Category: Field Reports

This is my first time in Norway and, thanks to a grant from the American-Scandinavian Foundation, I get to make Oslo my home for the next few months. In addition to my residency at NOTAM, I really wanted to attend as much of the Ultima Contemporary Music Festival as humanly possible. I picked up an all-access pass (which can be purchased at any local 7-Eleven!) which gets me into eleven non-stop days of music. For a country with less than five million people, the government funding for the arts is astonishing; the budget for Ultima last year was 7.1 million Norwegian krone (1.16 million dollars).

The first day of the festival kicked off with the opening of several sound installations, including Jana Winderen’s Energy Field in the main atrium of the Oslo Opera House. The sounds, recorded on a recent expedition to Greenland, included buzzing water insects, harsh wind and cracking glaciers. The speakers for this installation were configured in a three-by-three grid with the entire array facing the entrance of the opera house. The vastness of this recorded landscape was successfully captured and reproduced in this highly resonant space.

Jana Winderen’s Energy Field in the main atrium of Oslo’s Opera House

Later that evening, Benedict Mason’s Music for Oslo City Hall found the musicians of the Oslo Sinfonietta and other local ensembles scurrying around, on top of and inside City Hall. The entire night felt like one big game of Pac Man, as we (the ghosts) were pushed from one room to the next. The piece was conducted by the unseen Brad Lubman, feeding the musicians cues through their wireless headsets.

Halfway through Benedict Mason’s site specific work Music for Oslo City Hall

The next day included Marina Rosenfeld’s Teenage Lontano, her cover version of this Ligeti classic. For the piece, thirty or so teenagers stood in a long line, affixed in pairs, with each group sharing a set of ear bud headphones attached to an iPod. Taking cues from their headphones, the teenagers were successfully able to block each other out, creating the very dense textures needed throughout this work. The material way up in the ether was achieved by a series of whistles hung around the teenagers’ necks. A giant, rotating speaker affixed above the choir, fed the audience Rosenfeld’s vaporous remix of the piece.

Marina Rosenfeld’s teenage choir cover Teenage Lontano

Just down the street at the Black Box Theater was the Verdensteatret theater group’s evening-length piece And All the Questionmarks Started to Sing (Electric Shadows). The stage resembled the lab of a mad musical scientist. Scattered around the set were imaginatively reassembled bicycles, loads of magnifying glasses, and bits and pieces of circuit boards, all spinning and operating in a glorious chaos. The projected visuals had a Stan Brakhage vibe to them, juxtaposed with lots of birds. Audio was fed partially through an array of homemade speakers and included everything from skull splittingly loud noise to the hushed, slightly out of tune churning of music boxes.

Getting a closer look at the stage from the Verdensteatret theater group’s work And All the Questionmarks Started to Sing (Electric Shadows)

Getting a closer look at the stage from the Verdensteatrettheater group’s work And All the Questionmarks Started to Sing (Electric Shadows)

The German new music/gypsy band Zeitkratzer turned it up to eleven with their late-night, high-octane take on folk music from Bulgaria, Austria, Norway, and countless other cultures. It was a killer show. At one point, reed player Frank Gratkowski and French hornist Hild Sofie Tafjord abandoned their instruments for a mind blowing Inuit throat-singing duet.

Germany’s new music/gypsy band Zeitkratzer (with fog machine!)

A pair of weekend concerts took place at the beautiful waterfront Henie-Onstad Art Centre just outside of Oslo in Bærum. I definitely have a soft spot for vintage analogue electronic music and got my fix that afternoon. Pierre Henry was on hand to present his epic forty-five minute work Le Voyage from 1962 alongside the world premiere of Envol, all on a beautifully arranged 36 channel sound system. Another concert that afternoon provided a very nice tribute to the Norwegian experimentalist and microtonal guitarist Bjørn Fongaard.

Speakers of all sizes at the Henie-Onstad Art Centre

The highlight of the first week of Ultima was a concert by the vocal sextet Nordic Voices. I really hope this concert is some indication of the events to come next week. Their performance of Peter Ablinger’s Studien Nach der Natur was one of the most intense and riveting vocal performances I have seen since moving to Europe two years ago. Also featured on the program was a solid performance of Ordinary Measures by American composer John McGuire alongside four pieces by the exciting Norwegian composer Lasse Thoresen.

I am already feeling the wear and tear from this first week of Ultima. Having performed at festivals of this length before, it is an entirely different experience being on the audience side of the action. Any strategies or words of encouragement to get me through the twenty or so concerts left would be much appreciated!

When putting together Zappa Plays Zappa in 2006, Dweezil Zappa set expectations for himself and the musicians that clearly reflected his late father Frank Zappa’s exceedingly high musical standards. Shortly before the band embarked on a 40-plus-date tour this past spring that included stops across the United States, as well as in Mexico, British Columbia, Nova Scotia, the Netherlands, Belgium, Israel, Italy, France, and the UK, Dweezil and I spoke about the challenges and the preparation that has gone into presenting his late father’s music to both new audiences and longtime fans. —DB

Dweezil Zappa

David Brensilver: This “grassroots movement” in support of Frank Zappa’s music, as you referred to it in an interview on the Zappa website, was designed to give “longtime fans something to be excited about” but also to “provide an opportunity for new potential fans.” Obviously the bar had been set high. What did you learn personally in studying the music and Frank’s playing?

Dweezil Zappa: I studied the music for two years and just wanted to be certain that I could execute things the way that they needed to be executed on my part before I even bothered to put a band together. It was kind of like training for the Olympics. I practically had to change everything about the way that I played, even my mental approach to playing. Once I felt that I was going to be able to do what was necessary, that’s when I put the band together.

DB: You referenced Frank’s “potential musician criteria” in that same interview. What is the makeup of that and what did you need to see and hear from musicians auditioning for the band beyond being able to play the notes to “Inca Roads” or “The Black Page”?

DZ: It’s one thing to be able to play the stuff—there is certainly a very high level of skill that’s required. It’s another thing to have the right attitude in the sense that you’re going to respect the music enough to play the parts as written. A lot of times Frank had problems with people starting off playing the parts right, but then trying to do their own little additional harmonies or change things here or there because they were trying to draw more attention to what they were doing. I wanted to avoid any of that kind of stuff. The kind of people that I am lucky enough to have in the band are people who have the right dedication to learning and executing the parts but have enough self-restraint to not try to embellish something.

When we play, we choose specific arrangements or sometimes we’ll make hybrid arrangements of a couple different versions of things, but we don’t ever go out there and say, “Let’s just do something brand new from the ground up. Let’s do our own thing with it and let’s re-harmonize this or let’s change these parts.” That never happens, nor should it happen. We’re presenting it the way Frank intended it to be heard. Now, we have improvisational sections in the shows just like Frank did. That is where the band sort of gets to express themselves, and that’s one of the most fun parts of doing this—the chance to stretch out and spontaneously compose or spontaneously combust. But ultimately I’m pleased that within the band there’s enough discipline for people to learn the parts and stick to them in a traditional sense just out of respect. So, in the auditioning process, I needed to find people that had the innate ability but also had the right attitude and were also people that I wanted to spend time with. And that’s difficult.

DB: I assume it would have been relatively easy, hypothetically, to enlist players like Mike Keneally or Scott Thunes or Chad Wackerman, but you wanted younger musicians in the band. Beyond presenting a band with which new, younger audiences could identify, do you think that the gelling process was aided by what had to be a high level of intensity in those three months of rehearsing the music that might not otherwise have been there?

Zappa Plays Zappa

DZ: I wanted to actually avoid alumni members because to me, I knew that I was going to be under enough scrutiny. To avoid any speculation that I was just coming in and playing a guitar solo and everybody else was doing all the work, I spent all that time learning the music—not only my parts but really familiarizing myself with everything else going on—and really taking up the role as bandleader. So this band is a band under my baton. The funny part is that, on the first tour, we really didn’t know how it was all going to go down, and so promoters really wanted us to use some alumni as special guests and they were sort of scattered in throughout the show. But, as I suspected, a lot of people sort of overlooked the core band. When we did away with the alumni stuff, which I couldn’t wait to do mainly because I felt that the band certainly was strong on its own, you’d literally hear people in the audience talking to the band afterwards and saying, “You guys are so much better than the last band that they had.” It’s like: Yeah, but we are the last band. You just weren’t paying attention.

DB: They just saw Terry Bozzio or Steve Vai. . .

DZ: Yeah, but that doesn’t happen anymore. Now people know this band as a band, and they’re interested in hearing it diversify. They want to hear more things that we’ll do with Frank’s music, but the majority of the time the thing that is being requested is for us to play new music, music that I’ve written for this band, which to me is very surprising because that’s not at all what I ever set out to do with this. But we’re also in our fifth year of doing it, so the majority of the people who come to see us have seen us multiple times. They are very familiar with the individual members of the band and are keen to see what the next step in the evolution of the project is.

We’ve done the last couple tours minus an additional keyboardist. When we started off we had a dedicated keyboardist and we also had a girl who plays multi-instrumental stuff, so she was playing keyboard, sax, flute, and all these different things, and she was taking up the responsibilities for a lot of that stuff, even at the same time—playing keys and horn at the same time.

Now we’ve just hired a new guy—it’s an interesting story. When I put the word out about the auditions, I put it out through my website and I said, “Okay, anybody who’s interested, here’s the parameters, here’s the songs I’d like to see you do, throw up some video clips and then we’ll see how it goes from there.” There was a kid from Tennessee who took up the challenge to put up the clips that I asked for, but then he went beyond that to some of the other hardest things that we’ve ever played, like “G-Spot Tornado” and some of these ridiculous things, and he put up videos that were not only good performances, but he had a good personality and they were entertaining videos. So I could sense from seeing that that he would be a good fit for the band. I wanted to give people a chance, and we brought in several people to come in and play in person, and he still ended up being my favorite. So we hired him. He’s only 23, and he got into Frank’s music from watching our DVD, the ZPZ DVD from 2006. So it’s the backwards way of getting in, but it’s exactly what this whole thing is designed to do—inspire the younger generation to be into the music.

DB: The Dweezilla music boot camp workshops: This is clearly not a Frank Zappa fantasy camp. It’s about, it seems, developing the skills required to play difficult music. It seems almost like the “grass roots movement” that began in ’06 has taken on maybe a bigger mission. So, I’m curious to know what kind of interest you’ve had among sort of the younger, new fans.

DZ: Well, the people that signed up instantly for the courses, the age range is kind of all over the map. You have parents signing their kids up, you have people over 40—some people over 50—that just want to be around the music and understand how we do it. Even if they’re never going to turn it into a music career for themselves, they want to have that experience. The whole goal of it is to give people an opportunity to have a chance at a different perspective. I think music is taught in a lot of different ways, but rarely is it really taught by people that are, day in and day out, doing it on the road. We all went through our own autodidactic cocoon to be able to do what we’re doing in this band, and we all have different areas of expertise. In a short period of time, you give someone the exposure to all these tools and then you present them with the notion of, okay, how do you implement these tools? The benefit that can come from it is that people will be more comfortable with their own abilities and be more adventurous. The tagline for the school is “Learn and Destroy.” So it’s kind of like: Learn some new stuff and destroy the boundaries.

I mean, just from a guitar perspective, I made so many changes in what I do that it’s not necessarily even very guitaristic. What I do now doesn’t even reflect what I used to do. Recently I was sitting with Eddie Van Halen—and he was one of my biggest influences if not the biggest influence that I had—so it was funny to me, where I was showing him some things that I had been working on, these different ways of playing quintuplets and septuplets. And he said, “You lost me there. I don’t even know what you’re talking about.” The fact that the fundamental concept of what it was didn’t register to him, even though he plays drums and he’s got an impeccable sense of rhythm and all that stuff. Intrinsically he knows what that stuff is, but he didn’t know the name of it. Even when I was showing it to him, he said, “Who’d have thought after all these years you’d be giving me a guitar lesson.” So it’s a very funny, full-circle type of thing.

I had been like that prior to learning what I had to learn to play this music. Now that I know the names of things, it gives me a lot more freedom to communicate with people. So the whole impetus of the school is to say we’ll give you some tools and what you do with them at that point is up to you.

DB: You’ve been introducing new, potential fans and longtime fans to Frank’s, dare I say, rock music. Is there any discussion or thought or consideration of a vehicle for delivering his chamber and orchestral music again?

DZ: Well, we’ve performed different versions within the rock band context, but we haven’t ever performed a show using instrumentation from an ensemble. It’s something we’ve been talking about. The only problem with it, really, comes down to what kind of venue, what kind of rehearsal time the ensemble would get, and just really making sure that it can come off the right way.

I mean, I’ve heard of many more requests for all those kind of projects and orchestras wanting to play Frank’s music more so now than in the past. And I think part of it has to do with the age range of conductors and people in the hierarchy of the foundations and things that put these kinds of shows on. I believe that the new generation of people that are coming in are familiar with Frank’s music and respect it in a way that the old guard perhaps did not. It’s the kind of thing where, if someone were just to look at the notes on the page, there’s no question that there’s validity within the music. But when people have a reputation that precedes somebody even looking at the page. . .

DB: Yeah, but I mean, some of the material on The Yellow Shark, that’s the real deal. . .

DZ: You don’t have to convince me.

DB: What you’re saying, though, is people who don’t know otherwise, they see Frank’s name and there’s a preconception about what the music may sound like.

Zappa Plays Zappa

DZ: That’s what I’m dealing with on a grand scale anyway: People know the name, but they don’t know the music. And what they think they know of the music is incorrect. The majority of people who have just casual exposure to Frank’s music only know songs like “Titties & Beer,” “Valley Girl,” “Don’t Eat the Yellow Snow,” “Dancin’ Fool,” all these songs that have little comical stories that go along with them. So people put him in the “Weird Al” Yankovic category. They don’t realize that he made records like The Yellow Shark and all these other things. Even if they do listen to that or find out about that, they don’t think that he actually wrote that stuff out himself. They think of it as the way most rock bands work with an orchestra: Oh, they got some other producer guy to come in there and do that. They don’t realize that Frank had that ability and could sit down on an airplane and write out a complete piece of music for all the instruments and know what it sounded like just from sitting there looking at the page.

That’s a whole other world. I mean, I don’t have that ability at all, but I wish I did. That would be awesome. So, part of what I do is try to give people a broad enough perspective, from the selections that we play, that can shatter the myth of Frank as only this guy. We have a DVD that’s going to come out later this year or early next year, and even within the 20 songs that are on it, it’s just astonishing to see the depth and variety within the music itself. We play some of the classical stuff, we play “Dog/Meat,” which is like a hybrid arrangement of The Yellow Shark and the rock version that he was doing from 1974, and we play “G-Spot Tornado,” but it’s mixed in with songs from the Joe’s Garage album and all these other things. And when you just listen to this stuff across the board, you’re thinking: How could somebody write all this music? You only have 12 tones in Western music. How did he do it? How did he make these things sound different—more different than everybody else?

DB: “Valley Girl” and Civilization: Phaze III are very different animals.

DZ: Exactly. And so I marvel at the fact that as a composer he never stopped growing. He never just settled in to say, “Okay, I’ve learned these techniques. I’m going to use these devices, and this is how I do it.” There was enough motivation for him to keep going and keep pushing it. There were no boundaries.

DB: Well even using the opening bassoon solo from The Rite of Spring on the (Cruising With) Reuben & the Jets record in “Fountain of Love.” I mean, even as someone who went to a conservatory, I wouldn’t have caught that unless someone—and that’s probably what happened—pointed it out to me, or I read it in his book, because it’s seamless and it’s not contrived at all. It’s learned and thoughtful.

DZ: There’s so much inspiration to be had in his overall body of work. We’re just scratching the surface. We’ve learned over 120 songs, and that’s just barely touching—out of the 80 albums that have come out—so there’s a ton of stuff. I mean, there’s stuff that we’ll never be able to play, there’s stuff that was never performed, there’s Synclavier pieces and all kinds of stuff. We’re just happy that there’s enough people interested to be able to keep it going.

DB: Since Go With What You Know, what plans do you have in terms of writing and recording new material? You talked about possibly writing for this band.

DZ: You know, a lot of that stuff was material that had been written years earlier. It’s probably been close to ten years since I’ve actually sat down to write something, so the process will be totally new to me and I look forward to it. There’s definitely things that I have learned in doing all of this that I would put to good use.

When it comes to putting my own music together, I think that it’s going to be interesting to see how much more people respond to it because now they actually have a sense of what I can do. Before they just thought, “Oh, it’s the kid of a famous guy. I heard he plays guitar but I’ve never actually heard him play.” Now they’ve heard a bit about what I can do, and they’re interested to see where I’ll take it next. I’m curious about it myself.

David Brensilver

David Brensilver has contributed articles to a diverse collection of magazines, newspapers, trade journals, and online resources. He has degrees from the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University (bachelor of music, 1992) and the Juilliard School (master of music, 1994) and studied during the summers of 1990, 1991, and 1992 at the Aspen Music Festival and School.

Some of the recipients of 2010-11 Rome residencies, from the official announcement on April 15, 2010. Photo courtesy the American Academy in Rome.

Last week, the American Academy in Rome announced the beneficiaries of its next season of year-long residencies for We asked the two composers chosen, Huck Hodge and Paul Rudy, to describe what the residency means to them and what they plan to do during their year abroad.—FJO

Huck Hodge

Huck Hodge

When I found out that I had won the Rome Prize this year, two thoughts kept going through my mind: “How inspiring to spend a year surrounded by all the cultural density of Rome” and “How am I going to get any work done spending a year surrounded by all the cultural density of Rome?” Certainly life in the eternal city must have a particular effect on the aesthetics and method of any artist—an effect quite distinct from being sequestered, say, in the New Hampshire woods. I have a feeling that my work will benefit from this through greater clarity in formal design and increased directness and simplicity of expression, if only because I expect that I will spend a decent amount of time thinking about and experiencing things outside of contemporary music.

Obviously one highly appealing aspect of the residency is the opportunity to interact on a daily basis with brilliant artists and scholars in a variety of fields. In browsing over the list of fellows and residents who will join me in Rome, I was very pleased to see in addition to the names of my illustrious colleagues in music, Paul Rudy and Robert Beaser, that the visual artist William Kentridge will be among the invited residents this year. This is particularly serendipitous for me because his work in the visual domain has greatly influenced my compositional method over several works, including the piece that won the Gaudeamus Prize a couple years back.

In some ways our work couldn’t be more different. His is generally representational and is often imbued with strong political intimations, while my work tends to be rather abstract and staunchly apolitical. But I have always found Kentridge’s technique to be fascinating and beautiful, particularly his animations in which each frame is drawn over the erasure of the previous one. This technique has been especially influential in my approach to melody, where pitches and gestures of a line are sustained and repeated in other voices so that the line is surrounded by an aura of its own past.

It is perhaps indicative of the segregation of the arts in academia that in the lectures on my music where the name William Kentridge came up, no one had ever heard of him. Ideally, the interaction with scholars and artists in so many disciplines will enrich my understanding of fields outside of composition as well as their understanding of contemporary music.

Paul Rudy

Paul Rudy

I am full of gratitude for the confidence in my work that the American Academy in Rome has expressed through awarding me with a Rome Prize Fellowship for 2010/11. The Rome Prize, first and foremost for me is an opportunity to compose unfettered!

Extended residencies of this type are where I have been able to synthesize thirty years of life’s experience and my work is firing on all cylinders because of it. It is through residencies that I have fostered a convergence between mind, body and spirit, and for the first time in life, I’m really having fun making music.

While in Rome I will continue working (and playing!) on a couple of ongoing projects. I started a series of CD length works (all of which are one big work) three years ago that I’m now titling 2012 Stories. There are four CDs (to date, with ideas for at least seven more) describing through aural journeys my path towards personal transformation, as well as reconnecting with and learning the multiple voices of Mother Earth. I recently started performing live with this project, using recorded sounds from around the globe and simple instruments from pitch pipes to drums, to rattles and toys. I will be working on the next two or three discs in this series, and also the live versions, which I’ve recently begun playing in meditation, free-dance, and metaphysical circles.

I’ve believed for a long time that sound has the ability to connect emotion and provide image to each individual imagination that it touches; thus it becomes physically tangible. In my music I’m exploring the connection between intellect and intuition, and I hope that my music allows others to explore that connection, too. I think the world is in dire need for a balance between our thinking and feeling sides, and so 2012 Stories is about my personal journey to do this. Along the way, I’m learning the song of mother earth, and to explore and express that sound for the listener to explore their own journey. 2012 Stories offer journeys, not of my making, but of the ones chosen by each individual listener. Listening becomes an individual creation: it connects, it challenges, it soothes, it reminds, reminisces and wanders, through the hallways of our planet’s multifaceted voice and the history of our own experience. It invites the thinking mind and the feeling heart to work together, to integrate, to unify, and become one. It facilitates individual cohesiveness.

I will also be working on a concerto for jazz sax great Bobby Watson—finishing a version for Wind Ensemble, and also composing a version for full orchestra.

I want to express my deepest gratitude to my colleagues at the UMKC Conservatory of Music and Dance, and especially our dean, Peter Witte, who is an inspiration to me; I also want to say thank you to the American Academy in Rome for this amazing magical opportunity.

[Ed. Note: the four CDs issued thus far in Paul Rudy’s 2012 Stories are available online at iTunes (and many other major download sites) and in hard copy from Aucourant Records.]

On April 19, MATA kicks off its 12th annual festival in New York City. Under the banner of “Young Composers—Now!” this four-night event at Le Poisson Rouge includes 14 world premieres—three of them MATA commissions. With such a range of composers on tap, we caught up with a few of them pre-festival to sample their sounds, find out a little more about them, and make sure we knew what their drink was before this thing was out of the gate.

Lisa Coons: “Cutter” from Cythère

With so many options in front of you, how do you approach creating new music?

I think of music as a way of engaging with lived experience, so my work is often grounded in memory or even physical sensation much more than abstract aesthetics. This allows me to compose music without getting crushed under the weight of “what has come before.”

What compels you to do such a crazy thing?

The other careers I was considering during undergrad required better standardized test-taking skills than I posses…

If the funding was flowing and time was no object, what project would you like to complete? Where would you like to live while doing it?

I would love to do an evening-length experimental “opera” where the movement/dance, sound and dialogue are completely integrated—where amplified rhythmic movements on stage contribute as much to the music as traditional instruments. It’s one of my favorite projects to sketch. Ideally I would still live in New York while writing it, just maybe someplace with an actual kitchen.

Christopher McIntyre: Soundtrack from Quartet Music, mvt.2

If the funding was flowing and time was no object, what music project would you like to complete? Where would you like to live while doing it?

A project that my MATA piece is the first baby step toward: an evening length multi-media event inspired by the concepts and work of visual artist Robert Smithson. The current plan is to involve Ne(x)tworks’ full compliment plus two additional actor/vocalists, two computer specialists for real-time sound/score creation activities, a sound engineer, a video artist, and a stage designer. I can’t imagine working on it anywhere else but in NYC!

There are 77,200,000 search results returned when you Google “What is a composer?” and the “end of genre” stylistic descriptor is so commonly inserted it’s groan inducing. Still, with so many options in front of you, how do you approach creating new music?

It does seem that genre has sort of become an antiquated way of thinking (or so we’re being led to assume—not so sure it’s true myself). Despite that, I approach creating new music from both a purely personal context and from within a certain aesthetic ancestry that I feel connected to. Living in New York really highlights the fact that we’re all part of a continuum regardless of differences between language and presentation, and a key component of that continuum is staunch individuality. When I start to create a new piece, I try really hard to focus on the material at hand and just trust the filter that is my personality and knowledge base.

Missy Mazzoli: Orizzonte

What compels you to do such a crazy thing as compose music?

Composing music is the best way I’ve found of making sense of the world. It gives me an opportunity to put things in order, create structure, and process ideas. It may be a crazy career choice, but without music I would be a lot crazier.

What people/things/ideas have had the biggest impact on the music you create?

Meredith Monk has been a huge influence on me. My music is very different from hers, but we have a similar approach to the creative process and I have learned a great deal from watching her work. She’s not afraid to start from nothing, to create a new work that is completely different from all of her previous works, and she never seems to be confined by the limits of notation or the weight of tradition.

Alex Sigman: mi(e)S(e)-En-abîMe II

What people/things/ideas have had the biggest impact on the music you create?

The external environment, wherever I happen to be located, has often influenced my creative process. Urban, industrial, and natural sounds heard while walking or on bicycle, a neighbor’s blaring stereo, and the interruptions of the background music in an airport lounge by an intercom system, among other stimuli, have all been integrated into the musical fabric, albeit having first passed through a series of filters.

What is the most amusing thing that has ever happened to you/your music in performance?

Now for a bit of dark humor: In an earlier version of the piece to be performed on the MATA festival, a rather extreme scordatura in the cello is required. When collaborating with one particular ensemble on the piece, the cellist objected strenuously to the re-tuning of his instrument. As such, a rental cello was obtained, the exact physical properties and condition being unfamiliar to the performer and composer. During one the rehearsals, the A-string (tuned a major second higher) snapped and lacerated the cellist just below the eye. As a preventative measure, he decided to wear goggles in performance!

Since that incident, I have modified the scordatura.

What would make a good drink pairing with this piece for the people in the audience?

Well, my piece has a deceptively “light” and unassuming beginning, a strong aftertaste, a French title, is small but quite concentrated, and is best performed in a cool, dry place, presented with ice water. Perhaps a glass of pastis?

Daniel Wohl: Glitch, mvt. 1 – “Skip”

If the funding was flowing and time was no object, what project would you like to complete?

I think I’m doing the kind of projects at the moment that I would be working on if time and money were no object. The ideal situation for many musicians is to have as few restrictions as possible as to the content of their music; whether you’re writing an album, an orchestra piece, or a piece for one of your friends, it’s important to be able to have the creative freedom to explore your ideas. So in that sense more time or money wouldn’t help. Of course it would be nice to be able to hire a world-class orchestra every time I have an idea or just want to try something out. But then again, it’s definitely 100% better to be asked by a world-class orchestra to write a piece rather then to hire them!

Concerts can be stressful for composers. What will you be drinking during the performance of your piece at LPR?

I often feel like I need a drink before and/or after a performance—but at LPR you can actually have one while listening to your music. This time though I’ll be handling the electronics for my piece, so I’d better hold off until after the show. I really enjoy being involved in some way or another in the performance of my music, because it replaces the stress of passively hearing your music performed as an audience member, with the positive stress of actually helping it be performed well!

Tristan Perich: qsqsqsqsqqqqqqqqq

What people/things/ideas have had the biggest impact on the music you create?

Mathematicians. I’ve spent the last six years slowly unraveling the layers of meaning behind working with basic electronic audio and each step of the way it’s an idea from information theory, or the foundations of mathematics, or computer science that unlocks a deeper consequence of what I’m exploring. Kurt Gödel, Alan Turing, and Gregory Chaitin in particular have influenced my thinking.

What is the most amusing thing that has ever happened to you/your music in performance?

When we performed Between the Silences at Issue Project Room I had the visual click track projected large at the back of the room (usually the musicians just see it on a small video screen to stay in sync with the electronics), so throughout the piece the players were looking off into the high distance, as if towards some celestial deity, guiding them through the waters of the music. It was rather strange.

What would make a good drink pairing for the people in the audience?

I’d say drinking a glass of fine red wine while listening to waves of toy pianos and synchronized electronics is a rather perfect pairing.

Nathan Davis: The Bright and Hollow Sky

With so many options in front of you, how do you approach creating new music?

I try to get my hands on whatever instruments I’m writing for, whether I can play them or not, so that I can approach them directly, physically, and see what sounds they want to make for me. In this way, I can forget some of the weight of history and style.

What compels you to do such a crazy thing?

I enjoy it. Writing is an opportunity to tell stories, however opaque.

Concerts can be stressful for composers. What will you be drinking during the performance of your piece at LPR?

I often occupy myself by mixing or running live electronics during my performances, so I don’t go to the bar ’til afterward. Since this performance is in the very capable hands of others, I will probably sit in the audience during my piece and just listen—but leave my beer on the table so that I can be free to turn all the knobs on some little mixer that’s not connected to anything.

There is a fluid back and forth motion across continents and centuries that impresses when it comes to the work of Garrett Fisher. It’s showcased once again in his latest piece At the Hawks Well.

To build this production, Fisher adapted the original one-act play of the same name by William Butler Yeats, condensing the original text and working in haiku by Basho and Buson at key points. The underlying story is structured around an old man, a young man, a dried up well, and a hawk-like woman who guards it (its waters are believed to offer immortality). Even in Yeats’s original script, the spare staging, the references to Noh drama, and the elaborate masks seem to make it a work particularly tailored to Fisher’s sensibilities. Previous productions in this composer’s catalog such as The Passion of Saint Thomas More capitalized effectively on similar constraints, particularly the stylized movement the characters employed and the masks created by Louise McCagg (who returns to collaborate on At the Hawk’s Well).

The piece is scored for three singers (soprano, mezzo soprano, and tenor), who merge to form a chorus of voices (new music pure, not operatic in style) and then separate to take turns performing the old and young man roles as the show progresses. The guardian is represented by a dancer, as well as by the piccolo/flute/alto flute line. In addition, there is percussion, a harmonium, and a six-string fretless bass.

Looking at the libretto, it appears that Fisher is once again holding to a working MO tied to collaboration. He provides a complete framework and instruction for how he wishes the piece to unfold, but one that also leaves room for freely sung sections and for the performers to contribute their own creativity to the project. In this case, as in previous compositions, the final result is a work that is rich and deeply affecting, and yet spare and spiritual enough to draw a listener in much more intimately than more elaborate opera productions. A simple plucked bass line or harmonium drone supports the strong, clear voices without rushing them along. Fisher’s music seems to have gathered influences from music across time and geography—echoes of Asia, India, and Europe color the lines—and distilled these points of reference down to something that speaks quite strongly to and through this small group of performers. Using this palette, they spin out a tale of tragic beauty that’s at once as familiar as a favorite fairytale and yet offers something fresh and unique.

Though not currently available commercially on recording, the production will make stops in two East Coast cities this week: Boston on March 17 @ Cathedral of Saint Paul, 12 p.m. and NYC on March 20 @ Judson Memorial Church, 2 and 8 p.m.

Roberto Valera, 2nd from left; Zenaida Romeu 4th from left; and Guido López Gavilán, far right

My week and a half at the Festival de Música Contemporánea in Havana, Cuba (October 30-November 9, 2009) was much more than a musical education: it was a remarkable artistic immersion that left me sad and frustrated that the U.S. travel ban is depriving other Americans of access to this rich culture. I heard nine concerts over ten days, with about 80 pieces by 56 different composers. The festival was largely a celebration of music by Cuban composers, although invited performers from six different countries (Spain, Denmark, Mexico, Uruguay, Argentina, and Japan) included compositions from their own nations. The broad theme, as announced by the festival’s director Guido López Gavilán, was music of the past, present, and future. “Contemporary” was defined very flexibly, in general to mean “not old”—repertoire spanning the 20th and early 21st centuries. (Although there was some “old” music, too, when invited guests had particular works they wanted to play, e.g. Schubert and Sarasate.)

Oddly enough, I was the only attendee from the United States and no music from the U.S. was performed (apart from arrangements of popular standards performed by a trombone quintet, and an electronic piece on a concert that I was unable to attend). Because of the economic embargo and travel ban, we have shut ourselves off culturally from Cuba, and thus we are deprived of some important and powerful music. U.S. composers are missing out on hearing this music, meeting Cuban composers and other musicians, and taking part in true cultural exchange. Cuba is the only nation that our government restricts travel to. This U.S. policy seems to have no imaginable purpose; rather it is part of a senseless feud that most people have forgotten and only our government maintains. But we are poorer because of what we are missing.

There are signs that the U.S. is permitting some cracks in the cultural wall, since a few prominent Cubans have been granted visas to visit. Ormara Portuondo was allowed in to accept her recent Grammy, and in the classical world, Zenaida Romeu recently was the guest conductor of the Fargo-Moorhead Symphony, the first time in six years that a Cuban has been allowed to perform in the United States. This still leaves us a good deal behind where we were over ten years ago, when a major festival, the American Composers Orchestra’s Sonidos de las Américas, brought together a great number of Cuban composers, both those who remained there as well as exiles in this country. It was an extremely important event that used music as a means to heal old wounds and to serve as a step toward reconciliation. We have to catch up to that point, and then try to move forward!

There are certain exceptions to the U.S. ban on travel to Cuba; it is possible to visit Cuba for authorized research, journalism, and approved cultural exchange. But my travel agent (at Common Ground Education and Travel Services, a Cuban travel specialist) told me that attending this festival would not be one of them: attending a festival that is organized by Cubans would fall under the heading of helping the Cubans economically. Thus instead I went for my research purpose of interviewing women composers (which I did, very diligently) rather than to attend the festival.

The grey areas in the travel ban, which are large, looming, and confusing, were illustrated by the announcement earlier this season that the New York Philharmonic would travel to Cuba followed by the cancellation of the trip because the patrons who were to fund it were not allowed to go with the orchestra. This major institution, with their experienced professional staff, had been totally confused by the nature of the exceptions to the travel ban. One of the criteria seems to be: you cannot just go to enjoy yourself, it has to be work. (Don’t enjoy this, just work! I kept reminding myself. Very hard in a country filled with so many talented and friendly people).

Much about the concert culture of Havana is different from what I am used to, and I sometimes found this irritating. First, it was difficult for me to learn about the festival: official websites posted different and very sketchy information; my emails to addresses listed on the websites went unanswered; and once I got there I learned from the printed overview that there had been several concerts preceding the “opening” concert that I attended.

Once at the concerts, the distribution of information did not always improve much. Except for the final “Concierto de Clausura” (closing concert, performed by the National Symphony), there were no program notes, and the lack of details like internal headings and movements of works at times made it difficult to follow where we were. In some cases performers made comments about the program at a volume that could be heard only in the first two rows. Composers were sometimes not acknowledged even when they were present at the event. At three events, I was handed two different versions of the concert program. And was it the XXIII year of the festival or the XXIV?

Although the spare quality of the concert apparatus was sometimes frustrating, I also found it oddly refreshing: attending a major U.S. symphony concert, we generally receive as a program a substantial, glossy, and full-color booklet, and then look through 96 pages of ads and lists of sponsors in order to find the four relevant pages on the music. Often, the musical experience gets bogged down under the weight of the accompanying trappings. In Cuba—the land of “no advertising”—less could sometimes be more. It put more of a focus on the musical experience, rather than being shaped as a consumer while attending a concert.

The venues were beautiful, but not always convenient or ideal. The renowned Casa de las Americas demanded an athletic climb up several flights of stairs to its performance space. (The elevator was out of order, as they so often are at everyplace that is not a tourist hotel.) Another of the principle venues, the Basilica de San Francisco de Asis, is praised for its acoustics, but outside noise from the adjacent plaza—cars, people, and at dusk a persistent chirp of a cricket or a little frog—is part of that acoustic experience.

Finally, there were also cultural differences in matters of concert etiquette. Photography by audience members was uninhibited, and to my taste distracting, starting with the TV camera operators (presumably from the government TV station, which is the only TV station) who roamed the stage and audience during the first concert.

But with all that said, I consider this festival a huge success. I cannot imagine hearing so much recent and contemporary music in the U.S. and enjoying it nearly so much. Cuban composers of both this century and the last tend to blur the boundaries of “classical” and “popular” and to assert Cuban identity through various traditional vocabularies. This melding and merging of genres is a theme, and a process that keeps Cuban musical life of all kinds infused with energy. This takes place in various ways: folk instruments (percussion but also strings) are used in a classical context; and rhythms and other features from popular, folk, and dance music are invoked or even used as structural features. The audience was not subjected to intellectual exercises intended only to impress other composers or melodic lines designed to make reading music a sport in the Extreme Olympics. Cuban music is lively, rich in emotional content, and unpretentious; it is music you are happy to listen to.

My experience at the festival left me with this clear realization: we are shooting ourselves in the foot with the travel ban. We are denied access to not just tourism, not just beaches and scenery, but significant cultural content. This was not supposed to be the point of the travel ban, but it is the result. While travel can in some cases be negotiated, for the most part U.S. citizens are dissuaded and discouraged from dealing with the confusing bureaucracy and restrictions that our government applies only in the case of Cuba. Thus we are missing out on the music—of the past, present and future—that this nation has to offer.

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For most of the programs, two or even three ensembles that could have merited their own concerts were compressed together onto a single program, but this allowed listeners to take in a very broad and mostly interesting swath of musical creativity. From such a wealth of performances, I will touch a few of the highlights, although almost every piece was enjoyable, memorable, or both.

October 30, 2009

Havana’s Basilica de San Francisco de Asis was the site of many of the festival’s concerts.

The first official concert of the festival took place at the historic (1580s) Basilica de San Francisco de Asis. The program opened with Sonatina Hispánica (for piano, 1957) by Harold Gramatges, several of whose works were showcased during the festival. Gramatges, an influential teacher, composer and cultural leader, passed away last year at the age of 90. The Sonatina began with a driving moto perpetuo, reached an abrupt halt, and launched into a more neo-classical passage. Following an interlude with Spanish flourishes, an evocative melody gradually emerged. It was given a spirited performance by Yisel Rubio.

Argeliers León (1918-1991) was another influential figure of Gramatges’ generation. His Danzons 1 and 2 (from 1945), for piano and percussion (tom-toms and guiro) were compelling and freshly modern. The first framed an oscillating micro-pattern with flashy chordal outbursts. The second offered contrapuntal piano texture and vibrant dance rhythms in the percussion, building to an exuberant conclusion. Next, a set of songs by Alejandro García Caturla (1906-1940) ranged from a Debussian lushness to a more driving and buoyant use of rhythm. Soprano Maité Fernández’s voice was delicate, but her dramatic abilities were convincing. After these three historic figures of Cuban music, the rest of the concert featured works by living ones.

Efraín Amador’s Fantasia guajira (1984) explored timbral contrasts and interchanges between the laud (a flatbacked instrument with seven courses of double strings), the guitar, and the piano. Guajira is a reference to the people who live in the countryside, “the folk,” hence the inclusion of a folk instrument alongside others more typically found in concert halls.

Ariadna Amador’s Luces y Remolinos (Lights and Swirls) was the newest piece on the program (2009), and it featured the composer as the pianist, with Roviet Oses on tenor saxophone. Infused with spontaneity and energy, the sheen of the legato sax line soared over the swirling piano cascades. Riffs were interjected and the energy built in frenetic waves, eventually ascending into a playful tinkling, with the sax phrases becoming more clearly songlike. The composer told me she and Oses collaborate frequently, and that the work had some improvised elements.

El Bolero de Ravel segun [according to] Juan Piñera (2008, for violin and piano) raised themes of reflection, memory, and a musical past. Piñera’s commentary on Ravel’s Bolero was engaging, and as the strains of “My Way” gradually emerged as a theme, it became a whimsical and ironic comment of the individual against a canon both classical and popular.

October 31, 2009

The concert the next day (also in the Basilica) featured instrumental music, followed by a choral performance. Roberto Valera is a venerable Cuban (age 71) recognized and honored for his teaching, leadership, and wide range of important compositions. The program began with his 1965 Toccata for piano, built of contrasting panels: scenes of driving, building energy interrupted by static but atmospheric passages. Works by Giselle Hernández (1912-1971) followed, first a Prelude and Giga for piano. The Prelude was a Bach-like study in counterpoint, beginning with a spare texture and building in density and with gem-like beauty. The Giga was much simpler, evoking French baroque through its use of drones. Hernández’s subsequent Sonatina for violin and piano was steeped in 20th-century French style, from Debussian sensuality to the playful simplicity of Les Six. Alfredo Muñoz (violin) and Ulises Hernández were the excellent performers.

Liz Mary Díaz’s new work for string ensemble, Sincopadas, was in two movements: the first with dissonant low rumblings and spiky rhythms; the next with a bouncy theme executed in col legno. Festival director Guido López Gavilán led the ensemble, and also the next work, his new composition for chamber orchestra, Ritmarc, an exhilarating work that occasionally reminded me of Holst’s “Jupiter” with its cascading patterns and energetic drive. A slow movement was also English in flavor, but more pastoral, and the ending was hushed and breathless in solo exchanges of evocative melody. It would have been a fine conclusion to the program, but there was a whole set by a choir to follow.

Cuba has a very strong choral tradition, and I felt privileged for the opportunity to hear two fine ensembles. The Coro Polifónico de Habana (dir. Carmen Collado) performed six varied works, including several effective and colorful pieces by Beatriz Corona and Roberto Valera, works that should be part of the repertoire in the United States. Lopez Gavilán’s Canta, a powerful and rhythmic crescendo that the choir performed with great drama, ended the program.

November 2, 2009

Zenaida Romeu (Director of Camerata Romeu) and composer Alfredo Diez Nieto

Yet a third concert at the Basilica featured a set performed by Manuel Guillén (violin) and María Jesús García (piano), and after that, the renowned Camerata Romeu, directed by Zenaida Romeu. Guillén and García are a distinguished duo, invited from Spain, but their set of contemporary Spanish pieces was of little interest to me. The most notable work, Miguel Bustamante’s vividly illustrative Ferraz, felt like it could be a silent film score, as if the music was depicting some rather energetic and playful drama, even a cartoon.

Camerata Romeu, an all-female string orchestra directed by Zenaida Romeu, is (arguably) Cuba’s best-known classical ensemble. This is largely because of the fine 2002 documentary about the group (by Cecilia Domeyko), which first made me want to visit Cuba; and also because of their many recordings. So I was moved and excited to hear them, and to see them en vivo demonstrates the advantage of the group’s practice of playing by memory: it allows the musicians to connect with directness with each other, to their own instruments and playing, with the director and the audience. Although the group has grown in size to sixteen players (adding depth to its sound), it retains a sense of vital intimacy. I recognized a few of the performers from the film; others have now moved on to the National Symphony Orchestra of Cuba or to teaching positions.

And two are now composing. Jenny Peña Campo is the lead violinist of the ensemble, and her Pequeñas cosas (Small things) was as lush and sensual as anything John Williams ever wrote, eventually introducing a contrapuntal passage with an angular theme. The next work, ¡Estos mundos! (These Worlds) for flute, clarinet and string orchestra, by Yadira Cobo, moved with lyrical exchanges through a pastoral mood, then jazzy and sprightly, and finally luscious and sweet. The excellent soloists were Jennifer Lugo (flute) and Susel Díaz (clarinet).

At aged 91, Alfredo Diez Nieto is the last surviving composer of his generation, and he was very much a presence at the festival concerts. His Sinfonia no. 2 for string orchestra (2007) used a craggy tonal framework and a rugged, jazz-infused language, with unexpected harmonic shifts and contrapuntal exchanges of angular melodies. A pensive slow movement led to a final movement that used a raw dissonant chord, held obsessively and even lovingly. The gestures were simple and direct but powerful.

The Camerata’s latest CD, Non Divisi, is entirely devoted to Roberto Valera’s music, and the title piece of that recording was nominated for a Latin Grammy in 2008. The disc’s title track, Non Divisi, was performed on this concert. It is a work of great intensity, starting with a hushed unison melody that underlies the work, varied profoundly with agitated rhythmic figures, tremolos, dramatic cascading scales, and dense chordal elaborations. The structure is large and full of a sense of inevitable momentum. The final diminuendo was executed with great control. This was followed by another of Valera’s works, La Lenta noche en tus ojos (The slow night in your eyes), which was also intense but more intimate in mood, like an intoned, passionate prayer building in small outbursts, and then in gradual waves. (It is possible to purchase the new CD in the United States, and I highly recommend it.)

November 3, 2009

The concert the following day featured the chamber ensemble of Universidad Autónoma de Zacatecas, Mexico, in a program by Latin American composers.

Guido López Gavilán (far left) and the group from Zacatecas, in the Lobby of the Teatro Almadeo Roldan (l to r), Cristina Pestana Alpízar, Miguel Francisco Hudson Montenegro, Jorge Barrón Corvera, Alejandro Barrañón Cedillo

The Sonatina for flute and piano by Brazilian composer Radames Gnatalli (1906-1988) was given an excellent performance by Miguel Francisco Hudson Montenegro (flute) and Alejandro Barrañón Cedillo (piano); the work ranged from jazz-infused dance rhythms to a dark meandering piano accompaniment underneath a buoyant flute melody. The ensemble’s violinist Jorge Barrón Corvera is also a pioneering scholar who has researched Manuel M. Ponce, so we had the rare opportunity to hear unknown works by Ponce. A single-movement Trio for violin, viola and piano, written in Paris in 1929, was impressionist in feel, building in lush waves; it was given a nuanced and effective performance (violist Cristina Pestana Alpízar joined Barrañón and Barrón). And a Sonata for Violin and Viola (written in Mexico in 1938) was written effectively and brilliantly played. The second movement, a Sarabande, was modal with dark oriental flourishes. The third movement, which featured ostinatos and a propulsive rhythmic drive, suggested the neo-classical Stravinsky.

Barrañón performed several intensely virtuosic works by Carlos Chavez (1889-1978). Estudio IV (1919-1921) was riveting and relentless. Of two Etudes a Chopin (1949), the first owed much to Debussy, with its swirling flourishes that parted to reveal a luscious tenor melody. The second was moody and dark, with a rich heaviness to the peroration. Flutist Miguel Hudson joined Barrañón for a brilliant performance of Transparencias, an attractive work for flute and piano by Eduardo Gamboa (b. 1960, Mexico) which featured various folk and dance influenced styles.

November 4, 2009

The Casa de las Americas presented three varied sets in a lengthy concert. Denmark’s Adam Ørvad, a compelling advocate for the classical accordion, performed five varied works by Danish composers, spanning the last half of the 20th century. He also included a recent work by Cuban composer Louis Aguirre (b. 1968). Titled Yemayá after the Santería goddess of water and creation, the work evoked nothing of Cuban folklore and instead suggested East Indian vocabulary with its complex layering of rhythms, and stark melody that is revealed at one point. Experimental in its wide-ranging vocabulary, it explored the full range of possibilities of the instrument, with effects that evoked electronic music through startling use of extreme highs and lows (including dramatic arpeggios spanning a huge range), disjunctures and fragmentation of ideas, thick organ-like chords, and then a peroration that slowly expired (I held my breath) below the level of the audible.

Orfeón Santiago, a renowned choir from Santiago de Cuba (on the eastern end of the island) performed both on this concert and the one of the previous day. The director, Electo Silva, was too ill to attend, and he was the subject of many tributes; assistant director Daria Abreu led the group with great elegance. The choir featured music by Silva, including his well-known Misa Caribeña. Other selections included Cántico de Celebración by Leo Brouwer, which created invigorating percussive effects (with the voice) and layered rhythms. Brouwer is another highly distinguished Cuban composer. (A concert commemorating his 70th birthday was one of those that preceded the Festival which I hadn’t known about.)

November 5, 2009

The historic facade of the Teatro Amadeo Roldán, first opened in 1928, disguises a totally contemporary interior which was completely rebuilt decades after a fire in 1977.

The modern interior of the Teatro Amadeo Roldán was the site of another concert with three sections, each of which might have been a concert on its own. Yasuaki Shimizu and Saxophonettes, a quintet of tenor and baritone saxophones from Tokyo, offered playful interpretations of movements from J.S, Bach’s cello suites, alternating with Shimizu’s own compositions, improvisations, and folk arrangements. This was followed by a set of three works by Cubans. The standout of these was Carlos Fariña’s Estudio: Variables in Canon (1982), for four sets of four drums; it’s an intriguing contrapuntal piece featuring a motive of continual eighth-notes being passed around with breathless energy.

The final set was by another eminent visiting ensemble, Conjunto de Percusión de Barcelona. These three men were not only amazing instrumentalists; they also brought an excellent sense of theatre to their work. Serie C3 (by Carles Santos of Spain) was played on three sets of metal bowls; the trio evoked its minimalist patterns with a Zen-like solemnity and devotion. The Belgian Thierry de Mey’s Musique de table (1987) was really a work of choreography for the hands of the musicians on a wooden table top. Executed with grace and meticulous attention to detail, rhythmic sounds emerge but it is the dance-like motion and interplay of the hands that is riveting. (To get a better understanding of how Musique de table works, visit YouTube and look at one of the several performances of this post-modern classic.)

November 6, 2009

Back at the Basilica, the Argentinean pianist Dora de Marinis offered a huge and exhilarating set of music from Argentina. She began with a remarkable and completely compelling set of Five Tangos by Juan José Castro (1895-1968). Each title begins with an ellipsis (suggesting a continuation of something?) “… Evocation” moved from an opening rumble to a splashy colorful melody “…Llorón” had a restless energy, like a repeating question (“llorón” means “weeping”), a query rather than a cry. The work by Carmen de Juan (a pseudonym used by the music professor Mirtha Poblet de Merenda, b. 1934) was titled Pieza para armar y sonar, that is, “piece to assemble and play.” It was built of abstracted layers of rhythmic ostinatos moving at different speeds, like shifting tectonic plates. After a confrontational theme, the motion of the shifting plates becomes almost frenetic with alarming jabs from the bass region. Marinis concluded with several works by Ginastera, including the Piano Sonata no. 2, which with its torrents of pounding chords, was astonishingly violent and forceful. Luckily, the middle movement, Adagietto pianissimo, offered relief with its atmospheric beauty. This amazing performance felt like a whole program in itself, but there was more after that (no intermission).

Juan Piñera’s Trio Cervantino (for clarinet, violin and piano) again engaged themes of a musical past. The first of two sections was expansive and felt overly long to me. But the second part never lost momentum during its breathless, wild ride. The young musicians of Trio Concertante (Dianelys Castillo, clarinet; Leonardo Gell, piano; and Fernando Muñoz, violin) for whom Piñera wrote the work, gave it a rousing, committed and virtuostic performance. But what did the title mean? Was it a reference to iconic Cuban composer Ignacio Cervantes (1847-1905) – OR a comment on the author of Don Quixote? The work was both epic and episodic in nature. Back home with access to Google (internet access in Cuba is both slow and expensive) I found an article that explained the reference. The pianist of the ensemble suggested to Piñera that Prelude No. 1 for piano by Ignacio Cervantes might be used as the basis of a Theme and Variations. Piñera took the Cervantes work as a starting point, but also pays homage to composers including Satie, J.S. Bach, Rachmaninoff and Prokofiev.

Following the concert, UNEAC, the Union of writers, artist and composers, sponsored a party on the patio of their beautiful colonial mansion. There was food and drinks, and the choir from Santiago de Cuba sang again. Then the famous Septeto de Habana (of the Buena Vista Social Club vintage and style), performed. Lots of people got up and danced, because in Cuba you have to have some dancing!

November 8, 2009

Pianist Leonardo Gell Fernández-Cueto with the Orquesta Sinfónica Nacional de Cuba, conducted by Roberto Valera, during the final concert of the Festival Internacional de Música Contemporánea de La Habana

The National Symphony of Cuba (Orquesta Sinfónica Nacional de Cuba, the leading but not only orchestra of the island) gave the concluding program of the Festival, performing four pieces by living Cuban composers. Roberto Valera’s Suite Caribeña (2004) was popular and accessible in flavor, and full of distinctly Cuban references and rhythms. Its six movements included “El baile de recuerdo” (the dance of memory), “Berceuse Caturliana” (a reference to Alejandro García Caturla, who helped establish a classical tradition with a distinct Cuban identity in the early 20th century), and “Danzon Raro.” Valera based it on his piano suite of 2002, and this orchestrated version featured the piano, performed by the distinguished Leonardo Gell. Occasionally the orchestra (which Valera conducted), lacked precision in the syncopations but the performance was spirited and lush in sonority nevertheless. At times jazzy, romantic, restless, or sweetly nostalgic, Suite Caribeña proved to be a completely engaging work. The other works on the program were also fine, but perhaps not as tightly crafted and focused in their intensity as some of the chamber works.

The Festival as a whole offered a variety of works, and for the most part, the Cuban music communicated freshly through recognizable vocabulary. Pieces were tonal but with imaginative twists; in several cases the final chords spun startled listeners into a new key. An emphasis on melody and direct emotion results in music that is attractive to a general listener; it doesn’t need the special pleading of “give new music a chance.” It was not a “new music festival” that you would hear anywhere else. That is why Americans need to be able to hear it! Guido López Gavilán’s work (to take just one example) reminded me at times of music by Holst, Rachmaninov, or Scriabin. I say this not to deride it, rather I say bravo that something new and fresh can be made out of familiar aspects of the language, something full of intensity, that can be uplifting through an emphasis on lyrical melody, structured phrases, and engaging rhythms.

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After the festival was over I had the opportunity to sit in on Juan Piñera’s composition class at the Instituto Superiore de Arte, and two students gave intense performances of their own works for piano. Ernesto Oliva’s was a fantasy evoking vivid folkloric scenes from a rural village: markets and church bells and crowd scenes were conveyed with breathtaking virtuosity. Yulia Rodríguez’s was an abstract pianistic soliloquy—jazz infused, dark, passionate and introspective—her piece would be welcome on a concert stage or in a jazz café in New York City. Hearing these two remarkable works suggests that Cubans will continue to work within familiar musical language and the future will offer new and moving artistic insights drawn from that vocabulary.

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Composer Magaly Ruiz Lastres (seated with her dog Mickey) and the author, Liane Curtis

Liane Curtis (Ph.D., Musicology) is a Resident Scholar at the Women’s Studies Research Center of Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. She is President of The Rebecca Clarke Society, Inc. and Women’s Philharmonic Advocacy. She would like to thank Laura Macy for her help in editing this article, and she also thanks the Cuban composers Magaly Ruiz Lastres and Sigried Macías Lastre who helped a great deal in obtaining information about the Festival (and who also had pieces performed on the Festival although Liane was not able to attend those performances).

J. Mark Scearce J. Mark Scearce’s This Thread Marietta Simpson, mezzo-soprano Christian Teal, violin Orchestra Nashville conducted by Paul Gambill

This past August, J. Mark Scearce was awarded this year’s Raymond and Beverly Sackler Prize in Composition at the University of Connecticut. I have known Mark since we were at Indiana University in the mid 1980s. Since then I have commissioned him four times while music director of Orchestra Nashville. He also served as our composer-in-residence for two seasons and we recorded his evocative elegy, Endymion’s Sleep.

Needless to say, I’m a fan, and so it was with special joy and shared pride that I received the news of this new recognition of Mark’s work. But I was especially delighted when I learned that the score he had submitted for consideration by the Sackler Award committee was one of my commissions: This Thread, for solo mezzo, solo violin, and orchestra. The story of the premiere of This Thread is one that I hope will lead to more performances of this work and will serve to inspire ideas for how orchestras can successfully present new music.

This Thread sets the text of Toni Morrison’s poem, The Dead of September 11. The poem is, to say the least, a powerful response to that tragedy. At the time, Mark was preparing to come on as our composer-in-residence, and when he first suggested he set The Dead of September 11 as one of his two residency commissions I was a bit wary of the challenge of programming a work of that nature. But his passion for the project led me to let go of my fears and I decided that the inspiration for how to present it would come after I saw the finished work.

This Thread is a single movement work that begins with unaccompanied solo violin presenting the principle theme masterfully written in double stops. After being joined by the orchestra to conclude the introduction, the mezzo enters and the two soloists continue to exchange the spotlight throughout the work, occasionally coming together but most often in their own space. This Thread is episodic, with a compelling ebb and flow that is beautifully shaped to serve Morrison’s text. The opening theme returns throughout the work with a growing and relentless intensity, and after an exhaustive 20 minutes, This Thread concludes with five solo strikes of the chime, symbolizing the historic tradition of the five firehouse bell strikes that were used to summon the firemen to their station.

The final work was, as expected, intense and emotionally challenging. Beyond that, I felt Mark had captured the essence of Morrison’s words in a way I couldn’t have anticipated. Mezzo soprano soloist Marietta Simpson summed it up nicely to me in a message after the performance, saying “The blending of the solo violin, solo voice and orchestra felt to me that we represented the different parts of creation joining together to lament this great tragedy caused by hatred, while looking forward to the day when we can discover and respect the ways in which we are all the same.”

When we realized that September 11th would fall on a Saturday in the coming season, we slated it for the season opener. I knew the sensitive topic would challenge audiences from many perspectives, and to open the season with it added extra pressure. Additionally, the text is not easily absorbed in one reading, let alone while listening to it for the first time being sung with orchestral accompaniment. The solution I settled on was to find a way to integrate Morrison’s text into the program prior to the audiences’ first hearing of Mark’s piece.

We had been developing relationships with the gospel music community in Nashville and had already had one concert that featured a gospel choir. As I searched for the right mix of music to help us enter into Morrison’s text, I felt that the unique energy and passion we had experienced in performance with our new gospel choir could help us celebrate the power of the human spirit for an ultimately uplifting experience.

With a narrator reciting Morrison’s poem in sections throughout the first half, I chose gospel selections that responded to the text—the text that would be heard again in the second half as This Thread. Deborah Roberts, from ABC’s 20/20 program narrated one evening, and Anne Holt, from Nashville’s Channel 2 News on the other. We featured eight gospel vocal soloists on the first half, with the music flowing between the narrations. And I began the program by speaking to the audience with a brief set-up of what was in store for the evening. (Click here to read the full program.)

By the time we began This Thread, the audience had been immersed in Morrison’s text on the first half and prepared to receive the powerful performance of the orchestra with mezzo soloist Marietta Simpson and violin soloist Christian Teal. The audience responded to This Thread first with stunned awe over its sheer power, and then with wild celebration over the success of the performance and Mark’s achievement at setting Morrison’s text so beautifully and reverently. Ultimately, the juxtaposition of the gospel selections on the first half against the classical intensity of the second half combined to create an unexpected synergy that carried the day.

In the expanding dialogue about the future of classical music, and especially new music’s role in attracting and nurturing audiences, I firmly believe that the music we call “classical” can best be advanced with a creative mix of new and traditional works, in whatever style best fits the occasion. This Thread, as the Sackler Prize committee recognized, is an important work by a gifted composer who found a way to bring a voice to the memories of those tragically taken from us before their time. As orchestras search for meaningful ways to use new music to connect with their audiences, certainly This Thread should be considered.

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Paul Gambill

Paul Gambill has thus far commissioned 45 works for orchestra from American composers, several of which can be heard on his recordings for the Warner Brothers, Naxos, Angel, Albany, Compass, and Alabaster labels. He is music director of the Nashville Ballet and was the founder and music director of Orchestra Nashville for 19 years. He was recently appointed music director of the Montpelier Chamber Orchestra in Vermont.

Suzanne Fiol at ISSUE Project Room’s original East 6th Street location, December 2004

On October 5, 2009, Suzanne Fiol, the founder and artistic director of the Brooklyn performance venue ISSUE Project Room, died after a year-long battle with cancer. She was 49 years old. She leaves behind her daughter Sarah, her sister Nancy, her parents Lawrence and Arlene Perlstein, and her partner Anthony Coleman. Known to all as a fiercely passionate advocate, Suzanne’s passing is an utterly profound loss for the experimental arts community. She possessed an insatiable curiosity and nurturing spirit—qualities that sustained ISSUE through various growing pains and the vicissitudes of presenting avant-garde art, and continue to drive its eventual move to a permanent home in downtown Brooklyn.

The fabric of Suzanne’s personality and spirit are woven into every inch of the ISSUE Project Room quilt. Her background outside the field of music as both an esteemed photographer (with works in the permanent collections of The Art Institute of Chicago and The Brooklyn Museum, among others) and a commercial gallerist afforded Suzanne a singular, artist-centric perspective. What ISSUE at times lacked in production materials and funding in its early days on East 6th Street was exponentially made up for with old school hospitality, collegial camaraderie, and genuine respect for the various artistic languages and voices being explored. Like Suzanne, ISSUE successfully straddles the precarious line between challenging aesthetic concepts and a personal connection to the art with a relaxed, inviting demeanor that welcomes novices and initiates alike.

I was aware of ISSUE Project Room fairly early on. Looking at the online performance archive from IPR’s earliest days clarifies how it arrived on my radar. In typical fashion, Suzanne had garnered the support of many preeminent Downtown artists to kick off the space such as Marc Ribot, Elliott Sharp, The Jazz Passengers with Deborah Harry, and Anthony Coleman. I was curating at The Kitchen at that time, and before even attending a show at IPR I sensed the forming of a venue reminiscent of that venerable institution’s beginnings. After spending time there, I did feel the sort of collective, like-minded energy that I imagine existed in the SoHo scene circa 1972. In any case, Suzanne and her staff had successfully created a professional/personal space for people to get to know each other, and I was delighted to be a part of it.

Suzanne with IPR Production Director Zach Layton, January 2008

Personally, over the past six years, I’ve created some of my best work as an artist and curator at ISSUE Project Room, and I owe Suzanne a great deal for the opportunity to bring these projects to life. As she did with so many artists, Suzanne supported my ideas unconditionally and afforded me the time and space to manifest them in any way that I saw fit. As ISSUE’s first Artists-In-Residence during the Spring of 2006, the ensemble Ne(x)tworks found its group voice while presenting works by composers including myself, Joan La Barbara, Kenji Bunch, Cornelius Dufallo, and Julius Eastman. The work we did over three important events led to many future opportunities and a greater profile in the field. In July of 2006, Suzanne took a true leap of faith in agreeing to present two seven-hour performances by choreographer Yoshiko Chuma’s School of Hard Knocks and my trombone septet. The work, Sundown, encompassed IPR’s entire Carroll Street compound, with simultaneous performances inside the famous silo space and on the banks of the Gowanus Canal. It was an incredible weekend of interdisciplinary art making, and it couldn’t have happened anywhere but ISSUE Project Room.

I believe that Suzanne’s steadfast faith in the people and community around her will be her most lasting legacy. From the very start, she wanted ISSUE to be a place for serious artists to experiment, innovate, and push their own boundaries. This attitude is in very short supply in these high-pressure times in which ticket and bar sales seem paramount. Thankfully, Suzanne’s wonderful legacy has an opportunity to carry on with the advent of IPR’s new space at 110 Livingston. It will be a bittersweet triumph for some when the “Carnegie Hall of the Avant-Garde” opens sometime next year, but it will indeed be Suzanne’s triumph. She did all that she could possibly have done to make it a reality, and for that we will all be eternally grateful.

Cornelius Dufallo (left), Suzanne, Yves Dharamraj (right) at IPR’s James Tenney celebration (May 2005)

One of my biggest regrets with her passing is that my 14-month old son Arav will live his life not having known Suzanne. To many in our community she truly was “Mama ISSUE.” She was someone that I hoped he would get to know very well, a beloved extended family member that he could look up to and admire. Her loss is a real tragedy, and one that I may never be able to reconcile.

I believe that Suzanne Fiol the artist, curator, and mother was guided by a true reverence for the sublime. As with many people who spend their lives searching for aesthetic bliss, she could be charmingly impractical and perhaps even maddeningly irascible. But these were forgivable and forgettable peccadilloes: Suzanne is one of the warmest souls I’ve ever met and I will miss her deeply for the rest of my life.

We all love and miss you Suzanne. Rest in peace.

Suzanne, CJM, Curtis Hasselbring, Steve Swell, Peter Zummo, Jacob Garchik, Peter Evans, and Richard Marriott at IPR in October 2006

Leon Kirchner Photo by Lisa Kirchner Courtesy G. Schirmer/AMP

Last week we reported the death of Leon Kirchner who was among the most honored American composers. Kirchner was also an important teacher for many composers. We asked John Adams, who studied with Kirchner at Harvard, and Stanley Silverman, who studied with Kirchner at Tanglewood and Mills, to share their memories.—FJO

Joe Maneri (1927-2009)

Joe Maneri has left us. Those of us who were close to him will need to adjust to life without Joe’s infinitely expressive face, the sound of his voice, and the access we were accustomed to having to his acute mind and compassionate soul. Or, to view it in a more hopeful light, we will now need to find another means of access. The rich gifts Joe gave us through his music will always offer contact of a sort. In fact, one of the most valuable aspects of all great art is how it can connect us with the mind and soul in their highest form, and how in its permanence it is able to keep that mind/soul alive and with us.

It is often the death of an important artist that prompts us finally to go and seek his or her work. In the case of Joe Maneri, there are two bodies of work to explore: his substantial and powerful output as an improvisor, and his smaller, but no less powerful, output as a composer. If you have never heard Joe’s performances as an improviser, go and find them now. His numerous quartet and trio recordings with violinist/violist Mat Maneri (his son), drummer Randy Peterson, and various other artists are available on CD from the ECM, HatArt, Leo, Avant, and Atavistic labels. (Some tracks are available also as mp3s.) In these recordings you will hear a way of producing sound and melody with the saxophone, the clarinet, and the voice like nothing you’ve ever encountered. Microtonality, which so many over the past century had speculated and theoretized about, was something Joe Maneri the improviser simply jumped into because he had to; only in this way could he complete the particular curving shapes and shimmering rhythms that were his musical self.

Which of his recordings to begin with? If you have an appetite for truly wild and unfamiliar territory, why not start with “Number Three,” Joe’s solo alto track on the ECM CD Angles of Repose? Still, you may be shocked by the naked expression here, the twisting of his tone, the way he squeals and cries with his voice through the horn, bending his lines in directions that seem almost forbidden. There is always restraint and focus, though; not once does he abandon the melodic thread. Like the majority of his recorded work, this is an entirely free improvisation, yet it maintains a sense of structure and forward momentum that never falters—a lesson for other aspiring free improvisers.

On the other hand, if you feel that you like “something to hold onto” while you listen, then begin with the familiar old spiritual “Nobody Knows,” on In Full Cry, also an ECM release. Here you hear the sweet, soulful tone of Joe’s clarinet, gently accompanied by Mat, Randy, and bassist John Lockwood, adorning and prodding the pentatonic sad cheerfulness of that tune, more and more, until it’s eventually opened up and its troubled interior is revealed. On that same CD, three other old tunes are translated into this new language: Walter Gross’s 1946 tune “Tenderly,” the spiritual “Motherless Child,” and Ellington’s “Prelude to a Kiss.” On that last tune you will discover Joe Maneri the pianist, another much too well-kept secret. Joe’s presence on the piano is tremendous.

Also on In Full Cry, “Outside the Dance Hall” is a free, “up-tempo” number, and is a great example of the intricate counterpoint that made this quartet legendary. The melodic interplay between father and son is uncanny; each musician seems to respond to the other not after, but at the very same moment a musical phrase is conceived. “Telepathic” is how writer Harvey Pekar once described it. In fact, this is not really musical “response” but the two halves of a single musical gesture, moving in tandem.

If you’re curious to learn how Joe Maneri reached this place as a player, the 1963 recording Paniot’s Nine—released only in 1998 on John Zorn’s Avant label—shows the thrilling start of that path. Early in his musical career, his years spent performing Greek folk music, with its tradition of bent and sliding pitches, had shown Joe an open portal. On “Shift Your Tail,” a Greek “syrto” dance-style tune, we can hear him wandering a little “too far” into that portal, savoring the “wrong notes” he’d become so enchanted with by that time. Here he has set himself free to make something of his own out of this genre, something far beyond what he would have been allowed to do during any regular Greek wedding gig. Joe’s tune “Mountains,” from that same session, has always been a favorite of mine—I heard it on a cassette Joe had way back when I first met him in the late ’80s, and I’ve always felt there is something deeply Greek yet distinctly Joe Maneri about it. The opening figure, played in unison by Joe on tenor and John Beal on bowed bass, has the shape of a mountain itself, and could be the moaning of some mountain creature.

Mountains were in fact a source of inspiration for Joe. In one particularly memorable composition lesson with him, he invoked for me the image of a mountain, or the powerful sensation of being on a mountain; he described to me a day many years earlier that he had spent with his wife Sonja and Mat, still a young boy, on top of a mountain somewhere, just sitting. Joe, who always pushed for larger forms and longer phrases, must have been inspired by the magnitude, solidness, and certainty of mountains, and felt something alive in their awesome presence. On another occasion he described with great excitement the strange giant rock that loomed over Marineo, his parents’ town in Sicily, where he had spent one wonderful summer as a child. Could this powerful image from a time of rare happiness in his childhood have been the origin of his attraction? I know also that after struggling for over a year to find an ending for his piece for soprano and piano And Death Shall Have No Dominion (dedicated to two friends, a mother and daughter, who had committed suicide), it was looking out a window somewhere and gazing at a mountain that finally gave him the psychological nudge he needed, and he finished it in 20 minutes. Then there is the choice of “Coming Down the Mountain” for the title track of one of the quartet’s HatArt CDs; this was most certainly Joe’s descriptive name for the spiritual experience of that performance. Perhaps it can be felt by us in the intense momentum that builds so gradually over 11 minutes, from the hazy, brooding beginning to the furious end.

Joe Maneri’s composed music possesses all of these same basic characteristics: the same soulful voice in the melody, the intricacy of line and counterline, the vastness of form and space, and the momentum. In fact, one of the challenges for performers of his music is to maintain this momentum, the intense forward-moving feeling, often through long silences between phrases and gestures. The primary difference from his improvisations is a predictable one: it is even more disciplined, the structure even more controlled. He uses the same sorts of rhythms that seem to come at you from out of nowhere, and in works from the late ’70s onward, the same wild microtonality, though the individual components of the music seem more measurable to the ear.

But I must pause here, before you get too excited about Joe Maneri’s composed music, and point out that finding it is a complicated matter. Scores and recordings are difficult, though not impossible, to get. Two of them, And Death Shall Have No Dominion and Maranatha, were originally published by GunMar Music and now can be ordered print-on-demand from Schirmer. The remaining works must now be requested from the Boston Microtonal Society, also print-on-demand. Only one recording of a single, short, composed work is commercially available: the brilliant violinist Biliana Voutchkova recorded Joe’s Violin Piece for Gunther Schuller, from 1982, and included it on her CD Faces, which you can order on CDBaby.

And here is where I will use this platform to broadcast a message to the new music community, directed now at performers, ensembles, and concert producers. There is a gap in your repertoire, and as long as it remains there, our collective understanding of the music of the last five decades is incomplete. Make the great effort: seek out the hard-to-obtain scores, schedule the extra rehearsal time, and challenge your audiences to open their minds to this strange, expressive new language. The Boston Microtonal Society includes a work by Joe Maneri on every concert, but this is not enough.

Not that there are a large number of pieces to choose from. A certain psychological suffering persecuted Joe throughout his life, and he also struggled with a learning disability, a kind of dyslexia, that wasn’t clinically recognized until he was in his 60s—much too late. All of this made the process of composing excruciating for him, even though when he performed, the music flowed out of his horn effortlessly. A complete list of his works, as well as a few audio and score samples, can be found on his website, joemaneri.com, but I will list some important ones here, by category. Some are microtonal and some not.

There are two important chamber works. Maranatha (1967), for woodwinds, brass, and percussion, though “atonal,” has all of the heavy, rustic swing and excitement of the Paniot’s Nine recording from four years earlier, including a jerky, speech-like bass clarinet solo that could be straight out of one of Joe’s own improvised solos. Ephphatha (1971), for clarinet, trombone, tuba, and piano, is the first piece in which Joe used microtones—quartertones—though they are mostly used in a coloristic way, to enliven sustained tones with wavering or what he called “frozen glissandi.” There also is a string quartet I have never heard, completed in 1959, written in the mid-century serialist spirit and dedicated to Josef Schmid just after Joe completed ten years of study with him. (Schmid was a former student of Alban Berg, assistant conductor to Alexander Zemlinsky, who had fled Germany to the U.S. with Zemlinsky during the Second World War, and who had many students in New York, including Robert DiDomenica and Angelo Mussolino.)

There is a piece for chorus and two soprano saxophones, Holy Land (1980). This was intended as the introduction to a larger work, but the parts to follow never materialized. Nonetheless, this piece stands on its own, and is a stunningly bold act, a contrapuntal work for chorus in four parts, using 72 equal divisions of the octave. Think of it! And yet as one who has taken part in “decent” student performances and who teaches microtonal ear-training, I have seen glimpses that it is possible. All it takes is a lot of time and practice. Fortunately, in his mercy, Joe used only one word for text, the word “heaven,” and I believe that when a professional chorus one day finally performs the work with the proper amount of work, a truly heavenly sound will be the result.

There are several solo works: Osanj (2004) for viola, his last composed work, dedicated to Sonja; Sharafuddin B Yah-Ya Maneri, Makhdum Ul-Mulk (1993) which has been performed on flute, contrabass, and cello, and Violin Piece for Gunther Schuller which I mentioned before. These are all composed with 72 divisions of the octave. Feast of St. Luke is for quartertone pianos (two hands), and is one of the rare quartertone piano pieces that get beyond the out-of-tune piano sound into something lyrical. There also are three virtuosic serial works for piano from 1957 and 1958, “Rondo,” “Theme and Variations,” and “Pax.”

Metanoia, Joe’s piano concerto, was commissioned by Erich Leinsdorf, then director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, but then abandoned by him after it was completed in 1963, perhaps because of its difficulty. It was finally performed by the superb Rebecca LaBrecque with the American Composer’s Orchestra in 1985, but other than that this momentous, formidable piece has collected dust on the shelf in Joe Maneri’s closet ever since.

There are three pieces for soprano. And Death Shall Have No Dominion (1977) on the famous poem by Dylan Thomas, uses microtones in the vocal part only, in a manner similar to that of Ephphatha. If you can make your way up to the Northwest corner of Massachusetts on September 12, you can hear a performance of this hair-raising work by Jennifer Ashe and Barbara Lieurance. (This will be part of a NotaRiotous concert at Williams College.)

Kohtlyn (2000) and Oulge Urngt (2001), both for soprano and tenor saxophone, use 72 equal divisions of the octave. These songs feature another of Joe’s innovations, from the last decade of his life—the use of his own written and spoken “language.” Joe filled notebooks with poetry he wrote using words—an entire vocabulary—of his own creation, and he read these to friends and at concerts. The meaning of his words was not translatable into other languages, but they did have meaning; they were not mere phonemes. They had meaning in the same sense that music has meaning, though they were mostly spoken, as poetry is spoken. This language, with its highly nuanced vowels and tongue-twisted consonants, seems so perfectly suited to the special microtonal musical language he also invented. You can hear Joe reciting poems in his own language on tracks 1, 7, and 14 of the ECM CD Tales of Rohnlief—”Rohnlief,” “Flaull Clon Sleare,” and “Pilvetslednah.”

“To end, or not to end?” This is the title of another Joe Maneri improvisation, the last track on Coming Down the Mountain, and I think of it now because I don’t know how to end this essay on my former mentor. Joe himself never wanted to end anything—concerts, lessons, visits with friends, life. I could keep on remembering more things about Joe and his music, and writing away, because I intend for the music world to turn its head and listen to this man on the mountain.

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Julia Werntz Photo by Michele Macrakis

Composer Julia Werntz lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her husband, jazz pianist Pandelis Karayorgis, and their daughter Anna. Since the mid ’90s her music, mostly chamber pieces, has been almost exclusively microtonal. Her music has been performed around the Northeastern United States and Europe, and may be heard, together with works by composer John Mallia, on the CD All In Your Mind (Capstone Records).