The following are extended versions of the interviews I had with Toby Twining and Iva Bittova, who are both appearing at the 2011 Vital Vox Festival (Both will be performing on Night 2: Vocals + Strings)
First up, Toby Twining talks about his beginnings and inspiration as well as the new and current material.
CM: How did you go from roots in country-swing to rock to the other-worldly music you’ve been making for various instruments, including voices and chamber ensemble?
TT: This is a long story—I’ll attempt a Reader’s Digest version.
I grew up in Houston and my maternal grandparents were both pro musicians—grandad played guitar, pedal steel, string bass; grandmother played gospel piano like Liberace/Debussy mix. As a teenager, I played guitars, bass, and keys in rock bands. All the kids played Texas blues as well. (more…)
The following is the extended interview I had with singer/composer Judith Berkson, who will be appearing at the Vital Vox Festival this Saturday at Roulette in Brooklyn (She’ll be appearing on Night One: Vocals + Keys). Here she talks about her beginnings, and the preview of selections from her upcoming opera.
CM: Can you give sort of a small recap of how you got from your musical beginnings to your current status as a composer/performer? Was there a significant a-ha moment or was this something that was gradual?
JB: My father who is a cantor taught me to sing when I was very young by methodically teaching me Hebrew blessings which I would sing back by rote. He was demanding about precise pitch, I remember that. From about age 5 to 10 my family had a singing group/band where we played community centers and synagogues and we were required to be in it. It wasn’t really that fun since we had no choice and rehearsals were long and my father a perfectionist. But despite these conditions I was secretly compelled by music. I liked discovering how to do it. I started classical piano at age 5 and when I was 10 my father insisted on music theory lessons too. None of my friends had to do anything like that. I actually really enjoyed it though. I remember the circle of fifths blowing my mind. In high school I took singing seriously and started voice lessons. I reluctantly auditioned for conservatories not really wanting to go to college and ended up at the New England Conservatory. I thought I’d drop out and find people to play with and start a band but then I ended up falling in love with opera. (more…)
Once again, we find ourselves in the thick of things. The New York concert season is reaching a fever pitch of pre-holiday season intensity, in which presenters and ensembles try to get their programs heard before the inevitable onslaught of Messiahs, Nutcrackers, tree-lighting ceremonies, and caroling elbows its way to the forefront of New York’s calendar of musical events – ready or not. While we can’t be in two places at once (I still think Steve Smith has a magic ring that enables this power!), hopefully between the various new music enthusiasts in the Sequenza 21 community’s NYC cadre, we can support these “hot tickets.”
Tom Cipullo's The Husbands in Rehearsal
11/4 at 8 PM at Weill Recital Hall: Opera Shorts 2011
The third annual installment of the Remarkable Theater Brigade’s Opera Shorts program is this Friday. These mini-operas – ten minutes or less – are an emerging composer’s dream: a chance to hear a brief slice of their work on the stage. But Opera Shorts draws some heavy hitters to the mini-opera game as well. The 2011 installment features works by prominent songsters Jake Heggie, William Bolcom, and Tom Cipullo, as well as emerging creators Marie Incontrera, Mike McFerron, Davide Zannoni,Anne Dinsmore Phillips, Patrick Soluri, and Christian McLeer. Given the length of that list, it’s lucky that none of them have Wagnerian ambitions — this time out at least!
11/4 at 8 PM on the water: Bennett Brass at Bargemusic
Can’t decide whether you’d prefer an evening of early music or present day fare? Bennett Brass (trumpeters Andy Kozar and Ben Grow, hornist Alana Vegter, trombonist Will Lang, and tubist Matt Muszynski) has got you covered. Friday night at Bargemusic, they are presenting a program that works with both of the venue’s series: ‘Here and Now’ and “There and Then.’ The latter is represented by a Rameau suite and Elgar’sSerenade for Strings (but this time arranged for … you guessed it … brass!). Among the more recent music is Fanfare for All by the Dean of Dodecaphony: Milton Babbitt. His compositional antipode John Cage is also on the bill, as are some still-living figures: Ted Hearne, Nick Didkovsky, and Dan Grabois.
BoaC. Photo: Pascal Perich and Julien Jourdes
11/5 at 9 PM at Zankel Hall: Bang on a Can’s 25th NYC season opener!
BoaC celebrates 25 years of gigging in New York City with a show at a ‘modest’ venue – Zankel, the theater downstairs at Carnegie Hall! The centerpiece of the show is the New York premiere of Louis Andriessen’sLifewith film by Marijke Van Warmerdam (postponed from a previous season due to that unpronounceable volcano in Iceland). There’s also David Lang’ssunray, Michael Gordon’s for Madeline, Kate Moore’s Ridgeway, three pieces commissioned by Bang on a Can from David Longstrethof the Dirty Projectors (Instructional Video, Matt Damon, Breakfast at J&M), and Lukas Ligeti’s Glamour Girl. The concert serves as a live preview of the All-Stars’ first studio album in five years: a two-CD set titled Big Beautiful Dark and Scary (out January 2012 on Cantaloupe Music). Ticket info is here, but we’ll let you in on a nice perk for early attendees: the first 200 to arrive get a free drink at the Zankel Bar!
11/8 at 7:30 at Le Poisson Rouge: IN MEMORIAM HENRYK MIKOŁAJ GÓRECKI
Seems like yesterday, but it’s been a year since Gorecki’s passing. To commemorate the first anniversary of his death, the Polish Cultural Institute is hosting a concert at Le Poisson Rouge on Tuesday. The program includes Kleines Requiem für Eine Polka (1993), performed by Ensemble Signal, conducted by Brad Lubman, as well as JACK Quartet playing the 2nd SQ (“quasi una fantasia,” 1991).
Up until this last weekend, the true new music season was yet to begin at the University of Michigan. True, fabulous the Symphony Band and members of the performance faculty have already made fabulous presentations of contemporary music (as I’ve written about), but the two groups most dedicated to the work of living composers – the students of the Composition Department and the Contemporary Directions Ensemble – did not start their engines before last Saturday.
Although it is gaining momentum at the University of Michigan, the Contemporary Direction Ensemble is one of Ann Arbor’s best kept secrets, thanks in large part to its dynamic director Christopher James Lees. Maestro Lees’ commitment to new music is only matched by his charisma and musical ability. In the case of the group’s first concert of the season on Saturday, all three of these qualities were overshadowed by Mr. Lees’ perspicacious programming. If I wanted to be understated, I would say the selection and ordering of works was immaculate, but I prefer language more elaborate. I was entrained from beginning to end by the beguiling ebb of instrumental strength, musical style and length as each work passed to the next. Collectively, the pieces Mr. Lees selected attacked me, beckoned me, mesmerized me, connected me to an imagined past, nuzzled me, astonished me and drove me to tap me feet. It was the most engaging, well-constructed and consistent new music event I’ve ever attended. So, without discussing (or identifying!) any of the individual works and performances, I can confidently declare that, at least on Sunday night, Maestro Lees and his performers were far beyond reproach.
The first work on the program was Chris Theofanidis’ Raga (1992), scored for pierrot-plus. As the program note mentioned, the piece makes many allusions to Indian music, mainly through the use of drones, melodic slides and the bongo drums’ ‘faux-tabla’ groove. Overall, the work moves from simplicity – one note colored variably in the ensemble – to more melodic complexity. Raga is tied together by the consistency of the melodic material and the two percussion parts: the bongos are omnipresent and gong hits accompany most of the important structural delineations in the piece. As I’ve indicated, all the melodic/harmonic material is very closely related throughout, so development takes place in subtle ways such as increased ornamentation when melodies return, thickening the contrapuntal landscape (which produces a kind of whitewash effect since the mode is shared in all the lines), and so forth. The only notable contrasting ideas come in the form of dissonant clusters in the piano, which play an important role in leading the piece to its climatic conclusion of towering, static harmonies.
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
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: 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 AdamsLight 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!
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Tickets to the Sequenza 21 Concert are free (the venue charges a $12 food/drink minimum).
Back in 2003, the incredible pianist Amy Briggs (and if you don’t know her playing, you should check out some of her performances of the David Rakowski Etudes on YouTube) was approached by the music department at U.C. Davis to engage in a residency built around the idea of new tangos for piano. As part of the project, they asked Amy to build an entire concert program of tangos, each of which needed to be no longer than three minutes. She could use completed pieces and have others write for the project, and the Davis composition faculty (including Laurie San Martin) all agreed to write new works for her and to arrange for her to record a CD of the entire concert repertoire. Amy chose me, along with several wonderful composers like Hayes Biggs, to write a new tango of no more than three minutes. She toured with these pieces for several years and the entire project is now available via Ravello Records and at Naxos.
When Amy first approached me to contribute to this project, I was both excited and quite fearful. Tangos long ago achieved the status of major cultural achievements, basically functioning as the national musical style of Argentina. As an outsider with relatively little experience of this genre I felt that there was little that I could add. At the same time, it would have been disingenuous to write a generally inspired piece and to cavalierly claim it as a tango, and I very much wanted to work with Amy and to be involved with this endeavor.
After listening to many traditional tangos for various ensembles and several experimental composers’ reinterpretations of this form, this piece began to take shape. I retain the staggered rhythm in the first half of the measure that is the most recognizable element of the traditional form, using it as an accompaniment for a simple and mournful melody that to my mind evokes the mood of the dance. The piece then presents variations on this melody. Perhaps more important than these purely musical impetuses was my attempt to portray the various aspects of the tango itself as though constantly refracting through the emotions of the dancers and the scene itself as viewed by the participants and audience. For this reason, Requests continually presents sudden shifts in mood and affect as the perspective jumps from the internal to the external and between the various perspectives on each level.
Since I knew I was writing for an astonishingly virtuosic player, as I composed this piece I allowed myself to be pulled constantly towards ever-greater feats of pianism, making this short work very daunting for most players. I’m thrilled that ACME has chosen to present Requests on the Sequenza21/MNMP concert and look forward to hearing all the pieces at Joe’s Pub this week.
– David Smooke chairs the music theory program at Peabody. He blogs regularly at NewMusicBox and plays a mean toy piano.
Sam Nichols teaches at UC Davis. His string quartet ‘Refuge’ is on the Sequenza 21/MNMP Concert this coming Tuesday (7PM at Joe’s Pub in NYC. Did we mention it’s free?).
In 2009 the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble asked me to write a string quartet. I was happy, for a number of reasons, but mostly because they bring a tremendous amount of oomph to any project. At the time, though, I was working on another piece, a trio, that was giving me a lot of trouble. Make that: a LOT of trouble. Pounding my head against the wall trouble, breaking pencils in half trouble, putting in an accent and then taking it out again trouble. Working on this trio was taking up a lot of time, and I had blown past the deadline. Meanwhile, the deadline for the new string quartet was approaching. So, I set aside the trio—it was already late, and I seemed to be stuck—and started the quartet. I didn’t have a lot of time, about six weeks (and I usually write pretty slowly; there’s usually a fair amount of moving down blind alleys, and retracing my steps sort of thing), and so there was a certain amount of adrenaline involved: I was already mired in one stalled-out project; I really didn’t want that to snowball into an unmanageable situation, where EVERYTHING I was writing was late. Yikes.
The Left Coast were going to play Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge; they asked me to design my string quartet as a sort of companion piece to the Beethoven. This was slightly terrifying—okay, more than slightly. But I tried to ignore that, and started to work. The first thing I decided was: I really couldn’t see my way clear to writing a fugue. But I thought it might be fun to take some of the basic ideas of fugal writing, twist them around, and use that as a jumping-off point. So, for example, instead of writing a traditional contrapuntal texture, I created a blurred, out-of-focus unison line that’s been twisted and tweaked. The four instruments are sometimes playing the same tune, but are ornamenting it differently, or are playing it at slightly different speeds. This results in a rough sort of do-it-yourself canon—anything but strict—where the lines are sometimes piled up very closely, and at other times are separated from each other quite dramatically.
The title, Refuge, started out as a pun. I often use a temporary working title, and once I figure out what I’m doing, I might throw the first title away, and replace it with something better suited to the piece. So, in quickly slapping a title on my string-quartet-in-progress, I chose “refuge:” not a fugue (or “fuge,” to revert to Beethoven’s language), but a re-imagining of fugue/fuge: re-fugue, or re-fuge. And for a few weeks, I left it at that.
But as I wrote the music, a simpler interpretation of the title started to appear. The piece is very episodic: just as one musical structure is established, it’s replaced with another. It’s almost like an Etch-A-Sketch; an image emerges, but then it’s (sometimes quite violently) shaken up and wiped clean. So, over and over, the piece seems to move toward quieter, restful episodes: little in-between bits of music that, until they’re disrupted, offer moments of calm. This pattern, of moving through active, violent sections (including passages which seem to bristle with hostility) toward calmer havens, became one of the basic ideas of the piece. Maybe the title exerted a sort of pull on the music? Or maybe it was a coincidence. Now, two years later, I can see that writing this piece offered me a kind of refuge. It allowed me to escape from the trio I had been writing (which I eventually returned to and finished). But in a larger sense, it helped me loosen up, and find a more personal way of putting together a piece.
We’ve profiled and interviewed composer Michael Hersch before here at S21. Unlike a lot of composers who lineage and influences I get pretty easily, In Hersch’s case there’s something coming from a place that I don’t get. And I tell you now, that’s a good thing. There isn’t a big grab bag of the latest tricks and fashions; the style could almost be called traditionalist. Yet there’s something at work that is so “interior”, an almost hermetic voice that owes nothing to anyone but the composer himself, that makes for a slightly unsettling but endlessly fascinating listen.
And tonight, for the first time since 2001, Michael Hersch himself is coming to NYC to play his own work. His recording of his sprawling, 2-hour piano work from 2005, The Vanishing Pavilions, was pretty highly praised here on its release; tonight Hersch plays his new 1-hour version, at Merkin Hall (8pm, details & tickets here), on a concert with his After Hölderlin’s ‘Hälfte des Lebens’ for viola and cello, played by the always-marvelous Miranda Cuckson and Julia Bruskin (this piece was premiered at a memorial concert held inside the Pantheon in Rome, just two months after September 11, 2001).
Here’s a small taste of The Vanishing Pavilions, Hersch playing movement 27 of the large version:
With just one week to go before the Sequenza 21/MNMP Concert, we’re all very excited. Music is being rehearsed, friends and loved ones have been invited, and, for some from out of town, travel plans have been made for a visit to New York. But one composer will be making a particularly long journey to hear the concert. James Stephenson is joining us from the United Kingdom. He tells us more in the following eloquent essay.
When my duo Oracle Night is performed at the Sequenza 21 / MNMP concert on 25 October, it will be my first performance outside Europe. A work being played overseas – on another continent even – means flights, hotels, jetlag, and – worst of all – funding applications. This comes as quite a shock to someone who is used to either conducting my own works or, at most, hopping on a train and speeding up or down the (rather small) British Isles for a couple of hours to go and watch a performance.
Writing funding applications might not be the most enjoyable way I can think of to pass a Saturday afternoon, but it does make you reflect on things. After all, as composers it’s not very often that we ask ourselves questions such as “what will you gain from this experience in terms of professional development?” let alone draw up a detailed budget. But in the never-ending quest for the next performance and the next commission, how often do we really think about composing as a career with a plan and a trajectory?
And so, whilst trying not to explicitly mention how much I wanted an autumn holiday in the Big Apple, I filled in my funding applications with reflective paragraphs about exposure and widening my profile, about networks and contacts, about the creative growth and technical development which will surely come from working with such high calibre musicians. However, by the end of it I realised that there was something else I was overlooking, and though the funding agencies might not be too impressed, it is nonetheless a thing of vital importance for the 21st Century composer.
That thing, of course, is the Internet. I am old enough to remember the days before I had my first email account, before we had dial-up internet access at home. But only just – the World Wide Web has certainly pervaded most of my adult life, and I count myself amongst the first generation of composers where the accessibility of information and communication which the Internet brought about has opened up literally a world of influences for each and every one of us. Oracle Night, as an example, makes use of Scottish and Japanese influences. Now it happens that I have visited both countries, but nonetheless the difference between having to travel somewhere to experience indigenous and traditional music as opposed to firing up your web browser and typing in a Google search is remarkable indeed. Every type of music imaginable is at our fingertips – to hear, to read, to analyse and to internalise and incorporate into our own output. And of course, I would never have seen a call for works for this performance if I couldn’t access the Sequenza 21 website from my desk in Manchester.
But beyond information, there is the communication aspect of the web: the social network. My greatest hope for my trip to New York actually isn’t that I will meet people who could be inspiring, influential or otherwise useful contacts. What I’m actually hoping for is to meet as many as possible of the people I know through facebook, twitter, websites and email discussions. A number of musicians who I greatly respect live on the Eastern seaboard – some old friends and collaborators, but many who I’ve only met through the internet, and the chance to meet them, argue with them, buy them a drink and put the world (of music, at least) to rights, that’s what I’m looking forward to most of all.
As a tool for bringing composers and contemporary performers together, as well, the web has opened up unimaginable avenues in recent years. Beyond the websites, blogs and tweets, there’s the interactivity of forums and facebook groups, some of which create rich opportunities for the web-inclined composer (I am writing for an ensemble in continental Europe at the moment, who I met through facebook earlier in the year after they saw a YouTube video of my oboe quartet). What a remarkable thing it is to meet a few of these people, with whom you have exchanged ideas, challenged and supported each other – with whom only 20 years ago you could never in a lifetime have shared a conversation.
