Category: Field Reports

Roddy Schrock Photo by Hideki Kubota

Communication through movement is a mysterious proposition. Dance always seems so fragile. Theater, with its grand excess of spoken dialogue, is an exercise in obtuse explication compared to the ascetic limitations of movement. One piece in particular drew me to the Paul Taylor Dance Company performance on March 31: Banquet of Vultures, a new work choreographed by Taylor receiving its West Coast premiere.

Taylor’s decision to use Morton Feldman’s Oboe and Orchestra to accompany the piece was part of the attraction. I wanted to find out how this work could be tied to his style of choreography or if the music would even be audible over the noisy patter of the dancers moving around the stage. In answer to the last question, it was, but barely. As to the first question, it was a success as well. Feldman’s music weaved its way around the dancers, maintaining its own presence as much as the performers on stage. Taylor’s interplay between physical and musical gesture was subtle, evocative, and convincing.

At first I took issue with Taylor seeming to have superficially chosen this piece only for its ability to evoke a sense of dread, but finally decided to just go with it, accepting his proposition. I’ve never found Feldman’s music disquieting at all, and frequently tire of hearing commentary linking contemporary composition to horror film soundtracks, but in this case, for whatever reason, it worked. Maybe Taylor is lucky, or maybe he is of that rare branch of choreography that is able to successfully marry pre-composed music with new dance. The Feldman piece, while not remotely dark on its own, is malleable, able to bend into a shape that compliments the stark commentary of Taylor’s piece. But why music so often has to be the compromised part in dance is another issue altogether.

In the piece, a frightening young man dressed in a black suit with a red tie, the kind worn only by politicians or real estate moguls, plays the role of some kind of American Psycho/Dear Leader character commanding a panoply of tightly synchronized soldiers, dressed in full military drag. The oboe with its long, sharp, subtly shifting lines provides a focal point to a dark stage with slithering characters holding candles. As time passes, the soldiers die, the Dear Leader jumps for joy in turn, and toward the end, vividly stabs a candle-bearing lone survivor of his indiscriminate war, eventually carrying her offstage.

Throughout the piece, while dramatic in its imagery, I couldn’t help but wish that there were more depth to the commentary, taking us somewhere other than the mindset of how horrible war is and how horrified we should be at the current wars happening around us. And there is one moment when the red tie-wearing presidential character dances solo, in convulsive movements, pummeling himself on the floor, forcing the audience to question whether politicians are capable of guilt or self-loathing when faced with the responsibility of their actions. This moment, this question offered to the audience, took the piece beyond the realm of cliché and into the refreshing area of direct cultural commentary. But I still wish that this approach were more the norm in the work of such populist-leaning artists as Paul Taylor. Banquet of Vultures is ultimately the V for Vendetta for the NPR-listening, Volvo driving, “supporters of the arts” crowd.

What’s more important: the movie or the music? Movies are visual creations, where flashing lights and tightly edited sequences capture our attention and transport us into the world of the director and screenwriter. But it’s the music, often forgotten about in the background, that targets an emotion, tells a story, and sets an atmosphere long before the visual components of a movie, and it can often drastically change how we interpret the story. For the third annual Syracuse International Film and Video Festival, the Syracuse Society for New Music brought the music of the movies to the foreground with live performances played to background film clips. This unusual reversal of roles was both an enticing and unique way of bringing attention to music that often goes unappreciated.

The concert opened with Laura Karpman’s five-movement composition, Rounds (2001), for viola and piano. Karpman is a four-time Emmy award winning composer who has worked with Steven Spielberg on a mini-series, Taken. A believer that video game music holds creative potential, she is the current composer-in-residence for Sony Online Entertainment. For those video game addicts out there, Karpman’s music can be heard on Sony’s Everquest II. Though Rounds was not accompanied with film clips or visuals, the music was so visual that a film could have been made as accompaniment to the score.

The piece began with hardly audible figurations on the viola, rising in volume as if something in the distance were approaching. The piano pushed along the rhythm with clear accents, both instruments rising in volume until a driving rhythm took over. The second movement was calmer, imitating rippled water with a reflective character. The third movement took off in a hurry, but the fourth movement returned to the rippled water, with more pensive and exotic melodies. And, in a full circle, the fifth movement returned to distant figurations, rising in tension and activity. However, the ending was so anticlimactic that it was almost lost. There were some ensemble issues, the two performers not exactly lining up, but the over-all impression was effective because it brought scenes and action into my mind as I listened, the way any good film composer knows how to do.

Featured next was a trailer of alma mater, one of the films from the festival, by Uruguayan director Alvaro Buela with music by Sylvia Meyer. The film traces a girl through religious and mystical experiences which ultimately give her a deeper understanding of her own motives in life. However, the trailer turned the girl’s depression into an artistic statement. The music helped with the artistic, pensive spin by illuminating the silent film editing with a cute Spanish vocal song with raw harmony in the piano. Composer Sylvia Meyer, who was also performing, sang not as an opera singer but as a Spanish folk singer, which gave the film added character and inspired me to want to see the full-length version.

In between set-ups, clips from the one of the Festival’s documentary films, Bright Circle, was shown. The film tracks American Indians in sports with music by Brent Michael Davids. The music wandered around with unresolved dissonances, but was very much a background event so as to not drown out the narration. The film proved to be an interesting account of the cultural cleansing that forced the American Indians to adapt to the social-rites of a Europeanized America, all while American Indians dominated the sports scene in the early 1900s.

Davids, of American Indian decent, also rescored the 1920 silent film, Last of the Mohicans in 2003 for full-orchestra and quartz flute. It’s a captivating score that perfectly lines up with the action in the movie, from the tension between the white man and the Indians, to the love between Cora and Uncas, and even the brutal fight scenes. For the Society for New Music concert, Davids pared down the score for a large chamber ensemble and he joined the action, playing the quartz flute and singing. The piece was held together with the film by using a somewhat audible click track. It was slightly annoying, but when the wood flute being played on the silent screen sounded loud and clear in exact time, it was chilling and worthwhile. Rumor has it that discussions are taking place with Daniel Hege, the music director of the Syracuse Symphony, to program the full orchestral score.

Kazuhiko Koyama gets the award for traveling the furthest distance to be at the concert. Express from Japan, lavished in bright blue silks with white socks and flip-flops, he came to share the sounds of his shamisen, a traditional Japanese instrument. For those who have not seen one up close, it looks like a cross between a bass guitar and banjo. The sound box looked and sounded as if it were made from solid clay. Koyama used a metal handle that could grab the string, plucking it upwards with a tingy sound, but could also hit the strings against the clay, making a loud clank. He played tracks from the movie Adan, which was also screened at the film festival. A score made up of Koyama’s playing makes me think that the movie must incorporate both traditional and modern elements.

The concert came to a dramatic finish with a clip of Episode 110 from the Spielberg’s Taken, with the second piece of Laura Karpman’s to be featured on the program, a score arranged for two violins, two violas, cello, and double bass. It was a huge contrast compared to Rounds. This piece was romantic in style, but never gave into clichéd dominant to tonic cadences, keeping the dissonance prevailing throughout. The tension created by the clashing of those compositional techniques was carried throughout the entire episode. Taking in Spielberg’s overly-dramatic Hollywood directorial style combined with the sci-fi edge of the series, Karpman’s sounds melded well and helped hold the dramatic tension through the long scene where the daughter of a young couple was lured away by spaceships hovering above the Midwestern plains. Because of the live accompaniment, the spoken words from the episode were turned off, so it was difficult to understand the action on screen, but the music gave enough information to hold the audience in suspense as the scene played out.

Listening to new music with International Film Festival reels attached was as magical as a new music concert can get and opened a new chapter for the Syracuse Society for New Music. Despite the unique nature of this concert, it seemed to be a technical beast to put on logistically. Except for the click track for Last of the Mohicans, the performers had to wing it, often times leaving the music lagging behind the end of the clip which resulted sharp cuts of film instead of nicely timed, edited endings. For a group such as the Syracuse Society for New Music, this was a humongous project, much larger than their usual fare, and perhaps it didn’t get quite enough preparation. The Society will do all it can to put on new music, even if it means short rehearsal times. Perhaps they’ll gain more recognition, and funding, through their relationship with the film festival, affording them more rehearsal time in the future. If music sets the tone, the Society sets the tone of a growing community with artistic potential.

Zachary M. Lewis Photo by Nowell York

It was a Thursday evening in mid-March. Members of the Cleveland Orchestra were gathering onstage at Severance Hall while a small group of ticket holders settled in a chamber hall downstairs to catch a pre-concert performance by the Oberlin Contemporary Music Ensemble.

That’s where it would happen. There, in the elegant Reinberger Chamber Hall, a fed-up listener would boldly strike back against new music.

The program at this mini-concert was Julian Anderson’s Poetry Nearing Silence, a brief septet from 1997 based on poetry by Tom Phillips. The music was serving the place of an introductory lecture or interview with Anderson (a British composer now teaching at Harvard University), whose Diptych the orchestra and director Franz Welser-Möst were to present later that evening.

Following the performance, OCME director Timothy Weiss offered to answer questions. An older gentleman, clearly disgusted by what he’d heard, shot his hand in the air and was given the floor. “Can you explain to me how that’s music and not just the group warming up?” he asked.

Momentarily flustered, Weiss smiled politely, gathered his thoughts, and proceeded to deliver a remarkably polished response that defused the situation. After first noting the music’s “almost embarrassing attachment to the 19th century,” he justified the performance with the principle many NMBx readers live by: “If you don’t continue to listen to new music, then music isn’t even an art form.”

The questioner nodded his head in seeming understanding. Nevertheless, an air of awkward hostility hung over the room through a round of tamer questions and another Oberlin student’s performance of a Schubert lied.

Reflecting on the encounter a few days later, Weiss said he wasn’t prepared for such a pointed question, but he wasn’t surprised by it, either. In fact, he took it as a sign of the times.

“The Thursday night audience is the conservative audience, and this man was just trying to get a reaction out of me. He was trying to rile me up…These are conservative times, and some of that conservative attitude in politics and religion is filtering down into the arts.”

“Of course,” Weiss mused, “I could have been like Harrison Birtwistle when he was here last year. He just said ‘That’s a stupid question’ and moved on. But he’s 70 and has an international reputation. I’m only 38 and I’m not ready to be that abrasive.”

Gail Wein Photo by Chad Evans Wyatt

Everything old is new again. Murry Sidlin, dean of the School of Music at The Catholic University of America, thinks so. Inspired by Aaron Copland’s Old American Songs, mid-20th-century settings of folk melodies, Sidlin commissioned ten composers to write new settings of traditional tunes. New Old American Songs premiered on April 5, 2006, as part of CUA’s Copland Festival.

Sidlin met Copland several times over the years, and once asked him if he planned to add to his two sets of Old American Songs. Copland replied that he was pointing the way for future composers to follow his example. Within these settings, Copland demonstrated the richness of American music and spurred Sidlin to launch the project, New Old American Songs, in celebration of Copland’s legacy.

Sidlin tapped CUA professor of composition Andrew Simpson to head up the project, coordinate the details, and choose the composers, all of who have some connection to CUA. Simpson laid out the precise parameters of the compositions: The original songs had to have been written before 1900. This not only satisfied the “old” part of the project, it also was a practical consideration to use tunes that are in the public domain. The source material had to be American, or at least well known in America, and the works should be brief, about two to three minutes long.

Murry Sidlin

By design, the composers represented a mixed bag in terms of background and experience, from student Stamos James Martin, 20, to composition professor Steven Strunk, 63, to award-winning Broadway composer Andrew Gerle, 33, to project leader Simpson, 39. Naturally, the composition styles varied, though considering the independent nature of development, the ten together made a remarkably cohesive set.

Only one, Joseph Santo’s setting of the 1651 hymn tune “Our Father which in Heaven art”, had an ultra-contemporary style. Most of the others were melodious settings of spirituals: Martin’s “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child” and Philip Carluzzo’s “My Lord, What a Mornin”; and popular songs, like Strunk’s take on “Grandfather’s Clock.” Roberto A. Martinez obviously had fun with the Mexican-American folk tune “La Cucaracha,” which added spice to the set, and the resoundingly silly “Risseldy, Rosseldy” arranged by Maurice Saylor concluded the cycle with whimsical amusement.

(L-R) Six of the ten participating composers: Leo Nestor (CUA professor), Andrew Gerle (Broadway composer), Robert Martinez (CUA student), Andrew Earle Simpson (CUA professor), Stamos Martin (CUA student), Maurice Saylor (CUA professor) Photo by Lara Fredrickson

Leo Nestor led The CUA Chorus and Chamber Players at the University’s Pryzbyla Center. The CUA Chorus sang with maturity and poise, making for a tight and engaging performance. Nestor’s conscientious direction ensured that each composer received full attention. After all, the cycle included his own setting of “Shenandoah.”

This is not Sidlin’s first foray into the concept of a community of composers contributing short pieces to compile a larger work. Last year, Songs of a Forgotten War engaged 19 composers to each write a one-minute piece about the Korean War Memorial in Washington, D.C. Sidlin jokes that “anyone can write a symphony,” but he seems especially intrigued by the challenges of writing very short compositions. In light of that, we can be sure that there’s another miniatures commissioning project up Sidlin’s sleeve.

Justin Schell

While some artists who work with digital samples seek to retain the fragment’s sedimented cultural and historical associations, Nick Zammuto and Paul de Jong, who make up The Books, find beauty in the decontextualization, but never dehumanization, of the voices they draw upon. On their three albums to date, Thought for Food, The Lemon of Pink, and last year’s Lost and Safe, those associations are still audible, yet much is left to the listener’s imagination. “When taken out of context,” Zammuto says of many of the samples he and de Jong use, “the imagery is really amazing.”

In possession of a digital sample library that numbers in the tens of thousands, de Jong (cello) and Zammuto (voice and guitar) select seconds-long gems from this abundance of digital riches, crafting surrounding textures corporeally—bowing, plucking, strumming—that never seem to overwhelm, nor are overwhelmed by, the sampled material. On Lost and Safe‘s “It Never Changes to Stop,” amid a plaintive banjo counterpoint hovers the voice of an overzealous preacher, whose diatribes quickly devolve from authoritarian power to sheepish vulnerability. Even Salvador Dali makes an appearance on “Venice,” a sonic rubberstamp courtesy of the surreal world through which The Books tread.

Samples are not always literal quotations, however. Most of the lyrics are also taken from other contexts, ranging from the writings of the Buddha and the Tao Te Ching for “A Little Longing Goes Away” and “Twelve Fold Chain,” respectively, and a Surrealist-derived, exquisite corpse-style lyrical composition on “Smells Like Content.” While watching television, Zammuto searched for poetically resonant phrases, then flipped the channels to find their completion. He delivers these words in a slightly delicate voice, yet one which thankfully lacks the whine of some contemporary male pop singers.

While composing with samples can lead to thorny legal territory, the two are not overly concerned with the possibility of a copyright lawsuit. “There is a danger in what we do, there’s no doubt about it,” Zammuto says, but feels that “we’re extremely conservative when it comes to dealing with copyrighted materials.” If there is a question over a sample’s lineage, the two simply put it aside and search for a something else in their library. For de Jong, “there is enough sound to play” that doesn’t involve undue legal attention. Besides, Zammuto concludes, “I don’t even think half of the people that would hear the record would even recognize their own voice.”

</tableSince they first began playing live, shortly after releasing The Lemon of Pink, The Books have navigated both the indie rock and new music concert circuits. Their current tour, however, which also included European dates, is their first full-fledged concert tour. For every club the duo plays, it seems, within a week they will be playing in an art museum. “The real purpose of touring,” Zammuto says—only half-jokingly, I suspect—”is to raid Salvation Armies and Goodwills for new material.”When I met them in Minneapolis, they were playing in the basement of the University of Minnesota’s student union; the space, filled to capacity with 240 people, was surprisingly intimate, with a large group seated on the floor enjoying the music just a few feet from the performers.The performance revealed the latest addition to The Books’s arsenal. Each song performed had an accompanying video, from disarming cross-cultural displays of laughter that formed the sampled landscape of “Take Time” to varieties of life in motion, nimbly synchronized with the undulating repetitions of “An Owl With Knees.””There’s this world of rotting videotapes out there,” Zammuto said with more than a hint of glee. “Now music is starting to arise simultaneously with image.”Zammuto, originally a chemistry student before switching to visual and now sound art, lives in North Adams, Massachusetts, while de Jong, who has played cello since early in his life, is based in New York. Each works on material separately until they have something to share with the other. Albums are recorded in North Adams, with the two doing all of their own mixing and editing. Originally from the Netherlands, de Jong is also completing a project that translates his experiences of Dutch neighborhoods into sound.Establishing their recording home in North Adams, home of Bang on a Can’s Summer Music Festival, has brought them in contact with the group’s founders. Zammuto met Michael Gordon, Julia Wolfe, and David Lang at the last Summer Music Institute. “It turned out,” de Jong said, “that most of the people involved with Bang on a Can knew our music already. We’re both pretty amazed by that.”Such interest has translated into greater interest from the New York new music scene. Todd Reynolds will open a series of Books performances, including one on May 5 at Brooklyn’s Northsix. And on May 24 they will be featured as part of Ben Neill’s PlayVision festival, sharing slots with established Downtowners Christian Marclay, Elliott Sharp, and Okkyung Lee.For The Books, then, digital sampling is more than a way to superficially revel in a pastiche of life’s audible shards. Rather, they have used their music to construct a coherent, distinct, and increasingly well-known musical identity, formed, in a gratifying paradox, from other people’s voices.***Justin Schell lives in Minneapolis. He is a first-year graduate student in the Comparative Studies in Discourse and Society at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, where his main research interests are the study of contemporary musical cultures, the relationship between music criticism and notions of historical value, and the myriad ways that music does cultural work throughout the globe. He previously lived and worked in Milwaukee, where he completed a Bachelor’s degree in Music History and Philosophy. And he unwaveringly agrees with Frank Zappa that The Shaggs are better than the Beatles.

Paul de Jong and Nick Zammuto a.k.a. The Books Photo by Nino P.

Kronos Quartet, L-R: Jeffrey Zeigler, John Sherba, Hank Dutt, and David Harrington Photo by Jay Blakesberg

The Kronos Quartet has been throwing a little party at Carnegie Hall over the past few weeks with plenty of A-listers on stage and in the crowd. I was in the house for three nights of Kronos: Live Mix, and the concerts left me speculating about the festival’s significance in ways that extended well beyond the impressive span of premieres and fresh programming the six-night series brought to the stage. Hearing new work from Alexandra du Bois, Michael Gordon, Henryk Górecki, J. G. Thirlwell, Glenn Branca, Terry Riley, Derek Charke, and a nice collection from R.D. Burman’s catalogue in such a concentrated fashion—all with the gloss of Kronos attitude and subtle lighting effects—demonstrated the larger importance of following your instincts (not to mention your heart) as a new music performer.

Kronos, of course, has built up quite a record over the past three decades, putting the ensemble in a particularly key place to present new work and take risks. They have the necessary mind-set and experience, but more than that, having ushered into being such a volume of work, there’s room for fans to have their own opinions, to not like a particular piece or album, without losing their faith in the ensemble. The power of that situation was on full display during Live Mix.

The quartet’s programming choices made for a notably eclectic festival, mercifully without the terms “iPod generation” or “shuffle function” being uttered. Instead, Kronos concentrated on what it always has—presenting work it’s rather in love with backed by all the passion and conviction it can rally. There were such large crowds on the street before the shows that tourists were stopping to ask what was going on, and the hall itself was filled almost to capacity every night. There was an overt excitement in the air—a concert circumstance that couldn’t help but infect even the most jaded members of New York’s music community. I’m sure not everyone with a ticket was a card-carrying member of the Kronos fan club, but the screaming and the ovations that greeted the quartet each night provided a glimpse of what “fame” in this context feels like. And maybe it’s just his West Coast sensibility crashing on our eastern shoreline, but David Harrington is obviously excited by the work his ensemble is doing and, just as importantly, is skilled at projecting that enthusiasm to the audience.

The opening concert in Carnegie’s downstairs Zankel Hall, Songs Are Sung (March 24), was a program of new pieces from Du Bois, Gordon, and Gorecki. The three works fit together into what Harrington characterizes as a sort of novel in music.

Du Bois’s Night Songs, String Quartet No. 3, inspired by the life and writing of Holocaust victim Etty Hillesum, was more introspective and meditative than blatantly mournful. The composer had done her homework, reading Hillesum’s work and visiting Amsterdam, Westerbrook, and Auschwitz to step as close to the Dutch Jew’s wartime life experience as possible. The music born of this was starkly touching, conveying the complexity of individual human darkness rather than the epic turmoil of nations in a time of genocide.

Gordon’s Sad Park was built on a selection of electronically manipulated voices of young children recorded sharing their memories of September 11. A dangerous approach to a memorial work, perhaps, but it assured that the piece did not come off as precious or manipulate the emotions of the listener like a Hallmark Hall of Fame special. The quartet took a backseat to the recorded material through the first half of the piece, though they were placed more squarely in the forefront as it progressed and turned toward more blatant rage and violence. The piece was hard to take—something about the slowed and stretched voices of youngsters saying things like “two evil planes broke in little pieces and fire came” over and over again made me physically nauseous—but I’m still not sure how much of my reaction to the piece was dislike and how much was a fear of being so close to this hideous juxtaposition. I suspect that very thing might have been what Gordon was after.

After intermission, Kronos offered the U.S. premiere of Górecki’s third quartet, Piesni Spiewaja (“…songs are sung”). Written in 1995, Gorecki delayed releasing the score for a decade, though he does not admit to why he felt compelled to withhold it. The piece carries an internal nostalgic softness that weaves its way through the nearly hour-long meditation. It brought up an easy comparison for me of watching my grandmother wile away the final weeks of her life sitting in silence on the back porch, reviewing memories in no particular order and without feeling pressured to reach any sort of conclusion. Structurally, Gorecki’s musical material seemed to mirror this train of thought as well, picking pieces up again and setting them down as desire dictated.

Things took a bit of a turn towards the hip and trendy for The Cusp of Magic (April 7) program, in terms of the crowd at least. Asymmetrical haircuts on display in the lobby aside, however, this concert was a stand out for how it pushed at the definitions of “string quartet,” playing with the ensemble’s organic textures rather than forcing it to mimic something it’s not (i.e. embark on a misguided venture to become a rock band).

Thirlwell’s Nomatophobis caught attention right out of the gate with its percussive, aggressive language. Slides in smallish intervals, harmonics, pizzicato—the playing was always a little dirty, even in the quiet exchanges between the viola and cello. Branca’s Light Field (In Consonance), characterized by the composer as an “air on open strings,” was a reworking of a piece originally scored for guitars, bass, and drums. Kronos kept up a steady sawing throughout the work’s 14-minute run time, kicking up harmonics and overtones while lulling the listener into the music’s mechanical, piston-action makeup.

Pipa master Wu Man joined Kronos on stage for the evening’s crowning work: Terry Riley’s The Cusp of Magic. Riley and Kronos have a musical relationship that dates back to 1978, and the depth and intimacy this allows between composer and ensemble was quite evident in this particular case. Riley started with a desire to have the piece be “magical” and Harrington’s granddaughter Emily’s toys and noisemakers helped guide him. It’s an expansive piece that covers a lot of ground without belaboring any one point, and I fell into it deeply without quite grasping the particulars of why. The integration of the toys was giggle-inducing (to keep a straight face while cellist Jeff Zeigler worked an orange squeak toy with his toe would have been criminal) and captured a joyful innocence without inducing a Slurpee headache.

Kronos wrapped up its festival with a blow-out production in the larger Stern Auditorium: India Calling (April 8), largely a selective recap of You’ve Stolen My Heart, the 2005 disc they recorded with Bollywood vocal legend Asha Bhosle. The glittering saris catching the light across the hall set the tone for the evening, and so even though Derek Charke’s Cercle du Nord III provided quite a bit of evocative color and rhythmic interest, it was simply focused on the wrong geography. Much of the concert’s opening half, in fact, felt like little more than killing time while waiting for the opening act to get off the stage. The low point was an unfortunate transcription of a Sigur Rós track (I was induced to flashbacks of playing electric violin in junior-high orchestra for a performance of the Paula Abdul classic “Straight Up”…shudder) which left me seriously searching for examples of an ensemble on the classical side of the tracks capable of uncovering something vital when “covering” anything. Zakir Hussain joined Kronos on stage towards the end of the first half and got the party started, so to say. By the time Bhosle made her entrance after intermission the crowd was in gear. She charmed the hall with ample stage banter in her admittedly broken English, tossing out asides in Hindi. At 73, her voice might not be quite what it was (and the guys on the mixing board seemed only to worsen the volume and clarity issues) but Bhosle has lost no edge as a show-woman, and she danced and flirted with the crowd as Burman’s music dictated throughout her set. Kronos did its best to conjure the heavy synth quality of the Bollywood classics, with violist Hank Dutt logging double duty on keyboard, but those in the audience as intrigued by the music as the spectacle hopefully already had the recording at home. In the end, the crowd roared its appreciation and offered Bhosle several bouquets of flowers. These she gamely offered to donate to Zeigler, who will be marrying composer Paola Prestini this Friday.

Roddy Schrock Photo by Hideki Kubota

I caught the Paul Dresher Ensemble in their second night of performances on April 1 at Theater Artaud in the SOMA district of San Francisco. The space is fantastic and the sound engineering was highly precise; much care was taken in presenting the electro-acoustic ensemble’s particular sound with clarity to the audience. This was a welcome change, as much electronic music is presented in spaces which seem to have sound systems designed for death metal bands. Not that there is anything wrong with death metal, of course.

The first half of the show found the Ensemble giving energetic performances of recent works by Dan Becker, Mark Applebaum, and Roger Reynolds. The most accessible of these was Becker’s Through a Window, described by Becker as a “dialogue between the nostalgic, witty, and sweetly guileless” music of 1920s big bands and his own post-minimal style. His piece, too, was sweet, guileless, and nostalgic: a good fit, I reckon. Whether it was post-minimal or not, who knows? Maybe self-genre-casting is a wily pre-emptive strike on a composer’s part. At least you beat the critics to it.

The division between what composers say about their music and the music itself can be large. In the case of composer Mark Applebaum, it is sometimes huge. In Saturday night’s performance of Martian Anthropology 7*8*9, after having read his program notes, one expected the piece to sound something like a combination of Rzewski’s The People United Will Never Be Defeated and Japanese harsh noise. “Structural clarity and proportion can be tediously mind-numbing…hierarchy seems like a hegemonic, counter-revolutionary plot…completeness seems like a cruel and unusual ideal…focus is overrated (the job of photocopiers); and self-contradiction, as should be plain…is my most trusted gravitational center.”

Applebaum’s music is consistently fascinating and colorful and the performance revealed the deep sense of playfulness and clever orchestration in everything he writes. However, I would not turn to his music for revolutionary hegemony busting. It is striking, actually, how he is able to reign in the natural chaos of homemade instruments, constructed of junk, and make them sound as though they are part of a well-established canon of musical practice. He has an outstanding ability to make a piece based on improvisation and chance procedure sound as though it were completely notated down to the last 128th note. The disparity between his stated ideals and his music as realized may well be a part of his admitted tendency towards self-contradiction, but one wonders what an Applebaum piece that lived up to its rhetoric would sound like.

Roger Reynolds’s piece for narrator and ensemble, Submerged Memories, uses texts by W.G. Sebald. Tenor John Duykers and the Dresher Ensemble vividly played out the themes of shared disorientation in human existence. Reynolds’s impenetrable and affected theatrical approach seemed to purposely alienate the audience as a means to act out, literally, the kind of disorientation one experiences when reading Sebald.

Rounding out this highly varied program, the second half of the concert was comprised of excerpts from Dresher’s recently revised work The Tyrant, made in collaboration with librettist Jim Lewis and performed by the Ensemble, now in acoustic mode, with the role of the tyrant played by the talented John Duykers. Unable to leave his throne, the tyrant is forced to rule only by information provided from his court, the Ensemble providing the soundtrack of chattering yes-men, so to speak. Dresher’s music is deeply intertwined with the text, neither overpowering the other, both playing the role of actors who depend on their fellow performers to vivify their characters. At times surprising, but never unrestrained, Dresher’s music avoids straying too far from the familiar but is consistently fresh and, dare I say, maybe even post-minimal.

Zachary M. Lewis Photo by Nowell York

Margaret Brouwer, head of the composition department at the Cleveland Institute of Music, will receive a 2006 Academy Award in Music from the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Brouwer was nominated for the award along with composers Derek Bermel, Tamar Diesendruck, and David Froom. Each will receive a $7,500 check and a $7,500 grant toward a new recording of their music.

“I’m delighted and honored,” Brouwer said by phone in mid-March, shortly after news of the award was announced. “It’s wonderful to…receive some public recognition.”

Actually, Brouwer has been receiving quite a bit of public recognition lately. In the last two years alone, she’s won a Guggenheim Fellowship and an Individual Fellowship from the Ohio Arts Council. Her latest recording, a Naxos disc featuring her percussion concerto Aurolucent Circles, has also garnered critical acclaim.

Brouwer said she can’t quite explain the recent surge of interest in her music. “I seem to be on a roll,” she said. “I don’t know if my writing has changed recently or people are just starting to become more aware, but I suspect it’s the latter.”

Margaret Brouwer

Then again, her work has changed recently, mostly in terms of tone. Brouwer said she has made a conscious effort to express anger in her music for the first time. “I’ve never written angry music, but today I’m quite upset with the direction our country is taking. It scares me, and it makes me angry. It’s hard to write music that doesn’t deal with that in some way.”

Recent works with elements in this vein include a Clarinet Quintet, a Trio for violin, clarinet and piano, and a set of soprano songs called Declaration. Brouwer said she hasn’t decided yet how she’ll use the recording portion of the Academy Award, but said it’s likely one or more of these will appear on the new disc.

“I’m happy with these latest pieces,” she said. “I was still tweaking them at the time of their premieres, so I think the next step is just to let them settle a little bit.”

Justin Schell

The 2006 Spark Festival of Electronic Music and Art, directed by composer Douglas Geers and held at the University of Minnesota School of Music, was hardly your typical academic electronic music festival. Composer J. Anthony Allen, the festival’s assistant director, believes, “You can go to plenty of electronic music festivals in the United States, some very good ones. What we want to do is engage all aspects of digital art that we can get our hands on.” This year’s event offered not only diversity within electronic music, but also varieties of multimedia collaboration. Headlined by Scanner (a.k.a. Robin Rimbaud) and Alvin Lucier, as well as violinist Maja Cerar and saxophonist Brian Sacawa, Spark’s five-day program was filled with exposure to the work of visual artists, musicians, composers, scholars, and dancers.

The festival opened with Scanner’s keynote lecture and performance. The Londoner surveyed his work over the last two decades, from his early days of “telephone terrorism”—recording, mixing, and releasing of cell phone conversations—to more recent “responsible” projects, such as composing a new anthem for the European Union, Europa25. Scanner’s performance was to bring musicians half a country apart into the same musical environment. The transmission arts group free103point9 was supposed to provide a live internet feed of audio and video originating in Brooklyn, which Scanner would manipulate in real time. Something failed, though, and all that came through was a 110 bpm click track, so the small audience was treated to a solo performance. Scanner’s set oscillated between ambient and more beat-driven textures and was sprinkled throughout with sound samples that spanned from Vietnam to a snatch of banal conversation between a woman and her personal trainer.

Brian Sacawa, widely acclaimed in new music circles for his innovative explorations of the saxophone, performed on three Spark concerts. The first concert featured works by the Dal Niente Composers Group, a collective formed in 2001. Highlighting Sacawa’s embrace of the laptop as a parallel compositional voice, many of these pieces were constructed around the saxophone triggering electronic counterpoints, from the metallic blizzard of Per Bloland’s Quintet to an IDM-like barrage of synthetic pulses near the end of Zac Crockett’s Flight to Flow Between.

In his other concerts, Sacawa explored an expanded electro-acoustic sonic palette. Lei Liang’s Memories of Xiaoxiang transformed Sacawa’s saxophone into a medium for the wails of a grieving wife, her husband killed by an official during the Cultural Revolution. The piece concludes with unsettling vocal samples as both the wife and the official lose their sanity. Not everything Sacawa played was as violent as Memories, however. The Capgras’ Patience Wanes, written by Christopher Biggs, was a musical representation of mental illness that nervously bordered on the cartoonish. With all of his performances, however, Sacawa deftly blurred the line between a performer’s acoustic and electronic sounds.

Maja Cerar renewed her association with Douglas Geers in her Spark performances. The two performed Autopoiesis (literally meaning “self-production”) and Enkidu. For Autopoiesis, Cerar donned luminescent tubing, which a camera and computer subsequently captured and processed before projecting them onto a large screen as the violinist’s ghostly double. At points it visually evoked a digital-era The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, with Cerar’s ghostly imprint dashing behind her. Able to control the elements of the performance through Max/MSP and Jitter, Autopoiesis was one of the best realizations I’ve witnessed of the multimedia possibilities that new technologies have offered to composers and performers.

The high point of the festival, however, was Alvin Lucier’s involvement. The 75-year-old composer’s keynote lecture was refreshingly nonchalant and lacked pretension; he mainly talked about his Sonic Arts Union colleagues Gordon Mumma, Robert Ashley, and David Behrman. At the concerts, the pieces performed were mainly for acoustic instruments and wave oscillators. Cerar and Sacawa performed Violynn and Spira Mirabilis, respectively. Heather Barringer performed Silver Streetcar for the Orchestra, which consisted of the Zeitgeist percussionist exploring the acoustic possibilities of folded metal. Liz Draper performed A Tribute to James Tenney, for double bass and two pure wave oscillators. Draper’s high harmonics intertwined with sine tones a major second apart, but the steadiness of the oscillators was complicated by a clear D from the Southern Theater’s HVAC system. It’s hard to imagine, though, Lucier not enjoying this sonic monkey wrench generated by the acoustics of the performance space.

The most poetic moment came with the performance of Lucier’s Nothing is Real, in which pianist Matthew McCright recorded the melody lines of “Strawberry Fields Forever” onto a miniature tape machine located inside a teapot. After he was finished playing, McCright opened and closed the teapot as the melody played back. Sounding more like a simulacrum than a faithful reproduction, it seemed to memorialize a by-gone era. The simplicity of construction in Nothing is Real and Lucier’s other pieces reveal and revel in an astonishing level of acoustic enchantment, exploring the sonic possibilities of electronic music performances and the spaces in which they are performed.

There were many other excellent pieces performed at this year’s festival, including a digital version of Jonathan Kramer’s Renascence and Kaija Saariaho’s Petals. They were part of the Spark Festival’s attempts to bridge both academic and popular electronic composition—represented not only in the pieces presented during the festival, but also in the Spark Night Life parties where people from all stripes of electronic music could get together and dance.

These groups are increasingly coming together, according to Allen. “Its like two communities trying to shake hands,” he explains, “but not being able to reach far enough. Spark serves as an intervention. We try to get them all in one place at one time and have a celebration.”