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Scott Winship Photo by Kathryn Gritt

Humans have always dabbled with the elements: tried to tame them; tried to understand and master them; and even worshiped them—all with varying degrees of success. Going hand-in-hand with that exploration from the very beginning is the arts—creating the magical with what you have, be it vegetable pigment or an open reed. As long as we are on this earth and the elements stay just out of our reach, we will always strive to capture their essence through art and science.

This is the focus of an ambitious five-year project titled “Essential Art: Essential Elements” undertaken by the Fulcrum Point New Music Project. Currently in year number three of this endeavor, Fulcrum Point has already tackled water and earth. This year’s brooding exploration is air. Not satisfied with simply a light covering of a topic so hefty as one of the elements, Fulcrum Point is devoting their entire three-concert spring season to it. The first took place on January 24 in the new Harris Theatre on the edge of Chicago’s newest cultural attraction, Millennium Park.

Entitled “Light as Air,” the program takes us across the span of a day, from dawn to dusk, with plenty of play on light throughout, composer-style. As the program notes state, “Light as Air” focuses “on the air in the atmosphere as it functions as a prism for light, a metaphor for hope, and a medium for spiritual insight.”

We start our concert “day” with the delicate beauty of Thomas Adès’s Darknesse Visible. Based on a John Dowland 17th-century lute song (“In Darknesse Let Mee Dwell”), Adès deconstructs the piece and puts it back together with graceful delicacy. Performed on the piano by featured artist Andrea Swan, the piece achieves its beauty through its simplicity and lightness. It is almost as if Swan is barely touching the piano and at times her touch is so light that the piano is slow to respond. The Dowland melody exists in fragments and floats in and out as if hanging in a cloud. Simply beautiful.

The sun continues its journey over the horizon in the form of another British composer’s work, At First Light by George Benjamin. Incredibly expressionistic, this work takes its muse from the painting by JMW Turner titled Sunrise. According to the composer, the piece centers around “a ‘solid object’ [which] can be formed as a punctuated, clearly defined musical phrase. This can be ‘melted’ into a flowing, nebulous continuum of sound.” Personally I had a little difficulty holding on to Benjamin’s “solid object” as the entire piece swirled around me in a mass of colors and changing textures, almost as if I was stuck in the dense build up of oil paint on an expressionist canvas. Where’s my absinthe?

As our musical day progresses we come to Charles Ives’s The Rainbow. This is a very brief setting (less than two minutes!) of a popular song although it contains no singer and no words. Rather, the “vocalist” is channeled through the English horn in this instance, which provides the melody as the orchestra weaves its way through a prism of colors. This has got to be one of the shortest Ives pieces that I’ve heard, especially for this voicing. I’ve always been fond of Ives’s use of color and this piece does not disappoint as the orchestra continuously shifts hues under the English horn melody. It left me hanging on the edge of my seat hoping for more when the piece ended abruptly, almost sounding incomplete.

Then we come to a catharsis, or soul-searching time, in Chicago-based composer George Flynn’s Toward the Light. Initially it began as what the composer calls “a short, essentially improvised ‘prelude’ that explored the piano’s middle register.” It evolved more recently, however, into “a precisely notated and harmonically shaped work that starts in the middle register and gradually expands to the piano’s extreme registers.” Ever undulating and moving forward, even in stasis, the piece leads us to “a releasing of sorts from a turbulent and swirling texture to a progressively more floating, serene freedom.” The thing that I really loved about this piece, besides its constant motion, was the poignant longing that Flynn was able to pull out from turbulent banging. One really hears a tortured exploration of the piano with extended periods of tension building, something that perhaps many of us (myself included) have dabbled with in our own improvisations but chose to leave in that form. I sat listening and wishing that I could see someone set this to choreography. The added tension of bodies in motion would really be a treat to see and hear.

As the sun moves across the sky and the shadows grow longer, we come to the work of David Stock, founder and conductor of the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble. In this work, Available Light, Stock combines many aspects of contemporary music into what Stephen Burns, artistic director and conductor of Fulcrum Point, calls “post-minimalist modernism.” The work takes us on an almost schizophrenic journey through Stravinsky-esque rhythms and orchestrations in the first section with sudden shifts to Bernstein harmonizations and restless perpetual motion reminiscent of a Saturday morning cartoons (Tom & Jerry was my first thought—you can almost hear them chasing one another in circles).

Finally our musical day winds down and the haze begins to settle—Purple Haze to be exact—yes, of the Jimi Hendrix variety. Hoping to be treated to something akin to the wonderful Kronos take on this classic, I was unfortunately treated to an orchestration (by Swiss composer Daniel Schnyder) that made me feel like I was back in my middle school gym listening to the pep band (complete with drum set). This rendition was homogenized. No howling feedback, no distortion, no giant stacks of speakers on stage.

And so ends Fulcrum Point’s journey into “Light as Air.”

The two remaining concerts in this series are titled “Breath of Fresh Air” featuring the work of Hannibal Lokumbe (Breath of Life), Melinda Wagner (Wing and Prayer), Stephen Jaffe (Homage to the Breath), David Lang (Sweet Air), Jerome Kitzke (Breath and Bone), and Lester Bowie (When the Spirit Returns), which takes place on March 14, and “Winds of Change” featuring the works of Shulamit Ran (East Wind), Paul Moravec (Tempest Fantasy), Osvaldo Golijov (How Slow the Wind), and Fareed Haque (a world premiere work), which takes place on May 30.

Founded in 1998 by Stephen Burns at the invitation of Performing Arts Chicago, the Fulcrum Point’s mission is to present contemporary music performances “that explore the marriage of classical music and popular culture.” On a quest to redefine the concert experience, the group focuses on “modern compositions inspired by folk, rock, jazz, blues, Latin, and world music, commissioned works, and contemporary arrangements of traditional pieces by composers from around the world.” Or in the words of Stephen Burns, “This is music for today’s diverse, multicultural world. Just like science and industry, the arts also share and are influenced by ideas from all over.”

I am personally looking forward to being treated to further explorations of an element as elusive as the sounds that we put into it.

Gail Wein Photo by Chad Evans Wyatt

I found out about this concert through an email directly from music director Armando Bayolo. There wasn’t any buzz on the usual listservs. No listing in the paper, no active website. So it wasn’t surprising to see that only a couple dozen people had come out to witness the inaugural concert of Great Noise Ensemble in Washington, D.C., last week at THEARC Theater in a residential southeast neighborhood.

Bayolo’s description of the inception of the group—musicians gathered by a shout-out on craigslist.com—as well as the composers-as-performers aspect of the ensemble gave the impression of a small-town, grass-roots organization. A quick glance at the concert program furthered this sense, with scarcely a familiar name on the roster of 17 players.

I arrived during a lackluster rendering of a violin sonata by Andrew Rudin, which had me questioning the professional quality of the group. But the compelling performance of the world premiere of Bayolo’s song cycle Silly Ditties instantly dashed away the student-recital feeling. Soprano Kara Morgan’s engaging stage presence and clear diction gave these appropriately titled songs just the right spin. In pigtails and a simple skirt, Morgan embraced the little-girl character outlined by the children’s lit texts. Some of the songs were a sendup—a tango, Chopin’s funeral march—and all were trite and flippant, but fun. Violinist Andrea Vercoe, cellist Caroline Kang, and pianist Bayolo provided the accompaniment, pulling off the whimsy of the piece with their mock seriousness.

Pianist Kristen Benoit’s great sense of rhythm and syncopation brought Robert Muczynski’s Third Piano Sonata to life. Her light but firm touch made for an engaging performance. Drew Hemenger’s string quartet was deceptively simple, with moments that really shone darkened by just a few intonation ouches. Works by Alec Wilder and artistic director Heather Figi rounded out the program.

Great Noise has three more performances planned this spring. Looming on the calendar are concerts on February 17 at the Sumner School in Washington, D.C., and February 24 at Shenandoah University, both featuring music by Bayolo, Blair Goins, Steve Reich, Adam Silverman, and Tom Schnauber. Later this spring, Great Noise Ensemble appears on the American Composers Forum concert series.

It’s exciting to witness the birth of this addition to the new music scene in D.C. And it will be intriguing to watch Great Noise Ensemble blossom from their humble beginnings.

Alyssa Timin Photo by Ross Hoffman

Ars Nova Workshop, a presenter of improvisational music helmed by the young Mark Christman, is doing well for itself. Crowned Best Jazz Series in 2000, 2001, 2002, and 2005 by the Philadelphia City Paper, Ars Nova has been responsible for more than 200 avant-garde performances since its inception.

Primarily, Ars Nova presents its concerts on the western edge of the University of Pennsylvania campus at alternative venues including the Slought Foundation, a gallery for conceptual and experimental art, and International House Philadelphia, which includes a large concert hall that plays host to Ars Nova’s “Ancient to the Future” series celebrating several “elder statesmen” of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, Inc. (AACM). In November, the Anthony Braxton Sextet packed in an audience of 380. In this neighborhood, concerts draw avid listeners from both the international intellectual scene at UPenn and the West Philly natives who remember, or whose parents remember, when jazz clubs used to line the streets of the city.

On the evening of January 19, I decided to check out a free Ars Nova event at the Rotunda, a classically-inspired space clearly battered by years of use by groups apt to scrawl and tag all over the basement where I went in search of the ladies’ room. On offer was the Arthur Doyle Electric-Acoustic Ensemble.

Doyle, a saxophonist, flutist, and singer born in Birmingham in 1944, describes himself as performing “free jazz soul.” In the ’60s, he spent time playing with percussionist Milford Graves, Pharoah Sanders, and the Sun Ra Arkestra. An unfortunate stint in Paris followed, during which Doyle spent five years in prison “horn-less,” but writing “prolifically nonetheless, producing the first compositions for his songbook: a massive, 300-piece aural memoir.” The work appeared on the albums Plays and Sings from the Songbook, Vol. 1 (1992), The Songwriter (1994), and Do the Breakdown (1997). In the ’90s, Doyle worked with, among others, bassist Wilber Morris and Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore.

Thursday night, Doyle came onstage alone in a day-glow orange cap with shoulder length dreads and an African-print shirt. He sat down and started to free-scat, a rapid-fire mumble and shout. His drummer, Ed Wilcox, joined in soon after, breathing quietly into a harmonica. Next came the rest of the ensemble, Daniel Carter (saxophones/trumpet), Vinnie Paternostro (electronics), and Dave Cross (turntables).

Wilcox worked hard to keep the group in motion. He claims to have “steered” his own group, Temple of Bon Matin, “on a 15-year tightrope between free jazz and heavy metal.” Pretty soon his shirt was off, and he was all over his kit, building a palette of sound. Doyle played his sax hard when he could but rested a few times, breathing heavily, nodding in his chair.

Carter, Paternostro, and Cross watched him closely. The electronics hummed, sang like a bird, whined. They sampled Doyle’s screeches and honks, looped them, processed his scats and yells. Their expressions conveyed that they weren’t sure where Doyle was going next, but maybe they were fine with that. Doyle’s performance was ideally grizzled for the technology his band mates dropped over him. He was raw. When Doyle spoke to the audience, we strained to understand: “Amen bye bye, I’ll see you all later, bye,” I think I caught in his farewell.

Photo by Richard Termine

We here in NYC have been arm wrestling each other for the last of the tickets to Osvaldo Golijov’s “opera” Ainadamar (“Fountain of Tears”). Tonight is the final performance of the three-nights-only production at Lincoln Center—put up as part of a month-long festival celebrating the composer—and at this point it seems that unless you are so bold as to trip a patron and snatch her ticket out of her hand, you’ll probably have to wait till next time. For the less aggressive Golijov fan and those living elsewhere, fret not: rumor has it that there is a Deutsche Grammophon recording in the pipeline.

Despite the fact that this production was packaged with Peter Sellars’s staging and L.A.-based artist Gronk’s faux fin-de-siècle expressionistic backdrop, a recording necessarily shed of these elements will be worth looking forward to, especially if some of the orchestra-vs.-voice balance issues I heard on Tuesday are resolved in the mix. I’m not always a fan of multi-culti scores, but this celebrated Argentinian-American has shown he knows how to work it, probably because he’s lived it. Working here with a libretto by David Henry Hwang, electronic and orchestral sounds are colored with snatches of more traditional Spanish inflection. The voices deliver their lines with a pure, clean pitch—the music itself offering ornamentation enough.

The libretto conjures aspects of the life and death of Federico Garcia Lorca and his friend and champion, the actress Margarita Xirgu. Dressed in simple black gowns, Dawn Upshaw (Xirgu) and a chorus of young women took the stage to begin what turned out to be less an opera and more an evening-length lament. Kelley O’Connor, the mezzo playing Lorca, exuded enough stage presence and charisma to command the necessary attention, even up against Upshaw, who was as striking as ever. Unfortunately O’Connor’s lower-register sound was almost completely buried at stretches by the Orchestra of St. Luke’s under the baton of Miguel Harth-Bedoya. Jessica Rivera’s clear soprano voice (in the role of Xirgu’s student) and Upshaw struggled less, and seemed generally to shoot straight to the ear. Speakers overhead handled the samples.

Photo by Richard Termine

All of the principals were required to pull off acting moves that could have easily turned into a sick sort of parody of the tragic plotline if not handled well, but they did so with notable grace, especially Upshaw who had to project while lying on the floor and pace herself through a death scene that must have accounted for at least 10 minutes of the piece. Some of Sellars’s directorial choices could not be saved by the players, however, especially when it came to the soldiers wandering around in fatigues pointing machine guns at the singers and most unforgivably the execution of Lorca, with the death shot delivered over and over again in a cycle that eventually just made you stare at your shoes until it was finished.

It’s a wrenching storyline, but the music channels the higher passions of the characters rather than the morose circumstances of their deaths. And though I’m not sure if the term “opera” is a very accurate moniker to slap on this 75-minute work, I was struck while listening that it would be my answer to what sort of piece 21st-century audiences disinclined to lose themselves in traditional operatic productions might be hunting for. The show was put up in Rose Hall, part of the Jazz at Lincoln Center megaplex in the Time Warner building (Barry Manilow was upstairs doing his thing the night I went), and I left the theater perfectly content to have forgone the Met pomposity and the three-hour run time. All the intellectual heft was there, just absent the trappings.

Mark Gresham Photo by Angela Lee

Every now and then, composers and performer-composers can use a tall glass of cultural reality check.

As these words are being written, we are approaching Mozart’s 250th birthday this Friday. It’s worth recognizing the degree of public popularity Mozart achieved over two centuries ago. One could hardly think that Mozart, as a composer or a performer, would deliberately avoid finding the broadest popular audience he could.

It need not be re-hashed here how “serious” composers had increasingly distanced themselves from the public ear and its immediate cultural environment over a good part of the late 20th century, including distancing themselves from song—meaning popular song. Would one think that Mozart would avoid the idioms in popular song if he were alive today? One could credibly conclude that he might take the attitude of rock violinist Bobby Yang.

A 27-year-old protégé of Paul Kantor (then at the University of Michigan), Yang followed his mentor to the Aspen Music Festival camp each summer for extended study but honed his rock chops playing at clubs five nights a week. After settling in Aspen for a while, Yang moved to Atlanta in 2003 in search of a larger market, creating original string tracks locally for acts like Avril Lavigne and Collective Soul. He has recently done the same for producer Ron Saint Germain at The Shed in New York.

In November of last year, and again this January 6, Yang came out from behind the studio to perform as a headliner at Eddie’s Attic in Decatur backed by his Unrivaled Players—Clay Cook (guitar), Rob Henson (bass), and Mark Cobb (drums). The repertoire: instrumental transformations of classic rock songs made famous by Led Zepplin, Smashing Pumpkins, Guns N’ Roses, Eddie Van Halen, Jimi Hendrix, et al. Yang’s “not exactly covers” deploy the full-on energy and fun of rock without the sheer volume of arena bands using only amplified acoustic instruments. Yang refuses to play an electric violin, amplifying his number one ax (made in the same year Mozart was born) with a mic strapped on with a No.3 rubber band. The performance and Yang’s energy thoroughly engaged the mixed-generation audience, which joined in a sing-along during Def Leppard’s “Pour Some Sugar on Me.”

Bobby Yang Photo by Melissa M. Bugg

What does this have to do with “serious” composing today? Everything, suggests Yang, who can play Mozart concerti or Paganini caprices with equal facility as he does rock and pop classics.

“So many times I hear people diss pop music as being just three chords. It really isn’t. It’s three chords that can rock 150,000 people at Wembley [Stadium]. I challenge [composers] to do that in their own way. It’s really not about the theories of music, it’s about the passion and the energy you put into it.”

In performance, Yang plays an amalgamation of lead guitar and vocal parts, but not slavishly—instead, with a good dose of improvisatory freedom. “I was taught a clean, pure sound,” says Yang. For rock, he found a different way. To do it, he starts conceptually from that “white canvas” of pure classical sound, which he describes as driving from three elements of bowing:

• 1) Bowing direction. For purest timbre, the bow remains perpendicular to the strings. “This requires the arm roll outward as the bow is pulled,” says Yang.

• 2) The amount of bow hair contacting the strings. “The frog is heavier than the tip, so the bow is rotated for less hair at the frog, more at the tip,” he says, to achieve evenness of volume.

• 3) The point where the bow contacts the string. “The middle of the string is where you get the most torque—too much. [The normal] contact point is about 1″ off the bridge, but the sweet spot varies about 1.5 centimeters [overall among] the different strings.”

“I think it’s a big mistake to work on vibrato until the bow is mastered,” says Yang of playing rock idioms. He jokes that the left hand is over rated, but is adamant about the importance of bowing to style. “If the bowing isn’t right, no amount of effects (like wide vibrato or slides) will cover for you.”

“The classical goal is to imitate a pure-voiced opera singer,” he says. “But to take it beyond that is where I come from. I actually hold back [on velocity] so I can sound like singers on the radio, who don’t sound like Cecilia Bartoli. I focus on intonation, on the ‘breath,’ and little idiosyncrasies. I’ve developed a personality in my bowing, like the little hiccup before Michael Jackson starts a phrase.”

“I’ve watched Ron Saint Germain mix, and you know what he’s listening for? The breath in a singer. He makes sure you can hear it. And that’s what makes his mixes [work for] all these huge, huge bands. There’s something subliminal there, subconscious, that makes them sound like they’re in the car with you.”

“From a composer’s standpoint, I would listen to libraries of popular groups today, find out what textures, what instruments I wouldn’t use,” he insists, avoiding some that are common in classical scoring. “Maybe more collaboration, maybe between someone like Bono and a contemporary composer would completely launch that [composer’s] career.”

Surely Mozart would have liked the idea. After all, his three most successful Italian operas were the product of a close collaboration with librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte. Who knows? Had they written Don Giovanni today, the opera might well have included a song like “Pour Some Sugar on Me”—I mean “Versimi un Certo Zucchero.”