Concerts

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
Composers, Concerts, New York

Composers Play Composers Marathon to include Babbitt Tribute

Composers Concordance is hosting a Composers Play Composers Marathon tonight featuring 21 participants.

Peter Jarvis has sent word that, in honor of Milton Babbitt’s recent passing, he’ll be performing Milton’s Homily for snare drum on the event.

The organizers have shared more details in a promotional video (below). Tickets are $20, but you get a free beverage along with a dynamic evening of music-making.





Sunday, January 30 · 7:00pm – 10:00pm
Drom
85 Avenue A (between 5th & 6th Sts.)
New York, NY

Director:
Sound Liberation

Co-director:
Composers Concordance (& CC Records)
International Street Cannibals

by Christian Carey
Chamber Music, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Festivals

February in Fredonia, pt.1: Jamie Jordan

While the Weather Channel might only associate our flyover community with snow & cold every year, here in western New York at SUNY Fredonia things are heating up with the onset of the yearly NewSound Festival sponsored by the student-driven Ethos New Music Society. Since I started teaching here in 2007, we’ve continued a 30+ year tradition of spectacular guest composers and performers, and this year looks to be our largest festival to date. Since Fredonia is in driving distance (3 hrs or less) of so many different arts centers, including Buffalo, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Rochester, Syracuse & Toronto, it seemed only right to let y’all know what’s going on in our small but mighty new music haven here on the shores of Lake Erie. This year’s festival was curated to showcase the human voice and the wide array of composers and works that explore and expand the realm of vocal music in the 21st century.

First a round-up of the entire festival, which hits the ground running Friday evening in the Rosch Recital Hall (where all the events will be unless otherwise noted):

  • 1/28: Jamie Jordan, soprano w/ Daniel Pesca, piano & Sean Connors, percussion, 8pm, free
  • 2/4: Tony Arnold, soprano w/ Jacob Greenberg, piano, 8pm, free
  • 2/4: Opening of Notations21 Graphic Notation Scores exhibit with author and musicologist Theresa Sauer, 6-8pm in the Rockefeller Art Gallery, free
  • 2/11: NOW Ensemble and composers Missy Mazzoli, Corey Dargel and Judd Greenstein performing works of Mazzoli & Dargel, 8pm, $2 students/$5 public
  • 2/16: Lindsey Goodman, flute & voice, 8pm, free
  • 2/18: Florestan Recital Project with Aaron Engebreth, baritone and Alison d’Amato, piano, 8pm, $2 students/$5 public
  • 2/19: League of the Unsound Sound with composers David Smooke and Ruby Fulton, 8pm, free
  • 2/25: Chamber Music of Dan Welcher, 8pm, $2 students/$5 public
  • 2/26: SUNY Fredonia Wind Ensemble performing works by Welcher, Ives, Stravinsky and a world premiere by tubist/composer Jim Self, 8pm in King Concert Hall, free

The first concert with soprano Jamie Jordan will feature works by Hannah Lash, Zachary Wadsworth, Eric Nathan, Daniel Pesca and Michaela Eremiasova as well as our own Paul Coleman and the first of two performances of George Crumb’s Apparition (Tony Arnold will be performing the same work the following week). If you’re in the area, come join us for some great music-making!

by Rob Deemer
Classical Music, Commissions, Composers, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Houston, Performers

Duo Scordatura Presents: COMMISSIONED

Houston, TX – There’s no question that Houston’s proponents of contemporary music are enthusiastically embracing creative marketing concepts and alternative venues for performances in an effort to expand and educate a new century of audiences. In an un-zoned city like Houston, I find that musicians and audiences will happily cross so-called genre and cultural boundaries especially if there’s promise of a good time (Texas barbecue can help too, but that’ll be another entry…). Much to my delight, I am seeing familiar faces when I’m out at performances of new music be it in a gallery in the Third Ward, a club in Montrose, or the Hobby Center’s Zilka Hall. Although I’ve only been living in Houston for short time, I feel a sense of connection to what is a pretty broad cross section of the city’s creative community.

Duo Scordatura violinist Nicholas Leh Baker

One of the familiar faces I see around town is Houston composer George Heathco, who hipped me to what will be an exciting concert of contemporary pieces for the violin and viola, including three (!) world premieres, performed by the duo of violinist Nicholas Leh Baker and violist Faith Magdalene Jones who call themselves Duo Scordatura. The concert takes place Saturday, January 29th at 6pm at First Presbyterian Church, located at 5300 Main Street. Tickets for concert are $10 for general audiences and $5 for students, children, and seniors.

The concert, titled COMMISSIONED, includes four works commissioned by Duo Scordatura, including works by Alexandra T. Bryant, Luke Dahn, George Heathco, and Dr. Daniel Kramlich. Part of the creative marketing for COMMISSIONED includes the Commissioned Project Interview Series featuring the duo and commissioned composers discussing the collaborative process that takes place between composers and the performing musicians.

Composer George Heathco

Heathco describes his programmed piece Turbine (2010) as “a bitch to play, but…a very entertaining work (or so I hope).” Also on the program are pieces by Jack Benson and Jodran Kuspa.

All of the composers on the bill either currently or have at one point called Houston their home and, according to Nicholas Leh Baker in his video interview, will all be present at the performance. Duo Scordatura is committed to presenting works “in a wide range of venues across the Houston landscape.” I look forward to hearing them next Saturday at First Presbyterian Church, and in the future wherever their mission takes them.

by Chris Becker
Chamber Music, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Festivals, File Under?, Video

An Ecstatic Trailer for an Ecstatic Festival

Merkin Hall’s Ecstatic Music Festival kicked 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 America later this week).

by Christian Carey
Chamber Music, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Electro-Acoustic, Events, Experimental Music, Festivals, New York, Performers

Viola & …

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

by Armando Bayolo
Chamber Music, Choral Music, Composers, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Electro-Acoustic, Experimental Music, File Under?, Interviews, New York

Jeff Gavett talks about Ekmeles

Ekmeles rehearses Iddon

On Tuesday 1/11, newish New York vocal ensemble Ekmeles presents 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’s Nymphes 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’s Theme, 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’s the 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’s Song 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

by Christian Carey
Chamber Music, Classical Music, Composers, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Film Music, Houston, Music Events

Houston’s Musiqa presents: Real and Imagined

[vimeo http://vimeo.com/12767232]

(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’s Visual 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.

by Chris Becker
Composers, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Experimental Music, File Under?, New York

SEM Holiday Concert on Tuesday

Petr Kotik

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’s Fugue 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




by Christian Carey
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