Category: Field Reports

New England’s Prospect: Fellow Travelers

Posted on January 24, 2014 by - Field Reports, Headlines

5th Floor Collective

“Come, then, into the music room,” she said, and I followed her into an apartment finished, without hangings, in wood, with a floor of polished wood. I was prepared for new devices in musical instruments, but I saw nothing in the room which by any stretch of imagination could be conceived as such. It was evident that my puzzled appearance was affording intense amusement to Edith.
…
She made me sit down comfortably, and, crossing the room, so far as I could see, merely touched one or two screws, and at once the room was filled with the music of a grand organ anthem; filled, not flooded, for, by some means, the volume of melody had been perfectly graduated to the size of the apartment. I listened, scarcely breathing, to the close.

—Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward (1887)

Collectivism has a long history in Massachusetts (periodic paroxysms of reaction notwithstanding). The Puritans, after all, were nothing if not utopian collectivists; the Transcendentalists, too, had their communes. At the end of the 19th century, Edward Bellamy, hailing from Chicopee Falls, saw his utopian best-seller inspire the Nationalist movement, an organized effort to put utilities, transportation companies, and other such private enterprises under collectivized government control. (It is a testament to the depth of collectivist sentiment here that such sentiment could divide along class lines: Nationalism was for Brahmins; those without the proper family connections instead joined up with the Socialists.)

Composer collectives are a more recent development in the Commonwealth, but they, too, have become a constant, ever since Composers in Red Sneakers got the ball rolling in the early ‘80s. They tend to be short-lived—indicative, perhaps, of their often academic origins and their bootstrapping purpose, a way to bridge the gap between the thrown-together enthusiasm of a student cohort and the geographic scattering of professional achievement. (Even the Sneakers have been quiet for the past few seasons, though their history of resourceful persistence makes one unsure whether to mourn their demise or brace for their unexpected return.)

But some of them do keep going. The Fifth Floor Collective, for instance, is now in its fourth season. That comparative longevity is probably due to Fifth Floor’s habit of inviting other composers, lots of other composers, to join in. The official members (Joseph Colombo, Patrick Greene, Andrew Paul Jackson, and Keith Kusterer) make ample room for compositional friends and acquaintances. At their concert on January 14—“Plugged In 2,” an evening of electroacoustic music—participating member composers (Greene and Jackson) were outnumbered by guests.
The locus of Fifth Floor is The Boston Conservatory; all four member composers are a

lumni. There is also a strong Chicago connection in the group, through Kusterer, a Columbia College graduate. Two of the guest composers on “Plugged In 2”—Monte Weber and Daniel Dehaan—had that Chicago provenance, as did the guest soloist, the excellent soprano Tony Arnold. The other guests—Amber Vistein and Timothy McCormack—were local, but with résumés that diverged from the core constituency. Fifth Floor concerts are all about expanding a web of colleagues. That collegiality extends to the concerts, which aim for a casual atmosphere—the black-box ambience of Somerville’s Davis Square Theater for this concert, with some pre-concert chit-chat, the possibility of in-concert drinking, post-concert cookies, and a DJ.

Weber’s Chanting Atmospheres, an exercise in loops and layering, featured Arnold, dispatching vocal effects into the microphone (breath sounds, clicks, whistling, vocal percussion, and singing) which were then broadcast back, repeated and multi-tracked into a foundation for the next round of live-produced, digitally-reiterated sounds. An opening section of all white noise and unvoiced consonants led into a series of clustered drones; a series of swooping glissandi—laminated into to a nice, Penderecki-homage roar—led back to the drones; and then the whole thing was rounded off with a more delicate stacking of open fifths and hollow overtones. Chanting Atmospheres did, however, trigger one of my own (admittedly irrational) pet peeves about electroacoustic-plus-live-performers music, the way a lot of it circumscribes the performer’s range in order to better suit the electronic possibilities—to write for someone like Tony Arnold and not have her do more flat-out singing felt like a bit of a missed opportunity. But those ramjet glissandi warmed my in-your-face-modernist heart, and the ending section was particularly lovely.
The muse for Greene’s contribution, Juicy (subtitled “Spectral Studies for a Citrus Juicer”) was the whimsical, mass-produced Juicy Salif, a standing juicer designed by Philippe Starck for the Alessi company in the 1980s. (The Juicy Salif’s unusual shape was supposedly inspired by a squid, but it looks more like an enlarged chrome teardrop resting on a spindly, space-age tripod.) Greene used a host of other household objects to ring the juicer like a bell, subjected the results to some SPEAR-powered spectral analysis, then assembled the waveforms into a grand, gradually-building slow-motion clang of overtones. Having generated that shimmering multitude, Greene then dropped everything down to a fat, low buzz appropriate to the juicer’s resemblance to a Doctor Who prop. (Seriously: compare and contrast.) Like Chanting Atmospheres, Juicy had the feel of an elaborate sketch, but the simple formal unfolding (and—let’s be honest—the visual lark of a spotlit, foot-high juicer holding the stage) created an estimable divertimento.

Not all the music stayed within a synthesized hothouse; Jackson’s EIMI Два (“I am” [Greek] “two” [Russian]) ventured out of doors, drawing on ambient recordings Jackson made during a trip to Russia. (The title references one of e. e. cummings’s oddest books; EIMI is a fractured, dream-like account of a disillusioning trip to the Soviet Union in 1931.) The piece’s use of documentary sound was more mashup than musique concrète, the sources—broadcasts, conversations, an opera singer, an orchestra—were often easily identifiable, and not so much recontextualized as artfully rearranged (singer and orchestra kept bumping into each other at various angles), an entire journey converted into the discrete jumble of an envelope of snapshots.
Timothy McCormack’s Interfacing with the Surface and Daniel R. Dehaan’s Objects in This Mirror were, as the composers admitted in a bit of pre-concert banter, a yin-and-yang pair. Interfacing with the Surface was a quadruple-forte, fun flood of maximalism: hornist Sarah Botham and cellist Benjamin Schwartz working hard as McCormack (currently a PhD candidate at Harvard, a department that has definitely gotten louder in the past few years) manhandled a MIDI keyboard loaded up with what seemed to be all manner of industrial samples—revving engines, jackhammers, car horns. The effect was that of a catastrophically-malfunctioning chip-tune version of An American in Paris, urban energy compacted into an impenetrable surface; even McCormack’s apology for a botched ending felt as much like an extension of the aural critique of the modern condition as anything.

In Objects in This Mirror, a purely electronic work, Dehaan peeled away where McCormack piled on. A shimmering cluster was first deconstructed into audio artifacts: the crackle of overmodulation, the diffracted, stuttering chime of intersecting oscillators isolated and extracted. Then the cluster was divided and recombined into a slow, lush, Eno-like progression. To call something “tasteful” might seem like damning with faint praise, but the piece’s sure-footedness was impressive—with Dehaan tweaking away at a mixing board, the durations, balances, and timbres always felt like just the right choice. (If you’re going to indulge in circling, melancholy pop harmonies, you could do a lot worse than a repeated vi to V7/V to IV.)

The final work of the evening was Vistein’s; Apropos set a text by Rabelais, referencing an old myth that words spoken in winter would freeze, only to thaw the following spring. Vistein’s background has a strong conceptual streak—installations alongside performances, an MFA instead of an MM—but Apropos was, perhaps, the most musically straightforward piece of the evening: Arnold singing the text in longer, blooming phrases, her voice processed into a sonic background that unfolded an almost traditional narrative of illustrative effects.

Despite the congruence in electronic means, the program was distinguished mainly by a lack of any other connecting thread. If anything, it confirmed that style is not much of a banner to rally behind anymore (even if old dichotomies continue to stalk the new music world like some sort of rare, protected species of zombie). The only possible theme I could sense was one of simulation: all the pieces might be heard as using very up-to-date technology to produce sounds that, within the comparatively brief history of electronic music, could be considered somewhat retro: Jackson’s cut-up field recordings, Weber’s loops, Greene’s and Dehann’s oscillator-and-pad soundscapes, McCormack’s riot of sampling. Even Vistein’s piece could, perhaps, plausibly be realized by a chamber group with enough percussion and extended techniques at their disposal.

There were hints of other speculative generalizations: that we are in a musical era of consolidation rather than innovation, maybe, or that processing power has allowed more of a convergence of the aesthetic of electronic and conventional music than was possible in the days of more uncooperative equipment. But, really, the concert was too small a sample size to make any sort of larger statement; and larger statements didn’t seem to be the point, anyway. The Fifth Floor Collective is after something both more modest and grander: community, collaboration, camaraderie.

Three Words for 2014: Chicago Musicians Reflect and Aspire in the New Year

Posted on January 3, 2014 by - Field Reports, Headlines

2014 sparkler
1. Alex Temple
2. Kyle Vegter
3. Amanda deBoer Bartlett
4. Anthony Cheung
5. Nina Dante
6. Ryan Muncy
7. Renee Baker

ALEX TEMPLE: COMPOSER

Alex Temple

Alex Temple

1. What was your biggest musical challenge of 2013?
Probably a piece called Switch: A Science-Fiction Micro-Opera, which I wrote for Cadillac Moon Ensemble last summer. It’s the most political thing I’ve done, and also the most directly I’ve dealt with trans issues in my work, so I had to be careful not to be too heavy-handed. It’s a dark and angry piece, but with a lot of humor in it. I actually wasn’t sure if it would make emotional sense until I got to hear it in the venue, the day of the concert!

The other thing about Switch is that it has rhyming lyrics, which I’ve only done a few times before. I wanted the rhymes to be witty and memorable, in a Tom Lehrer sort of way, and while I’m pretty proud of what I came up with (one of my favorites: “writing ambidextrously” and “she was never quite direct with me”), it took forever.

2. What was your favorite record, or favorite thing to listen to, this year?
Chairlift’s album Something is definitely a candidate. I actually discovered it last year, through the video for “Amanaemonesia“—a wonderfully unsettling New-Wave-ish song built out of repeated melodic cells that don’t always combine in the way you’d expect them to — but I’ve been listening to the album a lot this year, too. It reminds me of an old favorite of mine, Thomas Dolby’s The Golden Age of Wireless: poppy on the surface, but melancholy and strange when you look a little closer.

3. What was your favorite musical moment of 2013?
First some background: last spring I spent a lot of time watching Wagner operas in preparation for one of my qualifying exams. Wagner is…problematic for me. His work is full of mysterious, evocative moments, but they’re almost always surrounded by long-winded exposition and endless churning.
About a month ago, I was lying in the bath listening to Gesualdo. I usually find his chromaticism beautiful in an abstract, detached way, but that night, I heard the ending of “Mercè grido piangendo” for the first time. The line “Potessi dirti pria ch’io mora” is sung twice, and both times, it ends with a startling chromatic shift. I thought of all those moments in Parsifal where the music suddenly moves to a pure major triad in a distant key, and I suddenly realized: this is the stripped-down Wagner I’ve been wishing for, and it predates him by almost 300 years.

4. What are you most looking forward to in 2014?
I’ll finally have time to work on my podcast-opera, End! I’ve been planning this piece for years, and it deals with a lot of topics that are personally important to me: the American landscape, the strange resonance of obscure mass-media artifacts, and the idea of being punished for breaking an arbitrary metaphysical rule that you didn’t even know existed. I keep putting it off to work on other, less daunting projects, but now that it’s been approved as my dissertation, I’ll have to write it!
Also: the next season of Mad Men. I know, the show has been hyped to death, but I’m continually amazed by how psychologically, politically, and aesthetically nuanced and complex it is. I’ve actually lost interest in film since I started watching it, because after all, how much depth can you go into in two hours?
5. If you could sum up what you’d like 2014 to be in three words, what would they be?
Worldwide queer liberation!

KYLE VEGTER: COMPOSER

Kyle Vegter

Kyle Vegter

1. What was your biggest musical challenge of 2013?
1) Figuring out a way to really, really get down (git down) to the bottom of Jenny Zhang’s poem for the Parlour Tapes+ *AND record compilation thing. In working with Jenny there were more than a few moments of, “OMG, I will never live up to her ultimate ART PERFECTION.” Instead I wrote a slimy little jam and pretended I was Roy Orbison on psilocybin/percocet/psilocybin again.

2) This new project I’m doing with Zach Schomburg where whenever he thinks he sees someone talking to themselves but they’re actually talking on a bluetooth headset, he immediately writes a little poem using something they’re talking about and texts it to me. Wherever I am at that moment, I have to stop and record myself singing the lines—whatever comes out on take #1. So far it has required me to leave a meeting, go to the weird grimy bathroom down the hall, and emote over Aunt Fran’s death into my iPhone.

2. What was your favorite record, or favorite thing to listen to, this year?
I think this year I’ve been doing a lot learning HOW to listen, in a very Cageian touchy-feely way. I had a bunch of opportunities to teach sound design this year (for theater/film but more specifically for puppetry). My approach to sound design comes from a very biological, even evolutionary place, and a lot of these classes were focused on trying to get my students to have real, meaningful experiences with sounds they hear all the time/may not even notice. We’d go on long silent sound walks and have discussions afterwards about our experiences, etc. Doing all that deep listening and hearing about my student’s experiences really had an impact on the way I think about sound and music and how it becomes meaningful to me.

3. What was your favorite musical moment of 2013?
Manual Cinema (my shadow puppet/performance company), did a huge insane-o-hustle summer of performances in Chicago and Pennsylvania and New York for four weeks, including the NYC Fringe. It was exhausting and the most fun thing ever and we drove a devastating amount in our tiny cars with puppet trailers hitched to them.

There was this one performance, though, at the National Puppet Festival at Swarthmore U (yes, there is a national puppet festival, and it’s EXACTLY WHAT YOU THINK IT IS>>) that was packed with something like 800 puppeteers from all across America. I had just driven overnight from Chicago and was pretty completely out of it physically and emotionally. The music for the show is really slow and drone-y and terrifying and performing it in that state for 800 psyched out of their minds puppeteers was one of the most beautifully surreal experiences I’ve had as a performer.
Kyle Vegter performance
4. What’s your new year’s resolution for 2014? If you don’t have one, why not?
I think I have more resolutions than I even realize. They’re lying all over the place. Like I want to use less laundry detergent, and I want to make more diverse smoothies, and I want to take less showers, and I’d really like to wear more collared shirts.
The big overarching one though is to be more honest with myself about how I want to spend my time.

5. What are you most looking forward to in 2014?
Making the new Manual Cinema show (to premiere in January 2015). We’ve been jonesing to make a new show for years now, and I’m so excited to be working on new material with my Manual Cinemaites it hurts a little bit. They’re some of the smartest, most honest and intuitive creative people I have ever met, and getting to work with them every day feels like a dream that I’m constantly dreaming. The new show is shaping up to be like nothing we’ve ever made and it WILL involve sexy shadow puppets.
ALSO, ALSO, I’m moving my studio and home to Pilsen in June, and my love is moving in with me there. Uggh.

6. If you could sum up what you’d like 2014 to be in three words, what would they be?
VIOLET DEEP EARTHY
(beets), (beats)

AMANDA DeBOER BARTLETT: SOPRANO

Amanda deBoer Bartlett

Amanda deBoer Bartlett

1. What was your biggest musical challenge of 2013?
Recording music by Aaron Einbond with Dal Niente. Hands down. The music is in the extremes of my range and hinges on these intensely fragile textures. I had to rely heavily on the ears of the composer, engineer, and advisers in the control room. Admittedly, I haven’t spent much time in the studio (something I’d like to change), so the process isn’t completely natural to me yet.
However, at this point, I’m a leading expert at singing into thunder tubes and ceramic cups.

2. What was your favorite record, or favorite thing to listen to, this year?
I made many a road trip this year (I-80 is my nemesis), and something my friends know about me is if you put on any pop country radio song, I can sing every line with harmonies. It’s terrible, I know. These songs are sexist, commercial garbage, but they kept me awake. And now I can sing all about hoppin’ up into your truck with my painted on jeans…
Amanda deBoer Bartlett road trip
But it’s not all so dire. Here’s the soundtrack of my year:
While working:Noosa
Sunday mornings:Kurt Vile; Brahms
Pump up album:Janelle Monáe
Calming my road rage: Joni Mitchell
Long road trips: Mumford and Sons; country radio

3. What was your favorite musical moment of 2013?
My husband was out of town, and I had a night off–a rare combination–so I went to see The Tallest Man On Earth at The Waiting Room in Omaha. I like going to concerts by myself, but I don’t get to loud, sticky clubs often. I was pretty close to the stage, and Kristian Matsson was making intense, awkward eye contact with the audience. It was just him and his guitar, sweating it out in the middle of Nebraska. Everyone was swaying and vibing pretty hard. Then he played “The Wild Hunt” and I was transported back to Bowling Green State University. I listened to that album pretty continuously during my final year there, sitting on my friend’s carpeted apartment floor, eating pot-luck meals like lentil soup and grilled cheese, and quoting stupid comedies from the ‘90s. Oh, and complaining about comprehensive exams! I’m a pretty forward-looking person, so taking a moment to bask in nostalgia and honor that time was a rare treat.

4. What’s your new year’s resolution for 2014? If you don’t have one, why not?
Get better at disappointing people. I want to be a let-down! Really, in order to accomplish anything, I need to focus my energies and stick to my guns this year, which means I can’t be everything to everyone.

5. What are you most looking forward to in 2014? This can be a meal, a musical project, a trip, a party—whatever springs to mind.
Going to Italy with my husband! We both travel for work, but traveling together is tremendously rare. I just love it. Generally we bypass the museums and go straight for the consumables. Here’s what I want: outdoor seating, hand-rolled pasta with a slow-cooked red sauce, local wine, and some sort of perfect chocolate thingy for desert.

6. If you could sum up what you’d like 2014 to be in three words, what would they be?
more coffee please

ANTHONY CHEUNG: COMPOSER

Anthony Cheung

Anthony Cheung

1. What was your biggest musical challenge of 2013?
Very generally, distractions. An increasingly endless stream of information and stimulation, musical and otherwise, while keeping me apprised of everything current, was often detrimental to my creativity. When I was a fellow at the American Academy in Rome earlier in the year, it was a very good “problem” to have: long conversations with other artists and scholars, constant excursions, and amazing meals. Nourishment for future creative projects.

2. What was your favorite record, or favorite thing to listen to, this year?
Many things, but two albums that come to mind are Steve Lehman/Rudresh Mahanthappa’s Dual Identity, and Toby Twining’s Eurydice. Neither was released in 2013, but I first heard them in the past year and both made deep impressions and led to repeated listenings.

3. What was your favorite musical moment of 2013?
Well, bear with me as I list three: one as a composer/conductor, one as a performer, and another as a witness to history. The first was conducting the Scharoun Ensemble, which is comprised of musicians from the Berlin Philharmonic, in performances of Time’s Vestiges. After the premiere in Rome, they were kind enough to repeat the piece in Berlin, and getting to work with them one night and hear them play the Symphonie Fantastique under Abbado at the Philharmonie the next was an absolute thrill.
Then in August, at the Newport Jazz Festival, I performed in Steve Coleman’s new piece, Synovial Joints, written for the Talea Ensemble. Steve is one of my favorite musicians and a generally acknowledged guru of improvisation, and getting to play with him and the special guests he brought in (trumpeter Jonathan Finlayson and drummer Dafnis Prieto) was a revelatory experience.
Anthony Cheung performance
And finally, back in March, at the conclusion of the papal conclave, when white smoke finally billowed from the chimney of the Sistine Chapel, I was made aware of this momentous event not by internet headlines or word of mouth but simply by being in my studio at the American Academy in Rome with the windows open, hearing all the bells of the city ringing simultaneously.

4. What’s your new year’s resolution for 2014?
One is definitely getting to know Chicago better, as my wife and I have recently relocated here and haven’t ventured out nearly as much as we’d like. The cultural and culinary options seem endless. Though I’m not yet sure about changing my allegiances to the Bears from the 49ers. The UChicago community is incredibly engaging, and I’m loving my interactions with students here. Offering them the best advice and support I can will be my absolute priority.

5. What are you most looking forward to in 2014? This can be a meal, a musical project, a trip, a party—whatever springs to mind.
Premiere performances of my new orchestral work for the New York Philharmonic in June.

6. If you could sum up what you’d like 2014 to be in three words, what would they be?
Renewal without regress/regrets.

NINA DANTE: SOPRANO AND EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR OF FONEMA CONSORT

Nina Dante

Nina Dante

1. What was your biggest musical challenge of 2013?
Without a doubt, the greatest challenge of 2013 was re-dedicating myself to exploring and understanding the workings of my voice. I am more than happy to get lost in the wilderness that is extended vocal techniques, but expression is limited without a strong connection to the “raw” voice. This summer, I decided to see what I could accomplish if I spent more time with my unique instrument, finding ways to master its natural strengths and weaknesses not only through fundamental vocal exercises and breath work, but also through active listening to vocalists across the genres.

My new obsession is singing every vowel on a single note, and exploring the unbelievable range of timbre and expressive coloring available in this single note, making it a sort of three-dimensional musical object. As a performer of new music, it is amazing to be aware of and have access to this vast palette.

2. What was your favorite record, or favorite thing to listen to, this year?
Led Zeppelin, in all seriousness. For whatever reason, before the fall of this year I had never listened to their music; but this October, fate pulled the trigger and after one listen to “Babe I’m Gonna Leave You,” I lost my soul to them. Undeniably, they are wild, wild performers, and what makes them completely irresistible to me is that I know the music was really happening for them while they performed; it has an emotional and physical rawness that you don’t find otherwise. For me, it isn’t a question of losing your mind while they play, it is inevitable. (Robert Plant is my current fascination.) Check out at least the first few minutes of this live performance.

3. What was your favorite musical moment of 2013?
In the summer of 2012, I worked with the French singer Donatienne Michel-Dansac, at the Darmstadt Summer Courses for New Music. Most memorably for me, she said that if you interpret a piece of music before you perform it, then you will only ever be able to perform it in that one way.

My favorite moment performing this year was premiering Pablo Chin’s Boschiana with Fonema Consort. With Donatienne’s words in mind, I dedicated myself to keeping the interpretive slate blank, until the moment of performance could make its hand print. I spent my practice time learning the music as meticulously as possible, with the hope that this would free me to let go of interpretive control and perform honestly and spontaneously, through the labyrinth of the music.
It was an eye-opening performance experience for me. The music pulled from me something that felt honest, and at the same time, spontaneous enough to interact with the expressive prerogative of the pianist and saxophonist. I felt that I was speaking, rather than singing—it was thrilling.

4. What’s your new year’s resolution for 2014? If you don’t have one, why not?
Since 2012, I have dedicated much of my artistic life to the new music ensemble that I co-founded, Fonema Consort. Serving as general director in addition to singing in the group is a fascinating journey: learning to make a decipherable budget alongside learning to sing microtones, negotiating with venues and presenters while diving into artistic collaboration with the musicians of the ensemble … heaven, for me.
This year, a new and very personal goal for the new year is to strengthen my artistic relationship with some of the deeply inspiring musicians I have met and performed with through my work with Fonema Consort. I am eager to see what collaborative possibilities await. New adventures!

5. What are you most looking forward to in 2014?
I am beyond psyched for the release of Fonema Consort’s (and indeed, my own) debut CD project this spring. The album, Pasos en otra calle (Steps in another street), is a compilation of chamber works for voice and instruments by Costa Rican composers Pablo Chin and Mauricio Pauly. Not only will we celebrate the release of the CD at home in Chicago, but Fonema Consort will travel to Costa Rica for a release event as well, which is definitely something to look forward to!

6. If you could sum up what you’d like 2014 to be in three words, what would they be?
Unpredictable
Adventurous
Intense

RYAN MUNCY: SAXOPHONIST AND EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR OF ENSEMBLE DAL NIENTE

Ryan Muncy

Ryan Muncy

1. What was your biggest musical challenge of 2013?
Finishing my first album—and doing it in a way that was artistically satisfying and true to myself—was by far my biggest musical challenge of 2013. It allowed me to push myself to a new level and reinvigorated my enthusiasm for recording projects.
Certain pieces from 2013 really pushed me to the extremes as an interpreter and technician. The first that comes to mind is Sam Pluta’s 60 cycles for sopranino saxophone, violin, cello, and feedback televisions, a largely improvised piece we premiered at the Walden School in July 2013 with the composer himself performing the feedback TVs. Sam is one of the finest musicians and improvisers I’ve worked with—and he regularly plays with Evan Parker, an iconic figure in improvisation and arguably the world’s greatest living saxophonist—which forced me to rise to the occasion. It’s a piece that makes you Fight To Win; I remember the feeling of my forearms and wrists burning in pain midway into the piece.

2. What was your favorite record, or favorite thing to listen to, this year?
This year I found myself listening to the French countertenor Philippe Jaroussky, especially in his performances of Vivaldi’s arias, as well as my friends bassoonist Rebekah Heller, flutist Claire Chase, and Spektral Quartet on their groundbreaking new albums.
Also, I became a fan of the podcast Throwing Shade, hosted by Erin Gibson and Brian Safi. I’m really picky when it comes to podcasts, and this one is everything.

3. What was your favorite musical moment of 2013?
The blackout section during Dal Niente’s performance of Haas’s In Vain. I’ve never felt so exhilarated and terrified during a performance. My heart was beating out of my chest. You know: that insane C major chord with the string section pulsing, gliding, oozing all over the place. Lights flashing, gongs ringing, 24 musicians playing ten minutes of music from memory in total (hallucinogenic) darkness, the audience beat into submission.

4. What’s your new year’s resolution for 2014? If you don’t have one, why not?
When it comes to resolutions for the new year, I attempt to position myself for success. As a result, my resolutions are pretty lame. Last year I resolved to drink eight glasses of water each day. I did O.K. For 2014, I’ll probably resolve to spend more time in the kitchen.
Like many arts organization, our fiscal year begins on July 1. For me, this date feels more like the occasion for turning over a new leaf.
5. What are you most looking forward to in 2014? This can be a meal, a musical project, a trip, a party—whatever springs to mind.
I might be letting the proverbial cat out of the bag, but I’m looking forward to Sunday, May 4, 2014, when Claire Chase, Nadia Sirota, Rebekah Heller, and I will present a 40th birthday portrait concert of Marcos Balter in Preston Bradley Hall of the Chicago Cultural Center as part of the City’s “Loops and Variations” concert series. We’ll perform pieces Marcos has previously written for us, as well as the world premiere of a new quartet. Marcos is a composer who has greatly influenced the landscape of new music in Chicago, so it’s fitting to celebrate his 40th with a bang.

Also, I’m looking forward to finally earning “Silver Premiere” status at United, whatever that means.

6. If you could sum up what you’d like 2014 to be in three words, what would they be?
beautiful, ugly, REAL.

RENEE BAKER: VIOLINIST, COMPOSER, AND MUSIC DIRECTOR OF THE CHICAGO MODERN ORCHESTRA PROJECT

Renee Baker

Renee Baker

1. What was your biggest musical challenge of 2013?
Doing three recordings in three weeks in Berlin and Graz with musicians I knew and some that I didn’t.

2. What was your favorite record, or favorite thing to listen to, this year?
Two masters—trying to get inside the heads of Anthony Braxton and Wadada Leo Smith. I’ve been listening to anything written by these two AACM luminaries.

3. What was your favorite musical moment of 2013?
Presenting a 16-page graphic score at the Vermont College of Fine Arts with the Jazz Tentet from New York. I was SO mad that I couldn’t get a sound check that I threw all my anger and angst into that comprovisation and brought down the house! Then I left and went home, still pissed but vindicated. That group kicked ass!
Renee Baker
4. What’s your new year’s resolution for 2014?
Simplify everything.

5. What are you most looking forward to in 2014?
Finding a place in Berlin.

6. If you could sum up what you’d like 2014 to be in three words, what would they be?
Tea. Create. Be.

New England’s Prospect: May All Your Christmases Be Weird

Posted on December 23, 2013 by - Field Reports, Headlines

A price tage at Weirdo Records
About the time the hip-hop cover of “Silent Night” that I heard over a store’s PA system sent me scurrying not for SoundHound, as it would have in years past, but rather for the exit, I realized that I was deep in holiday malaise. It was shaping up to be a dispiriting slog through December. Christmas was in trouble. So thank baby Jesus for Weirdo Records. And not just for the Monday concert series (called, unsentimentally, “The Series on Mondays”), although the December 16 installment was the occasion for this particular redemption. The place itself is a source of energizing, if off-the-wall, wonder.

Since 2009, when Angela Sawyer moved her online record-selling operation to a small, agreeably crowded storefront space in Cambridge’s Central Square, Weirdo Records has been an epicenter of noisemakers, musique concrète collectors, cult connoisseurs, found-sound aficionados, Fluxus progeny, circuit benders, and general musical crazies for the entire Boston area. The selection is a tribute to the virtues of browsing: I like to pride myself on my knowledge of off-the-radar rarities, but scanning these shelves is a wonderfully humbling and enlightening experience.
instructions on playing records backwards at Weirdo Records
Sawyer, herself a performer—as a solo artist, and as a member of Duck That!, Exusamwa, Pretty Peggy and the Lazy Babymakers, and other provocations—opens up the space to other adventurers every Monday. Usually one artist will curate a month’s worth of concerts, which often means showcasing long-standing collaborations. December’s shows were organized by—and around—Boston-based synth adept Peter Gumaskas; last Monday was an improvisation by Gumaskas and Jesse Cousineau, two-thirds of the group Triode. Even a duo made for a crowded stage in the space; display fixtures pushed up against the walls, patch cords hung from stacks of LPs. And even an unusually paltry three-person audience—Sawyer, Michael Rosenstein (another Boston-area modular synth guru), and an interloper, me—was transformed by the tight quarters into something respectable. And, anyway, the music made its own multitude.

The medium was electronic, but, compared to current digital practice, the means were almost pointedly corporeal: Jesse Cousineau seated among an old Roland Alpha Juno and a briefcase full of crosslinked effects pedals, Gumaskas kneeling before a magnificent home-built analog synthesizer. (Gumaskas’s is the type of machine that can, depending on one’s personal history, make one realize how pleasantly Proustian the sound of a fan-cooled power transformer can be.) It was the sort of set-up in which persnicketiness and unpredictability are as much a feature as a bug—another layer of moment-to-moment inspiration for the improvising musician.

Tools like that can often find their home at the line between music and sound art, but this performance was eminently musical—and not just because the feedback loops and oscillators tended to hang around the lower, diatonic-analogue neighborhood of the harmonic spectrum. Gumaskas and Cousineau have a sensibility and a knack for textures in constant, slow-sweeping motion, the transitions enticingly gradual and smooth. Again and again, the pair would build to a wall-of-sound climax, then pull back to something more transparent without letting the musical drama collapse. At one point, a thick, redolent stack of noise, saturated with seventh partials, suddenly gave way to a distant metallic wash dotted with cricket-like chirps, a decidedly, ravishingly symphonic effect.

The performance lasted for maybe a half-hour, and seemed shorter, culminating with a fade-out of enough delicacy that Gumaskas finally reassured everyone that, yes, the show was over. Performers and listeners—augmented by another local maven, Reed Lappin of In Your Ear! records, who snuck in halfway through—gathered to talk shop. I, the outsider, paid for some finds (Luc Ferrari! The Stark Reality Discovers Hoagy Carmichael’s Music Shop!). I headed out into the night, where the holiday lights had somehow reacquired their disposable but effervescent charm.

Carolyn O’Brien: Making Music as Tactile as Possible

Posted on December 19, 2013 by - Field Reports, Headlines

Carolyn O'Brien

Carolyn O’Brien

Chicago-based composer Carolyn O’Brien’s path to becoming a composer wasn’t a typical one. She studied viola, piano, and French horn as a child, trained as a music educator, and taught in public schools for ten years. When she took her first composition lesson at 32, she was disappointed with the contemporary music repertoire for public school students and imagined she might create music for that medium. Now, O’Brien is a doctoral candidate at Northwestern University and known in the community for her humor, irreverence, and the quality of exploration and play that she brings to her process. Upcoming projects include works for Spektral Quartet, Axiom Brass, A/B Duo, and Bent Frequency, as well as people outside of new music such as Scott Carter Thunes—a former electric bassist for Frank Zappa—and Tristan Bruns, a tap dancer from Chicago. When I caught up with O’Brien recently, she had just returned from a five-week residency at the MacDowell Colony.

EM: Going from a doctoral program in composition to a multi-disciplinary colony is a major shift. What was it like to be in that environment?

CO: It was inspiring! Everybody there was truly curious in ways I haven’t seen in a long time. I think removing myself from a homogenous group of artists in my own discipline led to a freer, less stressful environment. It was a life-affirming experience. I realized that, yes, indeed I deserve to be here. Yes, indeed, I’m on the right path. I’m glad I bet the farm to quit my job and be a composer.

MacDowell’s nurturing environment got me out of that “only composer” world and made me start thinking: there are other ways I can use my music off the concert stage. I was inspired by playwrights, authors, visual artists, and filmmakers, and speaking to them about my work made me re-contextualize how I see myself. I realized that my voice is valid and it means something to people outside of composing—in fact, it might mean a hell of a lot more to them than it does to people inside. Being around people at the top of their particular but different fields, and have them appreciate what I’m doing, meant more to me than any composition lesson I’d ever had.

I’m a really different person since I went there. My insecurities have diminished a great deal. Before I had this constant Greek Chorus of No in my mind that has since been shut down. Now I’m rebelling against those guys in togas! They don’t know what’s cool! At MacDowell, I could get out my head, out of my lonely studio and discuss these ideas with real people before my solitude would talk me out of my ideas. They would listen to me and say, “Hell yeah! I would love to go to that concert.”
EM: It sounds like it was a really diverse, affirming environment.

CO: Yes. At communal mealtimes, I got more affirmation and ideas than I ever could on my own. Being social every night made me realize that being a composer had become a very lonely business for me. When I’m home alone too often, I pass on some of that negative stuff to my husband. At MacDowell, it wasn’t a burden to my fellows because they were in the same situation. We’d recognize one another had had a rough day then talk each other out of a funk. Two bites into the meal, the loneliness had eased, and the day’s trek seemed worthwhile.

EM: You connected strongly with one interdisciplinary artist in particular, Brent Watanabe. How did your friendship and collaboration develop at MacDowell?

CO: Brent is an interdisciplinary artist that brings his visual art degree and over a decade of computer programming skills into his work. He uses a technique called projection mapping, where he creates a three dimensional parameter for two dimensional materials to traverse. The framework is an environment for the creatures he has made to rebound from, fall off of, crash against. It’s fascinating, intimate, clever, and as beautiful as it is childlike. Lately, I have been doing the same sort of thing with my music. I create wall, floors, and ceilings with the intervallic compass or the temporal space, so the music can ricochet or get smashed into a corner. I create limits, but then I create chaos to be contained in these structures. I shared my music with Brent before I’d seen his work, and after he’d listened, he came to me and said, “Okay, I’ve been listening to your music. And I know we’ve bonded over our similar sense of humor, and Sesame Street, and these childlike worlds that we want our work to inhabit. But I’m presenting my work tonight, and I think you’re going to be so freaked out over how similar our work is that we’re going to have to work together.” So after a couple of videos at his presentation, I turned to him and said, “Holy $%*# Brent, this is exactly how I think!” “Right!?,” said Brent. “I knew right away that this was meant to be.”

EM: You bonded over Sesame Street?!

CO: Ha! Yes! Sesame Street was incredibly influential on my creative process and still is. It is on Brent’s, too. The original episodes came out when we were little kids. I would have been three or four when I saw Stevie Wonder singing “Superstition” on one of the earliest episodes. I’m always thinking about that show, or how to return to kindergarten, about the physical materials I played with as a child, playing with those blocks you can shoot marbles through. And Brent tries to keep Sesame Street in mind when he creates his pieces. We both approach our work with a very childlike curiosity. It’s a rare thing to find a person who maps their memories on a similar playground and who would kill to work for the Children’s Television Workshop and consider it one of the highest forms of art.

EM: What is it about those very physical materials of early childhood that appeals to you musically?

CO: I think what really attracts me is the elegance of the simplicity of those first lessons—lessons that are all about exploration without self-consciousness. I also think there’s something wonderful about seeing these materials, touching them. Not just hearing them. I’m very attracted to visual artists, because they do something tactile. I’ve always been jealous of mechanics – people who create something you can touch and see, something permanent. The ephemeral arts don’t exist outside of a recording. Music isn’t a physical object that you can enjoy for an extended time. That always makes me a little forlorn, and I long to make music last for extended periods of time beyond noise pollution. So when I met Brent, and he felt my music was similar to his concepts of his pieces using projection mapping, I realized I could make my music as tactile as possible. We’re now talking about a future collaboration and asking, is the music going to affect the picture, is the picture going to affect the music? Are the people in the space going to be able to touch objects and affect them? Or is the art a physical being that makes sound and exists on its own terms? His work can become musical, and mine can become tactile and visual. It’s about as close as I’ll ever get to creating a visual piece of art, and I’m really excited about that.

EM: It’s interesting that a playful, physical approach has remained important for you long after you left public school teaching. How did you come to composing?

CO: I really didn’t listen to any contemporary music until I was in my thirties. The first time I ever heard a new piece was in high school: George Crumb’s Voice of the Whale. That piece seemed completely insane and I loved it. I remember thinking: “God, what am I missing?” This was in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in the early ‘80s. But, then I never heard anything like it again, even when I went to college I got a degree in music education and taught orchestra in Texas and California.

When I was teaching, I started writing music for my students. It wasn’t great stuff because I was completely self-taught, but I realized I needed to explore composing. I stopped teaching public school, and when I was 32 I had my first private composition lesson. I remember thinking, “Let’s just try it and see what happens.” Part of the reason I didn’t take myself seriously at first was that I approached it with childlike curiosity, but an adult’s low self-esteem and perfectionism. When that perfectionism kicked in, I started to realize I cared a great deal more than I expected I would.

I hit a roadblock when I came to Northwestern; I lacked some skills in terms of craft. I really lost it and couldn’t write for three years. That was especially frustrating, to be creatively blocked, because it didn’t seem as if I deserved to be. I hadn’t been composing long enough to be blocked! I was cranking out music very slowly, in the same way, over and over. It felt like a sausage factory. And I realized if I couldn’t get back to that childlike curiosity, I wasn’t going to be able to play anymore. I needed to zoom way out. I realized I needed to look at form. Lee Hyla was very instrumental in helping me with my new process. Now I think of form as a canvas that I stretch before I put stuff on it. I make a building that’s safe for child’s play, and then I bounce a super ball in every room. That’s how I think now. And if I hadn’t been an educator first, I don’t think I could’ve pulled myself out of that funk.

EM: It sounds like you’ve learned a great deal about what you, as an individual artist, need in order to thrive.

CO: Yes. I also discovered a great gift. I now know how my brain works. I discovered at 43 that I have ADHD and cognitive disabilities because of depression. It was a difficult discovery to make, but now that I know how I learn and think, it’s truly informed how I work and is the origin of my recent creative breakthrough. Now I know I can that I can only concentrate for a certain amount of time. I don’t keep banker’s hours, so to speak. When I get restless, I have to do something physical. And if I can be physical and tactile, then return to my work when my mind has regained focus, I can be more prolific.

When I was a teacher, I would gravitate towards ADHD kids and kids with depression, and never realized why until I went back to school and tried to use my mind for much more difficult and abstract tasks. Having been an advocate for children with learning disabilities is now helping me advocate for myself as I try to succeed at this crazy composing gig.

EM: How would you describe the compositional places you want to go now?

CO: I really hope to work more with visual artists—including my brother, Michael O’Brien, who’s a sculptor—to build instruments probably played by percussionists. I want to fuse sculpture and performance together. I’d really like to work with choreographers, too. Now that I realize how tactile and visual my music is becoming, I think those bouncy, kinetic aspects deserve to be featured. My attraction to kinetic art and movement is going to be part of my music from now on.

I am also interested in composing music that spans longer stretches of time, but isn’t necessarily one single piece. I think my doctoral recital is going to be my first foray into working towards a continuous show. Each piece can stand on its own when performed outside this recital, but within the recital they will be used like modules that connect to the next, with transitions that help segue from piece to piece.

Now that I’m starting to find my own voice, I’m realizing I probably have a greater appreciation for American artistic styles than I do European Western art music. I’m not tossing out the latter of course, but these days I’m far more drawn to jazz, to the works of Henry Cowell, Harry Partch, and Conlon Nancarrow, and to many forms of dance. I’m intrigued by American pioneers of invention, artists, sculptors, and other imported cultures that make America so diverse. I’m surprised by how patriotic I’ve been feeling lately, maybe like Bartók was in his day. I’m not going to take it quite as far as he did, you know, whatever the American equivalent of going to parties in full Magyar clothing would be. But, I am finding the roots of American folk music, jazz, dance, and American industry to be a much more influential source of material for my work than the third Viennese school, the Spectralists, or the New Complexity composers. I’m grateful to be living in a country that might just embrace me for that when I finally emerge from graduate school.

[Ed. Note: A/B Duo is touring O’Brien’s Nocturne for contrabass flute and djembe at various venues around the country in March 2014. In the meanwhile, you can hear several of O’Brien’s other compositions on her Soundcloud page.—FJO]

Sweeter Music and High Art

Posted on December 18, 2013 by - Field Reports, Headlines

Sarah stipulated that the music should be about war or peace, “but preferably peace.” War seemed easy. Almost everything I had done in the last few years had to do with it. Peace was harder. I started War Dances, but soon got into trouble and couldn’t go on. So I dropped war and turned to peace.

—Frederic Rzewski, on Peace Dances

Sweeter Music CD
Pianist Sarah Cahill’s A Sweeter Music commissioning project, which has yielded 18 solo piano works that she has presented in concert both in the San Francisco Bay Area and on tour, developed as a response to the Iraq War. Cahill said in an interview with San Francisco blogger Michael Strickland, “After reading news about the latest deaths in Iraq, I would sit down and play [Frederic Rzewski’s arrangement of ‘Down by the Riverside’] as a kind of catharsis. I kept thinking that there needed to be more pieces like this, which are composed in response to a particular war … but can still provide solace and inspiration thirty years later and beyond. … So I really left it to the composers whether their work would be ‘anti-war’ or ‘pro-peace.’”
This fall, the Other Minds record label released Cahill’s recording of eight of the works that have come out of the project. (A second album is planned for future release.) This first CD, titled A Sweeter Music, comprises works by established American compositional voices, including Terry Riley, Yoko Ono, Kyle Gann, Meredith Monk, Phil Kline, Carl Stone, and, of course, Rzewski. There is also a piece written by the legendary experimental art collective The Residents, for solo piano and a recorded spoken text. Many of these composers have created works in response to war previously—Riley’s Salome Dances for Peace, Kline’s Zippo Songs, and much of Rzewski’s output immediately jump to mind—but Cahill’s juxtaposition of these diverse artistic reactions to mankind’s most destructive compulsion makes for a multifaceted and complex collective statement.


Only two of these works include text: whereas The Residents’ drum no fife uses a recorded text that addresses the universality of the desire for both war and piece, in War is Just a Racket Kyle Gann instead gives Cahill herself text to recite while playing, drawn specifically from a 1933 speech by U.S. General Smedley Butler denouncing the military and capitalism. Gann aligns certain chords and cadences with specific words and lines, with solo piano interludes that are pastiches of Americana, evoking a distorted Norman Rockwell image of apple pie. Within this compilation, Gann’s work is the most explicit in its condemnation of war and the motivations that have driven America into violent conflicts.

But Cahill’s title comes from Martin Luther King’s statement upon being honored with the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964—“We must see that peace represents a sweeter music, a cosmic melody that is far superior to the discords of war”—and several of the other composers chose to explore the topic from the pro-peace perspective. Yoko Ono’s Toning takes a conceptual approach, asking the performer to use the playing of a series of ascending major triads as the opportunity for a personal meditation, with each chord ringing like a Tibetan bowl, a looking inward to heal internally before looking back out to the world. Similarly, Riley takes personal compassion as his starting point, using a lullaby played for his grandchildren as a basis for his Be Kind to One Another (Rag), which takes its title from an exhortation by Alice Walker in the wake of 9/11.


As Rzewski notes, in some ways peace can be more challenging than war, but Cahill performs his demanding seven-movement Peace Dances with commanding and assured grace. Utilizing fragments of a number of traditional tunes, Rzewski wrote a series of short and varied works that acknowledge peace as a complex idea. While the ravishing sixth movement features a fluid stream of pentatonic runs with a bright melody ringing out above, by contrast the fourth takes elements of “Die Moosoldaten,” a song by Nazi labor camp prisoners, and builds an ominous canon. The optimistic final movement, “It Can Be Done!,” written both as a 100th birthday gift for Elliott Carter and as a tribute to Pete Seeger, features an ascending pointillistic line, glissing down repeatedly but climbing again. The piece ends with the left and right hands in quiet, settled dissonance.

*
 


A San Francisco-based percussion/electric guitar duo called The Living Earth Show unveiled their new album High Art last month with a performance on the Artist Sessions concert series, recently founded by pianist Lara Downes. Released on Innova Records, High Art is a collection of five pieces that The Living Earth Show has been performing regularly, written for them by a younger generation of composers than those represented on Cahill’s disc: Samuel Carl Adams, Timo Andres, Adrian Knight, and Jon Russell. To celebrate the release, they projected a film for Knight’s Family Man, created by Will Greene, and posted it as a music video on YouTube.
High Art CD cover
The tongue-in-cheek juxtaposition of the title High Art with the charmingly sophomoric album cover photo belies the deeply committed, totally focused playing of guitarist Travis Andrews and percussionist Andy Meyerson. In live performances, the musical communication between Meyerson and Andrews is at times astonishing and has the feeling of being completely natural. At the release event they played three of the works from the album on this concert, from memory. The CD listener is unfortunately denied the pleasure of witnessing the amount of multi-tasking required of Andrews and Meyerson to realize this collection of layered and multi-textured pieces. (Memorization seemed almost a necessity since often no limbs were left available for page turning.)

The album is framed by two works by Adams titled Tension Studies 1 and 2 from 2011, which were among the first works written for The Living Earth Show. Adams’ spacious writing for the duo plus electronics turns the listener’s focus in to the overtones from the guitar or crotales, notes that bend from the guitar and bowed vibraphone, pairs of pitches that are tuned slightly differently, or moments of stillness and resonance with unpredictable durations.

The longest work in the collection is Knight’s Family Man, an episodic work that, taken as a whole, paints a curious American landscape filled with nostalgia and decay, violence and melancholic solitude. The brief movements or snapshots are separated by live-triggered samples of the sound of a slide projector and languorous big band dance music, and as the interludes cut off abruptly the listener is deposited into another place in the expanse.

Living Earth

Living Earth in performance

All Venues Great and Small

Posted on December 16, 2013 by - Field Reports, Headlines

Kevin Puts

Kevin Puts
Photo by Henry Fair

Whenever I attend a concert at the 2,900-seat Bass Concert Hall in Austin, I like to stand up a few minutes before the show starts and have a quick look around. Before moving to the Long Center several years back, Bass was the home of the Austin Symphony Orchestra, an ensemble whose ticket sales managed to put more than a respectable dent in the available seating chart. However, on other performance occasions the balconies can be sparsely populated, and so it was here that my eyes rested minutes before the downbeat of the University of Texas Symphony Orchestra’s most recent concert. A Wednesday night offering at the close of the semester could easily be all tumbleweeds out in the house, but the UTSO doesn’t mess around, and the premier of Kevin Puts’s new work, How Wild the Sea, was enough to all but fill the house.

Puts is no stranger to Austin. He was a faculty member in the composition department at UT prior to his appointment at Peabody, and he has previously worked with other members of the Austin arts community—including last year’s collaboration with Conspirare. How Wild the Sea was the result of a commission from Texas Performing Arts, the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra Society, City Music Cleveland Chamber Orchestra, ProMusica Chamber Orchestra of Columbus, and the Naples Philharmonic, with additional support provided to Texas Performing Arts by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. As part of a three-year initiative, the Texas Performing Arts commissioning project has yielded new works from John Luther Adams, Dan Welcher, and a forthcoming Nico Muhly commission, as well as residencies by eighth blackbird and Brooklyn Rider. When asked to contribute a concerto to this list, Puts’s first thought was to write something for the Miro String Quartet, UT’s quartet-in-residence and for whom he wrote the work Credo. As such, Puts’s new work is a concerto grosso of sorts, which is a bit of a risk even for a Pulitzer winner who, one might assume, can write his own ticket. Puts is well known for his engaging and approachable music, but the market for this particular arrangement is, arguably, modest. Though largely a logistical issue (how easily do you fit a quartet’s touring schedule in with an orchestra’s yearly offerings?) another concern is, shall we say, positional? The Miro stood for the entire performance, and though a standing group is not unprecedented, it’s certainly unconventional and could be a tricky thing on a tour, not to mention having to haul around a big box on which to place the cellist. I saw the Miro and Shanghai quartets placed in an unconventional configuration last year, and while both groups rose to the challenge it’s always a risk to alter the fundamental workings of a chamber group. So, how’d it work out?

Great. It was a truly fantastic piece.

Not just “solid” or “attractive” or some such vague terminology, but really, really great. The work was based on reflections Puts had after seeing footage of a Japanese man sitting helpless on the roof of his house as it was carried away by the tsunami of 2011. Representing the elderly man, the Miro began the piece alone with interlocking minor scales falling quietly through rising arpeggios. This delicate texture was eventually picked up and overtaken by the orchestra, the sense of proportional change quite stunning and made more palpable by a subtle but distinct harmonic modulation. The pace of the work increased and was marked by brass and percussion providing a bed for a return of the quartet, this time with a peppering of sixteenth notes. The second movement seemed less directly related to the suggested narrative of the first and abandoned its formal parry and thrust. Emerging attaca from the first, the quartet and orchestra traded fours seamlessly, flying along at a breakneck pace. Puts is not only a fantastic composer but also a superior orchestrator, and his use of color (in the winds in particular) and natural sense of balance among the instrumental choirs (much less between the quartet and the orchestra!) was uncanny. I don’t know if this piece will live past its commissioner’s performances, but anyone who can overcome the logistical difficulties will be rewarded with a wonderful work for both performers and listeners.

*

Chaz Underriner and Colin Wambsgans

Chaz Underriner and Colin Wambsgans

As regional editor for the greater Austin area (in which I’ll include Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio, among others) I can tell you that while the music is great, the commute is drag. Long trips up and down one highway or another can be tempered with the right playlist or podcast, but the pain of hours spent in a car cannot be denied. However, I’ve got nothing on Los Angeles-based composers Sepand Shahab, Colin Wambsgans, and Michael Winter who, during a particularly thorny winter storm (and you have to remember that Texas has little infrastructure for such relative rarities), recently spent nine and a half hours in a car getting from Denton (a bit northeast of Dallas) to Austin—a trip that typically takes between three and four. The lion’s share of this trip was spent along the 40ish-mile stretch between Denton and Fort Worth; a nail-biting journey during which I-35 became a hellish slip and slide. Fortunately, all three composers arrived no worse for wear (and only a bit late, really) at the small venue in the neighborhood of Travis Heights. Measuring about 20’x100’, the private studio space held around thirty people, counting performers, and was a perfect, intimate location for the composers’ offerings.

Shahab’s Divisions on a Ground was performed by James Alexander on viola, Brent Farris on upright bass, and Travis Weller on violin. Written “for 2 or more bowed strings, sine waves, field recordings, and a metronome,” this performance was set to have a fourth player, but the weather did not permit. The work started with a faint and rising recording of an ocean joined eventually by Farris. The recording bore little resemblance to the “Gentle Ocean Sleepy Time” setting on your nighttime noisemaker, and was closer to a solid wall of constant sound. Farris’s entrance was met with another recorded sound (perhaps an airplane?) which was initially about a half step off the bass pitch resulting in subtle oscillations. A gentle rising chord in the strings developed into a slow resonant counterpoint, with voices leaving and returning and never fewer than two players at once. Long silences divided sections in which Shahab struck a balance between artificial and found sounds, finding common ground between the two sources.

Brent Farris, Travis Weller, and James Alexander

Brent Farris, Travis Weller, and James Alexander

Michael Winter’s Chorale and Finely Tuned Resonators for four electric guitars and sine tones was composed with larger forces in mind, but—along with the wayward violinist absent from the first piece—several of the guitarists lined up to play the tune were also missing. Fortunately, the work allowed for a solo version which was performed by Chaz Underriner. Wielding an Ebow over his semi-hollow body guitar, Underriner began the work against a sine wave beating. Plush pulses in a steady succession moved steadily higher, building to a shimmering crest populated by a lightly sawing sound which somehow resembled crickets. A largely textural work (at lease this version), Chorale still lived up to its namesake with a coda-like section involving more rapidly changing timbres, quick changes on the eighth note sounding like the pull of organ stops in place of the slower harmonic rhythm of the bulk of the work.

The final work, This Is A Long Drive for Someone Who Overthinks Things by Colin Wambsgans also required a bit of on the spot alteration to account for elements beyond the performers’ control. Originally intended to last over an hour and to include a video component, Long Drive was condensed to a 36-minute version for two guitars and two-channel fixed media with no video. Based on a candidly recorded conversation about a Modest Mouse album (highly influential among his peers) from the end of Wambsgans’s college days, the work started with the recording intertwined with the live guitars. Wambsgans and Underriner at times played notes in a pointillistic fashion, occasionally manipulating the tuners to realize a sort of measured vibrato, but for the most part the guitar parts were extremely sparse throughout the work. Though there were sections in which the recorded discussion of the music was echoed in the music (as in the vibrato), as the piece progressed, the ratio of live performance and electronic manipulation to pre-recorded dialogue became decidedly one-sided. It eventually morphed from the Modest Mouse dialogue into a monologue (from a mentor I believe) about the nature of music and composition which, while fascinating, seemed to go down a decidedly different path than the initial material. It can be challenging to get a complete sense of a work from what was essentially an arrangement, and I look forward to hearing it sometime in its full form complete with video to get the full effect.

While certainly distinctive in their own rights, Winter, Shahab, and Wambsgans did present a “sound.” Though Wambsgans work had a Presque Rein vibe with its electronic recordings largely laid bare, and Winter and Shahab played a bit more of a game of “guess the source” by mixing sine waves and natural sounds, there was still an organic element to the marriage of electronics and live play among the works that tied them together and made for a cohesive evening of chamber music. And were it not for the shuffling of the order of works and a few required changes, one would never have known what the composers went through to present their music that night. The show must go on, indeed!

Music for Angelenos, by Angelenos

Posted on December 5, 2013 by - Field Reports, Headlines

An overview of Los Angeles (composers!) at Walt Disney Concert Hall

An overview of Los Angeles (composers!) at Walt Disney Concert Hall
Photo by Federico Zignani

This Tuesday, the Los Angeles Philharmonic finally took the leap and programmed a concert of works all by Los Angeles composers—Sean Friar, Julia Holter, Andrew McIntosh, and Andrew Norman. Composer John Adams, who conducted most of the concert, had a hand in selecting these pieces, and to his credit, it was an extremely eclectic program that showcased the range and depth of talent here.

Sean Friar’s Little Green Pop, originally written for Ensemble Klang, began with a series of poignant, resonant chords before breaking them apart, rendering them into more capricious, pointillistic textures meant to invoke the popular music of imaginary aliens. Inexplicably, at this concert the piece was drenched in artificial reverb, which turned some of the piece’s extremely compelling, dense rhythmic interaction into a wash. But fortunately, this didn’t manage to bury the music’s obvious charm and wit.

The reverb continued throughout Julia Holter’s haunting Memory Drew Her Portrait, though here it was justified, even necessary. This piece was more concerned with setting a mood than creating a trajectory, with long, enigmatic pauses between phrases. Holter set and sang her own text, an evocative poem about separated lovers, inspired by the letters of medieval composer Guillaume de Machaut. The influence of early music was also readily apparent in the restrained harmonic language of the ensemble, making the barest hints of chromaticism feel extremely powerful. Modernity creeped into Holter’s vocal style too, which was somewhere between the pure tone of early opera and the more colloquial, speech-like character of a pop singer.

LA composers

(l to r) Composers Andrew McIntosh, Julia Holter, Sean Friar, and Andrew Norman.

After intermission, Andrew McIntosh’s Etude IV seemed to strip music down even further to its barest components. Arranged for two clarinets (James Sullivan and Brian Walsh) and violin (Mark Menzies), the piece consisted of slowly shifting patterns of just intonation intervals. The unadorned austerity of this piece made it challenging for some concertgoers, but I found it riveting after losing myself in the pattern of subtle harmonic changes.

The finale, Andrew Norman’s Try, proved to be bracing and invigorating after the relative tranquility of the rest of the concert. The piece begins with what almost sounds like a mistake, a fragment of a piano arpeggio, before exploding into a relentless flurry of ideas from the rest of the ensemble. The orchestration is dazzling, with each gesture so distinct that even brief moments are instantly recognizable when they recur. Adams seemed most in his element here as a conductor, and for the first time on the program I could see a direct connection to his music. The bouncy rhythmic interplay and flashes of orchestrational color reminded me a bit of Adams’s Son of Chamber Symphony, though Norman’s harmonies and timbres are a lot pricklier.
Norman has a few more radical ideas, too. After a furious climactic moment where you’d expect a John Adams piece to end, the piece returns to the initial piano arpeggio, which becomes a descending broken chord that is reiterated over and over, with slight variations. This revealed what the piece was about—having the courage to be wrong while having the patience to get it right.
I’m trying to decide if this program makes a statement about LA composers as a whole, or if there’s any particular aesthetic bent that can be detected. I don’t quite think so, though the progression suggested a narrative of sorts, a metacomposition that tried on a few different versions of minimalism, briefly erupted in a maximalist outburst, then returned to introspection and calm. There was also a kind of shared indifference to formal convention. All the pieces had at least moments of deliberate meandering, taking their time, refusing to be hurried. Only Andrew Norman’s work seemed tightly structured at first, before thumbing its nose at structure at the very end.

Maybe this expansiveness is Californian after all. The vast imagination on display, if nothing else, was certainly a testament to this.

If Elton John Sings But Everyone Else Does Too, Does It Make a Sound?

Posted on December 5, 2013 by - Field Reports, Headlines

I spent my adolescence doing musical theater. As teenagers, my friends and I went through life singing and dancing—in hallways, parking lots, cars, and kitchens. Our friend Nick was a harsh critic of this practice.

Whenever someone launched into a melody, he’d ask, “Hey, who sings that song?” And regardless of our enthusiastic answer, his grim punchline was always the same: “Yeah—let’s keep it that way.”

I thought of Nick this past Saturday night, as I sat in an unnervingly large crowd at the Allstate Arena to hear Elton John. Because the problem was, sometimes I couldn’t hear Sir Elton over the other eighteen thousand people in the room.

Scene from an Elton John concert in Cincinnati, Ohio, 2009

Scene from an Elton John concert in Cincinnati, Ohio, 2009
Photo by Sean Biehle on Flickr

As a performer myself, I found it deeply unsettling to see someone as legendary as Elton John get sonically engulfed by the voices of his adoring fans. These people had paid hard-earned money and traveled on a cold night to hear one of the great heroes of pop music perform live. That’s really him up there! It’s not your stereo this time! I argued silently. John sounds fantastic, and to hear the way he delivers these melodies as a man in his sixties is fascinating. Yet at the climactic moments of “Rocketman,” or “Your Song,” or “Yellow Brick Road,” it was their own unremarkable voices the audience apparently wanted to hear.

Today, I will put on the mantle of the classically trained elitist curmudgeon and inquire: what is it with people and singing along? No really, what is it? Here, I offer four possible explanations for a phenomenon that, for anyone who celebrates live performance, doesn’t make much sense.

1. Let’s start with the most compassionate explanation—the one that assumes that human beings are good people who don’t want to endlessly aggravate each other. This explanation goes as follows: audiences sing along at concert because singing is fun, and it feels good. Singing your favorite songs with a big group of people, being close to all those bodies breathing and resonating, can be a joyous expression of togetherness. Most adults haven’t been part of a singing community since they were thirteen years old. On some primal level, they miss it. They crave the experience of merging with and becoming part of their favorite music. And then one evening, they come face to face with one of the greatest songwriters of all time. They get excited. And when human beings get excited, they sing.

2. If we’re not feeling so generous towards our fellow human beings as they drink Miller Lite under a giant dome and drown out Sir Elton’s subtle melismas and timbre changes (seriously!), it may be time for a slightly less warm-and-fuzzy explanation: they’re blithely singing along because they do not acknowledge the humanity of the live performer. To these singers-along, what Elton John decides to do with this spontaneous vocal moment is irrelevant. What matters to them is the melody they’ve heard, memorized, and sung along with for the past three decades. Trying to convince them to pay attention to a live vocalist is like trying to present a homemade bechamel sauce to someone who loves Kraft macaroni and cheese too much to care. (I know—ouch.)
3. Still angry about the sing-along, but don’t want to hate everyone around you? Consider the possibility that, plain and simple, the hegemony of the recorded “hit” is to blame. It’s hard to imagine a piece of music whose recording feels more definitive, more final and complete, than “Tiny Dancer.” The way that a typical listener relates to these recordings—via some speakers, an iPhone, and the American open road—has obliterated the song’s possibility of existing as a live, changing, in-the-moment experience. I mean, even the cast of Almost Famous couldn’t resist singing.

4. Not convinced by any of the above? There’s one final, sobering possibility, which is that the singers-along aren’t the problem—I am. Maybe there’s nothing offensive about belting along to music that, after all, seems custom-made for exactly that. “Bennie and the Jets” can survive the senile humming of the man next door in a way that a Mozart string quartet cannot. The massively powerful sound system of the Allstate Arena made it possible (most of the time) for me to hear Elton over the crowd. Instead of casting sidelong glances at my neighbor, perhaps I ought to have remembered the all-important adage for surviving a crowd: If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.

100 Guitars Rock West Coast Premiere of Rhys Chatham’s A Secret Rose

Posted on December 4, 2013 by - Field Reports, Headlines


On November 17, 100 electric guitarists gathered with their instruments and their amps on stage at the Craneway Pavilion—a former car assembly plant situated on the San Francisco Bay in Richmond, California—for the West Coast premiere of Rhys Chatham’s A Secret Rose. Written in 2006, A Secret Rose had only received two prior performances, undoubtedly due in part to the scale of the venture: musicians for this performance, which was presented by Other Minds, traveled from Europe, South America, and at least a dozen states across the country to be part of this guitar orchestra performance, conducted by Chatham.
West Coast Premiere of Rhys Chatham's A Secret Rose
What does an orchestra of 100 electric guitars sound like? Chatham has been exploring the many possible answers to this question for three decades, starting with his 1983 work An Angel Moves Too Fast to See. Built in five movements over approximately 75 minutes (with a short tuning break), A Secret Rose fulfills one’s expectations of 100 electric guitars playing simultaneously in the same 45,000 square-foot room—that is, tongue-lollingly loud shredding that triggers involuntary head bobbing—but Chatham covers far more ground than that, and the use of volume is not simply for volume’s sake. The influence of Chatham’s early work with La Monte Young exploring tunings, drones, and overtones emerges in sections where the fundamental is so strongly established that a broad range of aural images emerge hallucinogenically in the air through the overtones: people chanting and yelling, swarms of insects, giant revving motors, dog whistles, and an airplane all made cameos in my mind’s ear.
West Coast Premiere of Rhys Chatham's A Secret Rose
The musicians for A Secret Rose are divided into three groups, each with a section leader (in this case, David Daniell, Seth Olinski, and Tobin Summerfield); each group is further subdivided into two smaller groups. Holding the masses together were Chatham, dressed in a proper suit and tie at the center podium playing the part of the conductor with a baton, and the three section leaders stationed on the sides—cuing, clapping, yelling, fist-pumping, and paper-waving to help keep the train on track. The conducting team was supported impressively by bassist Lisa Mezzacappa and drummer Jordan Glenn, who provided a steady foundation and energetic drive throughout.

Chatham has said, “There’s nothing like the sound of 100 guitars playing quietly,” and he explores this sonority in the third movement, thinning out the texture and having individual musicians play single pitches. Chatham left his conducting post and walked among the musicians, triggering pointillistic mini-bursts of sound as he passed. As the nebula of aleatoric pitches amassed, a giant celestial harpsichord seemed to emerge, with the fingers of the guitarists as the plectra—perhaps unsurprising, given that Chatham’s first instrument as a child was a virginal.

Other sections drew strongly from Chatham’s rock background, with homages and references to myriad styles and artists scattered throughout—each person I spoke to afterwards heard a different selection of influences embedded within the piece. The second movement was at times downright tuneful, a series of giant-scale rock instrumentals; at other points, it presented a great vibrating wall of sound that you could feel on the skin. Chatham set major and minor chords grinding upon each other across the sections, all the more unsettling at a heightened volume. Multiple concurrent meters were frequently used, creating the sensation of a behemoth machine with a variety of differently sized gears, moving itself forward with an immense amount of energy and effort. Despite the near unanimity of orchestration, the textural variations that Chatham found made for a constantly shifting and surprising listening experience.


A Secret Rose was a special presentation by Other Minds, led by the San Francisco Bay Area’s experimental music evangelist Charles Amirkhanian. In June, Other Minds hosted a performance of Chatham’s seminal Guitar Trio at The Lab in the Mission (covered previously in NewMusicBox here) as a preview to A Secret Rose. At an event later that week, a lengthy conversation between Amirkhanian and Chatham was videotaped and posted in chunks on Vimeo. One excerpt, in which Chatham talks about going to his first rock concert ever—which happened to be the Ramones at CBGB—is posted above. Other Minds does an extraordinary job not just archiving the organization’s activities but also making those recordings available to the public. A full recording of this performance of A Secret Rose is scheduled to be posted at RadiOM when it is available.
West Coast Premiere of Rhys Chatham's A Secret Rose
As the guitarists were tuning after the quietly plucked third movement, I commented to my companion that it wasn’t quite as loud as I had anticipated, since free earplugs were available at the front desk when we arrived. The final movement removed any disappointment on that front: with the full ensemble pounding on one minor chord for minutes on end, overtones began screaming like banshees in the cavernous space of the pavilion, and 100 variations on how rock guitarists move and sweat while shredding came on display. As a final gesture, Chatham himself took up his guitar and turned to the audience, faced up to the skies and fell to his knees, providing that moment of punk rock catharsis that we all had been waiting for.