Category: Field Reports

Gail Wein Photo by Chad Evans Wyatt

“I didn’t ask people to turn off their cell phones. It wouldn’t matter anyway,” Paul Lehrman told me right after the first public performance of Ballet Mécanique at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Lehrman was responsible for the modern realization of George Antheil’s 1924 extravaganza for 16 synchronized player pianos and a percussion orchestra: three xylophones, four bass drums, tam-tam, seven electric bells, a siren, and three airplane propellors. This is a piece that doesn’t require customary concert hall etiquette—it drowns out most ordinary intrusions. In fact, some more prepared attendees sported earplugs, and at least one had her fingers in her ears.

Antheil’s original score differed only slightly from the installation at the NGA; it called for two live pianists in addition to the 16 synchronized player pianos. Although the composer had imagined that there would be a device that could sync up the player pianos, it did not in fact exist, and the lack of technology prevented the work from being realized in his lifetime. Antheil did perform a modified version in 1927 with just one player piano and multiple human performers, reportedly to riots in Paris and indifference in New York (oh, those jaded New Yorkers!). And he ultimately rescored it again in 1952, leaving out the player pianos entirely, which is the version most commonly presented.

Eric Singer and Paul Lehrman Photo by Gail Wein

Antheil scholar and MIDI expert Paul Lehrman mounted the modern-day premiere of Ballet Mecanique in 1999. When the NGA decided they wanted a musical component to accompany their major retrospective on Dada, Lehrman was the logical go-to guy.

The NGA wanted to have Ballet Mécanique performed daily (through May 14), so, partly as a matter of practicality, this performance is an all-mechanical rendition of the piece. No doubt, Antheil and his Dada cohorts would have appreciated that. The player pianos are controlled via MIDI, and the rest of the instruments are played by robots. Eric Singer, of the League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots, or LEMUR, was engaged for the project, and he had just a few weeks to build the robots. Although the equipment is robotic in design, these machines don’t really resemble R2D2. The mechanisms are essentially sophisticated Rube Goldberg contraptions that automatically, for instance, strike a xylophone with a hammer.

Audience reaction at the preview performance on Saturday was overwhelmingly positive. But that’s no surprise. After all, these folks knew they were about to head into an art exhibit where one of the main attractions is a urinal hung on a door jamb.

A ten-minute excerpt of George Antheil’s Ballet Mécanique is performed at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. weekdays at 1 and 4 p.m., and weekends at 1 p.m. through March 29, 2006. Admission is free.

Photos by Gail Wein

Mark Gresham Photo by Angela Lee

Late January saw the presentation of two very different performance works that tackled the Holocaust as their theme.

Tikvah by composer/clarinetist Burton Beerman, received its Atlanta premiere January 21 in the Martin Luther King Jr. Chapel at Morehouse College, including first performances of three new choral movements recently added to the concert-length work.

For Beerman, an Atlanta native now at Bowling Green State University, it was a kind of homecoming. The composer has had other works performed in Atlanta, but this particular one forges a reconciliation of sorts, a coming to terms with the faith of his youth. Growing up in a conservative synagogue, Beerman recalls composing a piece for worship and showing it to his cantor, who looked, then laughed and tore it up in front of the young composer. An unsupportive talk with a rabbi did not help young Beerman understand the incident; apparantly his music contained religious ideas considered outside acceptable orthodoxy. Decades later, it took an encounter with theologian and Holocaust survivor Philip Markowicz to heal the rift of understanding between him and his religious heritage. At the same time, Markowicz was also coming to terms with his own past: the ability to write and speak openly and publicly about his own Holocaust experience.

Ultimately, the interaction not only produced Markowicz’s memoirs of the Holocaust, but also Beerman’s Tikvah, which makes extensive use of Markowicz’s voice and words on audiotape, and also includes the Kaddish. Like many of Beerman’s multidisciplinary works, this presentation involved video projection of his own creation and dancers (Celesta Haraszti and Anthony Elijah Gilmore).

Red Clay Saxophone Quartet and soprano Andrea Rae performing Tikvah Photo ourtesy of Burton Beerman

But the core of the piece rests with a saxophone quartet and solo soprano. The soloist was soprano Andrea Rae, who is Markowicz’s granddaughter. The Red Clay Saxophone Quartet from South Carolina underscored Rae’s vocals and played the purely instrumental movements. The music made use of Jewish tunes, largely from Beerman’s memory, in sometimes cantorial and sometimes klezmer-infused manners in nine “movements” plus four “interludes,” in combinations ranging from solo sax to the full ensemble plus taped narration—in rhythmic, modern, and sometimes minimalist textures. The use of saxophone quartet is appropriate and significant because the sax was deemed by the Nazi regime as “decadence” of the Weimar era, associated with American jazz, blacks, and Jews—thus “degenerate.”

Thematic connections between the Jewish and African American diasporas were not lost in this presentation. Coinciding with both the 100th anniversary year of the Jewish Federation of Greater Atlanta and a weeklong extension of holiday celebrations following Martin Luther King Jr. Day, the event sought to recognize parallels between Jewish and African American experience.

The three new choral movements contribute to that, framing the overall work: an opening prelude, a prelude to the second half, and postlude, sung by the combined “interfaith chorus” of singers from The Temple on Peachtree and Ebenezer Baptist Church, conducted by Dr. Uzee Brown, Jr. “The text is my own,” says Beerman, “interwoven with biblical texts extracted by Philip.”

Two actresses, Hope Mirlis and Janet Metzger, each dressed as Anne Frank, narrate the story while manipulating a variety of puppets in full view of the audience. Most are simple mannequins (the small kind used in art school) given heads and clothing to represent the principal historical characters. As actresses, Merlis and Metzger, who at first seem to portray parallels to Anne and her older sister, ultimately become two different sides of Anne’s personality as the story unfolds: the young eternally hopeful and the maturing worldly wise.

Chip Epsten, Hope Mirlis and Janet Metzger in Anne Frank: Within and Without Photo courtesy of Center for Puppetry Arts

Other puppets are more threatening. There is a 3-D cubist Dutch “Jewish Council,” and a jack-in-the-box Gestapo officer. There is even a traditional Punch and Judy hand puppet scene about the increasing restrictions on Jews in Dutch law. The audience at first laughs as a taunting Punch shouts “Nein!” and whacks Judy after each legal pronouncement, but the scene turns terrifyingly macabre as Judy, wearing a yellow Star of David, pleads with the audience for help, then is repeatedly pummeled by the bat-wielding Punch whose screams of “Judy! Judy! Judy!” transform with each whack into “Jew! Jew! Jew!”, and she dies.

Not confined to the pit, Epsten is frequently onstage playing either violin or toy piano. He interacts with the others as a kind of wordless observer, an avatar of Jewish culture while he plays, influencing and reflecting upon the story as it unfolds. The most poignant scene involving all three is a dream lullaby, where the Anne doll is rocked to sleep amid the branches of a chestnut tree, Merlis singing “Oyfn Pripitchik,” familiar to many Jewish people from their childhood, while Epsten accompanies on violin, bowless, played in a folk manner like a mandolin.

But Epsten’s score hardly dwells on the sentimental. It opens with sounds of smashing glass, representing Kristalnacht where the story begins. “Hulyet Hulyet Kinderlekh,” a Yiddish children’s song (which essentially says “have fun now kids, childhood is fleeting”) forms a bitterly ironic underscore to the aforementioned Punch and Judy scene, but also later accompanies an attic scene where unfulfilled feelings between Anne and Peter begin to bud, then fade away before blooming.

Most menacing is the undercurrent of Epsten’s “cattle car” music near the end, where the mannequins are placed in a railroad boxcar, represented by a baby doll’s crib, and moved around to various concentration camps.

In the more than half-century that has passed since the Holocaust, the topic has been addressed by many composers, not always with innovative, engaging, or memorable results. But the book is hardly closed on new artistic insights, and if history is not to repeat itself as we become farther removed in time, we might heed the words from Beerman’s Tikvah:

I do not remember
how to not advertise my pain
yet I dare not forget
if there is to be relief
from this madness

Roddy Schrock Photo by Hideki Kubota

Within the wild, wide universe of music, there’s a small planet called New. On that planet, there is the narrow island known as Electronics. Way off on the northwest side of that island, just past the savage village Video Installation, is a tiny unnamed cave where sound art lives, and off in the corner of that cave there’s a warm fire burning and that part of the cave is known as Berlin. The hoodie’d group warming themselves around the flames are all originally from other parts, drawn here by the sparkles, flashes, glitter, and strange popping noises seeping out of the crevasses. Once inside, easily finding available space for themselves and their shiny aluminum PowerBooks, they never desired to leave again.

If there is a Berlin aesthetic, and I would answer affirmatively on that question, pinning it down is a bit of a challenge. It’s all about studies in contrast: concrete yet ephemeral, bird chirps plus white noise feedback, depth and surface that seems to be one and the same. Everything appears to be represented here, and it’s all completely wide-open. The kind of openness demanded, not requested, by this aesthetic is a breath of cool, fresh air. The technology has completely and tangibly saturated the masses and is now firmly in the hands of kids of all ages.

Freed from weary conceptualism, fascinated by inherently playful qualities of sound on its own without apology, the artists of Berlin are defining in real-time what sound and technology are capable of, feeling out its border and pushing at its edges. Ragtag and idealistic, they make music that is up and down and all over the place but clearly focused in its 360-degree peripheral vision.

Example one: Nathan Fuhr’s ad hoc Cobra Ensemble. Performing at a space called Ausland last week, the ensemble featured avant-turntablist Ignaz Schick playing broken pieces of records with spinning toys rubbing up against the stylus, Otomo Yoshihide-style. Within the confines of Zorn’s game piece classic, they tore through expectations, at turns playful, aggressive, pensive, and reserved. The range of their performance and the enthusiasm from both the performers and the audience is the norm in this city of experimental sound. The ensemble itself is curated on a rotating basis by different artists, in the past featuring Berlin-based American expats such as Jason Forrest and Kevin Blechdom. Nathan Fuhr keeps Cobra super fresh, continually breathing new life into it by finding the most fascinating cutting-edge musicians at any given time and sharply focusing their collective creative energy to make a sonic flash in the moment.

Example two: Sinebag, the project of Leipzig-based Alexander Schubert with whom I shared the bill at Zentrale Randlage in Berlin and Hörbar in Hamburg. He plays behind a collection of junk objects: an antique PC laptop, an old battery-powered fan, a hanging Indonesian cymbal, a child’s tape recorder, several large blocks of something-or-other, and a tiny microphone suspended inside a small glass used for making and controlling feedback, perhaps an homage in miniature to Alvin Lucier. When performing he pulls out a guitar and scrapes, tweaks, bangs, and abuses it in a simultaneously serious and playful manner. Meanwhile, the computer picks up pieces of his eccentric weaving, hacking it into a strange colorful tapestry of sound. Schubert seems to have found the answer to the persistent question of how to perform with a laptop. Just pile up enough bric-a-brac around it and clink everything together….It keeps the audience interested, and it sounds amazing. His fragile balance between a historical understanding of electronic experimental music and a sharp pop sensibility is super kühl.

Berlin, with its combination of low rents, high IQ’s, and restless creativity, has become the unquestioned international center of innovation in the sound arts, and may have something akin to the relation between New York City and Abstract Expressionism in the ’50s. Who can say how long this aural paradise will last, but one thing is certain: The future is being created in this crazy laboratory of a city right now.

Amy D. Rubin

This month, the Central District Forum for Arts and Ideas brought violinist/composer/bandleader Daniel Bernard Roumain and his backing band, The Mission, to Seattle’s Town Hall. Local arts groups like the Seattle Theatre Group, Jack Straw Productions, and On The Boards joined in as promotional and/or education partners to make it their mission to make his “Mission” flourish.

I was able to see him and his 24 Bits: Hip-Hop Studies and Etudes, Book 1 on and off stage, in duet and in ensemble in a variety of venues: a presentation at Jack Straw Studios, a dress rehearsal at Town Hall, and finally a webcast from the city government’s public service station the Seattle Channel.

Daniel Bernard Roumain Photo by Amy Rubin

Roumain is a charismatic personality who values music of the body and heart over music created using games of intellectual sophistication. At the Jack Straw Composer Spotlight series he was outspoken and vulnerable, and his connection to the violin was palpable. Sometimes he turned to it as if it were an additional body part, sometimes an alter ego, and sometimes a Greek chorus commenting, illustrating, and extending his thoughts. He began by playing fragments of music which moves and shapes him, fragments of Hatikva, blues riffs, Paganini passages, and then returned to simplicity: the vitality of one note played well. I enjoyed his frequent irreverence regarding the academy and his definition of timbre borrowed from collaborator, choreographer Bill T. Jones, as “the sound of your lover’s voice,” a refreshing alternative to the definition provided by the Harvard Dictionary of Music.

Roumain then introduced his Hip-Hop Studies and Etudes. Almost all are very brief, rarely exceeding four minutes in length, and are built around 4 to 5-note riffs which repeat and mutate in cross rhythms over a four on the floor pulse. The pitch sets varied from piece to piece, from modal to chromatic, and interpolated by improvisation; occasionally they have a minimal harmonic background. Violinist Earl Maneein joined in and seemed perfectly capable of transforming blues, heavy metal, and Alban Berg-like gestures at a moment’s notice into something real and original. It was great to hear not one, but two violinists groove in virtuosity.

The next day, DBR & The Mission, (both violinists plus rhythm section and turntablist) were joined on the Town Hall stage by four local high school string players chosen by the Seattle Theatre Group’s More Music At the Moore program. I watched the quartet’s initial shyness disappear as they dove head-on into both the notated riffs and improv sections, urged on by Roumain’s growls of, “Hit me!” à la James Brown.

At Jack Straw the night before, Roumain had shared some criticisms which have come his way, judgments about the content and direction of his work. But what is being judged? Are we asking his pieces to be repertoire that will be played one hundred years from now? Are we evaluating his ideology of inclusion and transformation when bringing concert music and hip-hop audiences together? In Seattle, it’s nice to see an audience driven to a standing ovation as they were at Town Hall. Were they applauding the music, the performers, the ideas? Does it really matter?

DBR and The Mission joined by local high school students Photo by Amy Rubin

What does matter is that it makes a big difference when multiple arts presenters in a community get behind an artist by providing a space to speak informally, a concert with a connection to local youth, web streaming for those who can access it, and excellent promotion. Fortunately, Seattle’s connection to Roumain doesn’t stop here. Vicky Lee, the director of education and performance programs for the Seattle Theatre Group is bringing him back for a residency and performance with Seattle’s top teen artists on April Fool’s Day. “Hit me!”

Also, congratulations goes out to DBR who won a national CBS News poll last week, earning the opportunity to be featured on the CBS Evening News with Bob Schieffer this coming Friday, March 10. Three brief reports were aired last week and viewers were asked to vote for the one they were most interested in seeing in a full story. Charles Amirkhanian, director of San Francisco’s Other Minds festival, reports that CBS cameras were present during the festival’s March 6 performance featuring DBR, DJ Scientific, and the Del Sol String Quartet. This footage and more will be part of an “Assignment America Report” by Steve Hartman, so be sure to tune in.

It’s March, which means New York City’s art world is about to boil over with activity. Today is the day that the show we love to hate and pontificate over, the Whitney Biennial, opens its doors to the public. And what will the new edition of the Biennial sound like? Scottish-born troubadour Momus is among the selected artists, but don’t expect any laptop music or blindfolded story telling like last summer’s I’ll Speak, You Sing at Zach Feuer Gallery. This time, the eye patched pop-star-cum-artist will act as an “unreliable tour guide” for unwitting visitors. I’m thinking, finally, a decent docent.

Jim O’Rourke made the cut again this year. His sonic contribution to the museum’s restrooms in 2004 made a splash, or helped mask them. This time around he’s showing a film of the un-silent variety. Expect the same from Tony Conrad. Tony Oursler teams up with Dan Graham, Rodney Graham, and Laurent P. Berger for a puppet rock opera called Don’t Trust Anyone Over 30, All Over Again with a soundtrack by Japanther. The Melvins lend some music for Cameron Jamie’s contribution and T. Kelly Mason and Diana Thater use variations on the Bob Dylan classic “Subterranean Homesick Blues” to accompany a gymnasium filled with synchronized jump-ropers. Nari Ward’s Glory, a handmade tanning bed intent on branding stars and stripes on the skin, uses a sound component called How to Teach Your Parrot English, but you’ll have to get really up-close and personal to hear it.

All hail Trisha Donnelly for creating the exhibition’s only purely aural experience. Donnelly is the queen of not-to-be-missed-yet-hard-to-catch ephemera. Last year her 20-minute pipe organ sound installation only occupied the final moments of Creative Time’s exhibition The Plain of Heaven. At the Whitney, there will be a singular thunderous chiming sound reverberating through the galleries like a giant-sized gong every 45 minutes, which may take visitors on the museum’s fourth floor by surprise. Don’t say I never warned you.

But the biennial isn’t the only game in town this month. Head, get ready to spin because here come all the art fares: The Armory Show, Scope, Pulse, DiVA, ArtExpo, Works on Paper, New York Print Fair, and the International Asian Art Fair. While always a glutinous feast for the eyes, your ears will likely feel undernourished by day’s end. But there is a remedy for this condition: Drawing Restraint 9.

The latest head-scratching piece of cinema by art superstar Matthew Barney has been making its way through the museum and international film festival circuit for awhile now, but I finally got a chance to see it at a press screening a couple weeks ago. The film represents the first artistic collaboration between Barney and his wife-or-girlfriend-who-can-tell-anymore Björk—let’s say it together, pow-er-coup-le. Turns out that you may not have to make a trek to the Guggenheim to see Drawing Restraint 9, as IFC is distributing the film in limited release at the end of the month. While the film is probably destined to sell more soundtracks—composed by Björk—than box office tickets, it does underline the fact that music and film are indeed perfect bedfellows.

Judging from the opening shot, which features the most anal gift wrapping session I’ve ever witnessed accompanied by Will Oldham singing a salutary letter in a whispery voice, sliding in and out of tune—is this going to be a musical? Nope. This was just a little prolog before the CGI title sequence which, by the way, definitely confirms Barney’s graphic prowess and the depths of Barbara Gladstone’s checkbook. Let the two-hour-plus symphony of images and sound begin!

A giant industrial manufacturing plant hosts a parade of hundreds in traditional Japanese costumes pulling a shiny tanker truck draped in fabric, sporting a giant blue carnaval-like headdress like an out-of-gas grand marshal. An ancient tea ceremony with intricate tools incorporating seashells and oceanic forums complete with circumscribed movement provides the only dialogue heard in the film. Whaling ships, pearl divers, ritualized grooming, bathing with fruit, eyebrow shaving, hoses, harpoons, sculptural hairdos, animal fur, icebergs, unidentifiable goopy liquids, and of course Vaseline, tons and tons of it—every bit of the film’s imagery lends itself to sonic coloration. In fact, all of this would spell disaster without the presence of music.

Björk steps up to the plate and delivers some interesting sonic parallels. Her score uses harp, sho, piano, and brass, counterbalanced by that signature propensity towards laptop wizardry. The most striking sonic territory is her unabashed use of heavy distortion, as if the sound system were overloading, spewing out noises never before heard inside a movie theater. The music often astounds during such climaxes, but when whittled down to match the snail-like pacing of the film, we’re often left with looping textures, which work really well with the onscreen imagery of, say, an array nautical navigation radars, yet at the same time seems too small or out of place for other vistas and scenarios. That said, I’m still behind Björk’s new career as film composer.

If you’re a fan of Björk and Barney’s Cremaster Cycle, your lucky opening day is March 29. Despite the excruciatingly drawn out scene where the famous couple lovingly sever each other’s legs and continue to hack away at their remaining bloody bodies, carving their way into hip joints, etcetera—don’t expect the film to spring up at the local megaplex—the 35mm celluloid itself emphatically oozes art, instead of the glorified violence which seems to be preferred by the broader public of moviegoers. In Barney’s hands bloodshed comes across more like an Andres Serrano photograph rather than Die Hard With a Vengeance. Drawing Restraint 9 may not be a popcorn shoveling date movie, but I wouldn’t pass up the chance to see it if it rolls into an art house near you.

Julia Werntz Photo by Michele Macrakis

Music and art are parting ways in Inman Square, Cambridge. The Zeitgeist Gallery, an art gallery that also has become the Boston area’s best-known venue for cutting-edge improvised music, is picking up its paint brushes and moving to a new location on the other end of Inman Square, at 186 Hampshire Street. In its place, at 1353 Cambridge Street, the music will continue… On March 1, Gill Aharon—pianist, former Zeitgeist music co-director, and owner of the building—will open a primarily-music venue named The Lily Pad. Gill promises that the music programming will remain the same, programming he characterizes as “genre independent” but favoring people who take musical risks, and who, because of this, cannot play at other area venues (e.g. the posh, mainstream Regattabar in Harvard Square).

For musicians, the catch when booking gigs at the Zeitgeist has always been that they must rent the space, and then count on ticket sales to earn them back their money and, hopefully, respectable proceeds on top of it. This system will continue at The Lily Pad, though at new rates reduced by twenty percent. Some musicians, understandably, refuse on principle to pay rent for their performances. But Aharon plans to pay the mortgage and bills and keep the place open in this manner, rather than engaging in the formidable, distracting, and high-risk gamble of selling drinks or food along with the music. The risk is thus shifted to the musicians, who may potentially lose money if audience turnout is very low.

But Boston, strangely, possesses a very large number of innovative musicians (and appreciative listeners), while starving them for places to play (a subject I plan to further explore for my next Radar entry). For pianists, the situation is especially dire, since pianos are almost impossible to come by—and Aharon supplies a decent Kawai grand. Because of this, many musicians here are willing to take this moderate financial risk in exchange for the security of knowing this venue will remain open for them to take their musical risks. In addition, with the gallery gone, Aharon will be free during daytime hours to rent the very attractive and centrally located storefront space for classes of various sorts (music, martial arts, dance, etc.), thereby generating more income while serving the community.

Meanwhile, in his new, smaller space around the corner, Zeitgeist co-founder and director Alan Nidle plans to expand the scope of his gallery, focusing more on the work of local visual artists, while remaining open to the occasional performance-art and singer/songwriter type of concert. He also has his eye on a second, even larger space in East Cambridge. While money matters may be driving the split, my personal impression is also that both the art and the music of the Zeitgeist have grown in quality and seriousness to the point that each discipline now needs its own space.

The March 1 grand opening of The Lily Pad will be celebrated with 8pm performances by the Gill Aharon Sextet and Bar Rot, and, this being a Wednesday night, at 11pm “Gill’s Wednesday Night Jam,” (a years-old “jam invitational with the house band and guests”) will be able to continue, uninterrupted.

Justin Schell

Improvised music means many different things and in the Twin Cities it’s not hard to find such diversity in local artists, venues, and record labels dedicated to musical improvisation. While the Walker Art Center hosts many of the larger names in improvised music—Ornette Coleman last year and John Zorn earlier this month—most improvised music happens at smaller, musician-run venues, fostering a strong and close-knit community.

A stable of the scene is the Tuesday Night Music Series for Improvisers and Experimentation held at Minneapolis’s Acadia Cafe. Started in 2003 by bassist Andrew Lafkas, programming is now primarily coordinated by trumpeter Nathan Phillips. The series, according to Phillips, provides “a space where people can play improvisation in their own neighborhood.” He continued, “People who don’t have name notoriety, who have compelling music, can play.” The $3 cover brings an audience from 30 to 75 into the Acadia’s theater, its stage just a few feet from the audience. Over the span of a month, I heard a variety of improvised music, ranging from free jazz to noise-drone explorations to avant-garde free improvisation, reflecting the porous boundaries of improvised music in the Cities.

The multi-instrumentalist Milo Fine also facilitates venues for Twin Cities improvisers. Practicing his own style of self-determination, Fine has organized his own shows for nearly 40 years, currently performing at Homewood Studios and the West Bank School of Music. Accomplished on reeds, electronics, piano, drums, and “m-drums” (found objects Fine arranged into a drum set), he collaborates with a number of musicians, including bassist Anthony Cox, percussionist Davu Seru, and guitarist Steve Gnitka.

Fine has garnered both accolades and alienation during his career. He recorded with the late Derek Bailey in 2003—having also participated in the late guitarist’s Company Week in 1988—and Anthony Braxton in 2004. (Both discs are available on Emanem.) Fine tries to maintain “the spirit of what improvisation can be,” holding onto oppositional traditions birthed in the 1960s. “At that time there was the sense that anything was possible,” Fine said. Attempting to lessen the taint of what he calls the “insatiable beast” of the status quo, Fine’s course of action has served to alienate him from media attention and more lucrative opportunities. “It’s a glass ceiling that wasn’t put in by them, it was put in by me,” he said. Fine is integral to the history of Twin Cities improvised music, yet unwilling to be consigned to it.

Improvised music is also incubated in art galleries beyond the Walker. Saxophonist Chris Thomson and percussionist Tim Glenn began the iQuit Music Series in late 2004. While Thomson’s background is in the jazz tradition, Glenn has brought an influx of voices from the local rock, hip-hop, and noise scenes. Concerts are held every other Sunday at the Rogue Buddha Art Gallery in Northeast Minneapolis. According to Thomson, the series was started to “help foster a really terrific venue for people who do interesting things with sound and music.”

Shifting from production to reproduction, a number of Twin Cities-based labels support improvised music. The newest is Sugarfoot Music, co-founded by Chris Hinding and cellist Michelle Kinney. Sugarfoot was started, in Kinney’s words, as an attempt to “galvanize a community of people” through music and social responsibility. Ten percent of each album’s sales go to a charity of the artist’s choosing. Existing as two laptops and a website, the low overhead allows for quicker recoupment, in turn allowing more to be donated as well as put back into Sugarfoot. Officially launching later this month at a four-night concert series at the Southern Theater, it will coincide with the release of Touch It, the debut CD of Jelloslave, Kinney’s collaboration with cellist Jacqueline Ferrier-Ultan.

Mutant Music, based in St. Paul, recently released a solo LP from Paul Metzger, known for his addition of sympathetic strings to his banjo; the resulting sounds provocatively collide traditional American music with North Indian Hindustani music. Shih Shih Wu Ai Records, the label of Milo Fine, has been active since 1972 in documenting various musical encounters. Roaratorio Records has released a number of records by Carei Thomas, another established improvising musician in the scene. Roaratorio also recorded saxophonist George Cartwright, who moved to the Twin Cities seven years ago from Memphis. Best known for his work at New York’s Knitting Factory with Curlew, Cartwright has also worked with Innova, the label of the American Composers Forum. Innova recently issued his latest project, The Ghostly Bee, its stunning packaging delicately housing Cartwright’s anything-but-delicate music.

This snapshot of the Twin Cities improvised music scene only skims the surface of a vibrant culture of musical expression. “Most of the people doing creative work around here,” said percussionist J.T. Bates, “could do it anywhere.” George Cartwright, surprised by the quality of the music, concurs. “I think the music scene here is incredible and I don’t think the world knows about it.”

Twin Cities residents have been increasingly receptive, however. Bates believes that “all of us will improvise no matter what. But having a regular crowd makes it feel like you aren’t just throwing stuff out there with no idea if it’s running into anything.” Most importantly, however, the scene retains a sense of intimacy and community; it’s noticeable no matter the venue. Milo Fine, eloquently speaking for many other Twin Cities improvisers, believes these characteristics are necessary for the music “to be moved and developed. To keep it truly living.”

Gail Wein Photo by Chad Evans Wyatt

Roberto Sierra has written a winner. This month’s world premiere of his Missa Latina by the National Symphony Orchestra, Choral Arts Society of Washington, soprano Heidi Grant Murphy, and baritone Nathaniel Webster at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., showcased a work that will fit solidly in the middle of core classical repertoire.

Sierra has developed a pleasingly accessible, yet original style; creating a sound that does not imply a rip-off of some earlier fashion. Interestingly, and sometimes quirkily, he sporadically infused Latin rhythms into the piece, alternating flavors north and south of the border. The Missa Latina begs comparison to works by Leonard Bernstein, both to his monumental Mass and to the Puerto Rican rhythms he famously incorporated into West Side Story.

Sierra used the orchestra as one whole instrument. Not much solo work stood out, save for a deliciously snaky clarinet and, of course, mighty brass. The percussion section typically initiated the Latin mood, with occasionally stereotypical cha-cha and merengue rhythms.

At the post-concert discussion, nearly everyone admitted to fear: Sierra, in the daunting task of writing this evening-length work for a world-class orchestra, high-profile conductor, and professionally accomplished chorus; the chorus members, in being able to learn and execute the piece well; Choral Arts conductor Norman Scribner, who described the process as difficult but worth every note; and even the audience, some of whom admitted to being afraid that they would be subjected to an evening of “crappy twelve-tone” music, in the words of one gentleman who bravely spoke up.

The only person who didn’t seem scared was Slatkin. After all, he has done this—commissioned and given the first performance of new music—literally hundreds of times. And, for this particular work, it’s one that will ripple through the repertoire well into the future.

Scott Winship Photo by Kathryn Gritt

Humans have always dabbled with the elements: tried to tame them; tried to understand and master them; and even worshiped them—all with varying degrees of success. Going hand-in-hand with that exploration from the very beginning is the arts—creating the magical with what you have, be it vegetable pigment or an open reed. As long as we are on this earth and the elements stay just out of our reach, we will always strive to capture their essence through art and science.

This is the focus of an ambitious five-year project titled “Essential Art: Essential Elements” undertaken by the Fulcrum Point New Music Project. Currently in year number three of this endeavor, Fulcrum Point has already tackled water and earth. This year’s brooding exploration is air. Not satisfied with simply a light covering of a topic so hefty as one of the elements, Fulcrum Point is devoting their entire three-concert spring season to it. The first took place on January 24 in the new Harris Theatre on the edge of Chicago’s newest cultural attraction, Millennium Park.

Entitled “Light as Air,” the program takes us across the span of a day, from dawn to dusk, with plenty of play on light throughout, composer-style. As the program notes state, “Light as Air” focuses “on the air in the atmosphere as it functions as a prism for light, a metaphor for hope, and a medium for spiritual insight.”

We start our concert “day” with the delicate beauty of Thomas Adès’s Darknesse Visible. Based on a John Dowland 17th-century lute song (“In Darknesse Let Mee Dwell”), Adès deconstructs the piece and puts it back together with graceful delicacy. Performed on the piano by featured artist Andrea Swan, the piece achieves its beauty through its simplicity and lightness. It is almost as if Swan is barely touching the piano and at times her touch is so light that the piano is slow to respond. The Dowland melody exists in fragments and floats in and out as if hanging in a cloud. Simply beautiful.

The sun continues its journey over the horizon in the form of another British composer’s work, At First Light by George Benjamin. Incredibly expressionistic, this work takes its muse from the painting by JMW Turner titled Sunrise. According to the composer, the piece centers around “a ‘solid object’ [which] can be formed as a punctuated, clearly defined musical phrase. This can be ‘melted’ into a flowing, nebulous continuum of sound.” Personally I had a little difficulty holding on to Benjamin’s “solid object” as the entire piece swirled around me in a mass of colors and changing textures, almost as if I was stuck in the dense build up of oil paint on an expressionist canvas. Where’s my absinthe?

As our musical day progresses we come to Charles Ives’s The Rainbow. This is a very brief setting (less than two minutes!) of a popular song although it contains no singer and no words. Rather, the “vocalist” is channeled through the English horn in this instance, which provides the melody as the orchestra weaves its way through a prism of colors. This has got to be one of the shortest Ives pieces that I’ve heard, especially for this voicing. I’ve always been fond of Ives’s use of color and this piece does not disappoint as the orchestra continuously shifts hues under the English horn melody. It left me hanging on the edge of my seat hoping for more when the piece ended abruptly, almost sounding incomplete.

Then we come to a catharsis, or soul-searching time, in Chicago-based composer George Flynn’s Toward the Light. Initially it began as what the composer calls “a short, essentially improvised ‘prelude’ that explored the piano’s middle register.” It evolved more recently, however, into “a precisely notated and harmonically shaped work that starts in the middle register and gradually expands to the piano’s extreme registers.” Ever undulating and moving forward, even in stasis, the piece leads us to “a releasing of sorts from a turbulent and swirling texture to a progressively more floating, serene freedom.” The thing that I really loved about this piece, besides its constant motion, was the poignant longing that Flynn was able to pull out from turbulent banging. One really hears a tortured exploration of the piano with extended periods of tension building, something that perhaps many of us (myself included) have dabbled with in our own improvisations but chose to leave in that form. I sat listening and wishing that I could see someone set this to choreography. The added tension of bodies in motion would really be a treat to see and hear.

As the sun moves across the sky and the shadows grow longer, we come to the work of David Stock, founder and conductor of the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble. In this work, Available Light, Stock combines many aspects of contemporary music into what Stephen Burns, artistic director and conductor of Fulcrum Point, calls “post-minimalist modernism.” The work takes us on an almost schizophrenic journey through Stravinsky-esque rhythms and orchestrations in the first section with sudden shifts to Bernstein harmonizations and restless perpetual motion reminiscent of a Saturday morning cartoons (Tom & Jerry was my first thought—you can almost hear them chasing one another in circles).

Finally our musical day winds down and the haze begins to settle—Purple Haze to be exact—yes, of the Jimi Hendrix variety. Hoping to be treated to something akin to the wonderful Kronos take on this classic, I was unfortunately treated to an orchestration (by Swiss composer Daniel Schnyder) that made me feel like I was back in my middle school gym listening to the pep band (complete with drum set). This rendition was homogenized. No howling feedback, no distortion, no giant stacks of speakers on stage.

And so ends Fulcrum Point’s journey into “Light as Air.”

The two remaining concerts in this series are titled “Breath of Fresh Air” featuring the work of Hannibal Lokumbe (Breath of Life), Melinda Wagner (Wing and Prayer), Stephen Jaffe (Homage to the Breath), David Lang (Sweet Air), Jerome Kitzke (Breath and Bone), and Lester Bowie (When the Spirit Returns), which takes place on March 14, and “Winds of Change” featuring the works of Shulamit Ran (East Wind), Paul Moravec (Tempest Fantasy), Osvaldo Golijov (How Slow the Wind), and Fareed Haque (a world premiere work), which takes place on May 30.

Founded in 1998 by Stephen Burns at the invitation of Performing Arts Chicago, the Fulcrum Point’s mission is to present contemporary music performances “that explore the marriage of classical music and popular culture.” On a quest to redefine the concert experience, the group focuses on “modern compositions inspired by folk, rock, jazz, blues, Latin, and world music, commissioned works, and contemporary arrangements of traditional pieces by composers from around the world.” Or in the words of Stephen Burns, “This is music for today’s diverse, multicultural world. Just like science and industry, the arts also share and are influenced by ideas from all over.”

I am personally looking forward to being treated to further explorations of an element as elusive as the sounds that we put into it.

Gail Wein Photo by Chad Evans Wyatt

I found out about this concert through an email directly from music director Armando Bayolo. There wasn’t any buzz on the usual listservs. No listing in the paper, no active website. So it wasn’t surprising to see that only a couple dozen people had come out to witness the inaugural concert of Great Noise Ensemble in Washington, D.C., last week at THEARC Theater in a residential southeast neighborhood.

Bayolo’s description of the inception of the group—musicians gathered by a shout-out on craigslist.com—as well as the composers-as-performers aspect of the ensemble gave the impression of a small-town, grass-roots organization. A quick glance at the concert program furthered this sense, with scarcely a familiar name on the roster of 17 players.

I arrived during a lackluster rendering of a violin sonata by Andrew Rudin, which had me questioning the professional quality of the group. But the compelling performance of the world premiere of Bayolo’s song cycle Silly Ditties instantly dashed away the student-recital feeling. Soprano Kara Morgan’s engaging stage presence and clear diction gave these appropriately titled songs just the right spin. In pigtails and a simple skirt, Morgan embraced the little-girl character outlined by the children’s lit texts. Some of the songs were a sendup—a tango, Chopin’s funeral march—and all were trite and flippant, but fun. Violinist Andrea Vercoe, cellist Caroline Kang, and pianist Bayolo provided the accompaniment, pulling off the whimsy of the piece with their mock seriousness.

Pianist Kristen Benoit’s great sense of rhythm and syncopation brought Robert Muczynski’s Third Piano Sonata to life. Her light but firm touch made for an engaging performance. Drew Hemenger’s string quartet was deceptively simple, with moments that really shone darkened by just a few intonation ouches. Works by Alec Wilder and artistic director Heather Figi rounded out the program.

Great Noise has three more performances planned this spring. Looming on the calendar are concerts on February 17 at the Sumner School in Washington, D.C., and February 24 at Shenandoah University, both featuring music by Bayolo, Blair Goins, Steve Reich, Adam Silverman, and Tom Schnauber. Later this spring, Great Noise Ensemble appears on the American Composers Forum concert series.

It’s exciting to witness the birth of this addition to the new music scene in D.C. And it will be intriguing to watch Great Noise Ensemble blossom from their humble beginnings.