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This weekend, Ann Arbor’s University Musical Society is putting on its most ambitious project since I’ve been in town: Philip Glass‘s legendary opera Einstein On The Beach.

The production is directed by Robert Wilson with choreography by Lucinda Childs and includes a stunning cast hand-picked by Mrs. Wilson and Glass for the revival. Performances are this Friday (7 PM), Saturday (7 PM) and Sunday (2 PM) at the downtown Power Center performance space.

Alas, the shows are sold out at this point, but if you are a diehard fan, or just an interested individual in the area, there is always “second-acting” or last-minute availabilities to hope for (I’ve got my fingers crossed!).

For insights on the opera from one of its talented singers, check out Lindsay Kessleman‘s blog, “Inside Einstein on the Beach“.

I hope I can get in for at least some of it and report back on what it is like!

I’ve uncharacteristically procrastinated on this post for about a month and a half. In early December (I think), Christian Carey asked me to write a note about applying to doctoral programs in Music Composition after reading my incessant tweets on the subject, and I’ve been sitting on the assignment ever since. Much of the delay owes itself to my Masters Thesis. But, as of Monday afternoon, that project is finished and I have no more excuses.

The decision to apply to any program, whether a D.M.A./Ph.D. or a summer festival, is individual; the core motivations for pursuing or abstaining from the activity are absolutely personal. I urge anyone out there considering a graduate track in Music Composition to consider all the options – I have just as many peers who take time in between the stages of their education as those who, as I aspire, follow an unbroken path from their undergraduate studies to their doctorates.

With that said, I believe there is one universal I can offer: DO NOT do this because ‘everyone else’ does it, or you think it is a de facto part of a composer’s life. Although extraneous forces may shade doctoral studies as pro forma for the professional composer, this is not necessarily the case. No one should pursue a doctorate without a heartfelt motivation for staying in school.

My reason for continuing my education is impossible to capture in a pithy catchphrase. Even saying I, “love to learn”, is wholly inadequate because we are always learning no matter where we are and, more importantly, school isn’t the only place to absorb what we need to know. Last year, a doctoral student-friend of mine at UM told me, “don’t let your education get in the way of your learning”, which I think is excellent advice for any creative person in any level of schooling.

Along these lines, I didn’t choose to apply to doctoral programs for any curricular reason. Although there are specific parts of my craft/musicianship I look forward to working on (electronic music, orchestration, for starters), I don’t think I must be in school to meet these goals. In other words, I’m not searching for something in the schools I’ve applied to; rather, I’m looking for a place where I can look inside myself, become more familiar with the forces that drive me and mature into the musician I need to be to do my best in professional life. Perhaps naively, I consider the other responsibilities of a doctoral student ancillary to this process of self-discovery, experimentation and artistic refinement.

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Early this week I posted my report on the 2011 Midwest Composers Symposium, wherein I mentioned the fact I had heard a lot of students’ music in a short amount of time. Well, the 30+ works I wrote about Thursday were just the beginning of my new music marathon because Midwest was immediately followed by last Monday’s student composers’ concert at the University of Michigan. That composers’ forum, the year’s second, was refreshingly brief in contrast to the preceding weekend’s protracted program, yet it contained delicious variety and a few personal debuts by composers I was not familiar with.

Monday’s concert began with an electro-acoustic work by Robert Alexander, an accomplished, technologically oriented composer/sound artist who I saw perform with the MiND Ensemble last Spring. Mr. Alexander’s piece, a line between two spaces (turning and turning and resting), featured composer David Biedenbender at the piano and a host of live electronic devices. As I gathered, the work was mainly improvised, though it seemed like the overall structure – mostly in terms of energy level – had been agreed on beforehand. Most remarkable about the piece is the way in which Mr. Alexander’s electronics interacted with the piano.  At first, the piano’s sound is undistorted, with the first synthesized sounds regurgitating the piano’s music and then shifting the pitch ever so slightly. However, the electronics increasingly gain power over the piano, achieving a beautiful and stunning summit whereby the electronic part actually subsumes the acoustic space of the piano, and the instrument is no longer audible.

The next two pieces were beautiful songs performed by composers David Wolff (tenor) and Michael Schachter (pianist). First came Mr. Wolff’s “Of Mere Being”, an impressionistic setting of Wallace Stevens. With its impulsive musical moods, “Of Mere Being” reflects the text impeccably and expressively without being obvious. Moreover, Mr, Wolff’s performance, for both songs, was fantastic and demonstrative of his impressive musicianship. Mr. Schachter’s Pierrot (Heart), followed and didn’t shy away from the mantle of excellent vocal writing introduced carried by “Of Mere Being”. Pierrot sets a poem by Langston Hughes, and opens simply to establish a somber, contemplative space from which the narrator will tell his story. Like “Of Mere Being”, Pierrot merges the piano and singer into a single dramatic force that illustrates the text without being to transparent. Particularly important to the drama in Mr. Schachter’s work is the aforementioned simplicity of the opening material. This idea’s expressivity grows slowly, only to explode rather gloriously in the song’s captivating climax.

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The positive aspect of having too much of a good thing is that you’ve consumed something good. For me in the last week, the object of my over-consumption has been new works by student composers, not only created by colleagues of mine at the University of Michigan, but the representatives of the University of Iowa, Indiana University and the University of Cincinnati who attended the 2011 Midwest Composers Symposium. Topping off the weekend-long buffet of freshly baked music was Monday evening’s second student composers’ concert of the year here at Michigan (which I will cover in the next installment in this pair of reviews). Suffice it to say, I heard a lot of music in those four days, so I will do my best to cover what passed by my ears.

Midwest (as the event will be dubbed from now on) is an annually occurring conference of student composers held at one of the four member institutions (UM, UI, IU and CCM) on a rotating basis. For more background information check out last year’s post on the symposium. I participated in the Michigan delegation this year and traveled to Bloomington, Indiana (IU was the host this time ’round) with my work for two marimbas “Dark Spiral” (here’s a video). There were four concerts altogether, one Friday evening and three on Saturday offering over 30 individual works to an audience of composers, performers and professors. Intervening between the morning and afternoon concert Saturday was a very thought-provoking discussion session wherein each school elected students to give a brief presentation on a musical topic of their choice. I really enjoyed the interactions spawned by this feature of the event and I hope it is retained and, perhaps, expanded in the future.

I apologize in advance to all those performers and composers I am unable to devote much time to in the forthcoming paragraphs. The extreme volume of music presented to me forces me – understandably I hope – to be uncomfortably brief. Before getting specific I want to emphasize that every school represented themselves extremely well, in my opinion. Each offered a variety of styles and ensembles making the slate of proffered works as diverse as it was ample.

Now to the music.

Friday’s concert featured the “large ensemble” works, including performances by the Indiana University Chamber Orchestra, Contemporary Vocal Ensemble and New Music Ensemble. There were many remarkably beautiful moments in the first two works, Natalie Williams‘ Les Chant du Malador (2011) and Stas Omelchenko‘s Musings… (2011), particularly the third movement of Ms. Williams’ piece, which alludes to tonality in a very refracted way that is convincing and engaging without being too on-the-nose. These chamber orchestra works were followed by two very well-received (at least with my crew) choral pieces: Lindsey Jacob‘s Continue to Exist (2006) and Ji Young Kim‘s Reflections on Waiting for Mama (2011). Ms. Kim’s work is particularly striking in how it uses onomatopoeia to imitate the native language of her text’s subject, Korean. The piece balances the choir’s texture wonderfully, using precisely located solos to convey and magnify the work’s narrative backbone. The final two works on the evening’s program were Paul Dooley‘s Point Blank (which I already reviewed) and Justin Grossman‘s At Last the Secret is Out (2010), pairing very nicely together to conclude the first evening and set the bar very high for Saturday’s music.

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For those of you in the area, the highly-lauded chamber ensemble Brave New Works is returning to their old stomping grounds in Ann Arbor for two performances this weekend.

The first is at Ann Arbor’s beloved Kerrytown Concert House on Friday November 18, at 8 PM. The program will feature works by Joseph Schwantner, Chen Yi and UM’s own Evan Chambers and Bright Sheng. Tickets are $5 for students, $10-25 general admission

The second concert is the following evening (Nov. 19) at 8 PM in the McIntosh theater at the UM School of Music, and features an all-Michigan program of Erik Santos, Michael Daugherty, Kristin Kuster and Paul Schoenfield. This concert is free.

The Kerrytown Concert House

As those of you who regularly read my reports from Ann Arbor know, most of the new music I cover is related to the University of Michigan, usually in the form of a student composer concert, a performance by the resident Contemporary Directions Ensemble or the appearance of a contemporary work or two on a Symphony Band concert. Beyond these highly active groups at the Michigan School of Music, our town is gifted with two wonderful concert presenting organizations who regularly feature contemporary music on their programs: the University Musical Society and the Kerrytown Concert House.  Last year I attended several UMS events, but hadn’t stepped inside KCH as an audience member until last week when composer Ezra Donner invited me to hear the Aurea Silva Trio premiere his work Variations for Flute, Bassoon and Piano.

More so than UMS, the Kerrytown Concert House focuses on experimental programming and intimate presentations, garnering recognition from the Nation Endowment of the Arts for their important role in the music community of Southeastern Michigan and, frankly, the whole country. Unbeknownst to me, KCH has hosted a new music/jazz festival called “Edgefest” for fifteen years, which wrapped up last month. Although, I missed out on an opportunity to report on that concert series, I was able to catch a bit of new music there last week with the aforementioned recital by the Aurea Silva Trio.

Commissioned for the Trio, Variations reflects a consistent theme in Mr. Donner’s music: the influence of his upbringing in the Rust Belt of western Pennsylvania. To my ears, the connection was apparent in the first, expansive sonority of the piece, which ascends from the rumbling depths of the bassoon’s lowest register to the higher ranges of the flute and the piano. This section is the theme of what Mr. Donner called a, “classically oriented theme and variations” in pre-concert remarks, and does more than establish the root of all the subsequent music, it introduces bassoonist Gareth Thomas as a very prominent figure in the narrative of the work. Beyond the structure, the only stylistic allusion to classical tradition occurs with one variation I noted as a, “demented waltz”. I found the link impossible to ignore thanks to the section’s typifying meter and accompanimental pattern in the piano, though the passage’s melodic material is more of a grotesque caricature of than a respectful homage to traditional waltz music. As the variations continue, the ‘waltz’ music returns in a decayed form while the bassoon maintains its status as the principle melodic figure in the work – until the theme comes back. With the bassoon relegated to its lowest range, pianist David Gililand and flutist Brandy Hudelson are given an opportunity to expand on what we’ve heard before, leading to a rousing conclusion that caused one attendee – luminary America composer William Bolcom – to call out “good!” before the Trio could take its first bow.

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Conductor Christopher James Lees

Up until this last weekend, the true new music season was yet to begin at the University of Michigan. True, fabulous the Symphony Band and members of the performance faculty have already made fabulous presentations of contemporary music (as I’ve written about), but the two groups most dedicated to the work of living composers – the students of the Composition Department and the Contemporary Directions Ensemble – did not start their engines before last Saturday.

Although it is gaining momentum at the University of Michigan, the Contemporary Direction Ensemble is one of Ann Arbor’s best kept secrets, thanks in large part to its dynamic director Christopher James Lees. Maestro Lees’ commitment to new music is only matched by his charisma and musical ability. In the case of the group’s first concert of the season on Saturday, all three of these qualities were overshadowed by Mr. Lees’ perspicacious programming. If I wanted to be understated, I would say the selection and ordering of works was immaculate, but I prefer language more elaborate. I was entrained from beginning to end by the beguiling ebb of instrumental strength, musical style and length as each work passed to the next. Collectively, the pieces Mr. Lees selected attacked me, beckoned me, mesmerized me, connected me to an imagined past, nuzzled me, astonished me and drove me to tap me feet. It was the most engaging, well-constructed and consistent new music event I’ve ever attended. So, without discussing (or identifying!) any of the individual works and performances, I can confidently declare that, at least on Sunday night, Maestro Lees and his performers were far beyond reproach.

The first work on the program was Chris Theofanidis’ Raga (1992), scored for pierrot-plus. As the program note mentioned, the piece makes many allusions to Indian music, mainly through the use of drones, melodic slides and the bongo drums’ ‘faux-tabla’ groove. Overall, the work moves from simplicity – one note colored variably in the ensemble – to more melodic complexity. Raga is tied together by the consistency of the melodic material and the two percussion parts: the bongos are omnipresent and gong hits accompany most of the important structural delineations in the piece. As I’ve indicated, all the melodic/harmonic material is very closely related throughout, so development takes place in subtle ways such as increased ornamentation when melodies return, thickening the contrapuntal landscape (which produces a kind of whitewash effect since the mode is shared in all the lines), and so forth. The only notable contrasting ideas come in the form of dissonant clusters in the piano, which play an important role in leading the piece to its climatic conclusion of towering, static harmonies.

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The University of Michigan’s new music scene gained a full head of steam leading into this weekend’s Fall Recess with an appearance by Guest Artist Kayako Matsunaga and the Michigan Chamber Players’ first concert of the season. Ms. Matsunaga is an experienced new music pianist from Japan who was invited to talk to and perform for the Composition Department here at Michigan by Bright Sheng, with whom she has collaborated. The recital she delivered last Thursday featured work by many older Japanese composers alongside a piece by Mr. Sheng, Toru Takemistu and two University of Michigan students: Justin Aftab and Roger Zare. Yesterday’s Michigan Chamber Players concert featured work by four faculty composers: Paul Schoenfield, Stephen Rush, Michael Daughtery and Bright Sheng, again.

I am not extremely well versed in the work of contemporary Japanese composers, so I was very interested in what Ms. Matsunaga had to share with us, not only with her playing, but in her pre-concert lecture, as well. Essentially, she discussed and played music by Japanese composers who are heavily influenced by John Cage. However, what each composer’s work drew from Cage differed wildly. The first work, Toshi Ichiyanagi’s Inexhaustible Fountain, begins by repeatedly arpeggiating a three-note sonority from which two more complicated melodic ideas emerge – chordal tremolos that sounded like a riffing electric guitar and a linear passage denoted strongly by its exposed, octave doubling. These sonic characters converse with increasing bravado and drama as the piece progresses, yet, as enjoyable as the music is, its connection to Cage is unclear.

Such was not the case with the second work on the program – Yori-Aki Matsudaira’s Blending – insofar as it was clearly based on Cage-esque chance procedures. The piece is a series of very short, ‘blended’ quotations (he literally mixed the music of Stravinsky and Satie, for example, to create a new snippet of music), which are arranged by chance, leaving some to repeat unexpectedly and others to pass through the audience’s ears only once. To nail the Cage reference even more securely, one of the ‘blended’ pieces is Music of Changes. With that exposition taken care of, the piece is a little hard to listen to because none of the ideas connect, and few are transformed. Even hearing the Satie/Stravinsky nuggets change as they repeat, it is difficult to draw any meaning from the transformation. A similar diagnosis can be drawn on the following piece – Michiharu Matsunaga’s Meditation X – because it cycles through disparate ideas similarly to Blending. However, the same handful of figures returns, and becomes more ordered (though still rather heterogeneous) as time passes resulting in a more meaningful listening experience for me than Blending.

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Marilyn Shrude

Last week the Composition Department at the University of Michigan hosted two distinguished guest composers: Susan Botti and Marilyn Shrude. Their visit was marked both by an appearance at our weekly Composition Seminar class and, most importantly, performances of their work with Marilyn Shrude leading off a recital by her husband – renowned Saxophonist John Sampen – and Susan Botti featured as a composer and vocalist in the heart of University of Michigan Symphony Band’s inaugural performance of the year.

Mr. Sampen’s recital last Thursday was one of the more unique performances I’ve attended, continuously presenting a handful of works for saxophone without any pauses thanks to pre-recorded comments from each composer played in between the pieces. Some of these were straight-up verbal program notes, while others – like Ms. Shrude’s – set a backdrop for the forthcoming music. These oral preambles were not the only special aspect of the recital’s production: each work was paired with a visual accompaniment. Supplementary images we projected on a screen in conjunction with each piece, the most compelling and significant of which was the animation paired with Ms. Shrude’s composition, Trope (2007), written for alto saxophone and a pre-recorded tape of other saxophones.

Trope’s performance – the evening’s first – was set in darkness broken only by the auditorium’s projector, which displayed the beautiful animation I just mentioned. Given the darkness and the un-processed qualities of the tape, I found myself drawn into the sound as I attempted to locate where the saxophones I heard were coming from. The music itself is very closely written – neither the live nor taped parts leave the instrument’s middle register – and serene, at times using the multiple saxophone parts to create harmonies and, at others, playing timbral tricks with the instruments’ homogenous sound. The animation reflects the musical texture, and when the saxophones are united, only one line moves across the screen, while it splits into other, fainter lines when the sonic texture becomes more variegated. I was deeply engaged with the work’s visual element and felt it perfectly complemented Ms. Shrude’s gentle and tender music.

Despite the presence of multimedia throughout the evening, technology was not a prominent a feature of every work on the program. Japanese composer Fuminori Tanada’s Mysterious Morning III (1996) and William Bolcom’s A Short Lecture on the Saxophone (1979) solely featured Mr. Sampen’s talents, while the remaining three works all paired the saxophone with electronics – both interactive and pre-recorded. I mention Mr. Sampen’s “talents” and not simply his “playing” because A Short Lecture on the Saxophone is more of a dramatic work than a musical one. Essentially, the piece calls for Mr. Sampen to (seemingly) tell the story of his life as a saxophonist, coloring the spoken text with instrumental squeaks, over-played etudes and other demonstrative musical tidbits. The piece overflows with charm and humor, which more than compensated for the general absence of much musical substance. Of course, the point of the piece (if the title doesn’t make this clear enough) isn’t purely musical, and I was happy to see Mr. Sampen delightfully put his personality on display alongside his virtuosic ability on the saxophone.

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Joseph Gramley

After a long summer, students have returned to the University of Michigan. With all the excitement surrounding a new year of school, I found myself most eager to resume my role as an audience member at the School of Music, Theater and Dance’s perennially fantastic concert and recital offerings. The season opened up in a big way last Friday evening when Joseph Gramley – Michigan’s beloved, charismatic and preeminent Professor and Coordinator of Percussion – graced the stage of the Moore Building’s McIntosh Theater with a program this concertgoer is not soon to forget.

The evening’s theme, “Made in America”, was designed to highlight the contributions of American composers the percussion repertory. First in the lineup was Meditation Preludes (1970) by William Duckworth, a friend of Steve Reich’s and pioneer of post-minimalist music. One of my favorite things about Mr. Gramley’s recitals is his preference for oral program notes, which note only reveal the thought process behind his decision to perform a given work but also offer many interesting facts about the music and its composer. The most relevant ‘tidbit’ for Meditation Preludes is the work’s use of bitonality, which Duckworth drew from Darius Milhaud’s piano work, Saudades do Brasil. The tonal areas are divided instrumentally between a set of tuned almglocken and marimba, creating harmonic and timbral tension between Duckworth’s opposing sets of musical materials. Unity is the ultimate goal of the piece, which – after ponderously exploring the conflicting harmonic areas – weds them together in a more upbeat, more melodically expansive concluding section.

Two premiere performances followed Meditation Preludes, with one work by Mr. Gramley’s friend Kojiro Umezaki and the other by esteemed University of Michigan Assistant Professor of Composition (and Mr. Gramley’s friend, too) Kristin Kuster. Ms. Kuster also performed the piano part to her new work Sweet Poison (2011), which was a musical illustration of how her knee ‘sounded’ when she was stung by a stingray in Mexico a few years ago. The piece reflects Ms. Kuster’s inspiration with extreme clarity by means of a dissonant, biting ostinato figure in the piano that first appears in the highest register of the instrument and then – in the final stages of the piece – spreads to cover a much wider range. Interrupting the ostinato’s growth is a beautiful interplay of instrumental colors, which, despite the presence of melodies and harmonies, all felt very percussive in character. Mr. Gramley alternates between vibraphone and unpitched instruments including drums and a woodblock, while booming low notes in the piano part ring out like a church bell combined with a tam-tam. It is only when previously opposing material merges that we hear the ostinato – just like the stringray poison coursing through Ms. Kuster’s leg – come back and take over the piano part and, ultimately, the final bit of  music.

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