Category: Field Reports

New England's Prospect: The Gift of Sound and Vision

Posted on March 28, 2014 by Matthew Guerrieri - Field Reports, Headlines

Ben Russell and his machines; at the Middlesex Lounge, Cambridge, MA, March 25, 2014. Photo by Susanna Bolle.

In 1941, anthropologist Margaret Mead, then a member of a group called the Committee for National Morale, wrote a memorandum about a proposed exhibit on the theme of democracy to be mounted at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Having witnessed the methods of Hitler in the long crescendo into World War II, Mead and her colleagues were in search of a format that would (Mead wrote) provide a framework

to free the individual citizen from his fear of being moved, to restore to the individual his belief that HE CAN MAKE CHOICES, HE IS NOT JUST A HELPLESS INSTRUMENT ON WHICH THE PROPAGANDIST PLAYS WHATEVER TUNE HE WISHES[.]

The solution—developed in large part by designers and artists associated with the Bauhaus school, émigrés from Nazi Germany—was what today we would call a multimedia experience. It was a striking innovation, intended to promote a radical idea of democratic diversity: choosing their own path of perception through a multimedia environment, a viewer could absorb the overarching message of an exhibit while still maintaining a sense of agency that would work against fascist tendencies. “Ideally,” writes Fred Turner in his (highly recommended) new book The Democratic Surround, visitors to such morale-boosting exhibits “would come to see themselves not simply as part of a national mass, but as individual human beings among others, united as Americans across their many differences.” Still, as Turner points out, with the coming of the Cold War, multimedia techniques were easily appropriated into a campaign to combat communism by promoting American consumerist values. By the ’60s and ’70s, the original vision of the Committee for National Morale had migrated to the counterculture. Multimedia proved a provocative tool to combat conformity, but hardly a foolproof one.
On March 25, filmmaker/sound artist Ben Russell and musician Robert A. A. Lowe (a.k.a. Lichens) presented a joint show (sponsored by the invaluable Non-Event series) at Cambridge’s Middlesex Lounge, and that tension in the multimedia concept proved to be a running theme. Both performances were, on their surfaces, multimedia experiences. But each performance, in its own way, also ended up subverting the technique.

***

The show was the finale of a three-day residency of sorts—the previous two nights, there had been screenings of films by Russell and Ben Rivers at the Harvard Film Archive (including Russell’s 2013 feature A Spell to Ward off the Darkness, which stars Lowe). For Tuesday’s performance, Russell again turned to film, but as an instrument as much as a medium, manipulating and mixing film loops on two 16mm projectors in real time: overlapping images, drawing one and then the other in and out of focus, waving his fingers in front of the projectors’ lenses to adjust the light intensity, even at one point removing the lens and focusing the light through a stronger, hand-held one.
This was all in the service of sound as much as sight. At first, it was just an abstract, optical sound track on the film loops, but soon into the half-hour set, Russell deployed his light-sensitive skull: a human skull, with electronic light sensors mounted in the eye sockets which control a square-wave oscillator, the volume and frequency varying with the strength of the light. Put in the path of the projectors, the skull produces a soundtrack in perfect—if unorthodox—synchronization with the visual image.
At first, the film loops were representational: an outdoor scene, a man standing up, then walking toward the camera, smiling, and donning a mask. With both projectors running the same loop, in and out of phase and focus with each other, the effect was canonic for both senses, with an added level of organic, unexpected commentary from the skull. But then Russell switched over to more abstract film fragments: simple alternations of black and white frames, triggering simpler on-off sounds from the skull, essentially an elaborate, lo-fi series of driving beats. Image and sound were united in rapid-fire, techno-like regularity, Russell introducing glitch-like effects by interrupting the projectors’ beams.
What’s interesting about both Russell’s set-up and the end result is how it functioned, intentionally or not, as a critique of the sound-plus-image multimedia idea, how it flattened the choose-your-own-adventure possibilities of multimedia back into something more like a single-channel, one-way communication. The image was the sound, the sound was the image; and the almost pummeling insistence of the performance—the stroboscopic flashing, the relentless, high-volume pulsing—left little if any room for the viewer/listener to experience it in any alternate way. What little counterpoint there was to choose turned out to be the actual machines. The projectors still carried at least their potential for propagandistic promulgation; the skull faced them from the other end of the room in macabre riposte.

***

Robert A. A. Lowe prepares at the Middlesex Lounge, Cambridge, MA, March 25, 2014. Photo by Susanna Bolle.

If Russell’s critique was confrontational, Lowe’s was more hypothetical, suggesting the possibility that the diversity the old multimedia enthusiasts were after could be achieved through sound alone. Armed with nothing more than a microphone and a rack of electronics—analog synthesizer modules, filters, reverb and delay units—Lowe conjured waves of slow-spinning polyphony, singing a note, letting it loop, layering on another, and another, while a simple, gentle percussion pattern clicked away in the background.
The harmonic language was basically modal—for the first part of his 45-minute improvisation, Lowe didn’t stray much outside a single, natural minor scale—but that was just a blank canvas for shades and shifts of sound: the way a little glissando at the end of a held note turns into a rich little cluster on the other end of the reverb, the way slight shifts of intonation in the sung note can, a few seconds down the line, create the effect of a change in waveform or envelope. Of course, these sorts of maneuvers have been around as long as microphones and delay boxes, and even longer—most Renaissance composers worth their salt could wring some expressive use out of the protracted reverberation times of Gothic cathedrals. What sets Lowe’s music apart is, first of all, his sense of balance: even at the most dense, piled-up moments, every thread, every sound, every component was still clearly audible, contrasting timbres in distinct ranges. Add to that the sheer beauty of Lowe’s voice—clear, fluid, and pure—and you get some wonderfully luminous sounds.
There was a projected visual component to Lowe’s performance as well, similarly tied to the aural information: a kind of slightly less slick, more video-feedback heavy version of an iTunes visualizer. It was, perhaps, a bit of added value to make up for the fact that a guy with a microphone sitting in front of a box of wires is not all that visually dynamic, no matter how polychromatic the sound. But it was ultimately unnecessary: Lowe was creating a multitude out of singing and synthesis alone. Making himself into the instrument, he was anything but helpless, opening up the possibility of playing any tune he wished.

SXNY – The Big Apple heads to Austin

Posted on March 24, 2014 by AndrewSigler - Field Reports, Headlines

In a SXSW season that was largely panned as having jumped the shark commercially and was sadly marred by a horrific tragedy, two Big Apple bookends operating outside of the SXSW machine served to salvage an otherwise lost Spring Break. Jace Clayton (who performs as DJ Rupture) was joined by narrator/singer Arooj Aftab and pianists David Friend and Emily Manzo to perform The Julius Eastman Memorial Dinner, while Brooklyn Rider played the first of two shows of their ten-day residency with Texas Performing Arts.

Emily Manzo and Jace Clayton (with David Friend who is just out of this shot) perform The Julius Eastman Memorial Dinner
Photo by Sandy Carson

Presented by the University of Texas Visual Arts Center and Church of the Friendly Ghost, The Julius Eastman Memorial Dinner is a long-form work for two grand pianos, live electronics, and voice by Jace Clayton. Based fundamentally on two works by Julius Eastman, Clayton combined his live electronics with the pre-existing material and theatrical vignettes to create the new piece.
Clayton’s electronic set-up in the center of the stage was flanked by the two grand pianos, each placed so that the performer was facing away from the audience. Tremolo on single pitches played a significant role in the piece, and both pianists spent a great deal of the early portion of the work intoning streams of these over what amounted to a d minor key center. Clayton’s electronics would bubble to the surface by and by, sometimes manipulating the material we’d just heard and at others creating new textures. Everyone was amplified, so even his most delicate moments were accessible. Much of this would circle around before coming to rest via a big dramatic riff played by the pianos which lived mostly in the lower end of the range.

Lasting over an hour, the minimalist musical portions of the work were broken up by a few short spoken vignettes, brief interludes drawn from Eastman’s material including one of an interview for a position as an Eastman impersonator. Eastman was most active from the ’60s through the ’80s, and as a gay African-American was largely marginalized during his most creative period. It was interesting to get a glimpse into the world of sexual and racial politics, though at times it was difficult to reconcile the vignettes with the bulk of the music. The two seemed to reconnect more strongly towards the end when Aftab began to intone elements of the interview, singing in a smoky alto over dark minor chords coming from one piano while high pedal points came from the other. A provocative and challenging piece, The Julius Eastman Memorial Dinner provided a compelling perspective of the political, racial, musical, and historical climate of New York in the late 20th century.

Brooklyn Rider
Photo by Sarah Small

Brooklyn Rider is in town for a ten-day residency with Texas Performing Arts during which they’ll play two concerts and participate in a variety of activities involving the university and the community at large. Their first show had a decidedly eastern bent, starting with Eastern Europe and moving along to the Middle East.

The first half of the show consisted exclusively of the music of Lev “Ljova” Zhurbin, and the quartet kicked it off with Zhurbin’s Budget Bulgar, a short engaging Klezmer tune that was “sketched between playing dance sets at a Russian wedding in western New Jersey.” Full of life and energy, it set the tone for the evening and introduced the audience to Brooklyn Rider’s slightly unconventional configuration (left to right) of violin, cello, viola, and violin with all standing save cellist Eric Jacobsen who was perched on a platform. The standing configuration allows for more movement during performance, and the quartet took full advantage of this freedom by taking the standard physical movement inherent in typical performance practice and ramping it up. It never seemed forced or played for effect mind you, and I expect most players freed from the chair would do the same. Here it certainly helped convey the exuberance of both Zhurbin’s opening piece and the longer Culai which followed. The title of the latter comes from the nickname of Nicolae Neacsu who was violinist and vocalist for the Gypsy group Taraf de Haïdouks and who served as inspiration for the piece. Set in five movements, the work diverged from the Klezmer precedent and moved squarely into the realm of gypsy music, complete with shouts and pizzicato basslines swirling throughout the first movement. Eric’s brother, violinist Colin Jacobsen, conjured a languid melody punctuated by rapid lines which swooped in from above. The highlight of the second movement was during the two long solos which, while compelling in their own right, were almost outshined by a simple accompaniment of chords led by violist Nicholas Cords. Simple, unadorned, and only slightly syncopated, there was a drama in their simplicity and in the need for the players to be perfectly synchronized during this somewhat long section.

The final piece, an arrangement of a Romanian traditional work Music of the Roma, came in like a lion and went out like a lamb, its melancholy end accented when, as the final lines were played, Jacobsen and fellow violinist Johnny Gandelsman turned and walked offstage, followed in short order by Cords, leaving Eric alone for the final moments, a pregnant pause before an eruption of applause.

The second half of the concert began with a superb run of Bartók’s second quartet, the applause from the first half peppering the pauses between movements. Following Bartók is no small feat, especially in an evening dominated by eastern European folk-influenced string music, but Jacobsen (Colin this time) stepped up to the plate with his Three Miniatures for String Quartet. Inspired by a trip to Iran, Three Miniatures is a set of works that aim to embody “the tradition in which the epic stories of love, heroism, and allegories of human folly are played out in tiny portraits of incredible detail.” Jacobsen’s works lived up to the model, each a world (and occasionally worlds) of their own. The outer movements shined in particular. “Majnun’s Moonshine” opened with delicate harmonics following wandering pizzicato lines in the viola. Filigree scales feathered up and down, developing as the group came together in a 7/8 figure, the delicate opening forgotten and traded in for a lumbering exit. “A Walking Fire,” Brooklyn Rider’s debut CD namesake, was full of pulsing, nervous energy. The piece didn’t so much build to a climax as live in one. Ostinati and melodic fragments swirled around chunky double stops, the group rising together and fading back as one or another player came forward with a longer solo, only to rejoin the odd-time fray. It was a thoroughly enjoyable evening as evidenced by the animated post-concert chatter in the lobby, a chatter that will likely be amplified for the second concert when the quartet is joined by Dawn Upshaw for Schoenberg’s second quartet and a new work by Colin Jacobsen.

Vicki Ray Reflects on 20 Years of Piano Spheres

Posted on March 17, 2014 by Isaac Schankler - Field Reports, Headlines

Vicki Ray

“I believe in composers,” Vicki Ray tells me. This is exactly the kind of thing that could sound like an empty platitude, but she says it with undeniable conviction—and with the track record to back it up, too. Along with Gloria Cheng, Mark Robson, and Susan Svercek, Ray is one of four pianists involved with the Piano Spheres concert series, a Los Angeles institution that is now celebrating its 20th anniversary. Over the years, Piano Spheres has presented 73 premieres (48 of them world premieres), and commissioned 19 pieces through the Leonard Stein Memorial Fund. According to Ray, however, the actual number of commissions associated with the series is harder to pin down, since “sometimes other institutions like CalArts help out, and sometimes I just pay for it out of my own pocket.” (Because she believes in composers.)

Of course Piano Spheres programs older music, too—that is, contemporary music that is no longer contemporary, until we have a better term for this kind of thing. Mark Robson’s recent concert on February 11 covered a remarkable swath of music from the 20th and 21st centuries, including everything from extremely delicate pieces by Beat Furrer, Toru Takemitsu, and Olivier Messiaen, to thorny fingerbusters by Charles Ives and Thomas Adès, whose Concert Paraphrase on “Powder Her Face” sounded something like a diabolical tango buried under layers of dense counterpoint and Lisztian shrapnel.

Mark Robson in performance

Ray’s upcoming program on March 18, by contrast, is solely grounded in the present. She will play several recent works by living composers, including Hoyt-Schermerhorn by Invisible Cities composer Christopher Cerrone, Six Settings for Solo Piano by local composer and LA Phil percussionist Joseph Pereira, and Donnacha Dennehy’s Stainless Staining. She’s particularly excited to play Dennehy’s music, which doesn’t get a lot of performances on the West Coast, she says.

Ray will also play the winning piece from their spring 2013 audience poll, a new initiative created for Piano Spheres’ 20th season. This poll allowed the audience to vote for one piece from a shortlist of pieces from the last twenty years for each pianist to perform again. When the audience voted for Ray’s own composition, The Waking, her reaction was one of incredulity. “I was shocked, stunned… I swear I didn’t stuff the ballot box!”

This modesty carries over into Ray’s account of how she first became involved in Piano Spheres, the brainchild of musicologist and pianist Leonard Stein. “I had just finished my doctorate, and Leonard just called me up one day and asked me to be a part of it.” She attributes much of Piano Spheres’ early success to the respect and “street cred” that Stein carried within the new music community. (At the time, Stein was also the music director of the Arnold Schoenberg Institute at USC, which did much to promote Schoenberg’s music and legacy in Los Angeles.)

Ray with Morton Subotnick and Leonard Stein.

But even with Stein’s participation, Piano Spheres was a risky proposition at first, with the LA new music community being much smaller in those days. Ray vividly describes how things have changed in the past 20 years:

Back then, it was basically the [California] EAR Unit and Xtet in town, and those were the two main new music groups, and then there was the [LA Phil’s] Green Umbrella series, but there wasn’t that much going on, certainly not the unbelievable plethora of small venues that you see here everywhere today. There are so many new groups right now—for example, there’s Gnarwhallaby, and What’s Next Ensemble, and the Hear Now Festival, and all the stuff at Monk Space, and People Inside Electronics, and DC8—and that’s just a drop in the bucket. It just feels like the community’s grown, and it’s more vibrant, and it’s less dependent on big venues and established theories. There’s a lot more self-producing going on.

Part of that vibrancy is certainly due to pioneering groups like Piano Spheres, which started out with a similar DIY spirit. “When we first started out we didn’t have a board, we were just licking stamps and self-producing our own concerts,” Ray recalls. The series started out at the Neighborhood Unitarian Universalist Church of Pasadena, but their audiences quickly outgrew the space, and they soon moved to the Colburn School’s Zipper Hall, where they continue to host concerts today.

Piano Spheres (l to r) Mark Robson, Gloria Cheng, Leonard Stein, Vicki Ray, and Susan Svercek.
Photo by Betty Freeman.

Stein passed away in 2004, just before the series’ 10th anniversary, but by then it had enough structure and momentum to sustain itself. “As word got out, we started to get a lot of solicitations from pianists from all over the world, because there’s really no other series like this.” This allowed the series to host a rotating cast of guest artists from all over the world, a long list that includes Thomas Adès, Kathleen Supové, Christopher O’Riley, Ursula Oppens, Eric Huebner, Joanne Pearce Martin, and Liam Viney.
But as Ray says, “Leonard’s original mission was to showcase pianists from Los Angeles, so that has always been part of the mission. Our main new venture we’re starting is this Satellite Series, where we’re showcasing four younger pianists also from the Los Angeles area. We feel like we want to pass on the legacy that Leonard left us to the next generation.” The inaugural run of the Satellite Series will commence in 2015 with Steven Vanhauwaert, Richard Valitutto, Aron Kallay, and Nic Gerpe as the featured performers.

As for Ray, she has an eclectic range of things to keep her busy in the meantime. Her other performances in the past month have included a gig with jazz composer-improviser Wadada Leo Smith in Mexico City, and a performance with Aron Kallay as the Ray-Kallay Duo at the MicroFest Records Release Party, celebrating the album release of John Cage’s Ten Thousand Things, which earned Ray a Grammy nomination this past year.

When she goes on sabbatical from teaching at CalArts next year, Ray has a few other ideas for things in the works—“I can’t seem to stop starting projects,” she admits. She wants to get back into composing more, and dreams of commissioning a prepared piano concerto from John Luther Adams. She also hopes to start a new local concert series for art song, which would bring her closer to her classical roots as a performer, which she feels often gets overlooked:

You do get pigeonholed…I used to do tons of lieder recitals and traditional chamber music, but people tend to think of you one way, and what can you do? But they inform each other, so you want to keep your traditional sensibility, and your historical link to the past. When I was a student I did standard rep all the time. Now I think if it’s a great piece and I want to play it, I don’t care when it was written.

Inspired Collaboration: No Idea Festival 2014

Posted on March 13, 2014 by AndrewSigler - Field Reports, Headlines

The No Idea Festival started its second decade of improvisation with six shows over a four-day period in Austin and San Antonio. Founder Chris Cogburn assembled another amazing collection of performers this year, drawn from across the country as well as Mexico, where Cogburn spends part of the year performing and working in the improv scene.

The festival is a place for performers to develop the relationships started at previous No Idea gatherings and to develop new ones with artists of all stripes, and to that end this year’s lineup included—in addition to the musicians—a writer, a dancer, and a clown.

Michael Zerang and Julie Nathanielsz
Photo by Gudinni Cortina

The stage at the Museum of Human Achievement extended to the right of the audience to an intermediate area which served as an open stage-left for this performance and as a connector to another stage used for the second performance, a sort of lazy Z which faced and flanked the audience. Following a brief introduction by Cogburn, Michael Zerang and Julie Nathanielsz opened the third evening of the festival with a collaborative sound and movement performance. Nathanielsz stood completely still as Zerang, seated at a trap kit to our right, produced a series of breaths and tweets from a recorder. As this texture developed, Nathanielsz shuddered and shook, moving more while standing in place than she did when she crossed the stage. In response, Zerang began rubbing something across the head of one of his drums creating a wonderful keening counterpoint to the recorder. I couldn’t make out what he was using, but as he stood up with a frame drum and began walking towards Nathanielsz, it seemed as though he was getting way more vibrating mileage out of that drum than he should have been able to. As he got to the front of the stage, it became clear that he was using something which, when moved across the drum head, drove it like a speaker, ramping up the timbral and temporal possibilities. When I asked Zerang the specifics of the four-inch oblong whatsit, he said, “Well, this is what we call in music a ‘vibrating device’.” I couldn’t help but think that that’s what they call it in any number of fields.

Bonnie Jones and Juan García performance from another festival set.
For the most immersive experience, listen with headphones (though be prepared for the sonic peaks and valleys).
The second set was quite representative of the local meets national meets international flavor of No Idea. Austin-based guitarist Parham Daghigh was joined by cellist Aimée Theriot from Yucatán, Mexico, saxophonist James Fei from Oakland, and No Idea regular Bonnie Jones from Baltimore. As the crowd settled into their second stage seats, Fei began breathing through his instrument, the sound dovetailing with the audience noise. As the last of the latter subsided, Daghigh began applying pressure to the lower strings of his electric guitar, forcing them to touch the pickups and creating a sharp, popping sound. This sound had a slightly different quality when the strings detached from the pickup’s magnet, and the two sounds came across like a telegraph. Theriot joined in with slow, short, quiet glissandi on the C string over a small range, and these low moans made a bed for Jones’s electronic high-pitched echoes.

Jones’s setup allowed her to open and close a variety of circuits with an instrument cable, and while these connections and disconnections fell in the same A/B tick-tock world as Daghigh’s pickup manipulation, they were in a completely different timbral sphere, hers sharp and brittle and his warm and rounded. Jones’s foreground opening gesture became background as Theriot shifted to harmonics, still soft but taking the lead by virtue of their tessitura. Fei picked up on this shift as his breathing was broken up with jagged, pitched attacks. All of this was actually quite quiet and largely pointillistic, so much so that when Daghigh began to use a paintbrush across the strings the windlike continuity of the sound was particularly striking.

Perhaps it goes without saying that none of this music was really living in the twelve-note-to-the-octave world, but occasionally a conventional collection would show up. A beautiful Phrygian moment occurred when Fei picked up on a beating texture between two waves which Jones created. He cruised a half-step above the pitch and back down again, and in context of the surrounding material it had a decidedly tonal character. The group volume increased in a heartbeat, remained so for a brief period, then died down to its former level, all of this occurring together so tightly it almost sounded rehearsed, though it wasn’t. A few final clicks from Jones signaled the close of the set.

Perruque trio – (from left) Aaron Tucker,Kurt Newman, and Chris Cogburn (Bassist Juan Garcia is behind Tucker)
Photo by Gudinni Cortina

Aaron Tucker is a circus clown and member of the trio Perruque with Chris Cogburn on percussion and guitarist Kurt Newman. Bassist Juan Garcia joined the group for the third set of the night. I’ll take a moment here to say that my knowledge of clowning begins and ends with the handful of circus shows I saw as a kid, so I was quite interested to find out what would happen.
I’ve seen several No Idea shows over the years and the sets typically fall into two broad categories; the first is a fairly democratic group composition, while the second has a leader of sorts. In this set, the clown took the lead. And he was spectacular. It wasn’t slapstick or pratfalls that made it work either, he was just really good at working the audience and communicating with the other performers. Newman kicked off the set with light pick scraping on the strings while Cogburn rubbed the head of his snare, providing a hollow counter to the bright string sound.

Tucker (dressed the part with big checkered mu-mu pants, a wide and too-short purple tie, a little vest, the big clown shoes, a clown nose, and a mini pork-pie hat perched atop his large bald head) began to respond to these sounds, eventually grabbing a folding chair from the audience and threading his substantial body through it. A bit of Danger Music, no doubt. Garcia played off Tuckers movement, not exactly mimicking it but using his gestures to inform the pulsing gestures coming from the bass. Cogburn pulled out a cymbal which he placed at a 90-degree angle to the snare drum. This was a new one for me, and the sounds generated by dragging the cymbal across the snare seemed impossibly deep and thrumming.

Tucker made his way through and around the audience, sometimes sitting down among us or on the stage. My guess is that I was not alone in my return to childhood, and a few audience members couldn’t help themselves, occasionally interacting with Tucker and the band via crinkly water bottles and the shuffling of chairs. The players were able to interact with his movement without the whole thing turning into foley art, but the audience was not so talented. Fortunately, the performers were able to soldier on even as the audience attempted their own fourth wall excursions.

Tucker threads the needle
Photo by Gudinni Cortina

Unfortunately I was unable to stay for the fourth set, but honestly any one of the sets I saw that night could stand alone as a satisfying concert. Cogburn has created a perfect setting for improvisers and audience to experience a variety of distinctive collaborations. Year after year, artists return to Austin to reconnect with those they’ve shared sets with in the past and to make new noise with strangers. Whether in the audience or on the stage, the experience is a perfect antidote to so much of our repeatable, re-tweetable culture—a series of gems created in real time.

New England’s Prospect: The Agnosticism of Boston’s Equilibrium Concert Series

Posted on March 3, 2014 by Matthew Guerrieri - Field Reports, Headlines

Waiting for the show, February 21, 2014.

Boston’s Equilibrium Concert Series, which started in 2011, has made entire seasons—not to mention an entire new music community—out of that most alchemical of compositional tricks: establishing a connection between two ideas simply by putting them next to each other. The organization opportunistically shifts its identity between composer collective and presenter, at times putting together made-to-measure programs of premieres, at times turning over the reins to friendly performers and groups who bring in their own repertoire and connections. Instead of a unified aesthetic, they end up with a multitude of enthusiasms. The idea that 21st-century new music is stylistically agnostic might be somewhere between a truism and an extrapolation, but EQ actually comes pretty close to that ideal.

Their concert on February 21—at the Central Square YMCA Theater in Cambridge, one of the area’s more elegantly ramshackle spaces—featured Boston Modern Brass. (The group also made an appearance on EQ’s 2012-13 season.) The program was spiked with examples of the group’s spoke-by-spoke connectivity. One of the performers—trumpeter Jason Huffman—is also one of EQ’s core organizers; three others—trumpeter Jonah Kappraff, hornist Yoni Kahn, and tubist Beth McDonald—also lend their talents to the EQ Ensemble, an as-big-as-it-needs-to-be group that gathers for the more composer-centric concerts. (Trombonist Paul Fleming rounds out the quintet.) Another EQ organizer, Aaron Jay Myers, had a piece premiered on the concert, which also included a contribution from Kahn.

The rest of the program had something of a throwback feel, built around a trio of old-school modernist works combining mixed-meter angles with chunky dissonances and nervous energy. What was interesting was how much the program’s 21st-century pieces seemed to channel similar vibes; it was almost as if the sheer choice of instrumentation allowed some atavistic, brass-based form of American once-upon-a-time-new music to again express itself. Coincidental or not, it was a reminder of how much fizz is still in that style—it might be retro, but the best of it never gets old.

And the old stuff was pretty good indeed. William Mayer’s 1965 Brass Quintet was the busiest, a dense hubbub of teletype Neoclassicism. Mayer’s catalog has ranged far and wide, stylistically speaking; the Quintet is tonal, but just barely, with an efficient use of effect. (The third movement, a toccata-scherzo in which the players seem determined to sabotage any hint of heroic brass—with mutes, with fluttertongued raspberries, with speed-bump rhythmic shifts—was especially fluent in that regard.)

The music of John Huggler, who died in 1993, seems ripe for rediscovery. I was surprised to find he doesn’t even rate a Grove entry. For years a professor at UMass-Boston, he spent a couple seasons in the ’60s as that rarest of birds, the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s composer-in-residence. (One fruit of that has made it online.) Huggler’s Quintet for Brass Instruments, from 1963, was a real beauty, sinuous and austere: an opening movement that made compelling use of long tones in fast rhythms, an almost-fugue marked by stark unison passages, a “Mysterioso” wonderfully cast with a high tuba solo, a closing clutch of tight, cubist fanfares.

In between came Ralph Shapey’s marvelous grit: his Fanfares, composed in 1981, is three minutes of pure, unadulterated crunch. Shapey’s penchant for massiveness was out in full force—it’s kind of amazing how he could make the quintet sound so much bigger than it is, as if filming it from an extremely low angle—but so was his restless imagination: the clashes and clusters are refracted through all manner of mutes and voicings.

The concert opened with Counterpoint, a 2003 piece by Kahn —his first completed work, according to the program notes. It was an interesting mediation between busy modernism and easygoing post-minimalism. Its somewhat slow harmonic rhythm was translated into a density of attack: drones and pedal tones reiterated into an agitated stutter of short notes. Individual lines were overlaid with cross-traffic accents. Dissonant intervals came on a steady bed of fourths and fifths.

The one brand-new piece, Aaron Jay Myers’s FLUX, was, much of the time, an exploration of different kinds of homophony: first a series of repeated chords, then a division of the quintet into two factions (horn, trombone, and tuba in slow, moody cahoots, while the trumpets offer muted chatter), then a fluid lock-step chorale, then a return of the opening idea. (Myers’s program note linked the structure to a personal struggle and recovery; one could, in that light, hear those opening jitters transformed, lemons-to-lemonade style, into crackling positive energy behind the chorale’s cushion.)

The program’s one apparent outlier, Hans Abrahamsen’s Rundt Og Imellem (“Round and In-Between,” finished in 1976) seemed to visit from another concert, in both its European origin and its in-your-face simplicity and triadic tonality. Still, its rhythmic ideas were congenial to the program, its squared phrasing trimmed to odd numbers of beats, lending an off-kilter surrealism to its deliberate genericism. A cheery brass band marches through an Escher print; a bright fanfare drifts out of step with itself; a soft-edged legato turns more loping than lyrical. The piece makes the most of the most basic of formal contrasts, juxtaposed jump-cut style: that marching band tune interrupted by tuplet outbursts, those fanfares undercut with dark, droning pedals. Trumpet and horn pick up a triangle and bells, respectively, at the end, a pastoral touch genial and jarring at the same time. In fact, Myers’s currents and Abrahamsen’s clockwork formed a complement that, rhythmically speaking, encompassed the whole program. Where Abrahamsen’s mixed meters were subtractive, looping around faster than you might expect, Myers’s were more additive, which created its own layer of lacunae: the stop-and-go rhythms really did stop, noticeably, putting each phrase in its own frame.
Equilibrium’s mixed-meter programming gives every new music style its chance to have its say. The next few EQ concerts are like some kind of eclecticist’s fever dream: a solo glockenspiel concert from Trevor Saint; the debut concert of Trio Okho, three Boston new music percussion stars (Nick Tolle, Jeffrey Means, and Mike Williams) performing Xenakis, a new piece by Victoria Cheah, and Rick Burkhardt’s amazing Great Hymn of Thanksgiving; and a string quartet concert featuring a premiere from EQ organizer Stephanie Lubkowski alongside music by Zorn and Górecki. That’s a montage to make Eisenstein proud. Equilibrium Concert Series finds balance in variation.

Keep Dallas Wired: The Dallas Opera Plugs Into Death and the Powers

Posted on February 25, 2014 by AndrewSigler - Field Reports, Headlines

Hal Cazalet as Nicholas in Tod Machover’s Death and the Powers
Photo by Karen Almond, Dallas Opera

Tod Machover has a real knack for tapping into popular consciousness. While his background is as academically rigorous as it could possibly be, his compositional work, as well as his instrument and software design, leans in a direction that can certainly be described as approachable to a broad audience. It takes a certain sensibility to write music for the likes of Yo-Yo Ma and Joshua Bell one week then for Prince and Penn and Teller the next [1], one that is flexible and responsive to a wide variety of audiences and performers. This was on display in the recent production of his Pulitzer-nominated opera Death and the Powers by The Dallas Opera—even before I took my seat. Shortly after entering the Winspear Opera House, I noticed a group of people crowding around a simple metal chair with several sensors arranged in a semicircle behind it and flanked by what appeared to be two outsized lightsabers. Acting as a sort of a theremin for the torso, patrons were invited to sit in the chair and shimmy to their hearts’ content while the chair responded to their movements. Used as the focal point of Machover’s Brain Opera and developed initially as part of the Media/Medium project with Penn and Teller, this shiny new version of the Sensor Chair was built by Machover and Elena Jessop specifically as a catalyst for the production. It was quite popular and served as a gentle introduction to the technology as soon as one entered the hall.

There are robots in Death and the Powers, a 90-minute, one-act opera, and they are called Operabots. Perhaps to accentuate the difference between them and the humans who eventually join them on stage, their design is decidedly un-anthropomorphic. Think R2-D2, not C3PO, with one slight nod to human form in the inverted triangle that could be taken for a head. Operating independently and scooting around at various points in the evening, a quartet of these guys sat quietly at center stage as the work began. When they came to life, they announced that they would be re-enacting a drama left to them by their human predecessors, and in doing so they hoped to gain a deeper understanding of human existence through an examination of the concept of death. Accompanying their introductory material (which was voiced in the most stock ’50s nasally, monotone, robot voice you could possibly imagine [2]) were stylized computer sounds which swirled around the audience and read initially a bit more like sound design than music. My first impression was that both the robot voices and the opening audio were a bit dated, but on reflection I think that the use of those “on the nose” sounds served really well to both separate the human from the robot and to set the stage in the clearest possible way for the sci-fi to come.

Robert Orth as Simon Powers
Photo by Karen Almond, Dallas Opera

Robert Orth played the part of Simon Powers, a one percenter of the highest order who, as he is approaching the end of his life, has his consciousness downloaded into “The System,” a computer mainframe that will allow him to live forever. Joining him is his daughter Miranda, his third wife Evvy, and his protégé Nicholas, who as a child was rescued by Powers from an orphanage for disabled children. A set of strobe lights aimed at the audience masked the replacement of the robots with human counterparts, as three huge walls served as an ever-changing backdrop to the events. The walls were actually three-sided structures, each one able to rotate and move around to reveal what amounted to large video screens. The “screens” were actually made of dozens of vertical lights in an 8×20 grid which at times showed a variety of shifting patterns, but which were able to display a fine enough resolution to show faces, principally Powers once his transition to The System was made.

Orth’s portrayal of Powers was just thunderous; a stomping, garish, wonderfully obnoxious character who served as a perfect counterpoint to Joélle Harvey’s earnest Miranda. Once inside The System, his solo describing the transition was particularly compelling, though it’s a challenge to have that solo without the singer onstage. This was one of the instances in which Orth’s face does not materialize on the screen, so his work was really cut out for him. Running the gamut from bellowing bombast to a gentle nostalgia for his past, his performance here was even more impressive in that it occurred without his physical presence. Patricia Riley’s Evvy was engaging throughout, but never more so than in her duet with her disembodied husband. What begins as an innocent reminiscence about their first date develops into a full-fledged erotic encounter, one that Riley was able to communicate in every aspect of her performance without going full-Miley. Hal Cazalet’s Nicholas really came alive in the fifth scene while in the lab working with the robots. His retelling of Powers as his personal savior is passionate, as he notes that the prosthetic arm he has built is “post-organic,” a sort of preliminary version of Powers’ transformation. Powers financial standing is on par with many countries, and his exit from human affairs has left a tremendous void in the world. As such, all has gone to hell in a handbasket. A visit from the The Administration, The United Nations, and The United Way (played by Tom McNichols, David Kravitz, and Frank Kelley, respectively) provides comic relief, with Kelley’s piercing histrionics a wonderful foil to McNichols’s booming bass.
In a production with so many strong singers and performances, it was in the final scene where Harvey’s Miranda stole the show. Unable to follow Evvy into the world of The System, she is torn between her love for her father and her love of conventional human life. The 99 percent arrive as The Miseries, all of humanity living in a world turned upside down by the turmoil that occurred in the wake of Powers’s retreat from the world. Having escaped their grip, Miranda confronts Powers who continues to try to convince her that entering The System is the only option for the future of humanity. Miranda rejects this notion, repeating the word “Live, live, live!” as the orchestra ascends to a final climax.

Moody Foundation Chandelier extends from the ceiling of the Winspear Opera House.
Photo by Karen Almond, Dallas Opera

It’s not surprising that in a world where the line between human and robot is crossed, the music has a similar dichotomy. Nicole Paiement, artistic director of Opera Parallèle in San Francisco, returned to Dallas to lead her second TDO production, having done Peter Maxwell Davies’s The Lighthouse in 2012. Paiement and the orchestra not only handled everything Machover’s score threw at them, but did it while being surrounded and occasionally overwhelmed by all manner of electronic audio. And that audio was not fully confined to the hall in Dallas. Simulcasts of opera productions are nothing new, but Machover and a team from the MIT Media Lab developed an iPhone app which allowed patrons at satellite sites to receive secondary audio and video content coincident with the performance in Dallas, as well as the ability to control the Moody Foundation Chandelier, a huge structure with dozens of plexiglass tubes that descend from and contract into the ceiling.

Interactive, robot, remote simulcast, lightsaber, iPhone, Sensor Chair: the word cloud for this piece has everything a 21^st-century opera could ask for.
I, for one, welcome our Operabot overlords.

*

1. This may not be an accurate timeline.

2. Seriously, take a second and do a robot voice. That’s the one I heard.

New England’s Prospect: Boston Symphony Chamber Players Celebrate 50 Years

Posted on February 18, 2014 by Matthew Guerrieri - Field Reports, Headlines

Boston Symphony Chamber Players, Randall Hodgkinson, piano
Photo by Hilary Scott

Musical institutions have the amnesiac pleasure of getting themselves birthday presents and still being surprised. On February 9, the Boston Symphony Chamber Players unwrapped the bulk of their 50th-anniversary loot: four commissioned pieces, premiered en masse. (Another commission, Sebastian Currier’s Parallel Worlds, will have its premiere in Arizona before coming to Boston in April.) That nearly doubles the group’s commissioned repertoire all at once; up until this year, only seven other pieces (going by the handy list of repertoire included in Sunday’s program) had been written for them. Then again, I suppose 50 is a plausibly sitcom-ish age for suddenly realizing that you’ve always wanted a lot of new toys.

And, then again, the Chamber Players have always been institutionally unusual. They were founded (as I learned from Jeremy Eichler) as a side effect of Tanglewood’s long flirtation with the automobile; Erich Leinsdorf wanted prelude concerts to give patrons an extra hour to deal with traffic and recruited some of the BSO’s principals to fill the bill. (The members are all still principals, with the exception of cellist Jules Eskin, the lone veteran of that 1964 lineup.) Those commissions are technically BSO commissions, funded by the same pool that keeps the orchestra intermittently current. So the birthday party is both a calendrical observation and a confirmation of the Players’ success—five commissions is a strong commitment from the parent company.
The four new pieces on Sunday’s concert were deliberately local—a couple of old familiar Bostonians (Gunther Schuller and Yehudi Wyner), and a couple of newer connections (Kati Agócs, who teaches at the New England Conservatory, and Hannah Lash, who graduated from Harvard). Agócs’s contribution, Devotion, for horn, harp, and string quintet, hovered in an area somewhere between chamber and orchestral music—one could imagine the strings, at times, blown up to a full symphonic complement. (It did warrant a conductor, outgoing BSO assistant Andris Poga.) The harp (Jessica Zhou) primes the piece with a healthy dose of glitter, a kind of harmonic respiration between diatonic and synthetic scales, under which the strings (Malcolm Lowe, Haldan Martinson, Steven Ansell, Eskin, and Ed Barker) provide a cushion; over it all, the horn (James Sommerville) sweeps and soars, much of it haute-contre high. The middle section was a contrast in almost every way, triggered by Sommerville shifting from the highest part of the horn’s range to the lowest, one snarling pedal tone after another; the viola tiptoes around a melody; the violins and cello stalk soft chords; harp and double-bass keep a hesitant tick-tock. The horn rises back up to the top of its range, an A-section recapitulation, and a wheels-on-the-tarmac unison ending.

Boston Symphony Chamber Players perform Hannah Lash’s Three Shades Without Angles
Photograph by Hilary Scott

Lash’s Three Shades Without Angles also put Zhou’s harp front and center, flanked by Debussyian flute (Elizabeth Rowe) and viola (Ansell). The harp part started as an exercise in stamina, a moto perpetuo ride the other instruments hopped onto, all mixed meters and crossed accents; the effect was something like the world’s most dreamy and delicate action movie. Then the harp abruptly turned taciturn, offering occasional punctuation for flute and viola recitatives, before laying down arpeggios over which the other two strung a loping, wide-interval melody, hopping from stone to stone across a flowing stream. Like Devotion, Three Shades had that 21st-century sense of moving flats and bright outlines—sharp and deliberate section breaks, a constantly churning counterpoint that, however, keeps stirring through a seemingly single harmonic color (in this case, a higher-overtone, dominant-seventh plus sharp-9 and 11 sort of shimmer). Both pieces had an almost Vermeer-like polish: tightly framed, smoothly varnished vignettes of carefully modulated luminosity.

Where Agócs and Lash used controlled brushwork, Schuller and Wyner opted for more freewheeling lines. Schuller, 88, is a more frail presence than he used to be, but his music—on Sunday, it was Games, a compact divertimento for wind and string quintets—keeps doubling down on musical and intellectual energy. UNESCO has a program where they periodically designate a certain craft or tradition as (and I love this phrase) an Intangible Culture Heritage; if I was in charge of making that list, I would be sorely tempted to include Gunther Schuller’s late-period gonzo stream-of-consciousness style. Every piece of his I’ve heard over the past few years—his Four Vignettes, the Piano Trio No. 3, Dreamscape—is the product of a deep, singular, and probably inimitable reserve of skills and experiences being rummaged through with a compulsively entertaining raconteur’s disdain for restraint or the unities. Games is dense, mutable fun. The opening, a chattering overlap of conflicting tuplets, soon gives way to an entire midway of ideas: a Stravinskian ostinato stuck in its own groove; a burlesque quote of Ravel (the Valses Nobles et Sentimentales, transformed into something gleefully ignoble and unsentimental), whisked away behind some disjointed pointillism; a slashing, slapstick ending swiped from Mozart’s Musical Joke. Along the way, Schuller has a lot of fun with the sheer timbre of dissonance, odd combinations of instruments, and intervals that, on at least a half-dozen occasions, had me half out of my seat, trying to parse what strange alchemy had created such an unexpected sonority. Games was about half the length of any of the other new pieces, but it contained at least twice as much music. (Oboist John Ferrillo, clarinetist William Hudgins, and bassoonist Richard Svoboda joined the crowd; Poga again conducted.)

Boston Symphony Chamber Players perform Gunther Schuller’s Games
Photo by Hilary Scott

Wyner’s piece was nowhere near as manic as Schuller’s bag of tricks, but it, too, ended up covering a significant amount of ground. Into the Evening Air put a traditional ensemble (a wind quintet) into a traditional mood (nocturnal, in both susurrant and serene varieties), but deviated from the path just enough to keep the ear continually attuned. Both the busy, twittering opening and the languid dissonance it turned into nodded toward other staples of the repertoire (Samuel Barber’s Summer Music came to mind more than once), but only from a distance. In an analogous way, Wyner paid heed to customary quintet allegiances—flute and oboe, horn and bassoon, clarinet as a free agent—but then, in a section of passed-around solos, used some deft play with range to expand and shift those alliances: horn and bassoon going up into their higher notes to let low flute join in, oboe going down to its lowest tones to make common cause with the horn and bassoon, the flute and bassoon suddenly stalking about in wide-spaced octaves, the other three instruments slipping into the gap. Into the Evening Air moves from idea to idea with a kind of diaristic nonchalance. The conversation slows almost to a frozen stasis before Wyner turns one last nifty corner: a soft chord that fades into a single clarinet note, which then dovetails into a quietly questioning call from the flute.

Boston Symphony Chamber Players perform Yehudi Wyner’s Into the Evening Air
Photo by Hilary Scott

The group surrounded their bounty of novelty with a pair of turn-of-the-last-century works that extended the locavore theme—more New England composers—but also encompassed the program’s contrasts: mood and structure, formal and feisty, male and female. Ansell, Ferrillo and pianist Randall Hodgkinson opened the show with a lush and equable mezzotint reading of Charles Loeffler’s Two Rhapsodies. Hodgkinson was back, joined by Rowe, Martinson, Ansell, and Eskin, for the finale, Amy Beach’s brawny op. 67 Piano Quintet, in a performance that made a pretty good nomination for the Quintet’s admission to the Academy of the Underrated. (The Quintet’s Adagio espressivo movement, certainly, is a stretch of late-Romantic mastery that can take its place alongside anything at all.) Give the Boston Symphony Chamber Players their due as hosts and hostesses: the party favors were as good as the presents.

Very Modern Love Songs: Your Weird, Steamy Playlist for V-Day

Posted on February 14, 2014 by Ellen McSweeney - Field Reports, Headlines

Valentine’s Day is here, and for contemporary music enthusiasts, it can be hard to compile the proper twitterpated playlist. After all, laypeople are constantly referring to our favorite pieces as “scary movie music.” Don’t they know we’re just as romantic as the next guy? When we’re cut, do we not bleed?!

I started thinking about what makes new music erotic or romantic, and decided to ask my Facebook friends and Twitter followers the same question. Some of their responses were just weird enough to include…and some were just weird. From openhearted to kinky, we’ve got some pretty wide-ranging ideas of what romance is. Without further ado, here’s your 2014 playlist of avant-garde baby-makin’ music.

What’s sexier than the human body? Few composers explore this question better than Jenna Lyle. We can neither confirm nor deny rumors that Lyle’s upcoming doctoral dissertation will include microphones placed inside certain unmentionable orifices. While you’re waiting for that excitement, check out her duo Aqualung for some sensual girl-on-girl-on-violin action. (Full disclosure: I’m the violinist in this video.) Lyle here explores “the intimacy and claustrophobia of closeness to another in parallel with the intimacy and claustrophobia of being alone with oneself.” What’s more romantic, or real, than that?

You know it. I know it. The phenomenal composer and conductor Matthias Pinscher is a heartthrob on the podium and on the page. Exhibit A is his Songs from Solomon’s Garden, which takes as its text some of the oldest sex poetry in Western civilization. The throbbing (yes, throbbing) trumpet solos were reportedly written especially for his paramour in the New York Philharmonic. It’s not every day we get to know a living composer Biblically.

Is your Valentine’s Day more bitter than sweet? Or is it, er, another taste altogether? The unfailingly raunchy Matt Marks set a text entitled “I tasted another woman in your mouth” for his song cycle I[XX]. As you might expect, this audio is NSFW.

With dating apps like Tinder and Grindr starting to make OKCupid look downright quaint, we could all use a primer on love in the digital age. Composer Robert Honstein’s My Heart Iz Open is a lonely-hearts online love story complete with email subject lines and corny screen names. It even turns its compositional light on dating websites’ heartbreakingly detached Terms of Use.
Thanks to Chicago composer Morgan Krauss, getting in the mood tonight will not be a problem for any of us. Just imagine you’re in a darkened concert hall listening to her Gravity of Shadows: two female vocalists ooh-ing, sighing, and breathing their way through four sensual minutes. The flutes sound just as transfixed, focused and ecstatic as the humans. Are you tingly yet? (h/t Doyle Armbrust)

Let’s not forget the classics. Morton Feldman’s Piano and String Quartet, like great love, creates a sense of deep attunement and intimacy. The piece’s opening sequence has a sense of suspended timelessness, like two lovers lingering over every touch. But at an hour and twenty minutes, the piece more closely resembles a long, mindful marriage than a fling. (h/t Dave Reminick)
Thanks a lot, Jonathon Kirk: I’ll never think of hockets the same way again. When I asked friends to name their favorite “sexy” pieces, Jonathon chose Meredith Monk’s “Hocket” from Facing North. This vocal duet evokes either the rhythmic call-and-response of lovemaking or a couple in a lifelong repetitive conversation. Or both.

Things get kinky when the conversation turns toward Georges Aperghis. His quintet Crosswind, performed here by Chicago dynamos Anubis Quartet and Nadia Sirota, has a raw and ravaging energy, punctuated by yelps of unfulfilled longing and, let’s be real, sucking sounds. Though Crosswind feels more like an orgy than the more intimate couplings on this list, there is an innocent, charming little love song nestled in around 5:40. (h/t Seth Brodsky)

But perhaps, dear readers, you’re tired of weird. Perhaps you’re ready for real love. Two of contemporary music’s favorite lovebirds, writers and advocates Larry and Arlene Dunn, recommend “How Important It Must Be,” a kind of lifelong-love song by Maria Schneider on a text by Ted Kooser. While this particular song from Scheider’s Winter Morning Walks isn’t available for free streaming, the equally beautiful “Walking by Flashlight” gives a taste of the song cycle’s tender jazz sensibility.

Finally, for those ready to face the question of love and mortality, I offer up the sad and gorgeous musical legacy of perhaps the greatest contemporary music love story of the past decade. Composer Peter Lieberson was married with three children when he met mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt; they fell in love while working on the premiere of his opera, Ashoka’s Dream. After their marriage, he wrote his Neruda Songs for her. The piece was recorded just eight months before she died of breast cancer; sadly, Lieberson himself has also since passed away. The final Neruda Song begins with this text:

My love, should I die and you don’t
let us give grief no more ground:
my love, should you die and I don’t
there is no piece of land like this on which we’ve lived.

Hold your loved ones close, dear readers, and read a poem or two. Happy Valentine’s Day.

Aperio: Indie-A-Go-Go

Posted on February 3, 2014 by AndrewSigler - Field Reports, Headlines

Aperio performs at the Hobby Center in Houston
Photo by Trish Badger

Aperio–Music of the Americas is an arts organization with a broad vision. “Dedicated to preserving chamber music literature through performances that showcase contemporary composers from the Americas,” Aperio curates concerts that one night might feature contemporary chamber music from the U.S. (like the one I attended last weekend) and focus on the music of Nicaragua the next. Certainly each of these countries have varied styles within their borders, but the change in focus from one region to the next over the course of a season helps Aperio track and understand trends on this side of the pond as distinct from concert series that include European repertoire. Michael Zuraw has been at the helm of Aperio for many years and, in addition to being a spectacular pianist, he has also consistently assembled one crack team of musicians after another to achieve his vision.
In his introduction to the evening, a program billed as “Indie-A-Go-Go–Vibrant Alternative American Works,” Zuraw indicated that some in the audience might connect with various musical references from the rock world that would show up throughout the night, but I think that the youngest might actually get more excited about hearing the opening work of the show, John Mackey’s Breakdown Tango. This work served as the source material for his orchestral work Red Line Tango which, in turn, became one of his most well-known wind ensemble pieces—a work played by many college and high school groups around the country.

Breakdown Tango began with driving, syncopated motor rhythms played by violinist Chloé Trevor and accented in the piano by Zuraw. Cellist Patrick Moore supplemented the texture as clarinetist Christian Schubert played the main melodic fragment of the opening of work. This largely chunky and visceral opening gave way to a lyrical breather before calling out the tango namesake in broad strokes across the whole ensemble, though primarily in the violin and clarinet. A brief return to the opening material brought the work to a close.

As the concert went on it became clear that the show was a marriage ceremony of sorts, with some things old, new, borrowed, and blue. Following the Mackey were the “borrowed” selections: “Three Songs,” which are arrangements of Radiohead tunes by Christopher O’Riley (of From the Top fame). For both composer and performer, it is tricky to avoid the hotel lounge vibe that solo piano versions of rock tunes might yield, but pianist Brendan Kinsella did a great job breathing life into arrangements that, in lesser hands, might deflate ever so slightly. Closing out the first half was Carter Pann’s Piano Trio No.1 (“Nicky’s Trio”) which featured some of the best orchestration and pacing of the evening. In four movements, it was arguably the piece that walked and talked most like a classical duck, but that characteristic worked most solidly in its favor. The opening movement, “Cowboys,” was packed with big open sonorities. High and lonesome in the beginning, it popped into virtuosic gear with giddy-up rhythms and virtuosic lines traded deftly between violinist Kirsten Yon and cellist Daniel Saenz. This tight communication continued into the second movement, which started in a similar vein as the first, though much more subdued. Here the energy of the violin and cello was tempered and more space appeared for Kinsella’s piano work. A gem of a third movement (perhaps less than 60 seconds and somehow recalling “What a Fool Believes” by the Doobie Brothers; a connection that surely must have only been in my head) acted as a brief palate cleanser for a fiery final movement. Following a brief intermission, two works by Michael Torke brought us something “old” and something “blue,” though not in that order. Torke’s Blue Pacific for solo piano is indicative of much of his work in this century. Clean and simple, the work started for all intents and purposes like a pop piano ballad centered largely in the middle range of the instrument and only venturing out by and by. As the work progressed, virtuosic passages and a more adventurous harmonic language lent depth and complexity to the initial melodic material. This was followed by the “old” piece of the night, Torke’s Yellow Pages from 1985. I haven’t heard this work in years and two things struck me as I listened: 1) I’d forgotten how hard the tune is and 2) I still don’t hear Van Halen’s “Jump” as a reference or source material. Not that the ensemble’s performance showed the former; in fact, they looked very comfortable and their playing was quite assured. I suppose the latter comes out in the accented upbeats, but to me it sounds like a piece all its own. As the ensemble flipped through the tonal phonebook, I couldn’t help but wonder what it was like to hear this in the mid-’80s–the bright harmonic language and motor rhythms still part of the preceding ten years, but the phrasing and harmonic rhythm part of the relatively new post-minimal sensibility. Though not as ancient as, say, the Mac [1], the piece certainly holds up and was quite well received.

And last but not least, the “new”est piece by the youngest composer of the night, D.J. Sparr’s The Glam Seduction, closed out the evening. Starting out with a harmonically reimagined but structurally spot-on arrangement of the opening gesture of Eddie Van Halen’s seminal guitar solo “Eruption” (including devastating introductory thunder drums courtesy of percussionist Luke Hubbley), this Van Halen reference was laid bare. No coy rhythms here. The piece segues quickly from the opening material to a rising line shared among Moore, Trevor, flutist Judy Dines, and bass clarinetist Sean Krissman. This heads-up collective motive returns several times during the work and serves as a chorus of sorts between solo sections for each instrument. Each player in turn does their best metal impression, though I think if the piece had a less evocative title [2] (and performance notes that obscured the origin of the musical material) it’s quite possible that the “metal” elements would be less obvious. In fact, there are many tender and quiet moments and sections throughout the work which set off the wilder and more provocative core and do give the ears a rest before things are cranked up once again. The piece goes out with a bang, as well as a huge swaggering coda that all but invites the audience (as Zuraw suggested in his introduction to the work) to break out their lighters and put their horns up.
Though I write for the most part about the USA (with a few exceptions) under the auspices of NewMusicBox, I’m interested to see what Aperio does to represent the rest of this continent and its southern counterpart. I’ll admit that despite my classical guitar background (of which a great deal of repertoire, contemporary and otherwise, is derived from Central and South American composers) I tend to think about contemporary music from an American or American/European perspective. Perhaps that’s simply my upbringing and education, or maybe I need to get out of the house a bit more. Either way, if this concert is indicative of the level of curation and performance that Aperio provides, I suspect there’s a whole world of music out there that they can show me.

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1. Along those lines, it seems that the iPad on the piano (and the stage tech who has to carry it and a tiny new pedal out before the show starts) has officially replaced the Macbook on the stage in many new music concerts. Like all trends in music history these lines of demarcation are not always clear, so I suppose time will tell.

2. I’m by no means suggesting it should. I was seduced by this same glam in high school, and played tortured versions of “Eruption” until my parents couldn’t take it anymore.

New England’s Prospect: Three World Premieres in Wildly Disparate Styles

Posted on January 28, 2014 by Matthew Guerrieri - Field Reports, Headlines

A BMOP intermission, January 17, 2014: players get ready to work; composers work the room.

It has become commonplace to bash the symphony orchestra. All together now: it’s impractical, old-fashioned, a relic, a museum, a bastion of canonic conservatism, a hangover from long-gone eras and aesthetics. We know the drill.
We want it, though. The sonic luxury, the grandeur, the spectacle—we want it bad. I know this to be true because the Boston Modern Orchestra Project never seems to run out of juice. It fills a need. It mounts concerts that manage to be both one-stop shopping for the merely curious and essential for professionals. (As I’ve said before, BMOP intermissions feature some of the most vigorous new-music networking in town). Put enough people on stage, and any new-music concert becomes an event. BMOP and conductor Gil Rose have been leveraging that fact since 1996.

The “modern” in the name has always been as much stylistic as calendrical (BMOP’s opening concert this season, for instance, was a concert performance of Virgil Thomson’s Four Saints in Three Acts), but its concert at Jordan Hall on January 17 was aggressively new: three world premieres in wildly disparate styles. The curtain-raiser, Elena Ruehr’s Summer Days, continued a long relationship—Ruehr, based at MIT, was BMOP’s first composer-in-residence. Inspired by a Georgia O’Keefe painting (the third O’Keefe-inspired piece Ruehr has written), Summer Days was all mood and activity. The main formal signpost was a brief, brassy fanfare ritornello; the melodic ideas were mostly short and compact, circling around small groups of pitches. The fabric of the piece is repetition and sequence. (The one longer theme, a sustained excursion for the strings, was largely based on a simple rising scale.) Ruehr’s orchestration is Bruckner-like in its heavy outlines: families of instruments play together and stay together, juxtaposed more than mingled. The harmonic color might be characterized as exotically diatonic, bright but modal. But the emphasis is more on transformation and layering. Summer Days felt something like a long, excursively episodic development section, the goal subsumed into the getting there.

About the only thing Ken Ueno’s Hapax Legomenon had in common with Ruehr’s piece was a similar journey-like feel, and even that seemed to be radically altered, forward motion rejected in favor of a furiously concentrated focus on each present moment. Like a lot of Ueno’s music, the spur was a singular technique—in this case, the two-bow cello stylings of Frances-Marie Uitti, the quadruple-stop possibilities of which Ueno fashioned into ever-more dilated harmonies. (The title, the old scholarly term for any word that appears but once in the corpus, was Ueno’s own self-deprecating reference to his fondness for writing for such only-person-in-the-world-who-can-play-it performers.) One of Ueno’s talents is for taking what might seem gimmicks—not just Uitti’s unusual approach, in this case, but also a bunch of hoary extended techniques in the orchestra, key-clicks, breath sounds, having the players sing, etc.—and confidently turning them to new and convincing ends. Hapax Legomenon seemed to pass in heightened slow-motion, every note and texture a drawn-out respiration, every idea daringly situated in some musical gray area, between silence and sound, noise and tone, different temperaments and timeframes. The ending—a long cadenza which featured Uitti creeping up the fingerboard into a distant, shortwave squeal of high natural harmonics—was breathtaking.
David Rakowski’s Piano Concerto No. 2 was, on the surface, a much more conventional piece, and purposefully so—from its lushly chordal, moto perpetuo, étude-ish opening, the reference point seemed to be the highly-stylized, fashionably syncopated Jazz Age piano concerto. But that was a springboard for Rakowski’s brand of subtle mischief. That opening, for starters, ended up a lot more off-balance, the steady rhythmic stream sliced and diced into all manner of speed bumps. The second theme—the place, say, where Gershwin liked to let the piano take over in a wash of rubato—turned into an inside-the-piano exercise, plucked and strummed punctuation to a play of intervals in the orchestra, sixths and sevenths (and others) at harmonic sixes and sevens with each other. Throughout, Rakowski kept dropping in little bits of delicious orchestration. (Note to self: extended doubling of piano and motor-on vibraphone is an idea worth stealing.)

The second movement—conceived as an elegy for Milton Babbitt, one of Rakowski’s teachers—commenced with some more felicitious instrumentation: a stop-and-go duet between the vibraphone and marimba, joined by double-bass pizzicato, that turned into intermittent obstacles in a stream of English horn (then clarinet) cantilena. The echo of Ravel’s G-major concerto was strong, except that the piano filigree here roped the rest of the orchestra into an unexpected faster tempo. The finale had an expected fast and busy character, but ended up being more of a hesitation-toccata, the concerto’s traditional prizefight qualities reduced to a collection of feints and stutter-step footwork, before a cadenza—which finally tipped over into straight stride piano—and a vastly-telescoped reprise of the opening movement brought the piece to a close.
Like Ueno, Rakowski was writing for a specific performer: Amy Briggs, the profoundly adroit Chicago-based pianist who has been the primary performing means of Rakowski’s encyclopedic set of piano études, the increasingly whimsical challenges of which just seem to make Briggs more adventurously game. (Much of the flavor of the concerto—the jazz colors, the soloist’s doubling on celesta at particular formal landmarks—was, according to the program notes, at Briggs’ request.) Like the études, the concerto has more than a little of Rakowski’s trickster personality. Statements and ideas are inseparable from bluffs and subterfuge, not unlike a magic trick in which the misdirection is so skillful and impressive that you don’t notice that your chosen card is never actually revealed. But the patter and the choreography glister.

I suppose, if you take the current cultural landscape as a whole, any organization for which three orchestral premieres is just another night at the office is a little out of the ordinary. But BMOP has been doing it so well and for so long that they’ve created the luxury of expecting it. BMOP’s achievement is the possibility of taking that kind of programming, and the skill and panache with which it’s performed, almost for granted. But only almost. You’d miss it if it was gone.

Matthew Guerrieri

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