The Avant Music Festival, a 5-night event being held at The Wild Project in NYC between Friday, Feb 10th and Saturday the 18th, promises to be a compelling series of shows of music in the vein of avant-garde. Along with music by living composers Randy Gibson (whom you are about to hear from), Eve Beglarian (Songs From The River and Elsewhere) and Jenny Olivia Johnson (After School Vespers), there is a performance of Schoenberg‘s ground-breaking work Pierrot Lunaire and a 2-part show on Saturday the 11th celebrating the 100th Birthday of John Cage at 4 PM and 8 PM respectively (This concert, by the way, features Vicky Chow performing the great Sonatas and Interludes on prepared piano). Randy, who is one of the curators of the event, spoke briefly about the festival as well as himself.

CM: How did you get started and what brought you to the world of contemporary music?

RG: I began playing percussion when I was very young, and the Marimba became my main instrument for many years. Of course, with percussion, you’re almost immediately exposed to contemporary music because there’s very little written before the 20th century, especially as a soloist. I was playing a lot of modern Japanese music that had been written for Keiko Abe, and I had been exposed to Steve Reich a bit, working up Marimba Phase… It wasn’t, though, until I heard Cage’s Ryoanji that I began writing music. The listening experience was revolutionary for me and changed my whole concept of what music could be. I began writing almost immediately after hearing it for the first time, and just completely delved into Cage’s conceptual world.

CM: Who were the people that helped shape your identity as an artist?

RG: John Cage was the first one, for sure. Early on my works were sort of Cage rip-offs, experiments with chance, extended techniques, space=time, that sort of thing. As I began to develop an identity of my own, I grew extremely interested in the Minimalists. With the music I write, I’ve always had a love/hate relationship with rhythm, I think because of my history with percussion. Early on I would work with extremely slow tempos, or overlapping rhythmic cells like those found in Riley’s or Reich’s work. When I moved to New York, I contacted the people I most respected, and, as fate would have it, began studying with La Monte Young.

This is when everything changed for me. Little tendencies that had existed in my work (static notes, sine waves, glacial tempos, &c.) were all suddenly free to grow and live their own lives. Since 2005, I’ve been studying raga performance with La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela, and that has had a truly profound influence as well. The work I’ve been doing the last few years draws heavily on both the extreme sine-wave compositions using prime numbers pioneered by Young, and the rich, codified raga tradition, but it also harkens back to those early experiment with chance and rhythmic cells. I often use delay lines now to both create denser textures and to subvert rhythm.

CM: When and how did the Avant Music Festival get started?

RG: We did a performance of a piece of mine (Doleo Æternus) at The Wild Project in the fall of 2009, and just fell in love with the venue. Since it’s used primarily for theatre projects, they luckily had two weeks free that next February, and Megan Schubert and I decided to put on a festival. That first one was pretty cobbled together, and a little bit insanely ambitious. Since then we’ve really honed in on what we want to present, which is composer-driven evenings of work where an audience can really get into the mind and ethos of the particular composer.

CM: Can you talk about your two works that will be presented on Friday the 10th and Saturday the 18th?

RG: The piece that came to define my contribution to the Avant Music Festival is Apparitions of The Four Pillars. Since beginning writing this work for the first festival in 2010, I haven’t written anything else. All of my work now examines facets of this very small series of tuning concepts built around stacks of identical pure harmonic intervallic relationships over a single fundamental (a 72hz D).

Circular Trance Surrounding The Second Pillar with The Highest Seventh Primal Cirrus, The Utmost Fundamental, and The Ekmeles Ending from Apparitions of The Four Pillars, the work that opens the festival this year, on Friday February 10th, is a sort of choral-raga journey into the seventh harmonic. It draws a lot on my raga studies, bringing these techniques, to a somewhat traditional choral setting. The singers, from the remarkable Ekmeles Vocal Ensemble (who commissioned the piece) are accompanied by Sine Waves built out of the harmonic series and the septimal pitches they must sing. It’s really very traditional in form, with a long alap introduction followed by a bandish with all its associated parts, but it’s all amplified and presented in a very ritualistic way with video, lighting, and incense that speaks to my ongoing interest in the ritual aspects of musical performance.

The piece that closes the festival (Saturday, February 18th) is something I’m really excited about, it’s be far the most ambitious, bonkers thing I’ve written. The trombonist William Lang, who I’ve worked with for a few years now, will premiere a new three hour solo trombone composition entitled The Third Pillar in Primal Imperfect Palindrome with The Souvenir of The Second Pillar, The Floating Cirrus over the Pumping Slush, and The Highest Moving Chordal Motif from Apparitions of The Four Pillars. This piece examines the pure 9:8 relationship and all its constituent parts. It’s going to be a truly mindbending experience. The Sine Waves for this composition move through a few different areas, examining first the stack of 9:8 intervals, then associated prime-numbered harmonics, and finally the extremes of range presenting high pitched primal sine waves over extremely low trombone tones. It’s a rich and enveloping tapestry, and the video artist I work with, Oscar Henriquez, has created a really stunning new video that will accompany it.

CM: What is it about the new music festivals that make them important to the audience?

RG: I think a festival like ours really presents an unusual opportunity for an audience to really deeply hear an artist’s work. It’s not often that a composer gets to present a whole evening of their work, and I hope that presenting the festival the way we do, where each composer is given free reign over a night, can lead to deeper and more focused interest in an artist’s work. We include the full programming of the whole festival in the printed program, and it’s our hope that, if you’re attending one night, something that one of the other composers is doing can spark a new interest, and the concentration of all this music into such a short time frame I think makes it more and more possible for an audience to discover something new.

CM: The highlights of course are the works by John Cage for his 100th birthday and the performance of Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, which is also seeing its 100th year. Would you say these two composers continue to have such a lasting effect on today’s music?

RG: Absolutely! I think you find very direct examples of this lasting influence all over the place. Interestingly enough the first things that come to mind are in “pop” music – an album like Aphex Twin’s Drukqs with all its prepared piano samples, or a few years ago Björk singing Pierrot Lunaire. I think in the classical world the influence has maybe become a bit more subtle over time, but just look at how much is being done for Cage’s centennial, and you can tell it’s still there, strong. I think as a performer, or as a composer perfoming, Cage is absolutely vital. It opens your ears to new sounds, and new possibilities, and if you can really accept the true ethos of his chance operations, you learn to embrace the unexpected, and that’s what the most fun.

2012 Avant Music Festival Preview from Avant Media on Vimeo.

2012 Avant Music Festival
Feb 10, 11, 15, 17, and 18 at 8 PM (also Feb 11 at 4 PM with a composer roundtable at 5:30 PM)
Wild Project
195 East 3rd Street
New York, NY 10009
p. 212.228.1195
f. 212.228.1154
info@thewildproject.com

Click here for schedule and tickets for the Avant Music Festival

The Latin American Music Center at Indiana University is presenting American Cosmology, a program designed specially for the Composers Now  festival that is involving many members of New York’s new music scene in February.  Invited by Composers Now’s artistic director, composer Tania León, the program will be presented on February 4^th a the Music Now Marathon in Symphony Space , and on February 6 at the Americas Society Concert Series.

American Cosmology was designed by the LAMC’s director Carmen-Helena Téllez to showcase complementary meditations on the sky and the cosmos represented in David Dzubay’s Astral  String Quartet and in Gabriela Ortiz’s Baalkah for String Quartet and Soprano. Astral, written for the Orion Quartet, was inspired by the ensemble’s name and by the constellations visible in the sky while the composer worked at the MacDowell Artsit Colony in  New Hampshire. Baalkah was composed for the Kronos Quartet and Dawn Upshaw, and sets texts from Mayan cosmology addressing patterns of existence and the place of humanity in the universe.

David Dzubay has received commissions from Meet the Composer, Chamber Music America, the National Endowment for the Arts, the US-Mexico Fund for Culture, and the Fromm and Barlow foundations, among others. Recent honors include Guggenheim, MacDowell, Yaddo, Copland House and Djerassi fellowships, a 2011 Arts and Letters Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the 2010 Heckscher Prize. His music has been performed by orchestras, ensembles and soloists in the U.S., Europe, Canada, Mexico, and Asia, and is published by Pro Nova Music and recorded on the Sony, Bridge, Centaur, Innova, Naxos, Crystal, Klavier, Gia, and First Edition labels.

David Dzubay writes: “Beginning work on a piece for the Orion String Quartet, and taking a cue either from the group’s name or perhaps from gazing upwards on evening strolls around the MacDowell Colony in rural New Hampshire, I decided to focus on the stars, composing an “Astral” quartet, movements of which would look at stars and space in various ways. Though the movements are somewhat independent, they do share musical elements and together are balanced on the curious middle movement. Like our galaxy, the quartet has a spiral structure, both in the shape of an eight-pitch ‘spiral motive’ and in the duration of the movements (roughly 5′-3′-2′-4′-3′). A recurring element, first heard in the opening bars, is a group of three evenly spaced attacks, a representation of Orion’s Belt, the tight grouping of three stars lined up in the Orion constellation.

Gabriela Ortiz is one of the foremost composers in Mexico today. Recent commissions and premieres include her new videopera Unicamente la Verdad with the Indiana University Contemporary Vocal Ensemble under Carmen-Helena Téllez; Altar de Piedra for three percussion players, timpani and orchestra for Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra with Esa- Pekka Salonen and Kroumata percussion ensemble; Zócalo-Bastilla, for violin, percussion and orchestra premiered by violinist Pierre Amoyal, and  Altar de Muertos, a string quartet commissioned by Kronos Quartet.

Baalkah, which means ‘world’ or ‘cosmos’ in Maya, was inspired by the cosmological beliefs of the Maya of the Yucatan Peninsula and of other Mexican and Central American native peoples. For over 5,000 thousand years, these Native American peoples have conceived the world as being divided into 4 cardinal directions: east, north, west and south. In each one of these directions stands a gigantic tree that supports the sky, and each one has its particular cosmological characteristics, such as its own ruling deity, its own color, a set of related plants and animals, and, more generally, its own mood or personality. The lyrics of the first four songs of Balkah are taken from a 17th century Maya book, the Chilam Balam of Chumayel, a priceless depository of centuries of historical and religious wisdom inherited by Maya priests and kept hidden from the prosecution of the Catholic church. Each member of the string quartet represents one the four cardinal directions, and the center is represented by the soprano.

The ensemble includes Madalyn and Cicely Parnas, both soloists and members of the Parnas duo that has received accolades of  “stunning” and “electrifying” in the New York Times. Madalyn will play a solo piece by Timothy Dunne earlier in the evening on of Saturday February 4^th.  Cicely was the inaugural artist-in-residence of the radio program Performance Today last December.  Violinist Tim Kantor has been a featured artist with the Banff and Aspen festivals as well as with the Cleveland Pops; and violist Rose Wollman has performed all over the word with conductors such as Pierre Boulez, Fabio Luisi, Hugh Wolf, Joseph Silverstein, and Larry Ratcliff in orchestras all over the world. A fierce new music performer, soprano Sharon Harms will return later to New York for the performance of Charles Wuorinen’s It Happens Like This, which she premiered under the baton of the composer at Tanglewood last summer.

From Bora Yoon's "Weights and Balances." Photo: Julia Frodahl

Many of us waited with bated breath during the recent breakdown of talks between management and the orchestra at NYC Opera. Even though the season is proceeding, the company’s plan to keep themselves afloat (if not artistically viable) seems dubious at best. No music director, draconian cuts for the players and chorus, and no base of operations. Instead NYCO will present a truncated season at several venues. After hearing how shabbily the company has treated its employees – while George Steel continues to make in excess of $300,000 – why would they expect their audience to follow them around town? It portends difficult days to come for opera – and opera goers – in the city. Take nothing away from the Metropolitan (although its recent conductor troubles are noteworthy): but a city with New York’s operatic history would seem to have room for more than one major company.

Fortunately, as Zachary Woolfe points out in a recent excellent article in the NY Times, several smaller companies are attempting to fill the void left by City Opera’s vicissitudes. Opera Omnia, Gotham Chamber Opera, DiCapo Opera, and others are making it possible to hear a plethora of works from the repertoire that are unlikely to be programmed any time soon, either at the Met or languishing NYCO: baroque gems, less known Mozart, neglected bel canto, and the like. The remaining challenge, and it’s a daunting one, is to nurture operas by living composers.

To further the efforts of those working towards that end, three longtime champions of contemporary works – HERE’s Kim Whitener and Artistic Director Kristin Marting and Beth Morrison of Beth Morrison Projects (BMP) – have recently announced a promising new venture. Prototype: Opera/Theatre/Now, a festival that they plan to be an annual event, debuts in January 2013.

Unlike NYCO, Prototype will have a single performance venue, HERE’s space in Soho, for which they will try to build an audience. And, also unlike City Opera, the festival, with steady hands at the rudder, will pursue a coherent artistic vision, presenting chamber operas in the contemporary classical/post-classical vein. Some of the names being mentioned as participants in the Prototypes‘s initial presentations should be familiar to those who’ve attended recent editions of VOX: David T. Little, Byron Au Yong, and Bora Yoon.

Dare we hope for an open call for proposals for new chamber operas? More information about Prototype as it’s available.

“Last year’s program was a huge success,” says Artistic Director Giovanni Albini. “In 12 intense days we had nine lectures, several hours of both master classes and private lessons, 54 new music scores performed (of which 35 were premieres) in seven concerts, 30 participant composers and performers, and many guest artists. Plus Italian classes, a guided trip of the City of Pavia, and an outstanding workshop on Italian cooking.”

This year’s guest of honor is the legendary violinist Irvine Arditti, who has recorded more than 180 CDs with his own String Quartet and more than 30 as a soloist, premiering the music by the most important composers of the contemporary period. Arditti will present a lecture on contemporary violin performing practices, providing participant composers with his expertise and knowledge of modern music.

Christopher Theofanidis, fresh off the success of his opera Hearth of a Soldier, staged by the San Francisco Opera, is the Faculty Chair of the Festival for the third year in a row.

“Christopher is a great artist and an amazing teacher with an enormous experience,” Albini says. “A wonderful person, entirely dedicated to participants during the days of the event. He is able to offer so much, from both artistic and human point of view.”

Mario Garuti, Head of the Composition Department of the Conservatory of Milan, Dmitri Tymoczko from Princeton University, Amy Beth Kirsten, Ugo Nastrucci, Marina Giovannini, and Giovanni Albini complete the faculty roster.

Once again this year, the highSCORE Prize will be awarded to the best participant composer, who will have the chance to come back for free in 2013. In the previous editions, the highSCORE Prize has been awarded to Jenny Beck (2010) and Riho Esko Maimets (2011).

The 2012 edition will focus on the music for String Quartet, solo Violin, Viola, Cello, and Guitar (classical or electric), but participants are also invited to submit music for theorbo and lute, with or without electronics. In 2010, Ugo Nastrucci gave a lecture on contemporary music for early instruments. To see some tips on how to write for such instruments, see last year’s highSCORE Proceedings.

Among the many call for scores dedicated to participants the clarinet ensemble led by Denis Zanchetta, piccolo clarinet at Teatro La Scala, Milan, stands out.

Performances during the festival will be presented at cultural and historical sites throughout Pavia. Such venues will include the famous church of St. Peter in the Golden Sky where St. Augustine and Boetius are buried, while the “F. Vittadini” Higher Institute of Music Studies, with its 20 plus large, well-equipped rooms with Vertical and Grand Pianos, is the core of the festival.

The event, under the artistic direction of Giovanni Albini and the executive production of Paolo Fosso, is produced by the highSCORE New Music Center. The Center has just published the CD “Quintets,” containing five scores for electric guitar and String Quartet written by the best composers of the 2010 festival. A new CD, including the best compositions of highSCORE Festival 2011 for solo guitar, will be recorded in the next few months.

Proceedings and video excerpts from the last editions can be found on the highSCORE New Music Center brand new portal.

One of my favorite projects this past Fall was writing the program essay for American Composers Orchestra’s SONiC festival. I had the chance to interview several composers (though only a small sampling of the many fine participants) featured on SONiC, including Hannah Lash, Anthony Cheung, Keniji Bunch (an old friend – one of my classmates at Juilliard), and the National’s Bryce Dessner.

All of the interview subjects proved diverting. But I was particularly glad to have a chance in the essay to spotlight Ensemble Klang, a Dutch new music group that performed Oscar Bettison’s O Death on SONiC. Their performance was critically acclaimed as one of the highlights of the festival. And if you weren’t fortunate enough to be there, my recommendation would be to get thee hence to the group’s web store for a copy of the O Death studio recording (with liner notes by Alex Rose!).

While you’re there, I’d recommend checking out Ensemble Klang’s other studio recordings. Cows, Chords, and Combinations a portrait disc of minimalist composer/theorist/critic Tom Johnson has proved to be an extraordinarily valuable recording to me. It has reframed my thinking about the process-based components of minimalism: how they can be crafted into quite complicated structures and how they remain a vital component of whichever post (post post?) incarnation of minimalism we’re currently experiencing. The slowly evolving, spectral-inspired structures found on Waves, a disc of music by Peter Adriaansz, is equally engaging: a collection of soundscapes that require, nay demand, immersively intensive listening. (I haven’t yet heard Ensemble Klang’s recording of music by Matthew Wright; an oversight I hope to correct shortly).

Below, I’ve included an excerpt of my interview with Bettison, in which he discusses his creative process and the collaborative genesis of O Death.

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Traditional instruments are one way to go in new music. Another is to find or create new instruments altogether. Such is often the pathway of composer Oscar Bettison. He enjoys incorporating unconventional instruments, such as those made from found objects or junk metal, into his scores.

Bettison says, “This was all a result of moving to Holland to study in the early 2000s. Before that, I had written a lot of music for traditional forces and I wanted to get away from that: to stretch myself as a composer. So, I started to play around with things, even going as far as to build some instruments; percussion mostly, but later on I branched out into radically detuning stringed instruments – there’s some of that in the guitar part of “O Death.” These things I called “Cinderella instruments: the kind of things that shouldn’t be ‘musical’ but I do my best to make them sing. And I suppose as a counterpoint to that, I shunned traditional instruments for a long time.”

Cinderella instruments, as well as references to popular music of many varieties, are signatures found in his work O Death, played on SONIC October 19, 2011 by Ensemble Klang.

Of O Death, Bettison says, “It was written for Ensemble Klang between 2005-7 and is my longest piece to date. It’s about 65 minutes long and I wrote it very much in collaboration with the group. We were lucky enough to have a situation in which I was able to try things out on the group over a long period. This was very important in writing it. The piece is in seven movements and is a kind of instrumental requiem, which references popular music elements (especially blues) and kind of grafts them on to the requiem structure. It’s something that I fell into quite naturally.  This I think is tied to my idea of ‘Cinderella instruments:’ eschewing the “classical” tradition somewhat.”

Bettison continues, “The thing that a lot of people don’t know about me is that I come from a very strict classical background. I was a violinist; indeed I went to a specialist music school in London as a violinist from the age of 10. My rebellion to being in a hot-house classical music environment was getting into metal, playing the drums and listening to avant-garde classical music that was seen as outside the ‘canon’ and I think that carried on into my music. So, to psychoanalyze myself for a minute, I think I’ve done both things in a response (quite a delayed response!) to the classical tradition precisely because I feel so at home in that tradition.”

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.

Midwest restarted at 10 AM the next morning with a concert of 9 works, two of which (Justin Aftab‘s Landscape 4:54 and Andy Ly‘s In the Style Of…) I’ve already reviewed. The opening pieces were Matt Smart‘s alluring, color/timbre-focused string quartet Chiasma and Chaz Allen‘s Magnitude for clarinet and piano. I’ve heard Magnitude three times now, and it has grown on my highly favorable initial response with each listening. Essentially contrasting intimate moments with energetic bursts, Magnitude‘s intricate structure is based on a sort of exponential growth of material transformation with ideas returning in decreasingly recognizable forms until the piece is seized with the spirit of its highest energy moments and pounds itself into a rousing conclusion. The next three pieces were all very different. Carrie Magin‘s violin/marimba duo Capriccio (2010) showed off Ms. Magin as a tremendous performer and an insightful composer insofar as she skillfully balances this unusual duo . Sang Mi Ahn‘s Hwae-Sang uses four movements to explore the full breadth of timbre on two violins, recapping the individual colors of the first three movements in the work’s energetic, ‘moto perpetuo’ finale. The excerpted second movement of Stephen Weimer‘s Stray (2010) was the first of two really excellent works with saxophone performed on Saturday. Mr. Weimer deftly controls the colors of the piano and saxophone throughout, a quality shared by two excerpted movements from Stephanie Piecynski‘s Five Piano Preludes (2011). The two Preludes are consummate miniatures, and were particularly attentive to and successful at endowing their material with a strong, memorable identity. I still remember being taken by the color of the super-high flourishes in the first movement and following, with great suspense, the music’s expansion to the entire range of the instrument. Preludes was the penultimate work on the concert which concluded with Melody Eötvös‘ darkly dramatic, quarrelsome string quartet, How Dragonflies Cross the Ocean (2011).

Saturday’s second concert featured 10 pieces, beginning with Carlo Vincetti Frizzo‘s A La Noche (2010), a superbly engaging work for soprano soloist, small women’s chorus, harp, cello and percussion. Above all, I feel Mr. Frizzo handles the percussion in spectacular fashion, using it to ornament the sounds of his other musical forces.  Adding a captivating performance from soprano Paloma Friedhoff Bello to Mr. Frizzo’s fantastic scoring, A la noche is an embarrassment of musical riches. Next was Yunsoo Kim‘s Duo (2011), a mischievous cycle of maniacal gestures for trumpet and bass trombone, and Sangbong Nam‘s startling fixed electronic work, Awaken (2010). Based on the sound of a bell, Awaken (here’s a video), is one of the more structurally thoughtful electronic works I’ve heard. Gradually leading the listener from a transparent, relatable sound (the bell), to more abstract, heavily processed derivations of the work’s initial passages, Mr. Nam brings the listener back to beginning at just the right time, setting up his puckish ending. Joseph Prestamo‘s Sketches followed Awaken, and I have already review it.

The next work, Zach Zubow‘s Sundown (2010) for string quartet, unfolds in two parts. At first, the music is very much centered on color and timbre (accomplished through the use of different extended techniques). Then, a palpable harmonic center comes in, and eventually Mr. Zubow mixes the coloristic focus of the preceding music with a new sense of line. Following Sundown was Roger Zare‘s Fight or Flight (2011) (here’s a video) for violin and guitar. Opening with unison material, it doesn’t take long for the Violin to emerge as the piece’s most prominent figure, with the guitar providing an energetic and percussive accompaniment. There is a brief lyrical section, but the overall affect of the work is frenetic and entertaining. Excerpts from Pierre Derycz‘s previously reviewed Trois Morceaux Morose intervened before we heard Joel Matthys‘ Terms of Venery (2011) for baritone soloist and percussion. One of the more imaginative works of the whole conference, Mr. Matthys uses the percussionist to provide spoken word on top of playing marimba and flower pots. This dramatic element fit the music perfectly, and added an unforgettably charming quality to this unusual composition. Michael Schachter‘s Jig, which appeared in my last post, filled the penultimate position on the program with Ryan Chase‘s excellently scored, evocative (of the Western United States) Gold Rush (2011), for five violins, wrapped up Midwest’s third concert.

From its first piece, Demiurge (2011) by Bryan Percoco, the final concert of Midwest featured a suitably incredible amount of variety with its 10 featured compositions. Demiurge was the first of two electro-acoustic pieces on the evening’s menu, featuring amplified bassoon along with electric bass and amplified piano. The clarity of Demiurge‘s modal melodies and fast, pulsing rhythms contrasted strongly with the dialogue of fastidious counterpoint and ingenuous homophony in Brian Penkrot’s String Quartet no. 1 (2010). My piece was next, and it was followed by Ty Niemeyer‘s solo viola work What the Viola Tells Me (2011) and Bin Li‘s brass quintet Fanfare for Five (2011). Mr. Niemeyer impressively limits the color of several movements (i.e. one uses col legno prominently, another is only harmonics) while maintaining the music’s level of engagement. Mr. Li’s work is more contained and thoroughly dramatic, scored skillfully for the ensemble to create a compelling series of musical moods.

The next piece, Mike Sweeney‘s Mr. Brain, was incontrovertibly one of the most memorable of the entire symposium. An outrageous electro-acoustic romp, the work opposes a variably processed, computerized speaking voice with a large chamber ensemble. Unbelievably, Mr. Brain finds a tasteful, captivating way to use an otherwise obnoxious synth bass part and auto-tuning/vocoding in the electronics. Complex and convivial, Mr. Sweeney controls his materials masterfully, producing a feeling of chaos that is ultimately gratified through specific twists and turns in the piece’s form. Shane Hoose‘s Three Brief Pieces (2011) followed Mr. Brain. I was very fond of the Mr. Hoose’s approach to harmony, which, in this piece, centers on a lot of triads, but uses them in a pleasantly convoluted manner.  Next was Zac Lavender‘s The Study of Waves (again, covered in my last post), which was followed by Aaron Perrine‘s Bridge Suite (2011) for alto saxophone and cello. Saxophonist Nathan Bogert was stunning, unbelievably stunning at the hands of Mr. Perrine’s intimate score, which delicately (and successfully) balances the texture and prominence of each instrument. The final piece of Midwest was Gabriel Lubell‘s He Guards the Vision of the Sunset Sky (2011), for saxophone and string quintet (the kind with two cellos). Opening with glassy strings and, ultimately, a floating saxophone line, He Guards shifts between pulsating energy and moments of contemplation. The saxophone is both omniscient and participatory, though it tends to sail above the activity of the strings, particularly as the piece winds to the end and the quintet’s music becomes increasingly aggressive.

Ok, with that review taken care of, stay tuned this weekend for my review of last Monday’s student composers’ concert.

Vital Vox: A Vocal Festival (Vital Vox 2011)
Roulette
Brooklyn, NY
Sat, Nov 5 & Sun, Nov 6, 2011

I guess there was no better way to kick off the Vital Vox Festival than with a primal scream. Gelsey Bell and her partner for this performance, composer/performer Paul Pinto, actually gave us several of them separate and together at the start of the song cycle Scaling, and they seemed to be the sound that signified both the power of vocal performance and the experimental nature of the festival as well.
In general, the festival is a huge emphasis on artists that recognize the human voice as an instrument, an instrument that has just as much range and capability as any great violin, piano or guitar, and works wonderfully as a duet with other instruments or other voices. These artists are all equally gifted as vocalists as they are composers or musicians of other instruments, and they all put on compelling performances.

Night One: Vocals and Keys

Bell started the festival with a song cycle that was an artist’s display of going against a normal piano song set. After the screams, they changed shoes, and Bell performed piano in various ways other than hands in front (i.e. behind her back, from on top of the piano lying on her stomach, with her knuckles, knees and arms, from the floor, etc)–Pinto was on the stage floor placing dirt from a plant and pieces of paper inside several little sacks tied shut with strings (More about this in a second), putting foil tins and pins inside the piano for a prepared piano sound on one of the songs. For a couple of songs, Bell also switched over to a small digital synth keyboard on the floor that had a tiny microphone, in which she gave spoken word about youth foibles and piano songs (“…Every love song is for the piano, not as an instrument, but as a surface…”). Despite its feeding back like crazy, the mike seemed to spur Bell’s performance regardless.
For the last song of the cycle, Pinto handed the bags he was preparing out to the members of the audience (some of us; me being one of them), and inside was the plant dirt and a note saying “when you see the signal, come and press your ear close to the skin of the piano”. So we went onstage and proceeded with what was basically an avant-garde take on audience participation, and though I thought she would either scream again or hit a loud chord cluster to shake us, she just finished the piece quietly.

Using Wii remotes and a laptop, Dafna Naphtali followed with her solo performance project titled {kaleid-o-phone}, a cavalcade of electronic pieces with an equally experimental vocal performance both with and without delay effects. A brief set, but she made great use of the effects and combining them masterfully with her vocalizations.

The night’s biggest reactions were saved for Judith Berkson, who previewed her forthcoming opera with a suite of demo versions of the arias titled Vor an Sicht. Berkson’s solo performances on vocals, minimal drums and percussion, organ and piano (accompanied with some pre-looped drums and vocal parts), gave everyone a taste of the final scoring with drum core, organ and children’s choir, but this solo performance seemed to be in and of itself another unique work of its own, and hopefully will still be after the opera is published.
Berkson’s cantor-trained voice lent much authenticity to the liturgical nature of the work, and the combination of the a cappella choral music with the sound of visceral drums promises a striking piece for the opera stage.

Night Two: Vocals and Strings

Toby Twining Music kicked off night two with a rather puzzlingly joyous sound due to the fact that one just doesn’t expect such a feeling towards music that uses “notes between the cracks of piano keys” as Toby put it–The group seems to invoke thoughts of “The Swingle Singers meets Alarm Will Sound”.
Though the group is primarily a vocal one, they do make great use of the cello played by Malina Rauschenfels (who played Twining’s unaccompanied cello piece Schoenberg Dreaming), and she is equally productive as a member of the singing group.
By the end of their set as they performed “Yes Yes Yes!” from the recently-released CD Eurydice, the group looked excited and the audience seemed just as much.

When they aren’t busy running and functioning as artistic directors of Vital Vox, Sasha Bogdanowitsch (who also emceed) and Sabrina Lastman are also the performing ensemble SoCorpo. The duo performed their new work Inelement, a cycle that highlights the natural elements (In this work there’s a fifth one: Fire, Water, Air, Earth, and Void), and the piece was scored for vocals, autoharp (strings struck with tuning forks) and bowed psaltery (with white bows, but the forks were also used for this).
Sasha and Sabrina played so exquisitely off of each other that they sounded at times like one voice, and, like Toby Twining’s group, have a superb use of both harmony and oral shapes.

For the closer, Iva Bittova came out with with her violin, a kazoo and a mbira, and placed them on the stage as she proceeded to walk around the audience and, un-miked, utilizing the acoustics of the auditorium, filled the hall with a stunning a cappella intro to the work Wood In The Wind, sung in what sounded like Czech, English and un-worded vocal sounds. Right by the front row where I was, she picked up the fiddle and began blending in a slow but gradually building up spiccato that evolved into a manic duet between voice and violin, and punctuated with occasional foot stomps, the piece was in full force.
Bittova also played a section with mbira, and another one with kazoo, with which she proceeded to provide the audience with intentional laughs as she gave an unusually comical side of herself and performed a mock jazz vocalization and pantomimed a trombone slide.
Bittova wrapped up with one last exciting violin piece and was given the festival’s only standing ovation.

A very fascinating and exciting show on both nights, I hope that we see even bigger turnouts and the need for even bigger venues for Vital Vox in the years to come.

VitalVox.com
Official website for Vital Vox

The following are extended versions of the interviews I had with Toby Twining and Iva Bittova, who are both appearing at the 2011 Vital Vox Festival (Both will be performing on Night 2: Vocals + Strings)

First up, Toby Twining talks about his beginnings and inspiration as well as the new and current material.

CM: How did you go from roots in country-swing to rock to the other-worldly music you’ve been making for various instruments, including voices and chamber ensemble?

TT: This is a long story—I’ll attempt a Reader’s Digest version.

I grew up in Houston and my maternal grandparents were both pro musicians—grandad played guitar, pedal steel, string bass; grandmother played gospel piano like Liberace/Debussy mix. As a teenager, I played guitars, bass, and keys in rock bands. All the kids played Texas blues as well.

At age 16 I longed to expand my compositional palette and started listening to classical music. The European art music repertoire was almost entirely new to me. In addition to that, over the next 12 years or so, I learned some Jewish folk music, immersed myself in Early music, Ghanaian drumming, Ba Benzele vocal music, throat singing, improvisation at the piano for modern dance classes, the 20th century avant garde and studied composition with Ben Johnston (who didn’t teach me JI in my lessons, btw, but focussed on supporting my aspirations to compose and giving me a handle on organic form). While hanging around after graduation at the University of Illinois in Urbana, my friend Bill Brooks (now at York, UK) asked me to sing in a concert that featured Stimmung, Messiaen’s Cinq Rechant and Cage’s Song Books. Performing these works gave me a sense of terra incognita—the potential for extended vocal techniques with expansive structures—and I felt that all the mixed experience of my musical past coalesced finally in a vision for a new vocal sound. I’d like to think that the human voice can actually take a leading role in musical innovation again.

CM: Can you talk about the new pieces Toby Twining Music is performing at the show?

TT: About 12 years ago, Margaret Leng Tan commissioned me to write settings of poems and prose from Hesse’s Wandering, his sort of travel journal after WWI that included his watercolors. The work was originally for piano, narrator and tenor. Margaret and I put the project on the back burner eventually, in part because I couldn’t get enough pitches out of the piano.

I’ve begun to rework Wandering as bilingual, soprano duets for my ensemble (SSATBB, Vc) and can now do what I want with the harmony, which, in [Harry] Partch’s terms, is 13 limit otonal and utonal, but also modulates in ways that were unavailable to pre-digital musicians. The music is strikingly different from the earlier versions. We’ll premier Magic of Colors and Walk at Night, which feature Eileen Clark as soloist for the German and Eric Brenner for the English, Malina Rauschenfels playing cello and singing alto simultaneously, Avery Griffin and me on some inverted throat singing (fundamental moves while ‘monic ties over), and other timbral/rhythmic vocal effects that I can’t resist.

There’s a solo sonic poem/rap piece called O&E@theBeach, and a piece for solo cello called Schoenberg Dreaming–How I imagine he heard music in his sleep while evolving toward pantonality, moving around the frequency spectrum by interlocking interval cells comprised of pure intervals.

We’re also performing Yes! Yes! Yes! from our recent CD, Eurydice.

CM: The group sounded great at Bang On a Can (at WFC) when I was there volunteering–Do the different audiences of each venue affect the performances of the musicians?

TT: Thanks. Sure, the audience is one important factor for affecting our performances because of the informational loop that flows between people—even if it’s just body language and no one is talking, the loop is there. It affects singers enormously.

CM: I’ve been seeing quite a few things happening now with chamber musicians/soloists that have singing roles in works now. Do all of the members of Toby Twining Music sing?

TT: In the present configuration, yes. That’ll probably change with some future projects that include more strings and winds.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Czech violinist/vocalist Iva Bittova chatted very briefly about her inspiration and what she plans to perform.

CM: First of all, did you have any idea that you would be creating a very unique-sounding vocals-and-violin music? You are quite dynamic as a violinist alone, and then there’s your percussive vocal style combined with that.

IB: Yes, I would love to create spontaneously some new vibrations with my voice and violin. In my program is a lot of space for improvisation, it [just depends] on audience and acoustic space.

CM: You had put music aside for a time to be an actress in film. What was it that brought you back to the music world?

IB: As a musician I got more freedom to create myself and express my ideas of art. It is more difficult but same time very independent, which makes me happy.

CM: Will you be premiering any new pieces at the festival?

IB: Improvisation would be there as a new sound, also some songs, which I played just few times and always inspiration of every other performance coming stronger. It is quite long process and requires time to grow.

CM: Loved the piece you did with TwoSense last year–Will there be more commissioned works along those lines?

IB: Hopefully…

CM: The improvised work you do sounds so pure and meant-to-be. How long have you done that?

IB: I am on my way to raise my music from 1985. Still need more years to go.

2011 Vital Vox Festival
Sat, Nov 5th and Sun, Nov 6th, 8 PM
Roulette
509 Atlantic Ave (At the Corner of 3rd Ave)
Brooklyn, NY 11217
(917) 267-0363

info@vitalvoxfest.com

Vital Vox Festival.com
Official website for the festival

Toby Twining Music.com
Toby’s official website

Iva Bittova.com
Iva’s official website

The 3rd annual Vital Vox Vocal Festival, this year being held at Roulette in Downtown Brooklyn (Sat, Nov 5th and Sun, Nov 6th, 8 PM), is not just about singers, but those that are equally skillful at creating music. On November 5th and 6th, there is a sensational lineup of artists that are gifted at both of those as well as skirting genre lines between new classical, indie, jazz and world music.

Who’s there and what to expect to hear:

Night 1: Voice + Keys

JUDITH BERKSON: Singer/songwriter/composer/pianist Judith Berkson has a very obvious blend of influences that run from classical to jazz to liturgical music. In this performance, she plans to give the world a preview of her forthcoming full-scale opera. Berkson explains:

“The opera is yet untitled but it’s about Salomon Sulzer who was Vienna’s chief cantor for much of the 19th century. It takes place mostly in 1826 when Sulzer arrived in Vienna at the newly built Stadttempel and started to do experimental services as part of the reform movement by adding choir and organ – conventions of the European church. He also asked Franz Schubert to write a piece for the temple’s dedication and Schubert wrote Psalm 92 for Sulzer and a choir. So the opera is about this crossing of influence and ideas. The opera is being written for drum core, organs, voices and a children’s choir but for the solo performance I’ll be on vocals, organ, piano, drums, sequencer and drum machine. This is the first time I’m using an elaborate setup of instruments and sequencing in a show. It’s been a brutal amount of work but I am really really excited.”

DAFNA NAPHTALI: Combining the experimental electronics of artists like Milton Babbitt with the raw, guttural vocal stylings of Bjork, Dafna Naphtali seems to set a new, unprecedented direction in vocal music, and her set definitely should not to be missed.

GELSEY BELL: Although she does have a much more conventional singer/songwriter catalog, Gelsey Bell, along with composer/performer Paul Pinto, will be premiering a song-cycle titled Scaling, and this is scored for “a borrowed piano, a house plant, and a change of shoes”. Color me intrigued!

Night 2: Voice + Strings

IVA BITTOVA: Czech violinist/violist/vocalist Iva Bittova has been making incredible sounds as a string player and vocalist utilizing the folk music of her homeland. The pinnacle of her live appearances has been her improvisational work, and she told me that we can expect more of this at the festival:

“Improvisation would be there as a new sound, also some songs, which I played just few times and always inspiration of every other performance coming stronger. It is quite long process and requires time to grow.”

TOBY TWINING MUSIC: Composer Toby Twining and his ensemble Toby Twining Music have graced the stage of festivals such as Bang On a Can Marathon and River To River, and their spacious choral-style vocals have enthralled audiences worldwide. Toby spoke about the new selections the group will be performing:

“About 12 years ago, Margaret Leng Tan commissioned me to write settings of poems and prose from Hesse’s Wandering, his sort of travel journal after WWI that included his watercolors. The work was originally for piano, narrator and tenor. Margaret and I put the project on the back burner eventually, in part because I couldn’t get enough pitches out of the piano.

I’ve begun to rework Wandering as bilingual, soprano duets for my ensemble (SSATBB, Vc) and can now do what I want with the harmony, which, in [Harry] Partch’s terms, is 13 limit otonal and utonal, but also modulates in ways that were unavailable to pre-digital musicians. The music is strikingly different from the earlier versions. We’ll premiere Magic of Colors and Walk at Night, which feature Eileen Clark as soloist for the German and Eric Brenner for the English, Malina Rauschenfels playing cello and singing alto simultaneously, Avery Griffin and me on some inverted throat singing (fundamental moves while ‘monic ties over), and other timbral/rhythmic vocal effects that I can’t resist.

There’s a solo sonic poem/rap piece called O&E@theBeach, and a piece for solo cello called Schoenberg Dreaming—how I imagine he heard music in his sleep while evolving toward pantonality, moving around the frequency spectrum by interlocking interval cells comprised of pure intervals.”

SOCORPO: Performing arts duo SoCorpo (Sasha Bogdanowitsch & Sabrina Lastman) are not only both composers that sing, but incorporate movement as well, and are making their second appearance at the Vital Vox Festival (Sabrina has also appeared as a solo artist at the 2010 festival).

It promises to be an entertaining pair of evenings. Hope to see you there!

2011 Vital Vox Vocal Festival
Saturday, Nov 5 and Sunday Nov 6, 8 PM
Roulette
509 Atlantic Ave (At the Corner of 3rd Ave)
Brooklyn, NY 11217
(917) 267-0363

info@vitalvoxfest.com

VitalVoxFest.com
Official website