Category: Spotlight

Ted Hearne

When conversing with Ted Hearne, you can almost see each synaptic volley go off. There’s an energy to his thinking, a sign of the powerful curiosity he has fomented. He takes pains to both understand the perspectives of those he disagrees and explicitly put forth his own views. It’s clear that a broad spectrum of understanding is a critical virtue to him. “Diversity is a word that people use all the time,” he admits, “but I do think that you can learn in a very different way when you’re not just exposed to your family or your family’s friends.”

The resulting omnivorousness is, thus far, the most defining characteristic of Hearne’s music. His work Katrina Ballads, winner of the 2009 Gaudeamus Prize, is an hour-long cycle based on primary texts taken from the media coverage of the devastation of New Orleans in 2005. It combines a full scope of postminimal techniques with everything from electronic to (especially) jazz influences, taking the listener on a stylistically varied and emotional journey.

It’s an approach that was both philosophical and utilitarian. Hearne admits that it would probably have sounded pretty terrible if he just mimicked the many New Orleans traditions in his own written parts, being that he didn’t have much of a preexisting relationship with the music. Instead, he uses his particular blend of syncretism as more of an emblem for the city’s musical diversity. Hearne’s rejection of easy faux-nativism helps make the piece into something more distinctly from his own perspective. During Katrina Ballads‘ best moments, Hearne is able to turn his role as observer into a conduit for the sort of anger and frustration the rest of us felt.

Portraying this compositional process as a sort of natural genrelessness doesn’t present a fully accurate portrait, however. Some of the most interesting art is motivated by a fascination and confusion regarding just how to make it work, and Hearne is clearly motivated by such challenges. “I think that a lot of composers who have an interest in [synthesis] shy away from it because it’s so easy to mess it up,” he explains. “But once I started getting interested in what different genres could offer, and how I can express my interest in everything, I started to see those people as being a little scared. And that’s not the kind of composer I want to be; I want to take those risks, and if it sounds stupid, then I can always try again later.”

And certainly some of his best work has an unpredictable quality to it where it seems like composer, performers, and audience alike are taking mutual delight in something unexpectedly working. One such piece is Illuminating the Maze, written for and performed by his band Your Bad Self. An energetic 4/4 drumbeat persistently tries to break through a pack of insistent unison horns; the instruments slowly mend their shattered rhythm to create a boozy swing, before the textures disintegrate into a floating detritus of soft keyboards and clarinet. It’s by turns messy, exciting, and beautiful, and some of its success rests on the fact that the audience has little idea what Hearne is going to do with any of the materials he introduces.

In fact, Hearne seems to feed off of his own discomfort as a creative source, not satisfied with his work unless he is uncertain how it will turn out during performance. Certainly his voracious curiosity gives him ample opportunity to be uncomfortable, but it also gives him a lack of dogmatism that’s perhaps even more pure than many others who claim such a trait. There are some surprising juxtapositions among his influences—the cognitive dissonance of Peter Evans, Alex Mincek, David T. Little, and Bjork being mentioned in the same breath is actually kind of delightful. (How many people are there who actually have a strong familiarity with each of those artists’ work?) In addition to his own music, he actively works on a wide range of other projects, from conducting Red Light New Music in works by e.g. Grisey and Feldman to singing in “pop operas” such as Jacob Cooper’s Timberbrit and Matt Marks’s The Little Death. While there’s certainly a lot of talk about breaking down aesthetic barriers, Ted Hearne is one of the few who really walks the walk.

So though it may initially seem easy to place Hearne in a particular scene or aesthetic, it’s not totally congruent with reality. In five years, who knows what type of music he’s going to write? “I don’t want to be a composer who works really hard at a sound, and has a breakthrough with that sound, and then feels obligated to stick to that sound so that they’re then recognized,” Hearne explains, “because I think that in most cases that’s a formula for writing really boring music as you get older. I’m all for exploiting an idea for as much as you can, as long as it’s artistically viable or interesting, but then when it gets to be boring and you’ve done it, then you yourself are done with it. You’ve mastered your own game, and you have a choice: if it’s popular you can keep doing it, or you can take a risk and create something that’s totally new.”

Listen in on a conversation between David Bruce and Frank J. Oteri. Featured music: Gumboots (excerpt), performed by Ensemble ACJW at Skidmore College. To hear a full performance by Todd Palmer and the St. Lawrence String Quartet, please go to the Carnegie Hall website. A Bird in Your Ear (excerpt), commissioned by and for the Graduate Vocal Arts Program at Bard College Conservatory of Music, performed by the Bard College Orchestra and Choir conducted by James Bagwell Groanbox (excerpt), performed by the Groanbox Boys with the Metropolis Ensemble, conducted by Andrew Cyr, live at Le Poisson Rouge

David Bruce is a name that seems to be everywhere these days, particularly on programs at high-profile venues. In October 2008, clarinetist Todd Palmer and the St. Lawrence String Quartet performed his Gumboots at Carnegie’s Zankel Hall. And just a few days later, his music returned to Zankel’s stage when the Ensemble ACJW—the performing academy which is a joint initiative of Carnegie, Juilliard, and the Weill Music Institute—played his Polish song cycle Piosenki with Dawn Upshaw who had just done the work at St. Paul’s Ordway Theatre with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra. Then in May 2009, excerpts from his magical opera A Bird in Your Ear concluded the New York City Opera’s 2009 VOX Readings; it was the 100th work to be so featured on this annual showcase. And over the summer the Orchestra of St. Luke’s performed his Sports et divertissements at the Caramoor Festival. In September 2009, another song cycle for Dawn Upshaw, The North Wind was a Woman, opened the 2009-10 season of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center at Alice Tully Hall. Earlier this month Gumboots returned to Carnegie, this time at Weill with ACJW, and the Metropolis Ensemble, which had earlier played his Groanbox at Le Poisson Rouge, returned there to play his arrangement of Thomas Tallis’s “If Ye Love Me.”

All in all, it’s a pretty amazing CV. But although he’s almost 40, he seems to have come fully formed out of nowhere. Actually—though born in Connecticut—where he really comes from (at least culturally speaking) is the United Kingdom. He only lived here for the first six weeks of his life and has a distinctly British accent. His parents are both from the U.K. and he is the byproduct of Great Britain’s comprehensive music education system. And while one of his mentors was the American expatriate experimentalist James Fulkerson, he obtained his two compositional degrees under the tutelage of two of the England’s most revered composers: George Benjamin for his Master’s at the Royal College of Music and Sir Harrison Birtwistle, for his Ph.D. from King’s College London. And he has lived over there to this day.

Yet despite all that, in some ways he’s actually also very American. Technically, by United States law, birth on U.S. soil guarantees citizenship. And though Bruce was initially quite surprised to discover that he was a bonafide American when he attempted to apply for a work permit upon securing his first U.S. commission—an amusing anecdote he related during our talk—there seems to be something unmistakably American about the music he has been creating. His extremely independent-minded compositions, like so much of the music being created here today, is completely non-dogmatic and open to stylistic influences from around the world.

I certainly have felt over here a feeling of doors opening in ways that they haven’t so easily back in the U.K. I think more recently it is opening up slightly in the U.K., but there’s been a tendency for certain schools to coalesce. [Here] there’s a slightly more open attitude toward what you do—there’s a full range from the post-minimalists onwards through to the most avant-garde or experimental sides. […] It is the melting pot, but it’s also now the age of the internet, where our local tradition is the world; you can go in and explore anything you want to in an instant. One of the joys of life is exploring areas of music that you didn’t know so well and trying to learn new ideas and thoughts about how music operates from them.

Works like Gumboots and the accordion dominated Groanbox are filled with infectious idiomatic folk-like melodies and rhythms which sound like they were spontaneously created in performance and yet were carefully notated.

I work entirely with notated music but it’s a subtle balance of how to present those effects and ideas in a way that will be understood by anyone who comes to it. I’m very aware that although there is a folk music influence, I’m within the classical and fully notated world. Already when you put a piece of music paper in front of a player, that’s a different form of presentation of music than improvising in the pub or wherever. That’s why it’s something new. It’s not folk music; it’s just influenced by it. But I love the colors of folk music, and he rawness that it often has. I often find the classical concert instruments slightly too perfected over the years, and I like trying to imperfect them.

And his operas A Bird in Your Ear and Push!, as well as the song cycle The North Wind was a Woman, show a sensitivity to the nuances of the English language which make them immediately comprehensible, something which is all too rare in music coming out of the classical tradition and which, once again, has been a distinctive hallmark of American composers more attuned to the so-called vernacular. Still rarer, his cycle Piosenki does the same thing for Polish—turns out his wife is Polish and he’s fluent.

The texts are from famous children’s poems from Poland and these were from books my wife was reading to our kids. So working with that text was kind of second nature to me. But I don’t ever set texts in a language I don’t speak. […] For me that was a breakthrough in many ways because when the commission first came through it seemed kind of daunting—a song cycle for Carnegie Hall, which sounded all quite heavy and serious. But at some stage I though, “To hell with it, I’m going to just enjoy myself.” It was a sort of liberation. I was no longer attempting to join the Great Canon, I was just having fun writing music I loved.

All in all, Bruce has a multifaceted compositional voice that is very much a part of our current zeitgeist. Perhaps this is why so many prominent performance venues have taken note of him, even though bizarrely there hasn’t been a single commercially available recording of his music thus far. Without a recording as a calling card, David Bruce’s rise to the top of the musical echelon has been largely accomplished via word of mouth. So even though he’s now gotten some really major attention on this side of the Atlantic, David Bruce’s music still seems something of a well-kept secret. But we’ve never been particularly good about keeping secrets!

Hear Harnetty talk about his discoveries in the Berea College Appalachian Sound Archives, plus full tracks from his recent release, Silent City.

It’s easy to imagine that composer Brian Harnetty salvaged most of his equipment from various attics, basements, and yard sales. A scan of the stage at a recent performance revealed three worn turntables and a beast of a Rhodes. Even the tape deck looked like it remembered the ’80s.

As it turns out, it was an appropriately theatrical way set the scene, because in a sense the music itself is something of a rescue operation. Ever since he was a music fellow at the Berea College Appalachian Sound Archives in Kentucky, Harnetty has been creating work that brings gem recordings from that collection up out of the basement and into the light. With a soft touch, he weaves these aural snapshots—a snippet of fiddle playing or the gravely voice of an elderly woman singing a half-remembered folk tune—with his own music. The elements feel loosely tied together, allowing the lines to float over and beside one another, slipping in and out of focus.

The archival recordings are rich documents, often capturing related memories or the nervous laugher of the participants along with the music. Harnetty sought these moments out. “The whole allure for me in those archives, listening to these things, was that these people weren’t used to being in front of a microphone necessarily. So when they were being recorded, there was an awkwardness that I started to fall in love with,” he explains. “In most commercial recordings, obviously, that’s the part that gets cut out, so these in-between moments were really magical for me.”

Pairing those moments with newly composed music became a rewarding balancing act as he looked to filter experimental ideas through older media, and older ideas through new technology. The pieces Harnetty has created with this material are showcased on two discs: American Winter (2007) and Silent City (2009), both on the Atavistic label. While the music on American Winter serves as a kind of frame for the samples, with Silent City Harnetty seems to have shifted the equation around a bit and used the archival audio as one strand in the braid. His own music takes a more central role, and he’s also brought the striking vocals of Will Oldham in on several of the disc’s tracks. Oldham, a highly respected songwriter from Kentucky, is a collaborative partner whose raw, Americana sensibilities perfectly suit this old world/new world material.

Despite the creative motivation Harnetty found in the archives, the resulting music isn’t about stepping back into the past, but rather experiencing the past and the present simultaneously in a way that is instructive.

“I’m not too interested in sentimentalism or nostalgia; I don’t want to be there. I like the idea of showing many layers of history,” he says. And though the sounds are incredibly evocative, he’s not so much telling you a story as helping you tell yourself one. He was inspired by his own childhood and family memories while making Silent City, but Harnetty acknowledges that each listener comes to the music with their own histories as well. Instead of fighting that, he welcomes a certain sense of ambiguity in the music and invites the audience to let the sounds take them where it may. “I can’t control that,” he concedes, “so I like to present the material and then try to get out of the way as much as possible.”

In a way, creating this work was a kind of homecoming for Harnetty. Though he will never meet many of his collaborators, the sounds of Appalachia spoke to his own sense of personal history and helped him discover where his formal compositional training met his artistic motivations. Only then did his music began to find its own voice, he says. “I kept trying to be like I was in college, but that wasn’t working. It wasn’t until I started to pay attention to the things right in front of me, like literally in my room, or the landscape around me and the people around me, that the music became a lot better. It became a lot more personal, and it also became my own.”

Hear Jakobsons and Szelag chat about their music, and hear excerpts from their solo projects as well as their collaborative work as Myrmyr.

“How do you feel you’re most different as musicians?”

Dead silence is the one thing no interviewer ever wants to elicit from a subject—but that is the reaction of Marielle Jakobsons and Agnes Szelag to this ostensibly simple inquiry.

“That’s a good question,” Jakobsons finally says. “We’re always thinking about how we’re similar.”

Szelag remains perplexed. “Most different, that’s—”

“Well, I might just try to think about how we’re different at all,” Jakobsons finally suggests.

The obverse question, of course, has a much clearer answer. Jakobsons and Szelag met while getting their MFAs at Mills College and their similarities quickly drew them together as collaborators and kindred spirits. Beyond the traits that one would assume they share, given that they met in a SuperCollider class, they exist concurrently as string players, computer programmers, and Eastern European dronemongers. Their duo Myrmyr is the result of this consanguinity.

When putting together Myrmyr’s first LP, Szelag and Jakobsons felt it was important to go back to their first principles as a duo. “When we started to think about creating an album and were conceptualizing, we were like, ‘What’s the thread? What are the things that are important to us?'” Szelag remembers. What that conceptually and sonically turned out to be was a testament to their peculiarly particular shared interests. The Amber Sea, the result of their endeavors, is a lush meld of Baltic folklore and heritage (Szelag was born in Krakow while Jakobsons’s parents were born in Latvia and Lithuania) with scientific conceits. The fact that such a left-field pairing was a natural outgrowth of their mutual interests sheds a bit of light on why the “difference” question left them so tongue tied.

And regardless of the music being partially about science, it certainly uses a great deal of technology—to such a degree that the question of how to interface with the music becomes surprisingly complex. There’s the acoustic means—Szelag primarily plays cello and Jakobsons violin, but both are multi-instrumentalists whose music is filled with the exotic sounds of non-western instruments—and also the warped sounds of the electronics, which can take the form of standalone patches, nonstandard recording techniques, or tactile stomp boxes and synthesizers.

But there is freedom in the way they approach these choices, with the pieces from the album exhibiting an improvisational flexibility in the live setting where any interface, electronic or acoustic, can be used or not. “We’re always riding that line between being structured and composed, and improvising,” Marielle explains. “We’ve been playing together a while, and I think our improvisations are really strong, and often show a connection—you could listen to them and not know if they’re composed or not, necessarily.”

There are differences between the two, though, most easily grasped through listening to their solo outputs. Jakobsons’s solo project, darwinsbitch, focuses more intensely on the interplay between her electronic software and the instruments she plays. “This idea of the natural and unnatural world colliding is one of the main conceptual drivers,” she explains. Szelag, however, took a highly varied journey through music, starting with beat-oriented music, before passing through Mills, an experience that had unintended effects on her. She explains, “I thought that I would go there and I would focus, but literally it was like stepping into a room that was circular with 16 doors—and I opened a lot of them.” The result is a music that, while it shares Marielle’s interest with ethnic themes and electroacoustic sounds, combines a songwriter’s perspective with the interests of an experimental musician.

But the unaligned characteristics of their solo projects fit together to form a critical component of Myrmyr’s sound, with the ambiguity of darwinsbitch’s synthetic/organic interplay overlaying Szelag’s more songlike stucturings. That is, if Myrmyr’s sound stays the way it is, and that seems unlikely. In addition to all of the other interests that Jakobsons and Szelag share, they also have an artistic curiosity and adaptability that will inevitably lead them to explore new territory.

      “Journeys to relive your past?” was the Khan’s question at this point, a question which could also have been formulated: “Journeys to recover your future?”

And Marco’s answer was: “Elsewhere is a negative mirror. The traveler recognizes the little that is his, discovering the much he has not had and will never have.”

-Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, pg. 29

Hear Bloland chat about his life and music, and hear excerpts from his catalog.

The narrative foundation of Calvino’s novel Invisible Cities—well, such as one exists—is a dialogue between the explorer Marco Polo and his magisterial interlocutor Kublai Khan. What the Mongol emperor seeks in the reports of the explorer’s travels is an overarching philosophy that will direct his approach towards the expansion and management of his empire; what he gets are a bunch of weird fables about impossible places.

If Calvino’s art is to give these surreal encounters a poetic and philosophical heft, then Per Bloland’s art is to translate these ideas into a more visceral and abstract medium. “When I base music on literature, which I do a lot, I like to pick a theme from the book. I definitely do not replicate the narrative in any way—in Invisible Cities there isn’t really a narrative to replicate,” he explains. Bloland’s tribute to the novel, Elsewhere is a Negative Mirror for solo piano with electromagnetically controlled resonance, is more of an abstract analogue to the characters than a direct musical translation of the text: the reductionist Khan becomes an encircling torrent of tickled ivories irrevocably headed toward middle C, while the interruptions signify the deconstructionist (and spacey) Polo.

But quasi-programmatic conceits aside, the music has to sound good, too. And it does. Bloland’s setup creates music that both is and is not electronic music; the manipulation of the piano’s strings is accomplished with a computer attached to an electromagnetic resonating device that Bloland himself helped conceptualize and design, but the ethereal beauty that this complicated device elicits is purely acoustic. On top of this celestial “supertheme” (his term), the schizophrenia of the human-controlled piano creates forward momentum and drama; but rather than the performance melding into some sort of cyborg amalgamation, the two parts of the music exist independently of each other as ships passing in the night. And while the novel may give the ending of the piece additional structural meaning, more important is that the music itself is unexpected and beautiful: the soft ambience of the electromagnets dies away as the pianist is left alone to explore the formants and overtones of one single string.

Bloland’s pieces are like Calvino’s cities: they share many attributes and loose categorizations, yet are superficially quite different from one another. Quintet for solo saxophone and electronics might use the same instrumental conceit as Elsewhere—i.e., acoustic instrument + computer—but little else. Quintet explodes in mad punk energy as a Max/MSP patch augments the performer four times over (hence the name), a savage improvisation that’s worlds removed from literature or electromagnets. Bloland’s orchestral piece The Twilight of Our Minds, one of several based on Camus’s The Plague, takes a page from each, combining the aggression and electronics of Quintet with Elsewhere‘s literacy. And so on.

If anything, Bloland’s musical polyglotism is simply due to diversity of experience. Like Calvino’s explorer, Bloland has been a traveler: born in New York City, he has studied or taught in Ann Arbor, San Francisco, Austin, Palo Alto, and Oberlin. In these divergent cities he earned degrees in two fields and engaged in totally different types of music making. The cities he has lived in are as variable as the music he has created. This is probably not a coincidence.

Hear Lehman’s chat with Frank J. Oteri and listen to tracks from his recording catalog.

Listening to Steve Lehman‘s 2009 octet recording Travail, Transformation, and Flow will probably at first leave you speechless but will then make you want to learn how he did it; or, as Lehman puts it, go through stages of “wow! and how?”. But although it may ultimately be like nothing you’ve ever heard before, there have been precedents for the kinds of extended harmonies and ensemble textures he coaxes from a group of improvisers. Hard bop alto man Jackie McLean was a personal mentor to Lehman, and an underappreciated Blue Note LP that McLean participated in—Grachan Moncur III’s 1963 Evolution—foreshadows his own eventual sound world as does Eric Dolphy’s classic 1964 date, Out to Lunch. However, Lehman’s approach, informed by spectral theory, is much more tightly controlled. He’s actually going for a PhD in composition at Columbia where he’s working with spectral guru Tristan Murail.

But to Lehman, the world’s of hard bop and spectralism are actually not that far apart. He points out that Jackie McLean’s “intense focus on sound and timbre ends up for me having a lot of overlap with the music of someone like Tristan Murail and his kind of extreme focus on timbre and the physics of sound. These things can have unexpected confluences.” In his formative years, Lehman also sought out some of the music’s most far-reaching adventurers, Anthony Braxton and George Lewis, whose combination of free improvisation and elaborate formal designs left an indelible impact on Lehman’s compositional trajectory.

While no one before Lehman has set out to merge the sensibilities of post-bop improvisation and spectralism, he’s quick to point out that there is “a long history of musicians in several musical genres thinking in a lot of the same ways, even if they don’t articulate it in the same manner. There’s a long history of thinking about these things in improvised music.”

But introducing the specifics of this way of thinking about timbre into a jazz context requires a bit of a mindset adjustment—spectral voicings don’t happen by chance. “Being really precise, about who is playing what note or how loud it is, is very essential,” Lehman maintains. “And that was one of the things that was really interesting to negotiate with the players—to deal with music that is so meticulously organized and then take it into a context where you’re looking all the time to create the space for players to do what they do best, assert their own creative agency inside the context of a given composition. Some of the nuts and bolts stuff—like being able to execute quartertones on woodwinds and brass instruments, which is something that comes with executing spectral harmonies a lot of the time—is something that we were able to move forward because it is something that I’ve gotten very comfortable with over the years, and I was able to draw from a peer group of colleagues that were also comfortable working in several different musical worlds. It feels like a point in time where there are musicians that have so many different tools at their disposal as instrumentalists that they can take these types of ideas to new levels.”

Travail, Transformation, and Flow is chock full of intervals that are outside the compass of standard 12-tone equal temperament. A track on the disc that particularly stands out is “Dub” where the microtonal harmonies really cry out thanks to the remarkable players Lehman has assembled to realize his ideas—trumpeter Jonathan Finlayson, bassist Drew Gress, drummer Tyshawn Sorey, vibraphonist Chris Dingman—all of whom are veterans of earlier Lehman sessions, plus tenor saxophonist Mark Shim, trombonist Tim Albright, and tuba man Jose Davila. But despite the improvisational dexterity of this crew, much of Lehman’s material is completely written out. In fact, the level of precision on Travail, Transformation, and Flow is perhaps what sets it furthest apart from Lehman’s earlier output, including the remarkable quintet session On Meaning as well as Fieldwork, an ongoing trio project with Tyshawn Sorey and pianist Vijay Iyer, and Demian as Posthuman, the only album he’s released thus far which adds turntables and other electronically generated sounds to the mix.

Electronically generated material figures prominently in Lehman’s future compositional plans as well. “Part of what I got involved with very quickly, once I started to work here at Columbia, was developing a setup for saxophone and interactive electronics, mostly in the Max/MSP programming environment but also working with the Ableton Live. I’m hoping to integrate it more into my work. It will probably come out of necessity as well. If you don’t have seven or eight musicians to work with, you end up having to come with alternative solutions to realize that sound world via electro-acoustical formats.”

But no matter what combinations of sonic ingredients are at Lehman’s disposal, his seeming alchemical compositional magic results in music that makes you think but also totally swings.

Listen to catch tracks from her new album (as well as some of our old favorites from her catalog) and conversation with the composer herself.

While many urbanites don headphones to block out the chaos, noise, and intrusions of city life—perhaps most especially when it comes to the cramped quarters of public transport—composer and vocalist Amy X Neuburg found herself heading down into the subway with open ears in search of external musical inspiration. Acknowledging her long-running infatuation with the New York subway system, she explains that it has always struck her as a particularly evocative space.

“I found myself thinking about my life and the world in general,” she says of her commuting experiences. “Who are all these people I’m on the subway with and what are they thinking about and what’s their secret language? There’s a kind of meditative thing that happens to you when you’re on the subway; you get into sort of a zone which for me was just a font of creativity.”

Neuburg tapped and molded those impressions into a new song cycle, presented on her most recent album, The Secret Language of Subways (released on the MinMax Music label this past August). Combining her own powerful voice with her arsenal of electronic gear and the talents of The Cello ChiXtet, she put together 13 songs that, each in their own unique way, speak to “the inane and perpetually unfinished business of love and war—and New York.”

Lyrically, Neuburg tackles these topics in a very personal, first person way, but she says she’s actually shy about casting her work as some kind of autobiography. “I hate the idea that to express myself in way that people think, ‘Okay, this is real,’ I have to say ‘I’. It has to be about me, that there’s something personal in there. But then it’s all about me, and then I feel kind of sheepish about me writing music about me. And when I’m looping, there’s like 16-channels of me coming out of the speakers.”

In live performance, however, there’s certainly nothing sheepish about Neuburg, even though more often not there are indeed multiple channels of Amy X in the air—Amy vocally traversing octaves, Amy whispering secrets, or Amy just chatting with her audience in conspiratorial soliloquy. Often by the end of a track, in fact, she has layered that all into a single sonic sandwich. And whether she’s fronting a band or playing solo and sharing the stage with only her racks of sampling gear, Neuburg seems at home in dramatic performance.

In tracing her artistic development, it’s a characteristic she can follow all the way back to her studies at Oberlin College, where she moved away from her classical training and got into more avant-garde music. She began working with the student composers and became known for her ability to stretch her limits. After seeing her single-handedly crack an egg on stage while singing, the word went out. “Someone else had me yodeling in Korean while swinging on a rope across the stage,” Neuburg recalls, “and I became known as the soprano who will sing anything.”

After that, singing her own work was an easy step, no matter how experimental she wished to be. “The fact that it’s my music that goes the way I want it to go and nobody’s comparing it to the last person who sang this aria, I’m doing it my way, means that I can’t really make a mistake. It’s brand new music.”

Her approach to the electronics has a bold outward physicality as well—samples are triggered through drum pads and loops are set off with a well-timed whack of a mallet. The drama of the performance makes a visceral connection with her audiences that’s important to Neuburg and that’s sometimes lacking in today’s electronic music landscape.

But if anywhere, this is also where she feels most vulnerable. “You can’t screw up,” she cautions. “Because I’m working with loops, you go from this loop to that loop, and you have to change right on the millisecond.”

And where other performers might break a string or trip on some scenery, Neuburg is negotiating a particular brand of high wire act in dealing with such technology in live performance. “If you hit the wrong pad, you might erase the whole song.”

Ruby Fulton

Prosopagnosia. Police beatings. Comic book characters.

Ruby Fulton hears music in some unusual plot lines. In her ear, a case of face blindness turns into a fractured choral work, a beating is embodied by a line for steelpans, and Batman’s nemesis falls out of a string quartet.

Fulton radiates a sort of “ask me anything” energy, so when the Baltimore-based composer stopped by the Counterstream studio to chat about her work, questions were fired and she unloaded the details behind some of the stories that have inspired her and the philosophies underneath the musical choices she’s made.

Listen to full tracks from Fulton’s catalog and get the inside story from the composer herself.

Despite the complexity of many of the underlying concepts, Fulton is actually generally hesitant to disclose the narrative string beneath her work in any kind of formal program note-style exegesis. The stories are a tool she often uses to create, but she doesn’t want to control her audience and put programmatic limitations on where the music can take them. She’s happy to put out the welcome mat, but she isn’t looking to give listeners a guided tour—an analogy she picked up from composer Julia Wolfe.

“This idea of opening a door for someone and letting them explore whatever’s in there by themselves, I like that,” Fulton acknowledges.

As a young composer actively exploring sound worlds, Fulton is no stranger to such solitary investigations. After studies at Boston University, the San Francisco Conservatory, and the Peabody Conservatory, however, she was left feeling somewhat too isolated as a composer. She credits Wolfe and the people she met in 2007 at the Bang on a Can Summer Music Festival at MASS MoCA (Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art) with really helping her solidify her own goals in music. “I was kind of going in a direction by myself, and it was such a great experience to meet this whole community of people who were like-minded.”

She found the long-term impact of that mentorship and learning period on her work deep and personally empowering. “One of the biggest things I learned from those guys is if you find a sound or sound world that you like, just live in it; dwell in it for as long as you want,” Fulton recalls. “[Julia Wolfe] was the only teacher who ever encouraged me to repeat something for longer! Just taking delight in something you like and staying there.”

This was a switch from some of the academic training she’d had up to that point, during which she’d found herself in more discouraging situations.

“I don’t want to necessarily name any names, but he hated my music,” says Fulton, alluding to a professor who constantly prodded her to make more frequent and dramatic changes in the line of her music. After a semester of taking his artistic beatings it was time to move on. Still, she did take away some valuable lessons. “It’s kind of nice at first because you have to really know what you’re doing. I had to really try to explain myself and that was in a way a good challenge, to have to be clear.”

Though still a few years shy of 30, Fulton feels she’s now honed in on some key musical ideals, though she is still actively questioning how to best live a life in music and picking up some lessons her professors seem to have skipped over. One of her biggest discoveries: “It seems so obvious, but it took me a really long time to figure out that I should write music that I like. It seems like you would just know that, but when you’re in school in this academic institution where you’re always trying to please other people or you’re always trying to get an “A” or whatever it is, I just didn’t know that for a long time. And then it dawned on me and it was just like, oh, why didn’t someone tell me?

“When I’m teaching myself, that’s definitely going to be a big thing that I tell people all the time—What do you like? Do that!”

Listen to an interview with McIntyre with selections from his work.

For New York City’s arts scene, the descriptor “melting pot” doesn’t really pass muster—it’s more a loose conglomeration of small communities, with substrata that seem only tenuously connected when you look closely. Contra the usually accepted idea of artists being islands unto themselves, the most important and engaging individuals are often those who serve a sinuous and binding role, i.e. those whose work within the field codifies a disparate mass into this thing that we call “the new music community”.

Chris McIntyre is one of those people. As a trombonist, composer, curator, et al., he’s integrated himself into the NYC music experience in a way that most don’t have the opportunity to—and it was mostly luck and happenstance that brought him there.

“Most everything that I do somehow relates to the trombone,” McIntyre explains, and it certainly serves as the germ for his career. His own instrument’s lack of prominence before the 20th century pushed him right into the arms of contemporary composers. That engagement as a performer led to an interest in curating, although again in a typically unromantic way: “I literally typed ‘music curator’ into Google, and the first thing that came up was The Kitchen.” His work at The Kitchen as Associate Music Curator helped propel him into his current role as artistic director of MATA, arguably the most important organization for putting on new music by young composers in all of New York.

From the start, all of his activities were integrated into something both general and specific: the interfacing of notation with improvisation or chance, whether it be Julius Eastman, Earle Brown, or the AACM. As almost seems inevitable, his interests would expose an aptitude for composition as well. And he seems like he’s been doing it all his life, with an unabashedly nerdy interest in the nitty-gritty details of form and pitch classes.

Stuplimity No. 1 (page 8)

The first and most important piece was Stuplimity No. 1 for seven trombones. “It came at a time when I was working so hard on everything else, I just needed to start composing too,” he explains. “I was already thinking composerly thoughts all the time.” But it wasn’t just a new area of interest—the composition served as a synthesis for everything he was already involved in. Inspired by Sol LeWitt’s Variations of Incomplete Open Cubes, McIntyre created a graphically ensconced notation that allowed him to indulge his preoccupation with chance operations/improvisation using an instrument that he was intimately familiar with.

Since Stuplimity, McIntyre has continued to expand his compositional palette. Raster for quintet, one of his most recent pieces written for the ensemble Ne(x)tworks (with whom he plays), incorporates for the first time a strong rhythmic element into his technique, although everything is still kept loose and open. Groups of twos and threes are spread throughout the ensemble, resulting in a sound not unified but definitely not chaotic—”like you’re inside the nucleus,” as McIntyre puts it. Unlike his previous more modular compositions, Raster has a seamless and unrelenting form that pushes the listener through its entirety without a breath.

New York is always changing, and McIntyre has plans to change alongside it, expanding his compositional realm into soundtracks for films and installations. Still, one imagines that he will keep everything in his life tightly integrated. As McIntyre puts it, “I’m studying people doing work in the way that I’m trying to do work, while I’m playing it with other people. Somehow it all ends up being one life.”

Cenk Ergün and Jason Treuting share a history of musical familiarity, one that goes back more than a decade to their student days at the Eastman School of Music. But when Treuting begins to describe the Turkish-born composer’s output, he hesitates for a second, not quite sure which words to choose even though he’s served as a percussionist in performances of Ergün’s music.

“If somebody’s going to say ‘I’ve heard a Cenk piece,’ probably what you’re going to think of is—sparse?” Treuting ventures, glancing Ergün’s way as if to confirm he’s selected correctly and not inadvertently caused offense.

“I would be happy if somebody said that,” Ergün agrees, and the room exhales. As the two men continue their banter, it quickly becomes clear that there is little chance of serious misunderstanding between them. After years of working together, part of the appeal seems to lie both in the confidence they have in the other’s skills and the trust they can place in the other’s judgment.

Having successfully distilled Ergün’s style, Treuting takes a shot at zeroing in on the impetus behind his often spare aesthetic. “You put down on the paper what you need,” he suggests, “and then know that there’s nothing there that you don’t mean.”

It’s a clean idea in theory, but in practice it can get a little messier. Ergün’s approach—taken to the extreme in works such as An, a 17-minute piece for flute, viola, and harp that focuses on only a single pitch for all three instrumentalists and employs plenty of rests—can also leave a performer standing center stage feeling overexposed while waiting to play the next note, a situation whose emotional dynamics are not lost on Ergün. “It becomes theatrical a little bit. It puts a responsibility on you to believe in the music that you’re not playing,” he acknowledges.

What once might have been admittedly spurred by a desire to confront the expectations of the audience and a reaction to the complex works being produced by fellow students has now evolved into a distinct personal style, and silence remains a high-value commodity on Ergün’s sonic pallet. “It’s usually better not broken,” he says, only half kidding around, “and when you break it, you better have something nice to say.”

On a recent outing, Ergün did get a little more generous with the notes. It was a piece called Proximity that So Percussion, a quartet of which Treuting is a member, premiered at the 2009 MATA Festival. Though Ergün had been working on the piece for years on and off—”It was a long enough time that we had found some tractor blade that was in F and by the time you came back we didn’t have that tractor blade any more,” Treuting teases—but on the eve of the premiere, after months of careful crafting and revision, Ergün almost made a drastic alteration to the piece.

“Should I say this in public?” Ergün asks, plowing on without waiting for a response from Treuting. “I freaked out the day before. The piece has no skins, no drums; it’s all metal.” Still, as he traveled to New York for the performance, he found himself calling Jason and So percussionist Adam Sliwinski in a panic. “The opening, it’s bad,” he recalls telling them. It was the section that had taken him the longest to write, but later he worried it was too intense and stressful a way to open the work. So he proposed a radical alternative. Over the phone, he told them, “We’re going to use drums, loud drums—and the piece is not loud at all—we’re going to use loud drums, eight drums. Adam was like, ‘You had me at eight drums.’ ”

The So percussionists said that they would do whatever he liked—it was his piece.

Ergün appreciated their flexibility, but recognized that their reaction was not exactly a vote of confidence and reversed course, “but I almost screwed up the piece, honest to God.”

Last minute panic attacks aside, Ergün acknowledges how vital it was to work directly with the musicians over the course of work’s development. “I think for me at least, this is the only way to write chamber music, where I don’t sit in my room by myself and write a piece of music and then say, ‘Here, you play it.'”

Treuting finds that, depending on the composer, there still comes a certain point when it becomes “a negotiation on how collaborative it can be,” but it makes for an incredible experience to be so intimately involved, particularly with a friend like Ergün. And it’s also perhaps been influential—these days Treuting has been taking steps deeper and deeper into the composing pool himself.

Ergün—who also does some performing, mainly on laptop—applauds the double title Treuting is taking on. “It will make you a very sensible performer and a very sensible composer, to be able to do both,” he points out, though personally “if I had to let one go, I’d let my performer side go.”

“Yeah, yeah, right,” Treuting agrees before revealing how deeply enchanted he’s become with composing himself. “Me, too!”