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M.E. and Brett Campbell

Robert Kyr just enjoyed the kind of months most composers dream of. Recent events have tested the 54-year-old composer’s self-asserted ability to get by on a couple hours per night, however, and forced him to trade in his dream time just to keep up with the demands of his waking life.

In Portland, the new music ensemble Third Angle performed his second Violin Concerto. Three days later, the University of Oregon School of Music in Eugene staged an all-Kyr concert in which his faculty colleagues and some students performed his music, with the composer himself playing various keyboards and percussion instruments during his chamber symphony Transfigured Lightning. Later that week back in Portland, the David York Ensemble sang Kyr’s “Alleluia for Peace” at the beautiful Grotto. Then, just a few weeks later, the Oregon Repertory Singers, whom Kyr once served as composer-in-residence, performed his The Divine Image for cello, chorus and piano at Portland’s St. Mary’s Cathedral, and the Yale Symphony Orchestra played Kyr’s Fanfare for a New Dawn at UO.

Somewhere in there, when he wasn’t zooming up and down Interstate 5 to participate in rehearsals for all these performances or teaching classes and attending to his other duties as chair of UO’s composition department, Kyr found time to fly to Minneapolis for several performances of his a cappella work “Living Peace,” that was earlier sung in Nagasaki for that city’s commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the world’s last (so far) atomic bomb strike. The work is a transformation of the third movement of his tenth symphony, Ah Nagasaki: Ashes into Light, a collaboration with Japanese writer, calligrapher, and artist Kazuaki Tanahashi, commissioned by the city’s Peace Museum.

Such a frantic schedule is nothing new for Kyr, who obtained music degrees from Yale, University of Pennsylvania, and Harvard, and also studied at London’s Royal College of Music, MIT, and Darmstadt before joining the UO music faculty in 1990. He’s since made the composition department into a model of stylistic diversity—requiring, for example, that students compose for Balinese gamelan and study non-European musical forms. Over the past decade or so, he created several ongoing contemporary music performance series at the university and sextupled the size of the composition program.

His pedagogical emphasis on diversity reflects Kyr’s vast range of interests, which have produced a decidedly non-doctrinaire compositional voice that embraces influences from around the world and across the centuries. His music is intentionally quite accessible to broad audiences, while, especially in recent years, increasingly free from conventional constraints. The influences of Indonesian gamelan music, medieval music, and American hymns are especially evident.

For all its diverse influences, much of Kyr’s music shares an overriding concern for peace, as many of his titles attest. He grew up in an Ohio family where World War II’s wounds still burned, inspiring his lifelong pacifism. From 1999-2002, he directed a special UO program, Waging Peace in the New Millennium, that sponsored community workshops and lectures on peace and issued an international call for scores resulting in the creation of a sizable repertoire of new choral music on peace-related texts.

Nature has also been a frequent presence in Kyr’s work. He moved to the Northwest to be closer to its soaring vistas and also has drawn upon the canyons of the Southwest; he spends part of each year composing in a New Mexico monastery.

Kyr’s frenetic pace shows no sign of slowing. In September, Chanticleer sings Kyr’s In Praise of Music, which it commissioned, in the San Francisco Bay Area. In December, the Moscow State Chamber Choir premieres his Elegy. Next April, the New West Symphony in Los Angeles is scheduled to premiere his twelfth symphony, Yosemite: Journey of Light, a collaboration with photographer Lawrence Janss, in which images of Yosemite will be projected on a screen above the orchestra. A month later, the Oregon Symphony plays his twelfth symphony in Portland, and its string quartet debuts his third quartet alongside performances of his first two. The acclaimed Portland-based choir Cappella Romana will perform his settings of environmental and spiritual texts related to nature as it tours the Northwest and other regions in 2007-8.

Justin Schell

While the story of Pinocchio is well over a century old, most views of Italian author Carlo Collodi’s work are filtered through Walt Disney’s 1940 adaptation. The saccharine character of the animated version removed many of the story’s darker elements as well as the political overtones of the original. With the multimedia work Pine Eyes, premiered by the St. Paul-based Zeitgeist Ensemble last month at the Walker Art Center, Martin Bresnick sought a “direct, vigorous, vivid, unadorned” conception of Pinocchio to serve as “an antidote to the Disney version.”

Some readers may recognize Pine Eyes. Zeitgeist commissioned a piece from Bresnick in 1996, and the four-movement Pine Eyes was completed in 1998. Premiered in 1999, it was then recorded by Zeitgeist and Bresnick for CRI’s 2000 release of Opera della Musica Povera, a collection of his pieces inspired by the 1960s Italian arte povera movement. Bresnick and Zeitgeist, however, did not want to stop at four movements. “I always had it in my mind to make it bigger,” Bresnick said, but it took six years for that dream to be realized.

The title of the two act, 80-minute work comes from a possible translation of “Pinocchio.” Instead of its customary rendering as “pine nut,” Bresnick instead translated pino as “pine” and occhio as “eyes.” Act I encompasses Pine Eyes’s birth to the attempted murder-by-hanging of the puppet by two assassins, while Act II presents the rescue of Pine Eyes by the blue-haired fairy through his human transformation.

Pine Eyes provocatively shifts between the abstract and the literal in its refashioning of Pinocchio. Bresnick’s music takes full advantage of Zeitgeist’s unique instrumentation—two percussionists, piano, and bass clarinet. Like most of his compositions, it is crafted with great attention to formal structure. Pine Eyes is atonal but generally consonant. It does, however, float around key areas a tritone apart: B and F for the first act, D and A-flat for the second act. Pitches symmetrically revolve around these tonal areas, forming palindromes of various sizes. In contrast to the pitch material, Bresnick utilizes asymmetrical divisions of 12, especially groups of 5 and 7, to rhythmically structure the piece.

More recognizable, however, are the numerous moments that mark Pine Eyes as musical theater. “We had many different roles in the piece,” Zeitgeist clarinetist Pat O’Keefe said, and the group fulfilled them all with great agility and skill. In some cases Bresnick utilized traditional leitmotivs: when the puppet experienced more human emotions, pianist Shannon Wettstein played a series of slow, descending chords underneath O’Keefe’s plaintive bass clarinet. Bresnick also used Zeitgeist as foley, the musicians audibly illustrating the story. When Pine Eyes falls to the ground after burning his feet off, Barringer dropped a set of wooden wind chimes; similarly, the ethereality of the bowed vibraphone evokes the mystery of the blue-haired fairy. In fact, the entire first scene, “Myths of Origin,” is composed solely of unpitched wooden instruments. Such literality, however, is emphasized less and less as the piece progresses, a musical parallel of Pine Eyes’s movement towards humanity.

Martin Bresnick’s score is paired with the digital puppetry and animations of his brother, Robert Bresnick, and Robert’s wife, Leslie Weinberg. A persistent theme in Collodi’s story is how nature and culture, reality and unreality, are continually confused and the images, done after the score was complete, add a visual interpretation to such themes. Pine Eyes, for instance, is a literal stick figure, yet because the human characters are digitally scrubbed of recognizable facial features, the puppet looks the most realistic of all the main characters.

Above all, the roots of Pine Eyes, a work that doesn’t hide the artificiality of its means of production, are in Brecht. Or, in Martin Bresnick’s words, it “shows you the hat where the rabbit comes out.” Conceiving of Pine Eyes in Brechtian terms clearly makes it more than just a children’s story. Collodi’s original tale served as a kind of instruction manual on how peasant Italians—puppets in a less literal sense—could attain middle class status. Most evident in the work’s conclusion, Collodi celebrates Pinocchio’s transformation into a proper middle class boy, as the puppet is literally discarded and a new boy brought into the world. “How funny I was when I was a puppet,” the new boy says condescendingly.

Bresnick eschewed much of Collodi’s moralizing for Pine Eyes, and the work’s conclusion is far from celebratory. A final, grotesque image of the puppet is paired with music that attempts to cyclically return to the key area of B, yet is continually frustrated by semi-tones above and below. With poverty still rampant both at home and abroad, the creators of Pine Eyes seem more suspicious of the value attributed to the middle class, and perhaps its transformative potential, than Collodi.

Such political interpretations are not out of place, yet no one involved in the production forgot that the tale is a children’s story at heart. “We envisioned this piece as one that children will like,” Barringer said. Many children, in fact, attended the premiere performances, and Barringer hopes that Zeitgeist can perform the work for more children in the future. There is also talk of releasing the work as a DVD. Pine Eyes, she believes, is a piece “that can engage schoolchildren, families, and adults,” something not often found in new music circles. Martin Bresnick extends this to an even more humanist position. For him, the story of Pine Eyes contains a deeper truth that “the becoming of a fully-sentient and caring human being is a journey that we all make.”

Scott Winship Photo by Kathryn Gritt

It’s not a secret that folks in the new music community don’t always get along, be it stylistic differences or idealistic ones, but I’m not going to talk about that here. Instead I get the pleasure of reporting on an instance where people are actually playing nice with one another.

New Music Chicago is a coalition of 17 different new music ensembles and organizations here in the Windy City. According to their president, Stephen Burns, who is also director of the Fulcrum Point New Music Ensemble, the organization was formed a year ago to “coordinate schedules, build audiences, and to promote new music.” Patricia Moorehead, founder and director of the CUBE ensemble, also added that Chicago “is one of the only places that has [new music] groups working together.” I can’t tell you how helpful it is that they not only publish a calendar, but they also coordinate schedules to avoid conflicts. One of the most frustrating things about going to new music events is that there always seems to be two concerts you want to attend on the same night. I used to lament, “if only they would talk to each other!” Well folks, the Chicago new music scene is talking, and I’m listening.

This fraternal spirit was on display on May 14th during the organization’s first public outing. Five of the member ensembles—Fulcrum Point New Music Ensemble, the Accessible Contemporary Ensemble, CUBE, the MAVerick Ensemble, and the International Contemporary Ensemble—participated in a free concert in the Chicago Cultural Center’s Bradley Hall. Before I entered the hall, I was handed a flyer advertising the event by volunteers on the street trying to attract meandering tourists and locals on a sunny Sunday afternoon. Located right across the street from the new Millennium Park, the Cultural Center attracts folks from all over, many of whom seemed to find their way to this concert providing a diverse audience of old and young alike (including strollers), new music aficionados, the newly initiated, and a few curious passersby.

The Fulcrum Point New Music Ensemble started the program with two small chamber works featuring trumpeter and NMC founder Steven Burns. The first piece, Hikari (meaning light) for trumpet and piano by Japanese composer Somei Satoh, can best be described as a mix of traditional Japanese elements within a minimalist framework. Over a continuous chordal pattern provided by the piano, the trumpet explores its register beginning with sustained tones that gradually become more animated, emulating a shakuhachi, and ending in a large crescendo. Next up was Trail of Memories (2005) by American Dafnis Prieto. Burns explained that Prieto is a Latin jazz experimentalist who studied the Afrocuban and world music scene in Havana. His composition for trumpet and percussion contains several themes that “act like memories that come back or disappear” and contains elements of experimental music, improvisation, electronic, and Latin grooves. Built around a three-note figure that gets passed between the trumpet and the mallet percussion instruments, the piece starts with a long trumpet line which the percussion accents. As it progresses, the percussion takes on a greater role but still generally remains an accompaniment. Gradually the texture is thickened with the addition of an electronic bell-like track. Overall, it avoids settling into any real grooves until near the end where the percussion finds a Latin beat and the trumpet seems to be improvising over the top.

Next up was the Accessible Contemporary Ensemble performing A Woman’s Beauty (1991) by the American ex-pat Jane O’Leary (currently residing in Ireland). Scored for flute, percussion, dancer, and narrator, the composition sustains an ethereal mood, almost somber, as instruments weave in and out of extended lines of choreography. The narrator’s words (reading from a poem of the same title) are animated by the accompanying elements, finishing with the dancer moving in silence.

CUBE, arguably Chicago’s most established new music ensemble, offered a world premiere by composer Drew Hemenger. Commissioned by soprano Alicia Berneche on the topic of women poets who committed suicide, Hemenger chose the poetry of Anne Sexton. His selection of text was “primarily based on their appeal to me as well as their potential for taking on music, but [I] also have tried to give a glimpse into this woman’s life by showing a small cross-section of her work…there are crazy and tragic moments as well as happy and awestruck ones.” Hemenger’s treatment of the material leaned towards a musical theatre approach in terms of the vocal writing, but the piano would often venture into some interesting territory if only to return to that familiar sound.

The MAVerick Ensemble chose to perform pieces written within the last year. The first was World, conceive a man from the e.e. cummings poem of the same name, composed by MAVerick Ensemble founder and cellist Jason Raynovich for soprano, clarinet, guitar, and cello. The music seemed to flow slowly forward almost like a dirge with hints of Eastern European mystic minimalism. It created a haunting sound world accentuated by multiphonics in the clarinet and reduced range and movement in the soprano. The next piece, Juggernaut for cello and electronics, was written for Raynovich by Paul Oehlers. As its name suggests, the piece is packed full of perpetual motion propelling it forward. The piece seemed to be in a simple A-B-A format with driving chords in the cello and a playfulness between the cello and electronics.

The final performers of the day were the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) who chose to perform Linea d’ombra (1981) by Magnus Lindberg. Translated as “shadowlands,” flutist Claire Chase told me that the instruments “shadow each other” through the piece, constantly chasing each other. The work is incredibly difficult from the performers’ standpoint, requiring them to sing, yell, play percussion, and employ multiple extended techniques in addition to handling intricately complex ensemble playing. The music is very expressionistic and gestural with incredibly virtuosic flourishes. Ultimately the piece ends by decomposition as the flute, percussion, and clarinet surround a single tam-tam and alternate between playing their instruments and pounding out rhythms. Finally, the performance ends with rhythmic vocalizations.

Overall the concert was a great coming out for an organization which should serve as a model for other cities. It showed off the diversity of new music in Chicago in a unified format, from the academic to the accessible. These groups reached out to a broad audience and were well received. Personally, I’m happy to know that, at least for the time being, the community here is willing to work together to further the broader cause of new music in America. See what happens when you play nice?

Roddy Schrock Photo by Hideki Kubota

Ducking out of the deep, deep ghetto of West Oakland into LoBot Gallery, I was immediately hit by what at first sounded like the most genius remix of ABBA’s “Dancing Queen” I’d ever heard. (A dear friend of mine takes the controversial stand that all of Western Musical History has been clearly distilled in the pop music of Abba.) Speaking to Jon Leidecker (a.k.a. Wobbly) afterwards, I realized it wasn’t a remix at all—it was simply the original running at exactly 60 percent the speed of the original. It was made using a nifty granular time-shifting technique which allows you to slow sound down without the usual ’80s-style cliché pitch shifting. It was this aesthetic of technical-wizardry-cum-source-material-silliness that was to frame the local debut screening of Slomo Video, a nearly two-hour ride running in, you guessed it, slow motion.

Slomo Video is the brainchild of Ryan Junell, a prolific video artist who has worked with some of the Bay Area’s most well-known electronic artists and has been at the forefront of the area’s video art scene for quite a few years now. In 2004 he went political, making a surround-sound, four-screen immersive video installation of the Republican National Convention called See The Elephant. (A fresh and interesting idea, but isn’t there something a bit masochistic about immersing oneself in that particular environment?)

Slomo Video is made up of 100 one-minute videos, all very slow, created by a total of 85 artists from all over the country, including myself. One of the standouts of the evening was the work of Scott Arford. Arford’s work creates a sense of not just slow motion, but actually frozen time. For example, in his piece Little Station, his clever usage of a severe form of time-lapse imaging and manipulated field-recorded noise creates a world in which you sense the passage of time, but there is little on screen to indicate how much has passed, how much change has occurred. The intensely restrained imagery is placed in counterpoint to processed noise and rhythmic clicks—it, too, disorienting one’s sense of time. Did we witness a day in the life of this small metal building, or was it a second, an hour, or a decade?

All of the videos in Slomo, working on such a small timescale, rely heavily on sound to make their impact. I’ve never seen a video screening with such a large representation of sound artists. This is one of Junell’s talents: he convinces those working in sound that their audio inquiries are equally applicable in the realm of video art and vice versa. This approach ekes out videos from the likes of people such as Keith Fullerton Whitman and Tigerbeat6 recording artists.

The large-scale form of Slomo has a very musical pacing. The whole evening came across as a non-stop piece made up of one-minute etudes, all weaved together with recurring and expanded themes throughout.

A large percentage of the videos had an element of humor, a kind of absurd slapstick particular to the Bay Area with roots running back to the Beats, formed from the detritus of San Francisco’s past lives as home to gay disco, hothouse of technological innovation, flagship of American sexual liberation, and organizational center to ’50s and ’60s counterculture. Junell’s video Partytime Sleepover is a perfect example of this. It’s made from an old TV commercial featuring Mary-Kate and Ashley advertising their new dolls. In Junell’s version, the Olsen twins are speaking in strange, slowed down and reversed sound with monstrously huge smiles, this image repeated ad infinitum, frightening with its juxtaposition of childish innocence and monstrous, unintelligible high voice. The resultant image has been unnaturally forced, by video technology, to loop over and over, like a disco beat, lacking narrative trajectory. Mary-Kate and Ashley have had a kind of violence forced upon them but without resultant bodily harm—the mainstay of slapstick humor. And, like its predecessors, Junell’s video is amazingly funny. Yes, slightly disturbing, but funny.

It seems that there is a marked tongue-in-cheek quality to so much music and art that is produced in this area. Whether it be the techno-concrete of Matmos, who produced two videos that were included in Slomo Video, or the Residents, whose real identities behind their giant masks are shrouded in a fog of conjecture in local mythology. The lightness of spirit of San Francisco and its environs could be limiting for those who are doing something a bit more centered and earnest. The difficulty of the Bay Area to take itself seriously may sometimes be its Achilles Heel, but it surely is also its saving grace.

Justin Schell

Alvin Lucier’s sonic works often take after the man himself: quiet, gentle, and unassuming. Such is the case with his Music on a Long Thin Wire, originally conceived of in 1977 and recently featured at the Milwaukee Art Museum’s Schroeder Galleria, part of the Santiago Calatrava-designed Quadracci Pavilion. When the Museum officially turned off the work at the end of May, however, it also closed a chapter on one of the institution’s more bizarre episodes, showing that even the gentlest of sounds can have the most visceral of consequences.

Music on a Long Thin Wire was brought in as part of the museum’s On Site series, where artists and artworks are brought in to literally reshape the space of the Schroeder Galleria. Instrumental in bringing this particular work to Milwaukee was Joe Ketner, the museum’s chief curator. Ketner has a long history of working in new music, kinetic art, and sound art, including two previous projects with Lucier. Ketner wanted to explore what “immaterial forms like light and sound” would be like in the architectural space, and Lucier’s work seemed to fit the bill perfectly.

Christopher Burns, a composition professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, also was involved in bringing Music on a Long Thin Wire to Milwaukee. “Given the unusual acoustics of Calatrava’s space,” he said, “it seemed like an interesting place to perform Lucier pieces…that explore the acoustical qualities of a given venue.” The Galleria’s multi-angled marble, glass, and concrete surfaces offered ample opportunities for unusual reverberation.

Milwaukee Art Museum, Quadracci Pavilion, Schroeder Galleria

Like many of Lucier’s works, Music on a Long Thin Wire is constructed with relatively simple means. A single metal piano wire of variable length is strung between two small wooden bridges, its ends clamped to two tables. Embedded in the bridges are contact microphones, which are routed through an amplifier and into a stereo system. On one end of the wire stands a large electro-magnet. The ends of the wire are connected to the amplifier, which is itself connected to a sine wave oscillator. Once the oscillator is set to a specific tuning, the wire will begin to emit a range of sounds corresponding to the aural dynamics of a specific room. Any number of factors, including pressure, temperature, and even the number of people moving about in the space could change the sound produced. Because of these variables, the sound one would have heard in the Galleria could change with each step taken.

Lucier was in attendance for the opening in mid-February, but it was on this first night that things started to go wrong. For some Museum employees, the quiet sounds of the wire went beyond ambient, as they complained of feelings of nausea after listening to the work for extended periods of time. Ketner, Lucier, and Lucier’s technician, Haucke Harder, set out to adjust the work in hopes of alleviating these symptoms, especially after OSHA was contacted about the situation. One theory proposed was that the sheer length of this particular version of the work was responsible. Running the length of the Galleria, the wire stretched nearly 300 feet—the longest version of the piece ever installed. Such a length, combined with the unique acoustical signature of the space, could have produced inaudible, subsonic frequencies that could have had an adverse effect on listeners’ health. Ultimately, however, neither Ketner, Lucier, Harder, nor any of the specialists brought in to adjust the work could alleviate the employees’ symptoms before the installation’s scheduled end. The only viable solution was to reduce the length of the wire and route the piece through headphones.

When I donned the headphones, I was treated to a sound hovering around a medium-range F# that provided an ongoing, if slightly metallic, aural snapshot of the Galleria. Voices and footsteps within the gallery, when registering on the wire, were distant, almost ghost-like. It was like playing telephone with two cans and a piece of string. Even more interesting, however, was the effect that other music had on the wire, in this case a small choir singing a movement from Rachmaninov’s Vespers. Whenever the choir would swell to a greater volume, the wire seemed to come alive, as the sound began to scurry with sympathetic overtones.

These sonic phenomena are indeed interesting and seem to keep to the spirit of Lucier’s work, regardless of the mediation that the headphones bring about. When I spoke to Ketner, he seemed disappointed with how things turned out, but not enough to deter him from bringing more sound art to the Milwaukee Art Museum in the future. What’s unfortunate about the situation, however, is that Lucier’s piece of audience-constituted sound art was reduced to the level of a portrait. With its inherent interactive element all but removed, it became something to be looked at—or in this case, heard through tethered headphones—only from a distance.