Category: Headlines

Mark Gresham Photo by Angela Lee

New music group Bent Frequency concluded their season with a concert at Eyedrum on May 8, titled (Bang Fist). Within the first half of the program, Stuart Gerber offered two interesting solo performance art pieces: Bang Fist, a short, early text by John Cage which eventually appeared in his piece 45′ For a Speaker, and Giorgio Battistelli’s Il Libro Celibe which has a score that is essentially pictures.

The “libro” is a large, briefcase-like box that the performer opens in the manner of a book, each “page” being a rather flat “instrument,” such as a piece of paper, cellophane, metal, or a sound-making construction. Sounds came from the amplified pages as they were manipulated by being torn, flapped, crinkled, blown around, or struck.

The rest of the first half included challenging music by James Tenney, Sylvano Bussotti, and Herbert Brün. Among them, Tenney’s Diaphonic Toccata for violin stood out as a process piece where the composer (per his stated aesthetic) deliberately avoids emotional elements. An unceasing string of 16th notes in octaves on the piano underscores a calculated, irregular line of longer notes in the violin.

(L-R) Christopher Theofanidis and David Del Tredici Photo by Jeff Baxter, courtesy of Atlanta Symphony Orchestra

May 12–14, the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and Chorus reached a milestone in its 60th anniversary season, the first time they have ever premiered two major works on the same program—and both choral-orchestral. The Music of Our Final Meeting by Christopher Theofanidis and Paul Revere’s Ride by David Del Tredici were the premieres on the docket with Bernstein’s “Jeremiah” Symphony. The luminous Theofanidis work was a setting of text by Rumi, in English translation by Coleman Barks of Athens, Georgia. Del Tredici’s exuberantly melodramatic setting of Longfellow’s Midnight Ride of Paul Revere was his tribute to the firefighters who died on 9/11, and featured the amplified voice and photographic memory of soprano Hila Plitmann, who performed in both works without score in hand. Seen in the audience and backstage was Plitmann’s husband, composer Eric Whitacre. ASO music director Robert Spano conceived of and conducted the program. The ASO&C also recorded for Telarc in the same marathon weekend: Theofanidis on Saturday and Del Tredici on Sunday.

Atlanta composer Eddie Horst completed the score and studio master tracks in early April for Fatwa, a feature film from Washington DC-based Capital City Entertainment, which had its debut private showing to press and invited guests last month in DC. Shot in Panasonic’s new VariCam^® high definition video (which claims an image quality indistinguishable from film), the music and other sound elements were edited into the video at Atlanta’s own Lab 601 post-production house, say Horst. Rumor is that deals for exhibition in North American and European theaters and on cable television are “in negotiation” in Hollywood.

Alyssa Timin Photo by Ross Hoffman

In the past, I have seen pianist McCoy Tyner and other jazzmen of his generation referred to as “luminaries,” which conveys exactly the sort of musical halo these gentlemen have earned after decades playing in the clubs. On April 8, the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society conferred their own symbolic honor on Tyner by presenting his trio at the Gershman Hall of The University of the Arts, in its recently refurbished second floor Elaine C. Levitt Auditorium.

Simply put, the concert was one of the very best I have ever seen. If you get a chance to see Tyner perform, you best take it. On Friday night, the crowd was standing room only, an affirming ethnic mix of baby boomers with a healthy sprinkling of University of the Arts students leaning over the balcony rail in their tee shirts. When Tyner entered the hall and approached the piano, preceded by his bassist, Charnett Moffett, and drummer, Eric Harland, the whole room immediately rose to its feet for the first of the night’s several exuberant standing ovations.

The playing was hot. Really hot. If I were Lenny Bruce, I’d say it cooked. Tyner took obvious delight in racing over the high end of the keys, rushing down to the bottom, punctuating the run with an articulate crash. Moffett’s solos were so dexterous, slipping back and forth between intricate fingerings and intense bowing that Harland began to make fun of him, flailing around the kit with his brushes. The crowd laughed.

When the second set finished and the standing ovation began to loosen toward the exits, those of us who were still at our seats watched an elderly woman hunch forward from the front row to talk to Tyner. After a moment of whispering, he announced that she had been his music teacher in the fifth and sixth grades.

The audience was delighted and grew increasingly tickled when she presented Tyner with a picture of himself in junior high and announced that she wanted to play. So she did. She then stole a very difficult show to steal by sitting down, playing a few very fine bars, then sweetly bullying Tyner into an encore and announcing to all of us, “I don’t mind telling you, I’m 96.” The crowd went wild.

Roddy Schrock Photo by Hideki Kubota

Carl Stone, currently based in Tokyo, has been active in promoting the work of Japanese artists abroad. Fortunately for those of us who live in San Francisco, he was able to curate a duo performance by Yuko Nexus 6 and Mariko Tijiri here a few months back. I knew the work of Yuko Nexus 6 a bit from my years in Tokyo, but the work of Mariko Tijiri was something that I had not had the pleasure of experiencing. The downtown venue of 964 Natoma, sadly no longer presenting work, was the perfect space to hear this performance: a large warehouse space whose upstairs was quietly intimate, with bean bags and pillows scattered around for the audience to sit on. As Aaron Ximm, organizer of the Field Effects concert series, said, “The ears are only able to listen when the body is comfortable.” Field Effects is a uniquely San Francisco series: it is very DIY, flies under the radar, is community oriented, and is able to present work of the highest caliber.

The concert of Yuko Nexus 6 and Mariko Tijiri was well attended, the audience compiled of hipsters who saw the advertisement in local magazines, local luminaries of electronic music, and a collection of people who just enjoy listening to new music. Yuko and Mariko were seated amongst the audience on the floor towards the back of the space behind the glowing screens of their PowerBooks. It seemed as though one of them was primarily controlling the video and the other was working on the sound, but this was unclear and rather irrelevant to their aims which seemed to be a kind of total interconnectedness, between performer and performer, audience and performers, and among the audience members themselves.

The video was comprised of lightly processed shots of everyday objects, at times in very tight zoom, and at others from a much wider angle. The objects themselves were strikingly unspectacular but their arrangement was not—one got the sense that a lot of time was put into the preparation of these props for their filming. For example, an aluminum lamp would be filmed from behind at a very close distance creating little beads of light and darkness, then the camera would pan down to a pot of boiling water on a gas stove.

The sounds were treated much the same way. It seemed there was very little processing, the focus being primarily on subtle change of tone and placement of sound in time, all the while never leaving the realm of the delicate and suggestive. This was a sound environment for aural connoisseurs, so to speak. The intense care taken with the presentation of every gurgle of water, every slip of metal against metal, every atmospheric wash, was highly polished, deliberate, and lovely.

Throughout their performance I was thinking about how meaning is conveyed through performance, and how refreshing it was to hear and see work which seemed to avoid any overt insistence on message or commentary. If there was intentional communication taking place, it was of the kind that one might receive from the hands of a gifted masseuse, the kind that communicates relaxation to tense muscles and calms anxiety. Their music was content with the simple and powerful act of making a beautiful experience for all present. And at that concert in that space with that particular audience, it achieved its goal marvelously.

Julia Werntz Photo by Michele Macrakis

“Where are you?” An eminent composer to whom I had just been introduced, also as “a composer,” asked the question politely with a handshake and a curious smile, and with a slight emphasis on the word are. Where was I? Inside the same university concert hall in Boston, Massachusetts, that he was, attending a concert of contemporary music, but obviously that was not what he meant. He meant, “At what academic institution do you have a teaching position?” The context would have made this clear to anyone present, since a large percentage of the audience appeared to be professor-composers.

I begin my presentation of the Boston new music scene with this point because the academic atmosphere is an inescapable feature and usually colors the experience of new music consumption here. If it is generally the case in America that contemporary classical music is associated with the academic intelligentsia, then Boston, with its unusually large number of universities and music schools, is a place where this class distinction could be described as overwhelming.

Aside from being bad news for composers stuck outside the ivory tower, what does this mean for audiences? On the one hand, it means that the quality and quantity of new music performances is high. Largely because of its schools, Boston attracts a surplus of world-class composers and performers, and we have many university-resident performing groups and concert series. The landscape includes the Lydian String Quartet at Brandeis, Alea III at Boston University, the Fromm Foundation concerts at Harvard, as well as many independent performing groups, such as the Dinosaur Annex Ensemble (who just celebrated their 30th anniversary), Boston Musica Viva, Collage New Music, and several other excellent younger ensembles.

On the other hand, it also means audiences must not only posses the desire to hear this music in the first place, they also need to feel comfortable in the elite atmosphere that often weighs so heavily at these events—and this is no minor point. I believe there is a constituency of people out there interested in the arts who would be thoroughly enchanted by the music of Chen Yi or Mario Davidovsky, if only they had access to the music. They don’t. Most haven’t even heard of these groups, while others feel alienated by the milieu, indicating just how remote and secluded this large, rich, exciting musical world is from ordinary people.

A few groups, such as the Boston Modern Orchestra Project with their Club Café series, and pianist Sarah Bob’s New Gallery Concert Series, try to break through this barrier, and have had some success. And this is the context of Boston’s new music scene: a wealth of new music and musicians, and a profound need for the music to seem more relevant.

Werntz curently teaches music theory as an adjunct faculty member at universities in the Boston area, and also is Director of the Boston Microtonal Society, together with her former teacher and BMS President, composer and jazz saxophonist Joseph Maneri.

Mark Gresham Photo by Angela Lee

April’s new music calendar opened in Atlanta in a blend of old and new with an Eastern twist. On April 2, the Emory Javanese Gamelan, directed by Steven Everett, presented both traditional gamelan music and new works for (or inspired by) Indonesian instruments. Included was one of Everett’s own works, Ladrang Kampung (slendro), from his 1999 music for a dramatic work k a M. The gamelan was the supporting ensemble for a solo violin part, digitally processed through Symbolic Sound Corp.’s Kyma software with Kim Twarog as the violin soloist. This was the first time the solo part had been performed on violin, according to Twarog; cello or flute having been used in the past. She also plays traditional gamelan instruments as a member of the ensemble, but found playing violin in slendro tuning a novel and somewhat ear-challenging experience.

The late Lou Harrison’s Gending Moon sl. (1994) for gamelan was also on the program, as was Double Music (1940) collaboratively composed by Harrison and John Cage, played by guests from the Georgia State University Percussion Ensemble, who were invited to participate when Everett learned they were preparing it for their own concert on April 11. A simple but clever clue as to who wrote what in the piece was indicated by the performers’ shirts: blue for Cage, black for Harrison.

That April 11 concert by the entire GSU Percussion Ensemble, directed by Stuart Gerber, itself featured a panoply of newer music, including the premiere of Burning Moon (2005) by Nikitas Demos. Gerber himself was marimbist, sharing solo status with bouzouki soloist Esteban Anastasio. The duo parts, which the composer compares to “a pair of dancers,” were accompanied by an ensemble of six percussionists which seemed to have a role akin to a chorus in classical Greek drama.

Instrumentalists also had dancer-like roles in Pas de Deux by Brian Luckett, performed by the composer on guitar with flutist Carl Hall, in a duo recital at Emerson Concert Hall on April 8. The two also performed Libby Larsen’s two-movement, jazz and be-bop inspired Blue Third Pieces (1996).

Larsen’s music was featured again at Emerson Hall with the premiere of a new version of De toda la eternidad by members of the Emory Wind Ensemble on April 13. The original voice/piano version was commissioned by soprano Bonnie Pomfret, and premiered by her and pianist Laura Gordy for the opening of the Schwartz Center in 2003. The new version, which includes the addition of a chamber-sized group of winds, was commissioned by ensemble director Scott Stewart. Pomfret and Gordy were also featured soprano and pianist in this premiered revision. The premiere of a new concerto for piano and winds by Stephen Paulus was originally scheduled to be on the program as well, with William Ransom as soloist, but has been postponed until the fall.

Eyedrum, an in-town Atlanta alternative venue, frequently hosts improvisers like Erik Hinds of Athens, Georgia, who performs on quarter-tone guitar and the H’arpeggione, a large, upright, guitar-like device that includes a dozen sympathetic drone strings. Hinds and Tennessee-based vocalist/keyboardist Dennis Palmer took the stage at Eyedrum April 9 for a meeting of their personal electro-acoustical styles. Palmer cites John Zorn and Fred Firth as influences, while Hinds emphasizes the rawly naked sounds of his instruments’ strings. Eyedrum also hosts “open improvisation” nights, most recently on April 7. Says electric guitarist/composer Darren Nelsen, a first-time participant: “You get all kinds of characters showing up for that open improv. People will bring anything in—kazoos, megaphones, theremins. It was wild. Some of it falls flat, some of it is funny, some of it’s good; it’s all kinds of stuff.”

Scott Winship Photo by Kathryn Gritt

All too often Chicago gets labeled as simply a blues city, and there is much of that, but if you start poking around inside the deep and richly varied music scene, you’ll find new music ensembles and performing venues for new American music are popping up all the time. Performance opportunities great and small abound in the city, from major institutions such as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra to the experimental music on the fringes happening at places such as 6ODUM, the Empty Bottle or, for you experimental jazz folks, 3030.

First I’d like to tackle one of the biggies—don’t worry, out of the way places coming soon—the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s MusicNOW series. With a major orchestra that employs Pierre Boulez as its principal guest conductor and Augusta Read Thomas as its Composer-in-Residence, one would expect some quality new music…they don’t disappoint. Usually given as a series of four concerts throughout the season, MusicNOW is billed as “the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s most innovative series, devoted entirely to NEW MUSIC. The series brings together LIVING COMPOSERS from around the world. MusicNOW includes DYNAMIC discussions with the composers, led by CSO Mead Composer-In-Residence Augusta Read Thomas. The INTERACTION continues with the composers at each post-concert reception.” I personally enjoy the all caps tag words supplied by the CSO’s website, but they forgot to mention the FREE WINE supplied at the reception! Currently in the middle of the 2004-05 series, the third concert was held on April 18th, 2005 and only featured one American work, that of elder serial statesman Milton Babbitt. His jazzy Whirled Series—right in time for opening day of one of the few sports that really matters to most Chicagoans—was featured alongside works by George Benjamin, Unsuk Chin, and Wolfgang Rihm. The programming of Whirled Series is notable not only for the rarity of its performance in these parts, but also due to the wonderful performers enlisted to bring it to us: pianist Marilyn Nonken and fellow member of Ensemble 21 Taimur Sullivan on saxophone. Perhaps one of the consequences/benefits of Ensemble 21’s executive director Jason Eckardt as a recent addition to the faculty of Northwestern University will be the chance to enjoy more performances by the ensemble’s members here in the Chicago area.

The last installment of the MusicNOW series for this year will be held on June 7th at 8 pm with music supplied by Americans Steven Mackey (Indigenous Instruments), Robert Lombardo (Compressions II), and Joshua Fineberg (Recueil de pierre et de sable), as well as Cyprus-born Evis Sammoutis (Prelude and Allegro). For those who have not attended a MusicNOW concert, be forewarned that the CSO attempts to create an intimate listening experience in the vacuous expanse of Orchestra Hall by seating the audience in the terrace, a raised seating area at the back of the stage normally employed for choir performers. The ensemble in turn performs facing the terrace, with their backs to the traditional audience.