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As anyone who has ever been there knows, Miami is a pleasantly surreal place where all things trendy flirt with the seedy, all wrapped up in a schlock of glitzy panache. You can surround yourself with Paris Hilton clones while sipping Manhattan-priced cocktails at the Delano any night of the week—that’s a given. But it’s only once a year that you can check out the New Music Miami ISCM Festival. I did both.

My whirlwind experience begins with a hasty shuttle bus ride from the airport—”Somebody Told Me” by The Killers blasting over the radio while we whip around crisscrossing freeway overpasses. With just enough time to throw my bags into a hotel room, I board another shuttle. This one provided by the festival. Thankfully this driver is more Hoke Coburn than Jeff Gordon, and I arrive safely at the festival’s inaugural event: a concert of solo piano music served well-chilled, thanks to Wertheim Performing Arts Center’s overzealous air conditioning.

And really this was the gestalt of the entire weekend: shuttle vans, air conditioning, and lots of solo piano music. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out the raison d’etre behind this year’s festival. It was spelled out in hot pink and pastel yellow across the cover of the sexy program brochure that outlined the five concerts that took place over the course of three days: “Beyond the Piano Keys—New Music for Piano.” Despite the tight focus on a single instrument, the music presented over the weekend embodied a broad range, from straightforward notated solo piano performances to elaborate interactive electronic setups and forays into video.

No particular approach to composition seemed to dominate the overall programming. Aside from the de rigueur pre-concert talks, audiences were left to their own devices to parse out any trends that might emerge from the panoramic vista of more than 40—that’s right, 40!—compositions showcased during the festival. Do the math: these were long concerts, and the absence of intermissions made things borderline excruciating at times. But then again, there was no other way to cram all this music into five concerts. Still, I got the feeling that lower back pain sufferers or those with a nicotine addition, like myself, were on the verge of boycott.

After opening night, which featured the delicately balanced choral-like Mano a mano by festival director Orlando Jacinto Garcia, beautifully performed by Cristina Valdes, the festival switched locales to the Steinway Piano Gallery. In typical Coral Gables fashion, the intimate venue was flanked by a Ferrari dealership and Rodin International, where you can drop $60 million on a bronze cast statue—yeah, that Rodin—in hopes that it will fit in the trunk of your F430 Spider. The Friday afternoon concert kicked off with my own Detail of Beethoven’s Hair performed by the infallible Jenny Lin, but the most gripping work came from Francis Schwartz. During his piece The Headless Glory of André Chenier, the composer growls, shouts, and whispers odd decrees like “I love clusters!” as he gleefully jabs at the keys, eventually leading the audience in chants to send various people and concepts to the guillotine—it was fun and unexpected, if not a bit kooky.

My favorite piece of the afternoon was article 1 to 3 by Rozalie Hirs. Her idiosyncratically titled suite (article [the], article [aleph], and article [a]) only hints at this Dutch composer’s eccentric approach. The bulk of the piece featured a small intricate lick towards the high end of the keyboard relentlessly repeated, always with just the slightest variation. It was as if pianist Dante Oei was exploring the infinite ways that this interesting little figure could fit under his hands. I was totally fascinated, both by the intricacy of the music and how it brewed feelings of frustration inside me. It was like being chafed by a feather.

The evening concert featured the U.S. premiere of Evan Ziporyn’s finger twister In Bounds performed by Valdez, and the world premiere of Tzu Ling Sarana Chou’s Quadro Parlante played by Lin. The nightcap to this first full day of concerts was a spellbinding performance by Stephen Drury. The pianist seamlessly segued from Helmut Lachenmann to Morton Feldman to Paul Elwood to György Ligeti, pausing only to position the score of Toshio Hosokawa’s Nacht Klänge before finishing with John Zorn’s frenzied Carny. Drury’s meta-collage was so riveting that I didn’t even think about all those precious minutes that were carved off the evening until after the applause and bows ended. Ah, time for a cigarette.

The Saturday afternoon concert focused on works involving new technologies. Rocco Di Pietro performed his Deconstructed Fountain from Ravel with Derrida Watching and Wave Fugue with Electronic Lost which proved to be a blurry accumulation of prerecorded electronics with the composer’s musical responses, both notated and improvised, stored in a Yamaha disklavier, all presented simultaneously with the composer’s live reactions on keyboard. Jeff Herriott’s beautiful Velvet Sink used interactive electronics to delicately blend the piano’s quiet timbres with lightly processed sounds originally created on a tattered soundboard in the composer’s apartment. The final, almost blues-like sonority that ends the piece seems to come out of left field, yet it isn’t a complete head-scratcher. Somehow it just fits perfectly, so I’m bestowing Mr. Herriott with the best final chord award. But in the end, the only technology that seemed overtly “new” to me was the weird electronic pitch-bending device wielded by pianist Todd Welbourne for Joseph Koykkar’s piece Interfacing. It was very Mr. Wizard, as in I wish someone could explain to me how the damn thing worked.

With no time to sojourn at the beach, I grabbed some Cuban food at Versailles with pianist Cristina Valdes. Of course our impressions of the festival crept into our conversation. Besides the marathon length of each concert and the occasional mediocre piece here and there, we felt something else plagued the festival: really low attendance, despite the fact that all of the events were free of charge. The sheer size of the concert hall—gargantuan!—only served to mock the fact that there were so few spectators. It was nice to see university students peppering the aisles, but the sheer amount of text messaging during the music was a clue that they were only there to get their programs signed by the appropriate professor for class credit. But perhaps our ideas concerning appropriate audience size were imbued by New York City standards.

And speaking of New York City, the festival finale looked as if the Big Apple were magically transplanted to South Florida. I wandered into the concert hall a little bit late, only to find NYC-based pianist Anthony de Mare posed seductively atop a disklavier as he theatrically reacted to the phantom pianist. It was appropriately surreal. Also in de Mare’s Manhattan-inspired set was Meredith Monk’s Gotham Lullaby, Jason Robert Brown’s Mister Broadway, and Little Midnight Nocturne by Fred Hersch. Being in a New York state of mind, I snuck out of the theater and chain smoked during Dinu Ghezzo’s performance.

When I returned, fellow Brooklynite Kathleen Supové was gearing up to perform Dan Becker’s Revolution. The piece used a few strategic preparations inside the disklavier, allowing for some interesting timbral and rhythmic interactions that gave it a sort of Trent Reznor edge. Supové concluded the festival with Orlando Jacinto Garcia’s Feldman-referencing Why References? (featuring unfortunate cell phone interruption), and Carolyn Yarnell’s electronic/video hybrid The Same Sky.

I ran into one of the festival regulars after the concert, who was kind enough to offer me a ride back to the hotel. I was happy to circumvent another shuttle van ride, and in turn he was thrilled to attend the entire festival, claiming that “there are no other opportunities to hear music like this performed in such concentrated doses.” The 2005 New Music Miami ISCM Festival certainly delivered its city a hefty dose. My kind driver added that he had tickets to a big recital the following evening, but expressed some doubts about going. Turns out it was an entire program of compositions for two pianos.

Amy D. Rubin

The Seattle Chamber Players champion new music of all sorts with eclectic, provocative and frequently interdisciplinary presentations. Recent events have ranged from collaborative evenings with composer/performers John Zorn and Frederic Rzewski, to commissions of local composers like Wayne Horvitz, to a performance of Stanley Silverman’s film score for Nanook of The North, originally composed for Tashi and performed live against the original Robert J. Flaherty footage. Beyond SCP’s well-rehearsed and nourished premieres, the group is exemplary in stretching what we expect and receive from a “concert music” venue.

Last month, SCP not only sold out its performance of Astor Piazzolla’s opera, María de Buenos Aires, but could barely accommodate a second audience which eagerly paid for tickets to the morning’s dress rehearsal. Why so popular? As flutist Paul Taub responded, “I think it’s the drop dead beautiful tunes that are so emotive. They are always fresh and have such a universal appeal, whether you are a fan of jazz, classical music, pop, Latin, etc.” Conductor Pablo Zinger imported traditional tango singers for the presentation. Though not staged, a theatrical flair was achieved by featuring two local dancers. I noticed many dancer-like bodies in the audience and the young woman seated next to me had never heard of SCP, or been inside Benaroya Hall. She was there because she was beginning to study tango with one of the showcased dancers. Producers take note: a good way of attracting a new audience is to include artists from another discipline who have a following in the local community. Composer’s recipe for a crowd pleaser: begin with melodies and harmonies which touch our core; add sometimes raw, sometimes seductive rhythms; don’t be afraid to transform your melodies with the power of modulation; and combine all to convey the dance of sexual innuendo. Even an obtuse plot can be forgiven when these other ingredients are part of the mix.

Born in Argentina, Piazzolla spent part of his childhood in New York City’s Greenwich Village. He collaborated with American jazz players such as Gary Burton and Gerry Mulligan, and has inspired a number of tango based pieces such as Cafe Music by Paul Schoenfield. Piazzolla rejected the expectations of those who demanded that tango stay frozen in time. He erased the line between composer and improviser. Most important, Piazzolla’s success can provide advice to the rest of us. He was true to his language and his vision, and was urged by his mentor, Nadia Boulanger, to stick with tango. A message to young composers: you do not need to reinvent the wheel with each new piece. An alternative creative approach is to stick with the wheel that is really yours and spin it at different speeds, on different surfaces, at different angles and watch it roll!

Brandon LaBelle

With the ongoing proliferation of interest in the auditory, from the cultures of experimental music and sound art to theoretical elaborations as witnessed in a number of anthologies recently published, a general need for harnessing the radical diversity of all such theories and voices seems at hand. For continually one witnesses a general longing for “common ground.” Common ground may come by way of shared vocabulary (how sound may be spoken of) or historical referents that may create a territory of understanding (of where sound has come from), or through disciplinary mutuality (for instance, how the context of film studies may speak to the context of musicology).

The Sonic Interventions conference initiated and organized by Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis further indicated the ongoing struggles to establish common ground, yet managed to arrive at mutual understanding by the sheer investment of those participating. For even though all the participants seem to arrive at the issue of sound from different vantage points, the desire to share and create dialogue led to fruitful results.

Organized around a general call for submissions, the conference brought together an intensely diverse gathering of individuals from Europe and the U.S., across all levels of expertise. It was broken into four panels governed by the sub-themes (or groupings of sub-themes): “sound and the moving image & sound technologies and cultural change”; “the sonic in the ‘silent’ arts & bring in the noise”; “silences/orality”; “soundscapes: sound, space, and the body & sound practices and events”. Papers were given in the form of 10-minute summations with the intention of creating dialogue and exchange among the panellists. To add to the discussion, as well as to guide or lend definition to the conference in general, keynote lectures were given by Douglas Kahn, Emily Thompson, and Mieke Bal (who replaced Fred Moten at the last moment), each representing critical aspects of current histories and cultural analysis being done today on and around the subject. Kahn’s writings on post-war American culture continue to draw connections between composers, such as John Cage, and artists, such as Robert Irwin or James Turrell, whose works lend to exploring the perception of sound and light. Adding to such history, Thompson’s investigative work on the early use of sound recording in Hollywood cinema opened up an as yet written history highlighting the innovations film studios forged in the 1930s. Alongside these histories of sound cultures and technologies, Mieke Bal moved more consciously into exploring questions of personal experience. Recounting visiting an installation, Bal describes her wonder and amazement at feeling what she called “lost in space:” immersed in a room of mist and sound, Bal’s dreamy memory led her to a deeper realization of sound to not only disorient but also to create new possibilities for finding home. Each lecturer, while drawing upon their own backgrounds and academic disciplines, initiated various concerns, from the historical and cultural, to the technological and perceptual. Such broad topics found their counterpoint in the panels that followed throughout the day.

Spanning three intensive days, discussions ran from issues related to the voice and what it means to speak; architecture and the spatiality of sound, (which has its own unique history as witnessed in the works of Iannis Xenakis, Edgar Varèse, and David Tudor); sub-cultures of music (from raves in Goa to reggae sound systems in Jamaica) and what they lend to understandings of community and social space; cinema and its undercurrent of auditory specialization, which remains a relevant shadow to questions of sound technology; the relationship between visuality and audition and what each may lend to the other, from creating narrative to animating the senses; the project of soundscape studies and its continual concern for environmental sound, noise pollution, and music compositions that create bonds between listener and place; philosophies of listening and the culture of aural ideas; and lastly, various historical tracings of particular composers, artists, writers, and cultural moments in which sound may be teased into relief as lineage to the current media age. Of course, there was much more, as what became increasingly apparent was the degree to which each participant spoke from their respective vantage point, supplied with their own particular cultural and theoretical baggage, tools of investigation, and overarching concerns. Mingling within such diversity, at times I was led to wonder what led each participant to sound, and what was at stake in bringing sound into so many diverse academic categories? Can sound really help literary studies of the Victorian age? Does it add to developing possibilities for new forms of thinking about architecture? Possibly this raises what became an unspoken yet ever-present question: What does it mean to initiate a staging of sound on the field of cultural theory, history, and analysis in general? What does sound lend to the history of culture, and more important, to its writing? For as an underbelly to the output of writings, articulations, and research, was a general recognition of the tensions inherent to sound being brought forward into the arena of language, by way of text. Whether essentializing sound as the “other” to language and all forms of representation—that sound may provide an escape route to the embedded meanings within the sign systems of the world—or using sound to unravel any master narrative left-over from the Modern, the question of how to construct theory particular to the materiality and cultural teachings of sound outside any adoption of theories based on “visualist” thinking recurred as a backdrop.

To move toward the auditory within the field of language, and cultural analysis based on the production of text, it would seem stages a tussle with the discourse that allows access to sound—we may ask, what words can perform their task in fully integrating themselves within the sonorous? In discovering, through an engagement with words and their referents, the full body of sound? We may register this body in the form of movements of cultural signifiers, whether that be musical sub-cultures, the formation of built environments, the exchange of information through oral networks, or the historical tracings left by sound technologies, but on a foundational level one remains bound to cultural “readings” that already imply a reliance upon “visualist” discourse and the act of looking and reading.

Not that the form of cultural work and analysis need be done with the same material of that which it speaks of, for surely theory allows one to intervene within the field of practice and production, social relations and physical reality, by being altogether different from that reality: Sylvere Lotringer once described theory as a pair of headlights that allow you to see the road ahead while also blinding you to everything beyond. As headlights, theory cuts into the dark, by being altogether out of place, inappropriate to the scene, disrupting through a kind of alien invasion the environment of reality.

From Bruce Johnson’s proposal of sound as “anti-theory,” Michelle Duffy’s pursuit of sound through semiotic rhythms, to Marcel Cobussen and his use of the philosophical work of Alain Badiou along with the free jazz of Evan Parker, and Chelle Mcnaughton’s soundmapping of Daniel Liebskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin, the move toward the auditory may reflect the general longing for theory to possibly become less of a headlight and more of a sympathetic intrusion, less of a car cutting into the landscape and more of a nurturing force aligned with what it seeks to analyse or unearth. As Mieke Bal seemed to suggest in her keynote presentation, the auditory may offer us the chance to truly speak of the contemporary world by always attending to the larger global situation while keeping tuned to the particulars of individual voices. Thus, the global perspective and the local particular remain connected by turning cultural analysis and textual production into an act participating in culture rather than solely speaking about it. That sound lends us opportunity in this way speaks toward what it teaches us, what it allows to take place, by always being involved in the greater context, through modalities of affect, relation, and excess, while also always returning, through acoustic mirrors of social reflection, to the individual body. The gathering at Sonic Interventions may have proven, by being both absolutely individualistic as well as totally collective, that to write of sound is to also redesign the potential of theory to not only be critically acute, but to nurture and lend welcome.

Zachary M. Lewis Photo by Nowell York

They most likely weren’t there for the contemporary music per se but that’s exactly what the local parents and relatives of musically inclined teenagers got when they attended the Cleveland Youth Wind Symphony’s year-end concerts earlier this month.

Between two concerts, the two large groups that comprise the area’s premiere youth wind band ensemble managed to present eight pieces of music by contemporary American composers at Severance Hall.

Imagine the mass exodus that would ensue were their professional adult counterparts to do something similar. This was a ticketed affair, too.

CYWS Music Director and co-founder Gary Ciepluch, a professor at Case Western Reserve University, led a few of the performances. More often, though, he lent the baton to one of five variably capable assistant or graduate assistant conductors. A number of guest soloists also took their places in the program where necessary.

Ciepluch founded the CYWS in 1989 with sponsorship from CWRU and the Cleveland Institute of Music. A second group, CYWS II, branched off in 1995. The two ensembles, together totaling some 250 musicians, meet for rehearsal every Saturday from mid-September through May.

These being student players, the performances May 9 and 10 were not without their flaws, but to enumerate errors would be beside the point that these were not your average band concerts.

The events also served as occasions to honor the symphony’s graduating high school seniors, but even here, contemporary music was an integral part of the proceedings. Standard repertoire by Dvorak, Saint-Saëns, and Holst got their turns, but they were the exceptions, not the rule.

Instead of the ubiquitous “Pomp and Circumstance,” Lee University wind ensemble director David Holsinger’s To Tame the Perilous Skies was the homage to the first batch of graduates. Alfred Reed’s El Camino Real: A Latin Fantasy, a Flamenco-inflected 1984 commission by the United States Air Force Band, serenaded the second.

Both concerts opened with new music as well.

Ciepluch kicked things off the first night with a soaring, fast-paced workout for saxophone and percussion called Ride by the Pittsburgh-area teacher and composer Samuel Hazo. Melissa Lichtler, conductor of the CYWS II, began her concert with a movement called “To the Summit!” from a suite titled Strive for the Highest by the Florida-based composer Robert W. Smith.

James Barnes, a professor of theory and composition at the University of Kansas, was doubly represented on the program, first by the “Jubilation” movement from his Fifth Symphony (Phoenix) Op. 11, then by Centennial Celebration Overture on the second concert.

“Jubilation,” performed by the CYWS I, was the more interesting of the two: a brisk, syncopated perpetuum mobile that had six guest trumpeters trading low, elongated melodies from their antiphonal positions on either side of the stage.

Student trumpet players in the CYWS II got their moment in the spotlight in The Dream Chasers, a sparkling overture-like piece by Jared Spears, an emeritus professor of music at Arkansas State University.

James Hirt, a composer and teacher at Baldwin-Wallace College in Berea, Ohio, was present to hear the CYWS II perform his Baroque Celebration, a four-movement suite of stylized material. The players seemed to have the most affinity for its slow middle section, a mournful arioso.

No doubt the musicians were grateful to have Hirt, a real live composer, in the audience, but his attendance will yield the most fruit if he spreads the word to his composer colleagues that apparently there’s a demand for new symphonic wind music in Cleveland.