Category: Headlines

Roddy Schrock Photo by Hideki Kubota

I caught the Paul Dresher Ensemble in their second night of performances on April 1 at Theater Artaud in the SOMA district of San Francisco. The space is fantastic and the sound engineering was highly precise; much care was taken in presenting the electro-acoustic ensemble’s particular sound with clarity to the audience. This was a welcome change, as much electronic music is presented in spaces which seem to have sound systems designed for death metal bands. Not that there is anything wrong with death metal, of course.

The first half of the show found the Ensemble giving energetic performances of recent works by Dan Becker, Mark Applebaum, and Roger Reynolds. The most accessible of these was Becker’s Through a Window, described by Becker as a “dialogue between the nostalgic, witty, and sweetly guileless” music of 1920s big bands and his own post-minimal style. His piece, too, was sweet, guileless, and nostalgic: a good fit, I reckon. Whether it was post-minimal or not, who knows? Maybe self-genre-casting is a wily pre-emptive strike on a composer’s part. At least you beat the critics to it.

The division between what composers say about their music and the music itself can be large. In the case of composer Mark Applebaum, it is sometimes huge. In Saturday night’s performance of Martian Anthropology 7*8*9, after having read his program notes, one expected the piece to sound something like a combination of Rzewski’s The People United Will Never Be Defeated and Japanese harsh noise. “Structural clarity and proportion can be tediously mind-numbing…hierarchy seems like a hegemonic, counter-revolutionary plot…completeness seems like a cruel and unusual ideal…focus is overrated (the job of photocopiers); and self-contradiction, as should be plain…is my most trusted gravitational center.”

Applebaum’s music is consistently fascinating and colorful and the performance revealed the deep sense of playfulness and clever orchestration in everything he writes. However, I would not turn to his music for revolutionary hegemony busting. It is striking, actually, how he is able to reign in the natural chaos of homemade instruments, constructed of junk, and make them sound as though they are part of a well-established canon of musical practice. He has an outstanding ability to make a piece based on improvisation and chance procedure sound as though it were completely notated down to the last 128th note. The disparity between his stated ideals and his music as realized may well be a part of his admitted tendency towards self-contradiction, but one wonders what an Applebaum piece that lived up to its rhetoric would sound like.

Roger Reynolds’s piece for narrator and ensemble, Submerged Memories, uses texts by W.G. Sebald. Tenor John Duykers and the Dresher Ensemble vividly played out the themes of shared disorientation in human existence. Reynolds’s impenetrable and affected theatrical approach seemed to purposely alienate the audience as a means to act out, literally, the kind of disorientation one experiences when reading Sebald.

Rounding out this highly varied program, the second half of the concert was comprised of excerpts from Dresher’s recently revised work The Tyrant, made in collaboration with librettist Jim Lewis and performed by the Ensemble, now in acoustic mode, with the role of the tyrant played by the talented John Duykers. Unable to leave his throne, the tyrant is forced to rule only by information provided from his court, the Ensemble providing the soundtrack of chattering yes-men, so to speak. Dresher’s music is deeply intertwined with the text, neither overpowering the other, both playing the role of actors who depend on their fellow performers to vivify their characters. At times surprising, but never unrestrained, Dresher’s music avoids straying too far from the familiar but is consistently fresh and, dare I say, maybe even post-minimal.

Zachary M. Lewis Photo by Nowell York

Margaret Brouwer, head of the composition department at the Cleveland Institute of Music, will receive a 2006 Academy Award in Music from the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Brouwer was nominated for the award along with composers Derek Bermel, Tamar Diesendruck, and David Froom. Each will receive a $7,500 check and a $7,500 grant toward a new recording of their music.

“I’m delighted and honored,” Brouwer said by phone in mid-March, shortly after news of the award was announced. “It’s wonderful to…receive some public recognition.”

Actually, Brouwer has been receiving quite a bit of public recognition lately. In the last two years alone, she’s won a Guggenheim Fellowship and an Individual Fellowship from the Ohio Arts Council. Her latest recording, a Naxos disc featuring her percussion concerto Aurolucent Circles, has also garnered critical acclaim.

Brouwer said she can’t quite explain the recent surge of interest in her music. “I seem to be on a roll,” she said. “I don’t know if my writing has changed recently or people are just starting to become more aware, but I suspect it’s the latter.”

Margaret Brouwer

Then again, her work has changed recently, mostly in terms of tone. Brouwer said she has made a conscious effort to express anger in her music for the first time. “I’ve never written angry music, but today I’m quite upset with the direction our country is taking. It scares me, and it makes me angry. It’s hard to write music that doesn’t deal with that in some way.”

Recent works with elements in this vein include a Clarinet Quintet, a Trio for violin, clarinet and piano, and a set of soprano songs called Declaration. Brouwer said she hasn’t decided yet how she’ll use the recording portion of the Academy Award, but said it’s likely one or more of these will appear on the new disc.

“I’m happy with these latest pieces,” she said. “I was still tweaking them at the time of their premieres, so I think the next step is just to let them settle a little bit.”

Justin Schell

The 2006 Spark Festival of Electronic Music and Art, directed by composer Douglas Geers and held at the University of Minnesota School of Music, was hardly your typical academic electronic music festival. Composer J. Anthony Allen, the festival’s assistant director, believes, “You can go to plenty of electronic music festivals in the United States, some very good ones. What we want to do is engage all aspects of digital art that we can get our hands on.” This year’s event offered not only diversity within electronic music, but also varieties of multimedia collaboration. Headlined by Scanner (a.k.a. Robin Rimbaud) and Alvin Lucier, as well as violinist Maja Cerar and saxophonist Brian Sacawa, Spark’s five-day program was filled with exposure to the work of visual artists, musicians, composers, scholars, and dancers.

The festival opened with Scanner’s keynote lecture and performance. The Londoner surveyed his work over the last two decades, from his early days of “telephone terrorism”—recording, mixing, and releasing of cell phone conversations—to more recent “responsible” projects, such as composing a new anthem for the European Union, Europa25. Scanner’s performance was to bring musicians half a country apart into the same musical environment. The transmission arts group free103point9 was supposed to provide a live internet feed of audio and video originating in Brooklyn, which Scanner would manipulate in real time. Something failed, though, and all that came through was a 110 bpm click track, so the small audience was treated to a solo performance. Scanner’s set oscillated between ambient and more beat-driven textures and was sprinkled throughout with sound samples that spanned from Vietnam to a snatch of banal conversation between a woman and her personal trainer.

Brian Sacawa, widely acclaimed in new music circles for his innovative explorations of the saxophone, performed on three Spark concerts. The first concert featured works by the Dal Niente Composers Group, a collective formed in 2001. Highlighting Sacawa’s embrace of the laptop as a parallel compositional voice, many of these pieces were constructed around the saxophone triggering electronic counterpoints, from the metallic blizzard of Per Bloland’s Quintet to an IDM-like barrage of synthetic pulses near the end of Zac Crockett’s Flight to Flow Between.

In his other concerts, Sacawa explored an expanded electro-acoustic sonic palette. Lei Liang’s Memories of Xiaoxiang transformed Sacawa’s saxophone into a medium for the wails of a grieving wife, her husband killed by an official during the Cultural Revolution. The piece concludes with unsettling vocal samples as both the wife and the official lose their sanity. Not everything Sacawa played was as violent as Memories, however. The Capgras’ Patience Wanes, written by Christopher Biggs, was a musical representation of mental illness that nervously bordered on the cartoonish. With all of his performances, however, Sacawa deftly blurred the line between a performer’s acoustic and electronic sounds.

Maja Cerar renewed her association with Douglas Geers in her Spark performances. The two performed Autopoiesis (literally meaning “self-production”) and Enkidu. For Autopoiesis, Cerar donned luminescent tubing, which a camera and computer subsequently captured and processed before projecting them onto a large screen as the violinist’s ghostly double. At points it visually evoked a digital-era The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, with Cerar’s ghostly imprint dashing behind her. Able to control the elements of the performance through Max/MSP and Jitter, Autopoiesis was one of the best realizations I’ve witnessed of the multimedia possibilities that new technologies have offered to composers and performers.

The high point of the festival, however, was Alvin Lucier’s involvement. The 75-year-old composer’s keynote lecture was refreshingly nonchalant and lacked pretension; he mainly talked about his Sonic Arts Union colleagues Gordon Mumma, Robert Ashley, and David Behrman. At the concerts, the pieces performed were mainly for acoustic instruments and wave oscillators. Cerar and Sacawa performed Violynn and Spira Mirabilis, respectively. Heather Barringer performed Silver Streetcar for the Orchestra, which consisted of the Zeitgeist percussionist exploring the acoustic possibilities of folded metal. Liz Draper performed A Tribute to James Tenney, for double bass and two pure wave oscillators. Draper’s high harmonics intertwined with sine tones a major second apart, but the steadiness of the oscillators was complicated by a clear D from the Southern Theater’s HVAC system. It’s hard to imagine, though, Lucier not enjoying this sonic monkey wrench generated by the acoustics of the performance space.

The most poetic moment came with the performance of Lucier’s Nothing is Real, in which pianist Matthew McCright recorded the melody lines of “Strawberry Fields Forever” onto a miniature tape machine located inside a teapot. After he was finished playing, McCright opened and closed the teapot as the melody played back. Sounding more like a simulacrum than a faithful reproduction, it seemed to memorialize a by-gone era. The simplicity of construction in Nothing is Real and Lucier’s other pieces reveal and revel in an astonishing level of acoustic enchantment, exploring the sonic possibilities of electronic music performances and the spaces in which they are performed.

There were many other excellent pieces performed at this year’s festival, including a digital version of Jonathan Kramer’s Renascence and Kaija Saariaho’s Petals. They were part of the Spark Festival’s attempts to bridge both academic and popular electronic composition—represented not only in the pieces presented during the festival, but also in the Spark Night Life parties where people from all stripes of electronic music could get together and dance.

These groups are increasingly coming together, according to Allen. “Its like two communities trying to shake hands,” he explains, “but not being able to reach far enough. Spark serves as an intervention. We try to get them all in one place at one time and have a celebration.”

Gail Wein Photo by Chad Evans Wyatt

“I didn’t ask people to turn off their cell phones. It wouldn’t matter anyway,” Paul Lehrman told me right after the first public performance of Ballet Mécanique at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Lehrman was responsible for the modern realization of George Antheil’s 1924 extravaganza for 16 synchronized player pianos and a percussion orchestra: three xylophones, four bass drums, tam-tam, seven electric bells, a siren, and three airplane propellors. This is a piece that doesn’t require customary concert hall etiquette—it drowns out most ordinary intrusions. In fact, some more prepared attendees sported earplugs, and at least one had her fingers in her ears.

Antheil’s original score differed only slightly from the installation at the NGA; it called for two live pianists in addition to the 16 synchronized player pianos. Although the composer had imagined that there would be a device that could sync up the player pianos, it did not in fact exist, and the lack of technology prevented the work from being realized in his lifetime. Antheil did perform a modified version in 1927 with just one player piano and multiple human performers, reportedly to riots in Paris and indifference in New York (oh, those jaded New Yorkers!). And he ultimately rescored it again in 1952, leaving out the player pianos entirely, which is the version most commonly presented.

Eric Singer and Paul Lehrman Photo by Gail Wein

Antheil scholar and MIDI expert Paul Lehrman mounted the modern-day premiere of Ballet Mecanique in 1999. When the NGA decided they wanted a musical component to accompany their major retrospective on Dada, Lehrman was the logical go-to guy.

The NGA wanted to have Ballet Mécanique performed daily (through May 14), so, partly as a matter of practicality, this performance is an all-mechanical rendition of the piece. No doubt, Antheil and his Dada cohorts would have appreciated that. The player pianos are controlled via MIDI, and the rest of the instruments are played by robots. Eric Singer, of the League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots, or LEMUR, was engaged for the project, and he had just a few weeks to build the robots. Although the equipment is robotic in design, these machines don’t really resemble R2D2. The mechanisms are essentially sophisticated Rube Goldberg contraptions that automatically, for instance, strike a xylophone with a hammer.

Audience reaction at the preview performance on Saturday was overwhelmingly positive. But that’s no surprise. After all, these folks knew they were about to head into an art exhibit where one of the main attractions is a urinal hung on a door jamb.

A ten-minute excerpt of George Antheil’s Ballet Mécanique is performed at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. weekdays at 1 and 4 p.m., and weekends at 1 p.m. through March 29, 2006. Admission is free.

Photos by Gail Wein

Mark Gresham Photo by Angela Lee

Late January saw the presentation of two very different performance works that tackled the Holocaust as their theme.

Tikvah by composer/clarinetist Burton Beerman, received its Atlanta premiere January 21 in the Martin Luther King Jr. Chapel at Morehouse College, including first performances of three new choral movements recently added to the concert-length work.

For Beerman, an Atlanta native now at Bowling Green State University, it was a kind of homecoming. The composer has had other works performed in Atlanta, but this particular one forges a reconciliation of sorts, a coming to terms with the faith of his youth. Growing up in a conservative synagogue, Beerman recalls composing a piece for worship and showing it to his cantor, who looked, then laughed and tore it up in front of the young composer. An unsupportive talk with a rabbi did not help young Beerman understand the incident; apparantly his music contained religious ideas considered outside acceptable orthodoxy. Decades later, it took an encounter with theologian and Holocaust survivor Philip Markowicz to heal the rift of understanding between him and his religious heritage. At the same time, Markowicz was also coming to terms with his own past: the ability to write and speak openly and publicly about his own Holocaust experience.

Ultimately, the interaction not only produced Markowicz’s memoirs of the Holocaust, but also Beerman’s Tikvah, which makes extensive use of Markowicz’s voice and words on audiotape, and also includes the Kaddish. Like many of Beerman’s multidisciplinary works, this presentation involved video projection of his own creation and dancers (Celesta Haraszti and Anthony Elijah Gilmore).

Red Clay Saxophone Quartet and soprano Andrea Rae performing Tikvah Photo ourtesy of Burton Beerman

But the core of the piece rests with a saxophone quartet and solo soprano. The soloist was soprano Andrea Rae, who is Markowicz’s granddaughter. The Red Clay Saxophone Quartet from South Carolina underscored Rae’s vocals and played the purely instrumental movements. The music made use of Jewish tunes, largely from Beerman’s memory, in sometimes cantorial and sometimes klezmer-infused manners in nine “movements” plus four “interludes,” in combinations ranging from solo sax to the full ensemble plus taped narration—in rhythmic, modern, and sometimes minimalist textures. The use of saxophone quartet is appropriate and significant because the sax was deemed by the Nazi regime as “decadence” of the Weimar era, associated with American jazz, blacks, and Jews—thus “degenerate.”

Thematic connections between the Jewish and African American diasporas were not lost in this presentation. Coinciding with both the 100th anniversary year of the Jewish Federation of Greater Atlanta and a weeklong extension of holiday celebrations following Martin Luther King Jr. Day, the event sought to recognize parallels between Jewish and African American experience.

The three new choral movements contribute to that, framing the overall work: an opening prelude, a prelude to the second half, and postlude, sung by the combined “interfaith chorus” of singers from The Temple on Peachtree and Ebenezer Baptist Church, conducted by Dr. Uzee Brown, Jr. “The text is my own,” says Beerman, “interwoven with biblical texts extracted by Philip.”

Two actresses, Hope Mirlis and Janet Metzger, each dressed as Anne Frank, narrate the story while manipulating a variety of puppets in full view of the audience. Most are simple mannequins (the small kind used in art school) given heads and clothing to represent the principal historical characters. As actresses, Merlis and Metzger, who at first seem to portray parallels to Anne and her older sister, ultimately become two different sides of Anne’s personality as the story unfolds: the young eternally hopeful and the maturing worldly wise.

Chip Epsten, Hope Mirlis and Janet Metzger in Anne Frank: Within and Without Photo courtesy of Center for Puppetry Arts

Other puppets are more threatening. There is a 3-D cubist Dutch “Jewish Council,” and a jack-in-the-box Gestapo officer. There is even a traditional Punch and Judy hand puppet scene about the increasing restrictions on Jews in Dutch law. The audience at first laughs as a taunting Punch shouts “Nein!” and whacks Judy after each legal pronouncement, but the scene turns terrifyingly macabre as Judy, wearing a yellow Star of David, pleads with the audience for help, then is repeatedly pummeled by the bat-wielding Punch whose screams of “Judy! Judy! Judy!” transform with each whack into “Jew! Jew! Jew!”, and she dies.

Not confined to the pit, Epsten is frequently onstage playing either violin or toy piano. He interacts with the others as a kind of wordless observer, an avatar of Jewish culture while he plays, influencing and reflecting upon the story as it unfolds. The most poignant scene involving all three is a dream lullaby, where the Anne doll is rocked to sleep amid the branches of a chestnut tree, Merlis singing “Oyfn Pripitchik,” familiar to many Jewish people from their childhood, while Epsten accompanies on violin, bowless, played in a folk manner like a mandolin.

But Epsten’s score hardly dwells on the sentimental. It opens with sounds of smashing glass, representing Kristalnacht where the story begins. “Hulyet Hulyet Kinderlekh,” a Yiddish children’s song (which essentially says “have fun now kids, childhood is fleeting”) forms a bitterly ironic underscore to the aforementioned Punch and Judy scene, but also later accompanies an attic scene where unfulfilled feelings between Anne and Peter begin to bud, then fade away before blooming.

Most menacing is the undercurrent of Epsten’s “cattle car” music near the end, where the mannequins are placed in a railroad boxcar, represented by a baby doll’s crib, and moved around to various concentration camps.

In the more than half-century that has passed since the Holocaust, the topic has been addressed by many composers, not always with innovative, engaging, or memorable results. But the book is hardly closed on new artistic insights, and if history is not to repeat itself as we become farther removed in time, we might heed the words from Beerman’s Tikvah:

I do not remember
how to not advertise my pain
yet I dare not forget
if there is to be relief
from this madness