Category: Field Reports

**Part 1 of Hurd’s coverage of the 2011 Umbrella Music Festival is available here.

Sten Sandell

Sten Sandell sat down at the Steinway in Preston-Bradley Hall at the Chicago Cultural Center.  As the featured solo performer on the fourth of five sets of music on the second day of Chicago’s Umbrella Music Festival, the expectations of the audience were high.  Each of the three earlier sets that day had already revealed new avenues of creativity and featured world-class collaborations.  The introduction from the consulate of Sweden had outlined Sandell’s impressive credentials—citing his studies at the Academy of Music in Stockholm and his extensive recordings, tours, and collaborations with many high-profile improvisers across Europe.  Now it was time for the music to win over the sophisticated listeners in the audience whose ears had been calibrated by the excellent performances that the Umbrella Music organization facilitates year round.  Sandell began with sparse, unassuming textures.  Subtle, irregular patterns realized at a pianissimo volume that often trailed off toward something even quieter.  As his music drew ears closer to the restrained details of his improvisation, I moved physically closer to take a photograph for this column–waiting patiently for a louder passage to mask the shutter click of the camera.  In that moment he added his unique vocalization to the sound and entered into a resonant zone that made for a transcendent experience.  Building slowly and consistently outward from simple materials and patterns, Sandell realized a music that draws equal parts from the piano improvisations of Frederic Rzewski and Cecil Taylor.  Sten Sandell’s music mines the creative overlap of multiple modern aesthetics.  It’s not just an awareness of the music of Morton Feldman and Bill Evans that informs his sound as it is the clear absorption of those musics into a distilled sound that transfixed those gathered in the hall.  It cast a spell that stopped me in my tracks as I absorbed the other-worldly qualities of the music.

Thomas Heberer’s Clarino: Pascal Niggenkemper (bass)

Sandell’s performance was a highlight in an evening of music filled with creative risks that panned out with startling regularity. The evening began with the Jan Maksimowicz Quartet (featuring David Boyken on tenor and soprano saxophones, Josh Abrams on bass, and Tim Daisy on drums with the Lithuanian soprano saxophonist at the helm) exploring an expansion of the 1960s jazz avant-garde.  This was followed by a collaborative duo between two eccentrics: Chicago’s Jim Baker on piano and ARP 2600 analog modular synthesizer with Spanish percussionist Ramon Lopez working the drum kit, tabla, and hand drums.  There was also music from the great trio of Italy’s Francesco Bigoni on saxophones with the Chicago rhythm section of Jake Vinsel on bass and Frank Rosaly on drums.  Theirs was a trio that featured chart-driven improvisation that resonated with these ears.  In the wake of Sten Sandell’s amazing solo set, the Thomas Heberer Clarino (Thomas Heberer on trumpet, Joachim Badenhorst on bass clarinet, and Pascal Niggenkemper on bass) closed out the evening with a highly developed sonic language reflected in their graphic scores.  The variety of instrumentation, textures, and sources of creative inspiration had been eclectic, challenging, and rewarding.  And the Umbrella Music Festival still had further depths of intensity in store for the three nights ahead.

The headliners of the Umbrella Music Festival come out to play on the nights the music returns to its standard haunts.  The performances on those three days focus on established local groups mixed in with visiting players who have had a profound influence on the Chicago improvised music scene.  This was particularly the case at Elastic Arts on the third night for three sets of saxophone-centered music.  Beginning with one of Chicago’s most thrilling groups, the Nick Mazzarella Trio (Mazzarella on alto saxophone, Anton Hatwich on bass, and Frank Rosaly on drums) set a high standard for energy and polish.  Mazzarella channels both the vocal qualities of Ornette Coleman’s alto playing as well as the excitement that made those 1960s Coleman trios so vital.  This was followed by a solo set of John Butcher on tenor and soprano saxophones.  Butcher is a creative technician of the highest order who builds a sound out of extended techniques–especially circular breathing and multiphonics–to realize a colorful line.  The evening then concluded with the Tim Berne Trio (Berne on saxophones, Devin Hoff on bass, and Ches Smith on drums) playing a single, long-form work that owed as much to progressive rock as free jazz.  They were three outstanding players that immediately locked in and navigated the rough edges of Berne’s composition.

The festival closed out on a sound at the crest of the next wave of jazz to come: the Mary Halvorson Quintet.  The group of Mary Halvorson on guitar, Jonathan Finlayson on trumpet, Jon Irabagon on alto saxophone, Trevor Dunn on bass, and (again) Ches Smith on drums navigated a set of angular, unpredictable compositions that explore intricate arrangements without losing their swing.  Halvorson’s music and her playing have become increasingly more confident over the past couple of years and she hit her stride early in this set.  The aggressive and deliberately off-kilter energy of the rhythm section of Dunn and Smith is an ideal engine for Halvorson’s compositions as they dart wildly between varying densities of sound.  The focal point of her music shifts rapidly between all the players in astonishingly creative ways.  It was a fitting summary for a festival that encompasses and passionately promotes music that sprawls in multiple directions along many vibrant aesthetic lines.

I’ve covered a number of events over the last few months put on or sponsored by large arts organizations in and around Austin. These groups tend to have significant financial backing, (in “arts dollar” terms, that is) are typically frequented by a particular crowd, and have their own ebb and flow. Big rooms, slick clothes, and pricey intermission drink prices have their place, but I thought I should get out to shows organized by smaller, less tightly knit groups, where the filters are off and the experimentation is on. I also thought that I’d seen lots of fiddles and horns, so it might be worth finding a show where there’s more plugged in than the announcer’s microphone.

I took a drive north through the downtown streets and a few shucks and jives later found myself at the Green House, a funky little boutique that happens to have a tremendous backyard and a stage. As I walked through the shop and out into the backyard, I found myself in an environment that felt decidedly “Austin” to me. Complete with makeshift bar, mismatched chairs, and a few industrial thimbles for tables[1], the vibe could not have been more spot-on. A cadre of the tattooed and pierced mingled with folks from the neighborhood as Eli Good ran tests for his first set and, after a few squeaks and squawks, we were underway. Set up on a small table topped with the ubiquitous Macbook Pro, Good’s syncopated beats mixed with a stuttered bass groove that was one part club, one part jet engine from a distance. The jet bass was slowly granulated[2], becoming less and less defined as a second voice burst like wind chimes through the texture. It was tough to tell if these chimes were re-purposed from the granulated bass or a completely separate instrument, but the contrast between the initial signal and the chimes was striking. The chimes swirled around briefly before getting sucked back into the jet-engine mix, which as it drew to a close, was considerably closer and threatening to land right on top of us. The second piece began similarly with the manipulation of a simple texture which slowly developed into a large, dense mass, giving the impression of a huge, chugging Motown bass mixed with a church organ. Good controlled dynamics, loops, a variety of envelopes, and other parameters in real-time as the ghosts of James Jamerson and Earl Van Dyke traded fours.

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1. And at least one guy whose skateboarding skills were about as strong as his ability to chat up the girl at the bar. Who skateboards on grass?

2. For a super-detailed definition of granulation (including granular synthesis) go here, but basically it’s visually comparable to pixilation. Also, you can check out this example of Neo screaming from the Matrix. It starts fairly clean and becomes less focused and more granulated through the scream.

3. This actually was a bit distracting for yours truly. When my sister had surgery as a kid, the hospital had a few video games that you could play for free. I played a lot of Dig Dug.

4. It was around this point that captain skateboard tried to sync his ollies with the pulse of the submarine, with varying degrees of success.

Ab Baars Quartet: Ab Baars (tenor saxophone); Jeb Bishop (trombone); Jason Adasiewicz (vibes)

The first day of the Umbrella Music Festival got under way with co-curator Dave Rempis describing Chicago as a “nexus of creative improvised music.”  He went on to describe the city as “a resonant, nodal point that makes connections with players and listeners worldwide.”  The music that followed reflected upon the vibrancy of the Chicago music scene, as well as the sonic communications that cross both genre boundaries and international borders.

The first two days of the festival were a densely packed tour-de-force focused on various configurations of European improvisers playing with local musicians.  Stately introductions from dignitaries from the respective consulates of ten different countries preceded each set staged throughout the expansive interior of the Chicago Cultural Center.  It was a concentrated dose  featuring ten sets of avant-garde jazz and improvisation over two evenings offered up at no charge for a sizeable and curious general public.  Each performance featured at least one player from abroad.  This was the scene for the first two days before the music moved back into Umbrella’s usual haunts for the remaining days of this extended celebration of Chicago’s most vital music scene.

The Umbrella Music Organization is a collective run for and by improvising musicians in Chicago for the purpose of creating playing opportunities for its members.  The organization also enjoys strong creative alliances and relationships with musicians around the world that allow Chicago audiences to keep an ear on a broad range of creative improvised musics.  Umbrella Music consolidates three long-running weekly series under a single promotional structure; the Immediate Sound Series each Wednesday at The Hideout, the Elastic Improvised Music Series at the Elastic Arts Foundation on Thursdays, and the Sunday Transmission Series at the Hungry Brain.

Hans Peter Pfammatter Trio: Hans Peter Pfammatter (piano); Jason Roebke (bass)

With more than 150 concerts scheduled each year, Umbrella Music offers live music with remarkable consistency.  The Umbrella Music Festival is the highlight of the year as the organization celebrates by adding even more sets to the calendar, and for one week they miraculously increase both the quantity and quality of the music that is already presented year round.  The “nexus” quality of the Chicago music scene is emphasized by bringing in guest performers with strong connections to the improvising community in Chicago while still showcasing many of the city’s best players.  Simply put, it is the best week to bring one’s ears to Chicago.

With such an abundance of great music and guest performers, it inevitably spills beyond the confines of the official festival dates.  The pre-festival concerts set the tone for this year’s celebration and featured incredible performances reserved for the true die hards, beginning with the first ever Ratchet Series Home Concert held at drummer Frank Rosaly’s home.  The small, invitation-only event featured the duo of John Butcher (from the UK) on tenor and soprano saxophone and Jason Roebke on bass.  Their set was an exquisitely restrained music by subtraction.  The pair took advantage of the intimacy of the living room to realize music without amplification or projection. Their music was quiet enough to hear John Butcher scrape the reed of his soprano saxophone against his whiskers—a sound that he explored as musical material.  Music quiet enough to hear Jason Roebke bow the foot of his double bass.  Each player was enormously selective about what they added even as they made multiple break-neck transitions between textures with a coordination that bordered on sounding rehearsed.  They also demonstrated a remarkable ability to move freely between idiomatic jazz materials and sparse, open textures dominated by the extremes of their extended technique.  It was an impressive set of introspective rapport.

The pre-festival performances continued across town with an all-Chicago Trio of Dave Rempis on reeds, Devin Hoff on bass, and Mike Reed on drums holding court at The Whistler in the Logan Square neighborhood.  This trio offered up a pair of high energy sets that packed enough volume to offset the lively environment of one of Chicago’s hippest cocktail bars.  Taken together, these two pre-festival performances laid out the dynamic extremes that mark the Umbrella Music experience as one that embraces honest improvised expression in all of its forms.  With an advance screening of Soldier of the Road: A Portrait of Peter Brotzmann also happening downtown as yet another pre-festival activity, there was plenty to whet the appetite as things ramped up toward the full-on excess ahead.

Hans Peter Pfammatter Trio: Keefe Jackson

Franz Hautzinger Group: Nick Butcher

The “European Jazz Meets Chicago” celebration over the next two days provided a steady downpour of musical revelations.  It was a chance to hear the amazing array of angles different improvisers take toward realizing their music, beginning with an outstanding set by the Hans Peter Pfammatter Trio featuring pianist Hans Peter Pfammatter from Switzerland performing with Chicago’s Keefe Jackson on reeds and Jason Roebke once again on bass.  Pfammatter skillfully wove extended piano techniques into a free improvised set as the trio mined an expanse of dynamic range.  Keefe Jackson’s cadenza toward the end of the set was particularly stunning as he played single note blasts followed by quiet phrases that took advantage of the acoustics of playing under the dome at the Preston-Bradley Hall.  The unaccompanied solo emerging from dense, improvised textures proved to be a recurring theme early in the festival.

Franz Hautzinger

Another standout performance from the first day was the Franz Hautzinger Group: Franz Hautzinger on trumpet, Dave Rempis on saxophones and Nick Butcher on electronics.  Hautzinger possesses an ear for the expressive qualities of amplified, extended trumpet technique.  Nick Butcher works with the relatively “lo-fi” electronics of a single turntable, mic’d cassette players and a guitar pedal.  This was the only ensemble of the festival to feature a table-top performer as a substitution for a rhythm section.  This group sculpted a texture that built outward from the sound of amplified breath through the trumpet.  These were occasionally punctuated with explosive and expressive bursts of sound from each of the members of this trio.  Theirs was a music that lives along the contours and mortality of breathing, with equal attention brought to bear on the inhale and the exhale.  Again, the acoustics of Preston-Bradley Hall assisted the sound as the physical space took on an increasing presence during this set.

The first day concluded with a kinetic set led by Amsterdam’s prolific Ab Baars on tenor saxophone, clarinet, and shakuhachi.  The Ab Baars Quartet was filled out with a trio of Chicago’s best: Jeb Bishop on trombone; Jason Adasiewicz on vibraphone; and Mike Reed on drums.  Their set was a mix of composed and free improvised music that would frequently break into sub-groups of duos and trios over a wildly diverse set of music.  Especially notable was the performance of Toru’s Gone, a duet for shakuhachi and trombone based on a piece by Toru Takemitsu.  There was also an extended free improvisation by Mike Reed and Jason Adasiewicz that was incredible.  The quartet finally ended the night with a Misha Mengelberg composition, showing off the strong connections between the Dutch and Chicago jazz scenes.

The abundance and stimulation of so much creative music proved to only grow stronger as the festival continued.  Already, the ears were ringing within the nexus of the free jazz storm in Chicago.  The days that followed will be the topic of part two of this column, so stay tuned.

A few heads of the “Hydra” in the Fenway Center for the Sound in SPACE festival, November 18, 2011.

With its Atlantic outlook, it’s probably not surprising that Boston has always intellectually cast a devotional eye towards Europe, historically oscillating between the competing charms of Germany and France. German philosophy and music held sway through the 19th century—the Transcendentalists loved their Beethoven—but Boston lurched westward across the Rhine in the wake of World War I and the resulting anti-German sentiment. (Musically, much of Boston’s Francophilia would, like the music itself, dance cheek-to-cheek with Russia.) War created another pendulum swing: the post-World War II Boston Expressionist school of painting, figurative rather than abstract, was keyed by German immigrants.

French and German accents can still be found across the Boston musical landscape—the Boston Symphony, under James Levine, seemed to double down on its Munch-era French specialization, while the Boston Lyric Opera, under new leadership, has been taking tentative steps into the realm of Regietheater. New music has always been more of a grab bag. But a couple of concerts this month at least took that old German-French axis as a starting point—though the music ended up in rather more cosmopolitan territory.

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Sound Icon is now in its second season. Boston is crawling with new music ensembles, but most only rarely commit to Sound Icon’s larger dimensions, which means the group has the chance to present all kinds of European music that Boston hasn’t much heard. Last year, it was French spectralism—Grisey, Murail. This season, the spectral influence is being traced among France’s neighbors.

The highlight of Sound Icon’s season opener, on November 5, was the U.S. premiere of Wolfgang Rihm’s Concerto Séraphin, an hour-long, sixteen-player extravaganza. The angels are indeed fiery—this is exuberantly complex music, a bright riot of color. But the structure is simple: partition the ensemble, then keep reorienting it around the sound of particular instruments. The opening triggers a joyful, haywire outburst from two pianos, the energy of which jumps to the rest of the players like a spark. When the flutist makes the switch to alto flute, the group seems to become an amplifier for that sound, all keening long tones and deep gongs. A lot of the Concerto is built from giddy expectation, waiting for the gun in Act One to go off in Act Three: the horns sit quietly for better than half the piece, but once they enter, the trajectory towards pealing power is inexorable. Concerto Séraphin is demanding, crowded, oversaturated fun, what high modernism sounds like without existentialist angst.

Conductor Jeffrey Means, who keeps a busy schedule (a couple weeks later, he was conducting the East Coast Contemporary Ensemble in a similarly newfangled program at the French Cultural Center), is fascinating. His résumé is excellent; he programs with adventurously exquisite taste and he prepares complex scores with what must be superbly efficient rehearsal. And yet, in performance, he can be one of the most diffident conductors I’ve ever seen, his body language slack and passive. Most of the time, it’s a quirk—he drew out a terrific performance of the Rihm, with enough flair to carry through what admirably few unsteady points there were. But in pieces where there’s a lot of stasis or silence, it can be a problem. Salvatore Sciarrino’s Introduzione all’Oscuro, for instance, which opened the program: a tour of the glossed-over edges of instrumental sound, the squeaks, and clicks and rustles (not to mention heavy breathing) that proper technique brushes under the rug. Means’s control of all this hush was precise, and the grim storm it built up to was sharp and balanced. But along the way, in places where the intensity needed to be sustained across rests or pauses, the energy would instead drop, not revved up again until the next sound. On balance, though, Means’s eagerness to tackle monumental slices of modernism, and the care with which he shepherds them to performance, is a boon.

The concert also included the winner of the Boston University/Sound Icon composition contest, a product of the group’s connection with spectrally trained composer Joshua Fineberg, now a BU faculty member. The honoree was Rafael Amaral, whose Pherrk ic deconstructed the sounds of crows into a chorus of Sciarrino-like sharp edges—though, with lots of drone foundations, Pherrk ic presented a far thicker and more dense stew than Sciarrino’s hide-and-seek. The sound-world was an interesting paradox: loud but overcast.

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Over the past couple of years, the Goethe-Institut Boston has become a particularly entrepreneurial importer/presenter of electroacoustic music. For this month’s Sound in SPACE festival—three days of concerts and workshops (I caught a pair of concerts on Friday the 18th)—the Institut made an alliance, co-sponsoring the event with Boston’s French Consulate. (Academic sponsorship was via a hands-across-the-Charles partnership between Northeastern and Harvard.) The composers-in-residence—Daniel Teruggi, director of the Groupe de Recherches Musicales wing of France’s INA-GRM, and Ludger Brümmer, director of musical research at Karlsruhe’s similar ZKM—both heavy hitters, nevertheless remain largely unknown in these parts, an indication, maybe, of the continuing below-the-radar reputation of electroacoustic music in the U.S.

The focus of the festival was the interpretation of electronic music in live performance—the practical technique behind the mad-scientist image of the composer intensely hunched over the mixing board in a darkened hall. For most electronic concerts I’ve heard, the interpretive challenge is making the most out of limited resources—for example, last month, I heard Jed Speare, presented by the experimental music series Non-Event (a frequent Goethe-Institut collaborator for electronic music), making pretty skillful use of a pair of speakers and the tiny, shoebox-like space of Café Fixe. (Speare’s offering, a work-in-progress, was a lovely, almost wistful arrangement of very industrial sounds, like an abandoned factory left to its involuntary HVAC respiration; the coffee, a pour over of Stumptown direct-trade Indonesian blend, was equally diverting.) By contrast, the concert venue for Sound in SPACE was Northeastern’s Fenway Center, a repurposed Gothic-revival church, all vaulting space and cathedral ceilings. The wherewithal was Harvard’s “Hydra” Speaker-Orchestra, no fewer than thirty-two loudspeakers arranged about the place. The result might have been the best-sounding electroacoustic concert I’ve ever been to: crystal-clear, a huge range of frequencies and dynamic power, even sixteen-channel separations clean and distinct. Size—and quantity—matters.

Friday’s concerts began with works by three of the six finalists of the festival’s composition competition. All presented in-depth manipulations of found sounds, finding the music within non-musical noise: Andrew Babcock’s Anagoge used ingredients of crinkling paper and a buzzing beard trimmer, Ana Dall’Ara-Majek’s La Lechuga was based around the sounds of lettuce—rustling, snapping, crunching, chewing—while Simone D’Ambrosio’s Villusions presented a kitchen-sink selection of urban sounds, an aural inventory of, in this case, Montreal. (The night before, another finalist, Martin Bédard, had performed a work making similar use of Quebec City’s sonic landscape. I wish they had presented the two back-to-back, a St. Lawrence River rivalry in music.)

But all three works also showed imaginative use of the medium’s potential for varied dramatic dimension. Babcock’s was the most abstract, turning on illusions of sonic proximity: the way white noise always seems to hover at an indeterminate distance, the way some electronic drones can generate enough palpability to almost invade one’s personal space. D’Ambrosio’s soundscape was one of alienated familiarity, a distorted canvas of bells, bubbling voices, indecipherable PA announcements, machinery and engines of all kinds—a Dantean intermodal depot. Dall’Ara-Majek went in for surrealism, reimagining her chosen vegetable under different guises, from a beloved pet to “a monster provoking total panic,” with an appropriate horror-movie soundtrack of theatrical screams.

Unlike the finalists’ work, which all fell more-or-less on the sound-art side of the ledger, Brümmer’s works—a trio of compositions, presented on the evening’s late concert—for all their electronic intricacy, were musical in a quite traditional way, hinging on pitch, rhythm, harmony. Glasharfe, Brümmer’s homage to the glass harmonica, was appropriately limited to vitrine sources, struck or bowed, a palette of limpid resonance. For the piece’s climax, Brümmer engineered effects that would have made Bruckner proud: a driving, almost club-worthy rhythmic crescendo, with great, rising sweeps of sound, setting up the sudden entrance of a sub-woofer foundation, like an organist dropping both feet onto the pedalboard. Gesualdo made more explicit bid for a place along the continuum of musical history, taking as its source a Gesualdo canzona and recombining it into a slow-burn epic, patiently building up clouds of notes and even some Glass-like polyrhythms. The interpretive aspect was especially noticeable in this one, given its more manipulable four-channel construction—and Brümmer piled up some crescendi of hair-raising length and power.

Like Gesualdo, Brümmer’s Nyx quotes pre-existing music—in this case, a snippet of Debussy’s flute-viola-harp Sonata, stretched to such length that all that’s left is the music’s satiny sheen. And, like both other works on the concert, Nyx nourishes its substantial length—a continuous half-hour movement—by adapting venerable concert-music techniques to electronic environments. Both Gesualdo and Nyx, for example, set up the slow unfolding of their rhetoric with soft, slow introductions, Gesualdo creeping in on near-inaudibility, Nyx letting the listener get thoroughly lost in shimmering delicacy. And traditional strategies of long-range tension were front-and-center: Nyx seems to set up a conflict between mechanistic kinds of music—rhythmically regular, percussive—and more atmospheric sounds, though the protagonist-antagonist line is thoroughly blurred, the atmosphere, at times, becoming as tense and threatening as any ostinato assault. If the finalist composers were making a virtue of Cagean immediacy and novelty, noticing the music where music might not be expected, Brümmer effectively connected the very up-to-date computerized means to a very long line of Classical-Romantic ends—structurally sound, ravishingly beautiful. If one wanted, one could almost have called it a marriage between German sublimity and French sensuality.

You know how you tend to learn new things about your town when friends come to visit? This might involve a visit to that restaurant you never got around to checking out or to the bookstore you pass every morning but haven’t yet worked into your schedule because you’ve been reading everything on a tablet? Or at least you planned to read everything on the tablet, but hilarious kitten videos got in the way? Well, the kittens have gotten the best of me because despite living in this town long enough to remember when “Keep Austin Weird” was a way of life and not a t-shirt slogan, I’ve still managed to miss out on the Blanton Museum. Located on the south side of campus, this museum has been a part of the Austin community in one form or another for nearly fifty years. In addition to a wide variety of sculpture, painting, and installations, the museum features the Soundspace series which pairs composers with choreographers and dancers with instrumentalists to create interdisciplinary works that interact with and explore various spaces and works of art within the museum.

And then the fire alarm went off.

Cellist Elizabeth Lee and dancer Beth Terwilleger perform Aerial Ballet by Ethan Greene, choreography by Michelle Thompson. Photo by Elisa Ferrari.

Thirty minutes later, we were all back inside. Lee bowed long, continuous, pulsing arpeggios passages across all four strings while Terwilleger resumed her movement, at times stopping completely and striking a pose in response to changes in the music. Chromatic smears down the neck followed by declamatory, angular, melodic lines were contrasted by the smoother-flowing movement of the dance. In fact, much of the dance closely followed (or directly contrasted) the ebb and flow of Greene’s music; certainly the bread and butter of traditional dance but not always the case in contemporary performances which can at times seem like two different works of art simply coexisting.

Dancer Magdalena Jarkowiec. Photo by Elisa Ferrari.

Following Ariel Ballet, we followed choreographer Michelle Thompson into another large gallery for the second performance which featured violinist Molly Emerman playing the Bach Sonata no.1 in G minor with dancer Magdalena Jarkowiec. Separated from dancer and violinist by a large round rock installation some 20 feet in diameter, the audience watched as Jarkowiec arched her body over the installation, testing the boundary between art and artist and making yours truly just a bit nervous about the possibility of that boundary being breached. While most of her performance was opposite the audience, at times she circled the installation completely, testing the audience/performer boundary as well.

Flautists Francois Minaux and Joanna Martin perform Duet in E minor by W.F. Bach, choreography by Michelle Thompson. Photo by Elisa Ferrari.

We continued our journey through the museum with the third piece, Duet in E minor, this time by J.S.’s eldest son, W.F. Flautists Francois Minaux and Joanna Martin played inside a square installation (countering the previous large room with a round structure) with tens of thousands of pennies on the floor and backlit bones hanging from the ceiling. This smaller room-within-a-room was bordered by sheer gold curtains through which dancer Lisa del Rosario moved during the multi-movement work, her diminutive frame contrasting that of the long-limbed Jarkowiec from the previous performance. The border between performer and observer was further eroded in this movement with del Rosario dancing in very close proximity to the audience. The tension in the previous piece carried over here as well as del Rosario flirted with the penny pool, seeming to defy gravity more than once as her body extended over the pool in concert with the counterpoint of the flute duo.

Dancer Beth Terwilleger and trombonist Steve Parker. Photo by Elisa Ferrari.

Finally, we returned to the first gallery to hear Mike Svoboda’s Concert Etude performed by series curator and trombonist Steven Parker. Parker was framed in a central doorway on what was the right side of the room relative to our original orientation. Dancer Beth Terwilleger was joined by Emily McLaughlin for this piece, (providing yet another counterpoint, this time contrasting the “two musician/one dancer” setup of the previous piece) both dancers taking their positions framed in doorways that bookended Parker. The piece began quietly with scales running up and down as the dancers played hide-and-seek in the doorways with the audience. Deep swells traded place with low hits as the two dancers used the floor and doorframe as integral parts of their performance, holding doorjambs close and using the thresholds as invisible borders begging to be breached. Through his playing Parker somehow managed to move while standing still while the dancers illustrated a moving stasis; at once thrilling and undulating while also statuesque and posed against the full tones of the trombone. The second movement started with foghorn calls accented by Harmon mute. The dancers came out to play, at times running the length of the room only to meet in the middle and immediately return from whence they came. Eighth-note lines gave way to longer and longer figures punctuated by multiphonics and singing into the trombone to harmonize with the trombone’s pitch, which Parker somehow made sound like a Didgeridoo/Tuvan throat singer jam. In the last movement, Parker swapped out the Harmon for a straight mute. Distant gestures gave way to multiphonic timbral dissonance peppered with quarter-tones. As the dancers moved around Parker in close proximity, the notes were swallowed up through his twisting lines in a honking New Orleans Morse code of sorts. As the final notes echoed through the space we could have heard the proverbial pin drop, followed by huge applause.

Of course, the Bach family players have been on the scene for a while, but these performances, with their interaction with dance and art, served to reframe the music in a new light. They felt less like autonomous pieces and more like source material for a larger presentation; less like oratorio and more like opera. The Greene and Svoboda also benefited from a setting in which the audience is not tied to a seat for an hour or two but is allowed to move from one place to another to take in the art from new perspectives. Fire alarms notwithstanding, the afternoon was a great example of how to present new music to audiences. It gave a sense of mobility to player and listener alike, connecting the two by shifting focus, position, and perspective.

I can’t wait to see what they have on the first floor.

Ensemble Del Niente playing Fausto Romitelli’s Professor Bad Trip

The Chicago-based Ensemble Dal Niente consistently rises to the challenges of presenting the new music of this still emerging century. Their 2011-2012 season opened with a pair of contrasting concerts that explored altered states of mind and perception, from the psychedelic to the psych-acoustic. They began with the Chicago premiere of Fausto Romitelli’s sprawling tour de force Professor Bad Trip, presented at the nightclubish Mayne Stage in the neighborhood of Rogers Park, followed by their “Sounds Seek People” concert at the more reserved Nichols Concert Hall in Evanston.

Ensemble Dal Niente draws its personnel from the ranks of the music faculties at Northwestern University, DePaul University, and the Civic Orchestra of Chicago.  Since 2004 they have presented world-class performances and world premieres of music so new that the proverbial ink has yet to dry on the .pdf files. Their concerts offer a glimpse into the sounds and aesthetic directions just now being realized.

Russell Rolen (cello) performing Romitelli’s Professor Bad Trip

Fausto Romitelli’s Professor Bad Trip has an unusual buzz surrounding it in new music circles.  Few contemporary chamber works develop the kind of word-of-mouth that preceded the “must hear” experience of its Chicago premiere. And it is a standout composition in the relatively unexplored territory between art music and rave, deftly bridging the gap between the “modern” music of the previous century and the throbbing nightlife of the last thirty years, Over the span of three movements, called “Lessons,” Professor Bad Trip builds a trance-like texture over a persistent g-natural drone.  It is conducted to a click track that allows the live instruments to synchronize with a pre-rendered electronic track.

Professor Bad Trip brings a concentrated dose of amplification and trance state to chamber music.  It also treads a fine line between art and kitsch, occasionally drifting closer to the kitsch side with moments of fully notated, clichéd electric guitar solos embedded within its expansive texture.  Most of my new music friends have strong opinions regarding this piece that tend toward the extremes of love and hate.  Yet none deny that it is a significant work.

The strength of Professor Bad Trip lies in its hybridization.  The lessons Romitelli learned at IRCAM and from the French Spectralist movement were absorbed without turning a deaf ear to the sensibilities of underground dance cultures.  It is music composed with a full awareness of the plurality of progressive rock, dub step, and a lifestyle steeped in ecstasy.  The live processing of each instrument and the mixture of different reverberations applied to individual instruments adds to a sense of disorientation similar to the loss of balance and sense of space that accompanies inebriation.

Jesse Langen and J. Austin Wulliman performing Professor Bad Trip

Professor Bad Trip also comes with several of the uncomfortable aspects of hybridization.  Chamber and orchestral music has a checkered history of aesthetic colonialism: music that draws inspiration from other cultures and emulates its sonic character while somehow ignoring the sociopolitical implications of the exchange.  La creation du monde by Darius Milhaud is an example of such a work.  It’s a piece inspired by the jazz music heard in Harlem in the early 1920s that was composed as a ballet based on African folk mythology.  The piece sounds nothing at all like jazz to contemporary ears, but it raises several uncomfortable questions about the role of a French composer (albeit an accomplished French composer) having any kind of legitimate claim to the cultural materials of an oppressed people.  The music of Colin McPhee is another example of such a hybridization—in this case, a Canadian composer drawing from the music of Indonesia—that feels like an unequal exchange.  With Fausto Romitelli the exchange is between “high art” and “low culture.”  And while Professor Bad Trip does manage to avoid “elevating” one form over the other, there is the nagging suspicion that the end result manages to be great chamber music and bad trance music at the same time.  It’s an important piece that cracks open new territory.  One hopes that composers will push even further toward realizing music that exists along even deeper roots of electronica music and its culture.  I suspect that some of the most compelling works that span this same aesthetic gap will involve building a bridge from the other side of the chasm.  While Milhaud’s La creation du monde constructed an important span between classical and jazz, it is Ornette Coleman’s Skies of America that more convincingly brings the sensibilities of the improvising musician into the orchestral medium.  While Colin McPhee’s gamelan inspired pieces are pleasant on their own, the music of I Wayan Sadra is much more compelling, coming as it does from a composer who was hardly an outside observer of Indonesian culture.  The next piece that fires a shot across the bow that Professor Bad Trip hinted at will probably emerge from within the culture of trance music.

The decision to program arrangements of music by Carlo Gesualdo between the three movements of Professor Bad Trip was a curious one.  They were works from a completely different dimension that managed to dilute the ringing drone and other-worldly qualities of the full, uninterrupted Romitelli experience.  Nearly lost in the program was Franco Donatoni’s fantastic About for violin, viola, and guitar.  A quiet, understated work made up of odd, asymmetrical repeated phrases.

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Ryan Muncy plays After Tomorrow by Edgar Guzman

The “Sounds Seek People” concert took a decidedly less urbane approach toward altered states.  Featuring works composed within the past six years that take multiple avenues toward new sonic territories, the program showcased music that explored psychoacoustic means toward altered perceptions rather than the references to drug use in the text for Professor Bad Trip (a text that was ultimately cut from the final arrangement of the piece).  “Sounds Seek People” opened with After Tomorrow by Edgar Guzman.  It is an astonishing work for solo amplified saxophone and electronics that explores a soundscape of multiphonics.  Ryan Muncy gave an amazing performance of this physically demanding piece as he navigated its swirling eddies of sound.  After Tomorrow ended with an amazing exhaling of breath on the alto saxophone (minus its mouthpiece) that was a fitting coda for a piece that spans such a wide dynamic and timbral range.

The standout composition on the program was Ethers for horn, cello, and percussion by Ensemble Del Niente founder Kirsten Broberg.  It was a beautifully understated, spectral piece that built up harmonic constructions with a sharp ear for the timbres of the instruments.  Matthew Oliphant, Chris Wild, and David Skidmore gave a nuanced performance that allowed this delicate and restrained piece to soar.  I’d like to hear more works by Broberg.

Chris Wind, David Skidmore, and Mathew Oliphant performing Kirsten Broberg’s Ethers for horn, cello, and percussion

Another remarkable work on the program was Countenance by Edward Hamel for alto flute, English horn, baritone saxophone, violin, viola, cello, and bass.  It was a piece that developed along a taut tension of drone and silence with plenty of compositional detail within each texture.

The dedication of Ensemble Dal Niente was remarkable.  Their tight, well-rehearsed performances allow one to hear the details lurking within these new works.  There was more than enough in these two concerts to draw these ears toward further performances.

Bringing to light the latest generation’s approach to music, a few courageous folks recently set out to show us all what today’s music is really like and just how expansive it can be. Showcasing over 100 composers from six continents (all age 40 and under), 16 ensembles, and dozens of premieres, the SONiC Festival—which ran October 14-22 in venues all over New York City—brought the sound of the 21st century to life. Groups like Alarm Will Sound, eighth blackbird, American Composers Orchestra, and the JACK Quartet put in an effort we’ve come to expect from these stars of the contemporary classical world as they performed at venues as stately as Carnegie’s Zankel Hall and as intimate as Joe’s Pub.

And to think my introduction to this festival started out with an old lady trying to scalp tickets in front of Carnegie Hall.

American Composers Orchestra – Photo by RMK Photos

Testing my youthful endurance, this festival took me all around New York City for a tour of performance space hot spots. I caught a number of the SONiC concerts—the ACO at Carnegie Hall, eighth blackbird and the JACK Quartet at Miller Theatre, Camerata Aberta at Americas Society, ICE at The Kitchen, Alarm Will Sound at Roulette (with some electronic music afterwards), and electronica-infused percussion at Joe’s Pub. Since there was so much musical (and physical) ground to cover over the period of the festival, concertgoers planning on attending two evening concerts had to be mindful of the time and distance between performances. The logistics of presenting multiple concerts under the same umbrella in one evening can be a bit complicated. Committed SONiC Festival attendees found themselves navigating between venues that weren’t exactly right next door to one other. Here’s an idea of what I’m talking about:

Oct. 18 – Americas Society (7:00 p.m.) to The Stone (10:00 p.m.) (Google Maps)
Oct. 19 – Thalia Theatre at Symphony Space (7:30 p.m.) to Joyce SoHo (10:00 p.m.) (Google Maps)
Oct. 20 – The Kitchen (8:00 p.m.) to 92YTribeca (11:00 p.m.) (Google Maps)
Oct. 22 – Winter Garden at World Financial Center (7:00 p.m.) to Joe’s Pub (11:30 p.m.) (Google Maps)

Considering concert duration and the distance between venues, it was a little difficult to catch it all, but manageable if you hightailed it on a couple of these nights and the trains were running in your favor.

Kenji Bunch

Logistics aside, one of the most impressive elements of SONiC was its programming. All new music concertgoers have experienced blandness before; programs that don’t go anywhere or offer any sense of excitement past the endeavor to be original. Fortunately, for the most part, this festival had enough spunk to last the nine days. From the incredible left hand work of Camerata Aberta’s violist Peter Pas to Alarm Will Sound’s heart-wrenching performance of David T. Little’s Haunted Topography, there was skill and vibrance to be found in every corner of the SONiC Festival. And what would a new music festival be if it didn’t go above and beyond with some serious extended techniques and acting chops? Nathan Davis’s Dowser for bass clarinet and electronics could have served as a dissertation on multiphonics and Tim Munro pushed the theatrical envelope with Amy Beth Kirsten’s Pirouette as his voice meshed with the flute.

The American Composers Orchestra’s opening night program was about as motley as an orchestral program could be; not necessarily in terms of content, but in the stylistic voice of each composer. All the pieces sounded authentic and true to their respective composers, the only theme being “new.” The world premiere of Wang Lu’s Flowing Water Study II for orchestra and video graced the eyes and ears as video projection accompanied the ensemble. A lone qin (Chinese zither) sat silent on the stage as the orchestra retold a 2,000-year-old folk tale through a traditional melody. A short film by Jeremy Robins followed, profiling Kenji Bunch’s The Devil’s Box. A piece for amplified viola and orchestra, The Devil’s Box featured a wacky inverted bowing technique and two-hand plucking that even got the audience to applaud in between movements (see video below). I think “hootenanny” sums it up best.

International Contemporary Ensemble – Photo by Chad Batka

It is easy to see how one might find the relationships between performers and composers at SONiC a bit incestuous. Composers appearing on one program were frequently labeled as performers on another. As expected, I saw a fair number of names appearing on multiple programs throughout the festival. Whether it’s the nature of the niche or a fierce loyalty, the concertgoers also adopted this practice. Familiar faces presented themselves at many of the concerts and, from what I witnessed, pretty much everyone knew someone from one of the performing ensembles (this didn’t seem to be the case with Camerata Aberta’s performance at Americas Society—an organization with its own members.) Even considering the dedication of fans, attractive programming is a must for a festival of this scope. If SONiC hadn’t been riddled with some of today’s all-stars, the turnout would likely have suffered.

Camerata Aberta

Of course, this festival would never have gotten off the ground if it weren’t for some diligent people coordinating press and running the operations behind the scenes. Co-Curators Derek Bermel and Stephen Gosling were at every event I attended and spoke to the audience a couple of times during each concert to let everyone know what was in store the next day. One of the products they were pushing was an iPad app called Thicket. An interactive soundscape, this app responds to touch in different ways and plays audio samples based on gestures. Before concerts and during intermissions, there would usually be someone walking around trying to entice people with a demo. I was enticed (see video).

The late-night concerts carried the title SONiC Afterhours and featured more intimate settings with varying approaches to programming ranging from steel pan music and electronics to pop music to dance performances. If you had attended one of SONiC’s full-length evenings, these shows offered a nice change of scenery and content that was needed after a two-hour concert.

As incentive to go to multiple performances during the festival, SONiC offered a discounted pass that offered a 20% discount (sometimes more) on the ticket price for each event if purchased for $25.

Ultimately, the SONiC Festival concerts were well-attended, there were a number of diverse and suitable venues included, audience engagement activities were present and noticeable, and there were perks to attending multiple performances. Promoting a festival during the season is serious business and Christina Jensen PR was there every step of the way making sure this festival got the presence it deserved. Concert reviews and profiles appeared in publications such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Huffington Post, as well as on a number of blogs. The airwaves weren’t silent, either. Excerpts of the ACO’s performance of The Devil’s Box appeared on Performance Today accompanied by a short interview with Kenji Bunch. In addition, many of the fans, composers, and performers were tweeting their hearts out trying to hype up the concerts. Some of them were even smirk-worthy.

Still, I keep asking myself: was this whole endeavor to celebrate new music really so groundbreaking? Perhaps not, but the incorporation of alternative venues and star-studded ensembles made SONiC an attention-grabbing event. The SONiC Festival aimed to present a glimpse of the wide variety of styles alive in the 21st century’s musical atmosphere. This goal was achieved, but I was never on the edge of my seat wondering how all of these sounds could get along and live together in the same city. It was all very familiar. Perhaps that was the underlying point of SONiC: the contemporary music world has been stretched wide and it no longer means anything to say we live in a time where music knows no bounds. Anything and everything is legitimate and old prejudices have faded—this is the voice of today. Of course, this has been the case for a lot longer than a decade. “Sounds of a New Century” is just a title.

Don’t let the gray, which is rapidly overtaking the brown, fool you. Despite not looking the part, I am in fact a doctoral student at the University of Texas at Austin, and I make my way several miles north on a daily basis to get my fair share of abuse. It’s a big campus—40 acres—and like the downtown of our fair city, it is populated by cranes, work crews, new buildings, detour signs, and all the attendant din that accompanies such environments. Despite being constantly surrounded by sound and structure, the connection between the two is usually overlooked, especially while dodging buses, scooters, and the tide of humanity that moves hourly from building to building. Recently, the Center for American Architecture and Design, The School of Architecture, and The Sarah and Ernest Butler School of Music hosted Music in Architecture • Architecture in Music, an international symposium to “explore the connections between architecture and music through research, composition, design, installation, and live performance.” The four-day event featured papers and presentations from an international gathering of artists and scholars, plus a collaborative composition/architecture competition. Eight collaborations were presented, as well as several pieces that were written for the festival or were featured specifically because of their relationship to architecture.

Fieldsteel’s setup for hEAR TOuch LISTEN
Photo by Steve Snowden

hEAR TOuch LISTEN by Florian Tuerke and Rene Rissland was performed in the main lobby of Bass Concert hall by Eli Fieldsteel (full disclosure: Eli is a fellow student/colleague). The hall is five stories tall and the lobby is a large open atrium with balconies on each level. Connected to the handrails (actually sort of wedged in there) were seven speaker drivers which were, in turn, connected by long wires to a control system on the first floor consisting of a laptop, power amplifiers, and a MIDI interface with which Fieldsteel controlled various parameters. Each of the seven rails was chosen based on the natural resonant frequencies they produced when driven (vibrated) by the speakers, as well as to provide a variety of sounds from subsonic to supersonic [1]. The audience was encouraged to move around the space and among the floors, as well as to touch the rails to experience the sound in a variety of ways. The piece was in three continuous sections and began with primarily long tones. The volume and variety of sound was impressive, at times causing the floor to rumble before giving way to high ringing sounds like some giant bowed waterphone. Low frequencies descended and became rhythmic figures, which resulted in a number of “kids at the zoo” moments [2] (with all due respect to the audience) as people touched the rails and felt the vibrations course through their bodies. The second section contrasted the first and featured shorter, sharp sounds bouncing from floor to floor. Unlike the physicality of first movement, this section was primarily experienced through the ears for me. I noticed that some of the audience moved away from the rails to hear the sounds throughout the space. This finally segued to the third section, which featured pre-recorded sounds from outside the hall. The original plan was to feed live sounds from outside through the system, but because of technical issues the pre-rendered sounds of birds, bugs, and other campus life were featured instead.

Line Upon Line Percussion performing Seeing Times are not Hidden
Photo by Steve Snowden

A variety of styles and aesthetics were represented during the symposium, and the next presentation I saw was quite different from sound-art abstraction in the lobby of Bass. Composer Frank Clark and architect Cecil Balmond created Theater of the Imagination, a five-movement work for chorus based visually on elements from a variety of Balmond’s works and fundamental shapes such as line, circle, quadrilateral, polygon, and arch, and musically on “Byzantine Chant, Bartok’s axial tonal structures, and the prime numbers 2, 3, 5, and 7.” Clark used the aforementioned shapes not only in conjunction with the circle of fifths to derive the musical materials but also to derive the text of the piece. The choir appeared in a number of configurations relative to the audience; sometimes surrounding us, sometimes flanking us antiphonally, and even occasionally hopping in place. Center stage and facing the audience were two large flat screen televisions and two larger projection screens on either side, all of which displayed a variety of visual material throughout the piece, including architectural mock-ups, undulating shapes, and mathematical formulas. The piece was largely polyphonic and dense, and the performance was essentially a capella, though there were additional pre-rendered lines that echoed various lines of the chorus. At the end of the piece, director Jerry Ulrich came to the stage (he’d been conducting from the center of the seating area of the hall with help from assistant conductor Tim Hsu) and indicated that while the choir was from Georgia Tech, they were not music majors. He then asked the members of the choir who were engineering majors to please raise their hands, in response to which around 80% of the performer’s hands went up. He also indicated that later in the season they were performing pieces by Pärt, Webern, and Gorecki, which for a professional (or music-major populated) choir would be challenging, but for an amateur group (and I use that term in its truest sense: one who loves what they do) is really impressive. Avocational choirs populated by engineers, lawyers, bus drivers, and the guys holding the slow/stop signs at construction sites that perform 20th- and 21st-century repertory are a good sign for the future.

For the closing work of the symposium, Paul Dresher and Michael Benedikt, with Michael Rotondi and Coleman Coker, created LOW CLOSE VAST, a three-movement work performed (for the most part) with the audience and performers on the stage of Bass Concert Hall. The first movement began with Benedikt introducing the piece and informing the audience that he would direct them to different areas of the stage for each movement. He then directed the audience to move inside a large circle in the middle of the stage surrounded by several music stands stage left and right, a piano further back on the stage, and a drum kit closer to the edge of the stage. Above us were three large back-lit cloth panels. The stage curtains were drawn and the lights were low, so we were all pretty cozy in there. The piece started with the piano playing ascending eighth-note lines accompanied by low brass that would occasionally peak above the piano waves. These were joined by high brass and winds in a slowly building antiphonal (there was a lot of surround sound at this symposium) hocket-centric maelstrom. The drum kit came in, hi-hats blazing on upbeats somehow squeezed in between the antiphony, all of which somehow held together despite the fact that the conductor was perched on a modest podium in the middle of a slowly simmering and spinning audience that was not only crammed (not uncomfortably) into a circle, but was also being advanced upon from the heavens by the aforementioned back-lit cloth panels. There was so much going on musically and visually that it wasn’t until the closing moments that I noticed that the sky was falling, albeit in slow motion. The movement ended with gentle swells and our friend the panels, well, quite low. For the second movement, the audience moved to bleachers set up further back on the stage. The bleachers faced gently inward and formed a “C”, converging on a pianist, a cellist, and a lamp. It was as though we were looking in on a living room and watching two friends play chamber music at home. This was accentuated by the fact that the cellist was facing the same direction (stage right) as the pianist, as opposed to facing the audience. And his jacket was hanging off of the back of his chair. A lilting 2 against 3 white note pattern slowly developed into a more dissonant texture until eventually the pianist’s right hand was doing a kind of cluster hopscotch from the bass to the treble while the cellist followed suit. The piece quietly ended having clearly given us a sense of “Close” in the same space we’d just experienced “Low.” The finale began with the lifting of the curtain and final move of the audience to the edge of the stage, which allowed for a nice full view of the hall. Those who have played in large theaters have experienced a view like this, but it was particularly interesting to experience it with most of the lights off and without anyone in the seats out there. Vast, yes. Off in the distance, a piccolo on the second balcony began sounding, and despite the tessitura of the piccolo (which usually allows you to find it with pinpoint accuracy) it took a moment to work out that it was all the way up there. Eventually a light fell on the player as he was joined by a clarinetist, both performers trading sparse parts off in the distance. One by one the other players were revealed throughout the theater as the piece unfolded, built, and quietly ended. This literal approach to relating to the space was refreshing, and it brought the audience into the music in a way I hadn’t experienced during any of the other presentations.

(left to right) Andrew Stoltz, Brent Farris, Ellen Fullman, and Travis Weller perform Fullman’s Tracings
Photo by Steve Snowden

Unfortunately, I didn’t get to see Ellen Fullman and the Long String Instrument, which was one of the performances I was most excited about. Despite arriving 20 minutes before the show (and only 10 minutes after the doors opened) I was told that they were already at capacity. Crushingly disappointed, I went back out into the cold Austin night (78ish…) sad that I’d missed the show, but heartened to know that even though there were four days of experimental music involving lowering ceilings, singing handrails, and hopping choirs, the demand and interest in such music is alive and well. And building [3].

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1. If this concept is little tricky to imagine, take a tuning fork, strike it, and put the handle firmly on the top of your head while it’s vibrating. In this scenario your head is the handrail and the tuning fork is the speaker driver. Now imagine that you have seven heads and your tuning fork goes to eleven.

2. Lots of “Ooohs” and “Ahhhs” and “That is so cool”s going on in that room.

3. That was a bad one, sorry.