Category: Field Reports

Chicago: For Practically Everyone—New Label Finds Our Musical Soft Spots

Posted on April 30, 2014 by - Field Reports, Headlines

About halfway through my interview with Matt Pakulski, the founder of new Chicago record label FPE, I asked him to describe the music of one of his label artists, the Miami Dolphins. By coincidence, Pakulski was actually wearing one of the band’s t-shirts.  “They’re kind of noise-rock,” he began excitedly. “They’re from Minneapolis…do you want to hear them?!” He sprang up from the sofa in his Oak Park home—strewn with big tiger stuffed animals and craft supplies for his daughter, Frances—and started looking for the album. “I’m going down to the basement,” he declared, and disappeared for a moment.

Pakulski’s home, and head, are filled with a dizzingly diverse and quirky music collection—and, now that he’s got his record label off the ground, everyone can start listening along. Pakulski is a musician, a largely self-taught composer, and a record enthusiast. Although he now has a work-from-home job in the corporate world, he once owned his own record store and has developed close relationships with Chicago record stores like Dusty Groove and Old School Records.
Matt Pakulski
The acronym FPE—For Practically Everyone—embodies Pakulski’s wide-ranging tastes, as well as his enthusiastic, happy-go-lucky approach to the curation and creation of musical objects. Although his work with FPE means he has less time to blog now, Pakulski’s online persona still reveals his unique passion and unpretentiousness as a record collector. His presence is equal parts perplexing and endearing: at his old blog, Frances Picks, he would regularly let his daughter pull a record off the shelf and then write a blog post about it. One recent post includes photos of the record posed with Pakulski’s pet turtle. Another post begins: “The records pile up. Every month more records. … Listen: each one is special. Each and every one was made for you. I’m lucky I’ve got someone to help me choose: a small person.” His new tumblr, Records are Fun, is a collection of unfussy portraits of records with scraps of commentary that are alternately goofy and rhapsodic.

Pakulski is utterly unique in Chicago’s music scene, and I sat down with him last week to talk about the new label and its first release from Nicole Mitchell’s Black Earth Ensemble. (The Miami Dolphins, and several other acts, have releases forthcoming on FPE.) We were surrounded by several boxes of the album, which had just arrived on Pakulski’s doorstep the day before.

So your first vinyl release is a live recording of Nicole Mitchell’s Black Earth Ensemble, in a performance they presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. Nicole just won the Jazz Journalists’ award for Flutist of the Year for the fifth time in a row, isn’t that right?

Nicole just keeps doing amazing things. She’s really a force of nature. Her vision is so broad and well-defined at the same time, it’s amazing. There’s a great video that really embodies that: at UC-Irvine, where she teaches, they had a speaker series called “What Matters to Me and Why.” She spoke on the series, and it’s fantastic. It’s really interesting to watch her in an academic context. She has this philosophy she calls “limitless possibility.” She talks about where she came from, and how the likelihood of her addressing a group of 100 students at UC Irvine was about .00001%—but hey, it happened. What I found interesting about that video is that her style of speaking in an academic context is very similar to the way she expresses herself creatively and musically. There is, actually, a solo improv in the middle of the talk—and it’s quite seamless, from talking to improv to talking. Like she just expressed an idea, but in a different language.

Why did you want to be an advocate for Nicole and her music?

Because “jazz flutist” doesn’t encompass Nicole at all. She is a brilliant jazz flutist, but the totality of her talent and vision is much more comprehensive. She’s got multitudes. Being known as a jazz flutist is, in some way, a limitation on her audience: people who don’t know jazz, or don’t pay attention to jazz, might not be aware of her. But I feel she has a potential to cross over, like a Sun Ra or an Art Ensemble of Chicago. People who aren’t jazz people were interested in what they were doing, and I think she has the same kind of potential.

I really hesitate to call it a jazz record. The soloing is minimal—it’s almost all composed. It’s a composition for a chamber ensemble, coming from the jazz world, in the same way that a lot of new music incorporates a jazz language in the statement that it makes. This is maybe a jazz piece that uses the language of new music.

Mitchell Intergalactic Beings
Dropping music into genre buckets is a challenging necessity for record labels. What does genre mean for FPE?

Genre is only a concern for me inasmuch as I’d try to avoid doing two things in the same genre. I think a lot of the time, musical expression is silenced because people don’t think it’s for them. Just because you say you’re a rockabilly person doesn’t mean that you don’t have some Herb Alpert records that you like! Everyone’s got their soft spots. People have their guilty pleasures: “I really love this Madonna song but don’t tell anyone.” And I say no! You shouldn’t be afraid to say if you like it.
I’m always debating with people on Facebook about pop music versus serious, versus underground, versus punk. I’m having these debates about authenticity. What I want to do with the label, and the roster I’m selecting, is to find artists that are doing their own thing and expressing it, in some cases, in terms of genre signifiers—but not in a way that is pandering to, or trying to be cool in the eyes of, specialists.

Nicole’s record is your first vinyl release, but you’ve already signed several groups for forthcoming albums. Tell me about some of FPE’s other artists.

I’ve got this great band, Zigtebra. The story is that although Joe and Emily are brother and sister, they didn’t meet until their twenties. They grew up separately, not knowing about each other, and ended up in a dance troupe together called Pure Magical Love. They went out on a date after they met and discovered that they were siblings. At first I wondered if it was a White Stripes thing? They were pretending to be siblings? Anyway, they formed in late 2011 and started making music together. Their first project was a musical about Leonard Cohen. They did a lot of weird performance art when they first started—papier-mâché masks and little operas with a storyline. They have since honed themselves into a brilliantly catchy pop songwriting machine—songs that are nothing but hooks. They have dispensed with everything that isn’t a hook. They’re earnest in a way that I often wouldn’t be able to appreciate, but they’re so damn charming that it’s hard not to appreciate them and kind of love them.

You’re a self-taught composer and a new music lover. Do you plan to have more contemporary classical ensembles on the label eventually?

I’d love to increase the amount of that on FPE. There’s this tension between the stuff that’s really challenging, provocative, and weird and, frankly, sales potential. But I firmly believe that with music that is important, one of the things that makes it vital or important is its ability to communicate to more than just a small group of people.
The ensembles I’m really into have a raw, visceral sound and a very intuitive way of playing. And a way of bringing people in, rather than distancing people.

Another thing which is really important to me, which is a criterion #1 for a band being on the label, is that they have to be energetic self-promoters. It can’t be a group that’s going to break up. They need to be there in two years when I’m still trying to sell the record.

What’s next for you and FPE?

The day after tomorrow, I’m going to Ethiopia to be with this other band on my label, Qwanqa, while they record. My friend in the band, Kaethe Hostetter, is from Massachusetts and she moved to Addis Ababa to start a music school. She’s also in Deboband, an Ethiopian-style brass and funk band from Boston, and they’re incredible live. I can’t wait.

A Qwanqwa tape, photographed in Pakulski's living room.

A Qwanqwa tape, photographed in Pakulski’s living room.

Nicole Mitchell performs her Liberation Narratives in Chicago on May 2. Meanwhile, you can buy Black Earth Ensemble’s new release at the FPE website, as well as in Chicago record stores like Reckless Records. A limited edition of 30 records, with a special art print inside, was created exclusively for Dusty Groove records on Record Store Day. There are reportedly a few copies left.

Austin: Mozart Requiem–Undead

Posted on April 25, 2014 by - Field Reports, Headlines

Requiem WEB
I’m a bit OCD about arriving on time. My wife is laid back about these things, but I just can’t be late. Can’t. Be. Late. So even though I arrived a good fifteen minutes prior to the scheduled downbeat of Mozart Requiem: Undead, when I came upon a line of about 100 people I got nervous. I thought, “I knew I should have gotten here when the doors opened an hour before the show, but we’re at the French Legation Museum…How many people could possibly show up?”
Built in 1840, the French Legation Museum is a sprawling outdoor affair featuring some of the oldest surviving structures in town, and it’s surrounded by huge lawns and six-foot stone walls. The place is so big nobody’s filling it up, especially with concert music.

As I shifted from one foot to the other, I noticed that several people around me had the same worried look, and soon a guy walked past saying, “We’re not getting in. They are contacting the Fire Marshall to see if more people can be allowed in, but I wouldn’t hold your breath.” I poked my head over the wall and saw this:
French Legation WEB
You know how it is when you’re trying to take a picture of something huge and the photo just can’t do it justice? See above. You can see a bit of the orchestra and maybe ¼ of the main lawn. On a Wednesday. After seeing that, I knew something had to be done. Suffice it to say I finagled my way in to see what was happening on the other side of that wall.

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Mozart Requiem: Undead is the brainchild of Graham Reynolds, Peter Stopchinski, and Brent Baldwin. The trio commissioned Glenn Kotche, Caroline Shaw, DJ Spooky, Adrian Quesada, Kate Moore, Todd Reynolds, Petra Hayden, and Justin Sherburn to “finish” the Requiem based on a computer analysis of the original manuscript that “definitively separated out what Mozart had written.” The composers were asked to keep the original vocal parts intact, but otherwise all bets were off. Of course, putting this all together requires a marshalling of considerable musical forces. Reynolds and Stopchinski’s Golden Hornet Project was joined by Baldwin’s Texas Choral Consort, Texas Performing Arts, Fusebox Festival, and Convergence Vocal Ensemble to put on the event. Presented as the kickoff for the 2014 Fusebox Festival, the performance featured over 200 artists (including the chorus, full orchestra, rhythm section, and electronics).

Twelve movements and ten composers—in addition to the commissions, Reynolds and Stopchinski took a few movements—make for a very full plate, and the arrangements ranged from full re-imaginings to more subtle alterations. Todd Reynolds “Dies Irae” was one of the former, with whispers building to shouts and a smattering of hi-hat on half-time drums. Pizzicato strings held the power of the work in check for a time, but the chorus would not be denied, belting out the lines until the final moment when they all fell down. Which they did (all fall down, that is). Glenn Kotche’s “Rex Tremendae” came in like a lamb with marimba, crotales, and shaker, the drum kit entering as Rex along with big choir roars before the whole thing drifted away in the wind. Stopchinski’s “Lacrimosa” had a Middle-Eastern flavor and featured violin soloist Roberto Riggio performing twists and turns over drones accompanied by strings and organ. DJ Spooky laid some beats over “Hostias” while Justin Sherburn (of Okkervil River) and Adrian Quesada brought a rock vibe to the proceedings. It was the loosening of an already colorful tie when Quesada and his band took the stage, strapped on their guitars, and began doling out the power chords to a wildly diverse festival crowd, complete with little kids doing cartwheels in front of the stage.

Many in the new music community are preoccupied with broadening the audience by changing venue and ceremony, and at times it seems a bit forced, like parents trying to be cool. When Golden Hornet Project puts a show together, there’s never any of that “Try it, you’ll like it!” earnest convincing going on, they just lay it out there and see what happens. The confidence that comes from curating hundreds of events in many shapes and sizes really shows when you see them pull off something this big. From the diversity and geographic range of the composers to the breadth and depth of performers to the ginormous attendance, the whole thing stood as an example of what you should do if you’re trying to reach a wider crowd.

And what a crowd it was. Seeing people of all stripes enjoying adult beverages while kicking back on blankets before an outdoor orchestra is one well-worn thing, but seeing them on a Wednesday afternoon in the middle of a school/work week attending a concert featuring a single tune is another. Granted, the Requiem is a big old piece, but still. Graham, dressed in a suit and ten gallon hat, and Peter in a tux with tails provided just enough funky formality while Brent Baldwin ran the whole thing like a champ. Notable also in this endeavor is that the whole thing was free. This year’s Fusebox Festival, once a ticketed affair, is now accessible to all. As board member Joe Randel explained, “We felt that making the festival entirely free was important in order to facilitate the discovery of new work for the audience, but that was just part of our goal. There is a common misconception that if people buy tickets to a performance, they’re “covering the tab,” so to speak. In reality, the box office receipts rarely cover the cost of presenting this kind of work, and they don’t even begin to recognize the artist’s costs associated with creating the work, so we hoped to stimulate a broader conversation about the reality of those costs.”

Free concerts combining hundreds of artists in town with some of the best composers from Austin and across the country? I want to have that conversation every day.

Austin: Fast Fo(u)rward

Posted on April 18, 2014 by - Field Reports, Headlines

I’ve complained on more than one occasion about the changing of Austin into a theme park, and I feel comfortable saying that if you’ve only been here during SXSW or the Austin City Limits Festival, than you haven’t really seen the town. It’s not the gentrification alone but the rate of change which makes for a real baby-with-the-bathwater situation in a town that got weird off the radar and for so many years stayed that way. The cache of interesting events and people that really make this town unique is being lost at a breakneck pace, replaced by stylized food trucks and Formula One Racing [1]. I like funky tacos and fast cars as much as the next guy, but at some point the value that is being traded on will be gone, and any number of other towns will be just as attractive assuming that they have buildings that will take a coat of paint.

So how is a festival that exemplifies Austin’s classic quirks so perfectly being run from LA, New York, and Hong Kong [2]? Shouldn’t I boycott these interlopers and demand that they get off my lawn? No, because Fast Forward Austin is run by three Austin ex-pats who know what the town is all about and who keep that in mind when putting this annual circus together.

Loadbang - Photo by Steve Sachse

Loadbang – Photo by Steve Sachse

This fourth installment of the all-day festival returned to The North Door with another fantastic line-up of local and national performers. Loadbang cranked up the show with offerings from Christopher Cerrone and Andy Akiho, the latter’s three movements from six haikus hinting at the percussion deluge to come with each player eventually trading their trumpets and clarinets for pot-top syncopation. The Skyros Quartet paired with the composers of West Fourth New Music Collective to present a number of quartets and trios written by the group. They opened with Matt Frey’s Procession which featured a repeating chord progression played largely in unison that eventually broke apart, each player moving mechanically away from the original material. Ruben Naeff’s Jackass, which was initially written for the JACK Quartet, closed their set. Quick, quirky, and rambunctious, the piece popped right off the stage.

Tatsuya Nakatani - Photo by Steve Sachse

Tatsuya Nakatani – Photo by Steve Sachse

To say that the music and performances of Tatsuya Nakatani are idiosyncratic and mercurial is an understatement. Perhaps FFA co-director Steve Snowden put it best during his introduction when he said, “I can’t really put into words what this guy does.”

I will now attempt this.
Nakatani began by working a large hanging tam-tam with a large bow [3], one that had a particularly arched stick and looked a bit like an archers bow. Intermittent hits with a large beater colored the sound and after several hits he grabbed a second bow and began to work another tam-tam along with the first. This was all well and good, and I figured we were in for a nice set of screeches and overtones.
Nope.

He eventually moved to a little trap kit with a kick, a handful of toms, and a grab-bag of goodies. Shortly after arriving at the kit, everything went nuts. Singing bowls danced on the head of a tom as he stacked half a dozen cymbals on one another, slamming them on and around the bowls until most were on the concrete floor. One cymbal with a hand-sized hole in the center was bent, and scraped rapidly across the head of the tom, producing a sound like a bowed saw run through a distortion pedal. Nakatani clearly had a few go-to sounds (such as the tam-tam bowing) that he used and manipulated convincingly, but it was when he seemed to be winging it that the real magic happened. The afore-mentioned cymbals and prayer bowls came and went frequently, and while Nakatani was able to keep the energy going (at full speed, even during the relatively quiet opening and closing portions of the set) it occasionally threatened to fall off the rails. Once or twice a cymbal fell too early or a stacking of instruments just didn’t quite gel and these moments were wonderfully visceral and real. This is what, IMHO, live improvised music is about: at least one part communication with the audience and one part danger. Totally fantastic.

Austin Soundwaves - Photo by Steve Sachse

Austin Soundwaves – Photo by Steve Sachse

Austin Soundwaves returned this year and sounded better than ever. I’ve heard the El Sistema-inspired group play multiple times over the past several years now and not only was this performance much stronger in terms of fundamental pitch and rhythm, they’ve also come a long way in terms of their musicality. Their rendition of Cielito Lindo was particularly strong and their works from the canon were very well presented.

*

Just back from a three-week European tour, line upon line percussion opened with Reich’s Music for Pieces of Wood, presented as a sort of historical preview of (spoiler) Mantra Percussion’s Timber performance. Watching LUL reminds me of my rock band days when we’d get home from a tour flush with road chops, except that these guys play like this all the time. They are all superb players, and while watching Matthew Teodori in particular you get the impression that every single note is the most important thing in the world. It makes you think that whatever endeavor you’re involved in, you probably need to up your game.

Fast Forward Orchestra - Photo by Steve Sachse

Fast Forward Orchestra – Photo by Steve Sachse

FFA has usually had a featured piece or act, something that gets all the nerds [4] hot and bothered. This year had a two-fer in Donnacha Dennehy’s That the Night Come and Michael Gordon’s Timber. The former was played by the Fast Forward Orchestra and conducted by Austin Symphony Orchestra’s Peter Bay. Featuring an emotionally powerful performance by mezzo-soprano Kathryn Findlen, the orchestra was a perfect example of what Austin has to offer in terms of new music. During the course of the day, sound from outside would make its way inside The North Door, but I swear Austin shut up for the whole piece. Mantra’s performance was no less thrilling, taking the audience on Gordon’s hour-long marathon of pulsing, surround-sound endurance. Finally, The Grant Wallace Band wrapped up the festivities with a set of folk and jazz influenced originals that would have been at home in any number of bars in town as well as they were at the festival.

Mantra Percussion - Photo by Steve Sachse

Mantra Percussion – Photo by Steve Sachse

Places change and grow, and the only constant is the complaint about how things used to be. Checking out eight hours of banging new music is one way of getting your mind off that fact.


1. The 24-gate regional airport that serves Austin has a direct flight to/from London now, so those from overseas can see F1 without connecting flights. This has been a dream of Willie Nelson’s for some time now.

2. Last year it was Sweden, Portugal, and New York. It’s my understanding that the next one is going to be run from the moon.

3. Actually, he began by asking the venue to turn off the AC. When it was revealed that the sound he was hearing was the refrigerator which was keeping all the beer cold, he smiled, shrugged, and started the set.

4. If you’re reading this, you’re the nerd.

Chicago: Relearning to Listen–New Piano Music for Children

Posted on April 17, 2014 by - Field Reports, Headlines

Joann Cho

Joann Cho

For her most recent commissioning project, composer and pianist Joann Cho invited a large group of composers to write a solo piano piece for her. The restrictions for the commissions were fairly simple: each piece needed to be between one and three minutes long, and use the keys of the piano rather than the inside. Most importantly, Cho asked the composers to compose their piece “for children.” The resulting volume of seventeen pieces — called Elaeth Songs in honor of Cho’s infant son -– will have its premiere this Friday at the Chicago Cultural Center. Appropriately, Elaeth Songs will be presented by the Chicago Cultural Center’s Juicebox series, which has the unusual mission of presenting cutting-edge contemporary art in a toddler-friendly setting.

When I heard about Cho’s project, I was moved by the idea of commemorating the birth of a child with a set of commissions. I thought about Bartok’s beautiful set of pedagogical piano pieces for children, Mikrokosmos, and the many other ways that music for children has manifested itself in our art form. I chatted with Cho from the Oak Park home she shares with baby Elaeth and her husband, composer Jonathon Kirk. She was making final preparations for the performance and looking forward to the September release of the Elaeth Songs recording.

How did you initially frame this call for children’s pieces, and how did the composers respond?

I asked composers who had strong compositional identities, many of whom I knew personally. Although at first the project was a little amorphous, when I presented the idea to the composers, they were all very receptive. The restriction of writing for children is a fun idea. It doesn’t necessarily mean anything — you don’t have to change the way you’d compose a piece of music. Some people did [alter their usual language], and some people didn’t. Everyone took something slightly different away from what I asked them to do.

Could you highlight some of the pieces, perhaps ones that had a particularly interesting take on this prompt?

Although I asked for solo piano pieces only, I did have one composer ignore me. And it’s beautiful! The Belgian composer Thomas Smetryns has written a piece that is accompanied by a recording of Swiss cowbells. He wrote a piece that is completely open notation. He’s creating timbres on the piano that are bell-like, combined with the bells of the recording.

My advisor and main teacher at UC-Santa Barbara, Clarence Barlow, wrote me a piece that’s probably one of the more unique pieces in the bunch. Clarence loves to use extramusical ideas, and since Elaeth is half Korean, he started with four traditional folk tunes for children — “Rockabye Baby,” “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star,” and two traditional Korean children’s tunes. He ends up creating two hybrid melodies throughout, combining the American and the Korean folk tunes. You get this sense throughout the piece where you recognize small motives and phrases from your childhood — you have this strange experience listening to it, exactly because of the juxtaposition.

I understand that Elaeth’s father, Jonathon Kirk, and his grandmother, Linda Kirk, wrote pieces for the collection!

Yes! And Jonathon wrote his piece, Fireflies, before I even prompted him. We were listening to one of Bach’s chorale preludes in the nursery, and Elaeth fell asleep. It’s this beautiful, slow, stately melody. Jonathon was listening to it — and falling asleep himself — and he got the inspiration to use this melody as a basis for his piece. It’s sort of structured like a theme and variations — he has one part in the style of Ligeti, once with a jazz harmonic progression. He places the melody in eight or so different contexts, with these nice transitions between each iteration of the melody.
Elaeth was born into a family and a world of composersI love the fact that I can include works by Elaeth’s closest family members. Jonathon and I are both musicians — we both started out as performers and began composing, we met in music school — so it’s a natural progression for Jonathon to have written a piece for him.

What a lovely family moment to have as a jumping-off point for a piece.

Anytime something like that would happen, we’d have to write it down for the scrapbook. It’s still like that. It’s amazing with a baby how you really notice those moments of calm and quiet. The moment they fall asleep, you finally see things, and you wake up for the first time — you notice.

The concept of time as a series of moments seems particularly important in a set of miniatures – and also in the experience of parenthood.

One thing that I have learned is that I really value time — my time with Elaeth, and also my time alone. All these little ways of compartmentalizing time in my life are really different than before he arrived, and I think doing a project like this also really reminded me that music is something that can transcend that feeling of having less time or more time. You can experience music apart from time.

Did the prompt to write children’s music seem to bring out anything special from the composers you chose?

I think it forced the composers to reflect on their own artistic and creative ideas in a way they hadn’t thought about in a while. Instead of trying to do something new, a lot of them reached into their previous experience. They imagined what they’d want to listen to in its purest form, from a child’s perspective. I don’t see any techniques here that are trying to be something they’re not. The composers worked with elements like harmony and rhythm — these things that we often overly complicate – in a pure and basic way. It reminded me of how children experience harmony and rhythm and form.
Every single piece that I received is completely unique. I was shocked at the diversity of the pieces I received. Even looking at the lullabies – I got several — each one is completely different from the last. These composers, who have established their careers, style, and sound, still have the ability to write a piece, listen to it, and experience the music exactly the way music is experienced by children.

What was the process of preparing these pieces like?

It felt like I was learning how to listen to myself play again for the first time. It was a rediscovery of using my ears to discern how I wanted to play some of these pieces. I was not practicing based on conveying a performance, but with a lot more thoughtful reflection on the music itself.
I was playing a lot for Elaeth — he’s amazing; he responds to all kinds of music — but it’s hilarious because sometimes I’ll play a lullaby. Scott Scharf wrote me this high, ethereal, floaty lullaby and Elaeth started dancing and screaming to it. You never know what kind of effect this type of music will have. I’m not necessarily running the pieces by him, but they were meant to be listened to by him.

Right! How do you imagine this collection, which is kind of a gift to him as well as to yourself, landing with him when he’s old enough to understand?

Actually, my plan is to do this again several more times — not necessarily with the same prompt, but to work with other chamber ensembles and continue to write new music for children. My biggest goal with this project, and doing another volume, would be to allow listeners of new music to be introduced to it without the idea of having to analyze the music. To sort of learn a perspective — not to be afraid of it because it’s in the contemporary classical idiom.

It sounds like your vision for this project expands well beyond what it means for your own family.

I’ve always wanted to include more people in the world where I studied music. I was so inspired at Northwestern when I took my first experimental music class, when we learned about content, and techniques, and zooming in. The course prioritized not only things that were new and edgy and avant-garde, but also an idea of inclusiveness. I’m not saying all contemporary music has to be accessible, or like mainstream popular music. But the first step towards getting to know something is lots of exposure.

Teaching at a community college, I notice now that students are only exposed to what they choose to get exposed to. And people like me are responsible for being advocates. To be exclusive as a contemporary musician or composer seems to me very much against the ideals of the whole reason why we got into it. The idea of including children, including newcomers to this music, is an important concept that’s close to my heart.

LA: A Spring 2014 Concertgoer’s Journal, Part 1

Posted on April 16, 2014 by - Field Reports, Headlines

If you’re anything like me, you feel a pang of guilt and regret whenever you miss a new music concert. This makes March and April particularly poignant months in Los Angeles, as the concert calendar becomes impossibly saturated. It was my original ambition to write about every show I make it to in March and April, but I quickly realized the foolhardiness of this ambition. I have to content myself with writing about a few highlights, which means that unfortunately I can’t write in depth about some really fantastic events I attended. But with that out of the way, here are a few concerts that made an impression on me in the past few weeks. In true social media fashion, this list is in reverse chronological order:

Maximum Minimalism (Disney Hall, April 8)

LA Phil New Music Group; photo by Craig T. Mathew/Mathew Imaging

LA Phil New Music Group; photo by Craig T. Mathew/Mathew Imaging

Originally this concert was advertised with the uninspired title “Classic Reich and Premieres” and was much smaller in scope. I’m not sure exactly what happened, but at some point it became a far more interesting four-hour marathon concert featuring a giant katamari of new music ensembles, including venerable visiting groups like the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) and the Calder Quartet, as well as the LA Phil’s New Music Group and local collective wild Up. This was wild Up’s first appearance at Disney Hall, and it was exciting to see the new and the established side by side like this.

Throughout, there was the feeling that this concert could have been even bigger, too. Multiple performances occurred in the lobbies during both intermissions, too many for one person to catch, and the concert was also preceded by a sensitive performance of William Duckworth’s Time Curve Preludes by wild Up’s pianist Richard Valitutto.

Claire Chase, flute; photo by Craig T. Mathew/Mathew Imaging

Claire Chase, flute; photo by Craig T. Mathew/Mathew Imaging

Paradoxically, the Reich pieces that were the focus of the original program sometimes felt like the least essential music here. ICE flutist and director Claire Chase kicked off the program with an mesmerizing performance of Vermont Counterpoint that balanced passion and precision, but the Calder Quartet’s performance of Different Trains felt strangely inert in a live setting. ICE’s impeccable rendition of Radio Rewrite fared a little better, but there was only so much they could do with this odd, chimeric beast. Listening to this series of not-quite-arrangements of Radiohead songs, you can’t help but feel that you’d be better off mainlining pure Reich or Radiohead, instead of ingesting a diluted, homeopathic version of both.

By contrast, wild Up’s repertoire choices felt genuinely subversive, as if they were smuggled onto the program under cover of night. Julius Eastman’s Stay On It presented a more inflammatory version of minimalism, with the relentless repetition of an obnoxious eight-note motive alternating with occasional improvisational and/or aleatoric freakouts. (Brian Walsh’s saxophone blaring was both a literal and figurative high note here.) Andrew McIntosh’s Silver and White poetically dealt with subtle gradations of pitch, with microtonal glissandi partially submerged under the oceanic undulations of a quiet, restrained snare drum roll.

The two premieres commissioned by the LA Phil New Music Group and conducted by John Adams were more conventional, confident works by composers in their prime. Mark Grey’s Awake the Machine Electric was a bit like a mashup of Annie Gosfield and Tchaikovsky, with industrial sound effects juxtaposed with Romantic-sounding orchestration and thematic ideas. The resulting combination didn’t always gel, but it was still thrilling. Missy Mazzoli’s Sinfonia (for Orbiting Spheres) created a bewitching sonic landscape with lyrical strings and winds suspended in a shimmering haze created by long chords held by harmonicas. Sure, she’s used this technique before (e.g. in Still Life with Avalanche), but not quite like this.

Nico Muhly, piano; Andrew Tholl, violin; Shara Worden, voice; Gyan Riley, guitar; photo courtesy Mathew Imaging

Nico Muhly, piano; Andrew Tholl, violin; Shara Worden, voice; Gyan Riley, guitar; photo by Craig T. Mathew/Mathew Imaging

David Lang’s death speaks repurposes fragments of text from Franz Schubert’s songs to create a complete personification of Death, sung beguilingly by Shara Worden with accompaniment from pianist Nico Muhly, guitarist Gyan Riley, and violinist Andrew Tholl. The last movement, “I am walking,” is the most effective, with its sighing two-chord motive and haunting male backup vocals. At times during the other movements, I missed Schubert’s unfashionable melodrama, which for me at least, often implied a lecherous menace underlying Death’s comforting platitudes. Lang seems to take these platitudes at face value.

The concert concluded with a rare performance of John Adams’s American Standard, played by a supergroup conglomeration of ICE and wild Up. Two of the three movements of this early work have been withdrawn, which may be what prompted Adams to come on stage before the performance to give a half-serious disclaimer about this piece from his “radical” Haight-Ashbury days. “It’s a bit like a 25-year-old coming up to you and saying, ‘I’m your son’,” he quipped.

John Adams, Tyshawn Sorey, Andrew McIntosh, Andrew Tholl, and Chirstopher Rountree with members of ICE and wild Up; photo by Craig T. Mathew/Mathew Imaging

John Adams, Tyshawn Sorey, Andrew McIntosh, Andrew Tholl, and Chirstopher Rountree with members of ICE and wild Up; photo by Craig T. Mathew/Mathew Imaging

That said, it was probably the most exciting performance of an Adams piece I’ve seen in years, possibly because I didn’t know what to expect. Each movement was newly arranged for the occasion with copious poetic license by a different young composer. Andrew Tholl’s arrangement of “John Philip Sousa” was a refreshingly juvenile Ivesian death march constructed from familiar patriotic melodies. Andrew McIntosh’s arrangement of “Christian Zeal and Activity” and Tyshawn Sorey’s arrangement of “Sentimentals” were more introspective and meandering. Throughout the final movement, Sorey seemed to be offering commentary on the performance from the piano, with occasional Thelonious Monkish asides and interjections. It was both puzzling and captivating.
At any rate, it was promising to see the truly collaborative nature of this final leg of the marathon, and its unpredictable mix of the radical and the traditional. As creative chair of the LA Phil, I hope Adams takes cues from his younger self more often.

WasteLAnd (Art Share, April 4)

Mark Menzies and Ashley Walters; photo by Micki Davis

Mark Menzies and Ashley Walters; photo by Micki Davis

WasteLAnd is a new concert series in LA with a strong experimental bent, and their April concert showcased extremes of texture both brutal and delicate. Nina C. Young’s violin and cello duo Meditation, performed by Mark Menzies and Ashley Walters, presented a kind of dialogue between scratchy, aggressive playing and more contemplative moments of repose. Brian Griffeath-Loeb’s …on par with grass & twigs, for three different flutes, prepared piano, and two percussionists, conveyed a fascinating, palpable sense of fragility, as conducted by Nicholas Deyoe with great attention to detail. Christine Tavolacci (C flute), Michael Matsuno (alto flute), and Rachel Beetz (bass flute) produced breathy, almost strangled-sounding tones, with sparse, judicious accompaniment from Steve Lewis (piano), Ryan Nestor (percussion), and Steve Solook (percussion). Fernanda Aoki Navarro’s Emptying the Body featured cellist Derek Stein savagely attacking his soundboard, generating powerful percussive effects and propulsive rhythmic activity.

Each of these pieces were extraordinarily successful at creating and exploring unique soundworlds, but once the limits of these worlds were established, I found my attention drifting at times. I longed for something more overtly teleological or developmental, but maybe this is just an aesthetic preference or limitation on my part.

Mark Menzies’s two songs from his cycle 11 elegies and a love song occupied an unusual place on the program. “two deaths” especially felt like an anomaly, with baritone Ian Walker singing melodiously over a gentle undulating electric guitar riff (played by Nicholas Deyoe) and occasional violin asides from Menzies. “18” felt like a return to form, with Walker’s voice stubbornly, obsessively reiterating a single high note while Menzies’s and Deyoe’s figures created frantic and furious activity all around it. This was riveting.

The last two pieces on the program finally united their extreme soundworlds with the sense of movement and change I craved. Kurt Isaacson’s the way of all flesh for solo double bass, here premiered by Scott Worthington, featured seesawing ostinati that slowly, satisfyingly built in intensity. Worthington’s control over this gradual process was masterful, and transfixing. Finally, Nicholas Deyoe’s Erstickend for two cellos and percussion, another premiere, spun an intricate web of epic proportions out of a skittering three-note motive. Ashley Walters and Derek Stein infused their cello parts with the requisite ferocity, while percussionist Ryan Nestor’s rhythmic interjections added even more tension. The piece concludes with a violent crescendo and snare drum roll — would it be churlish to point out the orthodox effectiveness of this ending?

JacobTV (What’s Next Ensemble, March 28)

JacobTV with What's Next Ensemble; photo by Tina Tallon

JacobTV with What’s Next Ensemble; photo by Tina Tallon

What’s Next Ensemble is perhaps best known for the Los Angeles Composers Project, an annual concert series championing the work of local Southern California denizens. Their last event, however, was an ambitious departure for them, a concert at Cafe Club Fais Do-Do devoted entirely to the music of Dutch avant-pop icon Jacob Ter Veldhuis, a.k.a. JacobTV. JacobTV’s sardonic pop aesthetic occupies a unique place in the current landscape of new music, getting lots of mileage out of marrying clips of recorded speech with acoustic musical accompaniment/counterpoint. Certainly he’s not the first or only composer to employ speech for its musical qualities — Peter Ablinger and Steve Reich come to mind — but no one, so far, has managed to do it in such a topical and witty way. The unpredictability of his subject matter, for one thing, keeps it fresh. Cheese Cake features the ramblings of tenor saxophonist Dexter Gordon introducing a Carnegie Hall concert, for example, while Grab It! cuts up candid interviews with convicts from the 1978 documentary Scared Straight!

The main draw of this concert, though, was definitely The News, his ongoing “reality opera” that is constantly being added to as current events march on. The News also incorporates video (compiled and edited by JacobTV himself, I hear), and there are wonderful moments when all the multimedia elements came together in a seamless, joyful way, as when a cartoonish evangelical preacher waves his arms about on screen in a panoply of Warholian windows while the ensemble funkily amplifies the absurdity of his words. This tends to work best with lighthearted subjects, and moments that aimed for more gravitas sometimes felt awkwardly mawkish, like the saccharine chords that accompanied a speech about peace by Pope Benedict. The exception to this was a segment devoted to an American ex-soldier’s account of an accidental killing in Iraq. Here the music followed the cadence of the ex-soldier’s powerful words precisely, amplifying them instead of commenting on them: in effect, letting them speak for themselves.

The musicians of What’s Next, led by the unflappable baton of Vimbayi Kaziboni, were downright fantastic in realizing JacobTV’s artistic vision, riding through a couple technical issues and an earthquake (both of which I’ve come to expect lately) with professionalism and aplomb. Ben Phelps, one of the ensemble’s directors, also deserves credit for producing the concert in the first place.

Collapse (Timur and the Dime Museum, March 27)

Timur and the Dime Museum; photo by Tina Tallon

Timur and the Dime Museum; photo by Tina Tallon

Like JacobTV’s music, Timur and the Dime Museum’s Collapse also takes on a newsworthy topic — this time, environmental devastation. This album-length work, presented at Disney Hall’s REDCAT, is loosely patterned after a requiem. These factors make it sound like it could be a dour and dreary affair, but Daniel Corral, the Dime Museum’s accordionist and composer-in-residence, takes an inspired, unexpected approach, turning the whole thing into a psychedelic rock opera of sorts, with catchy hooks, doo-wop harmonies, and a pantheon of stylistic references. This spoonful-of-sugar tactic works wonders for the show, which is more likely to generate delight than despair. I almost feel guilty for enjoying it.

Timur Bekbosonuv, a tenor equally accomplished in both pop and operatic idioms, was captivating as the lead vocalist, generating metric tonnes of charisma and stage presence throughout a variety of costume changes, including a half-dress-half-pantsuit number that deserves special mention (designed by Victor Wilde and the Bohemian Society). But most members of the band got some time at the mic too, and Corral’s score made the most of the myriad vocal qualities in the group. A highlight was the sweet ballad “Honeybee, Come Home,” sung with appropriate naivete by bassist Dave Tranchina.

But the score had its darker moments, too. “The House of Moloch” begins with a deliciously gritty riff from guitarist Matthew Setzer, and if you had told me it was a recently unearthed Diamond Dogs-era David Bowie B-side, I might have believed you. The beginning of the Dies Irae, titled “Demon Chora,” also caught my attention with its moody synths and ominous female voiceover, reciting text taken from the International Atomic Energy Agency’s INES scale. And throughout the show, drummer Andrew Lessman provided the endless, vital engine underneath it all, a constant powerful presence outside of the spotlight.

Boston: Practice Sessions

Posted on April 15, 2014 by - Field Reports, Headlines

Conductor Robert Spano and pianist Jonathan Biss perform Bernard Rands' Concerto for Piano and Orchestra with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, April 3, 2014. Photo by Stu Rosner.

Conductor Robert Spano and pianist Jonathan Biss perform Bernard Rands’s Concerto for Piano and Orchestra with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, April 3, 2014. Photo by Stu Rosner.

In the ever-futile quest to match up language with the experience of music, “meditative” is a useful shorthand, able to hint at a calm surface, a reflective cast, and an eloquent stillness all at once. (I’ve used it that way, certainly.) It is also, in the strictly literal sense, wrong. Keeril Makan’s Letting Time Circle Through Us really is meditative, in that, intentionally or not, it is true to the experience of meditation. It is a process and a journey, not a fixed state. And the journey isn’t always smooth.

Makan’s piece was performed by the New York-based ensemble Either/Or at MIT’s Killian Hall on April 5. It was the premiere of the full score. (The group introduced a 12-minute excerpt of the piece in Pittsburgh last fall.) Commissioned for the group through Meet The Composer (one of the last such commissions before the Meet The Composer/American Music Center merger), the work utilizes an unusual and somewhat distinct ensemble: cimbalom (David Shively), guitar (Dan Lippel), crotales and glockenspiel (Russell Greenberg), violin (Jennifer Choi), cello (Wendy Law), and piano (Taka Kigawa). It’s a sound world both ringing and atomized.

Letting Time Circle Through Us stretches a 50-minute canvas, broken up in a rondo-like way. The ritornello—almost ceremonially repetitious, marked by a rising major-second motive, a repeated, irregular inhalation—is repeatedly, sometimes suddenly interrupted by ideas that amass weight and shadow. The contrasting sections provide as much obstruction as variety, like formal parallels to the hindrances the Buddha warned about:

[T]here are these five obstructions, hindrances, corruptions of the mind, weakeners of wisdom. What five? Sensual desire is an obstruction, a hindrance, a corruption of the mind, a weakener of wisdom. Ill will is an obstruction … Sloth and torpor are an obstruction … Restlessness and remorse are an obstruction … Doubt is an obstruction … a weakener of wisdom. These are the five obstructions, hindrances, corruptions of the mind, weakeners of wisdom.

The practice of meditation is all about overcoming those hindrances—not by ignoring them, but instead by acknowledging them, examining them, because, to this way of thinking, by combining something bad (a hindrance) with something good (mindfulness), the good wins out.

That’s not to say Letting Time Circle Through Us is a triumphant piece. Its examination of its interruptions is dark and moody. Even the quieter contrasts are continually off balance: a 3/4+7/8 cimbalom pattern (later taken over by the piano) seeds a guitar line that upends the usual major/minor implications of the overtone series; a seemingly limpid piano loop is at hemiola odds with a string melody; a gentle gymnopedie is gradually encrusted with dense harmonies. The ostinati, more often than not, are inexact, almost-but-not-quite interlocking. (Points of arrival are less about dissonance and consonance than about a set of patterns finally settling, even into a clashing texture.) But there is a thread of optimism—that opening major second is constantly recontextualized, from a brooding, minor-scale la-ti to a hopeful, major-scale re-mi at the work’s climax.

And Letting Time Circle Through Us does, perhaps, embody the modest goal of any given meditation, that you end up a little farther along the path than when you started. Throughout the piece, the unusual instrumentation is used to constantly reimagine and translate timbres. The cimbalom’s buzz becomes a combination of guitar and pizzicato cello; piano and crotales trade their fraternal twin attack-and-decay sounds. During that gymnopedie section, Choi kept repeating the same note, but fingered on different strings. At the outset and the close of the piece, Shively and Lippell briefly utilized E-bows, an almost incorporeally delicate sound on cimbalom or acoustic guitar: in the beginning, an inchoate element, but by the end, a brief glimpse of, maybe, the instruments’ deeper natures. The way Letting Time Circle Through Us prompts and sustains that awareness is a considerable musical achievement.

***

The same weekend (I heard the April 8 concert), the Boston Symphony Orchestra was performing the second of its two world premieres this season, Bernard Rands’s Concerto for Piano and Orchestra, with pianist Jonathan Biss and conductor Robert Spano. (Marc Neikrug’s Bassoon Concerto was premiered last November; the BSO also gave the American premiere of Mark-Anthony Turnage’s Speranza, which it co-commissioned, in October.) The “Piano and Orchestra” is deliberate; soloist and ensemble are much more complementary than combative. A lot of the piece finds Rands reassigning traditionally “idiomatic” material to its instrumental opposites. The first movement of the concerto (“Fantasia”) opens with the orchestra pealing out bell tones of no little pianistic quality; the piano answers by taking over the orchestra’s usual function of providing sweep and saturation, filling in the spaces with ribbony flourishes of fast notes and crushed-ice chords, a bright, pixelated simulation of orchestral color. The movement’s ending—which ended up being the concerto’s biggest, most aggressive moment—punctuates a steady crescendo of volume and activity with an abrupt thump, as if piano and orchestra finally meet up just where hammer meets strings.

The slow movement uses the “Aubade” from Rands’s Three Pieces for Piano (also written for Biss), working it into a thoroughly Impressionist exploration of orchestral sustain and pianistic decay. Spano and the BSO had primed this movement well by opening the concert with the “Nuages” and “Fêtes” movements of Debussy’s Nocturnes, and Rands seemed to drop the concert back into that soundworld, right down to period details: melodies etched by doubled winds and harps; distant, buzzy muted-brass calls; catharsis via increased orchestral lushness rather than harmonic resolution. The scaffolding, though, carries hints of serialism, everything permuting out from a four-note motive that, in different guises, keeps inaugurating tentative, crystalline explorations on the part of the piano. The climax here, too, does a reversal, short brass stings giving way to the piano’s pedaled resonance. A challenge of touch and balance more than virtuosity, the movement was the beneficiary of a delicately precise performance.

The finale was built around another concept that has turned up before in Rands’s work, the sometimes paradoxical layers of time that can coexist in music. Here, the multiple layers are condensed into a single, near-ubiquitous idea: tremolos, across gradually expanding intervals, a texture that, all by itself, manages to be fast and slow at the same time. Trills were passed back and forth from soloist to orchestra, from high to low, from timbre to timbre, while bits of rhythmic cadence bounced across the stage. There was an almost insouciantly traditional cadenza—ideas from throughout the piece brought back for one last cameo—before the concerto, like Debussy’s party, seemed to drift away into the pre-dawn light.

A lot of the personality of the piece came from Biss’s particular style at the keyboard—crisp, impeccably controlled, fastidious to the point that it transcends stuffiness. But the concerto is already reticent in its grandeur. Rands, who just celebrated his 80th birthday, is still at least an honorary musical Bostonian, having spent over a decade at Boston University and then Harvard back in the ’80s and ’90s. But this piece called to mind a different civic cultural strain, the American Impressionist painters that flourished in and around New England in the early part of the 20th century—Childe Hassam, J. Alden Weir, Frank Benson, Edmund Tarbell—more concerned with capturing subtleties of light and shadow than monumental effect. The struggle and victory of the Romantic concerto were nowhere to be heard. In its place was something that, despite a wildly different vocabulary, was rather like Makan’s moods: a voyage, a passage, a span of time given significance just through the act of noticing.

Austin: Conspirare’s Moving Light

Posted on April 9, 2014 by - Field Reports, Headlines

Craig Hella Johnson - photo by Danny Brod

Craig Hella Johnson
Photo by Danny Brod

What are the first few names that come to mind when you think of Texas music? It’s not a stretch to imagine that Willie Nelson, Lyle Lovett, or Billy Gibson (of ZZ Top) might pop up, and it should come as no surprise that these are just a few of the people who have been honored as the Official Texas State Musician of the Year in the eleven years that the award has been around. However, it’s not only grizzled road warriors and guitar-slingers getting recognition in the Lone Star state. Selected for a one-year appointment by the Texas Poet Laureate, the current State Musician, and the State Artist Committee, last year’s honoree was Conspirare founder and artistic director Craig Hella Johnson. His career in Texas spans over twenty years, including a decade at UT Austin, and in that time he has taken a one-off project for the Victoria Bach Festival and turned it into a powerhouse of contemporary vocal music. That these accomplishments track in the world of concert music is no surprise, but the fact that they’ve garnered recognition as representative of the state at large is exciting.

Often referred to as “Conspirare’s Craig Hella Johnson” the truth is actually the other way around. Conspirare in many ways is Craig Hella Johnson, and when you see them perform you are seeing his vision come to life. To bring the members of an ensemble (let alone the audience) along on a journey takes the ability to show confidence and sincerity and to instill trust and wonder. I saw him speak about his life in music before a group of composers last summer and about twenty minutes into a two hour chat half of the people in the room were weeping. Several people had to leave the room to collect themselves. These were mostly simple stories about important mentors and moments in his development, but he had a way of talking about them that brought everyone in the room into his world by relating to similar stories from theirs. It was neither a motivational speech nor one that seemed to be engineered to endear; the guy just connects, and it comes through whether he’s on the stage or kicked back in a comfortable chair.

Conspirare Symphonic Choir - photo by Danny Brod

Conspirare Symphonic Choir
Photo by Danny Brod

“Moving Light,” Conspirare’s most recent concert offering, was held on campus at the massive University Presbyterian Church on March 28, and consisted of two light-themed pieces: Morten Lauridsen’s Lux Aeterna and Luminosity by James Whitbourne. The former has become a bit of a warhorse in its short life and generally finds itself paired with heavy hitters of the canon such as the Brahms or the Faure, while the latter is even newer and shows it with solo parts for tanpura, viola, and tam-tam. I’ve seen Conspirare’s professional chamber choir, Company of Voices, on more than a few occasions, but this was my first experience with the full symphonic choir. Playing to an absolutely packed house, the 80-member choir filled the stage to begin the concert with the Lauridsen. Cast in five movements and clocking in at just under 30 minutes, the work draws its text from ancient liturgies including the Requiem Mass and its musical inspiration from the late Renaissance. The movements are played without pause, and Austin Haller’s organ accompaniment more often traded moments with the chorus as opposed to playing with it.

It’s no wonder the piece has been played regularly since its premier in the late ’90s. A thoroughly approachable piece overflowing with clean consonances, it struck me that such a texture really does put into stark relief the few sharp edges that pop out from time to time. In particular, the theme which materializes homophonically in the outer movements is not harmonically adventurous (and need not be), but its coalescence in a sea of flowing lines was quite striking.

In contrast, the Whitbourne showed up in some flashier clothes by way of the Shay Ishli Dance Company, which joined the singers on stage. The seven movements draw freely and liberally from a variety of religious texts in which light plays a role, and as these unfolded the dancers moved around and behind several screens through which the light flowed, at times creating shadows and silhouettes and at others showing through what appeared to be smoke from a smoke machine. I was up in the balcony for this one, so it was tricky to see if the smoke played a larger role below my field of vision, but from where I was sitting it was subtly handled. Throughout, Mousumi Karmakar’s tanpura played its foundational role, intoning 5-1 at various points as Sean Harvey accented entrances and colored the texture with tam-tam. Violist Bruce Williams played beautifully and managed to project even through the thickest of moments, all while the chorus delivered a strong performance under Johnson’s direction.

It’s heartening to know that among those named Official Texas State Musician of the Year is a prominent classical musician (two actually; Robert Dick was the inaugural honoree), mostly because it’s not simply a token honor. It’s indicative of Johnson’s impact on Conspirare and, by extension, on the Texas choral scene, and he more than warrants such recognition. I’m not sure that it’s the kind of thing that’s really on his radar though. He’s planning the next twenty years.

New England’s Prospect: Beyond the Sea

Posted on April 8, 2014 by - Field Reports, Headlines

Lining out Matthew Ritchie's Monstrance/Remonstrance, ICA/Boston, March 28, 2014.

Lining out Matthew Ritchie’s Monstrance/Remonstrance, ICA/Boston, March 28, 2014.

Introducing his collaborative piece Monstrance/Remonstrance at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston on March 28, Matthew Ritchie—currently in the midst of an 18-month stint as the ICA’s artist-in-residence—gave a whirlwind, 30-second history of the philosophical object. His endpoint was deliberately unfathomable: the object-oriented ontology of Graham Harman. In Harman’s view, the ingrained philosophical habit of considering objects only inasmuch as they are used or encountered by human consciousness is forever incomplete: in addition to perceived and idealized objects, there are real objects, with their own ontology, existing whether we sense them or not. “[The] real world,” Harman writes, “is made up of individual objects that are withdrawn from all theoretical, practical, and even causal access.”
Harman’s philosophy isn’t much concerned with aesthetics, but one can see why an artist might love it. It’s full of sentences—

 The interplay of dust and cinder blocks and shafts of sunlight is haunted by the drama of presence and withdrawal no less than are language or lurid human moods

—that could easily double as mission statements for any number of post-modern conceptual art installations. If you were looking for them, you could see Harman’s real objects as a recurring feature of Monstrance/Remonstrance. They also were, in the end, something else: an alibi.

***

See and hear: music was an integral part of the piece. Ritchie had recruited an impressive group of collaborators, drawing heavily from what might be called the Parenthetical Parallel Résumé wing of the new music establishment: vocalist Shara Worden (My Brightest Diamond), guitarist Bryce Dessner (The National), clarinetist Evan Ziporyn (ex-Bang on a Can All-Star), sound designer David Sheppard (Sound Intermedia). The performance started in the ICA lobby, site of the ICA’s art wall, turned over to chosen artists on a regular basis for large-scale murals. Ritchie’s mural sprawls across the wall and into the adjacent glass facade. The imagery—spiraling lines, jagged, vectorized tendrils, vaguely organic circles—is congruent with his mural, Remanence: Salt and Light, currently covering a large wall in nearby Dewey Square (itself, not so long ago, the site of Occupy Boston); the mural recycles elements from Ritchie’s painting The Salt Pit, on display elsewhere in the ICA. Ritchie further echoed the imagery in the foam pads scattered across the floor in place of traditional seating.

David Sheppard (center) under the art wall, ICA/Boston, March 28, 2014.

David Sheppard (center) under the art wall, ICA/Boston, March 28, 2014.

The music for this portion was Propolis, devised by Dessner, Ziporyn, and Sheppard, first performed in 2008 as part of The Morning Line, a Ritchie installation in Seville, Spain. It is a framework for improvisation, though this performance had documentary specificity, being filmed and recorded for subsequent incorporation into the space, via playback and smartphone-accessible video. It started with Dessner and bassist Blake Newman slowly layering over a mulching electronic background, with Sheppard hovering nearby, manipulating the sound from a tablet computer. Then violinist Shaw Pong Liu began to weave through the crowd, soon joined by trombonist Randy Pingray, and then Ziporyn. Everybody was amplified; the conversation—or, maybe, competition—between local and global perception was constant.

The piece itself fell into four large sections: an opening in which the overlay of electronic noise predominated; an industrial breakdown (the “three minutes of excruciating pain” Ritchie warned the audience about, though it was actually pretty inviting in its head-banging way—a chunky, asymmetrical stretch of metallic thrashing); collective commentary over a pleasantly bumpy bass clarinet loop; and then a long coda settling into rich, Ligeti-like clusters. The improvisation had a tendency to default to a particular style—bursts of extended-technique scribbling over minimalist grooves—a little of which, for me at least, goes a long way. But the slower sections, where the players had an expanse of resonance to play into, built up into shimmering walls of sound.
The physical interaction between the players was minimal, ending in an apt tableau in which Pingray, Ziporyn, and Liu faced the wall, away from the audience and each other, while continuing to play. (Dessner had already left the space by this point.) The performance seemed to occupy the interstice between a group improvisation and five people improvising. Maybe you could call it a symbol of the gap between the perceived object and the real object.

***

Monstrance/Remonstrance then moved out of the museum, along the pier, and across the street, to the Our Lady of Good Voyage Chapel, for the second part of the piece: a screening of Ritchie’s film Remonstrance, to the live accompaniment of Dessner’s To the Sea. This, too, was a revival, having been premiered at the short-lived L&M Arts gallery in Los Angeles (though, like all of Ritchie’s works, it’s been continually tweaked and altered). Remonstrance was already playing as the audience was herded into the chapel. The film mixes sea imagery, computer animation, and allegorical ideas, all filtered through a sepia-toned, painterly filter of video processing. A drone flies over a beach; we see the pilings of a pier and a decaying bridge. (Harman: “The reality of the bridge is not to be found in its amalgam of asphalt and cable, but in the geographic fact of ‘traversable gorge.’ The bridge is a bridge-effect; the tool is a force that generates a world, one in which the canyon is no longer an obstacle.”) The whole is invaded by protozoa-like spheres, again recapitulating visual elements from painting and mural.

Worden and her on-film doppelgänger then made their entrances. (The film incorporates footage from an earlier, 2011 version of the piece, which included an installation/performance component that took place on Venice Beach.) In the chapel, Worden processed up the aisle with a model boat—a carvel-built, 17th-century English-style vessel, by the looks of it, appropriate for a pilgrimage—while on-screen Worden summoned seaweed-clad golems from the Pacific. Her costume made, perhaps, Harman-esque commentary: geometric patterns that evoked both fishnets and the harmony of the spheres, a carapace-like mask made of interlocking iterations of those jagged tendrils.

She was singing all the while, long, keening lines buoyed by Dessner and three trombones (Pingrey, Ian Maser, and Christopher Moore) and organ (Elaine Rombola) and Ziporyn, who turned up at the end. Perhaps this is reading too much into Dessner’s instrument of choice, but To the Sea seemed to derive its sound-world from a paradigm of guitar feedback: overtones and layers of pitch and noise built up into a shiny, grainy harmonic edifice. The basic progression was simple—a grim, lush circle of minor chords—but the musical surface (once again amplified and processed) was rich with constantly shifting texture. (One casualty of that texture was the text: Worden’s crystalline tone soared, but the actual words were largely a wash.) At the climax, Dessner veered into some marvelous big, dissonant, Messiaen-like chords: wide-angle, saturated luminosity.

***

I was kind of half-waiting for all of the disparate parts of Monstrance/Remonstrance to click into place, to come together in some summation, but they never do. Ideas mill around the same conceptual space, images are mirrored and echoed. It’s a series of partial glimpses of some theoretical, larger whole. I’m sure that’s intentional, but it kept running up against the notion that the piece was site-specific; the sites were more specific than the piece was, which sometimes made for an odd imbalance. It also brought to the fore how music is automatically site-specific in a way that visual arts have to work at.

Our Lady of Good Voyage, for example, is a utilitarian box of a building; apart from a couple of statues, some stained glass, and appropriately uncomfortable pews, there is not much in the architecture to suggest religious transcendence or mystery. Which is, one could say, part of the ontology of the place, a chapel for working sailors and fishermen whose required divine grace is of an unapologetically practical form: safety, security, survival. The way Remonstrance evoked the elemental nature of the sea, by way of mythology, was a little bit dissonant with such a practical place. I kept thinking of that most powerful of New England seafaring myths—Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick—and how its literary summoning of the sea’s power is inseparable from its exhaustive, anthropological detailing of the rituals and rules of shipboard life and the equipment and techniques of 19th-century whaling.
Of course, this was where the invocation of Harman’s real objects could answer any such quibbles. The performance’s disconnection from the place could, after all, reflect our inherent disconnection from the world of objects. The seeming jumble of images and ideas could, possibly, be taken as a shadow of a web of meaning beyond our perception. But Melville is dealing with real objects, too—he’s just doing it by describing, cataloging, narrating as much as he can, up to the limits of language, and in the process making you realize that it’s still not enough.

In press materials for the show, the ICA proposed that “the performance connects Boston’s seafaring history with its new identity as a hub of technology and innovation.” I could see a few connections in retrospect—that drone flying around at the beginning of Remonstrance, for instance—but, then again, you can see those connections just by walking around the neighborhood: building and development is going on all around the ICA. (Our Lady of Good Voyage, situated on prime real estate, is about to be moved.) Would I have been primed to think about those connections without the experience of Monstrance/Remonstrance? Probably not—in that sense, Ritchie’s project was a success. But I wonder if the connections would have been more immediate, more powerful, if it had been just the music—if we had heard the snaggy machinery of Propolis with only the view of the girders and excavators in the ICA’s parking lot, if we had heard the deep currents of To the Sea with the chapel as the main visual component, rather than just a box to be filled.

But what does it matter what I wonder? According to object-oriented ontology, none of it, not the sea, not the buildings, not the bulldozers, not the instruments or the loudspeakers, not the paintings and sculptures and rolls of film, not even my eyes and ears, none of it needs my consciousness in order to have presence and withdrawal and biographies and philosophical actuality. Maybe that’s the ultimate point of Ritchie’s work, that art, or anything we make or do, turns to music, essentially, as soon as its made or done: in the world, apart from us, beyond our sway or even comprehension. What is art? In multiple senses: it’s out of our hands.

Brooklyn in Austin’s House

Posted on April 2, 2014 by - Field Reports, Headlines

Aaron Copland

Aaron Copland

Conceived and curated by Joseph Horowitz and presented in partnership with Texas Performing Arts, The Butler School of Music, The Austin Symphony Orchestra, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, “Copland and Mexico” was a four-day celebration of the music surrounding Copland’s trip to Mexico in the early 1930s. Copland, a Brooklyn composer of the last century, hoped to embrace the folk music of both Mexico and the United States, and this trip had an impact not only on his creative material but his sense of social purpose as a composer. His output following this trip includes works such as El Salón México and Billy the Kid, pieces that spoke to his new populist leanings. The former a hodgepodge of dance hall tunes and folk songs and the latter populated by cowboy tunes, both were wildly popular and signaled Copland’s desire to move towards a more accessible and nationalist means of expression.

Three shows (four nights counting the ASO’s repeat performance) focused on different portions of not only Copland’s output but also that of composers in similar veins, as well as other cultural and artistic endeavors that speak to the period. ASO’s show included wonderful performances of  El Salón México and Two Mexican Pieces (“Paisaje Mexicano” and “Danza de Jalisco”), plus Carlos Chávez’s Chapultepec and Redes (complete with film) with a score composed by Silvestre Revueltas. The final work is significant not only to the populist theme (fishermen in the Gulf of Mexico experience a labor-related political awakening) but also for its connection to Austin. Mexican nationalist composer Silvestre Revueltas is best known for a significant creative period late in life, but he is less well known for the time he spent in the U.S.A. in his early years, in particular the time spent at St. Edward’s College (now St. Edward’s University) in Austin. His contribution to Redes is significant in that, to quote Dr. James Buhler, associate professor of music theory at the Butler school, “Revueltas’s music is beautifully composed to sound as though it must labor mightily against the technology, a straining that is central to its affective character. In live performance this musical struggle with technology is transformed into an opposition, as music is freed from the grim determinism of the recording apparatus.”

I don’t know the original soundtrack version of this music, but the ASO performance was stunning, and the free, organic quality of live performance did make for a compelling contrast to the content of the film. Other events in the series included performances and workshops by Danzonera SierraMadre of Monterrey, Mexico, northern Mexico’s most prominent danzón orchestra, with UT music students and Patio del Danzón dancers as well as the UT New Music Ensemble, UT Percussion Group, and the UT Symphony Orchestra performing works by Copland, Chávez, and Revueltas. I only wish I could have seen them all.

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Brooklyn Rider

Brooklyn Rider
Photo by Sarah Small

The second concert of Brooklyn Rider’s ten-day Texas Performing Arts residency featured new works by several American composers, as well as Schoenberg’s second string quartet performed by Brooklyn Rider with Dawn Upshaw. Following an opening volley in the form of Schubert’s Quartettsatz was a performance of one of the group’s “Brooklyn Rider Almanac” commissions, Dana Lyn’s Maintenance Music. Inspired by Mierle Ukeles, self-appointed artist-in-residence at the NYC Department of Sanitation , Maintenance Music was written to draw attention to the everyday workings of our daily lives. Starting from out of nowhere with a texture like tuning, the piece featured glissandi from one chord to another as the cello played a wandering melody, an arrangement that switched to viola in short order as the other strings took up harmonics. Quick arco interjections played back and forth with pizzicato, building then stopping with a five-note riff. A group of discordant, rising, symmetrical arpeggios marked another section, one of many moods that rolled by in the work.

This was followed by Evan Ziporyn’s Qi, a piece that, in an evening of heavy-duty tunes and stellar performances, stood out as particularly special. The opening movement, “Lucid Flight,” featured pulsing factory rhythms which made way for long, luxuriant lines that developed into pointed sixteenths traded among the players. Big, blocky harmonies reminiscent of the best of the minimalist tradition faded into one another, almost as if the parts were suspensions and anticipations writ large. The following movement, “Garden,” was particularly compelling. Ziporyn spread chords across the ensemble with plenty of double-stops and little vibrato, imparting a pedal-organ impression that was stunning. This was complimented by a later section in which a similar treatment with harmonics sounded somehow like a harpsichord without the attack, which is something I think we can all get behind. His sense and use of rhythm was absolutely spot-on. Though he used relatively little surface complexity (no tuplets were nested in the writing of this piece), Ziporyn’s ability to take a relatively simple harmonic fabric and lay it over a subtly shifting rhythmic foundation left me constantly wondering where the pulse would be next. Though it sounded nothing like the following, it reminded me of how the Pixies sounded when I first heard them; recognizable and alien all at once.

For the second half of the show, Dawn Upshaw joined the ensemble for Schoenberg’s second string quartet as well as a new work by the group’s Colin Jacobsen. The Schoenberg was wonderfully rendered, and clearly Upshaw is still at the top of her game. Jacobsen’s Suite from Chalk and Soot was a five-movement work drawn from a larger piece for quartet and dance with text by Kandinsky from Klänge. It should be noted for those unaware that Brooklyn Rider draws its name from Der Blaue Reiter, a group of artists (Kandinsky among them) based in Munich in the early 20th century, so the use of Kandinsky’s work is not random. The texts in Klänge focus on the sound of words as much if not more than their meaning, so it should come as no surprise that the narrative in each of these is heavy on the whimsical and light on the narrative. Highlights included the slithery sul ponticello edging around the opening movement “Look,” as the quartet juxtaposed Upshaw’s clear tone with a creepy, muttered, singing response. “Curtain” made a reprise of an initial declamatory gesture from “Look,” and then turned a corner with fevered tremolo and talking among the players. The final movement, “Table,” was full of joyful expression, with clapping gestures moving around the quartet and Upshaw in a 5/8 rhythm. Even the light guy got in on the action, bringing in total darkness once or twice before the actual final downbeat.

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Sponsored by some of the heaviest hitters in Austin, both projects sought to present hidden gems of yesterday and today to the initiated as well as to an audience that might not otherwise uncover them. Providing great performances and cultural snapshots of Austin then and now, Copland and Mexico and Brooklyn Rider gave us an inside look into where we’ve been and where we’re going.

Buddhist music-making: how meditation could transform the way you work

Posted on April 2, 2014 by - Field Reports, Headlines

Tian Tan Buddha

Tian Tan Buddha
Photo by Molly Sheridan

The last concert I heard before I went on a silent meditation retreat was the DePaul University Chamber Orchestra’s all-contemporary program. The first-ever performance of its type at DePaul, the concert generated considerable excitement among the Chicago listening community. The evening was an ambitious tour of 20th-century orchestral monoliths, designed by conductor Michael Lewanski to make a strong statement of advocacy and artistry. The young ensemble opened with Xenakis’ Tracees, closed with Berio’s Sinfonia, and played Ligeti’s Lontano and the US premiere of Gerard Pesson’s Aggravations et Final in between.

As I sat during the Xenakis, utterly annihilated by the sound of the tam-tam, I wondered what it would be like for a musician, in particular, to pass seven days in silence.

We musicians know that silence is as precious as sound itself; we try to care as well for the rests as we do for the music in between. But we also, like most human beings, fear the idea of a long silence. Is it safe—is it even possible—to pause our perpetual inner soundtrack and be truly alone with our chaotic thoughts, our chaotic selves?

As it turns out, a week spent in silent meditation is difficult, but quite survivable—even wonderful. I was very fortunate that two of the foremost Western teachers of Buddhism, Christina Feldman (whose phrasing I use below in quotes) and Narayan Liebenson, led the retreat at the Insight Meditation Society in Massachusetts. Both teachers spoke about how ancient teachings on mindfulness and compassion can illuminate our modern lives. Now that I’m speaking, reading, writing, and playing the violin again, I’m reflecting on how these teachings could transform our work as composers and performers. While meditation is not a self-improvement or life-fixing project, the principles and guiding intentions behind the practice have the capacity to gently and completely transform the way we live.

Learning to live within our bodies. One of the primary trainings of a meditation practice is to notice how often we are lost in thought, and to redirect our awareness inside the physical body. The first foundation of mindfulness is to “know the body as the body.” For the performer in particular, this is a powerful tool. As we sit onstage, surrounded by a swirl of sound, activity, anxiety, and many other human beings, we can anchor ourselves in awareness of our breath, physical contact with our instrument, or where our body makes contact with the floor or the chair. We can recognize that we are here, and fully inhabit our bodies as they perform their complex tasks.

Learning that each moment disappears and is followed by another moment. This teaching—that all things are impermanent—might be one of the tidbits you learned about Buddhism during your middle-school survey of world religions. Or it might resonate as a kind of New Age cliché: this moment is all we have! Yet performers and composers already inhabit this reality, because impermanence is inherent to our art form. A beautiful chord, a nicely blended timbre, a favorite melody, or a facepalm-inducing mistake onstage: whether pleasant or unpleasant, they’re here and then they’re gone. Getting in better touch with the ever-changing nature of our experience might increase our sensitivity, relaxation, and appreciation of what we’re doing—and help us let go of what wasn’t perfect.

Learning to “cultivate non-distractedness.” What’s the point of sitting still on a cushion for several hours a day, doing absolutely nothing, paying attention to what we are experiencing internally? Perhaps we could consider it a kind of practice session for being present during everyday life. I still remember being a teenager and hearing a professional musician say that he sometimes thought about what color to repaint his kitchen during orchestra concerts. Distraction and boredom are utterly human, but they unfortunately can keep us from being present during the very moments in our lives and careers that we want to treasure most.
Learning to balance between “agency and receptivity.” In meditation and in life, this means striking a balance between doing something and letting things be. For chamber musicians in particular, this is such a huge part of our work. When do we lead? When do we follow? When do we seize control of the tempo to avoid it sagging, and when do we allow the music to simply unfold, trusting that it will do what it needs to do? A silent meditation practice is a kind of training ground for precisely this.

Learning not to be at war with ourselves or others. For about an hour each day on my silent retreat, we did a practice called metta, or loving-kindness, in which we set an intention for the happiness of all beings. During metta, you gradually widen the circle of good intentions: beginning with ourselves, then those we’re close to, then those we don’t know, and finally, those we struggle with. This insight meditation practice acknowledges that we spend much of our lives dwelling in the emotional equivalent of toxic waste, and that we need an active practice to create a more safe and nurturing emotional environment for ourselves and our awareness. In case you haven’t noticed, life in music can be difficult at times. The challenges often lead us into mind-states of competition, criticism, and anxiety. I’m hopeful that my own metta practice will help me make a shift in perspective from separateness to togetherness, and from scarcity to sufficiency.