Category: Headlines

Justin Schell

The contemporary dance group Danceworks introduced a new collaborative endeavor to Milwaukee last month with “Art to Art,” premiering new works from local emerging artists. Six choreographers—Kelly Anderson, Monica Rodero, Sofi Askenazi, Liz Hildebrandt, Diana LeMense, and Dan Schuchart—were randomly paired with six composers—Michael O’Day, Peter Pearson, Amanda Schoofs, Allen Russell, Eric Meyer, and Riles Walsh—in connections facilitated by Kevin Stalheim, director of Milwaukee’s Present Music. According to Sarah Wilbur, artistic director of Danceworks, the project is “a venue for exploration” that “expands the network of performing artists that live in Milwaukee.” Each of the twelve artists brought their own ideas to their works, though most agreed it was a unified process throughout, necessitating experimentation and compromise. The project thus gave each artist an opportunity to explore the dynamic relationship of cross-media artistic creation.

Kelly Anderson and Kelly Zwiers performing one might hear a feather or see a pin drop Photo by Keith Knox

Michael O’Day, who has previously written music for the Milwaukee Ballet, expressed this in recounting the genesis of the piece one might hear a feather or see a pin drop, choreographed and danced by Kelly Anderson. “Kelly’s first response to me was that she liked classical music, especially strings and arias,” he said. O’Day, who decided beforehand on an electronic piece utilizing granular synthesis, thus had to unify “a very broad, somewhat contradictory, palette of ideas.” As O’Day’s music subsumed ethereally human voices under digital debris, Anderson’s choreography worked in tandem to blur the line between human and non-human. Anderson writhed on the ground like a malfunctioning automaton, ceasing only when stilled by dancer Kelly Zwiers. As the work concluded with them lying on two blocks, Zwiers silently put Anderson to rest for the final time.

The other pairs had a similar story in their work’s creation, but with very different results. Monica Rodero and Allen Russell structured sotto voce as a conversational duet. Rodero crafted a dialogue between dancers Dan Schuchart and Liz Hildebrandt while Russell’s piece played violin and piano lines off each other. The work, like every conversation, traversed various emotional states, from sweeping legato themes when the dancers were joyfully entangled, to caustically percussive writing as the pair’s discontent and separation grew. The closeness of all four artists, however, produced a remarkably palpable sense of entwined intimacy.

Liz Hildebrandt, Karley Hetebrueg, and Dan Schuchart performing bound.struggle.release Photo by Keith Knox

Amanda Schoofs and Liz Hildebrandt produced bound.struggle.release, danced by Hildebrandt, Schuchart, and Karley Hetebrueg. Schoofs’s electronic composition utilized massive sound blocks that often rang like the largest gongs of a Javanese gamelan. The piece also possessed a spatial dimension, sounding different depending on an audience member’s location. Responding with violent outbursts of movement, the three dancers seemed caught in a web of struggle for superiority, hurling each other to the ground and crawling over the wreckage. Schuchart ended the work by simply dumping the two women on the ground, yet the look of dejection on Schuchart’s face, combined with the silence that accompanied his final steps, assured the audience that it was a Pyrrhic victory at best.

Here Again, the work of Diana LeMense and Eric Meyer, seemed to explore varieties of uniformity. Five dancers elegantly moved in LeMense’s staggered patterns to Meyer’s Wardances. Scored for clarinet, trumpet, bass, a variety of keyboards, and sampled percussion, the piece moved through a series of fractured grooves. The piece hinted at, but never quite achieved a steady beat, resulting in multiple pulses sounding simultaneously. Such an effect did compliment the movements, yet the components only briefly aligned, when each dancer performed a brief solo to a series of piano cadenzas. This was also the case with Divide, the work of Riles Walsh and Sofi Askenazi. Walsh’s “digital/analog mish mash” mined the words of Andy Warhol and samples from “The Velvet Underground and Nico,” resulting in a vivid sonic trope on the history of multimedia. Dancer Kelsey Heida moved through a series of strings stretched across the room, but unfortunately there was little visible connection between the music and the choreography, resulting in a disjointed and underdeveloped work.

Persephone’s Descent Photo by Keith Knox

Persephone’s Descent, created by Dan Schuchart and Peter Pearson added a further visual dimension with projections by filmmaker Brian Perkins. The dancers moved smoothly throughout the work, often imitating each other in what Schuchart called a “visual echo,” in order to “create a shifting world where perceptions are changed through different view points.” Schuchart’s employment of a large canvas screen added a striking combination of form and function. When wheeled across the stage, it became a billowing sail; when still, it served as the backdrop for Perkins’s silhouettes of flowers and video of leaves, adding further mystery by distorting the dancing shadows.

Pearson’s music, a single movement string quartet, not only fit Schuchart’s ideas, but enhanced the aesthetic experience. By displacing small pentatonic modules, Pearson achieved a constant pulse of ever-changing and polyrhythmic echoes. It was not, however, overpowering or aggressive. “I think the piece as a whole has a slight pastoral quality to it, somewhat akin to driving through Wisconsin,” the composer said, an idea which meshed well with Schuchart’s choreography, the wind from the open road filling the sails through the slow yet ever-changing world of perception.

Danceworks will continue to explore new collaborations across disciplines as “Art to Art” will be part of their annual summer series. Next summer, the group plans on pairing choreographers with visual artists. Those composers and choreographers that worked together this summer, however, learned something best articulated by Schuchart: “We made something more than any one of us could have done alone.”

Zachary M. Lewis Photo by Nowell York

Normally, Cleveland’s Old Arcade, an ornate, Victorian-style shopping mall downtown, is dead quiet during non-business hours. So quiet, in fact, that it can safely house part of the Hyatt Regency Hotel that’s adjacent to it.

But for one memorable night during Labor Day weekend, this beautiful, underused venue rang out with a screeching musical depiction of war loud enough to wake all the neighbors.

The occasion was Cleveland’s first Ingenuity Festival during which a string quartet from the Cleveland Institute of Music performed George Crumb’s 1970 masterpiece Black Angels.

Curious festival patrons on their way through the Arcade stopped to watch and listen as violinists Andrew Sords and Maisie Swanson, violist Michelle Paczut, and cellist Charles Tyler wailed on their amplified instruments, shook maracas, and ran their bows along the rims of tuned water glasses. Hotel guests, presumably disturbed by the strange sounds, emerged onto their upper-level balconies and remained there.

A program note and a pre-concert speech clearly explained the connection between Black Angels and the Vietnam War. They drew attention to its structure, its numerological symbolism, and its musical references to the Dies Irae chant and Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden.” The musicians, competent in all respects, delivered a deliciously abrasive performance.

Strangely, though, no one mentioned the work’s powerful relevance to the year 2005. Just as when Crumb wrote Black Angels 35 years ago, people are dying every day in an endless land war in Asia and the political establishment is trying unsuccessfully to claim everything’s fine.

In other words, Crumb’s original justification for the piece still applies: “Things were turned upside down,” he said. “There were terrifying things in the air.” Meanwhile, we’re still reeling from one of worst natural disasters to ever hit the nation.

Maybe this point didn’t need to be made verbally. Maybe every listener was thinking it. Maybe that’s why the music literally stopped so many of people in their tracks.

At the far opposite end of the emotional spectrum—and across Euclid Avenue—was Phil Kline’s Symphony for 21 iPods, a musical installation which had its debut during the Ingenuity Festival at Cleveland’s ArtMetro gallery. In this case, however, the charm was mostly atmospheric.

Think of it as an updated, indoor version of Kline’s Unsilent Night for 12 (or more) boomboxes. Twenty-one incredibly tiny iPod Shuffles, devices known for their random-play feature, hung from the gallery ceiling by small lengths of wire. Attached to each was an equally minute speaker. Kline programmed the players with dozens of short, original MP3 files then set them all to “random.”

What resulted was a pleasant cacophony of fairy-like sounds. Melodic wisps flew through the air and rhythms crossed paths unpredictably. Silence reigned briefly in corner of the room after another, creating the effect of electronic crickets chirping at each other across some enchanted field.

It wasn’t the first Kline work to be mounted in Cleveland. Earlier this year, Kline and his colleagues in the Ethel string quartet premiered his Meditations in an Emergency with Red {an orchestra} and its director, Jonathan Sheffer. Compared to that rocking, high-energy piece, the Symphony is a delicate lullaby.

As it happens, Sheffer, too, took part in the Ingenuity Festival, presiding that same evening over a mini-concert at the Cleveland Trust Rotunda that essentially served as a sampler of Red’s eclectic programming. It didn’t include any world premieres but there was at least one hors d’oeuvre from 20th century America.

Seven musicians—a string quartet plus oboe, flute, and Sheffer on synthesizer, all amplified—performed Sheffer’s orchestration of a Contrapunctus from Bach’s Art of the Fugue, a few minutes of Morton Feldman’s Ixion, “Eleanor Rigby,” and the unaltered version of an Allegro from Mozart’s Oboe Quartet.

The concert involved giant video screens, a digital film collage, microphones, funky lighting, and computerized sound effects. It wasn’t the most musically rewarding concert that weekend but it had to have involved the most cables and electricity. Perfect for a festival subtitled “A Fusion of Art and Technology.”

Roddy Schrock Photo by Hideki Kubota

The San Francisco Electronic Music Festival’s Friday night event was packed. Two consecutively empty seats in the whole SomArts center couldn’t be found, forcing us to stand for the whole event. If an evening of experimental electronic music could draw this many people on a Friday night then there may be future for this type of uncompromising and nearly unmarketable music.

First on the bill was Victoria Jordanova, an American composer born in the former Yugoslavia, tonight presenting the premiere of her piece Suspended, for amplified pedal harp, live electronics, and something called a futuristic Fukuoku glove with five “vibes” embedded in the fingertips. At first I thought it must be some kind of musical device she made herself while in residency in the city of Fukuoka, Japan, maybe just misspelling the town’s name by one letter. Or possibly she has an affinity for Japanese electronic music, building the instrument from the country’s inspiration. It seems that is not quite the case. The glove does have five “vibes” but they’re more commonly used in non-musical applications. I doubt that promoting its effectiveness in amplified harp performance would do much to increase sales. I wonder if anyone has found a musical use for the Fukuoku Power Pack yet?

Back to the music, Suspended was a lovely piece presented through a delicate and subtle performance. Jordanova beautifully captured a mood that she is known for, a kind of contemplative, simple, and powerful aural motif combining minimal harp sounds and pitch-shifted percussive noise. It’s all suggestive of a kind of sound blueprint for a structure yet to be built. She has a tightly controlled focus to her work, a singularity of vision. I must admit however, I am quite glad that I did not read the program notes until after her performance was finished, at which time I found out that she was trying to sonically conjure the ideas of Hindi mystics through her sounds. Why it would require a Fukuoku glove and an amplified harp to create a mystically Hindu experience is beyond me. But the results, true to their spiritual origins or not, were lovely.

gal*in_dog performing Cruise 4ide Photo by Peter B. Kaars

Next was Guillermo Galindo performing under the pseudonym gal*in_dog, presumably a partial anagram of his surname. He gave a performance that was comprised of approximately three sonic timbres: low industrial rumble, high industrial whine, and a kind of purely electronic gray noise. In addition he was wearing a space helmet and was using a modified crucifix to manipulate and control the sound. By modified, I mean it looked like a cross, about a foot high and 6″ wide, but it was made of metal and had wires attached. So while performing he could, for example, move the sound from a low industrial rumble noise to a gray noise by physically moving the cross closer to or further away from a seemingly random metal object, in this case they were an old fan and some power tools. The breadth of the piece was limited to about that, three different types of noise, one at a time, seemingly without purpose or precision, depending on how close he was to a metal object. It is possible that everyone in the audience got the aural and visual joke or even found deeply significant insights in Galindo’s piece Cruise 4ide. As far as I was concerned, it was during this long piece that I began to just wish I had found a comfortable seat.

Next, Subotnick was joined onstage by Miguel Frasconi, the duo performing Until Spring Revisited, diffused through a four loudspeaker arrangement. The original Until Spring was composed, as Subotnick explains “about 10 years after Silver Apples…I had evolved a whole concept and a technique, but I had gone as far as I could go with it. I could do everything I wanted to do, but I couldn’t do it in real time. So I actually stopped after that and gave all my equipment to Vladimir Ussachevsky.” With the advent of portable digital technology in laptop computers Subotnick was able to, as it were, revisit his earlier work adapting it for live performance. The piece controlled by the performers using finger and voice gestures, input through the computer keyboard and a microphone respectively, to control the slope and timing of the rhythms and timbres. The performative impact was evocative, both musicians seemingly speaking aggressively into their microphones, the audience unable to hear their live voice and never quite sure if they were being sampled for sounds later heard in the music. The resulting textures leaned a bit toward the academic side of the spectrum but were a welcome reprieve from the aggressively obtuse nature of Cruise 4ide.

The evening’s wide range of eclecticism presented a telling glimpse into the current state of electronic music in California. The event showcased the rich ecosystem of electronic sound arts in this area and posited a future that was not clearly in focus. In fact the evening seemed to be a resounding confirmation that the future of this genre is an exciting one and still completely up for grabs. And if the audience this evening was any indication, there may even be people listening.

Alyssa Timin Photo by Ross Hoffman

Eleven months of the year, Abington Art Center, nestled in the northerly Philadelphia suburb of Jenkintown, hosts contemporary art exhibits in its welcoming and airy space. August, however, is given over to displays of children’s art. On the evening I went to the Art Center, they were showing The Spongebob Squarepants Movie, catering to the tastes of over a hundred youngsters gathered on the verdant lawn.

Such family-friendly summer programming played a breezy counterpoint to the cerebral and intense installation I was there to witness: The Lost Meeting, a collaborative project between J. Morgan Puett, spurse (a nebulous collective), Philadelphia-based curator Julie Courtney, and Bang on a Can’s David Lang. Down a hill and into the thin woods, I followed a short cedar chip trail to a small building where, for something like a century, a group of Quakers came to worship silently.

The installation takes as its point of departure a Quaker theological dispute tied to the history of this meetinghouse, a dispute on the role of “mediators” in religious worship: the Bible, primarily. The Lost Meeting seizes on the concept of the mediator and its importance to human meaning-making, and, via some algorithms fashioned from data sets based on the Quakers themselves, arrives at a reinvention of the space so radical that many people who have come to see the installation (so I hear), have hated it. New music lovers with some affection for highly mathematical and conceptual approaches may find this visual work right up their alley.

David Lang’s contribution to the project takes a different, though in a sense no less unconventional tack. He’s written a round called No Pain, to be performed outside the meetinghouse, to the meetinghouse, by anyone who happens to be around—any musical ability, any instrument—on September 11 at 2 p.m. Brochures for the installation include a scanned copy of the music, but the instructions include, “All performers are encouraged to adapt, arrange, improvise upon, ignore or transcend this score.”

The words to this work are by William Penn and read, “No pain, no palm, no thorns, no throne, no gall, no glory, no cross, no crown.” This iconoclastic view stands to balance the interpretive riot within the meetinghouse. It’s a chance to participate in a peculiarly democratic chorus. Go sing.