Category: Field Reports

Miami: All Keyed Up

As anyone who has ever been there knows, Miami is a pleasantly surreal place where all things trendy flirt with the seedy, all wrapped up in a schlock of glitzy panache. You can surround yourself with Paris Hilton clones while sipping Manhattan-priced cocktails at the Delano any night of the week—that’s a given. But it’s only once a year that you can check out the New Music Miami ISCM Festival. I did both.

My whirlwind experience begins with a hasty shuttle bus ride from the airport—”Somebody Told Me” by The Killers blasting over the radio while we whip around crisscrossing freeway overpasses. With just enough time to throw my bags into a hotel room, I board another shuttle. This one provided by the festival. Thankfully this driver is more Hoke Coburn than Jeff Gordon, and I arrive safely at the festival’s inaugural event: a concert of solo piano music served well-chilled, thanks to Wertheim Performing Arts Center’s overzealous air conditioning.

And really this was the gestalt of the entire weekend: shuttle vans, air conditioning, and lots of solo piano music. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out the raison d’etre behind this year’s festival. It was spelled out in hot pink and pastel yellow across the cover of the sexy program brochure that outlined the five concerts that took place over the course of three days: “Beyond the Piano Keys—New Music for Piano.” Despite the tight focus on a single instrument, the music presented over the weekend embodied a broad range, from straightforward notated solo piano performances to elaborate interactive electronic setups and forays into video.

No particular approach to composition seemed to dominate the overall programming. Aside from the de rigueur pre-concert talks, audiences were left to their own devices to parse out any trends that might emerge from the panoramic vista of more than 40—that’s right, 40!—compositions showcased during the festival. Do the math: these were long concerts, and the absence of intermissions made things borderline excruciating at times. But then again, there was no other way to cram all this music into five concerts. Still, I got the feeling that lower back pain sufferers or those with a nicotine addition, like myself, were on the verge of boycott.

After opening night, which featured the delicately balanced choral-like Mano a mano by festival director Orlando Jacinto Garcia, beautifully performed by Cristina Valdes, the festival switched locales to the Steinway Piano Gallery. In typical Coral Gables fashion, the intimate venue was flanked by a Ferrari dealership and Rodin International, where you can drop $60 million on a bronze cast statue—yeah, that Rodin—in hopes that it will fit in the trunk of your F430 Spider. The Friday afternoon concert kicked off with my own Detail of Beethoven’s Hair performed by the infallible Jenny Lin, but the most gripping work came from Francis Schwartz. During his piece The Headless Glory of André Chenier, the composer growls, shouts, and whispers odd decrees like “I love clusters!” as he gleefully jabs at the keys, eventually leading the audience in chants to send various people and concepts to the guillotine—it was fun and unexpected, if not a bit kooky.

My favorite piece of the afternoon was article 1 to 3 by Rozalie Hirs. Her idiosyncratically titled suite (article [the], article [aleph], and article [a]) only hints at this Dutch composer’s eccentric approach. The bulk of the piece featured a small intricate lick towards the high end of the keyboard relentlessly repeated, always with just the slightest variation. It was as if pianist Dante Oei was exploring the infinite ways that this interesting little figure could fit under his hands. I was totally fascinated, both by the intricacy of the music and how it brewed feelings of frustration inside me. It was like being chafed by a feather.

The evening concert featured the U.S. premiere of Evan Ziporyn’s finger twister In Bounds performed by Valdez, and the world premiere of Tzu Ling Sarana Chou’s Quadro Parlante played by Lin. The nightcap to this first full day of concerts was a spellbinding performance by Stephen Drury. The pianist seamlessly segued from Helmut Lachenmann to Morton Feldman to Paul Elwood to György Ligeti, pausing only to position the score of Toshio Hosokawa’s Nacht Klänge before finishing with John Zorn’s frenzied Carny. Drury’s meta-collage was so riveting that I didn’t even think about all those precious minutes that were carved off the evening until after the applause and bows ended. Ah, time for a cigarette.

The Saturday afternoon concert focused on works involving new technologies. Rocco Di Pietro performed his Deconstructed Fountain from Ravel with Derrida Watching and Wave Fugue with Electronic Lost which proved to be a blurry accumulation of prerecorded electronics with the composer’s musical responses, both notated and improvised, stored in a Yamaha disklavier, all presented simultaneously with the composer’s live reactions on keyboard. Jeff Herriott’s beautiful Velvet Sink used interactive electronics to delicately blend the piano’s quiet timbres with lightly processed sounds originally created on a tattered soundboard in the composer’s apartment. The final, almost blues-like sonority that ends the piece seems to come out of left field, yet it isn’t a complete head-scratcher. Somehow it just fits perfectly, so I’m bestowing Mr. Herriott with the best final chord award. But in the end, the only technology that seemed overtly “new” to me was the weird electronic pitch-bending device wielded by pianist Todd Welbourne for Joseph Koykkar’s piece Interfacing. It was very Mr. Wizard, as in I wish someone could explain to me how the damn thing worked.

With no time to sojourn at the beach, I grabbed some Cuban food at Versailles with pianist Cristina Valdes. Of course our impressions of the festival crept into our conversation. Besides the marathon length of each concert and the occasional mediocre piece here and there, we felt something else plagued the festival: really low attendance, despite the fact that all of the events were free of charge. The sheer size of the concert hall—gargantuan!—only served to mock the fact that there were so few spectators. It was nice to see university students peppering the aisles, but the sheer amount of text messaging during the music was a clue that they were only there to get their programs signed by the appropriate professor for class credit. But perhaps our ideas concerning appropriate audience size were imbued by New York City standards.

And speaking of New York City, the festival finale looked as if the Big Apple were magically transplanted to South Florida. I wandered into the concert hall a little bit late, only to find NYC-based pianist Anthony de Mare posed seductively atop a disklavier as he theatrically reacted to the phantom pianist. It was appropriately surreal. Also in de Mare’s Manhattan-inspired set was Meredith Monk’s Gotham Lullaby, Jason Robert Brown’s Mister Broadway, and Little Midnight Nocturne by Fred Hersch. Being in a New York state of mind, I snuck out of the theater and chain smoked during Dinu Ghezzo’s performance.

When I returned, fellow Brooklynite Kathleen Supové was gearing up to perform Dan Becker’s Revolution. The piece used a few strategic preparations inside the disklavier, allowing for some interesting timbral and rhythmic interactions that gave it a sort of Trent Reznor edge. Supové concluded the festival with Orlando Jacinto Garcia’s Feldman-referencing Why References? (featuring unfortunate cell phone interruption), and Carolyn Yarnell’s electronic/video hybrid The Same Sky.

I ran into one of the festival regulars after the concert, who was kind enough to offer me a ride back to the hotel. I was happy to circumvent another shuttle van ride, and in turn he was thrilled to attend the entire festival, claiming that “there are no other opportunities to hear music like this performed in such concentrated doses.” The 2005 New Music Miami ISCM Festival certainly delivered its city a hefty dose. My kind driver added that he had tickets to a big recital the following evening, but expressed some doubts about going. Turns out it was an entire program of compositions for two pianos.

San Francisco: The Beat Goes On



David Herbert and his “tenor” timpani

David Herbert, timpanist with the San Francisco Symphony, will give the world premiere performances of William Kraft’s XIII/The Great Encounter, Concerto No. 2 for Timpani and Orchestra in seven performances from June 9 through 18. What’s particularly interesting is that Kraft originally hesitated to accept the commission from the San Francisco Symphony since he had already composed a timpani concerto. But Herbert came up with the idea of expanding the range of the instrument, giving Kraft more to work with. He worked with instrument builders to create nine additional timpani in higher registers, which he calls “tenor” timpani, and metal workers fabricated a racking system so that he could play all 15 timpani at one time.

Those of you in the Bay Area can checkout Kraft’s new composition and Herbert’s new instruments paired with Beethoven’s 9th Symphony at Davies Symphony Hall on June 9, 10, 12, 15, 16, and 18, and on June 17 at Cupertino’s Flint Center.

Seattle: Spicing Things Up

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Amy D. Rubin

The Seattle Chamber Players champion new music of all sorts with eclectic, provocative and frequently interdisciplinary presentations. Recent events have ranged from collaborative evenings with composer/performers John Zorn and Frederic Rzewski, to commissions of local composers like Wayne Horvitz, to a performance of Stanley Silverman’s film score for Nanook of The North, originally composed for Tashi and performed live against the original Robert J. Flaherty footage. Beyond SCP’s well-rehearsed and nourished premieres, the group is exemplary in stretching what we expect and receive from a “concert music” venue.

Last month, SCP not only sold out its performance of Astor Piazzolla’s opera, María de Buenos Aires, but could barely accommodate a second audience which eagerly paid for tickets to the morning’s dress rehearsal. Why so popular? As flutist Paul Taub responded, “I think it’s the drop dead beautiful tunes that are so emotive. They are always fresh and have such a universal appeal, whether you are a fan of jazz, classical music, pop, Latin, etc.” Conductor Pablo Zinger imported traditional tango singers for the presentation. Though not staged, a theatrical flair was achieved by featuring two local dancers. I noticed many dancer-like bodies in the audience and the young woman seated next to me had never heard of SCP, or been inside Benaroya Hall. She was there because she was beginning to study tango with one of the showcased dancers. Producers take note: a good way of attracting a new audience is to include artists from another discipline who have a following in the local community. Composer’s recipe for a crowd pleaser: begin with melodies and harmonies which touch our core; add sometimes raw, sometimes seductive rhythms; don’t be afraid to transform your melodies with the power of modulation; and combine all to convey the dance of sexual innuendo. Even an obtuse plot can be forgiven when these other ingredients are part of the mix.

Born in Argentina, Piazzolla spent part of his childhood in New York City’s Greenwich Village. He collaborated with American jazz players such as Gary Burton and Gerry Mulligan, and has inspired a number of tango based pieces such as Cafe Music by Paul Schoenfield. Piazzolla rejected the expectations of those who demanded that tango stay frozen in time. He erased the line between composer and improviser. Most important, Piazzolla’s success can provide advice to the rest of us. He was true to his language and his vision, and was urged by his mentor, Nadia Boulanger, to stick with tango. A message to young composers: you do not need to reinvent the wheel with each new piece. An alternative creative approach is to stick with the wheel that is really yours and spin it at different speeds, on different surfaces, at different angles and watch it roll!

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Amy Rubin, pianist and composer, has written and performed music for the concert stage, jazz ensemble, film, television, and theater in the U.S. and abroad. Following a Fulbright in Ghana, she directed the music program at Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey, was a visiting professor at Cornish College, and now collaborates with the Seattle Chamber Players and the Seattle Symphony. Her ability to embrace all musical styles has brought her many awards including the Washington State Artist Trust Fellowship, the King County Special Projects Award, the 2005 Jack Straw Artist Support Award, and resulted in numerous recordings of her work.

Amsterdam: Sonic Interventions – On the Other Side of Theory

Brandon LaBelle
Brandon LaBelle

With the ongoing proliferation of interest in the auditory, from the cultures of experimental music and sound art to theoretical elaborations as witnessed in a number of anthologies recently published, a general need for harnessing the radical diversity of all such theories and voices seems at hand. For continually one witnesses a general longing for “common ground.” Common ground may come by way of shared vocabulary (how sound may be spoken of) or historical referents that may create a territory of understanding (of where sound has come from), or through disciplinary mutuality (for instance, how the context of film studies may speak to the context of musicology).

The Sonic Interventions conference initiated and organized by Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis further indicated the ongoing struggles to establish common ground, yet managed to arrive at mutual understanding by the sheer investment of those participating. For even though all the participants seem to arrive at the issue of sound from different vantage points, the desire to share and create dialogue led to fruitful results.

Organized around a general call for submissions, the conference brought together an intensely diverse gathering of individuals from Europe and the U.S., across all levels of expertise. It was broken into four panels governed by the sub-themes (or groupings of sub-themes): “sound and the moving image & sound technologies and cultural change”; “the sonic in the ‘silent’ arts & bring in the noise”; “silences/orality”; “soundscapes: sound, space, and the body & sound practices and events”. Papers were given in the form of 10-minute summations with the intention of creating dialogue and exchange among the panellists. To add to the discussion, as well as to guide or lend definition to the conference in general, keynote lectures were given by Douglas Kahn, Emily Thompson, and Mieke Bal (who replaced Fred Moten at the last moment), each representing critical aspects of current histories and cultural analysis being done today on and around the subject. Kahn’s writings on post-war American culture continue to draw connections between composers, such as John Cage, and artists, such as Robert Irwin or James Turrell, whose works lend to exploring the perception of sound and light. Adding to such history, Thompson’s investigative work on the early use of sound recording in Hollywood cinema opened up an as yet written history highlighting the innovations film studios forged in the 1930s. Alongside these histories of sound cultures and technologies, Mieke Bal moved more consciously into exploring questions of personal experience. Recounting visiting an installation, Bal describes her wonder and amazement at feeling what she called “lost in space:” immersed in a room of mist and sound, Bal’s dreamy memory led her to a deeper realization of sound to not only disorient but also to create new possibilities for finding home. Each lecturer, while drawing upon their own backgrounds and academic disciplines, initiated various concerns, from the historical and cultural, to the technological and perceptual. Such broad topics found their counterpoint in the panels that followed throughout the day.

Spanning three intensive days, discussions ran from issues related to the voice and what it means to speak; architecture and the spatiality of sound, (which has its own unique history as witnessed in the works of Iannis Xenakis, Edgar Varèse, and David Tudor); sub-cultures of music (from raves in Goa to reggae sound systems in Jamaica) and what they lend to understandings of community and social space; cinema and its undercurrent of auditory specialization, which remains a relevant shadow to questions of sound technology; the relationship between visuality and audition and what each may lend to the other, from creating narrative to animating the senses; the project of soundscape studies and its continual concern for environmental sound, noise pollution, and music compositions that create bonds between listener and place; philosophies of listening and the culture of aural ideas; and lastly, various historical tracings of particular composers, artists, writers, and cultural moments in which sound may be teased into relief as lineage to the current media age. Of course, there was much more, as what became increasingly apparent was the degree to which each participant spoke from their respective vantage point, supplied with their own particular cultural and theoretical baggage, tools of investigation, and overarching concerns. Mingling within such diversity, at times I was led to wonder what led each participant to sound, and what was at stake in bringing sound into so many diverse academic categories? Can sound really help literary studies of the Victorian age? Does it add to developing possibilities for new forms of thinking about architecture? Possibly this raises what became an unspoken yet ever-present question: What does it mean to initiate a staging of sound on the field of cultural theory, history, and analysis in general? What does sound lend to the history of culture, and more important, to its writing? For as an underbelly to the output of writings, articulations, and research, was a general recognition of the tensions inherent to sound being brought forward into the arena of language, by way of text. Whether essentializing sound as the “other” to language and all forms of representation—that sound may provide an escape route to the embedded meanings within the sign systems of the world—or using sound to unravel any master narrative left-over from the Modern, the question of how to construct theory particular to the materiality and cultural teachings of sound outside any adoption of theories based on “visualist” thinking recurred as a backdrop.

To move toward the auditory within the field of language, and cultural analysis based on the production of text, it would seem stages a tussle with the discourse that allows access to sound—we may ask, what words can perform their task in fully integrating themselves within the sonorous? In discovering, through an engagement with words and their referents, the full body of sound? We may register this body in the form of movements of cultural signifiers, whether that be musical sub-cultures, the formation of built environments, the exchange of information through oral networks, or the historical tracings left by sound technologies, but on a foundational level one remains bound to cultural “readings” that already imply a reliance upon “visualist” discourse and the act of looking and reading.

Not that the form of cultural work and analysis need be done with the same material of that which it speaks of, for surely theory allows one to intervene within the field of practice and production, social relations and physical reality, by being altogether different from that reality: Sylvere Lotringer once described theory as a pair of headlights that allow you to see the road ahead while also blinding you to everything beyond. As headlights, theory cuts into the dark, by being altogether out of place, inappropriate to the scene, disrupting through a kind of alien invasion the environment of reality.

From Bruce Johnson’s proposal of sound as “anti-theory,” Michelle Duffy’s pursuit of sound through semiotic rhythms, to Marcel Cobussen and his use of the philosophical work of Alain Badiou along with the free jazz of Evan Parker, and Chelle Mcnaughton’s soundmapping of Daniel Liebskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin, the move toward the auditory may reflect the general longing for theory to possibly become less of a headlight and more of a sympathetic intrusion, less of a car cutting into the landscape and more of a nurturing force aligned with what it seeks to analyse or unearth. As Mieke Bal seemed to suggest in her keynote presentation, the auditory may offer us the chance to truly speak of the contemporary world by always attending to the larger global situation while keeping tuned to the particulars of individual voices. Thus, the global perspective and the local particular remain connected by turning cultural analysis and textual production into an act participating in culture rather than solely speaking about it. That sound lends us opportunity in this way speaks toward what it teaches us, what it allows to take place, by always being involved in the greater context, through modalities of affect, relation, and excess, while also always returning, through acoustic mirrors of social reflection, to the individual body. The gathering at Sonic Interventions may have proven, by being both absolutely individualistic as well as totally collective, that to write of sound is to also redesign the potential of theory to not only be critically acute, but to nurture and lend welcome.

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Brandon LaBelle is an artist and writer working with sound and the specifics of location. He is the co-editor of “Site of Sound: Of Architecture and the Ear” (1999), “Writing Aloud: The Sonics of Language” (2001), and “Surface Tension: Problematics of Site” (2003). His sound installations and performances have been featured in exhibitions and festivals around the world, such as “Sound as Media” (2000) ICC Tokyo, “Bitstreams” (2001) Whitney Museum, “Pleasure of Language” (2002) Netherlands Media Institute, and “Undercover” (2003) Museet for Samtidskunst, Roskilde Denmark, and his writings have been published in various books and journals, including “Experimental Sound and Radio” (MIT Press) and “Soundspace: Architecture for Sound and Vision” (Birkhauser). He recently presented a solo exhibition at Singuhr galerie, Berlin, and is completing a book/CD project, Eavesdrops.

Cleveland: Grads and Scads of New Music

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Zachary M. Lewis
Photo by Nowell York

They most likely weren’t there for the contemporary music per se but that’s exactly what the local parents and relatives of musically inclined teenagers got when they attended the Cleveland Youth Wind Symphony’s year-end concerts earlier this month.

Between two concerts, the two large groups that comprise the area’s premiere youth wind band ensemble managed to present eight pieces of music by contemporary American composers at Severance Hall.

Imagine the mass exodus that would ensue were their professional adult counterparts to do something similar. This was a ticketed affair, too.

CYWS Music Director and co-founder Gary Ciepluch, a professor at Case Western Reserve University, led a few of the performances. More often, though, he lent the baton to one of five variably capable assistant or graduate assistant conductors. A number of guest soloists also took their places in the program where necessary.

Ciepluch founded the CYWS in 1989 with sponsorship from CWRU and the Cleveland Institute of Music. A second group, CYWS II, branched off in 1995. The two ensembles, together totaling some 250 musicians, meet for rehearsal every Saturday from mid-September through May.

These being student players, the performances May 9 and 10 were not without their flaws, but to enumerate errors would be beside the point that these were not your average band concerts.

The events also served as occasions to honor the symphony’s graduating high school seniors, but even here, contemporary music was an integral part of the proceedings. Standard repertoire by Dvorak, Saint-Saëns, and Holst got their turns, but they were the exceptions, not the rule.

Instead of the ubiquitous “Pomp and Circumstance,” Lee University wind ensemble director David Holsinger’s To Tame the Perilous Skies was the homage to the first batch of graduates. Alfred Reed’s El Camino Real: A Latin Fantasy, a Flamenco-inflected 1984 commission by the United States Air Force Band, serenaded the second.

Both concerts opened with new music as well.

Ciepluch kicked things off the first night with a soaring, fast-paced workout for saxophone and percussion called Ride by the Pittsburgh-area teacher and composer Samuel Hazo. Melissa Lichtler, conductor of the CYWS II, began her concert with a movement called “To the Summit!” from a suite titled Strive for the Highest by the Florida-based composer Robert W. Smith.

James Barnes, a professor of theory and composition at the University of Kansas, was doubly represented on the program, first by the “Jubilation” movement from his Fifth Symphony (Phoenix) Op. 11, then by Centennial Celebration Overture on the second concert.

“Jubilation,” performed by the CYWS I, was the more interesting of the two: a brisk, syncopated perpetuum mobile that had six guest trumpeters trading low, elongated melodies from their antiphonal positions on either side of the stage.

Student trumpet players in the CYWS II got their moment in the spotlight in The Dream Chasers, a sparkling overture-like piece by Jared Spears, an emeritus professor of music at Arkansas State University.

James Hirt, a composer and teacher at Baldwin-Wallace College in Berea, Ohio, was present to hear the CYWS II perform his Baroque Celebration, a four-movement suite of stylized material. The players seemed to have the most affinity for its slow middle section, a mournful arioso.

No doubt the musicians were grateful to have Hirt, a real live composer, in the audience, but his attendance will yield the most fruit if he spreads the word to his composer colleagues that apparently there’s a demand for new symphonic wind music in Cleveland.

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Zachary Lewis is a freelance arts journalist in Cleveland, Ohio. He covers music primarily but also dance, art, and theater. He writes regularly for the Plain Dealer, Cleveland Scene, Angle, Dance Magazine, and Time Out Chicago. Lewis studied piano performance at the Cleveland Institute of Music and holds degrees in English and Journalism from Ohio University and Case Western Reserve University, where he will conduct a Presidential Fellowship in arts criticism in the fall of 2006.

Atlanta: Branching Out Beyond the Borders

Mark Gresham
Mark Gresham
Photo by Angela Lee

New music group Bent Frequency concluded their season with a concert at Eyedrum on May 8, titled (Bang Fist). Within the first half of the program, Stuart Gerber offered two interesting solo performance art pieces: Bang Fist, a short, early text by John Cage which eventually appeared in his piece 45′ For a Speaker, and Giorgio Battistelli’s Il Libro Celibe which has a score that is essentially pictures.

The “libro” is a large, briefcase-like box that the performer opens in the manner of a book, each “page” being a rather flat “instrument,” such as a piece of paper, cellophane, metal, or a sound-making construction. Sounds came from the amplified pages as they were manipulated by being torn, flapped, crinkled, blown around, or struck.

The rest of the first half included challenging music by James Tenney, Sylvano Bussotti, and Herbert Brün. Among them, Tenney’s Diaphonic Toccata for violin stood out as a process piece where the composer (per his stated aesthetic) deliberately avoids emotional elements. An unceasing string of 16th notes in octaves on the piano underscores a calculated, irregular line of longer notes in the violin.

Christopher Theofanidis and David Del Tredici
(L-R) Christopher Theofanidis and David Del Tredici
Photo by Jeff Baxter, courtesy of Atlanta Symphony Orchestra

May 12–14, the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and Chorus reached a milestone in its 60th anniversary season, the first time they have ever premiered two major works on the same program—and both choral-orchestral. The Music of Our Final Meeting by Christopher Theofanidis and Paul Revere’s Ride by David Del Tredici were the premieres on the docket with Bernstein’s “Jeremiah” Symphony. The luminous Theofanidis work was a setting of text by Rumi, in English translation by Coleman Barks of Athens, Georgia. Del Tredici’s exuberantly melodramatic setting of Longfellow’s Midnight Ride of Paul Revere was his tribute to the firefighters who died on 9/11, and featured the amplified voice and photographic memory of soprano Hila Plitmann, who performed in both works without score in hand. Seen in the audience and backstage was Plitmann’s husband, composer Eric Whitacre. ASO music director Robert Spano conceived of and conducted the program. The ASO&C also recorded for Telarc in the same marathon weekend: Theofanidis on Saturday and Del Tredici on Sunday.

Atlanta composer Eddie Horst completed the score and studio master tracks in early April for Fatwa, a feature film from Washington DC-based Capital City Entertainment, which had its debut private showing to press and invited guests last month in DC. Shot in Panasonic’s new VariCam® high definition video (which claims an image quality indistinguishable from film), the music and other sound elements were edited into the video at Atlanta’s own Lab 601 post-production house, say Horst. Rumor is that deals for exhibition in North American and European theaters and on cable television are “in negotiation” in Hollywood.

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A native of Atlanta, Georgia, Mark Gresham is a composer, publisher, and freelance music journalist. He is a contributing writer for Atlanta’s alternative weekly newspaper, Creative Loafing, and was winner of an ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award for Music Journalism in 2003.

Philadelphia: The Real McCoy

Alyssa Timin
Alyssa Timin
Photo by Ross Hoffman

In the past, I have seen pianist McCoy Tyner and other jazzmen of his generation referred to as “luminaries,” which conveys exactly the sort of musical halo these gentlemen have earned after decades playing in the clubs. On April 8, the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society conferred their own symbolic honor on Tyner by presenting his trio at the Gershman Hall of The University of the Arts, in its recently refurbished second floor Elaine C. Levitt Auditorium.

Simply put, the concert was one of the very best I have ever seen. If you get a chance to see Tyner perform, you best take it. On Friday night, the crowd was standing room only, an affirming ethnic mix of baby boomers with a healthy sprinkling of University of the Arts students leaning over the balcony rail in their tee shirts. When Tyner entered the hall and approached the piano, preceded by his bassist, Charnett Moffett, and drummer, Eric Harland, the whole room immediately rose to its feet for the first of the night’s several exuberant standing ovations.

The playing was hot. Really hot. If I were Lenny Bruce, I’d say it cooked. Tyner took obvious delight in racing over the high end of the keys, rushing down to the bottom, punctuating the run with an articulate crash. Moffett’s solos were so dexterous, slipping back and forth between intricate fingerings and intense bowing that Harland began to make fun of him, flailing around the kit with his brushes. The crowd laughed.

When the second set finished and the standing ovation began to loosen toward the exits, those of us who were still at our seats watched an elderly woman hunch forward from the front row to talk to Tyner. After a moment of whispering, he announced that she had been his music teacher in the fifth and sixth grades.

The audience was delighted and grew increasingly tickled when she presented Tyner with a picture of himself in junior high and announced that she wanted to play. So she did. She then stole a very difficult show to steal by sitting down, playing a few very fine bars, then sweetly bullying Tyner into an encore and announcing to all of us, “I don’t mind telling you, I’m 96.” The crowd went wild.

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Alyssa Timin works as program associate at the Philadelphia Music Project, where she helps to fund Greater Philly’s flourishing music scene. She edits PMP’s self-titled in-house magazine to which she recently contributed a feature article on interdisciplinary performance.

San Francisco: Sonic Delicacies

Roddy Schrock
Roddy Schrock
Photo by Hideki Kubota

Carl Stone, currently based in Tokyo, has been active in promoting the work of Japanese artists abroad. Fortunately for those of us who live in San Francisco, he was able to curate a duo performance by Yuko Nexus 6 and Mariko Tijiri here a few months back. I knew the work of Yuko Nexus 6 a bit from my years in Tokyo, but the work of Mariko Tijiri was something that I had not had the pleasure of experiencing. The downtown venue of 964 Natoma, sadly no longer presenting work, was the perfect space to hear this performance: a large warehouse space whose upstairs was quietly intimate, with bean bags and pillows scattered around for the audience to sit on. As Aaron Ximm, organizer of the Field Effects concert series, said, “The ears are only able to listen when the body is comfortable.” Field Effects is a uniquely San Francisco series: it is very DIY, flies under the radar, is community oriented, and is able to present work of the highest caliber.

The concert of Yuko Nexus 6 and Mariko Tijiri was well attended, the audience compiled of hipsters who saw the advertisement in local magazines, local luminaries of electronic music, and a collection of people who just enjoy listening to new music. Yuko and Mariko were seated amongst the audience on the floor towards the back of the space behind the glowing screens of their PowerBooks. It seemed as though one of them was primarily controlling the video and the other was working on the sound, but this was unclear and rather irrelevant to their aims which seemed to be a kind of total interconnectedness, between performer and performer, audience and performers, and among the audience members themselves.

The video was comprised of lightly processed shots of everyday objects, at times in very tight zoom, and at others from a much wider angle. The objects themselves were strikingly unspectacular but their arrangement was not—one got the sense that a lot of time was put into the preparation of these props for their filming. For example, an aluminum lamp would be filmed from behind at a very close distance creating little beads of light and darkness, then the camera would pan down to a pot of boiling water on a gas stove.

The sounds were treated much the same way. It seemed there was very little processing, the focus being primarily on subtle change of tone and placement of sound in time, all the while never leaving the realm of the delicate and suggestive. This was a sound environment for aural connoisseurs, so to speak. The intense care taken with the presentation of every gurgle of water, every slip of metal against metal, every atmospheric wash, was highly polished, deliberate, and lovely.

Throughout their performance I was thinking about how meaning is conveyed through performance, and how refreshing it was to hear and see work which seemed to avoid any overt insistence on message or commentary. If there was intentional communication taking place, it was of the kind that one might receive from the hands of a gifted masseuse, the kind that communicates relaxation to tense muscles and calms anxiety. Their music was content with the simple and powerful act of making a beautiful experience for all present. And at that concert in that space with that particular audience, it achieved its goal marvelously.

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Roddy Schrock is a sound artist who digitally mines everyday sound for the profound and canvasses the glitzy, rough edges of pop for its articulate immediacy. He has lived and worked in Tokyo, The Hague, New York, and San Francisco, with performances in the Czech Republic, Holland, Japan, and North America. He is also an educator, currently teaching at De Anza College (California) and will be giving a summer workshop on Supercollider software at STEIM (Netherlands).

Boston: Six Degrees Equals Separation

Julia Werntz
Julia Werntz
Photo by Michele Macrakis

“Where are you?” An eminent composer to whom I had just been introduced, also as “a composer,” asked the question politely with a handshake and a curious smile, and with a slight emphasis on the word are. Where was I? Inside the same university concert hall in Boston, Massachusetts, that he was, attending a concert of contemporary music, but obviously that was not what he meant. He meant, “At what academic institution do you have a teaching position?” The context would have made this clear to anyone present, since a large percentage of the audience appeared to be professor-composers.

I begin my presentation of the Boston new music scene with this point because the academic atmosphere is an inescapable feature and usually colors the experience of new music consumption here. If it is generally the case in America that contemporary classical music is associated with the academic intelligentsia, then Boston, with its unusually large number of universities and music schools, is a place where this class distinction could be described as overwhelming.

Aside from being bad news for composers stuck outside the ivory tower, what does this mean for audiences? On the one hand, it means that the quality and quantity of new music performances is high. Largely because of its schools, Boston attracts a surplus of world-class composers and performers, and we have many university-resident performing groups and concert series. The landscape includes the Lydian String Quartet at Brandeis, Alea III at Boston University, the Fromm Foundation concerts at Harvard, as well as many independent performing groups, such as the Dinosaur Annex Ensemble (who just celebrated their 30th anniversary), Boston Musica Viva, Collage New Music, and several other excellent younger ensembles.

On the other hand, it also means audiences must not only posses the desire to hear this music in the first place, they also need to feel comfortable in the elite atmosphere that often weighs so heavily at these events—and this is no minor point. I believe there is a constituency of people out there interested in the arts who would be thoroughly enchanted by the music of Chen Yi or Mario Davidovsky, if only they had access to the music. They don’t. Most haven’t even heard of these groups, while others feel alienated by the milieu, indicating just how remote and secluded this large, rich, exciting musical world is from ordinary people.

A few groups, such as the Boston Modern Orchestra Project with their Club Café series, and pianist Sarah Bob’s New Gallery Concert Series, try to break through this barrier, and have had some success. And this is the context of Boston’s new music scene: a wealth of new music and musicians, and a profound need for the music to seem more relevant.

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Composer Julia Werntz lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her husband, jazz pianist Pandelis Karayorgis, and their daughter Anna. Since the mid ’90s her music, mostly chamber pieces, has been almost exclusively microtonal. Her music has been performed around the Northeastern United States and Europe, and may be heard, together with works by composer John Mallia, on the CD All In Your Mind (Capstone Records). She is currently working in collaboration with choreographer and dancer Christine Coppola and violinist Gregor Kitzis on a piece for solo violin and viola and dance, based on poems of E. E. Cummings.

Werntz curently teaches music theory as an adjunct faculty member at universities in the Boston area, and also is Director of the Boston Microtonal Society, together with her former teacher and BMS President, composer and jazz saxophonist Joseph Maneri.

Atlanta: From Gamelan to Quartertone Guitar

Mark Gresham
Mark Gresham
Photo by Angela Lee

April’s new music calendar opened in Atlanta in a blend of old and new with an Eastern twist. On April 2, the Emory Javanese Gamelan, directed by Steven Everett, presented both traditional gamelan music and new works for (or inspired by) Indonesian instruments. Included was one of Everett’s own works, Ladrang Kampung (slendro), from his 1999 music for a dramatic work k a M. The gamelan was the supporting ensemble for a solo violin part, digitally processed through Symbolic Sound Corp.’s Kyma software with Kim Twarog as the violin soloist. This was the first time the solo part had been performed on violin, according to Twarog; cello or flute having been used in the past. She also plays traditional gamelan instruments as a member of the ensemble, but found playing violin in slendro tuning a novel and somewhat ear-challenging experience.

The late Lou Harrison’s Gending Moon sl. (1994) for gamelan was also on the program, as was Double Music (1940) collaboratively composed by Harrison and John Cage, played by guests from the Georgia State University Percussion Ensemble, who were invited to participate when Everett learned they were preparing it for their own concert on April 11. A simple but clever clue as to who wrote what in the piece was indicated by the performers’ shirts: blue for Cage, black for Harrison.

That April 11 concert by the entire GSU Percussion Ensemble, directed by Stuart Gerber, itself featured a panoply of newer music, including the premiere of Burning Moon (2005) by Nikitas Demos. Gerber himself was marimbist, sharing solo status with bouzouki soloist Esteban Anastasio. The duo parts, which the composer compares to “a pair of dancers,” were accompanied by an ensemble of six percussionists which seemed to have a role akin to a chorus in classical Greek drama.

Instrumentalists also had dancer-like roles in Pas de Deux by Brian Luckett, performed by the composer on guitar with flutist Carl Hall, in a duo recital at Emerson Concert Hall on April 8. The two also performed Libby Larsen’s two-movement, jazz and be-bop inspired Blue Third Pieces (1996).

Larsen’s music was featured again at Emerson Hall with the premiere of a new version of De toda la eternidad by members of the Emory Wind Ensemble on April 13. The original voice/piano version was commissioned by soprano Bonnie Pomfret, and premiered by her and pianist Laura Gordy for the opening of the Schwartz Center in 2003. The new version, which includes the addition of a chamber-sized group of winds, was commissioned by ensemble director Scott Stewart. Pomfret and Gordy were also featured soprano and pianist in this premiered revision. The premiere of a new concerto for piano and winds by Stephen Paulus was originally scheduled to be on the program as well, with William Ransom as soloist, but has been postponed until the fall.

Eyedrum, an in-town Atlanta alternative venue, frequently hosts improvisers like Erik Hinds of Athens, Georgia, who performs on quarter-tone guitar and the H’arpeggione, a large, upright, guitar-like device that includes a dozen sympathetic drone strings. Hinds and Tennessee-based vocalist/keyboardist Dennis Palmer took the stage at Eyedrum April 9 for a meeting of their personal electro-acoustical styles. Palmer cites John Zorn and Fred Firth as influences, while Hinds emphasizes the rawly naked sounds of his instruments’ strings. Eyedrum also hosts “open improvisation” nights, most recently on April 7. Says electric guitarist/composer Darren Nelsen, a first-time participant: “You get all kinds of characters showing up for that open improv. People will bring anything in—kazoos, megaphones, theremins. It was wild. Some of it falls flat, some of it is funny, some of it’s good; it’s all kinds of stuff.”

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A native of Atlanta, Georgia, Mark Gresham is a composer, publisher, and freelance music journalist. He is a contributing writer for Atlanta’s alternative weekly newspaper, Creative Loafing, and was winner of an ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award for Music Journalism in 2003.