Boston

Boston, Experimental Music, File Under?

This Throat Singer ain’t from Tuva…

Ken Ueno appeared with Joan Jeanrenaud at BAM last month. I missed the gig, but was excited to see the YouTube footage.

When I met Ken, in the graduate program at Boston University, he hadn’t yet started to sing; he was primarily a guitarist. Although he’s written a wide range of compositions, including Shiroi Ishi, a beautiful choral piece for the Hilliard Ensemble, in recent years he has carved out a distinctive identity as a throat-singer. Combining techniques from multiple traditions as well as some effects and ideas of his own, Ueno is now slugging it out toe to toe with Jeanrenaud!

Talus, on BMOP/sound

You can hear more of Ken’s recent efforts, including a bunch of his throat-singing, on Talus, his disc for the BMOP/sound label.

BMOP, Boston, Contemporary Classical, Grammy, Interviews, Orchestral

And the nominees are….

derek_bermel2The 52nd Annual Grammy Awards are on Sunday night, here’s the list of all the classical music-related categories and nominees, and here are the composition-related categories and nominees.  Let’s give a shout-out to the Boston Modern Orchestra Project and to Derek Bermel for their nomination in the category of Best Instrumental Soloist Performance with Orchestra.

I was able to spend some time talking with BMOP Artistic Director Gil Rose (audio here), and BMOP violinist Gabriela Diaz (audio here) about their experiences working with composers and about what music they are excited about… or at least were excited about back in October when we spoke.

I also noticed that Meet The Composer is making another push for their Music Alive program, which matches up composers with orchestral residencies around the country.  There are not many of these residencies available, but if you work for an orchestra that’s thinking about creating a composer residency, you should visit the Music Alive site.  The reason I mention all of this is because our friends at BMOP have a video up where Gil talks about their three-year collaboration with composer, Lisa BielawaThis link should also take you straight to that video.

Congratulations, BMOP!

Boston, Composers, Contemporary Classical, Interviews, Performers, Podcasts

Who Interviewed Amanda Palmer?

Amanda Palmer (photo by Martin Foster)
Amanda Palmer (photo by Martin Foster)

Amanda Palmer is a bona fide rock star.  She first made her name as half of The Dresden Dolls, and has since struck out on her own with a solo album called “Who Killed Amanda Palmer.”  In June of 2008 she teamed up with the Boston Pops for two nights, and this December they’re doing it again for a New Year’s Eve concert.  Amanda has also been pioneering new models of how the rock music industry can work (staying in nearly constant contact with her fans via Twitter plays a key role), and I wanted to see if that ingenuity could be translated into advice for the classical scene.  I interviewed her by phone last week, and we talked about the upcoming Pops show, her musical background and training, and her impressions of the classical music industry:

Part 1:

Part 2:
Amanda is performing in Singapore right now, and when she returns she has a series of shows along the Eastern Seaboard which culminate with the Pops concert on December 31.
P.S. Here’s the link to the Shadowbox repertoire discussionAmanda mentions.
Boston, Electro-Acoustic, Interviews, Piano, Podcasts

My Ears Are Open. This week on the podcast: Seda Röder

4Seda Röder is a Turkish pianist who currently teaches in Boston.  Those of you who are interested in electroacoustic music may remember her performance back in April during the New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival at the CUNY Graduate Center.  If you live near Boston, take a look at her website: she will be playing four concerts in the area between September and the end of the year.

Seda has been very active recently, performing and recording works by young Turkish composers including Tolga Yayalar and Hans Tutschku. She believes that most Americans don’t know much about young Turkish composers — I believe she is correct!

You can listen to the podcast by clicking on the podtrac-player at myearsareopen.net or at instantencore.com.

Click here to subscribe through iTunes. Click here to add it to your RSS.
Bang on a Can, Boston, Composers, Contemporary Classical, Interviews, Performers, Podcasts

My Ears Are Open. This week: Evan Ziporyn

First, a quick introduction and thank you are in order.  My name is James Holt and I am a composer living in New York.  I started a podcast where I interview musicians specializing in performing contemporary music, and I ask them about their experiences with composers.  Simple. I want to thank Sequenza21 for inviting me to come on the site every couple weeks as a recurring feature to tell you about the new episodes.

This week is my interview with Evan Ziporyn…I’m sure that he’s someone who needs no introduction to most of the s21 audience, but just in case: Evan is probably best know as the clarinetist in the Bang on a Can All-Stars and as director of Gamelan Galak Tika.  He is also producing a new music festival in Boston called the Beeline Festival which happens to begin today if you’re in the area.

The easiest way to listen and subscribe to the podcast is through iTunes.  You can search the iTunes Store for “my ears are open” or click here to go there directly.  If you have any suggestions for musicians you’d like me to interview you can do that here (you’ll need a google account though).

I hope you enjoy this project as much as I do.  Coming up on April 19:  Alex Lipowski, percussionist.

Boston, Composers, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, File Under?, Orchestral, Orchestras, Photographs

Break a Leg?!?

Wendy plays Ken’s viola concerto with BMOP! Hear harmonies analyzed from Wendy’s ankle bone!

Friday, November 14, 2008 / 8:00pm – 10:00pm

Jordan Hall at New England Conservatory

290 Huntington Avenue, Boston, MA

The amazing violist Wendy Richman plays Ken Ueno’s concerto Talus, with the Boston Modern Orchestra Project and the incomparable Gil Rose.

Here’s the program:

Martin Boykan Concerto for Violin and Orchestra / Curtis Macomber, violin

Robert Erickson Fantasy for cello and orchestra / Rafael Popper-Keizer, cello

Arnold Schoenberg Concerto for String Quartet and Orchestra / BMOP Principals

Elliott Schwartz Chamber Concerto VI: Mr. Jefferson / Charles Dimmick, violin 

Ken Ueno Talus, concerto for viola and orchestra / Wendy Richman, viola 

Tickets for this concert are available at the Jordan Hall Box Office. Call (617) 585-1260 or visit the box office at New England Conservatory (30 Gainsborough Street), Monday – Friday 10am-6pm, Saturday 12pm-6pm. The box office opens at 6:30pm on the day of the concert. 

For an explanation of x-ray picture and how it relates to the piece: http://www.kenueno.com/performancenotes.html#Talus

Boston, Classical Music, Composers, Concerts, Contemporary Classical

Me and My Toy Piano

In 1973 my mother bought me my first toy piano at Harvey’s Department Store in Nashville.  This is not quite the heartwarming tale of a little tyke that it might at first seem to be, since I was at the time a student at New England Conservatory, and she was getting it for me so I could play the Cage Suite for Toy Piano in a concert in Jordan Hall.  It turned out that, completely inadvertently (only operating according to her generosity), she had got me the Steinway of toy pianos, a Schoenhut.  I’ve continued to play the Cage over the years, and last summer my toy piano more or less just fell apart. 
As I thought about buying a new one, it occurred to me that I should do an inaugural concert on it.  I began to ask people to write pieces for me, and mostly they agreed to do.  

The concert is on Sunday, April 8 at 8:00pm in the Marshall Room in the Music Building at Boston University (855 Commonwealth Avenue). 

The concert includes–in addition to the Cage–pre-existing pieces by Kyle Gann, Eve Beglarian, Richard Whalley, and Dai Fujikura (for toy piano and violin pizzicato–the violinist will be Peter Zazofsky).  There are new pieces, which will be having their first performances, by Lyle Davidson, Pozzi Escot, Stephen Feigenbaum, Michael Finnissy, Philip Grange, John Heiss, Derek Hurst (with electronic sounds–i.e. on my boombox), Matthew McConnell, Matthew Mendez, Nico Muhly, Ketty Nez (for toy piano and piano–Ketty will be the pianist), Dave Smith, Jeremy Woodruff, William Zuckerman, and me (for clavichord and toy piano–the clavichord player will be Peter Sykes).  (I’m pretty sure that’s everybody.) The pieces are all really good and all really different from each other. 

I hope you can come to this (what can only be described as an) unusual concert.

Boston, Classical Music, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Experimental Music, Music Events

Letter from Boston: Keep those hordes away

Achtung!

If you read something contrary here previously, consider this an update. The Lily Pad in Cambridge has been closed temporarily to obtain proper codes and licenses; they hope to re-open soon. Therefore, the Earle Brown FOLIO event scheduled for tomorrow night, Oct. 20, by the Callithumpian Consort will be rescheduled on a future date.

* * * * *

One conclusion that a body might draw from the Callithumpian Consort’s outing last week in Boston is that what some contemporary music needs — and richly deserves — is a near-empty concert hall.

No, seriously. Would Earle Brown’s “Sign Sounds” and John Luther Adams’s “songbirdsongs” have been anywhere near as atmospheric if the New England Conservatory’s Jordan Hall had been — sickening thought — full? Ah we happy few, all forty (40) of us.

The point comes up because of the way that “songbirdsongs” in particular relies, first, on silence, both in itself and as background; and second, on space, not just in the sense of there being a sort of aerating nimbus around the sounding notes (i.e., good acoustics) but room enough, measured in linear feet, for a pair of piccolo players to go wandering about inside and outside the auditorium making like birds.

These weren’t Messiaen birds, they were Adams birds. A nice thing about an Adams bird, if one can generalize, is that if it feels like modulating a bit that’s what it will do — just a little. And that’s as far in the direction of grandiosity as they ever get. Jordan Hall being three storeys high and with lots of doors to enter and depart from, there was a blessed abundance of perches.

So described, “songbirdsongs” might have you wondering about what’s been helpfully labeled the Cringe Factor. Yes, the titles that the piece’s sections bear — “Morningfield Song,” “Apple Blossom Round,” “Wood Thrush,” “Joyful Noise,” “notquitespringdawn,” “Mourning Dove,” “Meadowdance,” “August Voices” — do suggest a New Agey niceness that will not appeal to all tastes. And there were moments when you felt the composer was really pushing it (must all this be so calm, sparse, and Alpha-wavey?) but then what should land on us but an expertly timed, shock-cut, irruptive coup de theatre — so that’s what all those percussionists were on hand for.

Forget about the Cringe Factor then. Cumulatively, there turned out to be a much greater variety of tone color and strategy in “songbirdsongs” than might first have appeared. Examples: the quiet vibraphone roll teetering on the edge of audibility — you had to crane to see where it was coming from — that produced the oddest, near-electronic sort of hum; “Mourning Dove,” with its literalist sighing bent notes; the “Apple Blossom Round”; and the noisy bits, which in this context had the feel of natural disturbances.

How much of this sort of thing is too much? Reactions will differ, but evidently not a very great deal. “Relaxing but not insignificant” (John Schaefer) is one take on Adams’s music, “You either love it or like it” (Evan Johnson) another.

Finally, a matter we’re not exactly sure that the composer consciously intended. Toward the end of “songbirdsong,” as event placidly succeeded event, your reviewer became aware of a steady, silent pulse beneath it all — something like 50 ticks to the minute. The instrumental attacks were variously on or to either side of the pulse, but mostly on. It was there, wasn’t it? Or was it the brain that was supplying it? Or both?

The performers, excellent all, were: Nana Aomori, Jessi Rosinski (piccolos), Jeffrey Means. George Nickson, Joseph LaPalomento, Daniel Zawodniak (percussion), Stephen Olsen (celesta), Gabriel Diaz (violin).

* * * * *

Earle Brown’s “Sign Sounds,” which mobilized some 18 players plus conductor, raised certain questions if you thought about them as the music was going on, but somehow didn’t if you didn’t. The questions would have been: What, precisely, is in that score, and of what kind and how much, and did it matter?

It’s irresistible to quote Paul Griffiths, that indefatigible and learned pro, on the subject of Brown’s music:

“His aim was not the empty space of Cage, nor the quiet space of Feldman, but the decisive object — not the extinction of the composer, nor the liberation of the performer, but the creation of a well-made piece, one that would have a sure identity for all the variability of form and detail introduced by means of indeterminate notation. The more indeterminate the notation, the more the identity of the piece would have to be visual …”

— “Modern Music and After: Directions Since 1945” (Oxford University Press, 1995).

In this particular performance of “Sign Sounds” there was a sense of the piece being assembled and set up out of blocks of air, right there in front of you — and in that loveliest of musical work places, Jordan Hall. How everything did sound — the sprinklings of celesta, some very in-tune string harmonics, the lyre-like punctuations of the harp, a swinging brass choir, and the quartet of mallet-wielding percussionists who, when the texture allowed, created one doozey of a great splash (like New York Modernist flung paint? Just a thought.)

Near-stasis then a flutter of activity — it was at these extremes, it seemed, that all these colorful sonic possibilities were being realized. At one point a series of staggered entrances had you listening for, of all things, a fugue. A fugue! But shouldn’t ghostly traces of such things be appearing in Brown? His worklist does include after all, though from early on, a fugue and a passacaglia.

In any event, the piece went over like you wouldn’t believe (40 pairs of hands clapping, all belonging to the right people), and there was an encore: a fragment of what had gone before, sounding pretty much as we’d heard it the first time.

The heroes and heroines of this performance were: Jessi Rosinski (flute), Will Amsel (clarinet), Amy Advocat (bass clarinet), Adam Smith (bassoon), Andrew Stetson (trumpet), Dylan Chmura-Moore (trombone), Hester Ham (piano), Minji Noh (celesta), Franziska Huhn (harp), Ethan Wood and Heather Wittels (violins), Ashleigh Gordon (viola) David Huckaby (cello), David Goodchild (bass), Jeffrey Means, John Andress, Joseph Becker, William Holden (percussion) and Stephen Drury (conductor).

* * * * *

First on the program was Alvin Lucier’s “Ever Present,” which as a late arriver (accursed Harvard/Dudley bus) we were reduced to experiencing from outside one of the windowed doors leading in to the auditorium. The flutist, sax player, and pianist all looked quite at peace with themselves, not having very many notes to play and perhaps for other reasons as well. Anyway, we didn’t hear any. But wait, was it the overhead lighting in the corridor that was giving off that high-pitched technological noise? Or ventilation gone haywire? No, silly, it was one of Lucier’s beloved electric gizmos.

RICHARD BUELL can be reached at rbuell@verizon.net

Boston, Classical Music, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Experimental Music

The Callithumpians are Abloom Again

The Callithumpian Consort is at work again at 8:30 pm tomorrow night at NEC’s Jordan Hall  in a slightly premature celebration of the 80th anniversary of Earle Brown’s birth (it’s actually December 26).

They’ll be playing Brown’s Sign Sounds, a rarely heard masterpiece of open form from that resides somewhere on the frontier between serialism and improvisation.  They will perform the piece several times, and have assured us that no two performances will be alike.

And they’ll also be continuing their exploration of Alvin Lucier with his  Ever Present, for saxophone, flute, piano, and sine waves (which they describe it as “infinitely slow expansion of the music between your ears”) and John Luther Adams’s songbirdsongs, a JLA masterwork from the 1970s. 

The Callithumpian Consort has just recorded the complete songbirdsongs under the direction of the composer. Watch for the CD release.

And don’t miss Evan Johnson’s review of the latest Earle Brown recording on the CD Review page.

Boston, Classical Music, Composers, Concerts, Contemporary Classical

Letter from Boston: Ghosts, yearning, time, the sea, and the Globe

From H.H. Stuckenschmidt, “Arnold Schoenberg: His Life, World and Work,” translated by Humphrey Searle (New York: Schirmer Books, 1977):

” … in 1934 [Schoenberg] answered a query from Dr. Walter E. Koons of the National Broadcasting Corporation [sic] in New York, who wanted a definition for a book which he was planning, of what music meant to Schoenberg. His reply was:

Music is a simultaneous and a successiveness of tones and tonal-combinations, which are so organized that its impression on the ear is agreeable, and that its impression on the intelligence is comprehensible, and that these impressions have the power to influence occult parts of our soul and of our sentimental spheres and that this influence makes us live in a dreamland of fulfilled desires, or in a dreamed hell.'”

He had to ask?

* * * * *

Let’s say that your tastes run to Gagaku, the world’s most ancient (and ancient-sounding) orchestral music. Or to Messiaen‘s deliriously half-cracked song cycle “Harawi” (“Doundou tchil! Doundou tchil! Doundou tchil!” — one can’t help quoting). Or “Pierrot Lunaire.” Or that claustrophobic film classic “Woman of the Dunes” (dir. Hiroshi Teshigahara, 1964) …

Then lucky you if you happened to be at the First Church in Boston, 66 Marlborough Street, on a recent Sunday night (September 17) for the local premiere of Lee Hyla’s “At Suma Beach” (2003).

Something you noticed first off, and with relief, about Hyla’s “reduction/adaptation” of the Noh play “Matsukaze” was its avoidance of bogus japonaiserie, even of the most refined type. (If you crave some queasy examples of that, go and listen to Toru Takemitsu on one of his really bad days. And by the way, how widely known is it that in the early 20th century the Japanese themselves were turning out imitations of “Madame Butterfly”? Source: William P. Malm, University of Michigan.)

The piece’s instrumental setup — clarinet, violin, viola, cello, piano, and percussion — has nothing particularly extreme about it per se. But any mezzo-soprano who thinks about taking it on had better be carrying extra insurance. You either sing it or you die.

Mostly sing it, that is. Also required are: speaking, half-speaking and half-singing, moaning, whispering, and even growling. The pitches are fixed most of the time, but every so often they’re let loose and encouraged to range just about wherever they like. But please to come back. Towards the close, a few choice ones go either very high or very low.

Does “At Suma Beach” have one text or two? The question arises because for some 25 minutes the piece is constantly oscillating back and forth between the Japanese and an English translation, the latter making a point of leaving the Japanese word order quite as it is thank you. An example: “So recited with reason/Still longing deepens/’Yoiyo ni/Nugite waga nuru kari-goromo.'”

It probably doesn’t matter, since there was a kind of double benefit here. (1) You got to hear the abstract beauty an unfamiliar language can yield up (such vowels, such rhythms!) and (2) you also got to hear a fair amount of informative content. The sad, eerie story did indeed get told. We always knew where we were and what the characters were thinking and feeling.

It went like this. A tiny wisp of clarinet sonority gently detaches itself from the other instruments. Then comes some obliquely pictorial moon and sea music (more wisps and glints), and the singer enters: Bach specialist Pamela Dellal, whose lustrous mezzo — and its extensions — seemed primed for anything.

We’re told about the two sisters, who are now ghosts, about stifled passions of centuries past, and about the lover whom one of the sisters has willed into returning in an other than human shape. Nothing comes of it in the end except more longing and pain, the passage of time, the wind and the sea — those wisps of clarinet sonority have returned — and the sea and the wind. We are where we were.

Of course Hyla’s music is informed here by what traditional Japanese music sounds like — that’s why he went to Japan for two months — but it’s informed as well by his ease and familiarity with many different kinds of music, high and low, mandarin and demotic. (On that two-month visit to Japan to gather material Hyla found that there are such things as Gagaku garage bands. Well, he would. And by his own admission he threw out quite a lot to achieve that seamless 25-minute span.)

Overall what most struck your reviewer most about “At Suma Beach” was its feeling of steady, subtle emotional momentum. Next, how shrewdly integrated the thing was, and what a fetching, varicolored “sound” piece it turned out to be without half trying. That’s how Hyla is with instruments. He can’t help himself.

Marvelous stuff. Chilling. Moving. Will we ever hear it again?

The excellent performers — please note their names! — were: the Dinosaur Annex Music Ensemble: Diane Heffner (clarinet), Cyrus Stevens (violin), Kate Vincent (viola), Michael Curry (cello), Donald Berman (piano), Robert Schulz (percussion), with Pamela Dellal (mezzo) and Scott Wheeler (conductor).

* * * * *

October looms, the evenings draw in earlier, and the Boston musical scene has come to life again — flutist Fenwick Smith gave his annual virtuosic staples-plus-oddities recital at NEC, the BSO has had the carpenters in at Symphony Hall to lay down a new stage floor (mind those acoustics, lads!), the Handel and Haydn Society/English National Opera’s strongly sung, nice to look at, hip-exotic “Orfeo” came and went, and a rather dimly played all-Nikos Skalkottas concert at BU succeeded in raising doubts — not what was intended at all — about the reputation of this composer, who was cited as one of the 20th-century’s half dozen greatest by Hans Keller, the flintily brilliant UK opinion-monger, Haydn expert, string quartet coach, and BBC heavy, now deceased. (Evidently the Bis CDs of his music make a different impression, and it turns out that folklorism can indeed lie down companionably with the 12-tone method. See various rave reviews in Gramophone magazine.) A big shock: how loud and vehement, bludgeoning home point after interpretive point (the victim: Mozart’s K. 387), the Borromeo String Quartet, once everybody’s darlings, has become. Well, look at all the touring they do. They’ve caught the disease. Richard Dyer is gone, very gone (as of Sept. 18) from the Boston Globe. What a change in atmosphere. It’s as if the moment he left they immediately whisked away the throne chair, vowing: Never again another monstre sacre, never never. The question now is: who is this Jeremy Eichler person? Is there any ragtime in his soul? Will he spell even a wee bit of trouble? Let us pray.

All of which may be neither here nor there. The real event of the month — we insist — was Lee Hyla’s “At Suma Beach.”

RICHARD BUELL can be reached at rbuell@verizon.net