and engineers his own metal frames. He sells CDs and vinyl records to support his singular approach to a music rich in standing waves and complex overtones shaped by his finely honed intuition for his improvisations. His rapport with the audience and other musicians is understated and disarmingly humble. This is in stark contrast to the focused intensity and disciplined technique that goes into his transformative performances.

A solo, improvised set of music from Tatsuya Nakatani emerges as an act of intense, creative ritual. His language of bowed gongs and scraped snare heads focuses on percussion as a source for drone textures that ripple with complex energy. The music erupts and subsides with an intense focus on the intersection of disciplined technique and raw sonic energy.

Nakatani has been looking for practical ways to expand his solo percussive world. To this end he has taken an interest in workshopping pieces for what he calls the Nakatani Gong Orchestra. The membership of the orchestra is made up of people local to wherever he happens to be performing, which he finds gives it a dramatically different character every night. His preference is to work with non-musicians for a brief period–just two to three hours–before staging a performance. This is just enough time to cover the basic techniques of striking and bowing his large gongs and to teach the performers a set of hand gestures that communicate his intentions as the conductor. Conceptualized as an extension of his own appendages, Nakatani uses the ensemble to realize the sound of a multi-limbed version of himself. Working with performers without previous musical training allows him to better shape a sound that utilizes his own exceptional restraint without having to also manage the personalities and impulses of trained musicians.

The opening set for his recent stop at Chicago’s Elastic Arts began with a Gong Orchestra performance. The wide dynamic range of six performers bowing and striking gongs of various sizes was startling, although much of this music was not particularly loud. The relatively small space at Elastic Arts could easily be consumed by the vibrations of so many large gongs. Tatsuya Nakatani’s aesthetic draws from a sense of restraint that allows the complexities of sustained gong tones to fill the space without resorting to volume. Nakatani conducted crescendos and decrescendos that washed in like ocean waves. At other times he would shape a sustained, quiet textures that served as a bed for his own playing at the front of the gong orchestra. The formal construction of his conducted improvisation was remarkably transparent as he sculpted an elaborate drone that allowed the wealth of anharmonic frequencies to dance in the air between gongs and eardrums. Much of the performance featured Nakatani leading through conduction before reaching for his own bows and mallets to contribute his layer of sound. The vibrations within the room were filled with nuances that shifted audibly with even the slightest movement of one’s head. It gave the air a feeling of density, like being submerged within a rich liquid of sound.

The second set of the evening featured a solo performance with Nakatani playing a drum kit, several gongs, and handheld percussion. Nakatani’s dedication to his sonic language is readily apparent in the meditative, near trance-like state that he goes into once the music begins. The sense of invocation that flowed from the way Nakatani regarded his handcrafted instruments gave rise to a spiritual quality that was reinforced by his sense of submission to the improvisational space. It was a drum solo realized as a continuous drone as Nakatani explored a range of percussive frictions and air pressure applied to the membranes of his drums through a technique of blowing through the hole of a cymbal held flat along the surface of the snare drum. These were combined with the sonic richness of his bowed gongs, which demonstrated his ability to react and truly control the contours of the sound through subtle changes in bow speed and angle.

***

Later that same week, Third Coast Percussion offered up a performance of new music as part of the Sunday Salon Series at the Chicago Cultural Center. The quartet of Owen Clayton Condon, Robert Dillon, Peter Martin, and David Skidmore presented a polished set of composed music that explored different aspects of ensemble drumming.

A tight rendition of Mallet Quartet by Steve Reich opened the afternoon concert. It is a relatively recent work that builds upon the familiar harmonic progressions and fast-slow-fast form that are such an identifiable part of Reich’s sound. The use of two five-octave marimbas opened up a wider harmonic range of which Reich takes full advantage, particularly in the slow section. The use of amplification combined with the live acoustics of Preston Hall made for a loud excursion into the composer’s sonic language.

The next piece on the program was Credo in US composed in 1942 by John Cage. It is an early collage work that plays up Cage’s whimsical side, combining a mash-up of popular musical styles from that era along with the use of radio as an instrument, the live broadcasts adding various popular musical styles from this era into the mix as well. In addition to the radio, Credo in US is scored for piano, muted gongs, tom toms, tin cans, electric buzzer, plus a phonograph—though an iPhone served that role here as a 21st century technological substitution that was well within the spirit and sonic purpose of its 20th century counterpart. John Cage’s music soars when performed with a balance of reverence and enthusiasm, and the interpretation of this work by Third Coast Percussion—the tin cans and other physical materials tastefully selected for their timbral qualities—was an incredible success.

Third Coast Percussion performing Common Patterns in Uncommon Time (2011) by David Skidmore.The second half of the concert consisted of Common Patterns in Uncommon Time by Third Coast percussionist David Skidmore. Inspired by the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, the piece begins with the mallet instruments entering seamlessly from specially designed pre-recorded intermission music. The pulsating sound suggests Reich, but with a decidedly different harmonic sensibility. The music then breaks abruptly from the mallet instruments and moves into more expanded percussive timbres. Each movement exploring subsets of metals, drum kits, woods, or membrane instruments over a span of time that systematically exhausted a stage filled with instruments. The abrupt timbral transitions between movements emerge as a signature quality of the piece. The use of electric fan-driven wind chimes over a soft texture of mallet instruments was particularly striking. It served as a fitting contrast to the loud beats pounded out on multiple drum kits just before that section. The piece concluded with two of the performers moving into the audience while playing clay pots as an effective nod toward the sense of space that marks Frank Lloyd Wright’s creations. It was music that built out nicely from the iconic 20th century composers featured during the first half of the program.

New England’s Prospect: Sometimes a Great Quotient

Posted on December 19, 2011 by Matthew Guerrieri - Field Reports, Headlines

via 13sonoro

There are actors and actresses who have achieved a combination of fame and versatility such that you can separate their filmographies into movies they happen to have been in and movies that, without them, would not exist. So The Dirty Dozen has Charles Bronson in it, say; but Death Wishis a Charles Bronson movie. At Tufts University’s Granoff Center last Monday, a concert by NotaRiotous, the performing ensemble of the Boston Microtonal Society, showed a similar partition. There was music that happened to use microtones, and then there was microtonal music.

And, what’s more, that distinction, along the way, frustrated at least a couple of assumptions left over from the arrow-of-progress model of music history. One might have expected newer music and younger composers to make the microtonal language a more integral part of the rhetoric, but, in many ways, the opposite was the case. And the classical equating of quality with organic theoretical coherence was sidestepped as well; the caliber of the music, the level of risk and reward, had little to do with whether the microtones seemed to decorate the surface or well up from deep in the music’s DNA.

The Boston Microtonal Society has, of late, been fashioning a future for itself. Founded in 1988, the BMS long bore the stamp of its co-founder, the late Joe Maneri, composer, jazz performer, all-around musical frontiersman; even as Maneri relaxed into emeritus status some years before his 2009 passing, the Society was still a Joe Maneri movie, as it were. Artistic Directors Julia Werntz and James Bergin have expanded the group’s portfolio. With the debut of NotaRiotous in 2006—a chamber group of flexible size, drawn from expert performers familiar from many of the city’s other new music groups—BMS became as much a presenting organization as a composers’ collective; and a resulting shift in programming has made it as much a repository of historical microtonal repertoire as a spur to novelty.

This concert was the culmination of a NotaRiotous residency at Tufts, and featured a pair of premieres by graduate composers. William Kenlon’s Kuntanèré supplemented a string quartet (violinists Gabriela Diaz and Diamanda Dramm, violist Anne Black, and cellist David Russell) with Amy Advocat’s bass clarinet to pointed, groovy effect. (All the pieces on the program worked with permutations of these five performers, and all the permutations were superbly represented, performances both technically precise and energetically lucid.) Kuntanèré was a riff-based accretion of a piece, the higher strings building up collections of short phrases while Advocat and Russell punctuated with a rumble of low syncopation; the riffs then assembled into a scaffold for a slow bass clarinet solo. The microtonal content pungently inflected music more dependent on rhythm and contour, efficiently fueling the motivic repetitions: that chunky catchphrase from Advocat and Russell never got old, its harmonic outline remaining just out of earshot.

Michael Laurello’s trio The Disincorporation of Four Towns, another premiere, was sparse where Kuntanèré was spiky, motives regarded side-by-side rather than goading each other on. (Advocat, on regular clarinet, was joined by Black and Russell; the title refers to the creation of the Quabbin Reservoir, one of the more evocative pieces of Massachusetts lore.) Again, the microtones pushed beyond equal-tempered expectations, though in this case they nudged hollow-sounding perfect intervals further out of their customary focus, rather than sharpening their edge. Werntz’s Five Vignettes from the Garden by the Sea, a duo for Diaz and Russell, intensified sparseness into full high-contrast, stark expressionism, a kind of reboot of post-Webern dramatic style, but with the characteristic sharp-relief cells expanding and contracting in more subtle gradations.

If the newer works on the program emphasized the expressive possibility of microtonal accents, the older works seemed to revel in the sheer exoticism of the sonorities. Ben Johnston’s 1982 Trio (Advocat, Diaz, and Russell) worked both surface and structure, a sound world combining Harry Partch’s highway dithyrambs and Harold Shapero’s neoclassical industry, the music’s vernacular echoes burned and dodged into disorienting highlights and rustic shadows. Alois Hába’s 1963 String Quartet XIV also straddled the line, much of it sounding like unusually spicy Bartók, intervals more major than major and more minor than minor. But a recurring, woozy bit of rising viola-cello counterpoint, linking multiple movements, pushed past twelve-note analogues, as did Hába’s penchant for coming up with harmonic progressions that didn’t quite circle back to their origin the way they would in equal temperament, the dominant-tonic loop turned into a Moebius strip.

Ezra Sims’s 1987 clarinet-and-strings Quintet, which closed the concert, started off with that venerable gambit, a gradual accumulation of volume, momentum, and complexity, a precisely notated cousin of the ending of “A Day in the Life.” But the second movement (“Placid and Meditative”) suddenly plunged the ears into new territory, chorale-like successions of microtonal harmonies (drawn from Sims’s intricate, ingenious 72-note division of the octave) both completely unfamiliar and completely convincing. Quintet luxuriates in its harmony, and the luxury is all the more compelling for its total-immersion fluency, heady lungfuls of the air of another planet.

It was, fittingly, the oldest piece on the program that came up with the most old-fashioned charm. Julián Carrillo’s 1927 Dos Bosquejos, for string quartet, fit the milieu of their character-piece titles—“Meditación” and “En secreto”—while almost didactically working through the implications of their quarter-tone vocabularies. The creation story of Carrillo’s “Sonido 13″ (“Thirteenth Sound”) theory involved the composer dividing a violin string into sixteenth-tones with a razor blade; the Bosquejos shave Romanticism smooth. A Chopin-like progression, voice leading descending by quarter-steps, lent its melting slide to both pieces; again and again, quarter-tone sighs gave the lines a kind of hyper-refined wistfulness.

It encompassed the concert’s continuum: drenched in microtonality from the ground up, but also devoted to its capacity for amplifying conventional expressivity. Carrillo’s microtones were, in fact, downright suave. Divide the half-step, and it can be rather like raising one eyebrow instead of two.

Six Skinny Strings: The Reason for the Season

Posted on December 19, 2011 by AndrewSigler - Field Reports, Headlines

Two weeks into the virtually undodgeable 24/7 Winter Wonderland sound collage that is this time of year, I’ve been looking for something without sleigh bells, warm brass, and mixed chorus. Though we’ve finally cooled to a seasonally congruent temperature here, it’s still odd to hear all the Christmas tunes when only a few weeks back people were still wearing shorts and sandals in the beer gardens (I’m looking at YOU, me). I don’t mean to come off all Scroogey. For the most part I enjoy all the seasonal goodness, but my search for sanctuary from the rising Yuletide led me to Skinny’s Ballroom in the heart of downtown Austin for a bit of improv holiday cheer. After paying a sliding scale cover ($5-$10, pay what you can), I found myself in a physically typical and fairly swanky shotgun shack of a downtown bar (though one that had been thoroughly renovated) with a bar to port, a half-dozen church pews to starboard, and the requisite booths, stools, and dudes. A cursory glance at a stage decorated with drums, monitors, guitars, and all the typical gear—including a guy checking levels on a red Gibson 335—seemed to indicate a place that was prepped for any of a number of Austin’s indie bands.

The show was curated under the auspices of Ten Pounds To The Sound by Chris Cogburn (whose No Idea Festival will be covered here in the very near future) and featured three guitarists—Jonathan Horne (Austin), Lucas Gorham (Houston), and Mexico City guitarist and improviser Fernando Vigueras in his first ever U.S. tour. Kicking off the festivities was Horne, who started his set in a sort of gonzo, quasi-Hendrix fashion, steeped in feedback and blurred scale runs, head lolling around like a rag doll. Standing mute before a microphone, Horne smeared blues licks mixed with arpeggios in a flurry of messy, expressionist fretboard gymnastics. The second tune featured bowed sextuple stops and heavily textural elements—think of the first minute of Penderecki’s Threnody… without the following minutes, for about six minutes. In a screeching left turn, Horne followed up with an instrumental cover of the Carter Family’s version of “Wildwood Flower,” the melody peeking out through the madness like a country mouse lost in the big city. A brief encore echoing the gestural elements of the first piece wrapped up Horne’s set.

Lucas GorhamLucas Gorham began playing almost imperceptibly with a lap steel signal hissing like the start of a record. Volume and wah-wah swells developed so quietly you could actually hear him pick the string before the swell, and the audience (in a bar which required no such reverence) was drawn in and church quiet. These were actual Cageian moments in which the ambient sounds of the room (sounds at the bar, front door opening, someone walking to the back) mixed with the music in a truly compelling counterpoint. Granted, you might get a similar mixture of sounds at your local coffeeshop’s singer/songwriter night, but the impact here was different, perhaps because of the improvisatory and non-lyric-oriented nature of the music. As the piece developed, reverb explosions[1] morphed into lonesome tritones in a captured sound-on-sound texture. A layered figure not unlike cello tremolo was created by beating the bridge of the guitar, and as the sound-on-sound looped round and round, Gorham dumped the lappy and moved to a Strat to begin playing bass notes over the repeating texture. These notes had a multidimensional quality that I can only describe as the opposite of overtones—“undertones” maybe? Swelling power chords[2] oozing distortion spoke to their metal roots while shrugging off any sense of hipster appropriation as sixteenth note strumming lent a percussive rhythmic element to the pulsing mix. A shift to a hoedown rhythm marked a move back to the pedal steel, which Gorham used to play somewhat more traditional licks over the Strat groove-soup that still boiled around him. It was striking that despite the use of these instruments and fairly idiomatic techniques, the music never sounded like borrowed stylistic material. Gorham continued by picking behind the bridge and manipulating a delay pedal, which when done in real time (typically these pedals are “set it and forget it”) created a magical toy piano effect mixed with something of a microtonal glissando. This was followed by a return to the grumble roar of distortion which sort of tore the whole thing a new one. When the sound had faded and Gorham looked up, the audience responded with long and loud applause. There was even a guy in the back who did that “whipping your cowboy hat around in a circle” thing[3], which I can safely say I’ve never seen except in the movies.

Fernando ViguerasFernando Vigueras’s background includes conventional guitar playing and training, but his performance at Skinny’s was anything but conventional. He came on stage with a nylon string acoustic guitar and a small portable fan (the tiny handheld kind you might see around the pool) and sat down on a chair surrounded by foot pedals and other electronics. He began by detuning the bass strings while using the spinning fan blades to create a tremolo so severe that the loosened strings began to slam against the fretboard repeatedly like Bartók pizz trapped in a MAX patch. This quasi-percussive sound gave the impression of a drum roll as opposed to a pitch event, and as the sound evened out, Vigueras captured it with a loop pedal. Above this texture, he gave the same fan treatment to the treble strings which came off like a giant harpsichord or press-rolled hammered dulcimer in a horror film. He then began stick-rubbing, pick-sliding, and finger-tapping the strings against the fretboard, the last of which looked a bit 1980s but sounded really quite 2080s. Against the slow decay of this large texture and in a wash of reverb, he began plucking the strings and adjusting the tuning pegs, providing the first substantial (and melodic—a term I use loosely here) pitch material of the piece. Harmonies began to form from the extended single lines, which in turn formed beds for further melodic material. During the bulk of the performance Vigueras held the guitar in a more or less conventional fashion, but as the piece progressed he pulled the guitar up such that the neck was nearly parallel with his own, with the lower bout (the bottom of the guitar) in his lap. As both arms wrapped around the body, one hand made its way up the fretboard and moved above the nut, plucking the parts of the strings which are only a few inches long between nut and tuning pegs. The other hand moved down to the bridge and began touching the strings, creating sounds through the pedals like the striking of super-tight drum heads or (as it says in my notes) “popcorn in Satan’s microwave.” Finally, Vigueras pulled out a bow, carefully pulling across the highest strings[4] which created impossible overtones that, while quite beautiful, must have completely freaked out any dogs within several blocks.

A few weeks ago, I said that my experience at the Green House show was one that was “uniquely Austin,” and while I stand by that statement, I have to say that my idea of new music in this town (particularly in terms of venue) has been somewhat broadened. This show was really spectacular, pulled no punches, and was only a block from the Austin Convention Center. I’ll never tire of shows in funky little out-of-the-way venues, but to see a full-fledged improv show in an otherwise conventional bar in the middle of the week was heartening. Maybe it’s the season that’s raised my spirit, or maybe it’s Vigueras’s impossible overtones still ringing around in my head, but it’s good to know that I can duck into a downtown bar and hear looped and layered improv guitar alongside the backbeats and blues licks that have echoed through the air in Austin for so many years.

***

1.     Anyone who has ever moved a powered-on guitar amp with a spring reverb knows this sound (at about 0:08.)

2.     It’s just a root and a fifth, but with distortion they are, well…quite powerful. Just ask the Scorpions. Do not ask Twee.

3.     It was sort of like this. Sort of…

4.     A technical note for the uninitiated. Unlike the strings of the viola and violin (which describe an arch) the strings of the guitar live on a plane, so for the most part you can either bow the lowest few, the highest few, or all six. Horne was conjuring a big texture hitting all six, while Vigueras (for the most part) was shooting for more precision.

AndrewSigler

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