Category: Spotlight

Whether you’re a believer in fate or not, you kind of have to think Kirsten Broberg was meant to be a composer. Even from a young age it seemed inevitable; she recollects that, “I had trouble sleeping at night, even when I was 5, 6 years old, because there was music in my head, and I couldn’t get it out. I’ve been spending the rest of my life trying to figure out how to get it out of my head and onto paper, and heard.”

Compulsive earworms have proven to be a good motivator for pursuing composition; even with no other musicians in the family to provide a precedent, within a few years she was playing horn in the school band, and her parents recognized that her passion for music was not some passing phase. Now just finishing up her doctorate at Northwestern University, Broberg has already accomplished a pretty staggering amount, and her ambitions are even grander. In addition to her highly prolific and accomplished life as a composer and teacher, she is the executive director and founder of the Chicago-based non-profit Dal Niente New Music, with ensemble dal niente as its accomplished performing arm. She’s drawing up plans to start her own contemporary music festival in the upcoming year, all the while tackling a wide array of commissions.

But most important is still her own music. Broberg’s nocturnal earworms may be a fanciful explanation for her abilities, but this sort of connatural generation of musical material does actually do a fair bit to explain the allurement of her music. What it presents to the listener is a rich canvas which isn’t doing much to pull you forcefully one way or the other. It’s not imploring you to intellectually engage its own interior logic—although it is tightly and skillfully put together. But neither is it telling you what to think or how to feel, since it wasn’t birthed from some sort of Romantic desire to directly express inner turmoil or anything like that. It’s like an abstract visual; you can cogitate the technique, or consciously try to adapt the shapes and lines into something that has personal meaning; or you can stand back and take in the color, the form, the gestures as an aggregate, and really feel it.

This visual analogy isn’t out of hand, either—while often her own working habits approximate a sort of cerebral transcription, she also will use an imaged approach to plan out her music—and it’s probably a more literal process than you’d guess. She explains, “I finish the piece, and then a few months later I find the sketch, and its scary how much it looks like the gestural profile of the piece.” Her work Constellations for two pianos and percussion quartet was started on such a premise; spiral galaxies and brilliant starlight become visual contours on the page before notes on a staff. But while the title may guide you to think of Orion or Cassandra, the actual piece isn’t some sort of mawkish paean to mysterious galactic forces. The actual effect, from the stream of grace notes in the beginning to the sturdy yet serene fundamental iterated by the piano at the conclusion, doesn’t evoke huge flaming balls of gas so much as something way more recondite: It evokes itself. It totally embraces the most fundamentally ineffable qualities of music, so much so that you can’t even point to the generative techniques for description like you can with something like spectralism or minimalism or whateverism.

But even if it’s hard to really pin down, it’s still always expressive and dramatic. Her real gifts towards those ends are with sound and form—which, it turns out, she doesn’t actually separate all that much. To wit: “I like to use timbre in a way that’s structural. It’s not just a decorative feature of the piece, but it actually has something to do with how the piece progresses, and what are important elements in the piece, and what things are developed.” In Constellations, the metallic opening figures evolve into the deep resonance of the piano pretty frictionlessly; the journey of the piece is about, at least in part, that very change in timbre. Or, in her five-movement work Resonant Strands, the continuum of sonic possibilities inherent in a piano, bowed piano, and string quartet really provides both the micro- and macro-structures for the entire piece, from the smallest forces (Opening, an extractable movement for solo cello) to the entire ensemble. The seamless progression of the materials has everything to do with the success of the piece; in fact, all five movements might go by without you really being aware of the transition at all. It’s part of the game plan.

And you might sit in the concert hall afterwards and be profoundly affected by a piece like Resonant Strands, but still have nothing really concrete to grasp on. But that’s fine; it’s an hoary truism, but one that bears repeating sometimes: words aren’t always enough. That’s why some of us get into this profession, and it might be that those who understand it best are at an advantage.

Steven Ricks
Photo by Kory Katseanes

Imagine if American music history in the 1970s had taken a slightly different course and the iconic Synchronisms of Mario Davidovsky—works which combined acoustic instruments with pre-recorded electronics—were the foundation for the future direction composers took, rather than being sonic curiosities from a past zeitgeist. For Steven Ricks, a Davidovsky protégé who directs the Electronic Music Studio at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, works merging acoustic and electronic realms into a seamless whole serve as a sonic metaphor for uniting the corporeal and the spiritual. A practicing Mormon who is completely attuned to contemporary culture (everything from Thomas Pynchon to videogames and recent pop trends), Ricks (b. 1969) creates latter day synchronisms containing some of the most thought-provoking music written this decade.

“It’s coming out of a tradition; it’s definitely influenced by Davidovsky and his Synchronisms,” says Ricks. “I’m doing my best to try to figure out what else could happen, what’s the next step. Electronic media and electronic music permeate our lives so much. There’s that great quote by Brian Eno, ‘Chances are if you’re younger than 90, you spent most of your life listening to electronic music.'” My vocabulary is kind of modernist, it’s not neo-romantic and it’s not trying to be accessible per se, but I do hope it hits people on a gut level. I hope it can communicate in a very direct and personal way.”

To get a sense of how Ricks shapes his compositional vocabulary from these seemingly irreconcilable elements, a good starting point is actually a non-electronic work, Mild Violence, a 2005 composition for new music’s ubiquitous “Pierrot plus percussion” ensemble—a sextet of flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano, and percussion. While the title comes from a warning on a videogame, the piece was inspired by something very different—the brutal 1844 mob murder of Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism. Indeed that act was anything but mild, and Ricks’ music often isn’t either—sudden percussion attacks periodically punctuate music of relative calm, creating an atmosphere that it is never quite safe to relax in, and occasional unstable ostinatos reminiscent of Edgard Varèse and Igor Stravinsky make for a truly visceral listening experience.

According to Ricks, “Music in some cases attempts to deal with experiences from the real world, but it’s done in a very abstract way. So to portray musically the murder of Joseph Smith, even in its best attempt, is still going to be mild. Music is a euphemism and can never be like an actual violent event; nobody’s going to get hurt. I already had the piece a little bit underway and was thinking of this title, but the idea of connecting it with Joseph Smith came a little bit later. I was writing it in 2005, and knowing people that were writing various pieces to commemorate the 200th anniversary of Joseph Smith’s birth, I began to feel like this could be my little offering to that and thinking about that shaped some of the musical events—there’s a lot of snare drum hits that are meant to sound like gunshots and things being abruptly cut off. It’s the general notion of the one against the many, somebody tries to do something but the rest of the group is ganging up on them.”

Steven Ricks is well aware that the elements he is putting together are often worlds apart. The oxymoronic word combination “mild violence” also serves as the title for the first commercially released recording of Ricks’s music, a collection of six compositions which was released last year on Bridge Records. Another work included on that disc, which probably goes furthest in juxtaposing seemingly unrelated musical elements, is American Dreamscape, also composed in 2005. Scored for a standard jazz quartet—alto saxophone, piano, bass, and drums—plus Ricks’s signature electronics, it is one of the composer’s more secular creations, though not exactly: It was inspired by a passage in Thomas Pynchon’s otherworldly Gravity’s Rainbow. In the novel a drugged character in a hospital imagines himself in the bathroom at the Roseland Ballroom hearing strains of the popular standard “Cherokee” downstairs on the dance floor. At the same time, in a different place, bebop legend Charlie “Bird” Parker improvises on the chord changes of the same song and has an out-of-body experience.

Fueled by Pynchon’s descriptions, Ricks creates a vivid audio collage that opens with a noisy crowd at a club in the middle of a set—a pianist reminiscent of Bud Powell plays a run, but it sounds somehow not quite right because it has been microtonally altered. This quickly shifts into an electronically-generated timbral kaleidoscope before landing into a truly weird sonic space that is somehow equal parts post-bop jazz and so-called Uptown music. Eventually acoustic multiphonics and similar sounding electronic responses blur to the point where it is difficult to identify the source of any specific utterance with certainty. While the sonic translation of this literary passage sounds more like Eric Dolphy than Bird, Dolphy’s explorations beyond hard bop orthodoxies into free jazz melodic directions might very well be the sound of Parker having an out-of-body experience. Ricks explains, “I thought of Charlie Parker waking up in the after life, or pushing through past some sort of threshold into a very surreal world. The other thing is there are little short snippets of recorded alto sax where I purposely add in some record scratch, but the lines are funky and atonal. My idea was to try to create an unreal situation where somehow I had excavated these old recordings, but when you listen to them they are completely new or out of this world.”

Mormon cosmology is more overtly behind the structural conceit of Ricks’s 2000 percussion quartet, Dividing Time, which also eschews electronics. But while electronically produced sound is not part of the final product, an electronic devise helped to shape the piece—pitch materials were generated from a prototype of a piece of software Ricks co-invented called the Universal Music Machine. Ricks explains, “It’s basically a program that spews out a stream of notes based on the information that a user provides. Then you can export it as a MIDI file and use it to play a patch you’ve created, or import it into a notation program to look at the actual notes and then edit it and hand those notes to a performer.” (Click to download the Mac and PC Versions of the Universal Music Machine.)

“One of the techniques I used for Dividing Time was numbers in a hat—I was tearing up pieces of paper, but I was thinking there’s got to be an easier way. So at a certain point I used a prototype of the Universal Music Machine to randomly select different drum patterns. I actually now use it in every piece I write, but the way I use it is pretty controlled; it’s kind of meta-compositional. One of the influences that went into Dividing Time was the Biblical account of creation being the act of dividing: God divides the light from the darkness; organizes the earth and then divides the land from the water. Inherent in that is this notion that matter is eternal. Joseph Smith, the founding prophet of Mormonism, says that all spirit is matter. Even things we can’t see—things that are spiritual—still exist in the material world, but their particles are smaller or more refined and can’t be seen with the natural eye. So it is not creation ex nihilo—this vacuum that you then put something into; the stuff is there and creation is the act of organizing it.”

It might come as a surprise to a non-Mormon that adhering to a faith often perceived by outsiders as fundamentally old-fashioned in outlook would manifest itself in a corpus of musical compositions that are unapologetically experimental. But like other composers for whom firmly held religious convictions helped to shape aesthetics that might initially sound counterintuitive to tradition—Olivier Messiaen, Toru Takemitsu, and Steve Reich come to mind—Ricks has a relationship to his faith that has served as a wellspring for innovation. And he is not an isolated case within the Church of Latter Day Saints, although he admits that he is something of an anomaly.

“In general, the Mormon community is somewhat conservative and maybe not so interested in the avant-garde, but there are many people that are very supportive. In some ways, it’s just a microcosm of the United States in general. The audience for new music is somewhat small in comparison with the people who are willing to buy a ticket to go to a stadium concert. There are some people who are very enthusiastic, but those people are fewer than those who tend to be more traditional and have a feeling that art music ended somewhere around 1890 and anything after that is sort of strange.”

Buy Mild Violence from Bridge Records.

The music of Grouper, the moniker of Portland-based artist Liz Harris, elicits all sorts of semi-poetic description and creatively convoluted comparisons—like “Mazzy Star meets Arvo Pärt meets My Bloody Valentine,” if you can hear that in your head. While Harris’s uniquely noise-obscured take on the singer/songwriter might resist classification, what’s weird is that it doesn’t feel all that difficult or new, actually rather comfortable and familiar, which is perhaps why the rampant analogies to other artists are so tempting. This comfort leads to another critical allure: how it invites interpretation. For instance, the ways in which people describe the music—e.g., something you listen to while you walk back to your apartment late at night through empty streets while being whipped by the cold winter wind—are lonely descriptions, and one can imagine that a lot of those who listen to Harris’s music are lonely people. It’s not so much that the music functions as a locum for social interaction or as a source of yearned-for empathy; more that it makes loneliness feel beautiful instead of monotonous and crushing.

And have little doubt, Grouper’s music is incredibly beautiful. But personal projections like this might have very little to do with Harris’s actual intent. There’s a certain set of commonalities to abstract yet evocative music that encourages listeners to identify in a deeply emotional and visceral way, and this music has these qualities in spades. In the reviews of her albums there’s a tendency to talk about things like “what kind of girl” Liz Harris is, or the complex emotional inducements she intended with the music, based mostly on the internal agencies of listeners who have no real knowledge of the internal agency of the composer. Unsurprisingly, these attempts at identifying with a specific dark or isolated force behind the art can turn out to be misguided. Many of these individual idealizations also kind of fly in the face of other things one might notice given a closer look—her penchant for collaboration, whether it be with Xiu Xiu, Badgerlore, or Inca Ore, doesn’t indicate anything like an aggrieved outsider in a secluded cabin, nor does her unexceptionally well-balanced demeanor in person or interviews. Or take one of the few comprehensible couplets from her latest full-length, Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill: “love is enormous/it’s lifting me up”.

False countenance or not, the face behind the music is meaningful to people, and of course it’s the music and presentation itself that’s inducing it. While the style has changed over the four years since the release of the first eponymous CDR, especially with a fairly noticeable turn towards greater clarity and accessibility with 2007’s Cover the Windows and the Walls, there are some hallmarks of Grouper’s work that can be traced from inception. The instrumental rhythms tend to be little more than basic pulses, with a prevalence of drones underlying the structures and long-breathed and repetitive melodies floating over the top. Everything is bathed in reverb and delay, creating this quasi-aqueous sense of laying beneath waves of indistinct yet intimate sounds. Despite this aural envelopment, things are kept quite simple; the Wurlitzer featured in the early albums has given way to more guitar, but Harris’s voice has remained the binding phenomenon. Yet in a paradoxical way the voice isn’t treated as the cohesive musical factor at all, but rather is buried in the mix behind blasted phonic haze. Everything sounds de-emphasized.

The various levels of formal, rhythmic, timbral, and harmonic stasis in Grouper’s music then act like the treatment of a canvas for musician and audience alike. That may seem like a forced analogy, but its fairly apt given Harris’s visual predilections—she was an art student at Berkeley before turning her focus to music, and still contributes visually to her music career with album artwork and concert videos. It’s fitting then that she describes her treatment of the beclouded lyrics as similar to her use of pastels in visual works, which really only invites further listener speculation. The cumulative effect of all these little ambiguities leaves a body of work begging for subconscious and personal interpretation.

At a recent show at the New Museum, one of Grouper’s own coruscated videos played behind but also over her, lightly masking her in a really very beautiful way as she played. It was befitting of the music in this elemental yet ineffable way, as though they both came from the same marrow. Which of course they did. The massive video projection emphasized the spare closeness of the setup—basically a singer, a guitar, and a handful of effects pedals; a hissing cassette backed up delicate melodies and casual strums. The six songs passed without any applause in the intermediary; the pre-Valentine’s Day crowd consisted of a large number of couples who did not converse softly or nestle with each other during the set, but sat rapt, focused in their attention like they were trying to commune directly with the light-veiled performer on the stage. Of the many in the audience who were experiencing something very unique and secluded with the music, none were wrong.

Lukas Ligeti is always listening to music.

Even when the stereo is shut off, there’s a steady stream of sound running through his head. “The basic element of my sonic imagination is always my own voice,” he says. “It’s like I’m singing to myself.”

This constant state of mental invention keeps Ligeti, a composer and percussionist currently living in New York, on his creative toes, because “with 24 hours of soundtrack going on, you’ve got to listen to a lot of different things.”

Though yes, he is the son of Gyorgy, it wasn’t until he graduated from high school that Ligeti really even considered studying music seriously. As a child growing up in Vienna, Austria, practicing and reading music turned him off, but when he entered adulthood, he reexamined where devoting himself to sonic exploration might lead.

It certainly wasn’t going to put him back on a piano bench running scales and practicing etudes. “I enjoy studying other people’s music just to find out things about it, but to devote myself to playing other people’s music in a really serious way, to really being an interpreter, I don’t think I have the character for that. I’m too much on my own planet.”

For Ligeti, the most natural way to make music is to improvise. He wasn’t comfortable playing the solitary composer alone in his studio even if the scores were his own, so he reopened the idea of learning to play an instrument and began studying percussion—both to deepen his understanding of rhythm, but also, he admits with shy smile, because he naively thought it wouldn’t be too difficult for a late starter like him to get away with in performance.

Still, he stuck with it. After earning a masters degree from the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna and serving as a visiting composer at Stanford University in the mid-’90s, Ligeti moved to New York. In the creation of his own sound, he drew particular inspiration from the experimental and improvised music of downtown New York—artists such as John Zorn, Elliott Sharp, Bill Frisell, and David Moss, as well as city’s numerous jazz clubs. America felt like home.

“I feel a sense of purpose here,” Ligeti explains. “I was interested in things that the scene in Austria, Germany, those places, were not really interested in very much. There’s an aesthetic of contemporary music—kind of a post-Darmstadt hyper-complexity aesthetic—that I really have very little use for personally. And I felt much closer to the tradition of American maverick individualists and the pioneer spirit of discovery, of exploration, and also of combining popular music and non-popular music. All of these things attracted me.”

Another sound that attracted him, unlikely as it might seem on the surface, was the music of Africa. His grandmother’s African art collection first drew his attention to the continent, which became a place “where I could invest my fantasies.” Much as composers had looked to Indonesian gamelan to extend their palette, Ligeti reached towards Africa and established a number of deep musical relationships with people in several nations. “I thought it would be interesting to investigate certain types of African music in that way. Not trying to make African music, but trying to use African music as an influence, along with Western music, of course.” Today, the outcome of that exploration is perhaps most directly heard when he performs with Burkina Electric, a band formed in the West African country of Burkina Faso and which now performs all over the world.

Ligeti continues to draw from a wide variety of sonic influences as he crafts his compositions. And though one might try to separate the music he creates with fellow improvisers from the work he writes for classical ensembles, he is more likely to make a distinction between the musical idea and the outward packaging.

“I can actually take one idea and place it into a pop context or into an orchestral context, and that’s just the clothes, but the emperor is the same,” Ligeti says. “I think if you listen carefully, you will see that my concerns in many of these different contexts are actually the same.”

All perhaps just snippets of one long tune running in his head.

Keeril Makan

Keeril Makan contains multitudes. This was obvious enough back in 1998 when he wrote his duo for violin and percussion, 2. Contained within this Frankensteinian piece are the seeds of what he has explored throughout his career as a composer: pulsating rhythmic gestures, noise and abstraction, beauteous slow-moving harmonies, and long-breathed modal melodies. In the years that followed, these ideas would be dispersed, growing each of their own accord when Makan chose to explore them.

The seminal germinating event really occurred three years later with the composition of his second string quartet, tear. After years of using sequencers to help create his Bang on a Can-influenced works, he found that he missed the tactile feel of an instrument in the composition process. Makan explains, “It was really having the violin in hand that generated tear. After 11 years of not playing I had no technique anymore, but had a very trained ear and a lot of different ideas of how to approach the instrument in new ways… It was very much about how to place my hands on the instruments and the sounds that would be produced.” The change was radical—gone was the pulsing rhythmic interplay, replaced by chaos and noise. Makan has referred to it as a study for his later works—and indeed it doesn’t do much other than get louder as the piece progresses—but it helped him escape from the impasse he felt he had come to with his previous music.

After a few years of exploring the noisier end of the musical spectrum, Makan began to reintroduce more traditional notions of beauty into his music—exhibited in his 2006 work for chamber ensemble with violin and viola soloists, Still, a piece clearly and frankly indebted to Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante. The music is still undeniably Makan’s, and undeniably contemporary, but exhibits a rarely seen ease with its musical forbearers. In this sense, the acknowledgment of influences from the past paradoxically leads to greater compositional freedom and originality. Makan suggests that “the beauty that may arise in the music has to do with a certain honesty about this particular question of, ‘Am I aware of how the music relates to the past, both my own and otherwise? Am I exploring the idea as fully as I can, and not being lazy?'”

Soon thereafter, Makan wrote Washed by Fire for string quartet, a sort of full-circle return to form. The harmonic beauty he had been exhibiting since Still remains, along with the reintroduction of the strong rhythmic elements he had neglected after tear. In a way, it makes linear sense: after coming to terms with Mozart, Makan sought to come to terms with his own previous works. About the quartet he explains that “at that point in my life actually writing that was a very scary experience for me. It was really very challenging for me to get back into that world. It was more a question of personal perspective than anything more global.” Before tear, he had grown too comfortable with his compositional style; now six years removed from it, he could return with the same uncertainty that proved so creatively fecund when he first explored it.

The pieces since Washed by Fire have been more diffuse than ever, freely exploring past sound worlds as well as new ones. Yet, despite all the variety, there remains something very intrinsically Makanian about all his work. “I do think there is something of a voice that connects all of these pieces, and I don’t think that people are ever really surprised when they hear a piece of mine,” he says. “It’s not totally out of left field, there is some sort of connection. And it has to do partly with everything is coming out of my connection to my body. How I’m connected to it changes over time, but it still is my body. And there’s a certain history there, and I think that as I explore it there is a continuity that exists between the pieces as a result of having the starting point always be with my body, whether it was more rhythmic or more sonic.”

Eric Owens Photo: Paul Sirochman

Whether standing center stage under the spotlights or sitting just across a table while chatting over coffee, Eric Owens only has to utter a few lines to have his audience completely entranced. The warm rumble of his speaking voice hints at the powerful bass baritone he unleashes on stage, often in the service of contemporary composers such as John Adams, Elliot Goldenthal, and Michael Daugherty.

Owens was in New York this fall to play General Leslie Groves in the Metropolitan Opera’s production of John Adams’s Dr. Atomic. It’s a role he originated in the work’s 2005 world premiere at the San Francisco Opera and which has grown along side him though multiple productions. Still, stepping out onto the Met’s stage delivered a special emotional punch.

“It didn’t all hit me until the curtain came down after the first performance,” Owens admits. “Before then, you’re working hard and rehearsing hard and trying to put your best up on the stage. But when the curtain came down, I could finally take in the occasion of it all and sort of pinch myself—because just singing at the Met is a dream come true for me.”

Born in Philadelphia in 1970, Owens has appeared on a number of acclaimed stages in the course of his career, but he had a particularly strong connection to the Metropolitan Opera, having grown up listening to their weekly radio broadcasts. Back then, however, he still had no idea that opera would become such an important part of his life. His teen years were actually spent studying the oboe, and it wasn’t until his early 20s that he turned his focus to becoming a professional singer. Given the choice between the two, pursuing vocal studies presented itself as the more practical option—as practical as any career path in the performing arts can be, at least.

Owens as General Leslie Groves in John Adams’ Dr. Atomic Photo: Ken Howard/Metropolitan Opera

Owens credits his instrumental background for laying the groundwork that has allowed him a certain ease with new music and the demands of contemporary composers. But stepping out from behind his instrument felt like the most natural thing in the world. “I just thought it was the most incredible thing that the human voice could do something like this,” he explains. “There’s this wonderfully personal element to singing because there’s nothing between you and the music: You are the music. You’re not holding some thing in your hand, depending on it to do your bidding. It’s definitely something that’s external, whereas singing is something very much internal and very personal.”

Owens has gone on to perform and record a significant range of operatic and concert hall repertoire, both old and new. Through it all, he’s managed to maintain both his focus and his perspective.

“Looking back, there’s no reason whatsoever I should be doing this, as far as my background is concerned,” he admits. “It’s just something that I was drawn to and seeing how things progressed, it was definitely a calling for me. This is really what I’m supposed to be doing, and I couldn’t be happier.”

Robert Dick Tune in to Counterstream Radio on October 23 at 9 p.m. for more talk and full tracks of Robert’s music. If you’re away from your desk, you can catch the recap on October 26 at 3 p.m.

Composer, performer, improviser, teacher, writer—Robert Dick must be multi-appendaged to have his fingers in so many different pies at once, and it would certainly go a long way towards explaining the sounds he can coax out of a flute. But sadly, in person he has merely the usual ten fingers on two hands attached to their separate arms, with no clear physical abnormalities to conveniently explain away his instrumental prowess—a product of the more intangible concepts of hard work and insatiable curiosity. Yet while Robert may be best known for his admittedly revolutionary advancements of flute technique, his accomplishments actually roam more widely. In fact, he prefers to term himself a “musician who happens to play the flute,” with full complementary skills in composition and improvisation that connect his music not just with physical prestidigitation, but also to actual listening.

Even with his inclination towards past models, Robert’s 21st-century skills fit him perfectly within present realms. “My evolution into a more creative musician really began at Yale, when I met my composition teacher Robert Morris,” he explains. “Out of the competitive classical cauldron, other inputs started to just happen. I was hanging out with people who weren’t fanatic practicers on the flute or the oboe or the violin; they had other interests, and we talked about other stuff, and it was the first time I played in a new music group.” His influences, which had been constrained by large-C Classical training in a myopic community, began to expand as well: “The influence of the rock electric guitar players—their amazing range of sounds, the highly individual approach to sound that they all had—really speaks to me, even today, extremely deeply.” Like his new mentors, the young Robert set out to explore every nook of his instrument’s sound world.

Letting his flute freak flag fly during college led to Robert’s development of The Other Flute, the first of his three highly influential books on new techniques for the instrument. He also became active as a composer and improviser during this time. Because of his work with technique, there is a tendency to view his creative work through the lens of “special effects”—but this is otiose. “Don’t concern yourself too much with how the sounds get made,” Robert advises, “just listen to the music.” And a rewarding listen it is; Robert’s work as a composer reveals a unique and multitudinous voice that incorporates influences as diverse as Edgard Varèse, Indian Raga, and Jimi Hendrix. The exchange of information between the audience and performer is loose yet direct and affecting. “The thing that limits creativity is self-consciousness,” says Robert. “The more you think about yourself, the less expressive you can be.”

We are now in the 50th year of Robert’s life as a musician, and there is no indication that he’s slowing down. Always the consummate collaborator, he remains active in a variety of groups as well as on the solo circuit. His own music has turned increasingly towards the chamber world, where it remains as much for the audience as for himself. “Music is for other people,” he explains. “Music is the communication of emotion and meaning and thought through sound, and what’s the point of making it if you’re not going to communicate to someone? Other people are what make it important.”

Gabriel Kahane Photo by Jen Snow Tune in to Counterstream Radio on September 25 at 9 p.m. for more talk and full tracks of Kahane’s music. If you’re away from your desk, you can catch the recap on September 28 at 3 p.m. Sample a bit of the discussion right now.

The list of guest artists gracing Gabriel Kahane’s new self-titled album reads like a Who’s Who of great indie/classical/pop/chamber wherever-you-want-to-file-it performers. Sam Amidon, Rob Moose, CJ Camerieri, Chris Thile, Sam Sadigursky, Sufjan Stephens. The inquiring mind just has to know: Did Kahane post a “desperately seeking” ad on the right bulletin boards, or do these guys all just happen to drink at the same Brooklyn bar?

“Well, there is actually a restaurant in Ditmas Park called The Farm where we do tend to congregate,” Kahane confesses through his laughter. More accurately, however, he says the musicians involved are linked by a shared creative impulse. “If you’re interested in making music that is sort of genre-less or if you want to shuffle between the concert music world and playing pop songs and playing for different kinds of audiences, I think naturally you’re going to gravitate towards this community of musicians.”

From there, the road to inspired collaboration is not so long, and the mixed-genre aesthetics the group shares paradoxically paint the perimeter of a chic, if loosely defined, emerging scene all its own. And whether trained at Juilliard or in a childhood bedroom, participation is hardly dictated by a musician’s C.V. As Kahane tells it, “You just tend to meet people at shows or whatever and then you hand them a CD and say, ‘Hey, want to play a show at The Living Room?’ And then one thing leads to another, and you’re making a record.”

Maybe it’s the pressures of current culture, maybe it’s personal experience—Kahane did a year at the New England Conservatory before transferring to Brown—but he actually comes down fairly hard on the conservatory model for training young musical artists. “Conservatories tend to neglect the global nature of what it means to be an artist, that is to say making art that is a sounding board for what’s going on in the world,” he explains. “To me the idea of making music in a vacuum, where it’s just about the notes on the page, is obviously really unappealing.”

Notes on the page aren’t even necessary depending on the complexity of the passage and the limits of his memory. The performers themselves walk into the studio with a huge range of previous technical and musical experience, and he then takes it as his job to devise a method for communicating with each if them. It’s all tucked neatly under the music in the end, and the results make for some exceptionally sophisticated pop, if that’s the lens you look at it through, and some unusually addictive art song if those are the glasses you’re more at home wearing.

Kahane’s own mash-up of approaches is most striking when he throws complex musical ideas against straightforward lyrical storytelling. And his lines often feel intimately personal, though he clarifies that “it’s all to a certain extent fiction—but to sort of borrow a cliché from writer’s workshops, it’s all in the service of truth.” That said, his Craigslistlieder, an eight-part song cycle currently available on his website, was developed entirely from actual classified listings—want ads from people seeking everything from a roommate to forgiveness. “Neurotic and Lonely,” for example, is a post from a 20-year-old guy living with his parents while dealing with emotional issues and longing for love with a beautiful woman, preferably one who also owns the video game system he also seeks.

It’s heartbreaking, and Kahane works it for all it’s worth. “I get the sense that the kid was being utterly sincere, and I think it’s what makes that particular movement of the cycle particularly poignant. It’s one of those instances of humor emerging from something that is depressingly honest.”

It’s an honesty he continues to slip into the songs on his current album in small, fierce ways. Where few listeners these days can actually hear the song of themselves in Schubert lieder, Kahane is telling us the simple and tragic stories of a life we can comprehend using just as much poetry. “We bought each other hardback books/inscribed them with ice cream that dripped while we ate” he sings in “Villanelles”, “but petrified by your writerly looks/I simply wrote XO love Gabe.”

Peter Evans Photo by Bryan Murray Tune in to Counterstream Radio on August 21 at 9 p.m. for more talk and full tracks of Evans’s music. Not back from vacation by then? Catch the recap on August 24 at 3 p.m. Sample a bit of the discussion right now.

If you could end the world with the push of a button, would you? Peter Evans might. “It’s weird that some people just automatically respond ‘No’,” he observes. “I don’t understand that actually.” Lacking as simple a mechanism as a button, Evans instead uses his trumpet to assault the populace—and people are starting to take notice. In 2006, his debut solo recording on Evan Parker’s PSI label was released to considerable accolades, and in November of last year his eponymous Peter Evans Quartet was similarly lauded. He has further collaborated with Ned Rothenberg, Fred Frith, Tom Blancarte, Charles Evans—the list goes on.

Surely if the world were to meet a sudden end, it would have to be at the hands of Evans, a source of seemingly inexhaustible energy. Not that he fits the profile of any of the Four Horsemen. His “boy next door” appearance is hardly intimidating, and at only 26, he is still at the very beginning of his career. But, as the saying goes, appearances can be deceiving. “People make very weird comments to me about my concerts, like that they border on performance art,” explains Evans. “They think I’m going to completely lose control or fall off the stage. I guess I look like a pretty normal, buttoned-down guy, so when you see sweat and spit flying out of my face, it’s a little weird. Maybe I would make more money if I thought about how I looked.”

The intense physicality that causes Evans to produce such formidable spittle is backed up by his prodigious technique. He did go through a period of uncertainty with the physical demands of the trumpet—or, as he puts it, “What kind of instrument is it where you play loud for five minutes and you’re tired? That sucks.” But Evans has found a way to overcome those limitations. His recent solo efforts often extend beyond a half an hour, and there’s nothing quiet or minimal about them; audiences are faced with a constant onslaught of sound. “I don’t like silence that much, especially in concerts. I don’t know if you want to psychoanalyze me or something, but I’ve always liked to play the trumpet a lot, and I was always into finding ways to play as much as possible. I like information overload.”

A member of the International Contemporary Ensemble, Alarm Will Sound, and Ensemble21, Evans is also a go-to trumpeter for the new music scene in New York, even if it’s not really where his creative heart lies. “Something I don’t necessarily like about the way that people approach notation in classical music is not that it’s literal, but there’s just a lack of imagination. You play it, then that’s it. In new music ensembles, my favorite part is not playing the concerts—it’s rehearsing. I really like rehearsing crazy pieces. But then you play the concert, and usually there’s just one, and that’s it. To me that’s not very interesting. It seems to make a lot more sense and be more alive if you look at notation as something you have to water, and it grows in unexpected ways.”

Maybe the world is safe after all.