Category: Field Reports

See also:

• American in London: The Influence of Steve Reich, Part 1
• Video Gallery: Mazzoli interviews participants in the Barbican’s celebration of Steve Reich.

Appropriately enough for a Sunday morning, the day’s first concert at St, Luke’s church began with a set of works performed by the otherworldly Theatre of Voices, conducted by Paul Hillier. Their set began with a phenomenal performance of Steve Reich’s Proverb, the text of which, “How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life” has always hung in the back of my mind as a starting point for much of Reich’s work. I was also lucky enough to hear a breathtaking performance of David Lang’s Little Match Girl Passion, a work that felt doubly sparse and emotional in the context of a weekend of dense, multi-layered, Reich-inflected works. Again, I find myself moved by the math and simplicity of David Lang’s music, which never bubbles over into ham-fisted sentiment, but instead draws the listener into a thinly furnished and vulnerable world unlike any other. It’s a world that lets the listener fill in the gaps herself, and I have to admit it’s unsettling for a young composer to hear so much reflective, personal and, in my overexcited mind, close to perfect music in one concert. There’s a certain moment in my compositional process when the piece seems to be writing itself, when intuition leaps up and yells “I’ll take it from here,” and I yell back “It’s about time!” But Proverb and Little Match Girl Passion feel satisfyingly intuitive without ever losing a mathematically perfect sheen from start to finish. These pieces, like my favorite pieces by Beethoven, Sibelius, and Pärt, make me want to keep working, to strive for an impossible combination of control and instinct.

The afternoon’s concert again reset our ears with a performance of Music for Pieces of Wood, arranged for drums and performed by David Cossin and Ian Ding. As I’ve written again and again, the programming of this festival was superb; the audience needed the ecstatic, unbridled jolt of two drummers after the introspective works of that morning’s concert. Chicago-based new music iconoclasts eighth blackbird provided a further jolt with a set of works that showed the influence of Reich taken to an extreme place. They began the set with my work, Still Life with Avalanche, which I’m not going to talk about except to say that I was a very happy composer indeed, followed by Thomas Adeès’s Catch, a work written when the composer was only 19. I’m honestly not sure that Adès is influenced by Reich at all, but eighth blackbird gave a typically refined performance of this theatrical work that helped it tie this diverse program together. Philippe Hurel’s …a measure uses a musical language that, at first listen, seems to be very far removed from Reich. But Hurel, in his own words, built this frenetic work out of “short pulsating rhythmic sequences, each in turn accompanied by rhythmic accelerations and decelerations coming from a different musical universe.” These sequences “mix with abundant rhythmic polyphonies which ultimately settle firmly into loops.” It’s so Reich! Who knew? David Lang’s These Broken Wings Part 3, an exuberant and, I suspect, fiendishly difficult encore, concluded eighth blackbird’s set.

The Amadinda Percussion Group gave the UK premiere of Reich’s Mallet Quartet. Despite the bouncy, joyful melodies, Mallet Quartet strikes me as an introspective work, full of static harmonies, reverberant marimba notes that seem to be on the edge of the human threshold of hearing, and a sparse, beautiful middle movement.

The afternoon concert concluded with a performance by Dusseldorf-based composer/pianist Hauschka (a.k.a. Volker Bertelmann) who performed Movement and Maps for piano and two excellent percussionists. This set was a delightful descent into entropy and a little noise, the rattling of the prepared piano mixing seamlessly with the rock-inflected drums. While Hauschka only claimed to have discovered Reich four years ago, his music feels organically inspired by Reich’s pulsing ostinatos and unpredictable harmonic shifts. I met him outside after the concert for a little chat in the hopes of uncovering the inspiration for this set, and any possible connection to Reich:

The indefatigable André de Ritter pressed on with one of the most exhilarating and ambitious moments of the weekend, a performance of Canadian violinist/composer Owen Pallett’s album Heartland, featuring Pallett’s band backed by the orchestra. Heartland was, in my opinion, one of the most innovative albums of 2010, and the fact that it translated so easily to the orchestra underscores Pallett’s phenomenal musicianship and command of his material. I have heard Owen perform these songs many times over the last two months, but always as part of a solo set in which he generates all the material by looping the processed sound of his own violin and voice. I was worried that these works would lose some of their intimacy and poignancy when set within a large orchestra, but all for naught! The set was rambunctious and thrilling, and the orchestra seemed to be caught up in a wave of excitement that reverberated backwards from Pallett’s trio at the front of the stage.

Owen Pallett with the Britten Sinfonia

Eighth blackbird and the Bang on a Can All-Stars took the stage together for the London premiere of Reich’s Double Sextet. This work was originally written for eighth blackbird doubled by a recording of the same performers, but tonight we heard the “live” version, for a mirrored ensemble of two flutes, two clarinets, two pianos, two vibraphones, two violins, and two cellos. The excitement backstage before this performance was palpable, and the performance was phenomenal, particularly the placid and gently churning second movement, which always feels ready to bubble out of control in the most delicious way.

Reich after the performance of Double Sextet

OK, so, conclusion: what is the legacy of Steve Reich? How has the younger generation been inspired by him? After this weekend, I feel that it’s much more of a philosophical legacy than a sonic one. It’s Tyondai Braxton and Dan Deacon creating new ensembles just as much as it is Hauschka or Max Richter working with modulations, layers, and piano ostinatos. It’s also an influence that is so dissipated and widespread that it can’t easily be cataloged. It’s very young composers learning/stealing things from students of students of students of friends of Steve Reich. You can hear it when Michael Gordon smashes Beethoven to pieces, when Lukas Ligeti brings in a jangly, African-inspired guitar lick, when Bryce Dessner combines children’s choir and electric guitar in a beautiful web of polyrhythms. I can’t say it better than Alex Ross—as young composers “we are living in a world scored by Reich.”

See also:

• American in London: The Influence of Steve Reich, Part 2
• Video Gallery: Mazzoli interviews participants in the Barbican’s celebration of Steve Reich.

I’ve just returned from day one of the Barbican’s “Reverberations: The Influence of Steve Reich” festival in London, a 14-hour marathon of epic proportions that would give even the most obsessive Bang on a Can fan a run for their money. I should admit upfront that my intention here is not necessarily to review these concerts—your jet-lagged correspondent was physically unable to see every single performance—but to share a young American composer’s impressions of this fantastic and wide-reaching celebration of an American icon.

The first day of the festival was broken into three “sessions,” the first two of which took place at the beautiful St. Luke’s Church. Each concert began with a work that seemed to reset the audience’s ears and bring us back to the core of Reich’s music; session one began with So Percussion, in their London debut, performing the 1973 classic Music for Pieces of Wood. It was easy to hear Reich’s influence in the next work, Imaginary City, collectively composed by the members of So. But I wonder if we are hearing Reich’s direct influence or the influence of a Reich-inspired generation (David Lang, Michael Gordon, Evan Ziporyn) on these young composer/performers? Either way, Imaginary City has many electrifying moments, my favorite being a unison drumbeat with shimmering marimbas that burst onto the scene after ten minutes of watery ambience. Pulse is the core of this music, but it’s a different pulse than Reich’s; So Percussion’s music has a resolutely 21st-century beat to it, a syncopated, dance-like mania in every moment.

The first concert also included a set by the Bang on a Can All-Stars, performing works by Andriessen, Lukas Ligeti, and Steve Martland. Lukas Ligeti’s Glamour Girl, inspired by African music, opened their set, exploding into a beautiful web of counterpoint sweetened by a crisp, jangly guitar part. It’s easy to make a connection between Lukas Ligeti and Reich; both compose using rhythmic cells, simultaneous tempos and African-inspired rhythms. But again, I wonder if it’s not something more. Could it be that Reich’s clear and unabashed quotations of non-Western music helped open the door for young composers like Ligeti, who could feel free to quote and transform music from anywhere in the world? Andriessen’s Life is a classic late-Andriessen work pulled apart and laid bare, with textures that are simultaneously more romantic and more angular than the iconic Andriessen works. A startling second movement was almost folk-like, and a short third movement used the strings to imitate the sound of a finger drawn quickly across Venitian blinds. Crystalline films by Marijke van Warmerdam showed a series of simple, painterly images; a couple on a park bench, a rain-splattered window. Andriessen calls this “a contemporary Pictures at an Exhibition,” explaining that it is the latest in his exploration of “the lukewarm waters of romanticism.” The first concert concluded with performances of Martland’s Horses of Instruction and Reich’s Sextet, but I chose that moment to duck out and talk to members of eighth blackbird and Todd Reynolds about Steve Reich, dentistry, koans, and jet lag.

Derek Johnson, who performed with Bang on a Can, gave a riveting performance of Electric Counterpoint, followed by So Percussion performing David Lang’s The So-Called Laws of Nature. In the program note for this epic work, Lang poses a koan that could refer to most of the music on this festival: “Does the music come out of the patterns or in spite of them?” I find The So-Called Laws of Nature to be a highly emotional, moving work, though it is constructed entirely out of a tightly wound series of identical patterns displaced between the players. Why does this math bring me to tears? I feel that much of Lang’s and Reich’s music walks the line between two emotional extremes, the straight lines of math combined with some sort of curved, unpredictable element. In The So-Called Laws of Nature this element is the instrumentation; flowerpots, teacups, pieces of wood and metal that the performers are called upon to assemble themselves. The afternoon session at St. Luke’s concluded with an intimate set by Clogs, a band that has influenced many young composers of the post-Bang on a Can era.

The evening’s concert at the Barbican center began with a brilliantly programmed set by the BBC Symphony Orchestra, conducted by the wonderful André de Ridder. The concert opened with Reich’s first orchestral work, Variations for Winds, Strings and Keyboards. The work is a chaconne stretched into a strange and meditative journey. A Renaissance-inflected melody played by three oboes harkened back to the Dessner premiere earlier in the day, while the steady transpositions through each key foreshadowed Michael Gordon’s work later on the program. Anna Clyne’s driving, relentless Rewind was next, followed by what to me was one of the highlights of the evening, Michael Gordon’s Rewriting Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony. There are some things that you just don’t mess with, and until I heard this piece, I thought Beethoven was one of them. But Gordon manages to combine the nostalgia and familiarity of Beethoven with the intensity of his own compositional voice to create a remarkable work. He directly quotes themes from the symphony in each movement, using them as raw materials of the work. In the second movement, for example, the theme from Beethoven’s second movement spirals upward, transposing a half-step higher each time. As a Beethoven fanatic I went through an exhilarating series of emotions, from a feeling of intense familiarity with the themes to unease at hearing them torn apart by glissandos and unexpected transpositions, to a delicious thrill at feeling happily lost between centuries.

Tyondai Braxton then performed pieces from his album Central Market with members of the BBC Symphony, another highlight of the evening. On the surface Braxton’s music may seem to be the opposite of Steve Reich; it is prog-inflected collage music instead of a gradually unfolding process or a step-by-step layering of textures. But Central Market seems to be close to Reich philosophically; it is a truly modern, surprising ensemble of singers, kazoo players, five electric guitars, electronics, and chamber orchestra. Braxton has created a new sound, and this desire to explore new sonic territory, new instrumentations and forms, this fearlessness, may be the most important legacy that Reich leaves to the next generation. The second Kronos Quartet performance of the day included Bryce Dessner’s Aheym (Homeward), an arrangement of Perotin, and the European premiere of WTC 9/11, a set that I unfortunately had to miss in order to eat my first meal of the day.

The rest of the evening was a steady, two-hour-long crescendo, through a manic and boisterous performance of Dan Deacon’s Ghostbuster Cook: The Origin of the Riddler with So Percussion, Lee Ranaldo’s How Deep Are Rivers, performed by the Bang on a Can All-Stars, and the London premiere of Reich’s 2X5. I saw the New York premiere of 2X5 at Carnegie Hall last week, and was pleased that the Barbican turned up the volume for the London premiere. This performance had an energy and looseness missing from the New York concert—maybe it helped that it was after midnight at this point! At the end of the very long day—the day of concerts was apparently the longest that the Barbican has produced in its history—I was exhilarated and exhausted, and ready to do it all again.

All photos by Missy Mazzoli

Steve Reich after the London premiere of 2X5

Reich at the London Premiere of 2X5

Reich after the performance of Double Sextet

Clogs with the New London Childrens Choir

Standing Ovation after Double Sextet

Owen Pallett with the Britten Sinfonia

Owen Pallett

Eighth Blackbird, backstage

Josh Quillen of So Percussion

So Percussion, Drumming Part 1, Lobby

Reich and the Amandinda Percussion Quartet

The potentates of the old world found no difficulty in convincing themselves that they made ample compensation to the inhabitants of the new by bestowing on them civilization and Christianity in exchange for unlimited independence.

—Johnson v. M’Intosh, 21 U.S. 543 (1823)

Waiting for Berklee College of Music President Roger Brown to open the Rethink Music conference in Boston this week, I overheard some small talk a few rows behind me. “They were afraid there’d be too many lawyers,” someone said, “so they told me to dress down.”

The Rethink Music conference enjoyed some heavy aegis: Berklee, the music trade fair organization MIDEM, the Harvard Business School, Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society. The nominal ambition was similarly impressive: “To talk about solutions to moving the music industry forward,” according to conference Executive Director Allen Bargfrede; to “foster creativity and a thriving music industry,” according to the conference website. Roger Brown offered as inspiration the British government’s 18th-century Board of Longitude and its competition to solve that problem of marine navigation. Since we now cross the Atlantic 360 times faster than they did in the 18th century, we should be able, Brown said, to solve the problems facing the music industry “360 times faster than it took to solve the problem of longitude.” In practice, though, much of the conference seemed to echo that overheard comment: the discussions could dress down to the casual cool of social media and digital connectivity, but it was in tension with the old industry, beholden to back catalogs and billable hours.

From left: Dave Kusek, VP, berkleemusic.com, interviews Metric. Photo by Phil Farnsworth.

Thus there was, for example, Del Bryant, the president and CEO of BMI, opining on Tuesday morning that “giving things away for free” was “not building the business,” while the Canadian band Metric and their voluble manager, Matt Drouin, related on Tuesday afternoon how they built their business by giving things away for free. There was Cary Sherman, president of the RIAA, insisting that lawsuits against file-sharing end users had “clearly [indicated] to the public at large what was legal and what was not,” a day after the singer/songwriter Bleu had matter-of-factly said, “I don’t think there’s any way to go back to monetizing music.” The old system and the new system occasionally occupied the same host: Paul McGuinness, artist manager for, among others, U2, allowed as how “for a baby band, every Internet opportunity is something to be seized”—but, when allied with Bono et al., “we tend to be on the same side of the argument as the major labels.”

It was very much a music business conference. And it was very much a pop music business conference; classical music, experimental music, or the avant-garde barely rated mention, and the bulk of that came in composer Tod Machover’s Tuesday keynote (a breezy overview of gee-whiz technological advances his MIT lab has made on various fronts—performance, accessibility, music therapy—that seemed, in retrospect, like the keynote to a different, slightly more diverting conference). But there was one dominant topic that, for better or for worse, might have been borrowed from classical music’s long history: patronage.

To add to their misery, they had little hope of deliverance. For where does one run to when he’s already in the promised land?

—Claude Brown, Manchild in the Promised Land (1965)

The lesson from the money guys and the artists was that the path to salvation was in using digital connectivity to enable ever-increasing engagement with fans. “Direct-to-fan,” everyone called it, the idea that if the bond between artist and fan is strong enough, the fan will gladly pay for access, for premium content, for the sense of a less-anonymous relationship with the artist and the process. Direct-to-fan, by this way of thinking, is the new driver of revenue in the face of the fact that recordings are, now, little more than promotional material. It is, in other words, patronage. “Essentially, paying for music has become voluntary,” said venture capitalist Ron Nordin. “Essentially, now everyone becomes a patron.”

From left: Amanda Palmer, Ben Folds, Neil Gaiman, Damian Kulash at the Berklee Performance Center. Photo by Phil Farnsworth.

The financial justification—a balancing of customer-acquisition costs (free downloads, giveaways) with potentially long-lasting revenue streams (devoted customers)—is, as Nordin’s fellow VC Peter Gotcher astutely pointed out, one long-familiar to Internet companies but long-ignored by the music industry. And object lessons from artist-panelists pointed to the success and potential of such increased engagement. Metric leveraged incessant touring and a careful tending of their fan base into self-released albums and success far outstripping any they experienced with major labels (for which both the band and their manager displayed bemused contempt). Bleu, a notable beneficiary of Kickstarter success, characterized the possibilities to be unlocked with direct-to-fan connections via the conference’s best tautology: “People enjoy spending money on things they enjoy spending money on.”

Even the conference’s novelty act could be seen as a friendly, direct-to-fan-driven rebuke to the old models. Ben Folds, Amanda Palmer, author Neil Gaiman, and OK Go’s Damian Kulash got together on Monday night for “8 in 8,” a let’s-put-on-a-show recording project: write, record, and release eight songs in eight hours, a combination jam session and proof-of-concept stunt. In the end, they only finished six songs (and it took twelve hours), but they attracted a few thousand viewers to live, streaming video of the entire recording session (“We got a bad review even before the record was made,” Folds joked), and, sure enough, the album was ready for download Tuesday morning. The assiduous cultivation of online social connections provided a ready-made audience; the speed and casualness of the experiment seemed almost designed to show what the old record companies were scrambling to keep up with, the companies where, as Folds remembered it, “you were always told what wouldn’t work.”

Still, there was the overwhelming sense that deep, diligent, personal attention to building and maintaining a fan base on one’s own was not just an option, but, going forward, a necessity. As Tom Silverman, founder of Tommy Boy Records, noted, “Labels don’t want to start from scratch with an artist”—the fan base has to already be there before a relationship with a label is even possible. Bruce Houghton, the founder of Hypebot.com, proclaimed that creating, growing, and monitoring a fan community through social media and direct-to-fan entrepreneurship was “a required skill set for the modern artist.” Shy musicians need not apply.

A Wednesday panel on “DIY and Ancillary Revenue Streams” ended up being a combination of make-music-because-you-love-it poeticizations of the artist-fan relationship and visions of corporate brands savvy enough to want access to those enthusiastic fan email lists. A cynic’s takeaway could very well have been: spend a few years doing all your own legwork and marketing, and you too might be lucky enough to sell out. But what was the alternative? The labels were all touting their capacity for artist development, the skill to walk a nascent artist through the industry minefield—most cogent was Lyor Cohen, CEO of Recorded Music for the Warner Music Group, saying that “the only justification for a music company is A&R….We are reactivating the lost art of artist development.”

But wasn’t the minefield largely a creation of the labels themselves? And when Cohen justified 360 deals—the new contract standard in which labels take a cut of touring and merchandising revenue in addition to recordings—as, essentially, a replacement for lost recording revenue, necessary to maintain executive salaries, then admitted that, even in such partnerships, the label still maintained sole ownership of master recordings, one could only marvel that even a digitally-diluted siren song of fame remained a strong enough to keep such models going.

A Cloud withdrew from the Sky
Superior Glory be
But that Cloud and its Auxiliaries
Are forever lost to me

—Emily Dickinson

(From left) Rethink Music business model competition finalists Maxwell Wessel founder of Nuevostage, Executive Director, Rethink Music Initiative Allen Bargfrede, Fanatic.FM creator Ian Kwon, BigLife Music co-founder Eliot Hunt. Photo by Phil Farnsworth

Direct-to-fan was the leading topic among artists, venture capitalists, and entrepreneurs (nearly all the entrepreneur presentations and business-model-contest entrants were spinning variations on direct-to-fan, from RootMusic’s BandPage, a Facebook page customization application, to nuevoStage, the winning business model, a kind of Groupon for live shows). Among the media-company types, though, the buzzword was the “cloud”—music delivery services which would have consumers access, through the Web, music files on remote servers, rather than download those files to their own machine. Talk of cloud-based music services abounded: whether subscription-based, streaming services or “locker” services would predominate, whether there was any room for start-ups given the entry of Amazon, Google, and Apple into the cloud marketplace, whether the cloud would finally catch on with consumers or not. At the very least, it seemed a safe bet that the cloud would dominate music-industry jargon for the next year or so, if not longer.

Along with the cloud came the conference’s other mantra, the expressed need for a global copyright registry, a centralized, one-stop listing of copyrighted materials and their owners to alleviate the difficulties in tracking down unknown rightsholders and clearing licenses. Rights issues are “gravel in the ears” of music entrepreneurs, according to Peter Gotcher; a “tremendous impediment to everyone in the system,” according to Pandora CEO Joe Kennedy. After a while, it seemed that every panel, by some path or another, came back around to the idea of the registry, the great leap forward that would allow the industry to emerge into the sunlight of the 21st-century economy. The devoutly-to-be-wished registry was nearly universally supported, with the question mainly being who would create and administer the thing—existing rights collection agencies, some non-profit academia-industry consortium, some private, for-profit entity. (Nobody held out any hope that the U.S. Congress could ever be spurred to such action.)

Joe Kennedy, President and CEO, Pandora. Photo by Phil Farnsworth

But it was the one dissent, at the very end of the conference, on the final panel, that crystallized a hazy sense of skepticism. Larisa Mann, a DJ and academic at UC Berkeley, provocatively framed the registry talk in terms of Johnson v. M’Intosh, the Supreme Court decision that established the foundation of American property law—and, in the process, facilitated the expropriation of Native American land. The points being: Who compiles the list? Who gets on the list? Who gets left off? I thought about, say, how poorly classical-music metadata—artists, track names, credits—meshes with a platform like iTunes, and then I thought what would happen if that was the model for a database governing rights, licensing, and royalty payments. Imagine an industry whose large-entity representatives view DIY or deliberately independent musicians with either puzzlement or a kind of hostile pity—both of which could be sampled again and again on industry-player panels—and then imagine that industry exerting its influence over the future structure of ownership and revenue.

It was mostly left to the academics to raise such objections, to note, explicitly or implicitly, that, at their core, the conference’s concerns were matters of power and control even more than creativity and opportunity. On a Wednesday panel concerning “Alternative Compensation Schemes”—a perhaps-pejorative term for fresh approaches to managing and distributing royalties—Harvard professor Lawrence Lessig, speaking of policy fights, might well have described the conference as a whole: “It’s not a battle of ideas,” he said, “it’s a battle between those who make money under the old system and those who might make money under the new system.”

The political and financial sway of the old system lingered in the background of a trio of papers presented on Tuesday: Peter Alhadeff and Caz McChrystal discussed the quirks of U.S. copyright law that have resulted in a steady erosion of the mechanical royalty rate vis-à-vis inflation; Kaya Köklü cast a wry, skeptical eye on the French three-strikes approach to online copyright infringement, an enforcement scheme of questionable effectiveness, and one, Köklü hinted, resulting from the superiority of corporate lobbying. Most intriguingly, Giuseppe Mazziotti’s study of the EU’s push towards a harmonized regime of rights collecting societies did not leave unmentioned such a move’s privileging of larger corporate interests and threat to cultural diversity. A marginal issue in this conference’s context, for sure, but also a reminder that, for all the talk of democracy and access, the very industry being reinvented or reestablished was always a little, well, colonial.

A few minutes later what remained of Bendicò was flung into a corner of the courtyard visited every day by the dustman. During the flight down from the window his form recomposed itself for an instant; in the air one could have seen a dancing quadruped with long whiskers….

—Giuseppe Tomasi de Lampedusa, The Leopard
(1957, trans. Archibald Colquhoun)

Not that the industry paid much attention. At most, twenty people attended that Tuesday session; everybody else was down the hall, taking in the prospects of cloud-based consumption. And even that was at least partially an excuse. Kulash had jokingly asked, “Why does everyone pay a lot of money to come talk about how they can make money in music?” But, of course, they were also there to network, to make connections with industry executives and with each other, to meet and be met. (I was blessed with multiple iterations of the experience of having an attendee nonchalantly veer close enough to me to read my nametag, then just as nonchalantly veer away once they realized I wasn’t worth talking to.)

It was the engine of the old system, still humming—whether in counterpoint to the new reality or in defiance of it, whether out of determination or inertia, I couldn’t quite tell. The industry didn’t seem to be in denial about the spot they were in, but was the complementary confidence justified? When Thomas Hesse, the president of Global Digital Business for Sony Music, blandly touted the VEVO video streaming model as an opportunity to “reclaim the platform,” the tone of the old order trying to reassert itself was faint but noticeable. The corporate attitude might best have been summarized as a version of Lampedusa’s famous formulation: everything has to change in order for everything to stay the same.

Incidentally, remember that discussion of the brave new world of business casual I overheard at the conference’s outset? It was only a few minutes later that I learned, via the Internet, that Poly Styrene, the founder and lead singer of X-Ray Spex, one of the most indelible bursts of punk, rock and roll’s last great fury of innovation, had died.

Matthew Guerrieri

Matthew Guerrieri rethinks either too much or not enough.

“Live Music Capital of the World” Austin, Texas, more than lived up to its name this past Saturday with the first annual Fast Forward Austin Festival. Featuring locally sourced talent, community involvement, and a grassroots fundraising campaign (one that raised a surplus which will be applied towards to next year’s event), the festival had all the earmarks of an event uniquely Austin. Once inside, patrons were asked to make a suggested donation of $10-$20 (sliding scale, no obligation, no one turned away) to Anthropos Arts, an organization “working primarily in the East Austin community to bring top professional musicians into Title I, low-income middle and high schools to offer free music lessons, workshops, master classes, and performance opportunities to economically disadvantaged youth.” There were FFA T-shirts, beer koozies, and temporary tattoos. There were baked goods, coffee, and beer. Outside, a Filipino-American food truck called Be More Pacific featured (among other delicacies) longanisa and adobo chicken sliders.

Sounds like Austin to me.

The eight-hour festival was held at Space 12 in East Austin and began with Tim Doyle‘s still under construction piece A Gathering of Strings. Conceived for larger forces and dancers, this arrangement featured three guitars, viola, violin, and the mother of all string instruments, the French horn. With Doyle on the stage and the other players spread out among the audience, the piece began as a single tone and slowly gathered speed and density. This gave way to a second movement that in places echoed Robert Fripp and his Orchestra of Crafty Guitarists, and in others felt a bit like Bolero without all that pesky rhythm. Doyle commented on the pieces, lending a loose, laid-back feel to the performance which was a great way to kick off the festival. Contrary to the typical formal opening of a concert, this one seemed to just start out of nowhere while audience members were still coming in the front door, grabbing a drink in the back, and gathering at the seats and tables located in pockets around the stage.

Also worth noting were the programs, which featured the performers but not the pieces. A small point, perhaps, but interesting in that it obligated the performers to communicate with the audience to let them know what they would be listening to. It’s also worth noting that virtually every group not only gave a rundown of what they would play (typically before each piece) but actually spoke in detail about the pieces, composers, and relationship between the two.

Line Upon Line Percussion Photo by Elisa Ferrari

Next up was Line Upon Line Percussion who played a fantastic set, starting with part one of Reich’s Drumming and including pieces by festival co-founders Steven Snowden and Ian Dicke, before heading to the Round Top Percussion Festival for another performance that evening. Consisting of current and former students from The Butler School of Music at The University of Texas at Austin, LUL were the first of the three featured groups (and one jaw-dropping soloist) affiliated with the university who performed at the festival. LUL not only performed with incredible precision but also with a real sense of drama and the stage presence required by the newer pieces. Dicke’s Missa Materialis, a commentary on consumerism and waste featured trashcans and plastic bags from the supermarket. Snowden’s A Man With a Gun Lives Here featured, among other things, buckshot and a bass drum. Though performed in Texas, no one was harmed in the performance of this piece. Both pieces contained some of the most engaging moments in the festival, not only because of their musical content but because of the impact on the audience. Sitting in front of me were two mothers with their toddler daughters. Both little girls were fascinated by the variety of instruments and sounds that came from the stage and consistently asked their moms (pretty quietly for toddlers) what it was that they were hearing. The focus of this festival was not only to promote new music and rethink its presentation, but also to develop and cultivate future audiences. In a typical chamber music concert, those little girls might have been escorted out by apologetic hushing mothers before the buckshot hit the bass drum. Instead they experienced new music in the most real, organic way possible: by hearing it performed and asking about it while it was happening. Walking the line between presenting music such that it can be heard clearly and comfortably and presenting it in an environment where people are not compelled to sit in antiseptic silence, hands clasped, is a tricky one but certainly worth the effort.

Trombonist Steve Parker‘s set started in a corner of the hall and began informally, such that the audience didn’t realize the piece had started until he’d played a few notes. He then talked briefly about his second piece, Berio’s Sequenza V. The wide range of effects in the piece, bolstered by Parker’s insight and incredible playing, seemed to have a real impact on the audience. A piece that under other circumstances might have seemed pure abstraction to an audience unaccustomed to new music instead made a real connection. Steve Snowden’s Ground Round and UT composition faculty Bruce Pennycook‘s Broken Bones followed the Berio and featured a mic’d Parker playing along with pre-recorded material. Again, the variety of sound and the strong playing by Parker made for strong performances.

Bel Cuore Quartet Photo by Elisa Ferrari

The Bel Cuore Quartet performed music of Higdon, Ligeti, Victor Marquez-Barrios, and festival co-founder Robert Honstein. Though formed at UT only two years ago, this group of doctoral students performed as though they had been together much longer. In particular, the Marquez-Barrios piece Saxteto displayed not only the group’s virtuosic technique and ensemble cohesion, but their ability to engage with the audience. Each member took time to discuss the pieces as well as to describe and to give examples of the extended techniques that were employed.

Austin new music group Mongoose creates original music based on John Zorn’s Cobra rules. They were the first group to fully refocus the staging by performing at the “back” of the room. The instrumentation included (among others—I knew I should have written this down) guitar, bass, French horn, vocals, dancer, drum kit, laptop, and a variety of other bells and whistles. The performance was fun, provocative, and whimsical and provided a nice counterpart to the rehearsed performances of some of the preceding acts. Not better or worse, just different. And frankly, if you’re doing eight hours of new music (or likely any music) variety is essential.

Aeolus String Quartet Photo by Elisa Ferrari

Recent grand prize winners of the 2011 Plowman Chamber Music Competition, the Aeolus String Quartet was the last of the UT Austin-affiliated groups to perform at the festival. Of the four pieces the quartet played, two were premiers written for Aeolus (Snowden’s Appalachian Polaroid and Lady Isabelle Was That Kind of Woman by Alexandra Bryant) and one was the FFA Call for Scores winner, Black Bend by Dan Visconti. All three composers artfully combined American vernacular (including blues riffs and Appalachian folk melodies) with contemporary techniques to create thoughtful new works. These pieces were performed in the above order with a small break between the Bryant and Visconti for Bartok’s Fourth String Quartet.

You know, to clear the palate.

This is not Aeolus’s first rodeo, and they really played the hell out of the Bartok. This performance was the closest in feel to a traditional chamber music concert not only because it was the oldest music played on the festival, but also because there is a certain gravity to watching one of the paragons of traditional ensembles, THE STRING QUARTET, perform that puts in the mind of the audience a quasi church-like reverence which festivals like this hope to deflate. Also, this was quite late in the festival and while it’s only April, it is Austin, and it was getting pretty warm in there. However, concerns about etiquette were put at ease at the end of the fourth movement when, after spontaneous applause, Aeolus graciously smiled and thanked the audience before performing the final movement.

Next, Ellen Bartel and Mari Akita performed butoh with Adam Sultan on guitar. Butoh is not a piece, but a technique developed in Japan in the mid 20th century involving very slow articulated movement, surreal and often grotesque gestures, and painted performers, though all these parameters may vary. While beautiful and thought provoking, this work seemed initially like an odd duck at the festival given that Bartel and Akita are dancers and that the dance was arguably the focus of the performance. However, the guitar work by Sultan along with other prerecorded sounds clearly provided significant form, structure, interactivity, and counterpoint to the choreography in the single long-form performance.

Representing the somewhat established “establishment” of Austin new music, Austin New Music Co-op took the stage to perform Kinship Collapse by Arnold Dreyblatt, a piece originally commissioned and performed at the 2006 SXSW Music Conference. The piece featuring electric bass, guitar, two upright basses (one of which was strung with piano wire), cello, drums, and violin. It lasted the entire set, starting quietly with an imperceptible violin tremolo and building slowly from there. The sections ranged from long tones marked with percussive hits to tutti rock jams that had heads moving. Though it was the longest piece of the festival and the penultimate performance, the audience appeared thoroughly engaged throughout.

Festival pros and Anthropos students performing In C Photo by Elisa Ferrari

The final performance of the festival brought students from Anthropos Arts together with festival performers from various ensembles to perform In C. Though starting a full seven hours after the festival kickoff, the performance (and the audience) was full of life. Arranged around the room, small groups of young students paired up with seasoned pros to perform Riley’s pulsing notes and rhythms, while a few performers (including Honstien doing his best Pied Piper with a single bell) roamed the room. It was a great experience watching the audience consistently change their focus as the music evolved, looking around the room as parts started and ended. In many ways this was truly the most compelling and engaging performance of the festival, not necessarily for its precision or because it will be remembered as a seminal performance of the piece, but because it seemed to embody the spirit and purpose of the event.

“New Music” is not going to bring itself to a new generation. It needs festivals and performers like these to connect those for whom new music is a regular occurrence to those for whom new music is only eight hours, one weekend, in east Austin.

Andrew Sigler

Andrew Sigler is a composer and guitarist. His concert music includes music for chamber ensembles, orchestra, dance, theater, and film and has been performed by members of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, Toronto Symphony Orchestra, Seattle Symphony orchestra, and the New World Symphony. Recent performances include the premiers of Four Movements for Flute, Viola, and Piano at the National Association of Composers New Music Festival in Portland and Sparrows Jump Nine Sandpipers by Simple Measures in Seattle. His work in the commercial field includes studio work as a guitarist and vocalist as well as composition and sound design for video games, advertising, and animation for a number of clients including Microsoft. Andy lives and works in Austin and is pursuing his doctorate in composition at The University of Texas.

“Keep Portland Weird,” one of Portland’s unofficial mottos, is seen often on bumper stickers affixed to cars, skateboards, and bicycles and says a great deal about the city’s culture. With its population of about 600,000 (making it the 30th most populous in the United States), this little big town is known for its relaxed way of life, its green landscape, the coffee and micro-brewed beer that seem to be required if one is to successfully negotiate the rainy winters, and above all, its citizen’s affection for the unique brand of “weirdness” that permeates the place they call home.

Portland boasts a wide variety of festivals, new music ensembles, and presenters, as well as a host of artists young and old who are finding new audiences for their music through creative programming and new approaches to communicating with the public. There is no primary, preeminent new music venue, so a multitude of spaces and artists have come together to create a fabric of performance opportunities that present new music along with many other styles. This lack of a centralized source of presentation or funding has given rise to a scene that is as varied as it is fitting to a city well-known for a unique culture of individualists who pave their own way.

Portland hosts two internationally relevant festivals devoted to new music and performing art. The Portland Institute of Contemporary Art’s Time Based Art Festival, or TBA, is a gem of Portland’s creative arts scene, where contemporary performing and visual arts rub shoulders in a multi-venue festival. The events take place mostly over a ten-day period in September, with some additional programming throughout the year. TBA 2007 featured a performance of Rinde Eckert’s On the Great Migration of Excellent Birds in downtown Portland’s Pioneer Courthouse Square by the Portland Flash Choir, a non-traditional singing group dedicated to bringing unexpected art to everyday places. The Flash Choir has recently premiered a work by Portland composer Ethan Rose, Between Rooms and Voices, at the Portland City Hall.

The Portland Jazz Festival is another world-class festival that has brought to town many high-profile jazz artists who are committed to creating innovative music that expands and honors the jazz tradition. The Portland Jazz Festival came into being after the demise of the Mt. Hood Jazz Festival, which, when it ran into financial trouble, leaned more and more heavily on smooth jazz and pop acts. The Portland festival shed the large stadium approach of the Mt. Hood Festival and distinguished itself by featuring national and regional acts and offering innovative programming in multiple venues throughout the city. Many shows go on throughout each of the festival’s ten days. With its focus on some of the most creative artists in the field, the Portland Jazz Festival has quickly become one of the most respected in the world today.

A highlight of the festival is its connection to jazz outside of the United States. A particularly unique and memorable show was the Trygve Seim Ensemble’s performance for a sold-out crowd eager to hear this Norwegian composer’s finely constructed and highly personal compositions that have been seldom performed in the United States. This year’s festival draws connections between and Jewish- and African-American jazz musicians, featuring many musicians who find bridges between these two cultures: clarinetist Anat Cohen, trumpeter Avishai Cohen, violinist Regina Carter’s “Reverse Thread”, Don Byron playing the klezmer music of Mickey Katz, Maceo Parker, Joshua Redman, and the klezmer/hip-hop ensemble Afro-Semitic Experience.

The Portland Jazz Festival also sponsors the work of the Portland Jazz Orchestra as its “ensemble in residence”. Co-led by Lars Campbell and Charley Gray, this big band focuses on presenting repertory concerts of classic big band music, all of it composed in the 20th century by composers like Duke Ellington, Thad Jones, and Gil Evans. Though the group isn’t committed specifically to commissioning new works, it is an important member of Portland’s resident jazz scene whose members are all talented performers and composers themselves. A concert in February 2010 featured the music of Latin jazz master Tito Puente.

While these international festivals do bring a global reputation to Portland for great music, it is the resident musicians, working year-round to bring new music to their audiences, that make Portland the musical city that it is. Some new music groups have been working in Portland for decades to produce cutting-edge concerts every season and to improve Portland’s musical infrastructure. The Third Angle Ensemble, an active presenter of new chamber music for over 25 years, features Portland musicians playing the work of New York composers David Lang and Steve Reich in upcoming concerts. Fear No Music, with an impressive history of performances and commissions of Pacific Northwest composers and regional touring since 1992, brings Gabriel Prokofiev—DJ, producer, and composer, as well as grandson to Sergei—to the Aladdin Theatre in March. The Oregon Symphony, Oregon’s leading orchestra, has premiered works commissioned from Oregon composers Tomas Svoboda and Robert Kyr, with Svoboda’s Concerto for Marimba and Orchestra earning a Grammy nomination in 2000.

With the chart-topping success of bands such as The Decemberists, much attention has been given to Portland’s indie rock scene. Even before the Decemberists, Portland had long been a hotbed of such creativity, and the city’s musicians creating new music in concert, jazz, and improvised music have made some natural connections. One notable example is Douglas Jenkins’s Portland Cello Project, which finds sixteen cellists playing arrangements of pop music along side the music of contemporary concert music composers. The group has an impressively diverse repertoire that ranges from Kanye West covers to Bach to Arvo Part and film music by Tan Dun. Through March 2011, the “indie cello orchestra” performs with introspective indie-folk singer Laura Gibson. Hear some of these arrangements at NPR music’s Song of the Day feature.

There is an impressive scene made up of young jazz players in Portland eagerly forging a new future for jazz in the city. A notable partnership is the new jazz series Notes From the Underground, curated by pianist and composer Ben Darwish and hosted by McMenamins, the ubiquitous brewpub of Oregon and Washington. This series, on the first Tuesday of the month, presents new, original jazz music paired with concert footage from classic jazz artists at the intermission. Another club, the Blue Monk, has reinstated its jazz programming with Sunday night jazz curated by saxophonist Mary Sue Tobin. The Portland Jazz Composer’s Ensemble, after a brief hiatus, is once again an up-and-coming group that is expanding its funding to commission Oregon composers to create new music for large jazz ensemble. Led by pianist and composer Andrew Oliver, it is a group to look out for on the energetic and growing Portland jazz scene. The internationally recognized Jimmy Mak’s jazz club is another place to hear progressive jazz music. In this beautifully renovated space in Portland’s upscale Pearl District one can hear live jazz music six nights a week with younger and older generations of musicians appearing on the same stage—often in the same groups.

With an underground music of this kind, most of its performances won’t be covered by the usual channels of the media, though the online music journal Oregon Music News is doing a great job keeping its finger on the pulse of Oregon’s music scene in the experimental area and in many others. So, keep your ears to the ground (perhaps you’ll hear the rumblings of a PA system pushed to its limit) for news on performances in basements and in small venues in out-of-the-way neighborhoods. A good resource for learning more about Portland’s experimental music culture is the independent film “People Who Do Noise” by Adam Cornelius with concert footage and extensive interviews available at the independent film outlet, filmbaby. The new landscape of the music world has created challenges and opportunities for independent organizations to produce new music. The economics of making and selling recordings in the last few years has made it more challenging for emerging artists to document their music and establish their reputations. In an answer to this, Portlander Dusty York started a record label called Diatic Records and produced nine albums by Portland musicians. Diatic also produced collectively promoted performances and a weekly series featuring Diatic musicians that brought the them together into a new and exciting scene. The label folded after only a short time in operation, but was a noble and high-minded effort that grew directly out of the energy and creativity of Portland’s jazz scene.

It is unfortunately common to see the end of enterprises like Diatic, operations that often run on a shoestring budget shored up with nothing more than a love for music and an intense commitment from the people involved. Good times come and go, experiments pop up and die out. It is unavoidable in any town, and Portland, with its slightly smaller market, makes organizations here especially susceptible. But some efforts stand the test of time. Many of Portland’s institutions are going strong and are growing by finding new ways to connect with their audience and involving them in new musical undertakings. Rapid and sometimes unpredictable change is the rule right now in music, and Portland’s scene shows a great many responses to this situation from its ensembles, artist collectives, and innovative new music presenters. With all the energy for artistic projects in Portland, new ventures are sure to rise again from such fertile ground.

Portland’s scene is diverse and high quality, as is already known to all its residents. Anyone traveling there will find a unique musical offering on almost any given day. Portland’s particular brand of livability, with a small town feeling that still offers big city cultural events, has attracted many musicians to move in and add to the already vivid cultural fabric. Well known for the rainy weather, relaxed, independent culture and its own style of weirdness, Portland’s music scene deserves to join the list as one of the city’s brightest features.

[Ed. Note: We would like to update with an additional link to North Pacific Music, an independent record label carrying new classical, jazz and avant-garde music.—AG]

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Douglas Detrick

Douglas Detrick is a trumpeter, composer and music writer based in New York City. Having worked as a composer and performer in jazz, chamber, improvised and electro-acoustic music, he is interested in the intersection of these forms and their resonance with our culture. Detrick has written for NewMusicBox, About.com and for his own blog at douglasdetrick.com.

Milton Babbitt in 2000 Photo © by Jeffrey Herman

Milton Babbitt died Saturday morning, three and a half months shy of his 95th birthday. The news was devastating. He was a great teacher, a great mentor, and a friend. It is a terrible loss.

I expect that a lot of tributes to Milton will be appearing in the coming weeks. They will bring up his iconic stature in the field, his groundbreaking work in electronic music, his contributions to the field of music theory, his embracing of the complex in music, his devotion to his students, his extravagant wit and wordplay, his love of baseball and beer, and the warmth of his personality. None of them will contain the sentence “Milton was at a loss for words.”

He didn’t drive, and he didn’t type. A vast swath of America’s most distinguished composers studied with him. That they are all different is a testimony to his teaching.

My first encounter with Milton’s music was when I was in high school and had just been bitten by the composition bug. The only recent serious music I knew was band music I’d played at festivals, and I wanted to know what else was out there. My band director, Verne Colburn, had collected the 22-volume Time-Life series of classical music, probably from the late 60s, and he lent me the last volume, Music of Today. Besides Bernstein and Hindemith and Prokofiev, there was one LP side that was absolutely pristine: this one had the tracks Le Soleil des Eaux by Boulez and Ensembles for Synthesizer by Babbitt. This was, for a kid of 16 who’d spent his whole life surrounded by Future Farmers of America, eye-opening, ear-popping music. I listened to both pieces a lot, and though I couldn’t explain why, they both made a lot of musical sense to me. I particularly liked the moment near the beginning of the Ensembles that sounded like somebody turned on the vacuum cleaner. It was funny, witty, and musical in ways I was at a loss to describe.

I went to New England Conservatory as a composition major and almost immediately noticed that all the composition faculty—Ceely, Martino, Heiss, Cogan, Peyton—had studied with Milton Babbitt. So I was his grandstudent! One day in my freshman year, an oboe major rushed into my dorm room with a score and a record—actually, he rushed into my room with a score and a record a lot—of Babbitt’s String Quartet No. 2. “You have to hear this! This is so great!” He was right. It was an extremely clear and very traditional kind of rhetoric, I thought—fragments that gradually get assembled into the underlying melody (or set, as it turns out). And the moment when the quartet begins playing all in unison and busting out into chords, pure magic and beautiful. It was a piece with a big moment, and a big moment done right and for the right reasons. I definitely wanted to study with this guy.

I was tickled to get to meet Milton when Continuum and Bethany Beardslee came to NEC to do his Solo Requiem. He gave his usual scintillating lecture in the listening library’s “fishtank”, full of wordplay and paragraphs nested inside paragraphs nested inside paragraphs that unfold like a time-lapse movie of a flower blossoming. He brilliantly parried with one student who said he had proof that music was meant to be triadic. And of course, the piece was quite marvelous. I definitely wanted to study with this guy.

So I did. My four years at Princeton were Milton’s last on the faculty, so I was privy to the end of an era. I took lessons whenever I could, and I took the graduate seminars he taught. The seminars were just like the fishtank lecture—nested paragraphs, wordplay, and some pretty serious down-and-dirty analysis. In particular his two-lecture (five hours total) disquisition on a Bach chorale (an abridged version of which appears in Words About Music) was exciting. Discovering the depth and the many nested relationships happening on multiple time scales in a simple little piece inspired me to try and do likewise in my own music. By example, Milton taught us to strive to make our music all that it can be.

When Milton talked about electronic music, and the then emerging field of computer music, he always made a point of denying that composers embraced it for the new sounds that were available. “Nothing grows old faster than a new sound” was a mantra. He also regularly spoke with disdain about composers and listeners who wanted “nothing more than titillation” from music.

Lessons with Milton were bracing. There was plenty of talk about new beers we’d just tried, and baseball, and even more talk about the music I was writing. (The week I ditched my glasses for contact lenses, I recall a 20-minute disquisition on male vanity.) I had brought in an immensely complicated septet and its encumbering charts of pitch fields, home sonorities, and large-scale voice-leading. The piece was so fraught with notes that Milton asked me to give him copies of new pages two days before our scheduled lessons so he’d have time to go over the music. I don’t know how he did it, but he always began by pointing to the moments that I’d been the most unsure about—though he never asked me to change them. He would merely point out that the relationships he was hearing weren’t the ones I told him I’d been trying to make.

I suppose Milton wrote just about enough recommendation letters for me to repaper the walls in my house. Indeed, a secretary at Princeton said that he spent the whole morning of most days writing various letters for people, by hand, which he would deliver to the secretaries at lunch time. You can be pretty sure none of them were short letters, either. We corresponded occasionally, and his letters were just like him talking. They always ended “As ever, Milton.” Several times I asked him for scores, which he sent, and the accompanying letter was always the same: “The enclosed are what they appear to be. As ever, Milton”

I don’t remember going to a new music concert in New York between 1980 and 2000 where I did not see Milton. He came to every New York performance I had in that time, and he usually made a point of sitting next to me so we could talk.

Shortly after graduate school, I briefly crossed over from Babbitt listener to Babbitt performer—indeed, I have a Babbitt “West Coast premiere” to my credit. Milton had written a piano four hands piece for Don Martino’s 50th birthday for a Dinosaur Annex tribute concert. It was a four and a half minute ditty called Don, and it was very unusual. Almost all of the piece was marked at the dynamic ppp (a pun on Martino’s giant piano opus Pianississimo), with a single line in long notes in the middle register marked fff. I thought the piece was beautiful, and beautifully understated, and when the Griffin Music Ensemble was established, Martin Butler and I performed it on its first concert. I don’t suppose that was a great performance, but I do remember doing it again at Stanford and Davis with Lyn Reyna. We rehearsed it for eleven hours, and as I got progressively more familiar with my part, I started hearing jazz and wit and silliness all over it. I got really invigorated doing the complicated counting and getting it right. I got it! Our performance crackled. If listening to Milton’s music is like watching a lightning ball, then performing it is like being the lightning inside the ball.

The last time I saw Milton was in 1999 for lunch at his favorite hangout in Princeton, the Annex restaurant. He wanted to know everything I was doing, he had a list of new beers to try, and he offered a long disquisition about how hard it is to find a properly made rare hamburger (the Annex did it right). And he asked me about a piece that had recently appeared in The New York Times about composers under 50 to watch. He hadn’t read it. He chuckled and said his Juilliard colleagues were distressed that no Juillard graduates were on the list. He then smiled broadly and said, “How can anyone care about anything written in The New York Times?”

My last contact with Milton was in 2001, when I sent him my big wind ensemble piece Ten of a Kind, which I’d dedicated to him as an 85th birthday tribute. The inside of the score notes the dedication “to lapsed clarinetist Milton Babbitt”. I immediately got a handwritten note from him. “Dear David, This is a wonderful gift. I decided immediately to take out my clarinet and try out your licks, until I realized I haven’t owned one for sixty years. Thank you for this wonderful gift. As ever, Milton”

I also dedicated pieces to Milton for his 65th and 75th birthdays. It had occurred to me that the piece I’m working on now may be for his 95th. Now, sadly, it will be in memoriam.

Milton,

As ever.

Saturday, October 23
Rehearsals begin at the Eastman School of Music

We meet early in the morning for our first rehearsals. I drove in from Pittsburgh the day before and caught a full night’s sleep, but other members of the group aren’t so lucky. Cellist Mariel Roberts played a concert in New York City the night before and took an overnight train from Grand Central. Clarinetist Isabel Kim drove in from New Jersey—she set out on the six-hour drive at 3:00 a.m. the same morning.

Returning to Eastman is, for me, always energizing. For a few moments at certain times of day, the school’s main hall is swarmed with people, fast-walkers in belted coats with instrument cases slung over their shoulders. For ten minutes or so in the mid-afternoon, it seems that everyone is scrambling to their next class, rehearsal, or meeting at once—coffee in one hand, scores tucked under an arm, a pencil behind the ear. Then, just as suddenly, the halls clear out. Now, the feeling in the building’s common spaces is that these same quick-moving people are holed up in offices and practice rooms laboring patiently, intently. More than that, the sense is that good work is getting done, that exciting projects are being advanced.

The BroadBand is one such labor of love, a project that on the one hand requires an enormous commitment of time and energy—but on the other promises an experience that is worth twice the work. What’s better than performing with these old friends, participating in the premieres of exciting new works, traveling internationally?

It is so nice to see everyone in the group again. Most of us have graduated since we started working with the BroadBand, so this tour has the feel of a reunion. We spend the first ten minutes of rehearsal catching up, exchanging hugs, sipping coffee. Everyone looks different, but not much.

Sunday, October 24
Further rehearsals

We begin to work in earnest on some of the most difficult works on the program—progress is slow and steady. Working with conductor Juan Trigos is a pleasure and a challenge, because the man is very particular. Most conductors are, of course, but Juan requires that the details in the score are not just casually observed, but that they are each made special. In short, he is one of those conductors who might stop every three measures during rehearsal. “But I must insist,” he apologizes.

And it’s true, playing the marked dynamic is one thing—mimicking the character that it implies is another entirely. As a composer himself, Juan has special insight into the quality of sound and the variety of character suggested by the limited contours of a score. It may be that most experienced musicians are familiar with this effort—the job of seeking out the whole proposed by the ensemble of particulars in a score—but I began to learn its importance in my first rehearsals with Juan. He is constantly demanding greater sensitivity, more variety, clearer intention. He intuits exactly the sound, the attitude, precisely the quality of this minute gesture, that broad phrase, or the whole of the composer’s work. I have learned a great deal from my work with him.

Monday, October 25 and Tuesday October, 26
Two days’ break

We get a few precious days off. Even without rehearsals, it is hard to find the time to practice everything on the program. Still, what practice I can fit in supersedes the dozens of projects I’ve dropped momentarily in favor of the tour. The textbooks I brought with me remain untouched in the bottom of my suitcase, along with a handful of scores I thought I’d comb through during my “down time” on the trip.

I do prepare the first post in this series, and writing about these projects proves to be an interesting challenge. I also receive our first video from Reed Nisson, a filmmaker and student at the Rochester Institute of Technology. Reed will join the group on our trip—ultimately, he will produce a short film about the tour. His work is a pleasant surprise—he has a way of transforming the most mundane events into special, bright, kinetic happenings in film. Spaces I had thought were ugly—the rehearsal rooms at Eastman, for example, their cold light—are almost unrecognizable in Reed’s footage, in which they all take on an inviting glow.

Wednesday, October 27
Midpoint of the rehearsal period

Before our two-day break, we read through our repertoire quickly—now, we need to deal with the details. Some of us meet in sectionals outside of rehearsal to take a closer look at our parts. Five Memos, Carlos Sanchez-Gutierrez’s newest piece for Pierrot ensemble plus percussion, makes a number of demands on every player—virtually instantaneous changes in register, dynamic, or character, erratic accents, shrill outbursts. On top of that, it’s unbelievably fast, and full of irregular grooves that are tricky to piece together. The challenge is not only to play all of the right notes in time, not only to play all of the marked dynamics, not only to obey the indicated articulation markings, but also to phrase each monstrous lick the same way that your neighbor does. In my case, I couldn’t have asked for better neighbors. Other members of the group are fantastic players and careful listeners. In our sectional on the piece, they attend to the tiniest details, devise creative solutions to musical problems, move and breathe like experienced chamber musicians—so preparing the piece is a satisfying challenge.

Thursday, October 28
Soloists arrive

We work for the first time with soprano Tony Arnold, marimbist Michael Burritt, pianist Cristina Valdes, harpsichordist Josephine Gaeffke, and guitarist Dieter Hennings. Hennings is featured on Juan’s Ricercare VI for guitar and chamber orchestra. Based on the harmonies of the Cuban son, the piece has an aggressive, driving feel. Solos in the oboe, flute, and clarinet require players to engage in intent chamber music with the soloist; later, in an orchestral tutti, the ensemble is driven by pealing bells in the percussion section. I especially relish playing Juan’s characteristic piccolo parts—they are brutal, shrill, and demanding. I love the ending of the Ricercare, which crashes to a halt after biting piccolo line doubled by the piano. Guitarist Dieter Hennings is an old friend and an amazing performer—he always brings an intense, swaggering attitude to the piece.

Juan’s newest work, Sinfonía No. 2, has an entirely different feel. Its sentimental middle section requires extreme pitch bends and wide, slow vibrato in solos in the clarinet, English horn, flute, and trombone. These are tricks that Juan has used to great effect in other pieces of his I have performed—his opera, DeCachetitoRaspado, closes with a similar lazy oscillation in the muted trombone. It’s truly beautiful.

Friday, October 29
Further touch-ups

With the send-off concert only a few days away, we have precious little rehearsal time left. Ricardo Zohn-Muldoon’s works require special care, as they demand impeccable rhythm and the illusion of ease. We are preparing three of his works, including the premiere of his newest, Pluck. Pound. Peel. for chamber orchestra with solo harpsichord, soprano, and guitar. We will also perform his miniature opera, NiñoPolilla, and two songs from his cantata, Comala.

Each of these pieces features soprano Tony Arnold extensively. An experienced singer of contemporary music, Tony is a performer whose sensitivity and presence I deeply admire. Her voice is beautiful, clear, and powerful—but just as often it is delicate and articulate. An amazing chamber musician, she adapts her voice to each new context without hesitation—she complements the vibraphone here, the bass clarinet there, next the muted trumpet. More than that, her diction is rich and full of expression—she delivers the meaning of the text at the level of each consonant. I learn so much about a score from her interpretation.

More than other works on the program, Ricardo’s up-tempo pieces require unflinching and precise rhythm—only without the heaviness that comes from trying too hard. Their intricate orchestration makes them fun to play and they are persistent in their catchiness. But his slower songs for soprano are universal favorites, unselfconscious, beautiful miniatures that open up onto vast silences. No matter the circumstances—the audience, my mood, my performance, the number of times I’ve heard or performed El Mar, Tarde, and Vacío—these more tender pieces always have the effect of obliterating my ego, quieting my mind. I’m aware that this sounds hyperbolic, but I wish there was some other way to describe the special, tense silence that precedes the applause at the close of El Mar. I think that part of the feeling is an acute disappointment that the piece is over—there, it just ended a half a second ago, and I’m already wishing I could experience it again. Perhaps that’s a better way of putting it—Ricardo’s pieces are excruciating in their brevity.

Saturday, October 30
Final rehearsals

At the end of a week of hard work, we feel we deserve a little break. After a ten-minute debate about whether anyone is up for a few drinks before heading home, we get to the bar only to realize that everyone else there is celebrating Halloween. Oh, yeah, Halloween—it had slipped my mind. On top of that, it’s karaoke night. We shout at each other over a guy in a wig singing Ozzy tunes.

Sunday, October 31
A send-off concert at Eastman

The concert in Eastman’s large ensemble rehearsal space attracts a standing-room-only crowd. The program features the world premieres of Trigos’s SinfoníaNo. 2, Baljinder Sekhon’s Fanfare, and Zohn-Muldoon’s Pluck. Pound. Peel. Five Memos by Carlos Sanchez-Gutierrez, Rounders by Michael Burritt, and Roundelay by Bob Morris complete the program.

The get-together after the concert doesn’t last long. At first there’s big talk of a real celebration—after a beer or two, violinist Hanna Hurwitz loses gracefully to Dieter Hennings at a game of darts. Then the conversation changes; I talk to more than one member of the group who still hasn’t finished packing. Nothing kills a party like realizing you need to do your laundry—right now, before you run out of hours in the night. It starts snowing big soggy flakes. I’m tired, but I still appreciate that there has never been a better time to catch a flight to Mexico.