Author: Garrett Schumann

Contemporary Classical

Two Short Concerts, One Long Review

photo courtesy Patrick Harlin

This past Friday and Saturday gave Ann Arbor new music seekers two compact and powerful concerts: the final concert of the year for the University of Michigan Contemporary Directions Ensemble (CDE) and a series of 8-minute operas created by graduate students in Music Composition and Creative Writing from the University of Michigan.  The CDE concert – directed by charismatic conductor Christopher James Lees – was about an hour in length, and packed into that time four vibrant works from Pulitzer Prize winners Leslie Bassett, William Bolcom, Jennifer Higdon and Shulamit Ran. Similarly, it took an hour to see all the brief operas performed on Saturday, which were on display at the beautiful Univeristy of Michigan Museum of Art (UMMA).

The program for Friday’s concert featured a disparate set of pieces, which began with Jennifer Higdon’s Zaka for pierrot ensemble, written for and made popular by Eighth Blackbird. This was my first time hearing this piece – or any by Ms. Higdon, for that matter – and I was struck by how many other, later pieces I’ve heard by other composers, which resemble it strongly. With two opposing groups of material, Zaka is principally focused on rhythm and color, and – on its largest scale – contrasts incessant rhythmic drive with a placid chorale-like middle section, which she references towards the end.

Other writing about Zaka I’ve encountered likens the piece’s orchestration to Igor Stravinsky’s and notes how the work focuses on Ms. Higdon’s own instrument, the flute. I suppose the constantly shifting colors can be vaguely connected to the mischievous and convivial timbres of Petrushka or L’histoire du Soldat, but Zaka’s unusual sounds actually led my attention to a different member of the ensemble: the piano. For much of the work’s fast music, the pianist plays inside the piano, intermittently hitting open fifth ‘power chords’ along the way. Though the rest of the ensemble is subjected to similar extended techniques – none more remarkable than the clarinetist’s futile tapping on the mouthpiece-less opening at the top of his instrument – it seemed like the piano’s role in the piece was most significantly shaped by these uncommon colors, particularly because it leads the group in the work’s slow contrasting  midsection.

After Zaka whirled itself into nothingness, the audience was treated to Leslie Bassett’s Brass Quintet, a stark contrast to the Higdon in its traditional materials and nearly uniform instrumental color. The instigator in this work is the Tuba, which – from the outset – tends to challenge the textural status quo of the rest of the ensemble. Unexpectedly, only one movement uses mutes, but this overall stable timbre  suits the narrow scope of material transformation from the piece’s beginning to end. Brass Quintet stays close to home for much of its duration, and often references previous material sometimes for the purpose of establishing a landmark in unfamiliar musical territories or also developing earlier ideas a few movements later. Although the most reserved work on the program, Mr. Bassett’s Brass Quintet still shone brightly with its elegantly spaced sonorities, allusions to jazz and puckish Tuba part.

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by Garrett Schumann
Contemporary Classical

Sampling sound worlds

Since I’ve been at the University of Michigan, I’ve frequently pondered the nature of the “American” sound in contemporary music. I recognize the present state of American contemporary music a melting pot of almost every style imaginable, but I wonder further about common threads, the deeper musical and intellectual ideas American composers – my generation in particular – share.

I had the opportunity this past Sunday and Monday to experience a sample population – albeit it very small – of talented, ambitious student composers when I attended concerts at my undergraduate alma mater, Rice University, and my current school, the University of Michigan. I’ve been Sequenza21’s UMich beat writer since September, so I thought I’d use this unusual coincidence to analyze, a little more deeply, the commonalities and differences between these sets of musical minds. Though I have the larger community of composers in mind, my conclusions are relevant to/dependent on my individual experience and – alas – are limited in scope. If nothing else, I hope the following opinions will spark/provoke members of different musical networks to investigate the relationship between their personal or group sound and the rest of our musical society.

I’ll begin with what I think is the biggest difference between the two schools’ sound worlds: popular music influences more heavily permeate the new music at Michigan, both directly and indirectly. Freshman Zac Lavender’s Song Cycle in Three Movements is the most transparent illustration of this impulse I’ve heard all year at Michigan. The work consists of three pop songs that interpret common psychological themes in popular music (i.e. personal insecurity, the pressure of deciding one’s future, etc.) and are scored for a singer-guitarist and rotating battery of strings, drum set and electric bass. The individual songs were catchy – the second song, 17 Days Ago, is still stuck in my head – and the string parts were akin to producer/arranger George Martin’s work with The Beatles.

Based on last year, the much smaller composition studio at Rice could only boast one student with similar tastes: Joelle Zigman. I am not sure how her music has changed since I graduated, but her growth in the two years I knew her yielded a fusion of a pop-style musical surface with the more complicated textures and techniques she had learned as a student of contemporary music. Development like this is not unusual for composers, because many of us deeply love popular music. The degree of influence composer’s allow popular music to have in their concert works seems to be growing with time, and it wouldn’t surprise me if young composers’ works began to increasingly resemble the popular music they interact with daily.

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by Garrett Schumann
Composers, Concerts, Contemporary Classical

Orchestral Premieres from Michigan

Despite driving snow and slippery roads, an eager crowd gathered Sunday evening to hear Michigan’s University Philharmonia Orchestra deliver eight world premiere performances of works by student composers. The concert is one of the most highly anticipated of the year and is a culmination not only for the student composers involved but also for the student conductors responsible for bringing their pieces to life. This year was even more special than most because all the pieces on the programs were Masters Degree theses from the 2011 class. This fact made the evening more of a watershed event than usual as it represented these composers’ first forays into the venerable land of orchestral writing and all the professional implications we associate with it.

The music was consistently good throughout, which slightly surprised me because these works were many of the composers’ first attempts at handling a full orchestra. The pieces were also very individual, though it was possible to hear the history behind a few of them. Even though the connection some of the works had to the orchestral tradition did not affect my enjoyment of them, I must confess I found the more unique works more striking at the time. However, after a few days have passed and my initial reactions dissipated, it is clear this was an amazingly strong showing from a class of composers filled with distinct personalities and musical voices.

The evening began with Patrick Harlin’s Rapture, which he explained is, “not meant to invoke religious imagery…rather a state of extended bliss.” Mr. Harlin’s work fulfills his description with sustained periods of high energy bubbling with brief, repeated rhythmic-melodic packages embedded into a landscape of constantly shifting orchestral colors. Eventually, long lines emerge carrying the primary thematic material of the piece, but the energy level remains high most of the way through. Impressively, though Rapture careens through a narrow range of rhythms, Mr. Harlin avoids setting a groove or creating trite rhythmic parallelisms. Particularly towards the end of the, the phrasing is delightfully choppy and the orchestration shifts chaotically. To balance this out, Mr. Harlin makes the primary theme very clear, particularly leading into its final recurrence, which is signaled by a piccolo solo. In the end, Rapture comes across as both joyful and frenetic, and the work’s ebullient themes bounce across the orchestra like patrons of a wild amusement park ride.

Next was Donia Jarrar’s Border Crossings, which featured the composer on stage as a vocalist and narrator. The piece is overtly programmatic and deals with Ms. Jarrar’s experience as a young girl fleeing Kuwait after the Iraqi Army invaded the small Middle Eastern nation in August 1990. As one expects, Ms. Jarrar’s music references the setting of her story, but she is very intelligent about incorporating her allusions to the Middle East into the framework of the piece. The most striking example of this is the beginning where Ms. Jarrar sings over a drone of open fifths. The harmony changes but remains quintal until the strings land on an incredibly poignant major-seventh chord and the pattern of sparse accompaniment is broken. Border Crossings succeeds as a backdrop for Ms. Jarrar’s text, but it was her performance that rent the most hearts on Sunday night, nearly stealing the evening had it not been for the strength of the other pieces on the program.

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by Garrett Schumann
Contemporary Classical

CDE and the Machine Which Makes Art

Monday night, the galleries of the Univeristy of Michigan Museum of Art (UMMA) were filled with the music of Stephen Harkte, John Harbison and Julia Wolfe thanks to the University of Michigan’s Contemporary Directions Ensemble (CDE) under the direction of its energetic and accomplished conductor Christopher James Lees. UMMA opened its doors to CDE in a collaborative exhibition of the evening’s music and a piece by Swiss artist Mai-Thu Pirret currently on display at the museum. The connection drawn between Mr. Hartke, Mr. Harbison, Ms. Wolfe and Ms. Perret’s output comes from the creators’ influences: extra-musical inspirations for the composers and, for Ms. Perret, the following quote from artist Sol Lewitt, “The Idea is the Machine Which Makes Art.”

Before diving into the music, I’d like to spend a moment praising the concert’s setting on UMMA’s ground floor. Opposite the building’s main entrance, performers are recessed in a cathedral-esque nave where the sound reverberates wildly, resonating against the stone pillars, marble floors and masterworks of art lining the walls. Recently, the museum has made a habit of hosting performance groups associated with the University of Michigan, including last month’s triumphant standing-room-only performance of all six Brandenburg Concertos by a student early music ensemble under charismatic conductor/harpsichordist Brandon Straub. With unforgettable events like January’s Bach-extravaganza, and Monday’s intimate offering of contemporary music, the UMMA is one of the most exciting concert venues at Michigan.

Of course, a space is only as memorable as the music we experience within it, and Monday’s program was potent and profound, with each work demonstrating a different approach to the evening’s over-arching theme: outside influences. The first piece, Stephen Hartke’s The Horse with the Lavender Eye (1997), focuses on the idea of the non sequitur, and draws on sources from, “Carlo Goldoni to Japanese court music to the cartoonist R. Crumb, as well as 19th century Brazilian novelist Machado de Assis and Looney Tunes,” for its inspiration, according to the composer’s note.

A trio of clarinet, violin and piano, The Horse with the Lavender Eye unfolds in four seemingly isolated movements each of which has a strong individual identity. The second movement, “The Servant of Two Masters” is the best example of the movements’ idiosyncrasies as the piano alternatively serves the Clarinet and Violin of the course of its duration. The last two movements, “Waltzing in the Abyss” and “Cancel My Rhumba Lesson” make the clearest stylistic allusions of the work with hints at a waltz pulse and rhythmic and melodic tropes from early jazz and/or ragtime, respectively. As much as the movements feel disconnected – often,they just unravel, ending without a sense of closure, not least a strong connection to what follows – the whole work is held together by Mr. Hartke’s personal sense of rhythm, along with a very subtle reference between the first and last movements. A strong presence of rhythm, its transformative role in the music and – in particular – a rhythmic profile hovering on the boundaries of transparent grooves have always been prominent in my understanding of Mr. Hartke’s music and these elements were re-illuminated to me in the CDE’s performance of this composition.

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by Garrett Schumann
File Under?

Out on the Town with Vijay Iyer, Rudresh Mahanthappa and Bunky Green

One of the great perks of living in Ann Arbor, Michigan is the University Musical Society (UMS), a community group that, for 132 years, has brought diverse programs of dance, music and theater to this Midwestern cultural center. This year’s schedule has allowed me many new experiences as an audience member – most notably my first dance concerts with the Paul Taylor Dance Company and Sankai Juku – and has given all of us in the area access to many of the world’s most praised musicians, such as Renee Fleming and Wynton Marsalis.

This last Saturday saw the most recent chapter in my interactions with this UMS season when I attended an outstanding jazz concert featuring the Grammy Nominated Vijay Iyer Trio and Rudresh Mahanthappa and Bunky Green’s Apex. As a composer, jazz has always played an interesting role on the fringe of my musical development. I played jazz in high school at a decent level, studied it somewhat more in depth at regional summer programs, but never latched on to the genre in the same way as I did concert music, both historical and contemporary. I saw Saturday night’s concert as an important reconnaissance mission, so to speak: it allowed me a small window into the state of contemporary jazz and, more interestingly, gave me an opportunity to compare what I know of concert music with the evening’s performance.

The performances were really incredible, and quite different in a surprising way. The Vijay Iyer Trio opened and freely explored material on their acclaimed album Historicity, earlier music and even covered the Michael Jackson song “Human Nature”. What I found the most remarkable part of the Trio’s performance was the seamless coexistence of free-form improvisation and strict coordination. As many of you know, jazz compositions loosely mixture of pre-determined and extemporaneous material and Vijay Iyer’s music is an incredibly elegant emulsion of these sources. Most stunning were arrival points that emerged suddenly from long periods of cumulative improvisation. As impressively virtuosic as Vijay Iyer (piano), Stephan Crump (bass) and Marcus Gilmore (drums) were on their individual instruments, the sensitivity of their collective listening and concentration – which enabled elaborate musical structures to exist amongst improvised anarchy – was the most profound element of their act.

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by Garrett Schumann
Contemporary Classical

Music Now Festival 2011 at EMU

For those of you in the Southeastern part of Michigan and looking for something to do tomorrow through Friday, Eastern Michigan University is holding their 17th biennial Music Now Festival Feb. 16-18.

Here is a link to the School of Music & Dance home page with more details about the program, which sounds pretty interesting (interesting enough for me to go tomorrow, at least).

Thursday and Friday’s concerts feature the chamber and large ensemble works (respectively) of Dan Welcher and tomorrow night’s concert is a mixed bag, I’m looking forward to it.

by Garrett Schumann
Chamber Music, Composers, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Experimental Music

Live From Ann Arbor: Chapter 3

The first student composers’ concert of the new year at the University of Michigan took place last Monday, January 31st. Although brief, this evening of premieres and experiments was just as potent, moving and successful as the other student-run new music events I’ve shared with the Sequenza21. Offering a diverse menu of solo, chamber and electronic compositions, Monday’s concert made yet another statement toward the rich and vast musical community operating in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

The evening opened in grand style with Wil Pertz’ The Drink of the Wise #25 Origins (Ti), an aleatoric piece for 16 players divided into four choirs: strings, winds, brass and percussion. The music starts with quietly tinkling wood and metal percussion instruments, and then layers of string harmonics, brief woodwind melodies and, dramatically rich brass chords are added above. The music drives strongly toward sonic expansion, and gradually builds intensity culminating with a striking switch from metal and wood percussion instruments to djembe drums. Mr. Pertz even constructed a complementary visual layout for the music: the percussionists wore body paint and, as the music achieved its climax, the string players began to walk around the stage.

Next on the program was Donia Jarrar’s electronic composition The Dictator Balances on His Inside Edge. Though originally composed with a generic extra-musical program, Ms. Jarrar took time before the piece to connect the political implications to the current unrest in Egypt. The Dictator Balances is a “classic” electronic composition, building a complex and enthralling field of sounds from recordings of Ms. Jarrar performing various figure skating techniques. The most memorable aural event was a slowly intensifying swooshing noise, which could easily represent the churning of growing popular protest against any autocrat, not least President Mubarak.

Similarly compelling was David Biedenbender’s electronic piece cold.hard.steel, which appeared a later on the program. Like Ms. Jarrar’s work, cold.hard.steel used recurring sonic motives to create a clear aural narrative in the absence of “pure” musical material. Here, Mr. Biedenbender grabbed my ear with a striking contrast: cold metallic sounds juxtaposed with the sound of human breathing. The resulting affect was engagingly grim, and remained as such even when the clear opening gave way to heavier processing. Though the sound world changed from chillingly raw to rationally synthesized, Mr. Biedenbender found clever ways to preserve the identity of his most memorable sounds, constantly referring back to the work’s frighteningly visceral beginning.

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by Garrett Schumann
Contemporary Classical

Standing Room Only for ‘Crescendos”

2011 got off to a slow start in terms of new music in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Don’t get me wrong; there have been plenty of great individual and chamber recitals so far this semester, but the first concert solely programming 20th and 21st century music was Saturday afternoon’s performance by the University of Michigan Percussion Ensemble, dubbed ‘Crescendos’.

With the oldest piece on the program a two-marimba arrangement of György Ligeti’s harpsichord solo, Continuum (1968; score above), I expected to see composers and new music enthusiasts filling the seats of the intimate McIntosh Theater located on the lower level of the University of Michigan’s School of Music. However, I was quickly proven wrong as ranks upon ranks of families and Ann Arbor music-lovers filled the room to the brim, forcing many to stand or sit wherever they could find an empty piece of carpet. Steve Reich’s seminal Music for Six Marimbas and Ligeti’s aforementioned Continuum were the headliners in an exceptionally strong and wonderfully executed line-up of diverse and energetic percussion pieces.

Scott Verduin and Kyle Acuncius opened the concert with Continuum, which was originally conceived as a harpsichord solo to be played as fast as possible or at least at a tempo of 18 pitches per second. Though Saturday’s performance was slightly slower than the composer’s stipulation, the gradual harmonic unfoldings became more dramatic and emerged so strongly in the new tempo, I couldn’t help connecting this work’s sound-mass characteristics with its neighbors in Ligeti’s output: Atmospheres and Lontano. Starkly contrasting was the next piece on the program, the first movement of Nebojsa Jovan Zivkovic’s Trio Per Uno (1995). Thrillingly energetic, this work calls for three players to share a set up of bongo drums, cymbals and a communal bass drum, creating a sort of super-percussionist. The music was like highly sophisticated drum line music and opposed cooperative rhythmic grooves with outbursts of individual virtuosity.

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by Garrett Schumann
Composers, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Music Events

Three Premieres

Hidden within the typical drive-to-cadence activities that closed the 2010 Fall semester here at the University of Michigan were three special performances showcasing the creativity and boldness of student composers David Biedenbender, Roger Zare and William Zuckerman. The premieres of their works – Three Rilke Poems, Janus, and By the way: Music in Pluralism, respectively – demonstrated the profits of well executed collaborations with all of the following: a third-party ensemble, a soloist, and other forms of media. I am proud to report the largely unqualified success of these endeavors and suspect these works are part of a more general movement in the new music community to work closely with performers and performance groups on large-scale projects.

First, I will talk about David Biedenbender’s Three Rilke Poems, on which he worked closely with the University of Michigan Chamber Choir under the direction of Maestro Jerry Blackstone. For two reasons, this chamber choir collaboration was the most traditional out of the three works I’m discussing: it is not at all uncommon to work with choral ensembles, and Mr. Biedenbender’s music was fairly straightforward in terms of content. However, these realities should not diminish the absolutely overwhelming poignancy of his composition.

Three Rilke Poems had an overall structure of slow-faster-slow, though the two slow movements possessed highly contrasting materials and were not connected. The faster middle movement, Herbst, had a very elegant opening where Mr. Biedenbender layered opposing ostinati, creating a crackling bed of additive rhythms upon which he introduced the primary melodies for the piece. The practicalities of choir performance often obligate a composer to use more a more traditional harmonic language when writing a choral composition. While this was true about Three Rilke Poems, Mr. Biedenbender found many ways to undermine the order of his tertian or modal systems, such as the layered rhythms at the beginning of Herbst. Consequently, though Three Rilke Poems relied heavily on triads and diatonic dissonances, it was a clearly modern composition.

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by Garrett Schumann
Concerts, Contemporary Classical, New York

CDE Grooves

Its not often I leave a new music concert and my ears are ringing, but Friday night’s performance of the University of Michigan Contemporary Directions Ensemble (CDE) pumped up the volume with works by Jefferson Friedman, Stephen Hartke and Bang-On-A-Can founders Julia Wolfe and Michael Gordon.

The evening started off with Mr. Friedman’s 78 for pierrot ensemble, an upbeat mixed meter groove centering around a repetitive riff alternatively appearing in minor and major modes. As CDE conductor Christopher James Lees explained in his pre-concert remark, the program was designed to explore the “New York” sound, because the featured composers either live in New York now or grew up there. Maestro Lees noted the confluence of rock, jazz and contemporary music that surrounded these composers as they developed their mature sound. 78 clearly connected to these roots with its syncopated, pentatonic theme juxtaposed against the inside-the-piano techniques and extended tertian harmonies of a soft chorale. The work proved to be an excellent starting point for the concert because its successors carried these populist and eclectic tendencies to opposite extremes.

For example, Stephen Hartke’s violin duo Oh Them Rats Is Mean In My Kitchen amplified the allusion to jazz and other improvised music with a free-flowing structure and a textural dichotomy of solo-accompaniment or rhythmic/melodic unity. Oh Them Rats most elegant demonstrates the connection between these composers and the modernism of the 1970s and 60s with its balance between bluesy melodies and dissonant harmonies. The arc of the work, in fact, expressed a subtle emergence of the blues scale as a primary melodic source from beginning to end. Accordingly, the piece climaxed with a smeared blues-scale melody played by both violins but out of tune and asynchronously such that it sounded like shoddy overdubbing on an old Muddy Waters record.

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by Garrett Schumann