Merkin Hall’sEcstatic Music Festivalkicked off this week with a seven hour long marathon of concerts on Monday. The focus of the festival is on connections between contemporary classical and current indie/pop music. Artists from both sides of the stylistic street are performing. This year, the festival runs all the way until March 28th.
This pop/classical hybridization may not be everyone’s cup o’ joe (John C. Adams has had some less than charitable things to say about it of late), but it certainly is inspiring to a number of composers in their 20s and 30s, and the energy of their work and enthusiasm of their collaborations I finding exciting.
Alas, I missed the marathon, but I’m going to see the Chiara String Quartet, performing works by Nico Muhly & Valgeir Sigurðsson, tomorrow night (review will appear in Musical Americalater this week).
On Monday, January 24, 2011 at 8:00 p.m. at The Bushwick Starr in Brooklyn, violist Wendy Richman of the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) will present “Viola & “, the first program in her “Vox/Viola” project, in which she presents new and important works for singing violist and/or electronics. The program features works by Arlene Sierra, Lou Bunk, Hillary Zipper, Kevin Ernste, Kaija Saariaho, Giacinto Scelsi and Sequenza21’s own Senior Editor, Christian Carey. I caught up with Ms. Richman via email to speak with her about the project’s origin and her interest in performing “one-woman duos.”
“It’s not entirely fair for me to say all the pieces are one-woman duos,” she says. “There’s a very active partner, sound designer Levy Lorenzo, doing much of the program with me.” The idea for these programs goes back several years, growing in part out of Wendy’s involvement with a number of composer friends who happened to work extensively with electronics, but “also because I liked the idea of having a recital program that was totally self-contained. In my imagination, I could pack my laptop, mic, and a pedal, meet with a sound guy for 10 minutes, and—bam!—the show would go perfectly.”
The reality of doing recitals with live electronics proved more complicated than Richman imagined, however, until she met Lorenzo while performing Kaija Saariaho’s Vent Nocturne at an ICE Saariaho portrait concert in New York’s The Tank, where Lorenzo was the audio engineer. “I really experienced the piece differently during that performance. Levy is a fantastically sensitive musician, in addition to [having] great technological skills. Maybe it was in part the rather cramped quarters of the Tank, so we were essentially onstage together, but I’d never really approached playing this music as a duet. Now, it’s really important to me to approach it that way, so the electronics part is not only ‘live’ but ‘alive’.”
“About five years ago,” she adds,” I began playing Scelsi’s Manto, a three-movement work whose movements can be played separately, all together, or in any pairing. The last movement’s instruction states that it is for ‘altiste/chanteuse (necessarily female),’ and ‘the text is a speech of the Sibyl [a prophetess or seer].’ I was learning the piece during a really hard time in my life, when I was recovering from a bad accident, and I think I was looking for music that really spoke to me. Well, the Scelsi did! I guess I was speaking/chanting to myself, (because) it was the first piece in a long time that I had an extremely visceral response to, and that particular commitment seemed to speak to audiences. I received really positive feedback about it and began to feel that it was my piece.”
While there are a number of violinists who sing and play at once (Courtney Orlando of Alarm Will Sound and Monica Germino, of the Dutch group Elektra come to mind), singing violists remain something of a rarity. “I knew that there were some other string players who had done similar things but hadn’t heard much about viola/voice works aside from the Scelsi, and basically I just thought it would be a fun project for me to do.”
So at the urging of the composer Ken Ueno, Ms. Richman embarked on blazing a trail as a singing violist commissioning a number of composers to write pieces for her. The commissioning process, she says, was refreshingly informal and casual. “I talked to composer friends and told them that I don’t have any money (yet!) but that I’m fairly confident I can get a decent number of performances. Their responses varied, of course, but for the most part they were all interested and it was just a matter of time (many had paying commissions that would obviously take priority). I currently have eight finished pieces (three of which are being premiered on the 24th), and a total of about twenty composers who have committed to writing things over the next few years.”
The group of composers on the “Viola & “ program represents a highly eclectic and diverse group. This may seem unusual, but it stems from Ms. Richman’s refreshingly open and friendly approach to commissioning new works. “After hearing (a composer’s) music and liking it, the most important thing for me is that I like the composer (himself) and want to work with (him). In some ways, that’s more important to me, because they might find themselves making stylistic adjustments anyway given the relative newness of the genre to them. I needed to feel like we connected as friends so I could be really comfortable in the collaborative aspect of the project.”
Viola &
Violist/vocalist Wendy Richman and Engineer Levy Lorenzo
Part of The Forge’s Forgefestival
Monday, January 24, 2011 at 8:00 p.m.
Admission: $10
The Bushwick Starr
207 Starr Street
Brooklyn, NY 11237
Info Line: 201.875.8573 www.theforgenow.com
On Tuesday 1/11, newish New York vocal ensemble Ekmelespresents a program of music by Martin Iddon, Alvin Lucier, and David Lang at The Tank. I caught up with Ekmeles’ director, baritone Jeff Gavett to learn more about the event.
Carey: Why did you form the group Ekmeles?
Gavett: “While New York is home to many exceptional instrumental groups dedicated to contemporary music, there is a relative paucity of new vocal music. Ekmeles was created to fill the gap, and bring adventurous new music for solo voices to audiences that otherwise have little or no chance to hear it.”
“Our first season so far has included a US premiere by Mauricio Kagel, New York premieres by Aaron Cassidy and Kenneth Gaburo, and new commissions by Troy Herion and Jude Traxler. We also performed as the vocal complement in a sold out performance of Knee Plays from Einstein on the Beach as part of the Darmstadt Essential Repertoire series at Issue Project Room.”
Carey: Tell us about the works on the concert?
Gavett: “First on the program is our commission, Martin Iddon’s Ἁμαδρυάδες (hamadryads). It’s a transformation of Josquin’sNymphes des Bois which involves retuning the intervals of the original in chains of Pythagorean intervals. These pitches, notated to the hundredth of a cent, are traversed mostly through extremely slow glissandi, requiring the singers to use sine wave reference tracks to achieve the tuning. We’ll also be playing tuned wine glasses, which blend eerily with the vocal textures.”
“Next is Alvin Lucier’sTheme, a setting of a poem by John Ashbery which shares some kinship with his most famous work. Lucier fragments the poem and distributes it between four speakers, who read the text into what he calls “resonant vessels.” These are vases, milk jugs, any empty container into which is placed a miniature microphone, which picks up the sound of the voice as filtered by the vessel, much like the room filters the sound of Lucier’s voice in I am sitting in a room.”
“David Lang’sthe little match girl passion rounds out the program. As the title suggests, Lang has taken Hans Christian Andersen’s moralistic children’s story and infused it with the Passion. The suffering and death of a poor little girl is thus directly and explicitly equated to that of Christ, amplifying the story’s emotional impact. The singers all play percussion instruments, and the glockenspiel is featured especially prominently, its crisp attack evoking the freezing night. The clear and sparse textures throughout the match girl text are contrasted beautifully with richer quasi-choral textures in the Passion-derived elements.”
Carey: What’s next for Ekmeles?
Gavett: “Upcoming performances include John Cage’sSong Books at the Avant Music Festival on February 12th, and Chris Cerrone’s Invisible Cities with Red Light New Music in May.”
Concert Details
Tuesday, January 11th, 2011, 7 PM – Ekmeles – Resonances
$10 admission
The Tank
345 W 45th St, Manhattan, NY 212-563-6269
(Visual Abstract, First Movement, Music by Pierre Jalbert, Film by Jean Detheux)
On January 8th, 2011, at 7:30 p.m. in Zilkha Hall of The Hobby Center for the Performing Arts, the Houston TX new music group Musiqa presents Real and Imagined – a concert collaboration with Aurora Picture Show featuring Theo Loevendie’s Six Turkish Folk Songs as well as music by Eve Beglarian, Paul Frehner, and Evan Chambers. Houston-based composer Pierre Jalbert’sVisual Abstract for flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano, and percussion will be performed live to a film created by Jean Detheux. The concert will be conducted by Houston Symphony Assistant Conductor Brett Mitchell.
Led by five composers (including founding member Pierre Jalbert) Musiqa is receiving a great deal of notice for its innovative multi-disciplinary concert events (dance, visual art, and theater are always integrated into Musiqa performances) as well as its educational programming that annually reaches thousands of Houston area students. Next season, Musiqa will celebrate its ten-year anniversary.
Pierre Jalbert graciously responded to a few questions about Visual Abstract:
Chris Becker: Did Jean Detheux create his film before, after, or during the composition of Visual Abstract?
Pierre Jalbert: He created the film after the piece was written. The music was commissioned and premiered by the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble a few years back. Jean and I worked on a project last year in which he created a film first and I wrote the music to the film. That work was entitled L’œil écoute (The Eye Listens), and was also premiered by PNME. This time around, we decided that we would reverse the process, and he would do his film to the already existing music.
Chris Becker: In performance with the film, is the conductor watching the film for the timing of some of your musical events? I’m thinking of the third movement where rhythmic hits coincide with abrupt changes in the film.
Pierre Jalbert: Yes, the conductor is looking at the film for cues from time to time, and we rehearse many times through to get the timing down. As you can imagine, it’s very difficult as each performance is slightly different. But Jean made the film to not have too many abrupt changes. But still, there are a a few that make it challenging.
Chris Becker: The layers of images in Detheux’s film are very rich and tactile. They remind me of natural phenomena, weather, or even what we “see” when we close our eyes and listen to the sounds around us. Speaking as a composer, what do you think makes an “abstract” work of visual art successful?
Pierre Jalbert: I think when one looks at the film and hears the music as a single entity, and one does not dominate over the other, but each enhances the other, then we have something interesting.
Chris Becker: Next season, Musiqa will celebrate its ten-year anniversary. As one of the people who founded the organization, how does it feel to look back on all Musiqa has accomplished?
Pierre Jalbert: It’s amazing to look back and see how the organization has grown. I remember a few of us meeting at Tony Brandt’s house 10 years ago and brain-storming about what the organization could be. We wanted to get new music out into the community and into downtown and offer up repertoire that wasn’t being heard in Houston. All of the composers on the Artistic Board work really well together (Anthony Brandt, Karim Al-Zand, Rob Smith, Marcus Maroney, and myself), and that has been crucial in keeping things going through the years.
Tickets for Real and Imagined – including discounted tickets for seniors and students – are available for purchase on the Musiqa website.
Since 1984, the SEM Ensemble, directed by Petr Kotik, has given annual Christmas concerts. But these are not your usual holiday fare! The programs mix works from the New York School, other pieces in the avant-garde/experimental tradition, and early music.
On Tuesday evening December 21 at the Paula Cooper Gallery in Chelsea, SEM will present J. S. Bach’sFugue in 6 Voices from A Musical Offering (1747), Kotik’s 1st String Quartet (2007-’10), Why Patterns? (1978) by Morton Feldman, and two works by Christian Wolff: Small Preludes (2009-’10) and, incredibly, the American premiere of a work dating from 1958: For Six or Seven Players (for Merce Cunningham).
Petr Kotik and Christian Wolff were kind enough to share some remarks on For 6 or 7 Players and Small Preludes.
Christian Wolff – For 6 or 7 Players
Christian Wolff’s For 6 or 7 Players (for trumpet, trombone, piano, violin, viola, double bass, and optional flute, hence 6 or 7) was originally written for Merce Cunningham’s dance “Rune” in 1958, while Wolff served in the U.S. Army. Wolff sent the piece to Cage, not retaining a copy for himself and the original was lost. Finding the manuscript somewhat ambiguous, Cage painstakingly re-notated the piece into a precise score.
In 1964, during rehearsals with John Cage in Warsaw for the performance with the Merce Cunningham Dance Co. at the Warsaw Autumn festival, Cage brought a piece by Christian Wolff: For 6 or 7 Players (Music for Merce Cunningham). The piece was hand-copied by Cage, bearing his typical manuscript signature. The musicians were the Czech ensemble from Prague, Musica viva pragensis, which I founded few years back. Cage intended to perform the piece few days later, but it proved to be far too complicated to be ready in one or two rehearsals, so he gave up on the idea and left the material – the score and parts – with me. Going through my music archive last summer, I discovered the material and decided to perform the piece. Christian Wolff and I met to go through the score to resolve a few questions, and the performances are result of this effort. —Petr Kotik
The written music of “For 6 or 7 players” (1959) indicates, on a score, time spaces (brackets) anywhere within which a specified number of pitches, to be selected by the players from a given collection, are to be played. Dynamics and modes of playing are also variously specified or left free. That the music was made to go with a dance (Merce Cunningham’s “Rune”) encouraged me to allow for plenty of silence.–Christian Wolff
Christian Wolff — Small Preludes
The arrangements of “Small Preludes” (2010) were made to offer something more recent. There were 20 small preludes for solo piano (2009), of which 8 are arranged for the instrumentation of “For 6 or 7 Players” (the optional seventh player is a flutist) and a ninth is left as is, a piano solo. The original piano music was written on two staves but without specification of clef, so in playing and making instrumental versions, a considerable variety of different pitch readings are possible (in this instrumentation these choices are made by the composer). — Christian Wolff
Concert Details
December 21, 2010 at 8 PM @ Paula Cooper Gallery, NYC
Paula Cooper Gallery is located at 534 West 21st Street, New York. Tickets are $15, Students and Seniors $10. For information and reservations, call (718) 488-7659 or email pksem@semensemble.org
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.
The American Modern Ensemble performs Pieces of Eight, a program of sextets at Galapagos in Brooklyn on Monday, December 13, 2010. Among the eight under-40 composers featured on the concert is Sequenza 21’s own Contributing Editor Armando Bayolo.
I recently caught up with AME’s Artistic Director Robert Paterson and asked him for some details about the show. Here’s what he had to say.
“Pieces of Eight consists of works by composers from all over the United States, including Xi Wang from Texas, Armando Bayolo from Washington, DC and David Ludwig from Philadelphia. I chose these particular works because they are wonderfully stylistically different from each other, and help to demonstrate how diverse American composers are today, particularly with regard to the subset of composers under forty.”
“Action Figure by Armando Bayolo has a strong pulse and hyper-kinetic kind of energy, and encapsulates the image of an action figure—like you would play with as a child—but through sound.” “the resonance after… by Christopher Chandler is the winner of AME’s Fifth Annual Composition Competition. Christopher writes achingly beautiful music, and this is one of those “chills up your spine” pieces—a piece of music that really makes you feel something emotional. The title perfectly encapsulates what you hear, and the musical landscape he creates is simply beautiful.”
“Adolescent Psychology by Shawn Crouch sounds like the state of a child’s mind, at least to me, especially with the rapid changes of emotion, slower introspective sections and frenetic scalar runs. Shawn has written a number of works for voice and choir, so this is a wonderful glimpse into his chamber music world.”
“Among the many intriguing qualities of Hannah Lash’s music is how she uses and explores extended techniques. In A Matter of Truth, she asks the violinist and cellist to detune their instruments way below the normal range, effectively turning each instrument into a much lower version of itself.”
“David Ludwig’s Haiku Catharsis consists of a set of short movements that are inspired by poems, and what I love about David’s work is that even though there is a numerological importance to how he constructed this piece, it never sounds technically “on your sleeve” or academic. The whole works sounds organic and lovely, and is timbrally rich and colorful.”
“OK Feel Good by Jonathan Newman is probably the most “Downtown” sounding piece on the program, and has a kind of happy “feel good” sound quality. The piece joyfully carries you along with its bouncy rhythms and Major scale harmonies and melodies.”
“Three Images by Xi Wang is the longest piece on the program, and one of the saddest. It wonderfully contrasts some of the other works on the program that are more emotionally uplifting.”
“A criminal running scared from the police on old Route 66 inspires my own Sextet. It starts with the scream of police whistles and ends with a band; it even incorporates a chase scene. AME is releasing its brand new CD of my music at this concert, and my Sextet is on the CD, beautifully performed by our wonderful ensemble.”
1) at 4:30 the Chiara Quartet will play Gorecki’s 2nd quartet, Quasi Una Fantasia, and will premiere a new piece by Huang Ruo, Calligraffiti, which features projected video art by Seattle-based video artist Juniper Shuey. 2) and at 7:00, American Opera Projects and Opera on Tap present a show titled Sex, Cigarettes and Psychopaths (a Night of Laughs). There will be scenes from Matt Marks’ serial killer song-cycle The Adventures of Albert Fish, Daniel Felsenfeld’s collection of comedic sex songs called La BoneMe, among other sex(y) scenes. More information about each of these shows here.
First the good news: The Talea Ensemble performs the music of Boulez for the Miller Theatre Composer Portrait concert at 8pm. Now the bad news: it’s sold out! However, if you weren’t lucky enough to get your Boulez tickets in time, you can check out the MIVOS quartet at 9:30 at The Tank. They’ll be performing Wolfgang Rihm and Carl Bettendorf, which is pretty cool, too!
The bagpipe master Matt Welch, and his group Blarvuster will release their self-titled CD at 8pm. This show is free, folks, so make sure you pick up the new disc while you’re there. More info here.
The Metropolis Ensemble (who were just nominated for a Grammy!) will be presenting an intimate performance called, It takes a long time to become a good composer, featuring Timo Andres on piano. You’ll want to get your tickets for this one early if you can; they’ve already added extra shows on the 10th and 11th and one night is already sold out. More information about the show here.
American Opera Projects presents a workshop performance of John Glover’s one-act monodrama opera, Our Basic Nature. Fans of WNYC’s Radiolab might recall an episode entitled “Lucy”; this opera was inspired by that show, and the libretto (by dramaturg Kelley Rourke) is taken from the memoir written by the scientist that raised a chimpanzee as his daughter. The music will be performed by Redshift, pianist Jocelyn Dueck, and baritone Andrew Wilkowske, with projections by Erik Pearson. More information about the show here.
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.
The University of Michigan’s final student composers’ concert of 2010 took place this last Monday, November 29, in Stamps Auditorium, part of the University’s Walgreen Drama Center. This collection of performances was unexpected; so many composers submitted material for November 15’s composers’ concert, a brief third concert of the term was necessary.
Whereas the concert earlier this month was unique with its multiple composer-performers, Monday’s event possessed a more subtle distinction: a strong stylistic dichotomy emerged among the works, essentially pitting modernist and traditional forces in opposition to each other. From a qualitative standpoint, I found this duality inconsequential because all of the evening’s acoustic works had something in common: they expressed their structures with the recurrence of clearly identifiable themes. Although the two electronic pieces on the concert used different formal techniques, they also contained clear and satisfying dramatic lines. As a result, I felt the evening’s music was tied together despite the starkly contrasting musical tastes presented on the program.
First on the concert was Bret Bohman’s she comes back as fire (2010), a three-movement work for string quartet. This piece is the complete version of something I heard, and reviewed, in October at Michigan’s and I was happy to reacquaint myself with the first movement’s unforgettable midsection – an aria where the first violin saunters in its highest register above a placid accompaniment. The rest of the piece explores and culminates material from the first movement, varying the music’s atmosphere little even though new content is introduced. Ultimately, Mr. Bohman references the memorable first violin solo in she comes back as fire’s final movement, but the surrounding music is too chaotic for its reappearance to establish a sense of repose. Mr, Bohman used his themes economically, which illuminated much of the work’s structure on the first listen. I am also sure further interaction with she comes back as fire would, more deeply, reveal a tightly wound and efficient network of musical material.
Next on the program was Patrick Behnke’s viola and violin duet, Miranda at the Edge of the Water (2010). Mr. Behnke currently studies viola at the University of Michigan and delivered a fine performance alongside violinist Jordan Broder. Loosely based on certain Indian rhythmic modes, Miranda at the Edge of the Water proceeded in a pseudo-improvisatory manner from an opening drone through a variety of dance-like passages and finally back to the static beginning, which evoked Mr. Behnke’s South Asian influences. I say “pseudo improvisatory” because the piece progressed like a stream-of-conscientiousness, and the violin and viola alternated the responsibility of leading the duo to its next musical destination, often via imitation. Mr. Behnke’s note explained connections not just to Indian music, but to Bela Bartok and Jimi Hendrix as well; yet, I heard another association – Arvo Pärt’s tintinnabulation. One of the few recurring sections featured a modal melody accompanied by its supporting triad. Particularly at the end of Miranda at the Edge of the Water, this technique gave the music a reverent and meditative quality, fitting Mr. Behnke’s description, “the violin ascends to the heavens. All is over.”
