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Program Notes

Duo for alto saxophone and piano (2009) had its beginnings in an earlier work for alto flute and piano. Substantially reworked and revised to better suit the sax, it still retains the same core compositional goals. Certain gestures – trills, angular melodies, and widely spaced arpeggiations – are set against more conjunctly articulated lines and stacked verticals. This gestural vocabulary evolves in its juxtapositions throughout the piece, providing a variety of vantage points. A plausible non-musical analog to its structure might be gradually unfolding an abundantly contoured map. (World Premiere, William Paterson University, 4/21/10)

Swedenborg Variations for violin and piano (2010) takes as its jumping off point my recent fascination with the works of 19^th Century landscape painter George Inness. In 2008, I wrote a trio (for clarinet, viola, and piano) based on his painting Sunset (1893). In addition to a series of musical reflections on this enigmatic and inspiring artwork, I also incorporated aspects of his working methods and artistic philosophy into my making of the piece. The latter concern drew heavily on both the writings of the Transcendentalists and on a spiritual approach to making art that reflected the tenets of Swedenborgianism. The violin-piano variations are a reworking of the last movement of the trio in a duo context, re-envisioned to better suit the virtuosic capabilities of both instruments.  (World Premiere, Connecticut College, 5/13/2010)

Making the classical aspects of the burgeoning indie classical movement abundantly clear, crossover albums are now crossover marketing musical scores. Via his website, composer Owen Pallett has released a limited edition score for the music on Heartland, his latest Domino recording.

Owen Pallett's Heartland

Joined by the Czech Symphony Orchestra and a host of guests (including composer Nico Muhly) Pallette has crafted his most consistently engaging music to date. In some critical circles, indie classical has, rightly or wrongly, been under the microscope for making pop into a ‘longhair’ genre, robbing it of its immediacy in favor of overt sophistication. I’d submit that this vantage point doesn’t give enough credit to indie audiences, who seem to be just fine grappling with orchestral arrangements by Pallett and electronic experiments by Animal Collective alike.

What’s more, recordings like Heartland amply demonstrate that one can, if they’re talented, craft sophisticated music that has just as many catchy hooks as a three-chord, three-minute anthemic single. A case in point is the loop-laden and jaunty “Lewis Takes off his Shirt;” the music, and the video below, suggest that pop can indeed combine sophistication with immediacy, and that its orchestral incarnation can be downright cheeky!

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For those of your with a case of ‘artifact avarice,’ the full orchestra score for Heartland is $46 and has been printed in a limited run of 300. In addition to the music it also provides lyrics and a chart of diagrams of patches for the ARP 2600.

Owen Palett’s touring a bunch in support of Heartland. Here are some dates:

04-08 Toronto, Ontario – Queen Elizabeth Theatre
04-10 Chicago, IL – Lincoln Hall
04-11 Minneapolis, MN – Varsity Theater
04-12 Milwaukee, WI – Turner Hall
04-13 Columbus, OH – Wexner Center
04-14 Pittsburgh, PA – Andy Warhol Museum
04-15 Washington DC – Black Cat
04-18 Indio, CA – Coachella Festival
04-20 Boston, MA – Institute of Contemporary Art
04-22 New York, NY – Webster Hall
04-24 Baltimore, MD – Metro Gallery
04-25 Philadelphia, PA – First Unitarian Church
04-27 Atlanta, GA – The Earl
04-29 Dallas, TX – Granada Theater
04-30 Austin, TX – The Mohawk
05-05 San Francisco, CA – The Independent
05-08 Seattle, WA – The Crocodile
05-09 Vancouver, British Columbia – The Vogue Theatre
05-10 Victoria, British Columbia – Alix Goolden Hall
05-11 Portland, OR – Aladdin Theater
05-13 Salt Lake City, UT – Kilby Court
05-14 Denver, CO – Larimer Lounge

Composers Now: an Interview with Laura Kaminsky

Composer, arts administrator, educator, and now, festival curator, Laura Kaminsky is exactly the type of advocate contemporary music needs to ensure its survival. Until recently a dean at the Conservatory of Music at Purchase College/SUNY (she remains on the faculty), she’s currently Associate Artistic Director at Symphony Space. Since her arrival, Kaminsky has done a great deal to enhance the music programming at the venue.

“Symphony Space has long been known for its literary events. But in recent years we’ve been hard at work to create an increased role for music in our programming: both in terms of performances and in our educational activities. We’re trying to create a home at Symphony Space for all different kinds of music. I’m particularly pleased with our incorporation of Latin American music into various projects. We are lucky to have both classical composer Tania León and jazz musician Arturo O’Farrill and his Afro-Latin Jazz Orchestra involved in our programs.”

Despite the currently gloomy economic times, she’s helped to organize an ambitious weeklong undertaking spotlighting contemporary music: Composers Now. It all started with a conversation she had with León.

“Tania pointed out that poets and playwrights generally have a much greater public presence than composers. Oftentimes performers become the focus of an event and, apart from their music, we don’t get to know the composers too well. So, we decided to help to organize a festival that gives composers in New York a public face.”

The Composers Now festival has involved dozens of presenters, ensembles, and organizations. And Kaminsky is quick to eschew any notions of single-minded leadership, remarking instead that, “This was very much a team effort. I lived for a time in West Africa and I learned there that it really does take a village. The idea of Composers Now took shape gradually and somewhat informally, beginning as a series of conversations over lunch or a cup of coffee with various area presenters and arts professionals.”

“It seemed as if it was just as we were getting started that the economy took a drastic turn for the worse. For a little while, our informal group of organizers was reluctant to broach the issue, but eventually we started to talk openly about the funding challenges we were all experiencing; about being nervous about the future of our organizations and of this project.”

“I learned something very valuable from those conversations: when people trust each other enough to speak the truth, great things can happen. Once we had had voiced our concerns, we were able to set about finding ways to make Composers Now a reality. By getting creative, we found a solution. The organizers were able to find a week in the ’09-’10 season when we could all commit to programming contemporary music or involving composers in some way.”

Kaminsky and company didn’t look at this as an event exclusively open to composers of concert music. In likeminded spirit to her work at Symphony Space, Composers Now has welcomed a wide range of styles and genres, including Latin American music and jazz. Within the confines of its contemporary classical programming, the composers highlighted have been from a similarly catholic array of styles, ranging from a concert by ‘downtowners’ Bang on a Can to a Composers Portrait of Benet Casablancas at Miller Theatre.

“If all goes well, we want Composers Now to stretch beyond the boundaries of New York City in coming years. I don’t see why this shouldn’t be a nationwide program that raises awareness of composers with events throughout the United States.”

If a village’s worth of arts presenters can achieve what Composers Now 2010 has done in NYC, imagine what arts organizations across the whole country could do?

I really enjoyed Q2’s broadcast tonight of New Sounds Live, a concert at Merkin Hall by the Bang on a CanAll Stars that featured works by Nik Bartsch, Oscar Bettison, Christine Southworth, Michael Nyman,and David Longstreth. The first in a hopefully ongoing series of collaborations between Q2 and Merkin Hall, it was also a featured event in this week’s Composers Now festival.

I particularly enjoyed the Bettison work, The Afflicted Girl, in part because it’s quite affecting; but it also helps that I was able to study in advance and follow along with a perusal score sent over by the kind folks at Boosey. Funded by BoaC’s Peoples’ Commissioning Fund, the piece is what Bettison calls an “anti-pastorale.” Its based on a quote from Peter Ackroyd’s London: the Biography. It describes an afflicted girl frequently found in a busy thoroughfare, seemingly oblivious to the cacophony around her. Or, as in Bettison’s posits in his piece, perhaps she found a kind of music amidst the chaos.

Clangor is Bettison’s daily bread: many of his works employ junk metal percussion. The Afflicted Girl involves copious percussion batteries, prepared piano, a keyboard tuned a quarter tone flat, taped echoes of the ensemble, plenty of electric guitar harmonics, and a Shapey-esque scordatura tuning of the cellos C string – down to G for rumbled slackening. What’s more, all the players double on bicycle bells!

Alternately assaultive and contemplative, rhythmically charged and, briefly, eerily reposeful, its a demanding, challenging, harrowing, and memorable work.

Sad you missed out on the Q2 broadcast? Fear not: the performance will be featured on a March broadcast of New Sounds.

I’m at work on a new piece, a setting of a poem that prominently features images of nature; in particular, the greenness of Spring and its corollary to young love.

A number of composers speak of experiencing synaesthesia where harmony is concerned: they ’see’ colors when they hear certain keys or chords. Interestingly, the composers in question seem to each have their own ‘color wheel’ for tonalities: there isn’t a magic universality of the harmonic color experience.

While I may yet not have Messiaen’s specificity for ‘color chords,’ today I’m searching for the right ‘green’ chord: preferably, an all-interval 12-tone one!

Despite the impending snow this weekend will be a packed one.

I’m attending the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra’s concert this Saturday at Carnegie Hall. Pianist Angela Hewitt will be appearing with the ensemble, performing as soloist in Bach’s Concerto for Piano and Strings in D minor. Christopher Taylor will be the piano soloist in the premiere of a new work by Peter Maxwell Davies. The latter piece, Sea Orpheus, is a trope on Bach’s chamber concerto style, using Brandenburg #5 as its inspiration. Dvorak’s E major Serenade for Strings and Stravinsky’s Basel Concerto round out the program. I’ll be reviewing the concert for Musical America.

This Sunday, the Prism Quartet is celebrating 25 years of concertizing and the release of various CDs with a show at Le Poisson Rouge (details below). The show will feature music from their recording catalogue, focusing on their most recent projects. They’ve also shared a sneak peek at their set list, with audio clips below.

The quartet’s latest CD, Antiphony, is a collaboration with New Music from China. It includes works by Wang Guowei, Zhou Long, Lei Lang, Chen Yi, Tan Dun, Ming-Hsiu Yen.

Thus far I’m really enjoying the title work, by Zhou Long. In addition to the saxophones, it features Erhu, Daruan, and percussion in a piece that explores folk resonances and microtones in a finely sculpted modernist-tinged amalgam. Yen’s Chinatown lands on the other side of ‘town,’ stylistically speaking, but is equally fetching. Zesty minimal ostinati are juxtaposed against Sun Li’s vibrant pipa playing. It’s a postmodern audio travelogue that indeed captures its eponymous neighborhood’s energy and diversity. I’m still seeking out scores for the Tan Dun and Chen Yi works; more once I’ve had time to digest them.

25th Anniversary CD Release Concert
Le Poisson Rouge

Sunday, January 31, 2010
Doors open at 6:30 PM, show at 7:30 PM

158 Bleecker Street, New York City
Information and ticketing: 212.505.FISH (3474),

lepoissonrouge.com
$15, two item minimum

Audio clips previewing their set list for the LPR gig:

Steven Mackey: Jackass
from Animal, Vegetable, Mineral
Roshanne Etezady: Keen
Jacob TV: Jesus is Coming
William Albright: Pypes
Jacob TV: Pitch Black
Lei Liang: YUAN

Faculty Recital: 21^st Century Music with Christian Carey

February 7, 2009 at 3 PM

Bristol Chapel,

Westminster Choir College of Rider University

101 Walnut Lane, Princeton NJ 08540

Free admission

Program Notes

The pieces on this program, with the exception of Odds and Ends by Robert Morris (1996), have all been composed in the past ten years. The Morris work has a Princeton connection; it was an eightieth birthday present for composer Milton Babbitt, a longtime professor at Princeton University who still lives a short distance from here.

Michael Fili’s Sonnet is part of a group of Shakespeare settings. Originally written for baritone, Mike agreed to ‘tenor-ize’ this one for me to sing at his senior recital. Matthew Samson’s Kiss Me is a thoughtful setting with somewhat unorthodox notation. It includes cummings-like performance directions throughout – a continuous dialogue between composer and performers.

Robert Thomas composed three couplets to celebrate two weddings and an anniversary. One of them was a wedding gift for Kay Mitchell and me. The pieces are, appropriately enough, Two-part Inventions.

Jody Redhage is one of a very small number of singing cellists and a fine composer. The group of songs she’s performing today is by a diverse selection of poets – Wyn Cooper, William Carlos Williams, and her sister Jill. Redhage has also commissioned a number of other composers to write for her, calling the results indie art songs. Both Daniel Felsenfeld and I have been fortunate to work with Jody; she’s a talented and dedicated advocate.

Three Settings of Jane Kenyon depicts different moods and themes prevalent in Kenyon’s poetry. Song is a paean to nature and simple pleasures – exuding joy at simply being alive and in love. Otherwise deals with the frailty of human life. Written while Kenyon was battling cancer (to which she ultimately succumbed), it is both beautiful and harrowing. Its logical answer is found in Let Evening Come, a poem embracing impermanence, confident that “God will not leave us comfortless” despite the lengthening shadows of impending night.

Joseph Arndt was a student in the first Musicianship course I taught at Westminster Choir College.  After graduating, he commissioned Spiritual Variations for the recital series he runs at Grace Church in Newark, New Jersey. The piece is a short suite, utilizing three early American spirituals as source material: “Brethren, We Have Come to Worship,” “I Am a Poor Wayfarin’ Stranger,” and “What Wondrous Love is This.”

All three of my Flourishes were written for flutist John McMurtery. Each however, has a different dedicatee. Silver Lion Flourish was written for Leo Feigen to celebrate the silver anniversary of his Leo Records. Butterfly Flourish was written for Pete Gershon on the birth of his daughter Lela. Locrian Flourish was commissioned by the Locrian Chamber Players and is dedicated to their director David MacDonald.

James Romig has written a number of works for McMurtery and pianist Ashlee Mack. Back when they were graduate students at Rutgers, John commissioned Romig to compose Sonnet 2, paying for the commission with, “lunch at Taco Bell, a fresh can of tennis balls, and a 7-11 Slurpee.” McMurtery has performed the piece over 40 times since and provided an analysis of it in his Juilliard DMA dissertation. Thread Sketches was commissioned for the 2001 Pittsburg State University (Kansas) Festival of New Music. The title is borrowed from a fabric artwork by Juliarose Loffredo. Double 4 was written for McMurtery and Mack in 2004. Over the course of the composition the two instrumental lines begin similarly, diverge, and then gradually reunite for a unison coda.

My Bagatelles were written for the Society of Chromatic Art and are dedicated to John McMurtery and Ashlee Mack. There’s one each for solo piano, alto flute, and alto flute/piano duo. They’ve also been performed by the Italian ensemble Dal Suono Sommerso in Rome, Italy and in Sardinia.

I met with composer Lou Karchin today to discuss his opera Romulus. A CD recording of this comic one act work is forthcoming on the Naxos imprint. I’ll be writing up the interview for the liner notes.

Composed in 1990, Romulus is a charming work. But like most contemporary operas, it took a while to find a company willing to produce it. In fact, Karchin waited seventeen years for a complete staging at the Guggenheim as part of its Works and Process series.

When I expressed surprise to Karchin at the length of time between composition and premiere, he replied,”Actually, a number of composers have had to wait seventeen years – or more- to see an opera to the stage.”

Opera composers have to be multi-talented, understanding both music and drama, and willing to multitask.  But today, Lou reminded me of something else: they have to be patient too!

The Garden State has a new band!

On the Cusp New Music Ensemble debuts this coming Saturday. Details below.

On the program:

“Rough Edges Suite” – Kevin Norton
“++fridge” – Joe Branciforte and Chris Botta
“Trio” – Michael Sperone
“My barn having burned to the ground, I can now see the moon” – Barbara White
“For an Actor- Monologue for Clarinet (in A)”- Shulamit Ran

Performed by:
Joe Bergen – percussion
Chris Botta – guitar
Joshua Lopes – guitar
Bryan Rudderow – clarinet
Michael Sperone – percussion
Caroline Grano, Flute
Max Stehr – piano
Terrence Thornhill – cello
Jeffrey Young – violin

Saturday January 23rd, at 7:30pm
At the Paterson Museum
2 Market Street
Paterson, NJ 07501

admission: $12 | students/seniors: $8 | kids (under 9): free

directions by car: http://www.patersonmuseum.com/directions.html