Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust Grant Recipients Announced

The music and dance communities in New York City have just received major new support from a private foundation, the Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust. The Trust has made grants totaling more than $800,000 to assist in the recording of contemporary music and to help dance companies provide live music for their New York City performances in 2001. The recording grants enable nonprofit music institutions to record a wide variety of music that is not deemed commercially viable by the major recording companies. Most of these are CDs of music by living composers for whom high-quality recordings are important in reaching an audience and furthering their careers. The Live Music for Dance grants to New York City dance companies encourage collaborations with musicians and composers, and make the use of live music for their performances financially feasible.

Since its inception in 1988, the Trust’s Recording Program has dispersed grant funds totaling $2.45 million for 237 recording projects. In November 2000, grants totaling $440,000 were awarded to 29 institutions for 35 recording projects. For a complete list of grant recipients, click here [114k PDF].

One of the recording projects that received a grant was a disc of the music of C. Bryan Rulon, performed by the New Millennium Ensemble, which will be released on Koch International Classics. This will be the first CD devoted solely to Rulon’s music. He is a founding member of First Avenue, a trio of East Village composer/performers who combine conventional instruments with live, interactive electronics, computers, video graphics, and improvisation. As a composer, Rulon has received numerous awards including Guggenheim and NEA fellowships and commissions from Chamber Music America, the Fromm Foundation and NYSCA.

C. Bryan Rulon Photo by Marcello Maia

Rulon has worked previously with the New Millennium Ensemble and with the group’s pianist, Margaret Kampmeier. In 1997, the Ensemble received a Chamber Music America New Millenium commission for Rulon to write I’m Yolanda Vega! More recently, the group premiered MessMixExpress, for chamber ensemble and computer-generated and -processed sounds, at Roulette, in April 2000. Rulon is currently working on another piece for the New Millennium Ensemble: The Hyena and the Stork, based on Paul Bowles’ story of the same name. This piece will also be included on the new disc. “It could easily spoil a composer to be able to work with such technically and musically gifted musicians that one can also call friends,” Rulon commented.

The title of the CD will be After the Orgy, after a line from The Transparency of Evil, by Jean Baudrillard: “If I were asked to characterize the present state of affairs, I would describe them as after the orgy. The orgy in question was the moment when modernity exploded upon us, the moment of liberation in every sphere.” Rulon uses this quote in the first part of I’m Yolanda Vega! Other pieces on the disc include The Luddites’ Disclaimer, for “piano vs. computer,” commissioned by Kampmeier for the Musik im 20.Jahrhundert Festival, and Division of Labor, for flutes, clarinet, and piano.

Another project being funded by the Cary Trust is a recording of Mario Davidovsky’s music for CRI, performed by the ensemble Speculum Musicae. It will feature the first-ever recording of the String Quartet No. 5. Other works, such Junctures, Chacona, and the fourth string quartet, were recorded previously but are no longer in print.

Certainly much has changed in the music world since Harvey Sollberger first recorded one of the works on the CD, the Synchronisms No. 1, in the mid-1960s. “Performers have learned a tremendous amount in the last 30-40 years in terms of new music-making,” the composer reminisced. “When I was a kid, the performers that excelled at contemporary music were a small group of people. Then those people became teachers, and the repertoire and its new demands were passed on.”

This recording, then, could be perceived as representing the interest of a second generation of musicians in Davidovsky’s music. “To have the music documented on such a high level is the most important way of valuing my music available,” the composer commented. “It is much more important than any single group of concerts.”

Mario Davidovsky Photo courtesy of the Composer’s Guild of New Jersey

The works on the CD span almost forty years of Davidovsky’s career, starting with the first Synchronisms, and ending with the String Quartet no.5, which was given its premiere in 1999. The composer reflected on how the “first generation” of new-music performers has affected his writing, and that of his colleagues.

“Living in the 1960s and ‘70s close to great performers playing other kinds of contemporary music, we all picked up on different kinds of operations. Great performers were redefining the instruments, amplifying the conception of the instruments, which was a very impressive thing to composers. We incorporated those possibilities into our own writing, and they became part of the language of the literature.”

The continuing popularity of Davidovsky’s work, a fact that this disc surely evidences, raises the question of whether yet a third generation of performers will embrace his music. He took a selfless approach in answering this question. “If my sound world offers something of value, then it will be re-created and incorporated into the more general compositional language, even if a particular piece does not survive in an active way. Whatever contributions you make survive in the literature, even if not directly in your own music – they become part of a cultural tradition.”

A third recording project of interest is a Mondo Melodia disc of the music of Simon Shaheen and his group Qantara. The disc is being put together under the aegis of the World Music Institute, a group with which Shaheen has had a close relationship since he emigrated from Israel in 1982. The working title of the disc is Dance Mediterranean. Shaheen is noted in the Arab world as one of the top oud players in the world, according to WMI Executive and Artistic Director Robert Browning. Shaheen’s music shows the influence of many different traditions: traditional Arab music, Western classical music, and jazz.

Since 1986 the Trust has made grants totaling $3.7 million to help dance companies meet the expense of musicians’ rehearsal and performance fees, as well as composer commissioning fees and copying costs. The Live Music for Dance Program is the only one of its kind. In December 2000, grants totaling $391,800 were awarded to 22 dance companies for their 2001 seasons. For a complete list of grant recipients, click here [74k PDF].

Randy Woolf Photo by Robin Holland

Thanks to the Live Music for Dance program, Randy Woolf will be writing a new piece for choreographer Heidi Latsky. Latsky first got to know Woolf’s music when she performed in his piece BYOD. She played the role of “Heidi Dancer.” “BYOD is a parody of a TV infomercial in which the product being sold is a real, live postmodern dancer,” Woolf writes. Latsky became very interested in a piece Woolf was thinking about writing that would involve laughing sounds; this led to their Live Music for Dance application.

The piece that Woolf completed does, in fact, involve laughing sounds. It is scored for piano and sampler: Woolf’s wife, pianist Kathleen Supove, will play one instrument with each hand. “The samples are made entirely from the sound of Kathy laughing,” Woolf explained. The piece, which is organized into ten short movements, will accompany a dance entitled I’m Dying to Lift You, and will be given its first performance at St.Mark’s Church in New York in October, 2001.