Category: Field Reports

One of the more unpredictable communities in Boston music has comprised a group of pop/rock/other performers and acts that, in one way or another, seem to trace their lineage back to local heroine Amanda Palmer and her breakout duo, The Dresden Dolls. Part punk confrontation, part performance-art boundary-blurring, part art-rock musical ambition, and part burlesque naughtiness, it’s a loose, like-minded orbit, familiar faces turning up in various places—the “Org” shows organized by Mali Sastri of Jaggery are a good example, or the occasional (in all senses) themed shows curated by Mary Bichner, otherwise known as the band Box Five. Bichner’s latest effort was “A Dream Within a Dream,” an evening paying tribute to Edgar Allan Poe, which kicked off a brief tour on October 5 at the Somerville Theatre. (The tour then went to New York, Baltimore, Richmond, and Philadelphia—all the American cities Poe, at one time or another, called home—with local bands joining the lineup in each city.)

One might have expected an evening of non-stop, dark-cabaret gloomy edge; but with emcee Mika Cooper on hand as, often, the only real connecting thread, the concert encompassed a whole catalog of varied inclinations claiming Poe as an ancestor. Alexandra Day, visiting from Philadelphia (Bichner’s old hometown), contributed “Poe at Seven,” a portrait of the author as a Scottish boarding-school student, all discontent and images of distant trains, set to groovy piano pop that put the alienation firmly in the post-Beat road-scholar school of rock. What Time is it, Mr. Fox? brought a set mixing raunchy soul, gutbucket blues, and fierce Irish fiddle, all covered in Victorian cobwebs, but the group’s Poe-specific premiere was “Eleonora,” an arrangement of lines selected from that story (which, as lead singer Brian King pointed out, ranks as one of Poe’s happiest—dead lady notwithstanding); King and his guitar made it into a moody emo romance, a 19th-century alternative prom theme.

Bichner’s three Poe-themed works ran the gamut from melodrama (“Virginia’s Waltz,” with burlesque/performance artist “UnAmerika’s Sweetheart” Karin Webb reciting as Poe’s doomed wife) to art song (Poe’s famous poem “For Helen,” set in polished, pitch-perfect parlor style) to sketch comedy (another melodrama, to Poe’s slapstick romance “The Spectacles,” piano, drums, and strings providing parodic diminished-chord background while Poe impersonator Rob Velella narrated a semi-staged—and eagerly mugged—presentation of the tale). Sassier silliness came with the purposefully rambling, determinedly ragged, rollicking stylings of jojo Lazar and Amy Macabre, better known as WHY ARE THOSE GIRLS SO LOUD it’s ‘cos we’re jewish: ukulele, toy glockenspiel, jagged-razor cheer, and a steady stream of potty-mouthed lit-crit stand-up commentary, combining the morbid goof of a mash-up of “The Raven” and “The Rainbow Connection” and the connoisseurship of a cover of Iron Maiden’s “Murders in the Rue Morgue.” (True to this particular scene’s stock company/community ethos, both Lazar and Macabre figure in other groups as well, most notably the rock-and-roll circus of Walter Sickert and his Army of Broken Toys.)

Bassist Tony Leva (also part of Jaggery), with Michael Dobiel remixing on a laptop, spun a kind of free-jazz/spoken-word critique of “The Purloined Letter,” accompanying Webb performing a gender-bending change of costume. Guitarist/composer Brendan Burns’s “A Valentine for Poe” was especially strong, an acrostically derived theme that Burns, Leva, and drummer Nate Greenslit worked into an arc from Frisell-esque Americana evocation to full-distortion psychedelica and back again.

For a finale, Bichner organized a musically exquisite corpse, dividing “The Raven” into six parts, then assigning each part to a different act for musical realization: Bichner’s operatic lyricism; WHY ARE THOSE GIRLS SO LOUD’s garage-band drive; Mali Sastri in full dramatic cry; Day’s freeform rumination; the jazz duo Bottom of the Well‘s sultry noir; Molly Zenobia spinning a hell-lonesome variation on the most austere corners of American roots music. The wide-ranging, even contradictory variety was as apt a tribute to Poe as any.

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The next morning, word went out over Twitter that Amanda Palmer herself was going to make an appearance in the tent city of Occupy Boston, so I put on my favorite Situationist t-shirt and went down to the Financial District. The mood in Dewey Square was cheerful, laid-back, but a little vague. (This was the week before the Boston Police Department tried to bulldoze the protesters into evacuating.) A spokesman tried to fire up the crowd with an Occupy Boston mission statement, but “starting a conversation” is not much of a rallying cry. When Palmer showed up, the contrast was interesting: casual and equally laid-back, but nonetheless focusing all the scattered energy in her person and her performance. (She would make a good conductor.) Armed with only a ukulele, Palmer held the stage effortlessly. She sang covers of Neutral Milk Hotel’s “Two-Headed Boy” and Billy Bragg’s “The World Turned Upside Down,” as well as her own “In My Mind” and “Map of Tasmania.”

There were two songs, though that stood out. Palmer’s cover of Rebecca Black’s “Friday” rewrites the lyrics from the point of view of a downtrodden truck-stop prostitute, illustrating her penchant for pairing light and dark of such extremes that they seem to meet on the other side of the circle. Then there was a new song, so new the title hadn’t settled—it was either “The Ukulele Anthem” or “Play Your Ukulele”—an ode to the ukulele’s no-nonsense, no-excuse, anywhere anytime practicality, with enough punk attitude to suggest that Sid Vicious, Lizzie Borden, and John Lennon might have met better ends had they taken up the instrument. Dazzlingly, incontinently wordy, lethally catchy, “Play Your Ukulele” offered an object lesson in manifestos that any protest movement could learn from.

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A couple weeks later, on October 22, the mother superior of art-pop, Laurie Anderson, brought her latest piece, Delusion, to Veterans Memorial Auditorium in Providence. In Delusion—originally created for the Vancouver 2010 Cultural Olympiad—Anderson set herself a tricky goal: tell a story about the limits of telling a story. It was a solo performance, Anderson manning keyboards and electronic violin to trigger an austerely synthesized and sampled soundscape; the textual component was heavily oriented towards the spoken word, with only a couple of songs reprised from her previous collection, Homeland venturing into singing.

The show was structured in tag-team style, Anderson alternating between two voices. The vocoder-deepened “male” voice (an Anderson trademark that has taken on enough personality of its own that she has dubbed it “Fenway Bergamot”) cast a gimlet eye at history and power, even questioning the storytelling validity of time itself (“What are days for?”). Her own voice related quirky dreams and dispatches from her mother’s deathbed, with Anderson’s usual eye for telling quotidian detail or suddenly revealing clichés. Anderson touched on this sort of subject in her 2001 song “Slip Away,” written in response to her father’s death; if anything, Delusion makes that dissolve even more agnostic, narratives of identity, and loss, and death, that carefully but mercilessly describe their own ultimate emptiness. (One recurring visual was an animated chalkboard, the writings and drawings continually appearing and being erased.)

Mortality pervades Delusion, but the piece doesn’t feel heavy, its sadness sensed most only in retrospect; in performance, Anderson’s style is too precise, too crisp to admit sentimentality. Grief is only one kind of storytelling, one that just happens to break down more readily upon closer examination. Hence the dual-track narration: the stories we tell to make sense of all sorts of loss—personal loss, loss of ideals, loss of illusions, loss of empire—all wind up similarly absurd and confused.

Musically, Delusion is far more ruminative than the bright, pop-electronica accents of, say, United States, or even the moody-remix atmosphere of Homeland. Ominous rumbles and synthesized choirs stretch behind the Bergamot-voiced, long-view ironies; to accompany her own voice, Anderson again and again used her violin to trigger a pair of sampled clones, moving in parallel triads, both dulcet and eerie, a technological conjuring of a distant, shape-note past—”the sweet, though far-off hymn,” in the words of the old song. In one way or another, Anderson’s subject has always been America, the place, the idea of it, the story of it. In United States/Home of the Brave Anderson found the ideal vehicle for examination, a style that endowed commonalities with stadium-show grandeur, satirizing the engine of American life by embodying it. Delusion feels more elegiac, but still in Anderson’s wry manner: an unsparing dissection of the hand that waves goodbye.

I recently saw two shows in as many nights that were presented by a couple of fantastic arts organizations in Austin: Ballet Austin and the Austin Classical Guitar Society. They both featured something old and something new, though refreshingly (and surprisingly, given that these are not new music groups) there was more of the latter in both shows. And they utilized two of the newest and most beautiful facilities in town; the Long Center (which is home to the Austin Symphony and the Austin Lyric Opera) and the new black-box-writ-large Moody Theater in the heart of downtown. Both of these organizations warrant their own profiles focused on their performance and commissioning activities, but we’ll stick with their most recent presentations for now.

The Mozart Project. Yes, I know—wrong composer for NewMusicBox. And while half the concert was straight-up toe-shoes, the other half was not straight up in any way, shape, or form, and it is this portion we’ll discuss here. The Mozart Project is the brainchild of Ballet Austin Artistic Director Stephen Mills and features music by Graham Reynolds, DJ Spooky, and Mr. Wolfgang himself. Mills commissioned Miller and Reynolds to reimagine two of Mozart’s masterworks, Eine Kleine Nachtmusik and the Piano Concerto 12 (K. 414), which was also the featured piece in the aforementioned (and really fantastic!) toe-shoes section of the evening.

Though the Earth Gives Way – Photo by Tony Spielberg

Reynolds’s Though the Earth Gives Way featured violin and cello with real-time processing accompanied by pre-rendered percussion tracks. There were nine movements, each of which came in at around two or three minutes. Says Reynolds, “I took fragments directly out of the piano concerto score (some very small, some eight bars long) and created my music with them. In most tracks it’s very hard to hear the Mozart, but in one or two it’s a little more overt.” The piece began with a percussion line run through some delay and reverb to create a quasi-ambient bed for the main theme of the work. Most of the movements involved one part wandering line, two parts reverb/delay, and one part percussion loop (accompanied by the occasional tap on the acoustic instruments) so ultimately the piece was held together musically by texture and rhythm, and visually by the dance and the staging. The stark staging featured three large panels with fluorescent light bulbs (the long ones from high school, not the squiggly pigtail ones) placed vertically at the back of the stage. These were flanked by two similar constructions on either side, creating a large box in which the dancers performed. Dressed in black and white, the dancer’s simple but effective costumes coupled with the staging stood in contrast with the sensual choreography. The music was compelling and evocative, but often as soon as something interesting began to materialize it got lost in the echo and a new piece began. The exception was the penultimate movement, which involved running the string signals through distortion to create the impression of two metal guitarists chugging along, one of whom had clearly been spending time with his scales. It played provocatively in that we were hearing metal at the ballet, but it also seemed at times kind of odd, in that we were hearing metal at the ballet. Accompanying the distortion were quick snapshots of light from the fluorescents which caught the dancers in a variety of poses. It was very striking, and at times had a really creepy horror movie vibe to it. Very cool.

Echo Boom – Photo by Tony Spielberg

DJ Spooky/Paul Miller’s piece Echo Boom (based on Eine Kleine Nachtmusik) began with the string quartet playing a straight run through the allegro (with a bit of reverb and panning) while a video presentation involving graphics of notes and words moving across and up and down played on a screen above them. It wasn’t clear if the text was intended to be read or experienced graphically, but there was a stream of consciousness element to it that was compelling, if only because its juxtaposition with the music seemed to invite the audience to find the connection between the two. Having said that, a few people (perhaps saddened by the lack of dancing at the ballet) decided to get up and stumble over their neighbors (including yours truly) to seek out other sources of entertainment. If only those few non-believers had cooled their heels a few more minutes, they would have seen some of the most compelling dancing of the night accompanied by DJ Spooky’s remix of the Night Music. Says Miller, “Sampling and collage are what DJ culture is all about, so I wanted to figure out what would make a collage possible that looked at Mozart like a ‘record,’ but then allowed me to figure out some ways to compose around Mozart.” Here we saw, among other things, a number of landscape scenes projected behind the dancers, including several shots of Antarctica (the topic of Miller’s new book, The Book of Ice). As the piece built to a head, the sounds of the string quartet got progressively more and more obscured by the big beats and the disassembled form of EKNM broken down to such a degree that the effect was ultimately a total move from the concert hall to the club. By this point there were more than a few bobbing heads in the audience, and judging from the comments in the lobby afterward, Ballet Austin had a hit on its hands.

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Matthew Hinsley, executive director of the Austin Classical Guitar Society, holds court at all ACGS events like a mild-mannered P.T. Barnum, conjuring incredible spectacle. He also serves as a connecting hub for various elements of the Austin landscape, including the business, art, education, and commerce sectors; a feat that requires a mind that can see a dozen moves ahead on the chessboard and the vision to see how the game might be changed. ACGS hosted last year’s Guitar Foundation of America’s International Festival and Competition, which was the largest, most diverse, and most successful in its history (and the first not hosted by a university) so inevitably the question became, “What’s Hinsley going to do to follow up?” The answer was “Austin Pictures,” inspired by Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition and used as a theme for ACGS to spin its own musical variations. The show was held at the recently opened ACL (Austin City Limits) Moody Theater, which looks like what people who had never been to the original ACL theater on the University of Texas campus probably always imagined it looked like.

It’s big.

The show started with Austin Pictures a five-movement work commissioned from Joseph Williams II specifically for the event. The piece was performed by the Miro Quartet and a giant guitar orchestra, with Peter Bay of the Austin Symphony Orchestra at the helm. The concerto grosso of sorts began with “The Hill Country,” a lush, bright, flowing piece that started quietly and blossomed beautifully as it progressed. “Dance of the Grackles,” (What’s a grackle? Think ravens or blackbirds…) featuring the bird Austin loves to hate, was full of sharp hits and something of an old-world vibe; fun with plenty of sound from the 100 guitars on hand. “Violet Crown with Cicadas” featured long string lines and huge guitar thrumming strums that faded to nothingness. The closing movement, “Capital City Construction” (which describes the town I’ve lived in for over a decade to a “T”) was arguably the most visceral movement; its Stravinskian rhythms and powerful interplay between the orchestra and Miro brought the whole work to a thunderous conclusion. Following the intermission, the second commissioned piece of the night, Jorge Morel’s Songs and Dances, featured Miro along with the extraordinary guitarist Jorge Caballero. The three-movement work paired well with its predecessor, contrasting Austin Pictures‘ large-scale gestures with more intimate interplay among the five performers.

Photo by Jon Shapley

The pieces that followed, Boccherini’s Introduction and Fandango and Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, were wonderfully rendered, the latter a real tour-de-force with Caballero performing Kazuhito Yamashita’s infamous (and completely insane!) transcription for solo guitar.

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Ballet Austin and the Austin Classical Guitar Society have both been around for some time (20+ years for ACGS and 50+ years for the ballet), but their dedication to the performance and commissioning of new music (even if it occasionally ruffles the feathers of certain patrons) has been an integral part of both organizations for years. Both could easily bring the same material back year in and year out to the same (though likely dwindling) group of willing followers, and in doing so likely find themselves in the same sinking boat so many large organizations are frantically rowing (or have rowed) into oblivion. But by challenging their audiences to try something new, by connecting with their audiences to the events, and by treating each concert as part of a larger concept/vision/mission that extends beyond just that evening or even that season, Mills and Hinsley are models not just for music selection and commissioning, but also for music presentation and audience retention, interaction, and perhaps most importantly, generation.

And that last word is key I think. Generation. One of our most significant issues is getting new people interested in checking out new music, and part of that challenge is getting them to perceive these shows not just as new versions of “Classical” music, but as something that can be so much more diverse, interesting, and communicative. The shows I saw were fun, engaging, challenging, and rewarding. What more do you want?

I want a few less grackles in the city and few more shows like these.

If you’re headed west on I-10, the first highway sign you pass as you leave Louisiana and enter Texas says “Orange 3, El Paso 856.” Texas is well known for its big open ranges, but it’s particularly striking if, after you make it all the way across to El Paso (which will take around 14 hours by car), you reflect on the fact that despite all that time on the highway, you’re still in the same damn state.

Given this bigness, and in the interest of giving a sense of what’s going on throughout the region, I’m going to occasionally travel outside of Austin to explore other offerings. Among the heavy hitters in Houston is Musiqa, a new music organization run by professors from Rice and the Moores School at the University of Houston. In addition to the presentation and commissioning of new music, Musiqa concerts also regularly feature dance, readings, film, and plays. In the ten years since its founding, Musiqa has put on hundreds of concerts and it can boast one of the strongest educational outreach programs in the country. Despite my reservations about seeing anything run by college professors, (I kid! I kid!) I loaded up the car and pointed it east to hear the opening concert of Musiqa’s 10th anniversary season.

The evening’s program centered on the theme of American songs of the last two centuries, and began with the premier of Musiqa Miniatures, a short five-movement piece scored for that popular 21st-century chamber combo, the Pierrot ensemble. Each movement was written by one of the five directors of Musiqa, and they were played without pause. Despite its various authors, Miniatures held together well as a piece for reasons that became clear when conductor Robert Franz turned to welcome the audience at the close of the work. He explained that because it was Musiqa’s 10th anniversary, the directors decided to write Minatures on the theme of a certain song that is traditionally sung at birthday parties. You may have heard of it, but you’ll rarely see it listed on programs by its given name. Even John Harbison’s Songs America Loves to Sing (which we heard later that evening) features a take on this piece, but labels it Anniversary Song. Franz then said that because the piece was so brief and because it was the world premier, they would like to play it again for us. This was received with loud applause and there was occasional laughter as the theme popped its head up during the second run. I’ll admit to laughing as loud (and being as charmed) as anyone in the place, and I’ll also admit that I did not pick up on the theme the first time around. I just thought I was hearing a bright, colorful, extraordinarily well-rendered chamber work. So congrats Musiqa, you got me! (shakes fist in the air…)

The second half of the concert began with a reading by author Justin Cronin of an excerpt from his novel Mary and O’Neil. The reading, about a cancer patient and her family, was touching without being overly melancholy and provided a great change of pace and focus in the concert.

Karol Bennett and members of Musiqa performing Mr Tambourine Man. Photo by Bill Klemm

John Corigliano

John Corigliano’s Mr. Tambourine Man was introduced by way of a “period” performance of “Blowin’ in the Wind” featuring soprano Karol Bennett with Robert Wolf on guitar. This gave some historical perspective, though Mr. Wolf’s decision to not let vi come out and play with I IV V in the chorus was just a little bit too bad.(*) Mr. Tambourine Man’s seven movements (we heard five here) are available for performance in a variety of ensemble shapes and sizes, and Musiqa presented the chamber version. Beginning the cycle, the title track kicked up its syncopated heels and was twirled and dipped with confidence by Bennett’s strong and confident delivery before shuffling off all Gnarly Buttons into the ether. “Blowin’ in the Wind” starts with a light touch before revealing itself as something of a slow march. Layered bass figures that descend heavily throughout much of the movement are contrasted by the ethereal nature of the chorus, which does sound distant and not too little like the wind. The tension and dread leads perfectly to the full frontal attack of “Masters of War” which explodes out of the gate and, despite a brief respite in the middle, really does not let up. These were followed by “All Along the Watchtower,” and “Forever Young,” the last standing in contrast from the preceding material. Closest to its folk cousins, it makes for a very pleasant and peaceful ending to a dramatic work that has quite a few wonderfully pointy parts.

Among the most striking features of the concert was the average age of the audience. Typically at chamber music concerts in this area this number might be, oh, I don’t know…let’s say north of 60, but there were dozens of people in their late teens/early twenties at this performance. Now, given the folks driving this ship, I’ll bet that there might be a student or two among those kids, but it was still refreshing to see so many people who know how to operate a cell phone listening intently to what was offered. The addition of the reading, the appearance of a number of the directors during the concert to announce pieces and talk with the audience, and the generally laid-back atmosphere (about as laid back as you can be at the swanky Hobby Center) served to further connect the audience with the material and the performers. Unfortunately I was unable to stay for more than a few minutes of the post-concert talk, but watching Karol Bennett sit on the edge of the stage, legs casually swinging as she answered questions from an audience that had coalesced around her and the other performers, it occurred to me that while this is the 10th anniversary for Musiqa, in the grand scheme of things it’s just the beginning.

* It’s come to my attention that the original version of “Blowin’ in the Wind” in fact did not contain the vi chord that is found in so many other performances of the piece. Therefore the description of Robert Wolf and Karol Bennett’s performance as a “period performance” was even more spot on than I knew! Kudos to Mr. Wolf!—AS

Milwaukee Noise Festival curator Peter J. Woods describes his personal discovery of noise music like a conversion. “In 2003 I had a noisier rock band jump on a show called The Great Milwaukee Ear F*ck,” Wood recounts. “I had no idea what I was in for. . . . It totally blew my mind and I was hooked after that.  Then 2004 rolls around, Wolf Eyes drops Burned Mind on Sub Pop, and I caught Prurient, Emil Beaulieau and Crank Sturgeon . . . and I decided I needed to make this music.”

Woods has curated the Milwaukee Noise Festival for six years now.  He balances pragmatism with a boundless enthusiasm for the music.  He keeps three evenings of roughly nine different sets running on a tight schedule “like a well-oiled, motherf#@%ing machine.”   He deftly works the house sound system and corrals the audience back inside from cigarette breaks between sets without puncturing the casual, familial atmosphere of the gathering.  Occasionally he remembers to make sure people have paid the cover.  For Woods, hosting the Milwaukee Noise Festival is a matter of meeting the need for a concentrated gathering of Midwestern noise music artists.  “The Milwaukee noise scene has roots that go back the ‘80s, with Boy Dirt Car and f/I ruling the scene back when this stuff was called industrial.  The scene died down for a while, but picked up steam again when the first noise fest hit in 2005.  So many people were making this stuff and doing it well that someone needed to organize a celebratory event.  So I stepped up.”

Today, the Milwaukee noise scene is a tight-knit community of creative individuals exploring an expansive range of sonic methodologies.  Many performers use a table filled with gear or a suitcase packed with electronics as the physical canvas for realizing their music.  The diversity of sound sources is impressive.  From laptop computers running custom software to chains of guitar effects pedals to vintage analog synthesizers to cassette players and turntables, it is a community that embraces every possible means of getting sound to emit from a set of speakers.  It is a music scene that strikes a balance between the deliberate and the unhinged while allowing individual performers to tip that balance toward either extreme.

Noise music is generally built from a sonic palette of sounds that are normally suppressed.  Instability, dissonance, glitch, and electronic static are embraced as core elements.  Performances are often made up of improvised manipulations of signal flow and tapping into the expressive range of a harsh, saturated mass of sound.  Its roots go back to the Italian Futurist Movement and French musique concrète of the early 20th century that were a response to the industrial revolution.  Current noise music practices mix together a broad range of technological means as an emulation of the information overload that marks contemporary life.  Noise musicians have a license to work at extreme volumes with the explicit understanding that each performer and listener present is responsible for protecting his or her own auditory system.

Just under the shadow of Interstate 43 in Milwaukee’s Walker’s Point neighborhood—an area marked by vacant storefronts that reflect the economic realities of life in a rust belt city—one finds the Borg Ward Collective.  It’s an art space and all-ages venue that serves as the hub of Milwaukee’s simmering noise music scene, and it is here that the Milwaukee Noise Festival celebrates the creative drive that sets—and breaks—its own boundaries.  The Borg Ward Collective is a space without platforms or stages.  It is a back room that supplies little more than space and electricity.  Throughout the festival there was a remarkable fluidity between performers and audience members as each occupied every part of the room throughout the three-night event.  The music was experienced while standing in close proximity to the performers, and there was a collective sense of respect and curiosity for each act as an exchange of ideas among peers.  Between sets, many of the performers would swap recorded media that took the form of various “obsolete” formats such as cassette tapes, vinyl records, and mini-discs.

The Milwaukee Noise Festival is as DIY as it gets.  The performers would set up and break down their own rigs, and they were responsible for keeping their set durations within reasonable bounds.  The length of each performance varied wildly between three and forty minutes, largely driven by an intuitive grasp of what the musical material called for.  It was remarkable that there wasn’t a single act that felt indulgent or too long.

Not every performance operated at ear splitting extremes. Three Arguments Against the Singularity operated within a field of restraint and grounded harmony.  Nummy—a.k.a. Gabrielle B. Schwartz, the crowned princess of Milwaukee noise—offered a performance piece that focused on the micro-sounds of water evaporating from a hot frying pan.  Jason Zeh performed an exquisite set that used contact microphones placed on several running cassette players (most without cassettes).  And guitarist David Daniell offered up an introspective set of solo extended electric guitar technique with a sharp ear for texture and drone.

But loud excursions were clearly an important part of the Noise Festival.  The Spiral Joy Band presented a duo of amplified violinists playing aggressively into a wall of feedback. They performed facing two stacks of speakers accompanied by a tamboura drone played from a cell phone.  KBD offered a tasteful live collage of manipulated electronics, extended slide guitar technique, and recordings of a radio preacher.  Owlscry presented the full-throated screams of M. Jurek as he fronted an unlikely black metal band backed by a drummer and two noise artists working from tables filled with gear.  And Reptile Worship transmitted an imaginary message about what to do when our lizard overlords come to harvest our mortal bodies.  At least that’s what the pre-recorded message leading up to their drone-heavy outburst would have one believe.  I certainly came away feeling more prepared to meet our reptilian masters after their set.

Woods’s own Phoned Nil Trio offered up a cathartic, Dionysian mash-up of hi-tech, low-tech, hi-brow, low-brow, and theater that was the closest thing to a headliner in a festival that was remarkable for its sense of flat social hierarchy.  Phoned Nil Trio cooked up a sonic soup that played with the sonic possibilities of cassette recorders, laptops, turntables, bent circuits, trumpet, toys, and an amplified coffee percolator.  The set ended with a cup of fresh brewed java literally handed to me by one of the performers as if the caffeine could somehow resonate with the many jolts offered up by the music.  The performance was a slab of materials artfully carved by the ears and improvisational choices of Woods, Neil Gravander, and Dan Schierl.  To my ears, it was music in the proud lineage of John Cage’s Imaginary Landscape No. 1 delivered without the academic bona fides.

It wasn’t just the academic posturing that was notably absent from the Milwaukee Noise Festival.  It is also an event that operates without prominent sponsorships or marketing questionnaire forms—elements that represent “noise” of a different sort at most other music festivals.  Foam earplugs are essentially the only thing that comes between the listener and the music.  By supporting a body of music that generally has little chance of finding its way into concert halls, bars, or into the good graces of institutional support structures, the Milwaukee Noise Festival has tapped into an expressive sound that is brutally honest.  The creative energy on display at the Milwaukee Noise Festival was often deliberately unsettling, but thoroughly rewarding.

Music can be a force for healing in the face of devastating tragedy.  Composers who seek to confront the scars of loss and human suffering face the challenge of expressing qualities that transcend our differences and appeal to our shared humanity.

Chicago’s Fulcrum Point New Music Project addresses the need for healing after the painful events of 9/11 by programming an annual concert for peace.  The featured music consciously embraces every conceivable quality that runs counter to the violence and hate that flared up on that terrible day.  This year’s concert, performed at the Harris Theater for Music and Dance (and as a live broadcast on Chicago’s WMFT radio station), was offered as an extended meditation and as a humble sanctuary from the anger and sadness reawakened on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of 9/11.  The afternoon featured works by nine different composers searching for that expression of shared humanity through a plurality of traditions and beliefs.  The gift of free tickets for police, fire fighters, first responders, and their families was a gesture that kept the occasion grounded within a sense of connectedness to the brave actions that were also a part of 9/11.

The music included as part of 9/11: Ten Years and Beyond offered three distinct paths toward healing from the wounds of that day.  Some composers approached music as an introspective expression of prayer that took the form of an elongated crescendo.  Others chose to compose music that turned toward long-standing cultural traditions as a spiritual foundation for regaining one’s emotional bearings.  Only one piece on the program confronted the subject of 9/11 directly.

Music in the form of a crescendo creates an aural image of prayer rising toward a benevolent hope; sound in the shape of increasing resolve to build upon what is good.  Much of this was a music that focused upon simple materials and a sonic language of lyrical lines modeled after plainchant. This was the case with Musica Celestis for string orchestra by Aaron Jay Kernis, which began the afternoon set like a benediction.  This form was then echoed in Sensoo by Lee R. Kesselman as the New Classic Singers provided a choral texture over the pure-tone qualities of bowed crotales.  This same crescendo appeared again in Fratres by Arvo Pärt.  The piece features tintinnabulation (Arvo Pärt’s word for his technique of composing two simultaneous voices as one line) and triadic resonance that rings through a sparse texture assembled from materials carefully stripped of ornamentation and excess.

Lamentation on the Disasters of War by Karim Al-Zand straddled the dual aesthetics of form and tradition by building its crescendo within a neo-Romantic language.  This proved the musical durability of both approaches.  The Traditional Buddhist Chant performed by Drupon Rinchen Dorjee Rinpoche was an audible manifestation of the kind of faith we turn to in the face of events we cannot comprehend.  Lord Give Me Hope by Saalik Ahmad Ziyad was performed as a gospel lament for voice and contrabass.  Ziyad proved to be a talented vocalist with enormous range.  Kya Toota Hai, Andhar Andhar by Shehzad and Zeshan Bagewadi for acoustic guitar, voice, and contrabass is an Islamic prayer set to instrumental accompaniment.  And the world premiere of 3 Yiddish Songs by David Stock for voice and string orchestra offered an expression drawn from the Jewish faith.  The inclusion of each of the world’s major religions was an important part of reinforcing the universal desire for peace.

Buddha Girl for piano and electronics by Marita Bolles was the only work that took on 9/11 directly.  The electronic portion uses an interview with Debby Borza recounting the day she lost her daughter on United Flight 93 and how that loss became a catalyst   for making a life transformation and becoming a peace activist.  Kathleen Supové gave an outstanding performance on the piano.  She remained composed even as technical difficulties forced a re-start of one of the movements.  The   electronic part was mixed to a 5.1 system that surrounded the audience with a mix of recorded and altered sounds and speech  while the piano part provided both accompaniment and live reactive presence within the overall texture of the piece.  The stationary position of the piano on stage providing a counterbalance to the dynamic spatialization of the electronic material.  Transformation was the theme running through multiple layers of this composition: feedback became voice; voice became the sound of sirens.  Then the voice returned to describe the personal and spiritual transformation brought about by personal loss.  The transformation toward believing that peace is worth working for, even if we believe we will not know peace within our own lifetime.  Buddha Girl confronts the senselessness of 9/11 with a quiet persistence.  Programmed at the mid-point of the concert, it was the one piece that sliced at the heart of both the pain and the healing that made such a concert necessary.

Prior to the concert I was personally struck by how strong the waves of emotion were on the occasion of remembering the upsetting events of ten years ago.  The television programming that replayed the violent images and recounted the interweaving stories of loss grated against an emotional wound that runs surprisingly deep.  Much has changed over ten years, but the jarring cognitive dissonance of what happened seems not to have softened.  One cannot expect an afternoon concert to change this or bring more than temporary comfort.  But Fulcrum Point did provide more than a distraction from difficult feelings and memories.  In many ways, it suggested a multiplicity of paths toward peace that can be more vivid than the replayed video images seared into our collective consciousness.

Violence and loss challenge our comprehension and demand an exhausting effort to make sense of the senseless.  Approaching the emotion and meaning of such an event through music involves reaching toward extra-musical values that are held as sacred.  Whether those are inward looking or outward reaching toward the comfort of community and faith, this subject will continue to drive composers to examine our core values.  Stephen Burns, the artistic director of Fulcrum Point, made the conscious decision to build a program of music that serves as an extended prayer.  It was a prayer that emphasized inclusiveness and culminated in Kaddish, traditional prayer for the dead—a setting that incorporated every voice and performer from the day’s concert within a single piece.  It was a performance that offered an expression and a hope that the human desire for peace will eventually be stronger than the forces that divide us.  The standing ovation at the conclusion of this performance indicated that it was received in that spirit.

There aren’t as many generalizations to make about new music in Boston as one might think—even the old epithet of “academic” starts to fray when you realize that some of the city’s least academic composers are here because of academic appointments—but here’s one that’s not unreasonable: on balance, new music in Boston is institutionally driven. It’s ensembles and schools that curate the repertoire; the scene is parceled out by group and by season more than piece by piece. The sort of ad hoc, one-off new music event is a comparative rarity here; tellingly, when younger composers find institutional gates more tightly barred than they would like, their instincts are not to simply put on such a concert, but to start another institution (cf. the Boston Composers’ Coalition, the Boston Composers’ Collective, the Fifth Floor Collective, &c., &c.).

What this means, from a practical, concertgoing standpoint, is that there’s a strong inverse relationship between how experimental a performance is and how easy it’s going to be to find out about it. This is a tendency that’s only been getting stronger in recent seasons—the established institutions are taking up more of the reduced media and advertising footprint for classical music without seeding as many new cultivars. Even the flurry of high modernism that ran through Boston when James Levine took over as music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra has slowed to a crawl; this season, the BSO is programming but a handful of living composers, and only one premiere: a new symphony from John Harbison, the culmination of a two-season survey. (That dearth is at least a slight aberration, and probably a collateral result of James Levine’s exit as music director, drawn-out and hasty all at the same time, but the pattern has been steady.) The Boston Modern Orchestra Project, that supermarket of orchestral novelty, can usually be counted on for a bit of far-out provocation somewhere along the line (as of this writing, they have yet to reveal their full season), but it’s only one slot among the many styles and modernist histories BMOP tries to keep in play (and last season was comparatively middle-of-the-road, repertoire-wise). Many of the older new-music groups—Boston Musica Viva, Collage, and the like—are drifting into museum territory, maintaining their curated stock of ’60s-’90s contemporary chamber music as much as drawing out new creations.

None of this is bad—I like mainstream modernism, and I’m happy that somebody is keeping it in practice—but I also like to hear the latest news, as it were. And the institutional focus in Boston is so strong that, in order to find the latest news, one has to do a fair amount of deliberate spelunking. So, more and more, in addition to the standard tour of the standard groups, I find myself poring over university websites to see if any enterprising students are channeling their inner, bleeding-edge Mickey Rooneys and Judy Garlands. (This, in fact, has been one of the main engines for creating newer institutions—in the next few weeks, I’ll be reviewing several groups that got their start this way.) I find myself checking weeknight schedules at clubs around town to see if there’s any experimental filler on slow nights. I find myself doing Facebook searches on “John Cage” or “Fluxus” or “Scratch” on the off-chance that a similar, sympathetic happening is, well, happening. And all the
while, strangely, I find myself thinking about Brook Farm.

* * * * *

There isn’t much left of Brook Farm apart from its acreage. The Hive is gone; the Eyrie is gone; Margaret Fuller’s cottage was burned to the ground by bored vandals in the 1980s. The building that used to house the print shop is all that’s left, along with a few crumbling stone foundations and a patchwork of overgrown meadow and marshland. You can drive up to Brook Farm—the Transcendentalist, utopian commune in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, that flared brightly and then flared out in the 1840s, now a landmark-protected historic site—however, you can also get there in a more historically informed manner by way of the Blue Heron Trail, a ten-mile hiking loop that runs through Newton, Needham, Dedham, and Boston. It isn’t always comparatively enlightening to point out a New England locale’s historical connections (the region fairly reeks with history) but the Blue Heron Trail manages to cover a good amount of symbolic ground. It straddles a stretch of the Charles River, named for Charles I of England, the dirty water of Standells fame; a long portion of it runs parallel to Route 128, the site of the mid-20th-century tech boom in Massachusetts; it passes through Boston’s Millenium Park, a 100-acre repurposing of dirt from the Big Dig, the epic public-works expression of the commonwealth’s zenith of national political influence; and, of course, there is a side spur to the now-wilderness of Brook Farm.

And Brook Farm, however overgrown, is still a kind of secret nexus of new music in Boston. John Sullivan Dwight, the city’s first real music critic, was a Brook Farmer, preaching the gospel of Beethoven, a radically avant-garde message at the time. Dwight went on to found his eponymous Journal of Music, pushed for the formation of the Boston Symphony Orchestra—and never budged from his Brook Farm, pro-Beethoven stance, even as it tipped over into old-fashionedness. Ever since, there has been a strong instinct in the Hub of the Universe to approach revolutionary sounds with an ambition to institutionalize them into conventional respectability.

Critic-at-Large Moe and I hiked the Blue Heron Trail not long ago. For a while, the trail is clearly blazed; but large portions of the trail require a certain amount of entrepreneurial foolhardiness. There are welcome signs of institutional maintenance (marshes crisscrossed with accessible boardwalks) as well as institutional intrusion (a good section of the Newton side of the trail, for instance, is routed through a series of drab corporate parking lots). And then there’s the walk along 128, traffic, commerce, and transport continually in earshot, and occasionally clearly visible, but the trail nevertheless insisting on its own self-contained ecosystem. In other words, the Blue Heron Trail is a lot like new music in Boston.

Ed. Note: This week we are pleased to welcome and introduce to you the latest addition to our new team of regional editors, Chicago-based composer and new music omnivore Devin Hurd. These contributors, located in cities across the country, will be our eyes and ears on the ground, surveying the new music landscape in their areas and delivering regular coverage.
–MS

Fred Child surveyed the audience of 9,000 from the stage at Pritzker Pavilion in Chicago’s Millennium Park.  It was late August, and the host of American Public Media’s Performance Today—the most listened-to classical radio show in America—was emceeing a concert celebrating the music of Steve Reich, delivering commentary suitable for a diverse crowd of open-minded listeners with various degrees of exposure to new music.  We had all gathered on this warm summer evening for a free retrospective of Reich’s chamber works and tape pieces.  Some listeners were enjoying a bottle of wine and a picnic on the grass, accompanied by the phasing of Come Out and the 2009 Pulitzer-winning Double Sextet.  Child briefly interrupted his introductory thoughts on the music of Steve Reich for a shout out; “By the way, give it up for eighth blackbird!”  The sincere response he received in reply would have been suitable for a sporting event.

At the other end of the spectrum from this public concert in the park, one finds events such as the Transmission Series, which are presented late each Sunday night at The Hungry Brain in Chicago’s Roscoe Village.  Here the regulars are greeted by series co-curator Mike Reed’s admonition to “keep the talking to none. . . so that we can all enjoy the music.”  Considering the typical audience that congregates here, this is also a pitch-perfect approach to concert emceeing that builds upon the dedication of a group of listeners already well versed in jazz and improvised music.

Across the board, however, the audience for new music in Chicago is different from the audiences in other cities I’ve lived in.  When I moved here last year I noticed a significant difference in the attitude and open-minded attentiveness of concertgoers in both formal halls and alternative performance spaces.   People discuss and debate music with a sense of historical perspective built upon deep personal music collections and live performance experiences.  There’s a generosity extended toward music that takes risks. Some of this can be attributed to the range and diversity of opportunities to hear new music in a major urban center, but there is also a sense of pride about the local music scene mixed in with an overall sophistication.

May 8, 1965 was the day that the Association for the Advancement of Creative Music was founded by the visionary musicians Muhal Richard Abrams, Jodie Christian, Phil Cohran, and Steve McCall at Cohran’s home on East 75^th street.  This collective continues to promote and support creative music and has a strong track record for nurturing and exporting some of the best music to originate from the Windy City.  The massive audience that gathered at Pritzker Pavilion more than 46 years later is one of the fruits of the profoundly effective and sustained audience development that has been a big part of Chicago’s culture.  New music ensembles like eighth blackbird, Third Coast Percussion, Fulcrum Point, and Ensemble Dal Niente benefit from the progressive tastes cultivated and nurtured by the AACM’s community outreach over the decades.  Likewise, the Umbrella Music collective has modeled its own activities along the lines of the AACM and thrives within an environment where audience outreach has progressed well beyond simple introduction and initial exposures to adventurous music.

The music community in Chicago also maintains a healthy geographical reach, interacting with artists and audiences beyond its borders.  In 1967, the AACM began sending musicians to Europe to spread the sound of creative improvised music from Chicago.  The AACM eventually expanded to include a second chapter of the organization in New York City.  The dialog and cultural exchange between Europe and the East Coast continues to progress and extended Chicago’s position as a significant cultural hub in the Midwest.  This is particularly evident in the opening days of each year’s Umbrella Music Festival as dignitaries from multiple embassies and consulates introduce musicians from all over Europe featured alongside Chicago musicians.  Norwegian players like bassist Ingebrigt Haker Flaten and drummer Paal Nilssen-Love make frequent stops in Chicago.  The cultural hub aspect of life in Chicago also brings about fantastic collaborations with the likes of Poughkeepsie resident Joe McPhee or New Yorkers like Taylor Ho Bynum, and Mary Halvorson.  These exchanges go above and beyond merely being a stop for touring musicians.  There is a genuine creative spark that these players bring to the local scene on a regular basis.  McPhee’s collaboration with Chicago’s Ken Vandermark earlier this year offered incredible insight into how influential this cross-regional dialog has been for the Chicago scene generally and on Vandermark’s compositional approach specifically.

When new music ensembles resort to more traditional forms of audience outreach here in Chicago, they tend to fall flat.  For example, on-stage composer interviews are not uncommon, and they consistently leave the impression that the music cannot speak for itself.  Interest in how a piece was composed may follow after it has been heard, but rarely before.  Engagement cannot be coerced.  More often than not, this style of introduction has led to performances that would have been more convincing without saddling the music with too much detail about the compositional process, a situation that is often then compounded by the inarticulate descriptions offered by some composers during interviews in front of a live audience. The safest approach to set “discussions” is to physically remove them from the performance and the performance hall itself, making it an optional experience—preferably done at the conclusion of the concert evening’s performance. Otherwise, this type of live program note delivery works on the assumption that the audience needs to be gently coaxed toward new music and fails to recognize the clear commitment of the ears that have already made the decision to attend.  It is better to reward the ears first with the music and let curiosity grow naturally from the experience.

The AACM model has succeeded in its long-term audience outreach by forming itself into a recognizable part of the community.  It is an organization run by and for the musicians.  It is a broadly supportive environment that promotes creative growth and that has weathered significant evolutionary changes over time.  (George E. Lewis’s excellent A Power Stronger Than Itself details many of those changes as the responsibilities of sustaining the AACM passed from one generation of musicians to the next.)  Membership within the AACM communicates an immediately understood set of qualities to an audience, with a body of music to back it up.  Membership in the AACM indicates a near perfect balance of seriousness without stuffiness.  This is built up through a level of consistency that allows an audience to find and experience the music as often or as little as they wish.

At its best, audience outreach grows the appetite for seeking out new music.  It gives all ears present a stake in the music at hand, acting as an invitation to share in a communal experience and leaving a lasting impression that tempts the curious toward future concerts. The outdoor venue of Pritzker Pavilion is hardly an acoustically ideal place to hear music.  One would not stage a definitive performance there.  But Chicago’s own eighth blackbird presented a world-class performance that liberated the music from the confines of the concert hall and built upon the decades of communal experience that makes the Chicago music scene uniquely vibrant.