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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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For the students in Aspen’s Composition Individual Studies Program, the last week of the festival culminated the final student composers’ concert last Friday, August 19^th. This evening of music not only featured large works by the six students of George Tsontakis, but also featured the Aspen-first: an Exquisite Corpse composition created by all 12 of this half-session’s composition students. My review of the August 12^th composers’ concert presaged the strength of Friday’s program and – despite offering an unconventional lineup of ensembles – the featured works did not disappoint my auguring.

Patrick O’Malley’s Five Scales for Brass Quintet – the first of two works for that ensemble – opened the evening like a fanfare. The work is brightly scored and drawn from a simple idea of cleverly harmonizing a basic scale, such that the linear movement of the music is colored distinctly with varying levels of dissonance and consonance depending on the section of the work. The brass writing is solid and attractive, particularly the bass trombone part, which explodes at various times, adding breadth to Mr. O’Malley’s inventive harmonic progressions. A calming postlude in A-flat major cleanses the audience’s aural palettes after the work’s chaotic, polyrhythmic climax featuring clashing quarter-note triplets and sixteenth notes. As if the dissonances, jarring dynamics and wide orchestration of this moment aren’t attention-grabbing enough, this section offers a stunning contrast to the predominant chorale-like flow of the work. The necessity of this brief, violent burst is made apparent at the onset of the aforementioned and subdued postlude, whose sweetly and tightly voiced polyphony puts an appealing cap on the extremity of the preceding musical journey.

Five Scales’s reserved closing phrases acted as an effective set-up for the concert’s next work, Wen-Hui Xie’s …After… for clarinet, violin, percussion and prepared piano. The piece, written in response to the devastating earthquake that struck China in 2008, is not booming or violent as one might expect. Rather, the piece is a captivating series of widely-spaced (temporally) and subtle gestures that builds from extreme quietness to slight loudness over its 7-8 minute duration. The suspenseful delicacy of the work’s gestures draw the audience toward the stage, and put me – at least – on the edge of my seat as my attention was captured by Ms. Xie’s faint and translucent musical landscape. Supporting – perhaps even predicating – the music’s plaintive character is Ms. Xie’s exotic and elaborate sense of color. The prepared piano part includes multiple bowed passages along with fingered pizzicato, and similar extended techniques permeated the rest of the score: the percussionist rubs his fingers on a snare drum and bows a cymbal on top of a timpani while the clarinetist and violinist both speak in addition to producing ivarious unpitched instrumental noises. However intricate these sounds seem in writing, they carried essential and highly effective roles in the communication of Ms. Xie’s artistic message.

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This is my first year at the Aspen Music Festival, and the way the second session composition program has been run is a little different than it usually is. Namely, the two composition recitals have necessarily been divided evenly among Syd Hodkinson and George Tsontakis’ studios, six on each night with Syd’s kids – or the “Hodkie’s” as some of us call our group – going first, on last Friday, August 12^th (yes, that was our poster).

The reason for this is a scheduling conflict George Tsontakis had thanks to an appearance at the Cabrillo Festival he had committed to months before the festival began. Despite the knowledge that George would be out of town, the powers here at Aspen went ahead and booked the recital during his absence. The best reconciliation the festival could reach was agreeing that George shouldn’t miss his own students’ performances.

I mention this back-story to mitigate the sentiment that I am being partisan with the following praise-filled assessment of the recital. I have heard music by every composer here and we all write good stuff. As much as I intend to luxuriate in the overall excellence of last Friday’s premiere performances, I am unequivocally confident next Friday’s composition recital will be equally as strong, we just haven’t gotten there yet.

The evening’s opening piece was Dan Schlosberg’s I Was All Right for a While (2011), which takes its title – and the foundation for its material – from a Roy Orbison song. This reference’s transparency develops over the course of the piece, culminating in a full-blown quote of the song occurring at a decisive point in the work’s structure

Like the rest of us, Mr. Schlosberg gave a brief oral program note before his piece was played, in which he described the influence of the Orbison track on the work’s other musical content. I did not hear as ubiquitous a connection between the non-quoted sections and the quote as Mr. Schlosberg described, but I did detect other, more general, elements that beautifully melded these opposing sections of the piece. Namely, the restless character of the music preceding the quote conveys a clear sense of yearning I feel connects strongly with the emotional message of the referenced song. Moreover – and more importantly – the unique orchestration of the quote – vibraphone and viola harmonics carry the melody as the pianist strums chords inside the piano – elegantly transports the reference into the sound world of the rest of the piece, bridging the music’s stylistic gaps with the ensemble’s color.

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Last spring, a friend of mine joked I would welcome the incredible density of performances here at Aspen because, without them, I may get bored. In my first week here George Tsontakis quipped, “composers never have a day on”, and – yet – I find myself too busy to keep up with what the Aspen Music Festival has on tap. Because all the playing – student, faculty, guest regardless – is at such a high level, I’m pained to skip out on even the most middle-of-the-road program, but composing is why I’m here. Nevertheless, I’ve been able to skip around and see the recitals and concerts that, above the rest, showcase living composers and other dynamic programs, and here are the highlights of what I’ve heard since my last post.

In the last week, the most noteworthy of these events was Gabriel Kahane’s recital on August 3. As I am sure most of you know, Mr. Kahane was mentioned on New York-based radio station WQXR’s notorious/heavily-discussed “Favorite under 40” list of young composers, and the resultant name-recognition is what drove me to this concert. Honestly, I didn’t have much else to go on because the promotional calendar distributed by the festival only provided a vague description of what the evening would entail. Once onstage, Mr. Kahane even remarked, sarcastically, that the audience was brave because, based on the advertising, he, “could have been a serial killer”. The most prominent posters called him a, “songwriter/entertainer”, and that turned out to be a pretty accurate assessment of what he brought to the stage.

The program began with a series of pop songs from his upcoming CD Where Are the Arms, and then moved in a different direction in the second half with his Craiglist-Lieder and a one-man performance of Robert Schumann’s legendary Dichterliebe. The first group of pop songs was very solid, if not exceptional. I am no expert on the current trends in Indie/Pop music, but, to my ears, his harmonic language seemed uncommonly adventurous and his lyrics were compelling and appropriate to the style…I think. Admittedly, I struggle to delve into these pieces because when I’m not rocking out to contemporary/classical tracks I am head-banging to Megadeth, Slayer and their heavy metal brothers-in-arms. Yet, it was clear to me that Gabriel Kahane is extremely comfortable and capable in his arena of pop/rock both as a performer and songwriter.

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I am currently visiting my brother who teaches English at a University in Fes, Morocco. One of his roommates is Chris Witulski, a doctoral candidate in ethnomusicology from the University of Florida currently researching indigenous Moroccan music. A big part of Chris’ work is devoted to transcribing performances of certain types of Moroccan folk music, and Monday he hosted a group of Gnawa musicians at the house to perform a series of songs.

As Chris and a few Moroccans told me, Gnawa is rooted in West African music and primarily uses pentatonic scales, although more Arabic-sounding melodies with half-steps and microtonal vocal intonations evolved once the tradition reached Morocco. Monday’s performance featured three musicians, two who played iron castanet-like instruments called krakebs and one who played a three-stringed bass-like instrument called the hajhuj. The hajhuj player led the group through the songs, which often featured call-and-response passages.

Although the raw materials of the Gnawa music I heard were very straightforward – repetitive rhythmic grooves supporting tunes rooted in a simple melodic language – I was struck by the unpredictable phrasing. Rarely were lines repeated in a cookie-cutter manner, and most of the time there was little sense of antecedent-consequent relationships in the songs’ melodic framework. The music simply moved along from one piece of text to another, stabilized by the rhythmic drone of the krakebs.

Of course, I am no expert on this music and I dislike describing this music to you after so little contact with it. So, below is a link to a video of an earlier performance by this same Gnawa group. Note Abd ar-Rzaq, the ma’alem, or leader and the dual function of the hajhuj as a melodic and rhythmic part of the ensemble. The animal skin wrapped around the main body of the instrument not only helps it resonate, but also acts as a drumhead, which he taps from time to time.

Enjoy!

Ma\’alem Abd ar-Rzaq, Gnawa معلم عبد الرزاق الگناوي