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

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

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

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

ETHEL will soon be reunited with our dear friend and collaborator Ayelet Rose Gottlieb at the 2012 Winter Jazz Fest (January 7th @ Zinc Bar). Ayelet has composed a deeply heartfelt piece for ETHEL and percussionist Satoshi Takeishi entitled Shiv’a . We’ve been developing Shiv’a for over a year now, and recently recorded it. This January’s concert marks the beginning of a series of live performances of the piece.

Ayelet’s style combines tuneful folk influences with moments of abstract improvisation. Her tone color choices are unusual and interesting. In this interview she discusses her music, her projects, and the fascinating relationship between her music and her dreams.

Dufallo: Can you discuss Shiv’a – your inspiration for the piece, and how it came together?

Rose Gottlieb: Shiv’a is a meditation on the process of mourning. It referneces Jewish and Buddhist mourning rituals. I composed it following several deaths, including that of my good friend, drummer and percussionist Take Toriyama. It took a while to piece together the seven movements of Shiv’a, and to find the right “language” for it (the movements vary from graphic scores to traditional scores, with improvisation sections). It’s a very special piece for me, as it’s my first long instrumental composition.

Being a vocalist, I’m used to working with text, and in this case the composition process was very different from anything I had done before. Since there were no words, the way in for me was visual. Each movement in the piece is like a sketch that draws an image with sounds and textures. The titles of the seven movements reflect upon a quotation from the book of Kings:

There was a great and mighty wind, splitting mountains and shattering rocks [...] but the Great Spirit was not in the wind. After the wind — earthquake. But the Great Spirit was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake — fire. But the Great Spirit was not in the fire. And after the fire — a voice of thin silence.

The movement titles also reflect the four elements of nature, being slightly jolted and out of place — Geshem (rain), Ra’ash (earthquake), and Esh (fire). Air is referenced through the use of a unique instrument that was made specifically for Shiv’a by installation artist Michelle Jaffe: the “Blanket with 49 Bells (BW49B).” My dream life is at least as “real” to me as my waking reality… When I started composing Shiv’a I had an incredible,  powerful dream of a blanket with bells on it, that was moved by the wind. Michelle took on the task of bringing this sound-sculpture into physical reality, and the BW49B is now an integral part of Shiv’a. The bells signify a soul that keeps ringing in the world after the body has passed…

Dufallo: Can you tell a little bit about your musical history?

Rose Gottlieb: From childhood through the end of high school I studied to be a classical flautist. When I was about 14 I started “flirting” with improvisation — first as a flautist, then as a vocalist. Saxophonist Arnie Lawrence moved to Israel in the 1990′s, and performing with him solidified my direction into the realm of vocal jazz and improvised music… About a year before I started singing I started having a recurring dream of swirling colors — a large, intricate orchestral piece would be playing, causing the colors to move. Every time I awoke from that dream I experienced a great frustration about not having the skill to “transcribe” this sub-concious composition… I decided to start writing music, in order to be able one day to write that piece that was asking to be born… Of course, once I started composing, the dream stopped. I’m still hopeful this piece will come to visit me again some day…

Dufallo: What are some exciting upcoming projects?

Rose Gottlieb: With Shiv’a – I’m very much hoping it will now have life as a performed piece. I feel that the combination of ETHEL, Satoshi Takeishi, and Michelle’s BW49B will be a real treat to see on stage. We’re starting this journey on the night between the 7th and 8th of January at Winter Jazz Fest (Zinc Bar, 12:15 AM). The album is in the mixing stages, and will be released toward the end of 2012/early 2013.

Ayelet Rose Gottlieb, ETHEL, and Satoshi Takeishi rehearse Shiv'a

Aside from Shiv’a I have a few exciting projects in the works. On March 28th my composition for trombone and piano, Carry On — Check In, will be premiered at Carnegie Hall by pianist Vered Reznik and trombonist Haim Avitzur.

In Israel I recently recorded Betzidei Drachim / On the Roadside — a project that features my settings of Israeli and Palestinian poetry. The music is a cross-over of jazz, prog-rock, and middle-eastern music… This project features my long standing collaborator, pianist Anat Fort, as well as Ihad Nimer on oud and violin, and several other leading Israeli musicians.

With Mycale — John Zorn’s a capella vocal quartet — we’re touring the US and Europe, and working on new materials. We’re also gearing up for an exciting 2013 — Zorn’s 60th birthday year!

Outside my musical life — I recently shifted my base (once again) to London, where my husband works as an animator. I am grateful every day that music is my life and I have such incredible people to share it with…

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.

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

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

Sequenza 21 and Manhattan New Music Project present

ACME in Concert

Tuesday October 25, 2011 at 7 PM

Joe’s Pub, NYC

American Contemporary Music Ensemble (ACME)

Yuki Numata, Caroline Shaw, violins
Nadia Sirota, viola
Clarice Jensen, cello
Jonathan Singer, percussion
Timothy Andres, piano

Program

Wily Overture …                                                            Christian Carey (premiere)
Welcome …                                                                        Nancy Kleaver (MNMP)

Requests …                                                                        David Smooke

Grand Dragon (excerpt from Speedvisions) …            Rob Deemer
Slumber Music …                                                            Jay Batzner
Steal Away (excerpt from O Sapentia) …                        Hayes Biggs

Intermission –

Linea Negra …                                                            Laurie San Martin
Refuge …                                                                        Sam Nichols
Sixteen Lines …                                                            Robert E. Thomas

How it Will Go …                                                            Dale Trumbore
Oracle Night …                                                            James Stephenson
Nostos-Algea …                                                            James Holt

This concert was made possible by the generous support of Manhattan New Music Project (www.mnmp.org), and Sequenza 21 (www.sequenza21.com) publisher Jerry Bowles

Recording: Glenn Freeman of OgreOgress Productions (www.ogreogress.com)

Program committee: Clarice Jensen, Hayes Biggs, and Christian Carey

ACME Management: Bernstein Artists, Inc.

ACME Publicist: Christina Jensen

Thanks: Nancy Kleaver & Max Freedman of MNMP, Jerry Bowles, Steve Layton, Sue Renée Bernstein, Christina Jensen, Canelle Boughton, Glenn Freeman, Justin Monsen; the staff at Joe’s Pub: Shanta Thake, Sara Beesley, Michele Renkovski, & Patricia Bradby.

Special thanks: to the musicians for their dedicated work preparing the program; to the featured composers for their beautiful music; and to all the members of the Sequenza 21 and Manhattan New Music Project communities, without whom this event would not be possible.

Clarice Jensen and Nadia Sirota

Clarice: So, ahem, Nadia it was pretty remarkable when we switched from reading from the score to parts when we were working on Hayes’ piece (ed.: Steal Away by Hayes Biggs). It’s like the music took on a different meaning.

Nadia: I know!! I find that stuff so incredible. Sometimes I forget that a massive portion of our jobs as musicians (especially of the new music persuasion) is essentially translating visual material into sound. We’re kind of like professional map-readers. Do you have any notational pet peeves?

Clarice: Page turns of course… But other than that, just spacing in general. If notes look all bunched up, then it’s hard not to make them sound that way! What about you?

Nadia: My super-dork pet peeve is spelling; I hate it when chords are spelled out in ways that have little regard for traditional chord structures. It’s sometimes really hard to wrap your brain around a whole bunch of sharps and flats living together all higgledy-piggledy without regard for implied harmony. I know I know: super-dork. That having been said, I kind of love how notation is a kind of personal, no two alike sort of thing. It gives the performer so much insight as to how the composer may be thinking. Oh! And I can get kinda frustrated with things that are notated with very small durations (64th and 128th notes) which are then in a super-slow tempo. I understand a kind of freneticism may be what the composer is going for, but it just seems to add so much time to the rehearsal/parsing process.

Clarice: Totally agree on that one. Pretty amazing how this abstract system of symbols and lines and dots can be subject to so much scrutiny and discussion regarding interpretation. And how dots and lines paired with scrutiny and discussion results in beautiful music! Amazing!

Nadia: Yay! So, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the type of music and programming that translates well live vs. that which is great to listen to on the radio or on a recording. There are so many types of gestures which are fascinating to watch people achieve, which cannot be really understood in a recording. Like even a pregnant pause, for example.

Clarice: For sure – the physicality of achieving a musical gesture just can’t be heard in a recording, and sometimes seeing that gesture is what makes the music translate to the audience. However, would you say that there is any music that makes more sense recorded rather than live? What about music in the rock/pop world?

Nadia: Oh decidedly. Stylistically that’s an idea Classical peeps kind of “borrowed” from the pop world to begin with, even going so far back as Musique Concrète territory. Like, think about how many times we’ve heard the exact same performance of a song like “Louie Louie.” That performance IS the work itself. Everything else is a “cover.” This can seem like a weird, alien counterpart to the Classical model (like, do I only do covers???), but yeah, there’s a lot more of that type of thinking these days, from things like John Adams Light Over Water to Nico Muhly’s The Only Tune, a piece I’ve performed a lot. When that piece was conceived it was as a recorded collage. When we play it, we are trying our damnedest to approximate the recording. It’s sort of the opposite type of problem from what we were talking about above, the “why does this music lack the visceral impact it had live on this record” type of problem.

Well, I’m super into the diversity of voices on this program. I get to wear a lot of different hats! (Jagged hat, lyrical hat.)

Clarice: Yes, I think the variety of pieces we ended up with is pretty emblematic of the wide range of excellent writing and composition that’s happening now. And as a performer, it really is rewarding to wear all of these hats! I mean, I’ve always considered lyrical playing to be a personal strength of mine, but over the years I’ve worked so hard on rhythmic accuracy through playing intricate music, and now I consider that to be a strength as well. It’s amazing how all of this diverse writing is in fact shaping the performers who are often playing music in the contemporary world. Do you think your focus on new music has changed you intrinsically as a performer?

Nadia: Oh, totally. Whenever you work on some weird skill, it changes the kind of mental space in which you think about everything else, really. The rhythmic idea you bring up is super apropos; I also kind of came from a lyrical place as a kind of a default, but the more I work on concepts of groove and flow, the more these ideas end up creeping their way into even the most lyrical stuff. Knowing more things as time goes on rules.

Well, lovely to chat with you, C, I can’t wait for the show!!

Clarice: Yep yep, it’s gonna be a good one!

_______________________

Tickets to the Sequenza 21 Concert are free (the venue charges a $12 food/drink minimum).

October 25 at 7 PM

Joe’s Pub in NYC

Tickets and Tables are still available by phone.

Call 212.539.8778 to make your reservation

I’ve seen many such examples of concert music and nature coming together in my first week as a student at the Aspen Music Festival. It is an honor for me to be among the accomplished, ambitious and talented musicians – professionals and students – who, every year, congregate in this mountain town to showcase and expand their abilities in music performance, conducting and composition. Though I won’t bore you all with grandiloquent, Thoreau-esque meditations on the “vibratory hum” uniting music and nature, I am excited to report on the many wonderful performances of contemporary music I will attend over the next four weeks.

The first event I went to was a recital by the superb pianist Jeremy Denk, which featured an unusual pairing of Ligeti’s Etudes for Piano and Bach’s Goldberg Variations, in that order. Almost all the other student composers here came to the concert, and we wondered if these two heavy, complex and extremely contrasting works could complement each other. Mr. Denk’s reasoning behind the program was clear enough: he said he wanted to feature what he thought were the earliest and latest “titanic” masterpieces for solo piano. Yet, we were still a little intimidated by what lay before us. To his credit, Mr. Denk’s charisma was infectious and he did a wonderful job warming up the audience to the material he was about to present.

The same energy and personality – summated by a mischievous glance Mr. Denk shot the audience after a crunchy moment in the Ligeti – filled the performance and made experiencing these massive works more approachable. However, I feel like Mr. Denk’s decision to play the Bach on the second half was the most powerful element of the evening because it illustrated the masterful integrity of the Etudes. The works melded together and became a huge meditation at the piano, which Mr. Denk’s affable virtuosity presented to the audience with great success.

I’ve learned quickly that excellent performances like last Tuesday’s are not limited to the festival’s accomplished guests. Friday night, the Aspen Chamber Symphony beautifully performed Mahler’s Symphony no. 4 and, afterwards, I attended a recital by the two resident student string quartets. The program began with Beethoven’s String Quartet in B-flat, op. 18, no. 6, which is a personal favorite of mine thanks to its adorable themes. I am a particular sucker for the ‘cute’ melodies and textures of classical-period chamber music from Mozart through early Beethoven, and the members of the Aiana String Quartet delivered the work with just the right level of charm.

The highlight of the evening, though, was the second piece – Shostakovich’s String Quartet no. 9 in E-flat major from 1964 – which was performed adroitly and compellingly by the members of the Ars Nova String Quartet. I had never heard this piece before, though I do have a fondness for Shostakovich’s later works because they seem to illustrate the composer’s dark sense of humor. I was happy to find many parallels between this quartet and Shostakovich’s final symphony, such as a capricious violin theme that resembles the famous tune of the “William Tell Overture”, a melody he quotes in the fifteenth symphony. My only wish was that the work had ended with the dramatic, pizzicato chords the quartet plays in unison towards the end of the closing movement. Certainly, an ending like that would have been too severe for Shostakovich’s style, but I thought the work’s straightforward termination paled against the stunning severity of those strummed sonorities.

The final piece of recently composed music I heard in concert this week was Snatches of a Conversation (2001) by Hungarian composer Peter Eötvös. Humorously programmed against Dvorcak and Dohnayni on a chamber recital, the work was the week’s repertoire for the crack Aspen Chamber Ensemble (ACE), conducted by Sydney Hodkinson, one of the Festival’s famed composers-in-residence. Dr. Hodkinson encouraged us composition students to attend ACE rehearsals this week, and I was fascinated to see this complex, convivial piece of music come together.

The first unusual thing about Snatches of a Conversation is its use of a double-belled trumpet soloist. I learned there are only four such instruments in the world and they are very challenging to play. Eövös uses it to create a schizophrenic trumpet line that jumps from one muted bell to another instantly, yielding rapid shifts in the instrument’s color. Additionally, there was a dramatic, rhythmicized speaking part, which accounted for the disjunct conversational fragments alluded to in the work’s title.

The piece is spawned from Eötvös’ experience as a child listening to jazz music through jammed radio signals in Hungary. The music is very gestural and impulsive at first, with choppy phrases and a constantly shifting color palette thanks to varied brass mutes and special wind and string techniques such as half tone and scratch tone sounds and playing behind the bridge. This faster music returns as the final section of the piece but is transformed by a middle section with a greatly slowed down harmonic rhythm. This slower music is a wonderful contrat the work’s opening, but it is also here that the piece’s jazz references begin to take control in the form of two keyboard solos that have the character of a jazz tune’s solo piano introduction. When the opening returns after this slower music, it takes on the persona of these two keyboard melodies, eventually developing the jazzy material into a legitimately swinging groove.

The transient colors, uneven flow and textual subject matter of Snatches of a Conversation make the work rather humorous, which I believe is a deliberate part of Eötvös’. The piece ends on a pentatonic ‘button’ played by the bass, marimba and vibraphone. To me, it is cute and frivolous and certainly sarcastic in its role as the final gesture in such a chaotic and convivial piece of music.

If you are interested in a more detailed description of my time at the Aspen Music Festival, check out the observations page of my web site where I report on all my activities as a composition student here.

Outsound acquired a Board of Directors and incorporated its bad self in 2009.  Now with a 501(c)(3) IRS determination in hand, it’s a stalwart provider of experimental music, sound art, found sounds, improvisation, noise, musique concrete, minimalism, and any other kind of sound that is too weird for a mainstream gig in the Bay Area.

The upcoming 2011 Outsound New Music Summit is the 10th annual, running from July 17-23, 2011. All events will take place at the San Francisco Community Music Center, 344 Capp Street, San Francisco. Eager listeners can purchase advance tickets online.

Sunday July 17: Touch the Gear Exposition
Outsound’s free opening event allows the public to roam among the Summit’s musicians and sound artists and their sonic inventions, asking questions, making noise and learning how these darn things work.

Monday July 18: Discussion Panel: Elements of non-idiomatic compositional strategies
Another free public event in which composers Krys Bobrowski, Andrew Raffo Dewar, Kanoko Nishi and Gino Robair will discuss the joys and pains of creating new works some of which to be premiered in The Art of Composition.  The public is invited to participate in a Q&A session.

Wednesday July 20: FACE MUSIC
This concert is devoted to the voice, the world’s oldest instrument, and artists who expand its horizons: Theresa Wong, Joseph Rosenzweig, Aurora Josephson, and Bran…(POS).

Thursday July 21: The Freedom of Sound
A night of operatic free expression, and power of spontaneous sound from Tri-Cornered Tent Show featuring guest vocalist Dina Emerson, Oluyemi and Ijeoma Thomas’ Positive Knowledge, and Tom Djll’s “lowercase big band”, Grosse Abfahrt with special guest Alfred Harth (A23H).

Friday July 22: The Art of Composition
Gino Robair premieres his Aguascalientes suite based on scenes captured by Jose Guadalupe Posada, Andrew Raffo Dewar’s Interactions Quartet performs Strata (2011) dedicated to Eduardo Serón, Kanoko Nishi premieres her graphic scores along with bassist Tony Dryer, and Krys Bobrowski offers Lift, Loft and Lull, a series of short pieces exploring the sonic properties of metal pipes and plates and the use of balloons as resonators.

Saturday July 23: Sonic Foundry Too!
In a sequel to the first Sonic Foundry performance in 2006, 10 musical instrument inventors are paired up in 5 collaborations: Tom Nunn, Steven Baker, Bob Marsh, Dan Ake, Sung Kim, Walter Funk, Brenda Hutchinson, Sasha Leitman, Bart Hopkins, and Terry Berlier.

Jeffrey Mumford: through a stillness brightening (world premiere)
Argento Ensemble

Commissioned by the Argento New Music Project through the generosity of Marianna Bettman (in memory of Judge Gilbert Bettman) and Sonia Rothschild.

Brian Ferneyhough: La Chute D’Icare
Argento Ensemble

Harold Meltzer: Exiles
Da Capo Chamber Players, Mary Nessinger, mezzo soprano

Victoria Bond: Instruments of Revelation (NY premiere)
Da Capo Chamber Players