Category: Field Reports

Composers, performers, administrators, and other fans of contemporary American music gathered together on May 7, 2007, for the 67th Annual Meeting and 42nd Award Ceremony of the American Music Center. The ceremony, which took place at the Chelsea Art Museum in New York City, opened with a performance of original music by guitarist Dominic Frasca. Following addresses by AMC Board Chair Augusta Read Thomas, Board President James Undercofler, Treasurer Corey Field, and AMC CEO Joanne Hubbard Cossa, the AMC’s Letter of Distinction was presented to composers T. J. Anderson and John Corigliano, and Ralph N. Jackson, assistant vice president of classical music relations at BMI and president of the BMI Foundation, Inc. In addition, a Trailblazer Award was presented to the new music ensemble eighth blackbird.

– FJO

An attentive audience awaits the AMC Annual Awards Ceremony. Photo © 2007 Ray Tamarra

Joanne Hubbard Cossa, AMC’s CEO, addresses the audience. Photo © 2007 Ray Tamarra

Dominic Frasca entertains the crowd. Photo © 2007 Ray Tamarra

AMC First Vice President Barbara Petersen, awardee T. J. Anderson, Board Chair Augusta Read Thomas, and awardee Ralph Jackson (Pictured from left to right). Photo © 2007 Ray Tamarra

Composer conclave: AMC Honoree John Corigliano and Jennifer Higdon with Paul Moravec. Photo © 2007 Ray Tamarra

Four blackbirds are in town to pick up the AMC Trailblazer Award (from left to right: Lisa Kaplan, Tim Munro, Matthew Albert, and Michael Maccaferri). Photo © 2007 Ray Tamarra

Like people, conferences have their own personalities—public personas that take shape through programs of panels and presentations—but also private sides that reveal themselves more fully in hallway conversations, impromptu lunches, and after hours parties. If the Experience Music Project (EMP) Pop Conference’s recent meeting in Seattle (April 19-22) provides a reasonably accurate impression of its character, the precocious six year old acts its age: playful, intellectually curious, receptive to new ideas, and still growing. A bookish, nerdy-but-cool adolescent sporting square glasses and skinny jeans, EMP is the Elvis Costello of conferences.

Jonathan Lethem delivers the conference keynote address, “Collapsing Distance: The Love-Song of the Wanna-Be, or, Fannish Auteur.” Photo by Joe Mabel

That image has more than a little to do with the fact that pop journalists and critics represented the majority of this year’s approximately 150 attendees, who also included a large percentage of music academics—well-heeled graduate students and post-docs in somewhat greater numbers than junior and senior ranking profs. Few musicians participated, aside from those who double in one of the aforementioned categories, nor did many music industry types. There were no performances, no conference exhibits. Instead of a celebrity rocker or record label exec, noted novelist and sometime music writer Jonathan Lethem gave the keynote, “Collapsing Distance: The Love-Song of the Wanna-Be, or, Fannish Auteur.” Rhapsody and Real Networks counted among the handful of conference sponsors that made free admission possible, but their understated presence impacted the overall vibe of the gathering very little.

While the small number of attendees lent the conference an intimacy, the blend made for a congenial, low B.S., nearly hype-free convergence of music enthusiasts that felt tight-knit without being exclusive or cliquish. Instead of the pervasive high-octane networking encountered at CMJ (or the conferences of the American Musicological Society, Society for Ethnomusicology, International Association of Jazz Education, and Chamber Music America, for that matter), budding EMP relationships seem less effected by the desire for professional expediency and an individual’s place in the pecking order. Being there is unlikely to provide quantifiable results in terms of landing more freelance work, getting tenure, or scoring a job at a nicer college, which places the focus of interaction squarely on intellectual interests. A core constituency attends year after year, but conversations between regulars and newcomers started easily as attendees chowed down on free continental breakfast in the lobby, hung out at the lone book table, or grabbed lunch in the shadow of the Space Needle at the Seattle Center next door.

(L to R) Princeton English & African-American studies faculty member Daphne Brooks, critic Robert Christgau (Rolling Stone, ex-Village Voice), and Los Angeles Times culture critic Ann Powers at 2007 Pop Conference, Experience Music Project, Seattle, Washington. Photo by Joe Mabel

Perhaps it takes co-mingling individuals from different spheres of intellectual enterprise to create a healthier, less hierarchical environment for exchange. But thanks also go to EMP’s psychic parents, conference organizer Eric Weisbard, a former editor at the Village Voice and Spin, and program committee member Ann Powers, chief pop critic at the L.A. Times and ebullient spirit. These two appeared to be everywhere: moderating panels, asking questions from the audience, leading lunchtime discussions, chatting informally with old and new acquaintances, and generally meeting and greeting those present. From the outset, they established a collegial tone and created a welcoming atmosphere. Instead of adopting a traditional format for the conference’s closing panel on Sunday afternoon, “The Future of Thinking About Music for a Living,” Weisbard conducted it more like a town meeting: chairs arranged in a circle large enough to accommodate around a hundred people, whose lively and productive dialogue he orchestrated. After some talk about the successes of the conference and where there might be room for improvement, discussion touched on such topics as writers’ intellectual property rights, the underexploited potential of the academy to support writers, and the migration of work to the web. Pitchfork news editor Amy Phillips’ made the provocative assertion that even webzines failed to reach many of today’s young readers, who get most of their information from message boards. The future of music journalism? Hope not.

Having four simultaneous sessions at any given time, an expansion of last year’s three, made Weisbard and Powers’ omnipresence an even greater feat. This year’s loosely defined theme, “Waking Up from History: Music, Time, and Place,” generated a wide range of panels with titles like “Urban Dance Squads,” “A Seventies Moment,” “Indieland,” “Breaks in Time: Rethinking Hip-Hop Roots,” and “Pazz & Jop Live!”

Audience for a talk in the EMP Learning Lab. Photo by Joe Mabel

The individual papers varied in style and in strength—some more journalistic in approach, others more scholarly, irrespective of their quality. On the “Year Zeros” panel, poet Joshua Clover ruminated on 1989 and its “Winds of Change,” while Caroline Polk O’Meara used the Bush-Tetras’s “Too Many Creeps” to map early 1980s New York. An exploration of “Suburban Soundscapes” included Patricia Jeehyun Ahn’s analysis of music’s role in the hit show The O. C. and its representations of racial diversity. Between Daphne Carr’s exegesis on the Hot Topic chain in suburban malls and Erica Easley’s history of concert T-shirts, the panel on iconography revealed much about clothing and identity, whether or not it provided viable fashion tips. “Pazz & Jop Live!,” a conference highlight, started off with Robert Christgau speaking out on his firing from the Village Voice and the fate of his respected poll, followed by Princeton professor Daphne Brooks’ poetic exploration of the band TV on the Radio, and closed with Tim Quirk’s predictions about future listening habits as based on Rhapsody’s subscription model. (He is Rhapsody’s vice president of music content and programming.)

The panel topics also went well beyond “pop music” or “popular music,” however one might define it. Others included “Jazz Journeys,” “Forks in the Folkways,” and “Space, Place, and Race in Country Music.” A moving lunchtime session paid tribute the career of culture critic Ellen Willis. The University of Washington, a conference sponsor, hosted an evening discussion between Jeff Chang, author of the award winning Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation, and Gaye T. Johnson, faculty in the Black Studies Department at UC Santa Barbara, titled: “Made It Funky: New Orleans, James Brown, and the Foundations and Futures of U.S. Pop Music.” The fate of New Orleans and its musical culture remained a theme throughout the three days.

Academics might find EMP lightweight in terms of its theoretical rigor—nothing there shook the foundations of scholarship—while journalists and critics might rightly counter that the academic tone of many papers and the thick critical studies vocabulary that they tend to employ hinders their ready comprehension. Nonetheless, this conference provides a welcome venue for journalists and critics to reflect on their favorite subjects outside the daily grind and to work out long term projects in front of an audience of dedicated researchers, while also serving as a place where academics can catch up on current pop and media trends and benefit from the knowledge of insiders. The specifics may change year after year, but EMP is a precious and incredibly unique young hybrid, an open space for exchange between the two primary groups who think and write about music for a living.

On Saturday, March 24, 2007, composers Jennifer Stasack, T.J. Anderson, Stephen Jaffe, Rodney Waschka, and myself were joined by two-dozen colleagues gathered to talk about the state of music in society at the National Humanities Center in lovely Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. Billed as one of eight pre-symposium events across the country leading towards Tanglewood II, a 40th anniversary congress of the nation’s leading music professionals gathering in the Berkshires in Summer 2007, the North Carolina event paralleled similar gatherings at UCLA, Columbia, Minnesota, and other centers of music.

When Tony Palmer, national co-chair of the Tanglewood II symposium, called me around Christmas, he recounted a history I didn’t know. In 1967, the Tanglewood Symposium, a collection of 34 professionals, met in the Massachusetts Berkshires and examined music in American society. Tanglewood II will again meet in the Berkshires this summer with an international rostrum of educators and presenters, scholars and composers to examine how far we’ve come and where we have yet to go.

As Tony explained it, eight campuses across the country were giving pre-symposium events and one of the larger East Coast institutions had “hit a snag”: could North Carolina State host this? I explained to Tony that while NC State was big—a campus of 32,000 and a music department (which I began chairing only three years ago) that serviced nearly 2,000 of those students every year in 80-plus academic courses and 18 ensembles—we have no music major!

It was then that Tony told me the subject he needed covered: “The Value of Music in Society.” “Sign us up,” I said, and suddenly NC State got thrust into the Big Leagues. I immediately turned to my colleague, ethnomusicologist, and the closest to a musical bon vivant that exists in the world, Jonathan Kramer, to coordinate the effort. After New Years, Jonathan and I drafted the letter, wrote the news release, fashioned a tasty quote from Tony, and hit the ground running. Kramer contacted the National Humanities Center in Research Triangle Park—equidistant from the three powerhouse schools of the region, Duke, Chapel Hill, and NC State—and the Humanities Center leapt at the chance to bring us all together.

March 24 arrived and we anticipated a couple dozen participants—but boy did they have something to say! Bill McManus from Boston University welcomed the gathered from the national Tanglewood office and with that, the NASCAR checkered flag came down, starting the race. The talks proceeded throughout the day—a mixture of prepared papers and extemporaneous musings.

Jonathan Kramer, the event coordinator, punctuated every hour with the sounds of world music and readings. Scientist Patricia Gray from UNCG’s BioMusic offered response right away, offering that lab mice sing thirds but in the wild sing octaves and fifths—the physiological preference for the grounding of the overtone series. References to harmonizing mice raised their furry heads the rest of the day!

The first paper of the day was perhaps the best—when does that happen? Composer Rodney Waschka from NC State brought laughs early in the proceedings with his “Six Roles of Music in Society.” In short, music supports: advertising, religion, group identification, mating, clan history, protest. What can music do? He concludes: Do no harm. Try to be charming. Use craftsmanship to do good.

I followed Waschka—a tough act—by introducing five borrowed philosophical words and a method, repeating what Wittgenstein always said, “Art shows us the way we should live our lives.” My words? Hetereological (the study of music is not musical), Hermeneutic (interpretation is all), Qualia (we should study the phenomenology of experience), Praxis (the application of theory in experience), Maieutic (the Socratic method of questioning). NC State began with a good one-two punch, but yeah, I, too, think Waschka’s was better.

After the break and a Kramer video of New Orleans funeral music, the second session began with composer Jennifer Stasack extemporizing on one’s own musical culture. She grew up in Hawaii and thought herself Japanese as a child; her first music was Hawaiian chant. Only once her education was completed did she reconnect with her ethno roots and incorporate that into the college curriculum.

After three composers, musicologist Evan Bonds from Chapel Hill spoke of Orpheus going to hell. Music is what moves things to happen, he told us. In Monteverdi, it is the new form of recitative that causes things to happen. But in the original tale from Ovid, Orpheus lacks faith and turns around to look; even Orpheus doesn’t believe in music’s power. Music is very much like a religion, he concluded. We should have more faith in the power of music.

With another Kramer tangent into World Music, composer T.J. Anderson, the dean of African-American composers who retired from Tufts to Chapel Hill fifteen years ago, spoke up passionately about the divergences of music in America. “Start in your own backyard and work out to the world,” Anderson cautioned. “Don’t look outside your community. Link that diversity of cultures to your music.” It was an America First argument for music.

Ciompi Quartet cellist Fred Raimi thanked Evan Bonds for being emotional, stating that if was often hard to find the common ground between performance and musicology. “We’re all listeners,” Bonds responded.

Kramer then played a snippet of an archival YouTube video of Glenn Gould and Leonard Rose to preface Raimi’s comments. Rose once told Raimi, long ago at the latter’s audition into Juilliard, “You’re one fucked up cellist,” and thus Raimi began his talk illustrating the question posed with three musican-idols “doing the right thing through music”: two cellists—Casals and Rostropovich—and the singer Paul Robeson.

Patricia Gray followed Raimi. Senior research scientist of biomusic in the UNCG Music Research Institute, Gray brought a refreshing scientific slant to the day’s proceedings, beginning with looking at definitions of society and how we tend to focus on the human aspects, as opposed to animals. “Biomusic” Gray defined as linkages between musical sounds in all species, musical sounds as non-verbal communication, as well as the double-edged sword of the music of nature and the nature of music. “Both science and the arts have to inform the whole,” she repeated.

Gray showed video of the Bonobos of The Great Ape Trust of Iowa in Des Moines who improvise a D dorian melody over a drone provided on the video by pop musician Peter Gabriel. As a result of this example, Gray wants to define Music in ways that can incorporate apes, including getting a Bonobo an ASCAP affiliation. Others have gotten the association for less, some of us note, unconvinced by what we saw; others in attendance are impressed by the curiosity displayed. Gray concludes by pointing out current research on music and nanotechnology, brain, wellness, evolution, ecology, law, culture and philosophy.

After a splendid lunch provided by the National Humanities Center kitchen, we were back with a special session on textbooks. Textbooks, we were told by Prentice Hall editor Richard Carlin, can be paradigm-shifters but “you guys need to encourage students to read more.” A plea more than a presentation, but his lament fell more on the choir than converts.

Young musicologist Andy Flory, fresh from his doctorate, discussed the disciplines in the way of “intra” versus “inter” from a musicological perspective. “Interdisciplinarity has been a part of the American Musicological Society since its founding in the early 30s,” he told us. While the Society for Ethnomusicology “defines itself as multidisciplinary.” Post-Musicology is the future, he thinks: the unification of the disciplines.

The final Kramer connector was perhaps the most effective, echoing the Waschkian “group identification” mode in a way that proved his point that music can be used for harm: military cadence songs which use music to inure soldiers to violence. Frightening!

Session Three, and the final stretch began with Victor Hebert of Fayetteville State, the first of four to speak to the preparation of musicians. “How do we connect with our communities?” he asked us, and no one had a satisfactory answer.

W.E.B. DuBois talked of the Talented Ten in his The Souls of Black Folk. Well, Jim Ketch of Chapel Hill spoke of the talented two percent that ever do anything with their music education. Many of us, this author included, have always believed that only ten percent of our students in graduate schools should be there. Ketch produced evidence that the number is far smaller. But, he reminded, “we are educating both professionals and future patrons,” ending his presentation with some exciting developments in entrepreneurship and music taking place at UNC-Chapel Hill.

Diane Phoenix-Neal, also of Fayetteville State, continued the dialogue on preparation of musicians with her talk on the importance of interdisciplinary arts. “Art is a catalyst for critical thinking” was her primary topic, and, she tells us, we must start younger with our students.

Composer Stephen Jaffe of Duke closed the day with a personal history of growing up in the shadow of Tanglewood itself: early memories of attending performances and his first experience with new music and the Ivory Tower. Separate from “that rarefied air,” he questioned, bringing it home, “what of public schools, universities, and symphony orchestras preparing young musicians?” Creating places for new music to be heard and assimilating technological change were two successes he felt from the last forty years.

But, he warned, technology should be a part of an education and technology that fits the formalities and shaped by it (“the computer made me do it” syndrome). But “a little of this and a little of that won’t get us there.” The fellows who inhabit the offices of the National Humanities Center, Stephen posited, could easily name three contemporary authors, and three contemporary architects, if we put the question to them, but would be hard pressed to recognize the names of our contemporary composers. We are still not in the nation’s consciousness. His point hit home as the perfect punctuation to a great day.

The gathered rose and shook hands, the videographer cut the lights and assembled the tapes that will go to the national Tanglewood II symposium in June, and we, at NC State, felt we had done a good thing—made a good start—in bringing neighbors together to talk one Saturday in the North Carolina woods about the future of music and its value to society.

***

J. Mark Scearce

J. Mark Scearce, Director of the Music Department at NC State, is the composer of sixty instrumental works and over a hundred text settings. He has won five national/international music competitions, and is the recipient of five advanced degrees in music and philosophy. His music has been commercial recorded for the Delos, Warner Bros, Capstone, Centaur, and Equilibrium labels

“Without songs you don’t really have a culture. It’s a tie, a connection to every living thing—man’s power of growth and movement, the ability to think, to will, and to bring to pass. This life-force was always thought of as sacred, powerful. To it a name was given—in the Omaha tongue it was called Wakon’da.”

– Dennis Hasting’s notes in Omaha Indian Music:
Historical Recordings from the Fletcher/La Flesche Collection,
eds. Dorothy Sara Lee and Maria La Vigna.
(Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1985.)

Eugene Perry as Justin in the Prologue of Wakonda’s Dream Photo by Jim Scholz, courtesy Opera Omaha

Despite my familiarity with an emerging American opera that tangles with contemporary history, Anthony Davis’s Wakonda’s Dream, which received its premiere last month at Opera Omaha, still surprises me. It ventures into virgin territory, even by Davis’s push-the-envelope standards. (Davis’s previous works include X, based on the life of Malcolm X, and Tania, inspired by the abduction of Patty Hearst.)

Wakonda’s Dream delves into the fractured life of a contemporary Native American family, the Labells, who are emotionally torn by social prejudices and simultaneously shadowed by the memories of a tortuous Native American history. The opening of the second act of Wakonda’s Dream is especially disquieting. As the curtain rises, our psycho-sonic gaze, which until this point fixed on the familial tensions of the Labell family, depicted in a sometimes traditional operatic style, abruptly shifts to an icon of urban resistance, Hip-hop, which begins the downward spiral of Act 2. The Hip-hop number was composed by Davis but inspired by Native American reservation recordings and is layered atop Davis’s rich orchestral groove and an electronic soundscape improvised by Earl Howard:

A coyote’s a dog without a name.
Without a pack to share his shame.

The vocals are performed by several Native American dancers—not singers—and the sound is of a bruised and unsophisticated timbre—a moment of raw realism that foreshadows the death of the Labell’s young son, Jason.

Wakonda’s Dream, which features a libretto by Yusef Komunyakaa, explores the polymorphous tensions that arise within contemporary Ponca society more than a century after the 1879 trial of Standing Bear, which serves as a conceptual backdrop to the main story. The difficulties of maintaining a viable Native American social identity while also asserting the rights of American citizenship play out among the LaBell family: the father, Justin, the mother, Delores, and Jason, whose constant visions of Standing Bear plague the family and ultimately bring about Jason’s accidental and early death.

Standing Bear’s trial is a little-discussed event in American history, though it seems well-known to Native Americans residing in and around Omaha. In 1876, the U.S. government, after mistakenly selling Ponca land to the Lakota Indians, moved the Poncas to Indian Territory (in present-day Oklahoma)—in what is referred to as the “Ponca Trail of Tears.” In that year, as conditions worsened, a group of thirty tribesmen including Standing Bear attempted to return home to the Niobrara River, but were intercepted and arrested by U.S. soldiers. Standing Bear petitioned the court. And while the government claimed that an Indian was not a person so could not bring suit, Judge Dundy, in a surprise ruling, argued that “an Indian is a person within the meaning of the law.” He issued a writ of habeas corpus and Standing Bear was allowed to return home. The trial was a watershed in the fight for civil rights that would continue for Native Americans throughout the twentieth century—but also a harbinger of the ongoing battle to maintain a Native American identity and a Native American land as the push for assimilation steadily increased.

Arnold Rawls as Standing Bear in Wakonda’s Dream Photo by Jim Scholz, courtesy Opera Omaha

General Director of Opera Omaha, Joan Desens, recalls that the silence around this history was a motivating factor in her five-year collaboration on Wakonda’s Dream. In fact, Desens took over the project from her predecessor Jane Hill in 2002 and remembers that she had not heard of these events prior to the commission: “I was touched by the fact that I didn’t know this about American history…a step recognizing American Indians as human beings and the fact that we live in a country that ever could have thought that Indians are not human beings is a shocking fact.” The opera was originally, she says, to be a documentary of the trial’s history, but the end result is more a reflection on that history through the twenty-first-century perspective of the Labell family.

Hip-hop, in the context of Wakonda’s Dream, seems the perfect outlet for reservation youth still beleaguered by racism. (Indeed, Native American hip-hop is currently surging on reservations.) To be sure, Davis, throughout his opera career, has engaged these intricate intersections between social silencing and music. X, for example, takes another Omaha native, Malcolm X, and the sovereignty of African Americans, as a point of departure. Malcolm’s power to make song emerges alongside his transformation into an Islamic leader. It is Malcolm X’s enforced social silence that motivates the opera thematically and musically, from beginning to end.

However, while Wakonda’s Dream is also a sonic space for engaging racism, it is only in rare moments (like the hip-hop number) a space for obliterating the silence that racism produces. Davis acknowledges this key distinction between protagonists: “Justin goes to some ugly places that in X I couldn’t really let Malcolm go to. This is much more about the despair and the loss.” Certainly Native Americans, in their prolonged fight for civil rights, have often remained barely visible. So while Malcolm’s voice emerges as epic in X, it is only in the wake of the accidental shooting of Jason Labell in Wakonda’s Dream that Justin’s Indian brothers fill in the gaping silence: In the prologue, a Native American honor dance surrounds the grieving father and calls the opera to an end. Justin’s final words, in this case, are worth dwelling on: “Is it too late for us? Is it too late for me?” underscores the contemporary predicament of Native American peoples as a sometimes silent minority in post-civil rights America.

If Wakonda’s Dream highlights a contemporary and enduring social politics, it may also dream, at least musically, of the future. The score is not postmodern, pastiche, or pageantry, but rather a complex fabric of orchestral funk grooves, electronically produced soundscapes, jazz improvisations, rich choruses and sensitive vocal writing in a sometimes classic operatic style. Disparate elements share sonic space, are sometimes layered one on top of the other, or occasionally delve off in different directions: music is used here as a space for integration, perhaps, but not as a social metaphor for assimilation or preservation.

What is largely absent in the opera is Ponca music. The Hip-hop number and honor dance stand at either end of Act 2 in gorgeous symmetry: the past and present, the young and old. But the lack of additional Native American musics is intentional. Davis spoke passionately about capturing the emotional life of the Ponca story, without using music to reference Native Americans directly: “I was worried about not trying to appropriate it in obvious ways—in ways that one would expect,” says Davis. “I wanted to make sure that music in the opera had a kind of integrity in and of itself.” The Native American community in Omaha, Davis says, feels that the opera “is telling their story”: “We took very seriously their spiritual world—not as something exotic… A lot of times Native Americans are seen only important as the past.”

Many of us have witnessed, in over-abundance, the problematic nature of staging ethnic identities—operas about Chinese, Egyptians, Ethiopians, Turks, Japanese, Brazilians, and even several about American Indians, in which ideas about “authenticity” and “exoticism” collide

“Coyote Dance” with Will Ferguson and Trees, from Act 2 of Wakonda’s Dream Photo by Jim Scholz, courtesy Opera Omaha

in unfortunate ways. Wakonda’s Dream is, fortunately, not a paean to Indian otherness. It may coincide with what Charles Trimble, who served as a Native American advisor to the production, refers to as a “rebirth or resurgence in a faith in Indianness.” But it does so alongside that resurgence without claims to authenticity. Wakonda’s collaborators uniformly understand the opera as a drama that speaks across cultures, and that, if at all political, only because it has served as a catalyst for drawing communities together.

The reception of this opera would seem to prove them right. The premiere of the opera at Omaha’s historic Orpheum Theater followed a three-month festival of Native American art, poetry, lectures, and dance. The audience was incredibly diverse at the performance I attended (March 11)—and Native Americans were prominently and proudly in attendance at all three performances. In fact, Davis said that on the opening night of the run (March 7, 2007), Native Americans greeted the curtain call with standing ovations and traditional warrior cries.

In February 2007, in a lecture delivered at the University of Richmond (where I work), Anthony Davis emphasized that his work is culturally and politically relevant—that it has something to say about the ways in which our collective social consciousness in America continues to be governed by obdurate, if random, boundaries surrounding identity. He was referring at that time to earlier works: Amistad, Tania, and X. But his latest opera is significant, and unique, within this oeuvre. With Wakonda’s Dream, Davis has created a kind of community opera that has particular resonance within the Omaha community but that is bound to have a broader, perhaps international impact in the future.

***

Ruth Longobardi

Ruth Sara Longobardi is assistant professor of music at the University of Richmond. She is currently working on a book about American icons and contemporary American opera entitled, Representing and Re-Producing the Real in Turn-of-the-Millennium America: Opera, Documentary, and Spaces Between.

Richard Salter (center) as The Magistrate in Austin Lyric Opera’s production of Philip Glass’s Waiting for the Barbarians Photo by Ken Howard

Philip Glass’s Waiting for the Barbarians portrays pointless torture, executions without justice, futile interrogation, and a lost war on terror. Staging its U.S. premiere in Austin, Texas, might seem like a left hook aimed at the jaw of Bush Country—except that there’s little disagreement with its message in this cosmopolitan university town.

True, the setting is a never-named generic country that, if anything, superficially resembles the South Africa of J.M. Coetzee, the Nobel laureate whose 1980 novel formed the basis for the libretto (and who once taught at UT-Austin). But, in adapting that story for the operatic stage, Glass and librettist Christopher Hampton make obvious reference to the Global War on Terror, while aiming at universal truths. The parallels to our own time are ominous, and obvious: the frontier threatened by seldom-seen “barbarians” who, when captured, are subjected to fruitless interrogations and sadistic tortures; the town’s freedom submerged to the needs of a single-minded security force; the folly that inevitably results in a lost cause.

The Austin Lyric Opera have staged Barbarians with gauzy sets in which rising and seething fabrics become a landscape with a personality of its own, seeming to dance to the arpeggiated rhythms of Glass’s flowing string and wind parts. At one point, a veil of cloth stands between the magistrate and the torturers, rendering the latter unreal, like ghosts.

The abstractness of setting and universality of action and the theme of a decent person struck down by merciless power claiming righteousness, brought to mind Orff’s Antigonae, which was staged by the UT Opera Theatre elsewhere on campus in 2002. The contrasts help to point out how Glass’s oeuvre continues to differ from Modern forebears. By our contemporary American standards, Orff’s court of Thebes was the scene of high melodrama, “operatic” in the vernacular sense. In the Barbarians’ unnamed frontier town, we instead glimpse the banality of evil. Orff’s piece relies on German bombast, both in its declamatory, epic dialog and in its massive instrumental underpinnings. (The score calls for nine pianos but the 2002 production made do with three.) Glass’ music, on the other hand, is understated, perhaps to a fault. His approach to dialog closely mimics the rhythms of natural speech, yielding little to ornamentation and other tricks of classic vocal music.

Austin Lyric Opera’s production of Philip Glass’s Waiting for the Barbarians Photo by Ken Howard

Neither Glass nor Coetzee is a tragedian. Both prefer to evoke pity rather than terror. For Coetzee, eroticism is piqued and humanized by compassion. In Barbarians, The Magistrate tenderly bathes a barbarian woman onstage, and the nudity is more innocent than erotic. Yet The Magistrate’s fascination with her becomes romantic and erotic as well as rehabilitative—and exploitative. His supposed treason for “consorting with the enemy” becomes the excuse for his own imprisonment, humiliation, and torture, after which he comes to know in his flesh the suffering that so fascinated yet repelled him in the broken female Other. Yet he finds no new insight; as a man of compassion he is as incredulous of human cruelty and as unimpressed by the militant demands of imperialism as when the opera began.

Within the musical history of Philip Glass, it is now tempting to see his Orion as a last joyful effusion of the 20th century, and Barbarians as the first dark episode in an evolving soundtrack to torture, war, and authoritarianism in the 21st.

Much of the buzz among those waiting in the interminable line for cocktails at intermission was pleasant surprise that “This isn’t like Einstein on the Beach.” Only a small minority were unpleasantly surprised by Barbarians‘ conventional story line with developed characters and a realistic plot. After all, it was well advertised as an adaptation of a novel. If, say, Richard Strauss might find Einstein or 1000 Airplanes on the Roof a bizarre evolution of what he knew as opera, Barbarians would present no such challenge to the composer of Salome.

Yet, in other ways—especially its orchestration, at once (paradoxically) lush and austere—Barbarians marks a return to the Glass of Koyaanisqatsi. There are the wavelike arpeggiations, repetitive but not literally repeating the identical pattern. There is the patient elaboration of a sonic texture around an unyielding, drone-like tonal center till it reaches a climax that is inevitable yet gentle and restrained.

Restraint is evident in the vocal parts as well. Hampton’s dialog exhibits a Shepardesque talent for plain and idiomatic yet poignant everyday English. Thanks to the declamatory singing style and a score light on ornamentation, nearly all the dialog would have been easy to follow even without the prominent surtitles. There is an overwhelming reliance on recitative, and few arias. (One occurs by dramatic necessity when The Magistrate finds himself in solitary confinement and is thus forced to solo.) Choruses often consist of non-word vocalizations, or the mindless repetition of catchphrases by army personnel brainwashed into goons.

The plot naturally calls for a largely male cast. Countering the tradition of male lead as tenor, Richard Salter as the Magistrate is a stunning baritone; his nemesis Eugene Perry as Colonel Joll sinks even deeper as a baritone-bass. This bottom-feeding approach to male singing helps to accentuate the grim and violent subject matter. When we first hear the wail (in pain) of mezzo Adriana Zabala as The Barbarian Girl, the sudden intrusion of high-pitched female singing adds a welcome but rare dramatic contrast to a score that effectively, but depressingly, complements Coetzee’s grim tale. Salter in particular drew shouts of “Bravo!” for his aplomb in executing what must have been an exhausting role; Perry also drew adulation (and a few hisses for the authenticity of his evil) and, in addition to Zarbala, Georgia Pickett (soprano) stood out as the cook.

Gone are the days when the premiere of an Aïda or, for that matter, an Oklahoma! would have their audience streaming out of the theater humming a signature tune. But we should not mourn the disappearance of that ultimately guilty pleasure. In its place we have an opera capable of engaging the nonspecialist, the middle American who loves theater.

***

Lindsey Eck is a composer, musician, writer, and editor who lives in rural Texas near Austin. His Web site is The Corner Oak.

Robert Honstein

Welcome to Austin, Texas, “Live Music Capital of the World.” Or so claims the conveniently placed eye-level placard that greets weary travelers as they deplane at Austin’s Bergstrom Airport. More than just tourist propaganda, “Live Music Capital of the World” is indeed the city-sanctioned moniker for the Lone Star state’s illustrious capital. Known for the long-running PBS program Austin City Limits, the massive city-wide music industry festival/band bonanza South by Southwest, and a host of luminous musical personalities ranging from Willie Nelson to Stevie Ray Vaughn, Austin is a city overflowing with musical bounty. But in the sea of hipster indie bands, wayward singer-songwriters, grizzled blues men, and hardened rockers, that thing we call new music has sometimes been hard to find.

In the face of the cultural behemoth that is Austin’s bar/club scene, it has been difficult for new music advocates to carve out a niche for themselves. Ask most unsuspecting Austinites about classical music, let alone new music, and they would be hard pressed to mention anything other than the local symphony, opera, and possibly one of the many University of Texas ensembles. However, in the last five or six years things have started to change. Challenging norms of concert music presentation and programming, a handful of dedicated composers, performers, and promoters have succeeded in building a small but vibrant new music community, grabbing the attention of the wider Austin arts scene along the way.

The Establishment

Fortunately, even within Austin’s established classical music institutions, today one need not look quite so hard to find exciting new music. Founded in 1986, the Austin Lyric Opera in its last five seasons has produced operas by Andre Previn (A Streetcar Named Desire), Carlisle Floyd (Cold Sassy Tree), and Jake Heggie (Dead Man Walking). This year the ALO will present the American premiere of Philip Glass’ Waiting for the Barbarians, an opera based on the novel by JM Coetzee, himself a UT graduate and former UT professor. Similarly, the Austin Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Peter Bay, has ramped up its contemporary offerings, recently featuring performances of works by Kevin Puts, Chris Theofanidis, and Joseph Schwantner.

Of Austin’s many choral ensembles, the excellent chamber choir, Conspirare, has shown a consistent commitment to new music. Led by Craig Hella Johnson, Conspirare—whose latest recording, Requiem, received two Grammy nominations—has performed and recorded works by a host of contemporary composers, including, among others, Daniel-LeSur, Eric Whitacre, John Corigliano, Veljo Tormis, Paul Crabtree, and UT composers Donald Grantham and Dan Welcher. Recipient of a 2006 NEA American Masterpieces grant, Conspirare will host a major choral festival in January 2007, featuring collaborations between six Texas choirs and the premieres of new works by Stephen Paulus and John Muehleisen.

Tower Music: The UT Scene

Providing the Austin musical community with a steady stream of well-trained and adventurous young musicians, UT’s School of Music has always played a central role in the city’s classical scene, with many local composers and performers having at one point or another passed through the school’s doors. Home to an impressive composition department, led by faculty composers Dan Welcher, Donald Grantham, Russell Pinkston, and Yevgeniy Sharlat, the school has also been a reliable source for contemporary classical music performances.

John Corigliano in rehearsal for the premiere of third symphony, Circus Maximus, at the University of Texas. Photo courtesy of the School of Music, University of Texas.

UT’s new music ensemble, a cohort of up to sixteen musicians led by Dan Welcher, performs six concerts a year featuring works by prominent contemporary composers along side those of UT students. Jet-setting composers regularly pass through, receiving performances of their works by the New Music Ensemble, and occasionally the UT Symphony and Wind ensemble.

Along with the new music ensemble, the Wind Ensemble regularly presents concerts featuring 20th- and 21st-century works. Under the direction of Jerry Junkin, the ensemble frequently commissions new pieces, including recent world premieres of works by John Corigliano, Michael Daugherty, and UT faculty composers Donald Grantham and Dan Welcher.

For Austin new music fans, the Corigliano premiere was a particularly gratifying event. Playing to a nearly sold-out, 3,000 seat concert hall, the Wind Ensemble’s premiere of Corigliano’s third symphony, Circus Maximus, received a massively positive reaction from an audience filled with university and non-university folk alike. Regardless of one’s esteem for the piece itself, after the performance—with a fully decked out wind band behind them and nearly 3,000 rapt audience members in front—the image of Junkin and Corigliano taking bows was an undeniably encouraging sign, suggesting a public, and an ensemble, quite willing to give new music a chance.

For the electronically inclined, the school’s Electronic Music Studios, by definition of the medium, always offers contemporary music. Run by Russell Pinkston, who also doubles as the president of SEAMUS (Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States), UT’s Electronic Music Studios recently hosted Mario Davidovsky, who completed his Synchronism No. 11 for Double Bass and Tape while in residence at EMS.

An outlet for the work of EMS composers, the Electro-Acoustic Recital series, or EARS, presents two concerts a year. Incorporating lighting and visual effects, these concerts sometimes feel more like a theatre production than your standard new music concert. This multi-media theatricality, along with dynamic collaborations between composers, dancers, and filmmakers, contributes to the long-standing appeal of the well-attended concert series.

New Kids on the Block

Photo courtesy of the Golden Hornet Project.

Outside of UT, a number of dedicated new music organizations have emerged over the past six years. Marked by a preference for alternative venues, a delightfully flagrant disregard for boundaries of genre and style, and an intensely collaborative spirit, the Golden Hornet Project, masterminded by composers Graham Reynolds and Peter Stopchinski, embody the recent sea-change in Austin’s new music scene. Since its inception in 1999, the Golden Hornet Project has presented dozens of concerts featuring the premieres of over 100 works by more than 30 composers. Golden Hornet concerts reject the stuffiness of standard classical fare, presenting works that freely weave jazz, classical, and rock styles in an atmosphere more akin to a club or theatre than a concert hall.

A frequent collaborator with the Golden Hornet Project, composer Kelly Waddle seems to be everywhere at once. A composer of over 250 works, bassist for the Austin Symphony, author, and blackjack dealer, Waddle has crusaded to bring both his music and that of other Austin composers to the public in a non-threatening, non-pretentious way. Consolidating his activities under PKW Productions, Waddle puts on concerts in movie theaters, libraries, churches, and art galleries, frequently incorporating eclectic reinventions of standard repertoire with his own compositions.

Another outlet for local composers, the Barbwire Music Project, brainchild of composer Stephen Barber and Matt Orem, has been producing eclectic concerts featuring a healthy mixture of contemporary classical, experimental rock, and jazz artists since 2001. Featuring numerous Austin-based artists such as Terry Bozzio, Glover Gill, and the Tosca strings, their popular Dia de los Muertos concerts are marathon extravaganzas incorporating a wide range of music.

Having worked with the likes of David Byrne, Keith Richards, and Arto Lindsay, Barber has led a fascinating career as a composer, arranger, and pianist. Before moving to New York to study composition with John Corigliano, Barber, a native Texan, was a member, along with Austin guitar legend Eric Johnson, of the Electromagnets, a prominent Austin-based experimental jazz/rock group. While in New York, he led a duel life as both an arranger—writing charts for the likes of Joe Zawinul and Van Dyke Parks—and a concert music composer. Upon his return to Austin in the mid-’90s, Barber has continued to pursue both sides of his musical life.

In addition to Dia de los Muertos concerts, Barbwire also presents pianist Michelle Schumann’s annual John Cage birthday concert, a program devoted entirely to Mr. Cage’s works. Schumann, an award-winning pianist, professor at University of Mary Hardin Baylor, and director of the Austin Chamber Music Center, is a vigorous advocate for new music. Recently, she joined forces with the Tosca strings, choreographer David Justin, and composer Rob Deemer, in the newly formed American Repertory Ensemble, a group dedicated to innovative collaborations between dancers, composers, and performers.

The Audio Inversions concert series is perhaps the newest act in town. Established in 2005 by composers James Norman, Tony Suter, and flutist/conductor Karmen Suter, Audio Inversions concerts take place at the Austin Museum of Art and regularly include works by local composers. While the Golden Hornet Project, PKW Productions, and Barbwire, have taken a more pluralistic approach to producing new music concerts, frequently including pop-music elements while cultivating a distinctly un-classical feel to their concerts, Audio Inversions takes a slightly more conventional approach, offering the closest thing Austin has to a standard new music concert series (i.e. classically-trained performers, playing contemporary concert music, in a typical concert format). After a successful inaugural season, Audio Inversions is expanding their scope with a summer music festival, featuring concerts, workshops, and the premieres of three new Kelly Waddle concertos.

Noise, Oscillators, Improv, ???

Dedicated to the avant-garde tradition, structured improvisation, and experimental performance and compositional technique, the Austin New Music Co-op, founded in 2001, sits on the fence between Austin’s contemporary classical and experimental music communities. Holding performances wherever it can, including houses, lofts, apartments, ballet-studios, and meeting halls, Co-op concerts have featured premieres of dozens of new works by Austin composers.

A kind of school away from school, the Co-op offers classes in subjects ranging from circuit bending to creative improvisation, brings in prominent guest composers and performers, like Pauline Oliveros, Mary Oliver, John Butcher, and Frode Gjerstad, and holds regular informal house concerts where members can try out new ideas in an informal and intimate setting.

Co-op members with Arnold Dreyblatt at SXSW. Photo courtesy the Austin New Music Co-op.

In 2006 Co-op members Travis Weller, Nick Hennies, Steve Bernal, and Brent Fariss, performed with Arnold Dreyblatt at the Table of the Elements SXSW showcase. A landmark in itself, as it was the first time SXSW had presented a showcase of a major experimental record label.

Table of the Elements came to Austin for SXSW, but also because they knew they would find an audience for their music. Indeed, for years Austin has been home to a vibrant experimental music community. PG Moreno’s Epistrophy Arts regularly brings in top national free jazz and experimental music artists like the ICP orchestra, Evan Parker, and Mats Gustafsson, while Tina Marsh’s Creative Opportunity Orchestra has been an incubator for progressive jazz for over 25 years.

Austin’s experimental electronic community has been making noise for some time as well. Corry Allen’s Toneburst series, the Austin Museum of Digital Art’s concert series curated by Co-op member Travis Weller, and numerous loft, apartment and house concerts, provide frequent outlets for electronic composers, while the newly minted Spectral House Records, Bremsstrahlung, and Mike Vernusky’s Quiet Design label, have all helped give voice to Austin’s electro-acoustic composers.

What’s Next?

Looking into the future it’s not clear what direction Austin’s new music community might take. Marked by eclectic personalities, a fierce spirit of collaboration, and an intense drive to produce adventurous works, the scene feeds off of itself. And, although small, the community is highly supportive of its members, with performers and composers regularly participating in each other’s concerts and helping with each other’s recordings.

Although pop music looms large, the new music scene does not exist in a vacuum. Many composers and performers are active in both worlds and crossover between the two seems to be increasing. As new music groups begin to build loyal audiences, it seems clear that there are enough Austinites interested in new music to sustain its growth, regardless of its relationship to the bar/club scene.

The prospect for attracting new audiences is promising as well. Many Austin music lovers crave new and exciting music. While there are plenty of bars and clubs where the music is secondary to the socializing, there are also plenty where people come to listen. At a recent concert at one downtown club, The Parish, I recall an impressively attentive audience as the indie band Low played a brilliant late-night set. Same thing when Joanna Newsome rolled through with Smog. When Philip Glass’s Orion played UT’s 3,000 seat Bass concert hall, it was nearly sold out. Same thing when Sigur Ros, David Byrne, and Kronos play Bass. In short, there are many Austinites excited about both listening to music and listening to new music. Down the road, it’s these kind of people who can really give the new music community legs. If groups like the Golden Hornet Project, PKW Productions, Barbwire Music Project, Audio Inversions, and the New Music Co-op, haven’t reached them yet, it’s only a matter of time.

NEA Institute participants at a critical moment: (left to right) Dori O’Neal, Laura Emerick, Peter Lefevre, Claire Blaustein, Rick Rogers (All photos by Jason Gross)

The question of how the music of our time should be included in the classical canon has been debated everywhere: articles, board rooms, stages, and books, as well as in a lecture room on the sixth floor of Columbia University’s School of Journalism. It was there in Manhattan that the third annual National Endowment for the Arts’ Institute in Classical Music and Opera was recently held in late October, drawing in 25 music journalists from across the country, specifically “outside of the top media markets.”

The participants came from an impressive span of the country—Alaska, Florida, Kentucky, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, Texas, Wisconsin—and included a good balance of men and women. Most came from print backgrounds where their short-sighted editors slotted them to cover the classical music beat since they were already covering other arts (i.e. dance, theatre). At the Institute, each of them received an eleven-day crash course in the mechanisms of the classical world including lectures, writing assignments, workshops, discussions, venue tours, and concerts. Somewhere in this week-and-a-half marathon, they also received a glimpse of contemporary music and hopefully had their thinking changed as to how they might cover it in the future.

Program organizers (left to right) Joe Horowitz, Anya Grundmann, and András Szántó

The Institute—run by András Szánt&oacute, the former director of the National Arts Journalism Program (which the Institute developed out of), in collaboration with NPR’s Senior Special Projects Producer Anya Grundmann and author/arts consultant Joseph Horowitz—strived to show these that these media people were part of a community where they could communicate, share ideas, and not feel isolated in their work, all to help ensure an ongoing and vibrant discussion of classical music in the media sphere. As part of these goals, the Institute arranged discussions with noted writers such as John Rockwell (The New York Times), Steve Smith (Time Out New York), and Terry Teachout (Wall Street Journal). They also rubbed elbows with directors from Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Miller Theatre, the Metropolitan Opera, the New York Philharmonic, and the American Symphony Orchestra. The group attended the New York City Opera’s production of Cosí fan tutte, a Bach recital, two different versions of Mozart’s Linz symphony (for comparison), a pair of Shostakovich symphonies, and the Met’s production of Madama Butterfly. They managed to fit in all of this in addition to being exposed to some high-profile contemporary music events and speakers.

***

A Tale of Two Receptions

On day six of the Institute, the group gathered at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. BAM Communications Director Sandy Sawotka gave them a tour of BAM’s Harvey Theatre. Institute co-organizer Joseph Horowitz toasted the space’s excellent acoustics while the group asked about the architecture and décor there. They then strolled to BAM’s Gillman Opera House where Horowitz lectured again, explaining how the venue had fallen into neglect in the 1950s and 1960s, but has had a resurgence in recent decades.

From there, the group met up with Joseph Melillo, BAM’s artistic director. Melillo started the Next Wave festival upon his arrival 24 years ago, and described the festival as a mechanism for supporting American artists from the non-traditional community, artists who are usually denied the means to do a large-scale interdisciplinary work. Melilo explained that he’s constantly traveling in search of pieces to present, working one to two years ahead of time to plan the schedules. The NEA group was clearly interested in what he had to say, peppering him with questions about his criteria for selecting pieces, as well as working with peer institutions and other venues using new media.

About an hour into the discussion, a trio of artists arrived who were premiering their new work for an American audience that evening: Violet Fire, an opera about inventor Nicolas Tesla. Composer Jon Gibson, librettist Miriam Seidel and director Terry O’Reilly told how it took them 15 years to finally get the work produced. In the middle of this conversation, an extraordinary moment occurred. Gibson reluctantly admitted, “They call me a minimalist…” at which point Chris Waddington from the NEA group (freelancer for the Times Picayune, New Orleans) replied, “We can rip the label off; there’s plenty of us in the room!” Along with the ensuing laughter, there was also a moment of realization of the power that the group ultimately held in their positions as musical arbiters across the country.

In an ideal world, the opera that night would have matched the expectations of such a bold institution as BAM. But that wasn’t to be. The NEA group was nearly unanimous in their derision. “Re-VOLT-ing!” declared Arkansas Democrat-Gazette writer Eric Harrison. Orange County Register freelance writer Peter Lefevre was alone in his admiration: “People walked out but it obviously affected them.” Did this bad reception concern the NEA leaders that the group would be turned off by contemporary fare now? Grundmann didn’t think so, reasoning that the show was innocuous but not damaging.

Proof of that came the next night at the Steve Reich 70th birthday concert at Carnegie Hall. Famed jazz guitarist Pat Metheny performed Electric Counterpoint, playing over his own tape loops and creating such well-known Reich traits as phase-shifting patterns and an ebbing/flowing of the music. The second part of the program was another late-1980s piece from Reich, Different Trains, performed by the Kronos Quartet. Again, they played over taped segments of themselves, interspersed with ghostly, disembodied voices booming over the speakers, creating a lively, engaging atmosphere where the strings occasionally imitated train rhythms.

During the intermission, during which several of NEA participants gathered to discuss the show, it was telling that some of them were reluctant to make any judgmental statements about the pieces since they had never heard them before. This was especially curious since they weren’t willing to give the BAM performance the same benefit of the doubt. Reich is obviously the more established, lauded composer; most writers would find it hard to go out on a limb to criticize him at this point, whereas the lesser-known Gibson is an easier target for negative criticism.

The third and final part of the Carnegie concert didn’t lend itself to any reserved judgments. Reich appeared with his ensemble to perform his most famous piece, Music for 18 Musicians. The live performance proved magical with an interweaving tapestry of sound shimmering throughout the other-worldly composition. Near the end, the pace picked up and the pulse of the piece disappeared. Afterwards, the hall exploded in applause, forcing Reich and his group to come out for three bows. Later at a nearby restaurant, the NEA group buzzed about the show, sensing that they had witnessed something historic. Lefevre would later comment that “the Reich concert was one of the most profound musical experiences I have had.” Fellow NEA participant Edward Ortiz of the Sacramento Bee went even further, explaining that in large part because of the concert, “this program further fired my desire to champion this music as part of the greater continuum of music.”

***

Perhaps 160 Minutes is Not Enough Time for 100 Years of Music

New Yorker columnist Alex Ross was scheduled to present a three-hour lecture to the Institute’s participants covering the span of 20th-century music. However, the previous speaker, Nonesuch Records President Bob Hurwitz, drew such excitement from the attendees that it cut into 20 minutes of Ross’s allotted time. The late start meant that Ross had to hurry. He skipped through entire decades, movements, and genres. Plus, he ended his survey in 1985, completely leaving out the last 20 years. He also had to focus more on the development of individual styles, eschewing a strict chronology (which meant that he time-traveled back and forth a few times), only stopping once near the end for a leg-stretching break.

Alex Ross takes on the 20th Century

Ross sat at the front of the room with his Apple laptop hooked up to a large boombox as he fed through works from an iTunes playlist. He spoke softly, appearing amiable, thoughtful, and knowledgeable as he breezed through the material, occasionally pausing to play 20-30 second excerpts of the composers’ works. “This past century was an exciting and controversial time,” he told the group. “The worldwide audience is bigger now than a hundred years ago, and it’s spreading to a wider audience though culturally it feels smaller.”

Ross then went through some 30 compositions, touching on Schoenberg’s Five Pieces for Orchestra (“a new language”), Debussy’s impressionistic Pelléas et Mélisande, Stockhausen’s Gruppen (“free jazz before its time”), Berg’s violent Wozzeck, Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring (which he explained was cheered on after the initial riots), Bartok’s folk-inspired quartet works, Varese’s Arcana (“industrial-strength atonal music”), and John Adams’s Harmonielehre (the only extended piece of music played). If anything, Ross sought to convey two points: 1) this music shouldn’t be intimidating or threatening to an audience; 2) there are increasingly “porous musical borders” between classical and other genres (i.e. rock, jazz, electronic music). It proved to be a dizzying amount of material for the group to digest in one sitting. Lefevre again might have made the astute observation, saying that “(Ross) made a lasting impression in ways that I am not sure I will be able to sort out for a few years.”

***

On the final day of the Institute, András Szántó summed up what they had covered and handed out evaluation forms. While they briefly roasted Violet Fire again, the Reich concert was judged to be a huge success, faring much better than some of the older works they’d heard. The group was definitely grateful for what Harrison called a “broadening perspective.” After Szántó, Grundmann, and Horowitz were presented with cards and gifts, Naomi Lewin (Cincinnati Public Radio announcer/producer) sang her own set of words describing the whole experience to the tune of the hymn “Shall We Gather at the River,” which the group had learned earlier in the week during a choral voice lesson session with Judith Clurman at Juilliard. And then, the Institute was finished.

Last day of the 2006 NEA Institute

Or was it? By now, the group has long been back at their respective desks and has decompressed, hopefully having sorted out all that they’d seen and heard. While this year’s group ultimately fared slightly better than last year’s group in terms of new music exposure, it was largely due to serendipity. Hearing Steve Reich’s music in New York during his birthday month this October was almost unavoidable. Last year’s Institute also included a Ross lecture and a trip to BAM for a tour and performance, but last year’s BAM performance featured pop-turned-classical diva Daniela Mercury.

While it’s difficult to squeeze in any more to such a super-saturated program, one would hope that there would be a place in a future curriculum for avant venues which also organize worthwhile fall-time fare: The Kitchen, Issue Project Room, Diapason (which featured the cross-cultural, cross-genre N Collective), Roulette, the Dream House (to witness famed minimalist master La Monte Young’s decades-long installation), Tonic, and the Stone (where this year they could have heard New York contemporary group Red Light New Music Ensemble kick off its new season), as well as institutions like the Electronic Music Foundation (which organized an environmentally-minded Ear to Earth festival), and Columbia’s own Computer Music Center. Also, including some of the contemporary fare as part of the writing seminars would have undoubtedly helped the participants to appreciate and understand it more, and ultimately communicate about it more effectively in print.

Regardless of any suggestions of what should be included in the program, the NEA Institute at the very least provided a good basis for the participants’ journey into the world of classical punditry and succeeded in connecting these writers from across the country and making them feel part of a community. In the end, the ultimate proof of how it effected their stance on contemporary music will come in what the participants decide to write about (or not write about) in their future columns, based on what they experience in their own communities.

###

Jason Gross

Jason Gross is the editor/founder of Perfect Sound Forever, one of the first online music magazines. Along with freelance writing, he is also working with assorted members of the Gotham community on a New York City music commission as well as a world journalism project covering writers outside of America and England.</p

If you think that you have to have gallons of publicity and a well-developed knack for the commercial to survive in Los Angeles, contemplate a hardy, high-minded, world-famous concert series called Monday Evening Concerts.

The audience is small, the budget is tiny, the profile is low, and the music is thoroughly, uncompromisingly contemporary. Yet the series has been around in one form or another continuously since 1939—which in this city of constant turnover is quite a feat. Only the far more conservative Coleman Chamber Concerts in Pasadena can top MEC’s record of longevity in the area of chamber music here. Even for those who didn’t attend or stopped going, it was comforting to know that MEC was still around.

There was a moment, though, when it looked as if the Monday Evening Concerts were finally going down for the count. In the spring of 2005, the Los Angeles County Art Museum, which had housed the concerts in its gloomy, acoustically undistinguished Leo S. Bing Theatre for 40 years, decided to pull the plug on most of its music programming. MEC was given one more season and that would be it. Not only that, but almost as if on cue, the director of MEC for the last 34 of those years, composer Dorrance Stalvey, passed away just after the announcement was made—and just after he had finished planning what looked like it was to be MEC’s final season.

But no, the story isn’t over—at least for now. The musical press in Los Angeles decried the County Art Museum’s decision to abandon the series. A new advisory board, directed by Justin Urcis and containing figures like Stalvey’s widow Valerie, composer William Kraft, and former L.A. Philharmonic chief Ernest Fleischmann, was formed.

As a result, MEC—now an independent organization—has risen off the canvas again, albeit in greatly reduced form, announcing a 2006-07 season consisting of four concerts in two locations downtown. (By comparison, the 2001-02 season featured twelve concerts, and 2003-04 had nine). The programming for the last three concerts has been entrusted to three internationally-known “curators”—Esa-Pekka Salonen, Kent Nagano, and Steven Stucky—while the first concert on December 11 will be a memorial tribute to Stalvey.

For the whole fascinating story of the early years of the Monday Evening Concerts, read Dorothy Lamb Crawford’s invaluable Evenings On And Off The Roof (University of California Press).

Originally called Evenings on the Roof, at first the concerts were literally held on a roof—the small, add-on second-story studio of Peter Yates, built for him by the modernist Viennese architect Rudolph Schindler. Yates was a quintessential fish-out-of-water—an independent thinker with highbrow tastes in a city that had little use for intellectuals, a proud amateur in a circle of professional artists, a cheerleader for new music operating in a place that, then as now, mainly worshipped movie stars. He toiled away at a bureaucratic, low-paying job by day while organizing Evenings on the Roof in his spare time, citing the similarly-divided Charles Ives as a role model for not compromising one’s art to commerce. Like Ives, Yates drove himself to exhaustion and illness with his double life.

The first concert in April 1939 was an all-Bartók affair—this at a time when the Hungarian composer was still barely-known in America—for an audience of 19 people. But Yates’s policy of presenting new, old, and neglected chamber music caught on among the small intellectual audience scattered around the sprawling city. Highly skilled musicians, bored by the movie scores that they had to play in the studios for a living, flocked to Yates’s roof to perform challenging music for almost no pay. While there was plenty of contemporary music on hand, Yates also made sure that the past was well represented; there were extensive surveys of Beethoven and some of the earliest attempts at period-performances of J. S. Bach and his predecessors.

Hardly anyone else was presenting this mix of repertoire in the region then, and word spread around the country and Europe about this brave little series. Otto Klemperer, then the conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, attended the early concerts. The music of Schoenberg, who taught at UCLA and lived in Brentwood, was heard on this series with more frequency than probably any other place on earth during his lifetime. Indeed, Yates was lucky to have started his concerts at a time when sunny Southern California had become a place of refuge for gifted artists fleeing the Nazis.

Located on Micheltorena Street, a steep, out-of-the-way side street in the Silverlake district, the “roof” was abandoned after May 1941, and the series moved from auditorium to auditorium before finally settling into the then-new Bing Theatre in 1965. In 1954, Yates turned the leadership of Evenings on the Roof over to Lawrence Morton, taking the name with him. Since the series had taken place on Monday nights since its second season, it became known simply as Monday Evening Concerts when Morton took over.

Under this crusty, diminutive Minnesotan who had been a crusading music critic in town, MEC became Stravinsky Central, often showcasing the chamber works of the Russian émigré genius who lived above the Sunset Strip. MEC racked up no less than twelve Stravinsky world premieres, usually tiny chips from the workbench or re-arrangements of existing music, but still enough to give Morton bragging rights. In turn, MEC (and Evenings on the Roof before it) greatly influenced Stravinsky himself; the twelve-tone music that he heard there, as well as the performances of early music, recharged his creative batteries and helped usher in his final, forward-looking serial period.

Stravinsky’s right-hand-man, Robert Craft, used MEC as a staging ground for the long, pioneering string of new-music and early-music recordings that he made for Columbia in the 1950s and ’60s. (A great souvenir of that time is the photo on the back cover of Craft’s first Gesualdo album of the MEC singers—including the young, then-unknown Marilynn (sic) Horne—sitting on Stravinsky’s front lawn). Pierre Boulez, Luciano Berio, Luigi Nono, and Karlheinz Stockhausen were heard for the first time in America during the Morton years. Michael Tilson Thomas, still a student at USC, became the resident wunderkind at these concerts in the mid-1960s just before his rise to fame.

Yet even in its Golden Age, keeping MEC going was always a struggle—maintaining quality and adventure on a shoestring budget, and engaging in sometimes acerbic battles with the local press. The Los Angeles Times’ chief music critic from 1947 to 1965, Albert Goldberg, often had caustic things to say about certain works that were out on the edge (On Stockhausen’s electronic Gesang der Junglinge, he said, “If this is music, it’s time to drop the H-bomb.”). Morton gave as good as he got; at one concert in 1956, he took the extraordinary (for an impresario) step of making a speech accusing Goldberg of misrepresenting “the facts” of a concert that featured the controversial U.S. premiere of Nono’s Canti per 13. In 1963, when Goldberg’s antipathy toward the serial music heard at MEC produced a chorus of written amens from noted local composers and musicians, Morton defended the avant-garde in a piece that appeared in the LA Times.

Under Stalvey, who succeeded Morton in 1971, MEC’s agenda was eventually limited to 20th century music, and it became a presenting organization, with out-of-town groups performing most of the programs. Following a near-fatal financial crisis, the County Art Museum assumed stewardship of the concerts in 1985 while Stalvey doggedly stayed on as director until his death, ultimately logging more years in the job than Yates and Morton combined.

By the 1980s and ’90s, one had to accept the possibility that perhaps the contemporary music world had passed MEC by. Minimalism had caught fire, a revolt against serialism and academic music of all kinds was underway, and yet the programming at MEC was slow to catch on. There was a vital, exciting new-music scene developing at CalArts in Valencia, whose annual spring Contemporary Music Festivals of the late 1970s and early ’80s were attracting national attention before they ran out of steam at the end of the decade. The Los Angeles Philharmonic New Music Group’s concerts became the main platform in which to hear leading and rising figures in the avant-garde and remains so in the future-world setting of the new Walt Disney Concert Hall downtown. Newer series like Southwest Chamber Music and Jacaranda took up MEC’s abandoned mix of old and new using local players and made it work anew.

Now and then in recent years, MEC would rise out of its torpor and find someone or something new and arresting—like the personable, eccentric Italian pianist Marino Formenti—and the final concert of 2004-05, a juxtaposition of the latest works of Morton Subotnick and Paul Dresher by the iconoclastic California E.A.R. Unit, drew a large, demonstrative crowd. Ultimately, though, it became depressing to go to the dimly-lit, cavernous, amenities-lacking Bing and stare at the rows upon rows of empty seats and smatterings of hard-core aficionados whose polite applause barely rose above the silence.

Stucky’s Feb. 19, 2007, program will feature works by six young composers from Mexico, Canada, and the USA—Andrew Norman, James Matheson, Sean Shepherd, Philippe Bodin, Ana Lara, and Brian Current. At this writing, Salonen plans to showcase the music of fellow Scandinavians Kimmo Hakola and Rolf Wallin on April 16. Yet of the four programs, it is Nagano’s (March 19) that most closely embraces the Yates/Morton philosophies, juxtaposing works by living composers with classics by J.S. Bach and so help him, something as politically incorrect as Bach/Busoni. Another positive feature is a return to the Yates/Morton policy of mostly using expert local musicians.

For Kraft, who took part in some of MEC’s groundbreaking concerts of the 1950s and ’60s, the main issue is what MEC means in a multi-cultural city where there is no longer a Stravinsky sitting in the front row of the hall, conveying a silent sense of authority that this is the place in town where new music is happening. “It’s identity that we’re really concerned about, what will set the Monday Evening Concerts apart from others now that we have so much competition,” Kraft says. “The Monday Evening Concerts established the identity of the location, rather than the other way around. Now we have the Zipper and REDCAT, which are occupied by many ensembles. We don’t have the advantage of being the only act in town.”

Nor will the current programming formula necessarily extend beyond 2006-07. “We’re discussing the future,” says Kraft. “This first season is curated—that was Ernest’s idea. There’s the issue of continuing the curating of programs, and the other is to try to get it more focused in L.A., as a Los Angeles-based operation as it was before. I don’t know what we’re going to settle on as the location. It’s in flux.”

Who knows whether the new slimmed-down MEC will be able to compete with or complement the other new music presenters in town, let alone make history again. But at the very least, we repeat, it’s good to know it’s still around.

In recent years, Portland, Oregon, has earned a reputation as one of the capitals of indie rock, boasting musicians such as The Decemberists, Sleater-Kinney, the Shins, M. Ward, the late Elliott Smith, Dandy Warhols, and Pink Martini. But the city also reverberates to a surprisingly robust “new music” / postclassical music undercurrent, and recently, the two streams seem to be converging.

Classical to Post-Classical

Third Angle violist Brian Quincey performs in triplicate (with video assistance) at the group’s Frozen Music concerts. Photo by Carolezoom

The most established new music groups grew out of the city’s classical music institutions. The most prominent ensemble, Third Angle, which just celebrated its 20th anniversary, has commissioned more than 20 new works (many by Northwest composers), sponsored residencies by composers such as Steve Reich, Chen Yi, and Zhou Long, collaborated with dancers and videographers, and performed works by many of the leading American new music composers, including Portlanders David Schiff and Tomas Svoboda. Though it regularly performs at Reed College and the downtown performing arts center, some of its most fascinating concerts have happened in such unlikely spaces as a glass factory and a bank lobby. Its first concert this season (Oct. 27-28) features a newly commissioned score by Vivek Madalla for the classic King Vidor film Wild Oranges.

Like Third Angle, Fear No Music draws its members from the Oregon Symphony and other classical orchestras, and also presents music by 20th- and 21st-century composers. This septet is a bit smaller than Third Angle, whose six-member core can expand to 15 or more members when necessary. It performs in downtown churches, at Portland State University, and, last year, in the performance space at the advertising firm of Wieden + Kennedy, which also hosts many events in the city’s annual Time Based Arts festival.

The major classical organizations play contemporary music only occasionally, although the Oregon Symphony is set to debut Oregon composer Robert Kyr’s Symphony No. 13 in the spring. Portland choral groups have been more adventurous: the Oregon Repertory Singers (for which Kyr served as composer-in-residence) have commissioned or debuted almost 20 new American works since 1980, and the David York Ensemble performs new music as well as old. The 60-year-old Portland Chamber Orchestra has scattered 20th century music throughout its recent programs, including this year’s debut concert featuring Viktor Ullmann’s 1944 one-act anti-fascist opera, The Emperor From Atlantis, and the world premiere of Ofer Ben-Amots’s Klezmer Concerto, featuring the dazzling David Krakauer on clarinet. PCO’s next show, in January, features two more world premieres.

Bandoneon virtuoso Coco Trivisonno joins Third Angle in music by Astor Piazzolla. Photo by Carolezoom

Local classically trained composers also find outlets in a couple of regular concert series. Seventh Species, a composers’ collective led by Gary Noland that migrated from Berkeley to Eugene and then to Portland, will often showcase a dozen composers’ works (usually performed by the composers themselves or a few local musicians) and frequently include “older masters” such as Debussy, Schönberg, Messiaen, etc. The New West Electro Acoustic Music Organization (NWEAMO) started in Portland, where its founder, Joseph Waters, once taught college. He’s moved on to San Diego, yet maintains the series in both cities, and this year expanded it to New York as well. NWEAMO’s definition of new music also includes laptop composers and music that brings in jazz, hip hop, and other contemporary influences; it happily blurs the line between classical- and pop-influenced avant garde music.

Some of the Seventh Species composers record for North Pacific Music, a Portland-based record label founded by composer Jack Gabel that’s one of the city’s most important new music institutions. Gabel himself is a fine electroacoustic composer who often writes for dance. One of North Pacific’s newest groups, the East West Ensemble led by flutist Tessa Brinckman, specializes in Pacific Rim music (it includes a koto player) and is one of the most appealing new music groups to emerge in the Northwest in years.

College bound

Many of these composers and musicians also frequently perform two hours south in the college town of Eugene, home of the University of Oregon. The UO music school hosts a strong composition program, headed by Kyr, that includes a biennial new music festival (this year featuring Veljo Tormis), a new music performance series, a performance series for composition students, Future Music Oregon (an electronic music program run by composer Jeffrey Stolet), and percussion ensembles led by Prof Charles Dowd that play almost exclusively contemporary music by composers such as Portland native Lou Harrison, Frank Zappa, and other 20th century composers. UO music students have also founded a number of new music ensembles over the years that play student works as well as 20th century classics at campus concert venues. The university also hosts the Oregon Bach Festival, which has sponsored performances (often U.S. premieres) of music by, among others, Osvaldo Golijov, Tan Dun, Arvo Pärt, and Krzysztof Penderecki, and a biennial composers symposium, directed by Kyr, that’s hosted teaching residencies by those composers and others, such as George Crumb and Lou Harrison.

Daryl Groetsch of Pulse Emitter and Don Haugen of Warning Broken Machine perform at DIVA in Eugene. Photo by Carolezoom

The Eugene Symphony under music director emerita Marin Alsop won a reputation as a haven for contemporary music and seemed poised to continue it during Giancarlo Guerrero’s tenure, when his second season featured music and appearances by John Corigliano, Jennifer Higdon, Aaron Jay Kernis, and John Adams. Pickings have been slimmer of late, however, save for an all-Michael Daugherty concert last year. Touring new music types like the Kronos Quartet, Rachel’s, Invert, Laurie Anderson, and others have made infrequent appearances at local concert halls. But a new scene appears to be coalescing around Eugene’s three-year-old Downtown Initiative for the Visual Arts (DIVA), an arts institute that has hosted a steady stream of increasingly prominent noise and improv musicians, multimedia productions, and local avant garde composers.

A couple hours west of Portland at the Oregon coast, the 15-year-old Ernest Bloch Composers Symposium, held annually in conjunction with the Ernest Bloch Music Festival in Newport, has presented the work of over 100 composers, led each summer by a different “master” composer, including among others: Chinary Ung, George Rochberg, David Del Tredici, and Chen Yi.

From Clubland

Back in Portland, a different new music scene appears to be emerging from various music clubs. The Creative Music Guild has for 15 years hosted out-there jazz and improvisatory music from around the country at jazz clubs and other venues. A number of bands play new music inflected by jazz, rock, or electronica, the most venerable—and fun—being the uncategorizable 3 Leg Torso, who bring their mix of violin, accordion, cello, and percussion to various venues around the region, including summer concerts in parks and neighborhoods. New, young groups like the cello-fueled trio Bright Red Paper are invigorating the indie club scene with music that’s still recognizably based in rock and pop yet appeals to new music types. For two years running, the leading local alternative newspaper, Willamette Week, has voted its best new band award to products of Portland’s long-burgeoning electonica/dance scene: the viola-and laptop/percussion duo Talkdemonic and solo artist Copy. Those performers, and others from the club electronica scene like the music/film ensemble Small Sails, play hip clubs like Holocene, Doug Fir lounge, and Mississippi Studios and are even beginning to tour.

Electronic musician Copy performs in September at Portland’s annual Time Based Arts Festival. Photo by Carolezoom

The easiest way to experience Portland rock-related new music is to attend the city’s Time Based Arts festival, which happens in early September. Although TBA is best known for bringing in avant-garde performance artists, dancers, and theatre groups from around the world, it also hosts quite a few local bands that tend to be on the weird side. This year, TBA included street and warehouse performances by the Music Population Orchestra, whose mission is to “bring music that sounds like our time to audiences in clubs, bars, concert halls, streets and every other space that can contain live music in order to help familiarize those who are new to chamber music with what it means and to help broaden the horizons of those who already think they know it.” Founded by 20-something Norwegian immigrant Brede Rørstad, who’s also worked with Third Angle, MPO plays his chamber/electronic hybrid music along with other contemporary sounds.

MPO, a kind of a mashup of chamber orchestra and rock/electronica band, may signal the future of Portland new music. Portland is famous for its many bridges, and the city is just now beginning to see connections tentatively forming between its two major new music streams—the club/electronica oriented acts and the older, classically informed types. At the moment, it’s mostly visible in overlapping venues like the Wonder Ballroom, in the occasional electronic touches in Third Angle performances, in the use of classical viola or cello in club acts like Talkdemonic. Like new music anywhere, Portland’s version struggles from lack of support by cultural elites, such as arts grantmakers. But the flood of young, hip, creative 20- and 30-somethings moving to this happening city has roiled the musical waters enough to make it likely that Portland will soon see some welcome cross fertilization as musicians from various points of origin—geographic and musical—draw on the city’s increasingly diverse musical streams.