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

I asked Peri to answer a few questions from me, and she was happy to oblige:

Besides your usual hectic rounds as a freelance cellist/conductor, you’ve had a pretty good and busy year for performances of your own music. How did all of these things come together?

Being a constant presence on the musical scene and getting in on just about every opportunity I come across is the main reason I get so much work. My motto is “Seize the moment”, and there is so much opportunity, so many amazing people to hook up with. I see myself as part of a larger picture, and the possibilities for so much creativity and actualization are everywhere.

Your piece BLOGARHYTHM had a couple really well-received performances (in very different venues, I might add!). Could you tell me a little more about the title/inspiration, and the form of the piece?

Overall, BLOGARHYTHM is what I think of as an “umbrella piece”. I can adapt it to different performance situations and will keep adding scenes to it when given an opportunity to present it. It is totally my own project, my musical blog set to performance, and I enjoy it tremendously. Plus I get a chance to conduct and put ensembles together, which I also really enjoy. With it, I can integrate all the various facets of my musical life.

With all those previously-mentioned hectic rounds, where do you find the time to really sit down and compose? How hard is it to keep a good balance between playing and composing?

Doing both playing and composing are extremely important to me. At times it can be very difficult to maintain the balance (like right now, having  just returned home from a three-hour rehearsal for a concert), but I do my best. It is like having two children that you love equally and want to be sure they get equal time, one is not favored over the other, etc.  The result is I am always working on some project. This is what I do, this is my life.

You’re a life-long New Yorker? Does your life now resemble whatever plans you were laying for it back when you were just coming up through school? You’ve seemed to avoid the standard, safer course of sticking with teaching; was that a conscious decision?

Yes, I am a life-long New Yorker. Truth is, I never made any plans. I just kept going! I began piano when I was 5, cello at 11, went to the High School of Music & Art, and just never stopped. I am a bit unusual as far as composers go, in that I love to perform and miss it terribly if I let it go. I am miserable when things fall into an everyday sameness, so I never sought out either a steady orchestra or teaching gig. It would drive me crazy to have a regular ongoing routine.

When you look back at musical life in New York when you were just coming out from The Manhattan School of Music, and what you see going on now, what seems different/same, easier/harder?

The internet has definitely made everything a lot easier. I am amazed at how easy it is to learn of opportunities, to create them, to hook up with them, and get them going creatively.

What influences have been the guiding lights and inspiration for your own music language?

My own ear : ) …  I’ve always liked the sound of 12- tone music. Discovering Webern was very pivotal for me. Although my own music isn’t serial, it is 12-tone. I write from my life, and therefore my work is dramatic and emotionally relevant.

One thing you wish I’d ask you…..

Hmm, not sure! : )  My life is a musical one, this is what I do.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Zoë Keating (Wow, what can I say??) has definitely cultivated a very respectable place in the new music and indie music circles. After rethinking a classical concert career as a cellist for working a tech job, she was intervened to perform with various friends, played in the band Rasputina, eventually went solo with a gorgeously layered, rhythmic cello sound. Zoë went on to sell over 40,000 copies of her CDs without distribution, a record label or management. And she has over one million Twitter followers. The internet loves her!

Besides her solo career, her other projects include music collaborations with various dance companies (Apex Contemporary Dance Theatre, American Repertory Ballet, Digby Dance), film scoring (or soundtrack performances; Warrior, The Secret Life of Bees, The Conspirator), scoring for varied TV programs and other medias, and makes guest appearances alongside artists such as Amanda Palmer, Paolo Nutini, Imogen Heap, and many more.

CM: Can you give us the nutshell version of the beginning of your musical career up to now?

ZK: I studied classical pretty seriously as a teenager, but I decided not to pursue classical music as a career. I went to a liberal arts school, and when I got out of school, I started working in technology in San Francisco just because I needed to make a living. I played the cello in various groups, and friends started asking me to play cello in their rock bands. I said “yes”, and sort of just started playing in other people’s bands and playing non-classical music. I found that to be kind of more rewarding, and it became something that I was good at, because I listened to non-classical music. At the time it was unusual because classical musicians were supposed to play only classical music. So, then, time went on, and I just kept working and then eventually my cello career became big enough that I could support me and I didn’t have to work a day job anymore. I started playing with the group Rasputina in 2002, and I quit my tech job in 2003. I left Rasputina at the end of 2005 or early 2006, and I’ve been solo ever since. It’s been a very gradual process–I think it probably is for most musicians because it takes a long time to get established.

CM: How did that lead to composition?

ZK: I always wrote music. I started writing music in high school, just coming up with stuff, and then I pursued it in college, I took composition classes and improvisation, and made music there. I’ve been doing that since I was a teenager.

CM: It’s really amazing stuff! When you hear music from you guys in the new music world it’s hard to categorize it, and everything has its own version of melody and texture–it doesn’t even really necessarily have to factor in a categorization anymore. And the fact that you have this career where you can just make your own records, release them, stream them–Thank goodness for the internet because that definitely has played such a huge role in how you’ve sort of come up.

Click here to view the embedded video.

ZK: I think actually the internet is definitely responsible for my success, because I was playing the cello with other groups, but the kind of music that’s in my head that I wanted to make–Nobody else was making it, and it was just something that I wanted to do. It was a very solitary pursuit. When I finally had something recorded that I was happy with and was ready to release, which was in early 2005, I sent it out to a few people in the industry that I kind of had vague connections to, and they said “it’s interesting, but it has no absolutely no market potential”. So I felt like “okay that’s fine! I’ll just keep doing it ’cause it’s something I want to do and it’s my thing–Nobody else likes it, fine!”. [laughs] I really feel like in some ways it developed without outside input, you know, like business input or anything. And the fact that it ended up being modestly successful was a huge surprise and a bonus, and it was only possible because of the internet, because the internet allows me to find my audience, and it allows them to find me. It’s all about the fragmentation of music and the rise of subcultures. I’m very niche, and the internet is all about letting people and their niches find each other.

CM: I probably have heard you the first time last year on Q2 when you performed at LPR with Todd Reynolds. I think you were both awesome, and then the 2 of you played together–That was like 2 wonderful things happening at the same time! BTW, are you guys ever going to do another thing together like that either onstage or on a record?

ZK: I hope so! He’s kind of legendary, so I would love to do something else with him!

Click here to view the embedded video.

There’s a lot more musicians right now–Again we’re becoming aware of them because of the internet, and then there is a little bit of a trend happening, and I’m like ‘”Finally!”. The New York Times had an article a couple of weeks ago about what they called “alt-classical”. It was the first article I ever read where I read that I might possibly fit into a group! [both laughing] That was interesting to read! A lot of it is demographics–I’m on the older end of it, but there’s a lot of younger folks who are coming out of school, and there’s as many of them as there are baby boomers, and they grew up listening to classical and other kinds of music, and so it’s inevitable that they would be playing both or mixing them together and being without genre.

CM: What’s so great today is that you have everything that exists in contemporary classical–Sometimes people have music for one instrument, some have music for one instrument layered and looped the way that you do it and different people that have their own version of that, and there’s people that still write for orchestral or smaller ensembles, and vocals (with or without accompaniment)–Everything you can think of is all happening now, and it seems to all work, and people either like it or don’t like it, or like some of it, and it seems like it doesn’t fall into political camps like it used to.

ZK: In the United States, people tend to be, or they used to be, very socially identified by their musical taste, which is kind of big, for not all countries are that way, and that’s the other thing I like about this trend is that it’s cross-genre, but that doesn’t mean that it lacks social cohesion or whatever. It’s nice to see people get out of their genres.

CM: And you do some wonderful things on the side as well with people like Curt Smith, Amanda Palmer, Imogen Heap, Pomplamoose–All really good indie artists too. Is there a huge difference between working with them and just working with yourself?

ZK: Well there’s always…When you’re working with someone else, there’s compromise, and you have their vision meets your vision, so that’s always going to be different no matter whether it’s music or a technology project, so, I like doing both. I don’t necessarily like one more than the other. For my own music, I have certain things that I want to do, and I like doing it by myself. And then I like what happens when you have two people’s musical vision, and they come together, and it’s something neither of you would come up with on their own. They’re both valid things, and they’re both necessary.

CM: And pretty much everybody lets you be yourself, they don’t don’t try to tell you “Can you play more classical?” or “Can you play less classical?”?

ZK: That’s kind of my rule. I don’t do it unless it’s something where I get to be myself! I’m very consistently myself for better or worse! [laughs]

Click here to view the embedded video.

CM: During the LPR gig on Q2, you said that when you perform, it’s like you’re in a film, and when you close your eyes you’re invisible.

ZK: I don’t necessarily feel like I’m creating the music. [laughs] The music is its own thing, and I’m just consumed by it. I’m sort of inside of it or something, and it’s a very satisfying feeling, it’s kind of like I cease to exist and it’s just a musical expression of myself. And then it’s like I’m in a film in that when I close my eyes, I can sort of see the sweeping landscapes and the abstract things happening. I really like that, and it’s very hard to explain because it’s not linear, it’s just a whole different form of communication or something, and as soon as I open my eyes, I can’t experience it that well. That’s one of the reasons why I keep my eyes closed, so that then I can be in this musical world–This kind of abstract musical space.

I like keeping my music in this world that is non-narrative. Everything else in our culture is built around words and stories, and there are other ways to communicate, and so I like to stay in this realm of non-narrative storytelling, you could say!

CM: I like the version you arranged of the second movement from Beethoven’s 7th Symphony [Allegretto].

ZK: Thank you! That’s fun to do! It’s like a little academic exercise, but I like doing it!

CM: It was cool because you started with parts that sounded like harmonies of the melody, and I was like ‘is she doing it in a different key?’ By the time you threw in the rest of it, it was more recognizable.

ZK: Yeah, you’re hearing it sequentially, because what I’m playing is the actual cello part as it’s written, and I’m playing each phrase sequentially and then adding them accumulatively, so you wouldn’t naturally hear them all together because it’s just the cello part, although those phrases get passed around the orchestra. So it’s kind of like taking the music apart, cell by cell.

CM: It’s like when you mix a record, and you hear the parts that you’re not used to hearing separately.

ZK: It’s like a Beethoven remix!

Arrangement of Beethoven’s 7th-2nd mvt (Great American Music Hall, San Francisco, CA 6/26/11)

CM: Can you talk about the cycle Legions that appears intercut on the CDs?

ZK: Sometimes I feel like my life has sort of musical themes, and they have different forms, and so, the Legions one was kind of this–It was like a theme that was like the musical setting for something, and then there were different versions of it. There was “Legions (War)”, which is the main one, and then these other sort of ways of looking at the theme, and then on the latest album I did this one called “Legions (Forest)” because I wanted to feel like I’m moving from the city into the forest, and I’m sort of starting out with the theme of my life, and then I’m moving it into the forest. They’re really little threads that tie it all together. The music to me is really me making one large piece of music, and it just so happens that I’m breaking it up into smaller songs. I see it all as a linear progression for me, from my teenage years to the present day. If I have my own way, I might just number all the pieces or something. [laughs]

CM: No, but that’s cool–What it is, is you’re making it sort of like a saga, and it’s being broken down into different chapters.

ZK: That is kind of how it is. The Legions one–It keeps cropping up again and again, so no doubt there’ll be other versions of it to come out.

CM: If you move into a suburban area, there’ll be another chapter then, right? [both laughing]

ZK: Here we go from the forest to the shopping mall!

Click here to view the embedded video.

CM: You had recently written an article about Spotify that’s very interesting. It was about them saying they compensate every artist, and you were saying there’s great dispute with that. Is there anything you could add to that?

ZK: My career is possible because of the internet, and the because internet levels the playing field, there’s no gatekeepers. I can interact directly with my potential fans and I can sell my music directly to them. And when iTunes came along, it was kind of revolutionary in a number of ways, and one of them was that they gave the same deal to every single artist. Traditionally, with a record deal, you don’t know what the deals are because they’re under NDA agreements and they can’t discuss them, but it might be that an artist might get X amount of dollars for their advance, and they only get a few pennies per album, a different artist at the same label might not get much of an advance and more back in payments, and they’re all different. But with iTunes, everybody gets 70 percent of every sale, and Apple keeps 30 percent. It meant that it’s still the burden instilled in the artist to go out there and promote your music and do your own thing, however, if you’re able to do that, you can make the same amount of money as somebody who’s on a major label! [laughs] You’re getting the same deal! So I have a direct label account with iTunes, and if somebody goes and buys a track for 99 cents–We’re giving and taking pennies here–I make roughly, slightly less than 70 cents, and it’s extremely fair.

To go to Spotify, we’re moving towards this world where people are buying less and less digital music, and instead they’re streaming it, but Spotify has a throwback to the old way of doing things. They have different deals with each artist and each label, and they don’t allow independents to even negotiate, so, I can’t actually just go up to Spotify and put my music up there, I have to go through a gatekeeper, going back to the old model. So the gatekeeper I have to go through is somebody who aggregates music, for example, CD Baby or something. So Spotify makes its money through subscription fees, like if you get a monthly subscription for Spotify, that’s one way. The other way is advertising, in fact they make more money from advertising! But the major labels, they get a percentage share of Spotify’s profits, like share price, they own shares in Spotify–Across the board, they make money. So, it doesn’t matter for them about the exact streaming rates for a particular artist. In other words, like Warner’s, or Universal, they make money off of me! People go up there and they listen to my music and there’s advertisements up there and stuff, Universal Music is taking a cut of the proceeds. I don’t get to take a cut of that. So it’s not equitable, and that’s my complaint with it. I’m not saying that streaming might not be the way to go, and maybe it is the case, that artists have to adjust to this new world where they only make .0008 cents per song as opposed to 99 cents per song. Because that’s the difference. It would take me–I’d have to have millions and millions and millions of listens in order to make the same amount of money that I can make with just 10,000 listens on iTunes.

CM: It’s insane! I can’t even wrap my brain around it, other than Spotify doesn’t seem to play ball fairly–I also noticed that there’s a lot of artists that didn’t make the deal with them and are absent from the stream.

ZK: My other point about it is that not to sort of just complain, but I don’t see anybody standing up for independent artists, and so I feel like, because I small amount of prominence in the world of independent artists, I feel like it’s my responsibility to say these things publicly because nobody else is doing it. It’s kind of like, I feel like I have to stick-up for everybody. And then if nobody’s talking about it, then you have to fight for everything in the music industry, and I’m wanting to just make sure that people hear our story, that actually there are independent artists out there who make a pretty good living through music, and this new streaming model is cutting us out of the picture and saying that the only thing we should care about is exposure. That’s why I do it. I hate to sort of, go on about it, but I just feel like, for whatever reason I’ve always felt like this in life, it’s my responsibility to call out things that people aren’t paying attention to.

CM: For the record, believe it or not, they put my album [CMc] on Spotify, and I think the reason for that is CD Baby probably put it on there because I actually have a deal with them! [laughs] I was shocked to find it on there–All I had to do was type in the name of the record and there it was!

ZK: I have advice for artists about what to do, and this is what I have done–Don’t release everything. Don’t stream everything. I always say put some of it up there, the stuff that you want people to hear to get interested in you, and keep the rest back. 1/2 and 1/2. Because there’s nothing to be gained if people can get everything of yours for free. I think it’s better that they be able to get some of it, and if they want the rest, then they should go support you as an artist. And I also think that Spotify should make it easier to support artists, like, while you’re streaming on Spotify, if people are listening to my music and are listening to the whole album, Spotify should show them that I’m on tour. If they really do care about artists, they should make it easier for potential fans to find the artist and go to their concerts.

BONUS TRACK:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Zoë Keating: Avant Cello
Zoë’s official website

Click here to purchase Zoë’s CDs

“I always describe the viola as something that is kind of the wrong size for its body. It sounds like a man singing very high or a woman singing very low. And there’s something about that in-between-ness that is very attractive to me and the challenge of overcoming the fact that, physics-wise, it’s actually proportioned incorrectly, in other words, for a viola to be the right size for the length of its strings to play very easily, it would be something like the size of a small cello…There’s something about reaching in and having to get around that imperfection that really appeals to me, honestly.”

Those are Nadia Sirota’s thoughts on her instrument, the viola, the same instrument through which her wonderful gifts as an artist are brought forth and richly interpreted in such a passionate and thoughtful way. Nadia, who is the daughter of Robert Sirota (composer and conductor), Victoria Sirota (minister and organist) and sister to Jonah Sirota (another violist and a member of the Chiara Quartet) is very busy these days taking on work the likes of which Hercules would faint at the sight of. Nadia works and collaborates with various composers like Nico Muhly and Missy Mazzoli; she has a solo album titled First Things First; she can be seen in various ensembles such as American Contemporary Music Ensemble (ACME for short), Wordless Music, and yMusic, which is appearing this Sunday at Rockwood Music Hall in NYC for a launch party for their CD Beautiful Mechanical (btw, both ACME and yMusic also feature cellist Clarice Jensen). You can also catch her hosting each weekday afternoon streaming live (and in podcast form) on Q2, the internet’s best place for new classical music. And believe it or not, she also is an instructor at Manhattan School of Music (part of the Master’s Program in contemporary performance). Nadia had a little time to stop and talk to us via Skype.

CM: There’s the issue about the way that you breathe when you play. I remember when we first met you said that people have tried to get you to correct it. It seems that there are many musicians that are known for idiosyncratic habits during their performances–Glenn Gould being the most classic example, but yours is not so distracting, at least not for me.

NS: All along the way, I’ve heard that it can be a distraction, I get that. However, to me it’s more distracting not to do that, and it gets in the way of my music thinking more to try to sort of prevent that. I actually was just talking to a wonderful choreographer that I have incredible respect for who was saying that’s his least favorite thing about classical music ever that he bought an entire recording of all the Haydn String Quartets and literally couldn’t listen to it because he was so distracted by the breathing of the string quartet players, so I totally get that point of view, but for me, it’s just not something I can divorce myself from. I do feel like it helps me embody maybe exactly where I am in performance. It helps my brain be in the same place as my physical body.

CM: What’s also interesting is when you were playing with ACME [at the Sequenza 21 Joe's Pub concert], there was a lot of seat-of-your-pants kind of intensity during some of those pieces–It looked like there was a lot of dependence on one another’s queues because these pieces are so new.

NS: Sure, sure!

CM: And it was really interesting to see because I was like “Wow! It could unravel any second if somebody blows a note!” [both laughing]

NS: Hopefully that gave it some good energy, not stressful energy. I do find that the main job of an interpreter is to take the composer’s intent and try to just translate that to the audience as much as possible and that’s the entire point. Basically we’re kind of taking the listener by the hand and saying “This is where this piece is going, this is where we are right now, this is the architecture”, and you know the thing about music is that it exists in time, you have one shot. You can’t go back and re-read something, or go back and look at the upper-left corner of a painting again, you have to sort of figure it out in time and follow it in time. So, with any hope, these are things that help translate that kind of architecture to a listener.

CM: What is the story with yMusic? It is both a wonderful stand-alone group as well as a group that plays chamber arrangements with indie bands like The National, Grizzly Bear and My Brightest Diamond.

NS: yMusic sort of evolved from the fact that a lot of us–I mean, we have very catholic, and I mean “catholic” in the broad sense–a lot of us have very catholic taste, and like a lot of different types of music, and I have been discovering that I don’t really care where people come from, if the music’s awesome I want to support it, I want to get involved in it, and there were several of us that went to school together that found ourselves in these gigs backing different indie rock acts over and over again, and the quality of players in these gigs would vary immensely. You’d have the best violin player ever and then a really crappy violinist next to him ’cause that was just the way that the non-classical people finding their players. We discovered that we really wanted to be making this music on a level just as high as the classical and new music performances that we were involved in. So we very quickly sort of decided hey, what if we just kind of bound together and said “These are the excellent players that are interested in a lot of this stuff that you should totally hire for your classical gig”, and that’s what yMusic did. It was just like “If you’re gonna hire people, hire these people, here we are”. And then we soon discovered that not only are we lovely at this, but this is one of the most wonderful assemblages of performers that I can think of. Not only did we ask Judd Greenstein, Sarah Snider, people that are really comfortable [composing] classical concert music, but we figured we are already working with these unbelievably talented songwriters who are basically composers in and of themselves. What would happen if we gave them the task of writing concert music? And the result was something that was pretty shocking in that the quality is so high. You expect composers to need more of the 6-10 years of conservatory training in order to understand how to write for a chamber ensemble, and yet we had people that had been writing for decades anyway, just not for our particular [kind of] group. So the level at which we worked with often varied from composer to composer–Some people we were really, really involved with, and some just handed us a finished score and we performed it, but, we were really excited to continue to do this and work with all the different creators on the creation of music, whether it be songs or concert music. So that’s where that group evolved from, out of a sort of a concert-y necessity, and now it’s become sort of a fun project for us.

CM: How excited are you that you worked with Arcade Fire and you appeared on the album that won them the Grammy for Album of The Year?

NS: That’s great! Another thing about the music world is that it is based so much on relationships and wonderful people that you meet that you want to hang out with, and the Arcade Fire thing is such a good example. I got involved with them through Owen Pallett, whom I met through Nico–All of these relationships are very much friend relationships where you’re like, if you like this person, they’re a good musician, then you’re probably going to have something to say to each other artistically, which is pretty cool.

CM: And then there’s Wordless Music, another great group.

NS: That’s Ronin Givony’s brainchild. I am involved with several of their projects. A lot of these–We can treat this as the antecedent to sort of the current cultural climate, or one of the instigators of the current cultural climate. The nice thing about Ronin was that he came to New York as a non-musician, non-classical musician with no real knowledge of classical music, and he started working for Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, and was like “Hi! Chamber music! That’s what I like!”, except he was applying that term to a lot of non-classical works, and I think one of the reasons his series took off so beautifully was he was able to develop an excitement for classical music from a non-insider-y viewpoint, which is so translatable to those people who don’t exist within the classical elite already, and that is I think the biggest issue for classical music for the past 40 years or so, which is that those on the inside tend to have very specific tastes and the entire classical community tends to cater exclusively to them or at least try to, whereas millions and millions of people who’ve never experienced this stuff before should know it’s an awesome product and we get it to them. So I think he was one the people to really first successfully export classical music to audiences of very sophisticated ambient music or indie rock or whatever, and he was able to present it to them in a way that really resounded and made sense, and in a lot of ways I feel like he’s precipitated a lot of what’s happening in New York right now in terms of expanding audiences.

CM: It’s hard to get people who are in their 50′s perhaps who have probably not heard anything by Nico Muhly to suddenly hear his music or any music from his generation when they’re so used to “Ride of the Valkyries” or something. I think there’s probably some new music that speaks to that taste.

NS: Here’s the thing–I was raised in a very modernist-friendly way. I grew up completely idolizing Berg and Webern and all of those wonderful composers. However, for the uninitiated, that music can be stressful or difficult to understand. There’s a lot of music that’s being written right now which I feel has a surface appeal in the same way that a lot of older romantic music does, as does a lot of contemporary popular music. I feel like it really also stands up to academic debate and further looks, but at first blush, a lot of what’s going on right now in classical music is far more appealing for the uninitiated than a lot of modernist music from the 1950s through 1970s was. And in that way, it’s sort of a more accessible moment for the uninitiated than it has been in America especially in the past 40 years or so. A lot of the people I hear say “I don’t like modern music”, it’s kind of like them saying “I don’t like modern architecture” or “I don’t like modern art”–In other words, they’re responding to a movement, which is maybe done. What’s happening now, Post-modernist music doesn’t sound like that. What’s happening now in art is not necessarily the same thing as in [music] or in architecture, or whatever. So say what you want about that movement, now that’s an historical movement and we’re in a different place.

CM: Okay, so, you play the viola, and besides solo and session projects you are active in so many groups, plus you teach at Manhattan School of Music, and you are a radio host on Q2! How many seconds of sleep do you manage to get?

NS: I enjoy sleep, man! I don’t get it all the time, but when I can, I go for it! I don’t know! It’s really complicated, and I feel like a lot of people in my position which is to say people trying to make it as musicians have to stitch together these really weird careers, and right now, I feel like, I’m 28, I can do it physically, I can run around and do all this stuff trying to do as much as humanly possible right now because it’s not going to be possible forever. And eventually, maybe, I’ll have freedom to breathe a little bit but right now it’s all about 5th gear, just go go go go go, as much as possible!
The thing that I have sort of figured out at this point in the game is that ALL the projects that I do really do have to do with this goal that I have which is getting new music out to new audiences. Every single thing sort of fits into that particular brick, which is not always true. I did weddings for a long time and stuff like that, and now I’m sort of lucky to not have to do that!

CM: As long as you’ve mentioned that, what was the cheesiest thing you’ve ever had to play at a wedding?

NS: Oh man! Cheesy things at weddings? A string quartet arrangement of The Bittersweet Symphony, the same wedding where we had to play a quartet arrangment of “Heart-Shaped Box”, which is the same wedding where the bride said to the groom that she would have him “for richer or for richer”, which is the worst thing I have heard in my life! I think that’s actually the last wedding I played, I just decided that I had enough of that entire genre! [both laughing] Weddings are a time for cheese!

Nadia Sirota.com
Nadia’s official website

yMusic
yMusic page

Spectrum Concerts Berlin visits New York

Last week, I met with cellist Frank Dodge at Lincoln Center to discuss the upcoming concert his ensemble Spectrum Concerts Berlin is giving in New York.

At 8 PM on December 7^th at Weill Recital Hall, Dodge and his colleagues, in collaboration with the Abby Whiteside Foundation, will present a program that celebrates the works of composer/pianist Robert Helps (1928-2001).

Helps was a virtuoso performer adept at both contemporary repertoire and warhorses from the classical music canon. He also relished championing works that had been overlooked and crafting (often fiendishly challenging) transcriptions for the piano.  More than once, I heard Milton Babbitt suggest that Helps “made the unplayable playable.”

Born in the United States, Dodge relocated to Berlin in the 1980s. But he didn’t forget about his first encounters with Helps: in the late 1960s in Boston as a student at the New England Conservatory of Music.

He says, “Bob (Helps) liked to champion pieces that needed looking after. His performances of the music of John Ireland, Felix Mendelssohn, and Poulenc and, of course, his own music were truly very special to hear. We were fortunate to have him visit and perform with us in Berlin twice. I only wish that, before his passing in 2001, we could have collaborated more frequently.”

Dodge’s stewardship has cultivated a group of champions of underrepresented repertoire. Spectrum Concerts Berlin is currently giving its twenty-fourth season of concerts. They have recently released their second recording devoted to Helps’ music: Robert Helps in Berlin (also featuring the ATOS Trio and Helps; Naxos 8.559696-97). A double CD set, it features a number of Helps’s important chamber works, including one of his first mature pieces, the 1957 Piano Trio, as well as one of his last, Piano Trio No. 2, written shortly before his passing. It’s interesting to note his return to the genre after forty years’ absence. My initial impression of the piece is one of leave-taking. I hear its angular lines, brittle articulation, and acerbic harmonies as a defiant kind of valedictory statement. Dodge, on the hand hears the trio showing evidence of new potential directions in Helps’s music; alas, unrealized.

He says, “The second Piano Trio and some of the other late pieces, such as Shall We Dance (1994) and the Piano Quartet and Quintet (both 1997), provide glimpses of Bob considering his compositional approach afresh. I find the discoveries he makes in these works to provide some of his most exciting music.”

The CD also includes a live recording of Helps at the piano; performing a recital that includes some of his aforementioned favorites: Mendelssohn, Ireland, Poulenc, Shall We Dance, and Godowsky’s Studies on Chopin’s Etudes (or, as one of my professors used to like to call them, Chopin on steroids!). One is struck by his exquisite touch and seemingly effortless virtuosity of Helps’ playing.

The impressive array of compositions and music-making displayed on the Naxos disc raises a question. Why isn’t Helps a household name here? Why don’t American-based ensembles perform more Helps and why don’t more composers know him as an important figure?

When I pose this question to Dodge, he says, “Bob did zero self-promotion: none. Even though he taught all over and was very well respected, he had a difficult time with the conventional ‘career building’ activities that many musicians take for granted as part of the business. And he also had considerable personal struggles during his lifetime, with illnesses and other challenges. There were long periods of silence, where he didn’t play or compose at all. Fortunately, these gave way to great bursts of creativity.”

“So, Helps isn’t a household name … yet! Things will change. Sometimes, when a figure is hyped during his or her lifetime, but their work is nothing special, they fade away rather quickly. With Helps, the opposite can be true. It is durable work, and its legacy will only grow. The strength of his music is what will bring performers and listeners to it over time.”

My take: if you’re in the New York area, don’t miss out on this chance to hear Spectrum Concerts Berlin on 12/7. They will make you a convert to Helps’s music in nothing flat.

Ticket Giveaway

In a very generous gesture, the ensemble is offering 20 FREE tickets to S21 readers.  If you’re interested in attending the show, email Paula Mlyn at: paula@a440arts.com with your name. She will put aside a ticket for you for the December 7 performance.

Click here to view the embedded video.

John Corigliano (photo by J. Henry Fair)

The lyrics Corigliano chose for this song cycle, including Mr. Tambourine Man, Blowin’ in the Wind, Masters of War, All Along the Watchtower and Forever Young, are as timely today as they were when Dylan originally wrote them in the 60′s. “I felt the most important thing Bob Dylan did in the 60’s was raise political awareness of the situations around his time,” says Corigliano. “His time is not that dissimilar to our time.”

In an exclusive interview with Musiqa’s Chris Becker, Corigliano discusses the poetry of Bob Dylan, the challenges of composing for the voice, and the current state of music education.

Chris Becker: Have you had listeners come up to you, say people in their 20’s or students, and ask you about Bob Dylan? Do younger audiences know who Bob Dylan is?

John Corigliano: I think everybody knows who Bob Dylan is, 20 year olds too. Last season he was playing on the Grammys and he’s got new stuff coming out all the time. He’s an active artist as well as one who existed in the 60’s.

Chris Becker: Have you heard anything from Dylan himself about the piece?

John Corigliano: No, not a word. I sent him the CD when it came out, the orchestral vocal performance on Naxos. But I didn’t expect to hear anything for several reasons. He’s such a superstar this would probably be insignificant to him. I think he thinks that classical music is elitist music so he might not respond well and certainly he would probably have a response (like): “He’s setting it all wrong! That’s not the way it goes!”

Chris Becker: I wonder about that. I think it would be very intriguing to get a reaction from him at some point. I asked the first question I guess in part because I’d read that when you grew up when Dylan was first making the rounds…you weren’t really listening to his music? You were listening to other kinds of music.

John Corigliano: That’s correct. I wasn’t interested in folk music that basically dealt three or four chords and a melody that stayed the same verse after verse no matter what the words said. I was much more interested in more innovative things like what the Beatles were doing. If was at a coffee house and I heard Bob Dylan, I’d keep talking to my friend in the coffee house and I wouldn’t say: “What’s that?” It wouldn’t have drawn me. I think his words are magnificent, but when I finally did hear the music, I didn’t think it fit the words sometimes because that’s not how folk music goes. It has a single verse even if the mood and the whole tenor of the words change. When I heard the Beatles on the other hand, the orchestrations they do, the harmonies they do, the phrasing – it’s all very unusual stuff. I was much more drawn to that.

Read the entire interview here.

Special thanks to Jeremy Howard Beck for his help with coordinating this interview

Musiqa Presents: Play a Song For Me, September 24, 2011, 7:30 p.m. at the Hobby Center for the Performing Arts, Zilkha Hall, 800 Bagby, Houston TX 77002. Individual tickets: $40, $30 and $20. 50% off for students and seniors with ID. Individual tickets and subscriptions are available at the Hobby Center website.

Take a seductive voiced art-pop singer and a post-jazz/alt-classical trumpeter. Add fragments of nineteenth century classical melodies, electronics elicited by a “mutantrumpet” controller. Then add influences ranging from ancient Greek mythology to the Hudson River Valley. What you have are the intricate yet intimate sounds on an evocatively beautiful new CD: Songs for Persephone.

The Persephone legend is one of the oldest in Greek mythology, with many variants that provide twists and turns to the narrative and subtext of the story.  In the myth, Persephone, daughter of Zeus and the harvest goddess Demeter, is kidnapped by Hades, god of the underworld. During her absence, vegetation is unable to grow in the world; fields fall fallow and crops cannot be harvested.

To break this horrible time of famine, the gods come to an understanding with Hades. Persephone is eventually freed, but on the condition that, if she has eaten anything while in Hades’ realm, she must return to his kingdom for a certain length of time. Thus, each year she must remain in the underworld one month for each pomegranate seed that she has consumed. This serves to rationalize, in mythic terms, the change of seasons, times of decay and renewal, shifts in light and weather; even the autumn foliage and the falling of the leaves.

Vocalist Mimi Goese and trumpeter Ben Neill have updated the Persephone story, while retaining its iconic essence, on their new recording Songs for Persephone (out now on Ramseur Records). As one can see from the pomegranate on the cover, (a visual designed by Goese), the duo is mindful of the legendary Persephone’s history; but they are not hung up on providing a linear narrative.

In a recent phone conversation, Goese, who wrote the album’s lyrics, said, “The artwork that I did for the cover, featuring the pomegranate, is one acknowledgement of the myth of Persephone. And there are other images that I found in the lyrics. But we were interested in using what was evocative about Persephone to create our own story. That’s sort of how the myth evolved too – one storyteller picks up the thread from another down through the years.”

They started work on this music some five years ago, but originally presented it as part of a theatrical production by the multimedia company Ridge Theater, starring Julia Stiles. In 2010, it was produced at Brooklyn Academy of Music as part of the Next Wave Festival.

The theatrical presentation and the mythological story behind it are only two strands in a disparate web of influences that resonate with Songs for Persephone. Both Goese and Neill make their home in the Hudson River Valley. Both for its stunning natural surroundings and its history as a home for artists of all sorts, the valley is rich with reference points. Neill feels that these are subtly imparted to the music.

In a recent phone conversation, he said, “I found myself particularly interested in the Hudson River School of painters. These Nineteenth Century artists depicted the local landscape and the changing of season with a dimensionality and symbolism that seemed to have an affinity with what Mimi and I were after in Songs for Persephone.”

For Neill and Goese, these extra-musical influences – artwork, nature, and theater – are an important part of the music’s genesis. But the polystylistic nature of their music making adds still another layer to the proceedings.

Goese says, “I started in dance and theater and later moved to performance art. Singing came along later. But I don’t have the musical background or training that Ben has – I’m self taught.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

She doth protest too much. Goese’s voice provided the steely, dramatic center to the work of late eighties band Hugo Largo. One part art rock and another dream pop, the group incorporated bold theatricality and ethereal experimentation, releasing two memorable full lengths, Arms Akimbo and Mettle, and the Drums EP, an alt-pop connoisseur’s delight. She’s also collaborated on several occasions with Moby and, under the moniker Mimi (no last name) released Soak, a solo album on David Bryne’s Luaka Bop label.

Goese is a powerful singer, but Songs of Persephone brings out the lyricism her voice also possesses. Cooing high notes and supple overdubbed harmonies are juxtaposed with the more muscular turns of phrase. Experience plays a role in Goese’s tremendous performances on the disc. But she also credits the musical creations of her collaborator Neill with spurring on her inspiration.

“Ben has been a terrific person with whom to work,” Goese says. “He’s inventive and willing to try new things. From the moment we first performed together, at a concert nearly a decade ago, I’ve felt an artistic kinship with him.”

One can readily hear why Neill’s music would be an engaging foil for Goese. His background as a producer, and his years of work designing the mutantrumpet, have encouraged Neill’s ear toward imaginative soundscapes. His 2009 album Night Science (Thirsty Ear) is an example of Neill’s nu-jazz arrangements and soloing at their very best.

On the current CD, Neill’s playing remains impressive; but his arranging and collaborative skills come to the fore. There are intricate textures to found, on which Neill’s trumpet and electronics are abetted by strings, bass, and drums, but it’s the melodies, floating memorably past, one after the other, that are most impressive here. Some of the melodic lines he crafts are imitative of the voice in their own right: it’s no accident that some of the most inspired music-making on Songs for Persephone are when Goese and Neill create duets out of intricately intertwined single lines.

Neill says, “The classical materials that I used as the basis of the compositions on Songs for Persephone were melodies from the Nineteenth century: from opera and symphonic music. Many of them were from relatively the same era in which the Hudson Valley painters worked. I found it fascinating to juxtapose these two genres that were in operation more or less at the same time.”

He continues, “I’d describe the material as fragments of melodies: small excerpts rather than recognizable themes. None of them are treated in such a way that most listeners will be able to say, ‘Hey that’s Berlioz,’ or ‘That sounds like Schumann.’ They were meant to be a starting point from which I would develop the music: it’s not a pastiche.”

At 7:30 PM on September 27^th, Goese and Neill will be having an album release party at the Cooper Square Hotel, part of Joe’s Pub’s Summer Salon series.  Goese says, “It’s an interesting space – we’ll have glass windows behind us, which is unusual as compared with a more conventional stage. But it’s fun performing in non-standard venues. It allows you to try different things and to bring different elements into the mix in terms of theatricality, lighting, and the way that you play off of each other. I’m excited to see how Persephone changes as we take it into various performing spaces.”

-Composer Christian Carey is Senior Editor at Sequenza 21 and a regular contributor to Signal to Noise and Musical America. He teaches music in the Department of Fine Arts at Rider University (Lawrenceville, New Jersey).