Category: Field Reports

South of the Poconos, west of Philly, and way east of the Iron City, Central PA (no one around here really says Pennsylvania) encapsulates Harrisburg, Lancaster, York, and, perhaps most famously, Hershey (the “sweetest place on earth”). To those more accustomed to large urban hubs, it might feel like the middle of nowhere, but music fans here have a wide range of options, especially when you consider the concert calendars assembled by the many liberal arts colleges dotting the landscape.

Presenters know that they have a responsibility to bring fresh, new performers and music to the area. Often an orchestra or chamber group scheduled to play on the east coast will fill in a few concert dates here first. After their big city premiere, many soloists will tour—which bodes well for Central PA. More often than not, you’ll hear a new work and meet a composer who is, or will soon be, making headlines in the national arts sections.

Of course, you can always slip away to Philadelphia for the likes of Orchestra 2001, get to Pittsburgh to catch the fabulous New Music Ensemble under Kevin Noe, or make a weekend of it in NYC, but there are plenty of events to keep active in Central PA. Here’s a closer look at a few of the movers and shakers in the midstate.

Dickinson College

Composer Robert Pound

About 20 miles west of Harrisburg is Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA. The campus is near the heart of the charming town of 18,000 and has a lot to offer the community. Most notably, Dickinson College supports an ensemble in residence—and not just any old group, but performers with a new music slant. Previously the college hosted the Corigliano String Quartet (dedicated to the presentation of new American music and founded in 1996 with the blessing of the ensemble’s Pulitzer, Grammy, and Oscar-winning namesake); and currently, Alarm Will Sound is at the college through summer 2007. The 20-member band, committed to innovative performances and recordings of today’s music, have established a reputation for performing demanding music with energetic virtuosity. (Rumor has it that another cutting-edge ensemble will follow when Alarm Will Sound finishes.) This residency program is a great resource for the community and provides stellar study opportunities for the students.

Other great outreach efforts are the performances and masterclasses with visiting composers like Milton Babbitt and Samuel Adler, in addition to those offered regularly by the faculty. Composer Robert Pound is chair of the music department and sees that students and the community take full advantage of the new music opportunities. Voice instructor Lynn Helding is not just a singer but also a pioneer in the emerging field of voice science!

Concertante

The resident chamber ensemble at Harrisburg’s Whitaker Center for Science and Art, Concertante is committed to the presentation of new work. That, coupled with their “go-for-it,” spot-on playing, makes for some killer concerts. Comprised of a core of six virtuoso string players, the group performs in varied combinations of instrumentalists: sometimes a trio, or maybe a guest vocalist or pianist will join them. In addition to regular tours across the country, Concertante is truly global, spotted everywhere from New York’s Carnegie Hall to London’s Royal Festival Hall to Shanghai’s Grand Theatre.

This year, Concertante launches One Plus Five—a three-year, six-composer commissioning project designed to create six string sextets, each featuring just one of their core players. The group will premiere the first piece this weekend, Lowell Liebermann’s new work featuring violinist Xiao-Dong Wang, and later in the season they will present Tigran Mansurian’s take on the “soloist in a sextet” with violist Ara Gregorian. Future seasons will include new sextets by Gabriela Frank, Shulamit Ran, Richard Danielpour, and Kevin Puts.

Concertante also regularly finds itself doing a “preview” or “teaser” performance away from the Whitaker Center, perhaps at a tapas bar or at a library. They are young and hip players who have enough spunk to try something new and enough talent to breathe life into any chamber work of the past. If they make it to your neck of the woods, go see them, or plan a trip to Harrisburg and hear them in their natural habitat.

While in Harrisburg, you might stop off for a nightcap along Second Street—just a few blocks from the Whitaker Center, it’s the scene to be seen. There are clubs and restaurants to suit anyone’s style. Favorite places for a meal or post-concert drink include Café Fresco (215 North 2nd St.) and Mangia Qui (272 North Street). Both host live music.

Gretna Music

Another chamber music institution in Central PA is Gretna Music, about 30 miles east of Harrisburg. Combining the pleasantness of Pennsylvania’s outdoors and the freshness of new music, they held their 31st season of concerts this summer. They also have a winter season at Elizabethtown College.

Gretna Music strives to make the concert not just a listening experience but a complete entertainment package (and I mean that in the best sense.) “Concert Conversations” precede every performance and often a combined art or multimedia presentation is offered. For example, the nearby Annville Theater showed Jagged Harmonies, a film about J.S. Bach and Frederick the Great in conjunction with Tempesta di Mare’s concert program, which also included a pre-screening lecture and demonstration with Tempesta di Mare!

New music thrives on Gretna’s diverse series thanks to groups like Philadelphia’s Time For Three, an experimental country/jazz/bluegrass/classical string group, and the Audubon String Quartet, an ensemble which, when its members aren’t engaged in legal battles, can be heard playing new works by composers such as Donald Erb and Peter Schickele. Gretna Music also presents jazz in the summer with visiting performers such as Leon Redbone, Bill Charlap, and Patricia Barber. There is always something fresh: last year featured wonderful performances of works by Henri Dutilleux and Eric Ewazen; and Boston Brass will open this year’s winter season.

Next Generation Festival

Next Generation Festival

Each summer pianist Awadagin Pratt visits Central PA and presents the Next Generation Festival with his friends and students. Concerts take place across the region, from Gettysburg to Selinsgrove, based out of Millersville University. Last season audiences enjoyed music by Osvaldo Golijov and Dmitri Shostakovich; previously the festival included premieres of works by Thomas Kraines and Theodore Shapiro.

The artists making appearances at NGF are quite diverse, from the Cypress String Quartet and Rachel Barton Pine, to Juliette Kang and Zuill Bailey. If you go, be sure to stick around after the concerts for the “talkback”—I have it on good authority that whoever is the current “chip leader” in their nightly poker games has to answer some sort of dare. But hijinks aside, these talkbacks really do provide a chance for the performers to communicate with the audience at another level and help add another level of “personality” to the player.

The NGF takes place over two weeks each June and future commissions are afoot for upcoming seasons. It’s a real force in Central PA, getting out the word for music and really showing off new faces. Every concert has fresh listeners, and you can feel the electricity between the performers and audience.

If you’re in Annville for the Next Generation Festival or at a performance at Lebanon Valley College (another fine Liberal Arts school in the area) stop by MJ’s Coffee Shop inside the Annville Theater. Their jazz series runs October through June each year on the first Thursday of the month, though their calendar features all sorts of artists throughout the week.

But Wait, There’s More

I’ve listed the key presenters above, but it’s not exhaustive. Try one of the regional orchestras if you want some new orchestral sounds: The Harrisburg Symphony and energetic Music Director Stuart Malina often bring in guest composers.

Sunderman Conservatory of Music at Gettysburg College

There are lots of higher educational institutions to visit in this area of the state, and just 37 miles southwest of Harrisburg is Gettysburg College. They host the Sunderman Chamber Music concerts, a chamber music series that attracts world-class performers hosted in an intimate setting. Last season, eighth blackbird brought their Pierrot Lunaire with soprano Lucy Shelton to the newly refurbished Majestic Theater and this year So Percussion will drop by.

About 40 miles southwest of Harrisburg is Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster. F&M’s Barshinger Center hosts new works with the F&M Philharmonia, F&M Symphonic Wind Ensemble, and last semester they staged faculty composer John Carbon’s opera based on the life of Benjamin Franklin (in honor of the 300th anniversary of his birth).

While you’re in Lancaster, stop by the historic Fulton Opera House, widely considered to be the nation’s oldest continuously operating theatre. The Pennsylvania Academy of Music is also in Lancaster and is a great resource for students and locals in the area. Rounding out the scene in Lancaster, new works often are on the program of Allegro!, the area’s chamber orchestra, and the Lancaster Symphony Orchestra has given an annual composer award since 1959.

I’m sure you’re getting road weary so we’ll stop here, though we haven’t hit York, just 25 miles south of Harrisburg, or Allentown, which is a bit further down the road. You might have thought otherwise when we started this tour, but there’s really not enough space to cover all of the new music concerts that take place in Central PA in just one article—quite frankly, it’s an excellent problem to have.

John Nasukaluk Clare

John Nasukaluk Clare is a radio broadcast professional, violinist, and webmaster of ClassicallyHip.com. Winner of ASCAP’s Deems Taylor Award in 2005, he is a member of Phi Beta, the American Music Center, and an ordained minister of New Music of Universal Life Church. He moved from Las Vegas to Harrisburg, PA, in June of 2005.

M.E. and Brett Campbell

Robert Kyr just enjoyed the kind of months most composers dream of. Recent events have tested the 54-year-old composer’s self-asserted ability to get by on a couple hours per night, however, and forced him to trade in his dream time just to keep up with the demands of his waking life.

In Portland, the new music ensemble Third Angle performed his second Violin Concerto. Three days later, the University of Oregon School of Music in Eugene staged an all-Kyr concert in which his faculty colleagues and some students performed his music, with the composer himself playing various keyboards and percussion instruments during his chamber symphony Transfigured Lightning. Later that week back in Portland, the David York Ensemble sang Kyr’s “Alleluia for Peace” at the beautiful Grotto. Then, just a few weeks later, the Oregon Repertory Singers, whom Kyr once served as composer-in-residence, performed his The Divine Image for cello, chorus and piano at Portland’s St. Mary’s Cathedral, and the Yale Symphony Orchestra played Kyr’s Fanfare for a New Dawn at UO.

Somewhere in there, when he wasn’t zooming up and down Interstate 5 to participate in rehearsals for all these performances or teaching classes and attending to his other duties as chair of UO’s composition department, Kyr found time to fly to Minneapolis for several performances of his a cappella work “Living Peace,” that was earlier sung in Nagasaki for that city’s commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the world’s last (so far) atomic bomb strike. The work is a transformation of the third movement of his tenth symphony, Ah Nagasaki: Ashes into Light, a collaboration with Japanese writer, calligrapher, and artist Kazuaki Tanahashi, commissioned by the city’s Peace Museum.

Such a frantic schedule is nothing new for Kyr, who obtained music degrees from Yale, University of Pennsylvania, and Harvard, and also studied at London’s Royal College of Music, MIT, and Darmstadt before joining the UO music faculty in 1990. He’s since made the composition department into a model of stylistic diversity—requiring, for example, that students compose for Balinese gamelan and study non-European musical forms. Over the past decade or so, he created several ongoing contemporary music performance series at the university and sextupled the size of the composition program.

His pedagogical emphasis on diversity reflects Kyr’s vast range of interests, which have produced a decidedly non-doctrinaire compositional voice that embraces influences from around the world and across the centuries. His music is intentionally quite accessible to broad audiences, while, especially in recent years, increasingly free from conventional constraints. The influences of Indonesian gamelan music, medieval music, and American hymns are especially evident.

For all its diverse influences, much of Kyr’s music shares an overriding concern for peace, as many of his titles attest. He grew up in an Ohio family where World War II’s wounds still burned, inspiring his lifelong pacifism. From 1999-2002, he directed a special UO program, Waging Peace in the New Millennium, that sponsored community workshops and lectures on peace and issued an international call for scores resulting in the creation of a sizable repertoire of new choral music on peace-related texts.

Nature has also been a frequent presence in Kyr’s work. He moved to the Northwest to be closer to its soaring vistas and also has drawn upon the canyons of the Southwest; he spends part of each year composing in a New Mexico monastery.

Kyr’s frenetic pace shows no sign of slowing. In September, Chanticleer sings Kyr’s In Praise of Music, which it commissioned, in the San Francisco Bay Area. In December, the Moscow State Chamber Choir premieres his Elegy. Next April, the New West Symphony in Los Angeles is scheduled to premiere his twelfth symphony, Yosemite: Journey of Light, a collaboration with photographer Lawrence Janss, in which images of Yosemite will be projected on a screen above the orchestra. A month later, the Oregon Symphony plays his twelfth symphony in Portland, and its string quartet debuts his third quartet alongside performances of his first two. The acclaimed Portland-based choir Cappella Romana will perform his settings of environmental and spiritual texts related to nature as it tours the Northwest and other regions in 2007-8.

Justin Schell

While the story of Pinocchio is well over a century old, most views of Italian author Carlo Collodi’s work are filtered through Walt Disney’s 1940 adaptation. The saccharine character of the animated version removed many of the story’s darker elements as well as the political overtones of the original. With the multimedia work Pine Eyes, premiered by the St. Paul-based Zeitgeist Ensemble last month at the Walker Art Center, Martin Bresnick sought a “direct, vigorous, vivid, unadorned” conception of Pinocchio to serve as “an antidote to the Disney version.”

Some readers may recognize Pine Eyes. Zeitgeist commissioned a piece from Bresnick in 1996, and the four-movement Pine Eyes was completed in 1998. Premiered in 1999, it was then recorded by Zeitgeist and Bresnick for CRI’s 2000 release of Opera della Musica Povera, a collection of his pieces inspired by the 1960s Italian arte povera movement. Bresnick and Zeitgeist, however, did not want to stop at four movements. “I always had it in my mind to make it bigger,” Bresnick said, but it took six years for that dream to be realized.

The title of the two act, 80-minute work comes from a possible translation of “Pinocchio.” Instead of its customary rendering as “pine nut,” Bresnick instead translated pino as “pine” and occhio as “eyes.” Act I encompasses Pine Eyes’s birth to the attempted murder-by-hanging of the puppet by two assassins, while Act II presents the rescue of Pine Eyes by the blue-haired fairy through his human transformation.

Pine Eyes provocatively shifts between the abstract and the literal in its refashioning of Pinocchio. Bresnick’s music takes full advantage of Zeitgeist’s unique instrumentation—two percussionists, piano, and bass clarinet. Like most of his compositions, it is crafted with great attention to formal structure. Pine Eyes is atonal but generally consonant. It does, however, float around key areas a tritone apart: B and F for the first act, D and A-flat for the second act. Pitches symmetrically revolve around these tonal areas, forming palindromes of various sizes. In contrast to the pitch material, Bresnick utilizes asymmetrical divisions of 12, especially groups of 5 and 7, to rhythmically structure the piece.

More recognizable, however, are the numerous moments that mark Pine Eyes as musical theater. “We had many different roles in the piece,” Zeitgeist clarinetist Pat O’Keefe said, and the group fulfilled them all with great agility and skill. In some cases Bresnick utilized traditional leitmotivs: when the puppet experienced more human emotions, pianist Shannon Wettstein played a series of slow, descending chords underneath O’Keefe’s plaintive bass clarinet. Bresnick also used Zeitgeist as foley, the musicians audibly illustrating the story. When Pine Eyes falls to the ground after burning his feet off, Barringer dropped a set of wooden wind chimes; similarly, the ethereality of the bowed vibraphone evokes the mystery of the blue-haired fairy. In fact, the entire first scene, “Myths of Origin,” is composed solely of unpitched wooden instruments. Such literality, however, is emphasized less and less as the piece progresses, a musical parallel of Pine Eyes’s movement towards humanity.

Martin Bresnick’s score is paired with the digital puppetry and animations of his brother, Robert Bresnick, and Robert’s wife, Leslie Weinberg. A persistent theme in Collodi’s story is how nature and culture, reality and unreality, are continually confused and the images, done after the score was complete, add a visual interpretation to such themes. Pine Eyes, for instance, is a literal stick figure, yet because the human characters are digitally scrubbed of recognizable facial features, the puppet looks the most realistic of all the main characters.

Above all, the roots of Pine Eyes, a work that doesn’t hide the artificiality of its means of production, are in Brecht. Or, in Martin Bresnick’s words, it “shows you the hat where the rabbit comes out.” Conceiving of Pine Eyes in Brechtian terms clearly makes it more than just a children’s story. Collodi’s original tale served as a kind of instruction manual on how peasant Italians—puppets in a less literal sense—could attain middle class status. Most evident in the work’s conclusion, Collodi celebrates Pinocchio’s transformation into a proper middle class boy, as the puppet is literally discarded and a new boy brought into the world. “How funny I was when I was a puppet,” the new boy says condescendingly.

Bresnick eschewed much of Collodi’s moralizing for Pine Eyes, and the work’s conclusion is far from celebratory. A final, grotesque image of the puppet is paired with music that attempts to cyclically return to the key area of B, yet is continually frustrated by semi-tones above and below. With poverty still rampant both at home and abroad, the creators of Pine Eyes seem more suspicious of the value attributed to the middle class, and perhaps its transformative potential, than Collodi.

Such political interpretations are not out of place, yet no one involved in the production forgot that the tale is a children’s story at heart. “We envisioned this piece as one that children will like,” Barringer said. Many children, in fact, attended the premiere performances, and Barringer hopes that Zeitgeist can perform the work for more children in the future. There is also talk of releasing the work as a DVD. Pine Eyes, she believes, is a piece “that can engage schoolchildren, families, and adults,” something not often found in new music circles. Martin Bresnick extends this to an even more humanist position. For him, the story of Pine Eyes contains a deeper truth that “the becoming of a fully-sentient and caring human being is a journey that we all make.”

Scott Winship Photo by Kathryn Gritt

It’s not a secret that folks in the new music community don’t always get along, be it stylistic differences or idealistic ones, but I’m not going to talk about that here. Instead I get the pleasure of reporting on an instance where people are actually playing nice with one another.

New Music Chicago is a coalition of 17 different new music ensembles and organizations here in the Windy City. According to their president, Stephen Burns, who is also director of the Fulcrum Point New Music Ensemble, the organization was formed a year ago to “coordinate schedules, build audiences, and to promote new music.” Patricia Moorehead, founder and director of the CUBE ensemble, also added that Chicago “is one of the only places that has [new music] groups working together.” I can’t tell you how helpful it is that they not only publish a calendar, but they also coordinate schedules to avoid conflicts. One of the most frustrating things about going to new music events is that there always seems to be two concerts you want to attend on the same night. I used to lament, “if only they would talk to each other!” Well folks, the Chicago new music scene is talking, and I’m listening.

This fraternal spirit was on display on May 14th during the organization’s first public outing. Five of the member ensembles—Fulcrum Point New Music Ensemble, the Accessible Contemporary Ensemble, CUBE, the MAVerick Ensemble, and the International Contemporary Ensemble—participated in a free concert in the Chicago Cultural Center’s Bradley Hall. Before I entered the hall, I was handed a flyer advertising the event by volunteers on the street trying to attract meandering tourists and locals on a sunny Sunday afternoon. Located right across the street from the new Millennium Park, the Cultural Center attracts folks from all over, many of whom seemed to find their way to this concert providing a diverse audience of old and young alike (including strollers), new music aficionados, the newly initiated, and a few curious passersby.

The Fulcrum Point New Music Ensemble started the program with two small chamber works featuring trumpeter and NMC founder Steven Burns. The first piece, Hikari (meaning light) for trumpet and piano by Japanese composer Somei Satoh, can best be described as a mix of traditional Japanese elements within a minimalist framework. Over a continuous chordal pattern provided by the piano, the trumpet explores its register beginning with sustained tones that gradually become more animated, emulating a shakuhachi, and ending in a large crescendo. Next up was Trail of Memories (2005) by American Dafnis Prieto. Burns explained that Prieto is a Latin jazz experimentalist who studied the Afrocuban and world music scene in Havana. His composition for trumpet and percussion contains several themes that “act like memories that come back or disappear” and contains elements of experimental music, improvisation, electronic, and Latin grooves. Built around a three-note figure that gets passed between the trumpet and the mallet percussion instruments, the piece starts with a long trumpet line which the percussion accents. As it progresses, the percussion takes on a greater role but still generally remains an accompaniment. Gradually the texture is thickened with the addition of an electronic bell-like track. Overall, it avoids settling into any real grooves until near the end where the percussion finds a Latin beat and the trumpet seems to be improvising over the top.

Next up was the Accessible Contemporary Ensemble performing A Woman’s Beauty (1991) by the American ex-pat Jane O’Leary (currently residing in Ireland). Scored for flute, percussion, dancer, and narrator, the composition sustains an ethereal mood, almost somber, as instruments weave in and out of extended lines of choreography. The narrator’s words (reading from a poem of the same title) are animated by the accompanying elements, finishing with the dancer moving in silence.

CUBE, arguably Chicago’s most established new music ensemble, offered a world premiere by composer Drew Hemenger. Commissioned by soprano Alicia Berneche on the topic of women poets who committed suicide, Hemenger chose the poetry of Anne Sexton. His selection of text was “primarily based on their appeal to me as well as their potential for taking on music, but [I] also have tried to give a glimpse into this woman’s life by showing a small cross-section of her work…there are crazy and tragic moments as well as happy and awestruck ones.” Hemenger’s treatment of the material leaned towards a musical theatre approach in terms of the vocal writing, but the piano would often venture into some interesting territory if only to return to that familiar sound.

The MAVerick Ensemble chose to perform pieces written within the last year. The first was World, conceive a man from the e.e. cummings poem of the same name, composed by MAVerick Ensemble founder and cellist Jason Raynovich for soprano, clarinet, guitar, and cello. The music seemed to flow slowly forward almost like a dirge with hints of Eastern European mystic minimalism. It created a haunting sound world accentuated by multiphonics in the clarinet and reduced range and movement in the soprano. The next piece, Juggernaut for cello and electronics, was written for Raynovich by Paul Oehlers. As its name suggests, the piece is packed full of perpetual motion propelling it forward. The piece seemed to be in a simple A-B-A format with driving chords in the cello and a playfulness between the cello and electronics.

The final performers of the day were the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) who chose to perform Linea d’ombra (1981) by Magnus Lindberg. Translated as “shadowlands,” flutist Claire Chase told me that the instruments “shadow each other” through the piece, constantly chasing each other. The work is incredibly difficult from the performers’ standpoint, requiring them to sing, yell, play percussion, and employ multiple extended techniques in addition to handling intricately complex ensemble playing. The music is very expressionistic and gestural with incredibly virtuosic flourishes. Ultimately the piece ends by decomposition as the flute, percussion, and clarinet surround a single tam-tam and alternate between playing their instruments and pounding out rhythms. Finally, the performance ends with rhythmic vocalizations.

Overall the concert was a great coming out for an organization which should serve as a model for other cities. It showed off the diversity of new music in Chicago in a unified format, from the academic to the accessible. These groups reached out to a broad audience and were well received. Personally, I’m happy to know that, at least for the time being, the community here is willing to work together to further the broader cause of new music in America. See what happens when you play nice?

Roddy Schrock Photo by Hideki Kubota

Ducking out of the deep, deep ghetto of West Oakland into LoBot Gallery, I was immediately hit by what at first sounded like the most genius remix of ABBA’s “Dancing Queen” I’d ever heard. (A dear friend of mine takes the controversial stand that all of Western Musical History has been clearly distilled in the pop music of Abba.) Speaking to Jon Leidecker (a.k.a. Wobbly) afterwards, I realized it wasn’t a remix at all—it was simply the original running at exactly 60 percent the speed of the original. It was made using a nifty granular time-shifting technique which allows you to slow sound down without the usual ’80s-style cliché pitch shifting. It was this aesthetic of technical-wizardry-cum-source-material-silliness that was to frame the local debut screening of Slomo Video, a nearly two-hour ride running in, you guessed it, slow motion.

Slomo Video is the brainchild of Ryan Junell, a prolific video artist who has worked with some of the Bay Area’s most well-known electronic artists and has been at the forefront of the area’s video art scene for quite a few years now. In 2004 he went political, making a surround-sound, four-screen immersive video installation of the Republican National Convention called See The Elephant. (A fresh and interesting idea, but isn’t there something a bit masochistic about immersing oneself in that particular environment?)

Slomo Video is made up of 100 one-minute videos, all very slow, created by a total of 85 artists from all over the country, including myself. One of the standouts of the evening was the work of Scott Arford. Arford’s work creates a sense of not just slow motion, but actually frozen time. For example, in his piece Little Station, his clever usage of a severe form of time-lapse imaging and manipulated field-recorded noise creates a world in which you sense the passage of time, but there is little on screen to indicate how much has passed, how much change has occurred. The intensely restrained imagery is placed in counterpoint to processed noise and rhythmic clicks—it, too, disorienting one’s sense of time. Did we witness a day in the life of this small metal building, or was it a second, an hour, or a decade?

All of the videos in Slomo, working on such a small timescale, rely heavily on sound to make their impact. I’ve never seen a video screening with such a large representation of sound artists. This is one of Junell’s talents: he convinces those working in sound that their audio inquiries are equally applicable in the realm of video art and vice versa. This approach ekes out videos from the likes of people such as Keith Fullerton Whitman and Tigerbeat6 recording artists.

The large-scale form of Slomo has a very musical pacing. The whole evening came across as a non-stop piece made up of one-minute etudes, all weaved together with recurring and expanded themes throughout.

A large percentage of the videos had an element of humor, a kind of absurd slapstick particular to the Bay Area with roots running back to the Beats, formed from the detritus of San Francisco’s past lives as home to gay disco, hothouse of technological innovation, flagship of American sexual liberation, and organizational center to ’50s and ’60s counterculture. Junell’s video Partytime Sleepover is a perfect example of this. It’s made from an old TV commercial featuring Mary-Kate and Ashley advertising their new dolls. In Junell’s version, the Olsen twins are speaking in strange, slowed down and reversed sound with monstrously huge smiles, this image repeated ad infinitum, frightening with its juxtaposition of childish innocence and monstrous, unintelligible high voice. The resultant image has been unnaturally forced, by video technology, to loop over and over, like a disco beat, lacking narrative trajectory. Mary-Kate and Ashley have had a kind of violence forced upon them but without resultant bodily harm—the mainstay of slapstick humor. And, like its predecessors, Junell’s video is amazingly funny. Yes, slightly disturbing, but funny.

It seems that there is a marked tongue-in-cheek quality to so much music and art that is produced in this area. Whether it be the techno-concrete of Matmos, who produced two videos that were included in Slomo Video, or the Residents, whose real identities behind their giant masks are shrouded in a fog of conjecture in local mythology. The lightness of spirit of San Francisco and its environs could be limiting for those who are doing something a bit more centered and earnest. The difficulty of the Bay Area to take itself seriously may sometimes be its Achilles Heel, but it surely is also its saving grace.

Justin Schell

Alvin Lucier’s sonic works often take after the man himself: quiet, gentle, and unassuming. Such is the case with his Music on a Long Thin Wire, originally conceived of in 1977 and recently featured at the Milwaukee Art Museum’s Schroeder Galleria, part of the Santiago Calatrava-designed Quadracci Pavilion. When the Museum officially turned off the work at the end of May, however, it also closed a chapter on one of the institution’s more bizarre episodes, showing that even the gentlest of sounds can have the most visceral of consequences.

Music on a Long Thin Wire was brought in as part of the museum’s On Site series, where artists and artworks are brought in to literally reshape the space of the Schroeder Galleria. Instrumental in bringing this particular work to Milwaukee was Joe Ketner, the museum’s chief curator. Ketner has a long history of working in new music, kinetic art, and sound art, including two previous projects with Lucier. Ketner wanted to explore what “immaterial forms like light and sound” would be like in the architectural space, and Lucier’s work seemed to fit the bill perfectly.

Christopher Burns, a composition professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, also was involved in bringing Music on a Long Thin Wire to Milwaukee. “Given the unusual acoustics of Calatrava’s space,” he said, “it seemed like an interesting place to perform Lucier pieces…that explore the acoustical qualities of a given venue.” The Galleria’s multi-angled marble, glass, and concrete surfaces offered ample opportunities for unusual reverberation.

Milwaukee Art Museum, Quadracci Pavilion, Schroeder Galleria

Like many of Lucier’s works, Music on a Long Thin Wire is constructed with relatively simple means. A single metal piano wire of variable length is strung between two small wooden bridges, its ends clamped to two tables. Embedded in the bridges are contact microphones, which are routed through an amplifier and into a stereo system. On one end of the wire stands a large electro-magnet. The ends of the wire are connected to the amplifier, which is itself connected to a sine wave oscillator. Once the oscillator is set to a specific tuning, the wire will begin to emit a range of sounds corresponding to the aural dynamics of a specific room. Any number of factors, including pressure, temperature, and even the number of people moving about in the space could change the sound produced. Because of these variables, the sound one would have heard in the Galleria could change with each step taken.

Lucier was in attendance for the opening in mid-February, but it was on this first night that things started to go wrong. For some Museum employees, the quiet sounds of the wire went beyond ambient, as they complained of feelings of nausea after listening to the work for extended periods of time. Ketner, Lucier, and Lucier’s technician, Haucke Harder, set out to adjust the work in hopes of alleviating these symptoms, especially after OSHA was contacted about the situation. One theory proposed was that the sheer length of this particular version of the work was responsible. Running the length of the Galleria, the wire stretched nearly 300 feet—the longest version of the piece ever installed. Such a length, combined with the unique acoustical signature of the space, could have produced inaudible, subsonic frequencies that could have had an adverse effect on listeners’ health. Ultimately, however, neither Ketner, Lucier, Harder, nor any of the specialists brought in to adjust the work could alleviate the employees’ symptoms before the installation’s scheduled end. The only viable solution was to reduce the length of the wire and route the piece through headphones.

When I donned the headphones, I was treated to a sound hovering around a medium-range F# that provided an ongoing, if slightly metallic, aural snapshot of the Galleria. Voices and footsteps within the gallery, when registering on the wire, were distant, almost ghost-like. It was like playing telephone with two cans and a piece of string. Even more interesting, however, was the effect that other music had on the wire, in this case a small choir singing a movement from Rachmaninov’s Vespers. Whenever the choir would swell to a greater volume, the wire seemed to come alive, as the sound began to scurry with sympathetic overtones.

These sonic phenomena are indeed interesting and seem to keep to the spirit of Lucier’s work, regardless of the mediation that the headphones bring about. When I spoke to Ketner, he seemed disappointed with how things turned out, but not enough to deter him from bringing more sound art to the Milwaukee Art Museum in the future. What’s unfortunate about the situation, however, is that Lucier’s piece of audience-constituted sound art was reduced to the level of a portrait. With its inherent interactive element all but removed, it became something to be looked at—or in this case, heard through tethered headphones—only from a distance.

Sometimes it happens like this: You encounter an image—verbal, aural, doesn’t matter—and find yourself seduced by your own improvisations on the world it suggests. When the notice came for a production of a new chamber opera by Elizabeth Brown, it announced not only the chance to hear her intriguing music live—opportunities that are strangely rare—but also reeled out an example of such an attracting image. It came packaged in the guise of a quote from Franklin D. Roosevelt, of all things:

When rural Americans finally got electricity in the 1930s and 40s, decades after the cities, many went outside just to look back at their illuminated houses—it was wonderful, just like going from darkness to daylight. Corners of rooms, or a loved one’s face, were magically lit. As one Rural Electrical Administration worker said, I’ve seen this happen, the lights come on, hundreds of places, and it’s an emotional situation you can’t describe—something happens, lightning strikes them, and they all at once are different.

It is this moment that Brown has taken up as her starting point to create Rural Electrification, a 55-minute piece for voice, theremin, and recorded sound. Lit only by the deep glow of an oil lamp and the projections flickering against the back wall, the vocalist (a role sung here by Stephanie Skaff) makes her entrance—a young farm girl, Dorothy Gale on a fair weather evening. The scene is set by Brown’s recorded soundtrack of hums, whistles, and the delicate whir of mechanical language. The composer herself takes up residence in the corner as the soloist at the theremin, an instrument she selected specifically for its marriage of the human and the electrical. The sound she coaxes from it carries none of the usual horror-show implications, but rather colors in a solid, soulful line, more similar in character to the cello.

Composer Elizabeth Brown Rural Electrification has two remaining performances, May 26 and 27, 8 p.m. at the Old American Can Factory. For details, visit XO Projects. Inc.

The minimal scoring evolves over the course of the piece, but its tenor is largely laid out in the first 15 minutes. The vocalist pens a series of letters to her sister that chronicle the family’s adjustment to the electrical age, and though the underlying emotion will alter, the basic musical themes and form are carried throughout. It’s a journey that begins with plenty of wide-eyed excitement—young Mary Alice hopes to win an essay contest for a Frigidaire—and the ad man in the speaker delivers the golden promise that the hook up to the grid will allow her to “live a life of leisure in your spotless home.” Her letters are a vocal duet with the theremin, no small feat of intonation (though Brown’s characteristic propensity for sliding between pitches in her chamber music generally aides the strategy’s success in practice here). Snatches of familiar tunes—an “E-I-E-I-O” meditation on progress and a twist on “You Are My Sunshine” addressed to the light bulb—deepen the piece’s “Is it really better living?” question, though the work refrains from getting too caught up in any sort of moral message. Lothar Osterburg’s accompanying video carries a Monty Python-esque animated whimsy, and musically things are kept rather shear and echo-y—offering buoyancy even to the darker lament that the family must work harder and stay up late because now there’s an electric bill to pay.

As one might logically expect when considering the day-to-day life of a young farm girl, no large surprises appear over the course of Rural Electrification—neither in the plot, nor musically—and therein lies its significant charm. The venue it was presented in—the Old American Can Factory near the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn—is an 1880s complex that only heightened this sense of nostalgic romance for a time none of the modern-day, city-dwelling audience members would have been around to personally experience. They likely left the production, however, feeling that they had been able to glimpse it.

Brown herself boasts a bit more firm a connection, having grown up on an agricultural research station in Alabama (though presumably the lights had already been on for decades at that point). Still, it was difficult not to suppose that her writing in this work was drawn at least tangentially from her own history. Really, though, anyone who has ever driven down a rural highway at night carries at least the defining image of this piece in their memory—the shock of light cast out from the windows of a distant house. What is forgotten is the total cloaking blackness that came before. Mary Alice, her excitement replaced by exhaustion, shoulders this task and remembers for us. “It used to be so dark,” she recalls. “I miss it…”

Amy D. Rubin

High art or lowbrow, serious, entertaining—fit for a concert hall or suitable for a club? Many of Seattle’s music makers are stepping over these archaic lines of divisive thinking. This month I attended premieres of two high profile Seattle composer/performers, Wayne Horvitz and Tom Baker. Both curate innovative concert series, lead their own ensembles, and express their creative energies in string quartets and oratorios.

Horvitz has been experimenting with string quartets for a few years. An earlier quartet—Whispers, Hymns, and a Murmur—laid down a series of interesting vamps for the soloist to play over. A recent premiere—These Hills of Glory: Composition No. 2 for String Quartet and Improviser—goes a lot further to explore a seriously exciting concept: the creation of a piece for string quartet (fully notated) with six performances, six venues, and six different improvising soloists, one for each performance. The soloists included Eric Barber, saxophone; Eyvind Kang, viola; Peggy Lee, cello; Ron Miles, trumpet; Tom Swafford violin; and Gust Burns, piano. I was lucky to catch the last two performances of this series, one at Gallery 1412 and the other at City Hall.

The Odeon Quartet proved an excellent match for the project. Their playing, which was at different times gritty, warm, sensuous, delicate, and driving, gave shape to the music as they took real ownership of this set of premiere performances. Most often the improvised entrances come mid-movement. Horvitz indicates to the soloist where to play but never what to play. First violinist Gennady Filimonov thinks the string parts can stand on their own. I do too. When I asked the composer, he answered, “Definitely not!” Interesting.

To my mind, violinist Tom Swafford’s performance was about blending and extending, as his gestures spun organically from the quartet’s lines. Pianist Gust Burns had a greater challenge at the piano, and he seemed to search for his role throughout the performance. Horvitz writes from many musical influences but does not fall into the frequent trap of creating little more than pastiche. He is capable of honestly understanding, ingesting, and integrating a number of dialects, which results in a decidedly Horvitz sound. He frequently uses dense textures and seemingly unstoppable motion. Sometimes I wondered where there was space for the additional improvisatory voice to be heard. If the quartet was rich chocolate cake, I wondered what the soloist could add other than whipped cream? Well, that’s up to the composer and the performers. Maybe they like super rich deserts.

The four vocal soloists, the Puritan choir, and the six musicians gave a compelling, intense, and polished performance to a very enthusiastic crowd. The venue was Seattle’s literary home, Hugo House, and its modest stage provided a feeling of intimacy. However the set, which included the execution area and inquisitor Cotton Mather’s podium, overpowered the performers just a bit given the limited space.

Composer Tom Baker is eclectic and inventive in his use of pitch sets, instrumentation, and atmospheric textures. He joined the ensemble on fretless guitar for which he is known and, not surprisingly, my favorite “aria” was his riveting duet with Mary Webster. For me, this was the most memorable music of the evening. I also enjoyed his harmonic twists given to the hymn-like pieces where cadences took us to unexpected places in astonishing ways.

Using improvisation in both the vocal and instrumental parts, Baker has designed the piece to be different at each performance. The orchestra follows guided improv structures in the “Prelude” and “Interlude #1”; short improvised solos are performed by the trombone, clarinet, and violin in various songs; all of the songs for the tenor (Cotton Mather) are notated as to pitch and given precise starting places for phrases, but the actual rhythms of the speech/song are left to the performer.The drums in the piece “Grace” are improvised over graphic notational structures.

One issue I would like to raise is the lack of action in the story. A woman is accused, she is hung, she survives the experience. The drama lies in her inner turmoil when facing death. What is visual in this material? Perhaps it would be better to do away with the attempt to create motion on stage and instead let the emotion of the music stand naked, strong, and unencumbered. Of course, this is not the only piece to raise such an issue. Philip Glass’s 1984 opera, Akhnaten, performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, featured little action—just the soloists singing from their chairs. The music spoke for itself.

Julia Werntz Photo by Michele Macrakis

During a conversation with a graduate music student in Cambridge a while ago, I asked him his impression of the Boston jazz scene. There was silence, and I noticed a confused expression on the student’s face. Genuinely puzzled, he responded, “What jazz scene?” As someone who has been observing local jazz musicians for many years, I was initially as perplexed by his question as he was by mine. Our city, in fact, has acquired a reputation in faraway places as a kind of “hotbed” of jazz talent, due no doubt to the large number of excellent recordings local musicians have released on important jazz labels. Just the other day I read a statement by jazz critic Stuart Broomer (Toronto Life, Musicworks, Signal to Noise) that Boston “seems like the most creative place in American jazz right now,” and I’ve heard and read similar things several times. Given a little thought, of course, the student’s question makes sense—and not because he is classically oriented and simply unacquainted with the numerous professional jazz musicians in the area. He would need to search carefully to learn about the sparse and scattered jazz performances that occur, due to the nearly complete lack of solid, viable jazz venues in the area. No matter how many brilliant musicians may be living, rehearsing, and recording here, without a physical location where audiences can regularly listen to their work, how can there be anything the public perceives of as a “scene”?

Of course, equally important to one’s sense of “jazz scene” is a city’s ability to host visiting jazz artists from other places. Twenty years ago, the Boston area was still a stopping point with a number of venue options for musicians on tour. Here is a sample of what my husband, jazz pianist Pandelis Karayorgis, and I collectively remember hearing in the mid-to-late 1980s: Abbey Lincoln, Lester Bowie, David Murray, and Don Cherry with Ed Blackwell at Charlie’s Tap in Central Square, Cambridge; Cecil Taylor, Randy Weston, Steve Lacy, and Sun Ra at the Nightstage on the opposite end of Central Square; Mal Waldron, and Geri Allen with Joseph Jarman and Reggie Workman at the Willow Jazz Club in Ball Square, Somerville; Archie Shepp, Jacki Byard, and Henry Threadgill with Andrew Cyrille and Fred Hopkins at the 1369 Jazz Club in Inman Square, Cambridge. (Notice that none of these places, oddly, were actually in Boston itself.) These same venues, of course, were also the places one regularly heard local talent—older and “emerging”—such as the Fringe, the Joe Maneri Quartet, Jimmy Giuffre, Ran Blake, Joe Morris, and too many others to mention.

It’s stunning to think about what we’ve lost. All of the above venues are gone today (at least one was a drug front, another was evicted…), and no other jazz clubs have opened to replace them. Today musicians and their audiences here struggle desperately to find places to meet. Here is what their options are (or aren’t), arranged by category:

• Posh and/or cocktail-style venues that are inaccessible to many important musicians because…
  a) The music is intended as background for patron conversation.
  b) The music is intended for listening, but the message is clearly “We’re not looking for something ‘interesting,’ thank you.”
  c) You need to be famous enough to completely fill the house.

  Not exactly scene-promoting. Well-known examples would be Bob’s Southern Bistro on Columbus Avenue in Boston (a and b), Ryles in Inman Square, Cambridge (a and b), Scullers (a, b, and c) and the Regattabar (c)—the latter two are situated on either side of the Charles River outside of Harvard Square, and offer sporty, collegiate rowing motifs, a cold, touristy vibe, and $8 beers. The likes of Paul Bley, McCoy Tyner, and Randy Weston can be heard at the Regattabar, but on the other hand, phone calls from Matthew Shipp go unreturned, apparently.

• Places that feature popular jazz jam sessions, such as the historic Wally’s Café on Mass. Ave. near Symphony Hall, where amateurs and students can blow on Sundays. Thank goodness for Wally’s, but beyond this it doesn’t contribute to the scene as a vital jazz club.
• Alternative venues. I recently read a series of essays from 1989 on the subject of Boston jazz venues by Stu Vandermark, who writes about the Boston jazz scene for Cadence Magazine. He had already noticed then a shift to “places not identified as jazz clubs”—for example: salsa and reggae venues in Cambridge, the Cambridge Public Library, and the Coolidge Corner Theater in Brookline. The Middle East restaurant, a famous, multi-roomed pop and Arabic music place in Cambridge’s Central Square, occasionally had jazz artists in their “main space,” downstairs. I saw Don Byron there, as well as Sun Ra, and the Either/Orchestra. Of these places, only The Middle East still programs jazz on very rare occasions, in the piano-less “corner space.” One other, newer, pop music club, the Lizard Lounge in Cambridge, occasionally features groove-based jam bands, but also has no piano.

  Of the remaining alternative venues, only two currently possess pianos, and these both require a rental fee from the musicians: the Lily Pad in Inman Square, Cambridge (which I have written about here previously), and Rutman’s Violin Shop, on Westland Avenue in Boston, diagonally across the street from Symphony Hall. Rutman’s is attractive, friendly, and well situated, and hosts other, “legit” chamber music recitals as well.

• Concert series. The Boston Creative Music Alliance series is an important, but sparse, four-concerts-per-season affair run by Boston Phoenix and Jazziz critic Ed Hazell, and is held at the Institute for Contemporary Art in Boston. (This season featured Ernest Hawkins and the New Horizons Ensemble, Tim Berne and the Big Satan, Misha Mengelberg and the ICP Orchestra, and one local group—the Makanda Ken McIntyre Project with guest Oliver Lake.) Groups with no acoustic pianist appear on the new Friday Night Series at Brookline Tai Chi, an attractive, roomy space on Beacon Street in Brookline, thanks to the initiative of members of the Fully Celebrated Orchestra who work there. (FCO drummer Django Carraza told me they are searching for a piano.)

  Another excellent, musician-headed concert series is Modern Improvised Music (mim), originally run by bassist Nate McBride at a gallery called Artists-at-Large. AaL was situated on the main drag of Hyde Park—a far, far off, deserted corner of Boston, miles away from the last subway stop—and later moved around the corner to a church basement. Location, location, location… And yet mim’s reputation spread fast, and concerts were frequently full. Considering the difficulty of trekking out to Hyde Park, this success indicates the local audience’s appetite for interesting music. In addition to presenting locals, mim drew musicians from out of town, such as New York saxophonist Tony Malaby, Chicago saxophonist Ken Vandermark, and saxophonist Peter Brötzmann from Germany. When McBride finally gave up on Boston and moved to Chicago in 2004, pianist Steve Lantner took over the directorship. This spring, AaL was evicted from the church, and mim is currently on hiatus as it looks for a new home. Lantner plans to resume this valuable series somewhere in the fall of this year.

  There also is a series at the Cambridge Multicultural Arts Center called the Real Deal Jazz Club and Cafe. Tables and a bar are brought into the elegant concert hall, which is thus transformed into a “cabaret” setting. The Real Deal is run by Fenton Hollander, who formerly booked for the Regattabar. Ditto here for everything I described about that place, minus the rowing equipment on the walls.

  The local festivals scarcely warrant mentioning. The famous Boston Globe Jazz and Blues Festival, begun in 1966, has been inactive since 2003 and shows no signs of returning, and the Beantown Jazz Festival, founded by Bob’s Southern Bistro owner Darryl Settles, seems to feature at least as much R&B and gospel as jazz, so one wonders about its title.

I contacted musicians from three different cities, including Boston, to get their point of view. All three are well-known, risk-taking musicians who have gained devoted followings over the years, and they are almost guaranteed to bring out a good-sized audience here whenever they play. I asked them, most importantly, where they play when here, and why. I also asked them to compare the situation here with other U.S. cities.

Saxophonist Charlie Kohlhase has been based in the Boston area for more than twenty years and leads several groups, including the Charlie Kohlhase Quintet, the Explorer’s Club, and the Saxophone Support Group (whose name demonstrates the sense of humor required to survive here). Kohlhase used to appear occasionally at the Regattabar, but he told me now that since the previous booking agent (Hollander) left, he no longer does. He was playing at Artists-at-Large until it closed this spring, and now only plays at Brookline Tai Chi. (About both places he wrote: “the people are decent and trying to keep a scene going.”) He eschews places like the Lily Pad that “charge the artist to play—kind of a disturbing trend.”

Saxophonist and clarinetist Ken Vandermark of Chicago, leader and co-leader of numerous groups (e.g. the Vandermark Five and the Free Music Ensemble), also cites the former Artists-at-Large and Zeitgeist galleries as his stomping grounds when here. Now that one is closed and the other has morphed, we’ll see if Vandermark will opt for the Lily Pad, Rutman’s, or something else—or stop coming all together. Vandermark also balks at the rental fee arrangement, and he notices a decline in Boston “since the period in the early 1980s when challenging music was presented on a regular basis at the Willow, Charlie’s Tap, and the 1369 club.” By contrast, he says, Chicago is a place where “not counting the mainstream jazz clubs, there is a place to perform cutting-edge music every night of the week.” He partially blames Boston’s much higher real estate costs for its problem, and points out that while New York has similar problems, “the musicians in the New York area have somehow been able to coordinate with presenters to keep music happening, in Manhattan and Brooklyn.”

New York-based pianist Matthew Shipp, who performs and records as a soloist and in numerous other formations, said that New York really isn’t much better than Boston in this regard—it was a “don’t get me started!” moment in the conversation. He pointed out that the scene shifts from city to city, often depending on the existence of even one competent individual promoting jazz performances at any given time in a given city. (In Boston that individual was, for some years, a young man named Billy Ruane.) Currently, Shipp said, he has found the climate more favorable in places like Nashville and Austin. As for Boston, while Shipp used to play occasionally at The Middle East, he almost never plays here now unless he is featured in one of the four seasonal Boston Creative Music Alliance concerts—i.e. once a year, if we’re lucky. Keep in mind the piano issue here, add to it the inhospitality of the Regattabar et al., and the unpopular rental situation at the remaining two Boston-area venues that have pianos, and it’s clear that Boston has practically closed its doors to Shipp and countless other pianists, and their fans.

Vandermark ended his email to me with these thoughts: “The lack of performance opportunities in a city like Boston is crippling for the scene. More than any other kind of music, jazz needs a live environment for it to truly develop—it is a process art form. The fewer chances that there are to deal with the process, the fewer chances there are to find new ground on which to build.” Someday somebody here will decide he or she knows how to properly sell live, evolving jazz to its audience. Meanwhile, with schools like Berklee College of Music and the New England Conservatory, Boston will continue to draw large numbers of improvising musicians, and therefore there always will be a scene, whether or not it is seen or heard.

PLOrk could be the name of a new planet, a sitcom, or the newest catch phrase of America’s youth. Instead, it’s actually shorthand for the Princeton Laptop Orchestra, an ensemble of 15 laptops making music together in real time at Princeton University. The group is only in its infancy, this being the first year of the experiment, but they’ve made innovative strides. Last September, they began as a freshman seminar in computer music; in May, they took the stage as a performing ensemble. You can judge this book by its cover—PLOrk is just as cool as the name, as proven by their final concert at Princeton early this month.

They set up camp for the concert in Princeton’s Chancellor Green Rotunda, an octagon-shaped library with a circular upstairs deck. The laptops were situated upstairs while the audience sat below looking up or lounging on the floor with provided Pilates mats. Was this a concert or nap time? The pre-concert music featured the kind of sounds you’d hear at a planetarium, the light shimmering of stars and planets. Scott Smallwood, composer and the-guy-running-around-with-equipment, was the captain of this ship, pulling the audience out of their daily routine and preparing them to experience what might be thought of as other-worldly sounds.

Only partially coming down to Earth, the first piece, Orbits, allowed the laptops to connect to a remote server offering the chillingly urgent speech of air traffic controllers. The laptops controlled the amount of static and the loudness of the sounds, with other atmospheric noise in the background. As the sounds progressed, two of the five laptop players began making sounds by bowing an electric cymbal. Further on, more sounds were added as other players took mallets to metal bowls. It all faded away to the lonely sound of one air traffic controller in empty space.

CliX, by doctoral candidate and TA for the computer music seminar Ge Wang, followed. Each key on the laptop keyboard was programmed to make a clicking-type sound and the players typed away at racing speeds. Wang conducted the piece, asking for high and low pitched clicks by the level of his hand, and divided up the group at times to have multiple grooves going at once. He pointed all across the ensemble for a wave effect, the musical equivalent of cheering baseball fans. The clicks were like raindrops on a windshield during a downpour and the piece was just as energetic as a windy storm.

With young adults as composers, one would expect to hear a bit of the electronic generation rub off on the music. Chris Douthitt’s music, Piece for Plucked Strings and Bells (sort of) for Three Laptops and One Performer, made good use of electronica’s dense percussion beats and chill chords. It surprised me to find out after the concert that the plucked string sound was not a live performer, but a computer-made sound created with the help of the distinguished composer and computer music faculty member, Paul Lansky. It sounded like an acoustic instrument with the whimsical quality of a live musician. Mumble, by one-time NewMusicBox associate editor Nathan Michel, seemed also inspired by modern popular music with beautiful chords and clouds of twinkling stars.

Faculty member and electronic music queen Pauline Oliveros also “intended” to write a piece for the group, a piece called Murphy Mixup: Murphy Intends. With composer Zevin Polzin, she made a musical version of the Murphy Device from the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research lab. The device itself is a conveyor belt carrying 9000 black balls over the top of a wall, the balls falling into a Gaussian distribution, a bell-curve. However, it’s been proven with the Murphy Device that people mentally intending to influence the curve actually could alter it without any physical connection—only intention. Oliveros’s musical version is mostly pre-programmed in the software so the ensemble doesn’t actually have to do much during the piece except give mental attention to the sounds coming out of their specific computer. A bunch of fun sounds are mathematically happening in a Gaussian curve, but if a performer or audience member hears a sound they like, and intends to hear it again, they just might be able to influence that sound to pop up more often. The piece required minimal work from PLOrk but was interesting in both philosophy and sound.

Dan Trueman decided to take matters into his own hands by conducting his piece, not leaving anything to chance. His was one of the few chord-based pieces on the program, and it included live elements such as mouth clicks and heavy breathing by the performers in addition to a seemingly involved and fun process on the laptops.

Shifting the concert into a more interactive and entertaining experience for the laptop musicians, Scott Smallwood and Ge Wang developed a piece with an interface that resembles a video game. Little mice run around a checkered board on the screen, and the players place shapes in their path that create sound as the mice run over them. The mice go from computer to computer, so the players have to sit in anticipation for when the mice will come onto their screen. New mice are made by the conductor on a MIDI keyboard, and after a while, there are a ton of mice running around with the players trying to keep up. This piece was only in demo mode for this concert and Wang said that more planning and organization still need to happen before it’s complete, but it was intriguing to watch and listen to what they had come up with so far.

Staying with the theme of games, Smallwood took inspiration from his childhood memories of the local arcade. This piece was a crazy arrangement of fragments from all your favorite video games—Pac Man, Super Mario Brothers, and much more—with all the bells and whistles of an arcade. It was a lively and entertaining way to end the concert.

This ensemble is original because opens up the possibilities for computer music to be a more human and interactive process, instead of a lonely, isolated one. Cutting-edge equipment helps. The speakers are special-order, spaceship-looking creations that have six separate channels. The sound coming out eminates in all directions, simulating an acoustic instrument with depth rather than the thin sound of one speaker. Also, tiny Mac laptops allow this group to be portable, whereas in the past, it would have been a pain to carry around a desktop computer. Plus, technology has advanced in a way that computers can process sound in real time and servers can handle processing large amounts of information without much of a delay.

All these factors added up in PLOrk founders Dan Trueman and Perry Cook’s minds, and they decided to try out a laptop ensemble and see if it would sink or swim. In this case, it swam. PLOrk holds many possibilities and I look forward to seeing and hearing what the future will bring. If this past concert is any indication, there will be a plenitude of cool, fantastic sounds to be discovered.