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Seattle: Junkman’s Obbligato

Amy D. Rubin
Amy D. Rubin

Seattle claims Trimpin (who uses only his last name) as its own, but the sculptor, instrument builder, composer, and sound artist has only been a local resident since 1980. Born in Istein, Germany, in 1951, he began his creative tinkering at an early age under the tutelage of his grandfather and dad. A master recycler and transformer of found objects into striking innovations, he left his homeland to occupy a place which would furnish him with more useful materials to manipulate. In his own words, “I moved to the United States to have access to junk.” Trimpin: Archival Investigations, housed through February 24 at the Jack Straw New Media Gallery, shows just what he did with all that junk. It’s a retrospective view of some of his best known pieces from the 1970s and ’80s which mark him as a master mixer of computers and traditional acoustic instruments. His work is frequently whimsical, and in the case of the Player Piano Rolls, both archival and practical. The show includes:

Balancing Clown Playback Device

    • (1978): “Four clowns rigged with small amplifiers, speakers, and playback heads salvaged from thrift store tape recorders. They originally ran on wires taken from old wire recordings found at a flea market; a mechanical wheel would tilt the wire up and down, causing the clowns to roll back and forth, playing the sound recorded on the wires.”

Turntables and Pecking Chicken Controllers

    • (1980): “The liquid in the glass chickens is heated up by small light bulbs, causing it to rise to the birds’ heads and tilt them forward: the reflectors on their heads bounce light into the phone sensors. This apparatus functions as a random number generator, which can control a variety of electromechanical devices—in this case, turntables made from pottery wheels and the tone arms from old phonographs. These turntables can also be controlled with a MIDI keyboard or other device to manipulate speed and direction.”

Player Piano Roll Reader

    (1981): “This was specifically designed to convert all of Colon Noncarrow’s hand-punched player piano rolls into a computer database which could then be played back on any MIDI-controlled instrument. The score can also be printed out from the database for editing or other functions.”
Balancing Clown Playback Device
Early multitrack set up with tape recorders

Trimpin’s gallery talk on January 12 was a humorous and personal account of pieces and processes from his past as well as speculations about current ideas waiting in the wings. He mused about his childhood and evolution. While others his age were kicking balls after school, the young Trimpin dismantled radios and reconfigured them to pick up short wave stations. Trumpet was his instrument, and he wondered why it needed to be limited to playing one pitch at a time, and why that pitch had to fit into the system of conventional tuning. These questions led to his construction of the electric trumpet with two bells designed for microtonal polyphony. Mastery of this instrument required vigilant hours of practice with a slow learning curve, and over time Trimpin’s lips gave out.

Balancing Clown Playback Device
Trimpin beside his Turntables and Pecking Chicken Controllers
Photo by Amy Rubin

At this early juncture adversity became the hand of fortune, and the boy with lips too swollen to play turned to the visual art world. As a self-described kind of “sublimation and compensation,” he began to teach himself to draw and, as more opportunities presented themselves, his technique grew to accommodate them. The former brass player became the set designer for Samuel Becket’s Endgame, a production directed by the playwright. Over time things visual and things sonic began to come together. Today he continues to wonder about the potential of making sound visual for those without the ability to hear.

During the Q and A we heard about obstacles to Trimpin’s creative progress here in the United States: lack of funding for new work, lack of fees for presentation, and a lack of respect for artists. We also learned that while he occasionally has student helpers, he functions more like a one-man band without any support from a university engineering or music department. On the brighter side, his work is being presented by a consortium of ten arts institutions over the next two years including Seattle’s Henry Art Gallery, the Frye Art Museum, Consolidated Works, Suyama Space, the Missoula Art Museum, the Vancouver Jazz Festival, and the Tacoma Art Museum.

For me, the evening was inspiring. I saw and heard a man of many talents and limitless imagination. His own actions encourage others to think without boundaries and borders. It’s no wonder that his musical inspirations include Harry Partch, Anthony Braxton, and Cecil Taylor, because like them, his thoughts are large and loose enough to accommodate things nebulous, complex, and challenging.

Trimpin’s current commission for the Kronos Quartet has been under development for a few years. Each player will have a screen showing streaming information (such as seismographic readings regarding the location and magnitude of earthquakes) which will be converted into musical output by the live performers, linking the continuous data to various parameters of sound. In addition, Trimpin will add his motorized bowing wheel into the equation, enabling all the instruments to be bowed perpetually without alternating bowing directions.

I raised my hand and asked, “How will the streaming and transformation take place? How will the real-time decision making occur? How will you work with the players?” My thought was that even after hours of rehearsal, it takes a lot for four people to agree on the interpretation of a Beethoven string quartet. How would he get them to agree on interpreting something this abstract and unfamiliar? Trimpin smiled playfully and with a shrug answered, “I don’t know. I’m still learning.”

***
Amy Rubin, pianist and composer, has written and performed music for the concert stage, jazz ensemble, film, television, and theater in the U.S. and abroad. Following a Fulbright in Ghana, she directed the music program at Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey, was a visiting professor at Cornish College, and now collaborates with the Seattle Chamber Players and the Seattle Symphony. Her ability to embrace all musical styles has brought her many awards including the Washington State Artist Trust Fellowship, the King County Special Projects Award, the 2005 Jack Straw Artist Support Award, and resulted in numerous recordings of her work.

Trophy Time Roundup

Osvaldo Golijov
Osvaldo Golijov
Photo by Caroline Irby

With the Globes behind us and the Oscars on the horizon, awards season is in full swish. Along with the hangover, the New Year also brings the announcement of Musical America’s Composer of the Year. This year’s honor goes to, drum roll please, Osvaldo Golijov! Okay, no surprise here since Golijov has been gathering hype and praise nearing Brokeback proportions. What with a Grammy nomination, his very own festival at Lincoln Center beginning later this month, and the list goes on…bets are Musical America made a smart decision.

While the year may belong to Ang Lee and Golijov, others out there are getting recognized for their work too. Indiana University professor Jeffrey Hass received $5,000, winning the ASCAP Foundation’s Rudolf Nissim Prize for his Symphony for Orchestra with Electronics. The 27-minute work was selected from a pool of nearly 250 submissions. The jury—Gil Rose, Diane Wittry, and Michael Morgan—also awarded a special distinction to composer Paul Richards (Gainesville, FL), and Tyler White (Lincoln, NE) received an honorable mention.

Jeffrey Hass
Jeffrey Hass
Photo Courtesy of Indiana University

Hey, modern composition fans in the Bay Area, your Magic 8-Ball says “Outlook Good” thanks to Silicon Valley venture capitalist and philanthropist extraordinaire Kathryn Gould, who is single-handedly bringing nine newly commissioned works to a consortium of orchestras including Oakland East Bay Symphony and its neighbors, the Santa Rosa Symphony and the Marin Symphony. Meet The Composer just announced the complete lineup for Gould’s Magnum Opus project, which has already supported the creation of new orchestral works by Kenji Bunch, Kevin Puts, and Ingram Marshall. Now add to that list David Carlson, Osvaldo Golijov, Pierre Jalbert, Bezhad Ranjbaran, Roberto Sierra, and Peteris Vasks.

New to the cha-ching circuit is the Beverly Sills Award, which bestows $50,000 to singers between the ages of 25 and 40. The first recipient is the 35-year-old baritone Nathan Gunn fresh off the premiere run of Tobias Picker’s An American Tragedy at the Metropolitan Opera. In another first-ever, Bright Sheng will spend ’06 as New York City Ballet’s composer in residence. As a result, expect two new pieces by the composer during NYCB’s 2007-08 season. Just goes to show you, there’s always something to look forward to.

Cleveland: Arc de Triomphe

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Zachary M. Lewis
Photo by Nowell York

The new year started off brilliantly for James Gaffigan, assistant conductor of the Cleveland Orchestra. With Music Director Franz Welser-Möst in Europe nursing an ear infection, Gaffigan got to preside over one of the highest profile concerts of the season, one that featured Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and a U.S. premiere.

The latter was a captivating new piano concerto by Marc-Andre Dalbavie, the French-American who held the Cleveland Orchestra’s first composer residency a few years back. His orchestral and chamber music is about as well known here as any living composer’s can be.

Even so, Cleveland can stake only partial claim to the new work. Dalbavie’s commission involved both the BBC Symphony Orchestra, which gave the world premiere last August under Jukka-Pekka Saraste, and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, which will perform the work next month. Norwegian pianist Leif Ove Andsnes has been its gifted champion all along and is giving life to a work that deserves to be heard beyond these three occasions.

Dalbavie’s output for piano is relatively slim to date. Not only does this 25-minute concerto make a significant contribution to the modern concerto repertoire, it also represents his first major work for the instrument. It also leads off a cycle slated to include a piano solo, a trio with horn, and a quintet with winds.

Because Gaffigan stepped in relatively last minute, there was a change in the program: Debussy’s Printemps replaced Berg’s Lulu Suite. It proved to be an inspired decision. Although the Berg would have been nice, the concerto and the Debussy proved to have much in common, especially in terms of orchestration.

In designing the concerto’s structure, Dalbavie says William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury was a major influence, in particular the way the author tells the same story in different ways. In a pre-concert talk, Dalbavie also referred to clouds and our tendency to see shapes in them that aren’t really there, saying he wished to create a musical equivalent.

One shape, at least, is definitely there: the downward arc. The pattern reappears numerous times in each of the three interconnected movements. It comes in various guises, too, from dense, crashing chords to smooth, descending scales and arpeggios. The force of musical gravity is so strong in the third movement, it sounds like the orchestra is tumbling off a cliff. At other times, the arc pattern flattens out and the orchestra drives the piano onward with a chugging rhythm reminiscent of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. Indeed, the work comes to a halt on a violent thump.

Overall, though, the concerto is actually fairly temperate, and the calmer, quieter material comprises this work’s best side. Twice in the first movement the pianist pauses for a cool, questioning rumination, while the second movement starts off with a long solo section occupied mostly by airy single notes. These give way to a giant, colorfully orchestrated surge mimicking some of what the piano had done earlier and would do again.

Chicago is in for a treat. Gaffigan, meanwhile, goes down in history as having introduced the U.S. to a great new concerto for the 21st century.

***
Zachary Lewis is a freelance arts journalist in Cleveland, Ohio. He covers music primarily but also dance, art, and theater. He writes regularly for the Plain Dealer, Cleveland Scene, Angle, Dance Magazine, and Time Out Chicago. Lewis studied piano performance at the Cleveland Institute of Music and holds degrees in English and Journalism from Ohio University and Case Western Reserve University, where he will conduct a Presidential Fellowship in arts criticism in the fall of 2006.

Baltimore: Audience On Its Feet to Welcome Alsop


Marin Alsop

Much has been made about Marin Alsop’s appointment as the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra’s new music director—a post she’ll assume from out-going director Yuri Temirkanov beginning in the 2007-08 season. There’s the fact that she’s the first woman to hold a position with a major U.S. orchestra. And there’s also the fact that her appointment generated a lot of controversy, especially considering that nearly 90 percent of the orchestra’s musicians criticized the search process heavily, arguing that their input wasn’t given serious consideration. Be that as it may, the process is over, hopefully any bitterness has been put aside—she actually held a meeting with the musicians to talk about the search process and their feelings—and Maestra Alsop will lead the BSO full time, like it or not. Last Thursday, Baltimore got a glimpse of the maestra in action as she led the orchestra in a program featuring Christopher Rouse’s Symphony No. 1, Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 12 in A Major, K. 414 with pianist Leon Fleisher filling in at the last minute for Piotr Anderszewski, who cancelled due to “an over-commitment of performance engagements in the coming weeks,” and Dvorák’s Symphony No. 7, op. 70.

To say the least, Alsop’s appointment marks an immense change at the helm for the BSO. Gender aside, she’s relatively young, is largely American-trained, and is known for giving new music more than a fair shot. The former was evident from the get-go as the program—and her tenure with the orchestra, as far as Baltimore seemed concerned from the incredible welcoming standing ovation she received—began with Baltimore-native Chris Rouse’s one-movement Symphony No. 1. Speaking to the audience from stage before beginning the work, she expressed her excitement about being there and gave the audience a glimpse into the work, explaining how Rouse built the piece around the pitches B-A-C-H and using the orchestra to illustrate her words sonically. I liked this. She wasn’t “dumbing down” for the crowd, and her use of a little humor—”In the middle of the work, Mr. Rouse used the initials of many people he didn’t like,” which was followed by a cacophony of dissonance—was tasteful, effective, and right for the moment.

Alsop’s address to the audience stirred memories of another charismatic former BSO music director—David Zinman. I used to love Zinman’s programs with the BSO, the way he blended new American works with “old favorites.” But not only that, he frequently spoke to the audience from stage, which I think makes everyone feel a little more comfortable, especially those that might be wary of a new piece of music—or a piece of new music. It’s an interesting switch to have swung from one extreme (Zinman) to another (Temirkanov) and back now with Alsop.

I’ve noted before that the criticism often slung at Temirkanov might not entirely be a result of his own doing. There was a whiff of that last Thursday. During the Rouse, the orchestra really seemed to be defying Alsop’s ictus. At times her hands would go down, come up, and start back down before the orchestra produced any sound. While there’s usually a degree of conductor-orchestra lag time, this seemed so incredible that I had to take note of it. Despite this, the orchestra sounded fabulous all night long—the sound was warm, coordination was excellent, and the intonation was very close to perfect—although I thought I detected a drop in energy somewhere in the middle of the Dvorák, which, by the way, she conducted from memory.

Walking out of the Meyerhoff after the show was interesting as I tried my best to eavesdrop on as many conversations as possible. As you might expect, everyone was buzzing about the maestra. Actually, there was a lot of buzz both before and after the concert, something the review in the Sun captures well. (Interesting that the article doesn’t speak a lick about the program, her conducting, or the performance.) Many of the comments I heard, and of course I could only hear a small sample, sounded slightly disappointed, like she might not have lived up to the hype that the BSO had created. “Well, she is the first woman conductor of a major orchestra in the United States.” “It wasn’t really what I was expecting.” “She’s different than I thought.”

It’s understandable that people might have been slightly disappointed. First of all, the program wasn’t all that flashy. In contrast to Temirkanov’s programs, which featured many a warhorse, there weren’t any truly recognizable works on Alsop’s program that Baltimore concert goers might be able to sing in the shower the next morning. Second, she’s got kind of a strange style. It’s not flamboyant. It’s not grandiose. She doesn’t get up there and put on a show. But that’s the thing, there are conductors who don’t put on a show but still exhibit a certain power over an audience. I hope I don’t get struck by lightning by saying that her conducting style isn’t all that special. It’s a little tight. She tends to lurch at the orchestra bent over slightly most of the time. And another thing that might have contributed to an audience member’s disappointment last night given the grandness with which her appointment was announced, is that she is a rather diminutive presence on stage—physically, not musically. Hey, although I’m pretty sure her height didn’t affect my opinion of her performance, I’m just saying…

I hope Baltimore embraces Alsop. And I hope she puts a little spice into the orchestra. If anything, her commitment to new music should be applauded and welcomed. Her track record indicates an interest in fresh, inventive programming—something Baltimore hasn’t had much of in a while. If she isn’t the second coming of Christ, who cares?

Chicago: The Greatest Show on Earth

Scott Winship
Scott Winship
Photo by Kathryn Gritt

I didn’t hear a thing, I heard everything…well, at least in the eyes of John Cage, that is. Nothing and everything was happening at the Chicago Composers Forum’s Chicago premiere of John Cage’s multitudinous Musicircus at the Museum of Contemporary Art.

Even though it received its premiere in 1967 just down the street at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champlain, Musicircus has never been performed in Chicago. The ideas of Cage’s Musicircus exist mainly in various writings—Cage never actually wrote or published a score. As David Patterson puts it in the program notes to the performance, the idea of Musicircus brings together “the expression of several of Cage’s fundamental ideas about artistic creation and execution.” In a letter dated June 6, 1973, Cage wrote about Musicircus:

“You simply bring together under one roof as much music (as many musical groups and soloists) as practical under the circumstances. It should last longer than ordinary concerts, starting at 7 or 8 in the evening, and continuing, say, to midnight. Arrange performers on platforms or within roped-off areas. There must be plenty of space for the audience to walk around. If you have more groups than places, make a schedule….There should be food on sale and drinks (as at a circus). Dancers and acrobats.”

Well, as much as I wanted there to be elephants walking around at the Museum of Contemporary Art, that was not the case. There were, however, clowns (the Environmental Encroachment marching band), “Siamese” twins (a violin duet of young identical twins), and instead of a bearded lady, there was a mustached lady performing as Salvador Dali, providing mustaches and free Dali-esque portraits on Post-it® notes for the audience. All that and a DJ named Jesus, men in dresses, a guy in a wolf suit chasing a man in underwear with a deer hoof as a phallus, a ninja band, and way too many things to list in this article.

After attending so many new music concerts, I now realize that those that have the special ability to reduce me to the mindset of a giddy 5-year-old, such as this concert did, have been too few and far between. I was telling everyone (even strangers) that they needed to go just to see what could possibly happen. How many times do you get to see musicians, performance artists, dancers, and ordinary people all thrown into a blender and served up for a good solid four hours? The CCF performance was the brainchild of its current president, Christopher Preissing who, while working on his Ph.D. dissertation in multimedia, coincidentally at UI-UC, got more involved with the works of Cage and decided to bring this one to fruition in Chicago. As Preissing put it to me, Musicircus was a great vehicle to “build awareness” about the CCF, create a “very welcoming and opening kind of event” (not only for the audience, but for the performers as well), “and bring together the music community in Chicago.”

And bring it together they did. From my recollection, every new music ensemble operating in Chicago was represented and then some: a Suzuki guitar class performing “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” in a room next to male performers dressed in drag; performers dressed up in painters outfits (complete with respirators) being cheered on by cheerleaders as they chant; more traditional ensembles such as a full choir with piano accompaniment, brass quartet, or percussion ensemble, next to multiple radios and performers realizing Cage’s Imaginary Landscapes No. 4; and while using the men’s room, those of us at the urinals were treated to a performance art piece by young women sitting in the stalls having a conversation (reading passages to each other). True to Cage’s aesthetic, no bias was made and all told there were about 100 different ensembles and over 500 performers.

Spread across all three floors (indoors and out) of the MCA there were so many things going on that by the time you went from bottom to top and back again the ensembles had changed and you could start fresh again.

One of the things that really surprised me was the fact that so many ensembles decided to use this opportunity to perform many of Cage’s other works. Although this was never part of the design of the event, several groups choose to do this, which provided a wonderful opportunity to actually hear many of his works (a large amount of which I had never heard performed live).

The event proved to be a huge success with between 4,000 and 5,000 people attending. The MCA was so pleased that they are hoping to have the CCF do the event again next year. I’m keeping my fingers crossed for some musical elephants the next time around.

***
Scott Winship is the Associate Director and Youth Jam Coordinator for Rock For Kids, a non-profit organization dedicated to helping Chicago’s homeless children through Holiday relief programs and Youth Jam, a free music education program for underprivileged children. He has received degrees from Central Michigan University (music education) and Bowling Green State University (composition). Currently living in Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood, he tries to find as much time as possible to write music, attend concerts, and drink good beer. Upcoming performances of his work will be taking place in Chicago and Tucson.

San Francisco: Summoning the Ghosts of Ideas Past

Roddy Schrock
Roddy Schrock
Photo by Hideki Kubota

It was another concert of difficult modern music and the seats were packed. At this rate, one might be led to believe this stuff is actually becoming popular in San Francisco. Maybe it was due to the marketing brilliance of Other Minds presenting the day’s marathon three concerts under the moniker of a New Music Séance. And really, what is a concert besides a reconnection with the ghosts of ideas past.

Inside the mystical atmosphere of the Arts and Crafts-style Swedenborgian Church, the ghost that haunted the final concert of the day was that of Henry Cowell. His sound, that of a particularly West Coast experimentalism, was the link that held the puzzle of the evening’s program together. From John Cage up to Mamoru Fujieda, one could hear the ring of Cowell’s piano the whole way through. This aesthetic trajectory is one of rugged yet sensitive individualism, a gritty determination to express an idea in the most direct but sweet language possible, sort of like the cowboys in Brokeback Mountain.

The program began, appropriately enough, with Alexander Scriabin’s Vers la Flamme, positing the direction the evening was to take. Sarah Cahill then performed Dissonant Counterpoint 5, 7, & 8 by the relatively little-known Johanna Magdalena Beyer, a composer active in the circle around Cowell in the ’20s and ’30s. The piece was intensely intimate and, as one might expect, dissonant.

Cahill continued with a playful work by Lou Harrison, A Summerfeld Set. Following was a piece by the Bay Area composer Daniel David Feinsmith, called Self, for speaking pianist. This is admittedly the first work of his I have heard. The piece was energetic, built on a richly rewarding rhythmic and tonal framework. However the gimmick, the pianist playing while reciting a text by Ralph Waldo Emerson, was dull. Watching Cahill perform on piano and speak the text in rhythm was something like watching a tightrope walker attempting to sing an aria: the quality of both the aria and the tightrope walking seem diminished by combining the two.

One of the standout pieces of the evening was the highly virtuosic and deeply communicative performance by the duo of Kate Stenberg and Eva-Maria Zimmerman of Trois Regards, for violin and piano, by Ronald Bruce Smith. It is a contemporary piece that looks to the past, full of quartertones and passacaglias. The duo knocked it out of the park, giving a startlingly powered interpretation, full of character and presence.

In the second half, Cahill really came into her own, giving performances with directness, subtle detail, and richly personal interpretation. This was put to full effect in her presentation of Mamoru Fujieda’s Patterns of Plants, a work I have had a fondness for since I first heard it in Tokyo years ago. Though the original Tzadik recording sounded somewhat distanced, Cahill’s reading was very warm. Whether or not one is actually able to understand the relationship between flora growth patterns and musical patterns isn’t the point—in as much as one is challenged to imagine the precise process of moving towards a flame in the Scriabin piece. Patterns of Plants stands on its own as an important piece of late-20th-century piano writing, simultaneously humble and strikingly beautiful.

The evening was rounded out by Cowell, Cage, Adams, and a couple of piano rags. Taken as a whole, the program was inspired, marking a clear introduction to a strand of new music that is still vital. This line, from Scriabin to present-day ultra-modernists and post-minimalists is a refreshing one, clearing away much of the intellectual phlegm of many other trends and reminding the listener that music can be a sublimely atmospheric experience and maybe sometimes even spiritual.

***
Roddy Schrock is a sound artist who digitally mines everyday sound for the profound and canvasses the glitzy, rough edges of pop for its articulate immediacy. He has lived and worked in Tokyo, The Hague, New York, and San Francisco, with performances in the Czech Republic, Holland, Japan, and North America. He is also an educator, teaching summer workshops on SuperCollider software at STEIM (Netherlands).

Philadelphia: Phil Kline’s Dream Parade

Alyssa Timin
Alyssa Timin
Photo by Ross Hoffman

Unsilent Night has been around for a while now, not only in New York, but also in Philadelphia, where the new music ensemble Relâche—which has also been around for a while—plays host to the event. This year, the promo postcards branded the event Relâche and the Holidays, signaling both the ensemble’s drive to renew its public profile, as well as the warm and fuzzy patina that’s attached to the downtown ritual.

While most new music events in the city draw fewer than 100 attendees, I was delighted to discover a crowd of what looked to be more than twice that waiting on the southwest end of Rittenhouse Square, just before 7pm on December 19. They’d already run out of boomboxes by 6:30pm. Several elementary school students appeared to have beaten the rush—a number of boomboxes were in small, mitten-clad hands. Fun for the whole family.

It had been a while since I’d participated in a public spectacle. As the parade of gently pulsing, ethereal harmonies processed down Walnut Street—one of the city’s major commercial thoroughfares—the confused and entertained appraisals by onlookers were unavoidable. Digital cameras seemed to appear from the pocket of every bystander. Cell phones captured scraps of sound for someone somewhere else. The sharply-dressed saleswomen in the United Colors of Benetton stood with their arms crossed and their hips out, watching the crowd march bravely through red lights. Drivers honked and stopped; rolling down the window, they asked what was going on: “Unsilent Night!” we shouted, as though it explained anything.

Walnut Street is the street where I work. I couldn’t shake the feeling of being inside a dream: that slightly shifted, deconstructed version of the day. Last night I was walking down Walnut, and you were there, and we were in this huge crowd of people, all carrying boomboxes…No, nothing really happened. Everyone just smiling and carrying boomboxes. The hypnotic, decentralized soundtrack combined with the familiar strip of asphalt and the—still—somehow sacred space of the holiday season convinced me, just a little, that I’d wandered with a few hundred strangers into the surreal.

Down Broad Street, back up Locust, following a side street detour and several disgruntled motorists, the group gathered back in the middle of Rittenhouse, under the pleasantly gaudy colored lights hung from the park’s trees. Unsilent Night and its dream world ended with cheers and a reception at the Ethical Society.

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Alyssa Timin works as program associate at the Philadelphia Music Project, where she helps to fund Greater Philly’s flourishing music scene. She edits PMP’s self-titled in-house magazine to which she recently contributed a feature article on music education.

Atlanta: What Has 18 Strings and a Quartertone Fretboard?

Mark Gresham
Mark Gresham
Photo by Angela Lee

Athens, Georgia, is probably best known as having been a hotbed of new wave and other alternative rock music during the 1980s and ’90s—the origin and home of such bands as R.E.M. and the B-52s. But this capital of “Dawg Country,” greatly centered upon the University of Georgia and its football culture, has also been a cultivator of the artistically curious and unconventional in many ways.

Athens composer-performer Erik Hinds is one of its creative independents and an occasional visitor to Atlanta’s own alternative spaces, such as Eyedrum. But this December 1, Hinds appeared at one of the city’s smallest musical venues, A Cappella Books, at the behest of staff member Chad Radford. Located in the in-town counterculture neighborhood of Little Five Points, the tiny bookstore occasionally hosts informal musical appearances at the back of its retail space, in a cozy empty area that can accommodate maybe a dozen or so people at most, seated and standing combined. As such, it’s actually an ideal, quiet space for an intimate appraisal of solo music from Hinds’s “H’arpeggione,” a unique instrument with aspects found in guitar, cello, and some other real and imaginable stringed instruments.

“The H’arpeggione is an instrument built for me by Fred Carlson of Santa Cruz, California,” explains Hinds. “I came up with the name, a combination of Hardanger fiddle (a sympathetic stringed violin from Norway) and arpeggione (a bowed guitar from Schubert’s era). The instrument design was a collaborative effort and built as an expanded range (pitch-wise and timbrally) guitar departure.” An acoustic, upright, quartertone-fretted, 6-string instrument, tuned from a contrabass Ab up to Eb (half-step below the high E on a guitar), the H’arpeggione also has 12 resonating sympathetic strings which run through the neck, emerge over the body, and to a separate “buzzing” bridge. The body, made of black walnut with a belly made of recycled redwood, is larger than an acoustic guitar but smaller than a cello. It features an arched fingerboard and bridge, so it can be plucked or bowed, played across the lap like a guitar or, thanks to a supportive endpin, in upright playing position. “I use a piezo pickup to amplify it through two amps [at the same time], one clean, one a little fuzzy,” says Hinds.

Erik Hinds
Erik Hinds with his H’arpeggione
Photo by Delene Porter

Hinds’s performance for the evening was almost entirely improvised, the exceptions being a unique cover of Slayer’s “Angel of Death” and his own “Koité,” an original instrumental song dedicated to Habib Koité, a singer/guitarist from Bamako, Mali. Yes, all on solo amplified H’arpeggione. (Hinds’s live recording of “Koité” includes drums along with unamplified H’arpeggione.)

Despite the quartertone fretting of the instrument, Hinds’s music is hardly the kind that focuses upon rigidly-organized machinations of pitch. Instead, his improvisations draw more attention to variety in timbre and articulation, almost reminiscent of speech, with an undercurrent of driving pulse, whether Hinds is playing with guitar-like technique (which he does most frequently) or in his rare use of the bow which allows him to call forth cyclic drones of color that wail and throb meditatively.

It’s not difficult to pick up on the inspirations. Hinds cites African influences on the one hand, including his personal encounter in 2001 with the highest maleem (master) of Gnawa music, Mahmoud Ghania (or Gania). On the other hand, in the past few years Hinds says he has also consistently been moving away from composed or “pre-determined” music back to his roots as an improviser, a process of getting back to a “natural self” and a “spontaneous” music.

“I began as an improvisational musician when I was 12 years old,” says Hinds. “I feel like, intrinsically, I was instantly able to make music that wasn’t necessarily dependant on genre, time signature, anything like that; almost naturally side-stepping a lot of the hallmarks of what we consider appropriate or acceptable Western music. But I learned quickly that if I wanted to play with other people, I would need to figure out some of [those] specifics, like deliberate pitch and rhythm. So this has been a long process. What I’ve finally been able to do is to shed my music of some of the devices that made my music ‘coherent,’ some of the obvious trappings, so I’m left with underpinnings that still reference what was happening naturally when I was young.”

And his personal use of the quartertone tuning of the H’arpeggione actually falls into that philosophy of avoiding structural conventions of pitch. “That’s something people have talked about,” says Hinds, “and they say, ‘oh you must have some system you’ve developed with the quartertones and certain scales,’ and other things like that. But my approach, with or without the quartertone option, is generally seeking to have a focal or pivot pitch and rotate around that freely. So I’m not thinking in terms of modes or scales, but in terms of a kind of a drone setting.

“One of the things I’m really interested in is taking a single string, and if I play it, whether I pluck it or bow it, you might be able to say, ‘Oh, that’s a C#’—and it might very well be. But what I hear in addition to a fundamental or fixed pitch are a lot of other things. I listen for the scrape of the nail, the whirr of the bow, an overtone or [imperfect] frequencies. And I try to exploit those complexities.”

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A native of Atlanta, Georgia, Mark Gresham is a composer, publisher, and freelance music journalist. He is a contributing writer for Atlanta’s alternative weekly newspaper, Creative Loafing, and was winner of an ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award for Music Journalism in 2003.

Cleveland: Is Cavani the New Kronos?

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Zachary M. Lewis
Photo by Nowell York

Contemporary music by the boatload, performances sizzling with vitality, and a fervent commitment to education: You might say the Cleveland-based Cavani Quartet is on track to be the next Kronos Quartet. Further evidence that the Cavanis are super cool arrived late last month when the all-female group presented a concert of new and recent music by American women, including a piece by Merry Peckham, the group’s cellist. Annie Fullard and Mari Sato are the group’s violinists, and Kirsten Doctor is its violist.

The concert, titled “Confluence,” took place at the Cleveland Institute of Music, where the Cavanis have been artists-in-residence since 1988. In addition to music by Joan Tower, Margaret Brouwer, and Kathleen Ginther, it featured a dash of visual art and even a live poetry reading.

Breakfast at the Ibis, for string quartet and reader, was the evening’s briefest and most distinctive entry. Peckham wrote the piece in 1997, setting to music a poem by Mwatabu Okantah, a Pan-African studies professor at nearby Kent State University. It was, Peckham said, her “first original thought” and reflected the disparate musical influences of Jimi Hendrix and late Beethoven.

Cavani Quartet
Cavani Quartet
Photo by Christian Steiner

Okantah was present that night to read his own poem, a short, fragmented tale contrasting a chance romantic encounter at a luxurious European hotel with poverty and hunger, the rule outside it. The poet held a small drum. After each stanza he would strike it repeatedly like a bongo, but using a mallet. The musicians, too, employed unusual tools—miniature bows for their full-size string instruments. But these didn’t stay out long. No matter. The music, quiet and thin, was of secondary importance, anyway.

Joan Tower, writing in 1994, must have taken some of her material for Night Fields from Shostakovich’s Eighth String Quartet. The famous D-S-C-H theme is omnipresent in the work, if in splintered, distended versions. Unlike Shostakovich’s quartet, though, Night Fields heats to a boil extremely rapidly and includes a longish section in a major key.

Kathleen Ginther is an active composer and teacher at Southern Illinois University. Rather than perform one of her recent works, however, the Cavanis looked further back into her oeuvre to perform Blue and Green Music, a string quartet from 1983. Doing so allowed them to incorporate an element of visual art into the concert. Because Ginther thought about a Georgia O’Keefe painting when she composed the second movement of Blue and Green Music, the Cavanis felt a visual aid was in order and displayed a slide of the abstract painting on a screen next to them.

It was an inspired move. While the first movement, “Confluence,” was fragmented and percussive in nature, with squeaky individual parts swirling around each other, it was helpful to view the curved, gently rippling lines in the painting while listening to the second movement. Long melodies for violin and viola often rose to the forefront but the background was often just as rich, with groupings of short, high-pitched slurs, like baby ghosts just learning how to haunt.

By way of truly brand-new music, the Cavanis unveiled a Quintet for Clarinet and String Quartet by their colleague Margaret Brouwer, head of the composition department at CIM. Daniel Silver, the University of Colorado professor who commissioned the work, was the guest clarinetist.

The highlight of the work was easily its second movement, an adagio called “My white tears broken in the seas.” The title comes from a poem by David Adams called “An Angel’s Song” and describes a angel’s lament for the woes of humanity. The image of a crying angel is compelling in its own right, but Brouwer’s musical portrayal of it is even more entrancing. A long, legato passage in the clarinet hangs above slow, questioning phrases in the strings. The effect is an otherworldly calm, like something ancient being unearthed, a long-forgotten score by Hildegard of Bingen, perhaps. The impression transforms at the end of the piece as the score begins to suggest the thick, closely harmonized music of a modern-day mystic, Arvo Pärt. Singled out from the rest of the Quintet, “My white tears” seems destined for a long life, longer even than the hopefully never-ending career of the Cavani Quartet.

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Zachary Lewis is a freelance arts journalist in Cleveland, Ohio. He covers music primarily but also dance, art, and theater. He writes regularly for the Plain Dealer, Cleveland Scene, Angle, Dance Magazine, and Time Out Chicago. Lewis studied piano performance at the Cleveland Institute of Music and holds degrees in English and Journalism from Ohio University and Case Western Reserve University, where he will conduct a Presidential Fellowship in arts criticism in the fall of 2006.

Obituary: Donald Martino (1931-2005)



Donald Martino

[Ed. Note: December has been a very sad month for the new music community. Shortly after we ran our memorials to Stephen “Lucky” Mosko and Soong Fu-Yuan on NewMusicBox, we learned of the death of Donald Martino. This one particularly hit us hard as we were planning to feature Martino as our Cover next May in honor of his 75th birthday. We asked his former student, Steven Mackey, to reminisce about this important composer who remained a rugged individual to the very end.]

I had only been in the New York City area for a couple of months when, in November of 1978, I attended the premiere of Donald Martino’s Triple Concerto for three clarinets (Bb, bass, and contra). The piece begins with an explosion (piano clusters and tam-tam) and like some primordial creature emerging from the Big Bang, the contra-bass clarinet gradually makes its presence known on a low fundamental and then rises up a twelfth. Never before or since have I heard such a liquid connection between two notes—more of a cross-fade than an ordinary legato. As a clarinet player himself, Don knew how the 2nd note was contained in the first note and coaxed it out under cover of the decaying thunderclap.

In subsequent months I literally wore out the grooves of my Speculum Musicae recording of Notturno (the piece for which he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973). The timbral trills on the flute accompanied by strummed cello pizzicati were seductive, atmospheric, and exotic. There are parts of that piece that sound like backwards music. My housemate literally threw books against our shared wall out of frustration induced by my listening, over and over again, to those passages.

This is not dry music. In the generally arid landscape of late ’70s American academic serialism, this music was dripping wet with sensuality, color, affect, and drama—schmaltzy even. By the standards of the self-referential world of post-Schoenbergian American serialism, Don was quite eclectic. He harvested major triads and arioso melodies from his rows, and one got the feeling that, while he embraced the structural functions of the row, he fought with some of the incumbent sounds. He used to say, after tennis and a beer or two, that he thought Robert Schuman was looking for a way out of the tonal system (I think I know what he means) and I always wondered if Don was looking for a way back in.

In 1981, I made the pilgrimage to Brandeis to study with Martino. He was not the world’s greatest classroom teacher. We spent the mornings pouring over his writings about set theory; mostly articles that I had already read. The material was fascinating and the narrative logic inherent in his ideas about derived sets and combinatoriality continue to influence me, but in these seminars he basically read the text and paused occasionally for questions. Mondays started looking up around noon when the whole group of us, including Don, would have lunch together at the local hoagie joint. This is where we learned that he wrote those articles because that was the only way a “serious” composer could earn a reputation at a time when the state of new music performance was abysmal; new work was rarely performed and when it was, difficult passages would sooner be cut than rehearsed. Things got better for Don in this regard with commissions from the Boston Symphony and the Julliard String Quartet, but in the time I was close to him he never lost that scrappy attitude. It was part of his charm. I always got the impression that Don had even been a much tougher cookie before I met him. This I heard from Stephen “Lucky” Mosko who studied with him at Yale. (Lucky also died in the past week.) Don’s marriage to Lora and his professional success had sweetened and mellowed him by the time I arrived on the scene.

As uninspired as he was in the classroom, he was a gifted private composition teacher. Composition lessons in the afternoon were never about the hexachords we excavated in the morning. He was focused on the vividness of the surface of the music, the phrasing, the color of the orchestration, the drama, the intrinsic expressive potential of the form, and all the other things that made his music stand out. I still think about his advice in making a transition, “If you want to slow down, first get too fast; and if you want to speed up, first get too slow.”

After my first year at Brandeis Don moved to Harvard, but our shared interested in tennis kept us in touch. We played once a week which meant an hour or more on the court, then another hour over a beer or two, and occasionally as much as five hours with a big bowl of pasta from Lora in our laps in front of a Davis cup match on TV…good times!

When I heard that Don died, the first thing that popped into my head was playing tennis with him in the rain. Yes, it was pouring down rain, but we wanted to earn our beer so we were smacking soggy balls around a shallow lake with a net. It was kind of miserable and neither of us said a word until, after about 45 minutes Don shouted, “I don’t think any girls are gonna show up, so we might as well go home.”