Judith Berkson performing “Vor an Sicht” (Photo courtesy of Elizabeth Reddin)
Vital Vox: A Vocal Festival (Vital Vox 2011)
Roulette
Brooklyn, NY
Sat, Nov 5 & Sun, Nov 6, 2011
I guess there was no better way to kick off the Vital Vox Festival than with a primal scream. Gelsey Bell and her partner for this performance, composer/performer Paul Pinto, actually gave us several of them separate and together at the start of the song cycle Scaling, and they seemed to be the sound that signified both the power of vocal performance and the experimental nature of the festival as well.
In general, the festival is a huge emphasis on artists that recognize the human voice as an instrument, an instrument that has just as much range and capability as any great violin, piano or guitar, and works wonderfully as a duet with other instruments or other voices. These artists are all equally gifted as vocalists as they are composers or musicians of other instruments, and they all put on compelling performances. (more…)
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 3rd annual Vital Vox Vocal Festival, this year being held at Roulette in Downtown Brooklyn (Sat, Nov 5th and Sun, Nov 6th, 8 PM), is not just about singers, but those that are equally skillful at creating music. On November 5th and 6th, there is a sensational lineup of artists that are gifted at both of those as well as skirting genre lines between new classical, indie, jazz and world music. (more…)
From October 14-22 in various locations in New York City, the American Composers Orchestra hosts SONiC, a new music festival co-curated by Derek Bermel and Stephen Gosling. ACO asked me to write an essay for the program booklet, which they’ve kindly let me share with Sequenza 21 readers as a preview of the concerts
Trying to sum up the diverse array of compositional styles and performing traditions that comprise contemporary classical music’s many “scenes” is a daunting task. One can scarcely imagine distilling its essence, even over the course of several evenings. But during SONiC: Sounds of the New Century, the American Composers Orchestra aims to do just that. With curatorial assistance from pianist Stephen Gosling and composer Derek Bermel, ACO has organized an ambitious series of programs, enlisting many topflight ensembles and spotlighting composers under forty. The orchestra’s first free concert at the World Financial Center, a new music marathon, late night jam sessions, and several premieres are all part of the festivities.
JACK Quartet. Photo: Stephen Poff.
During late summer, I had a chance to speak with some of the composers and performers featured on SONiC, a small but representative sampling of the diverse array of participants. While one would need as many essays as there are participants to tell all of the stories of SONiC, we hope that what follows provides an idea of the variety of ways that new music is being created for these events.
JACK Quartet is an important presence at SONiC, hosting the Extended Play marathon at Miller Theatre on October 16. Along with harpist Yolanda Kondonassis, the quartet is premiering Filigree in Textile, a work commissioned from Hannah Lash by the Fromm Foundation. (Lash had a piece read by ACO in 2010 on the Underwood New Music Readings). While Filigree in Textile is inspired by Flemish tapestry – its movements are titled “Gold,” “Silver,” and “Silk” – two other “threads” run through its genesis: Lash’s own background as a harpist, and her frequent collaborations with JACK, dating back to their student days at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York.
Hannah Lash. Photo Noah Fowler.
Lash says, “I know the harp very well, so when I write for it, I feel that I can exploit a lot of that instrument’s possibilities without overextending the player in a way that would be uncomfortable. I notice that when I write for an ensemble that has harp in it, I feel very comfortable and excited to make the most of its presence.”
She continues, “As an undergraduate, I wrote quite a few string quartets, and at least three members of JACK Quartet played pretty much all those quartets over our years at Eastman on the Composer Forums. These players were wonderful, and always completely fearless. I remember one piece in particular that I wrote for them when I was a junior: it took me literally three weeks just to copy the score and make parts because the notation was so detailed. It was such a great experience to give it to these amazing players and have them learn it and play it so enthusiastically and elegantly. In fact, I was completely spoiled, because the summer after that year, I took this piece to a festival where a professional quartet was supposed to play it; they had one rehearsal and then told me I had written something completely unplayable. I did not mention the fact that it had only taken my friends at school a week to learn the piece and put it together.”
Currently, Lash focuses her energies on composing (and writing her own libretti); performing as a harpist has, for now, largely fallen by the wayside. Other composers in this era subscribe to the DIY aesthetic: performing their own music and forming their own ensembles. SONiC curator Derek Bermel is an acclaimed clarinetist.
Composer/pianist Anthony Cheung helped to form the Talea Ensemble, a group that has fast become one of the most formidable interpreters of the most daunting repertoire in contemporary music. These pieces are often categorized as works of the New Complexity movement or the Second Modernity. They return music to an aesthetic that revels in detail and is intricately constructed. Scores by New Complexity composers are abundantly virtuosic avant-garde fare.
On SONiC, Cheung will play his Roundabouts, a piece written in 2010 for pianist Ueli Wiget of Ensemble Modern. (Cheung is another composer familiar to ACO: he participated in the 2004 edition of the Underwood Readings.) There’s a long tradition of composer-performers, particularly pianists. One can look at great figures from the classical music canon, such as Mozart, Liszt, and Rachmaninoff; more recently, composers such as Thomas Ades and Philip Glass continue this tradition, championing their own music from the keyboard. Cheung feels that being an active performer informs his work as a composer. He says, “It’s definitely a huge benefit, but one that needs to be carefully considered. Getting inside a composer’s head and extrapolating a personal language from a score, while adding a unique interpretative angle if appropriate for the music, is as good as any analysis or score study. And while analysis can approach the minutiae of each moment and attempt to dissect intentionality, being part of the real-time re-creation of a work is a direct window into a composer’s experience of time and form. These things seep into your consciousness and make you more open to creative possibilities of your own. The danger is also to one’s advantage: falling back into a comfort-zone with your instrument, where idiomatic fluency can lead to a kind of repetition of received practice and prevent you from considering possibilities outside of them.”
Kenji Bunch is another composer/performer, active as a violist. He will perform as soloist (on an amplified viola) with the ACO in his concerto The Devil’s Box, a piece inspired by the many legends that associate fiddles and fiddle playing with diabolical influences and pursuits. It’s also a chance for the classically trained Bunch to demonstrate his mettle in the realm of bluegrass and folk music.
Bunch says, “Back in the mid-nineties, I spent a few summers teaching composition in Kentucky, and was exposed to some wonderful bluegrass bands. I had long been interested in improvisation and non-classical approaches to string playing, and at the time had been doing some work with a rock fusion band on electric violin. I was somewhat dissatisfied with what I was contributing in that context, and felt I was trying too hard to be an electric guitar. In this sense, bluegrass was a revelation. Here was an ensemble of all acoustic string instruments in which the fiddle was an essential, organic member. Further trips to Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Alabama helped to shape my understanding of the music and its history. Perhaps most significant to my study of American roots music was a chance acquaintance with master fiddler, composer, and educator Mark O’Connor, whose friendship and encouragement has given me an exposure to all kinds of string traditions well beyond bluegrass fiddle.”
He continues, “It was after teaching at one of Mark’s fiddle camps that I began to incorporate elements of American folk music into my compositions. Incidentally, before I started doing this, I had never performed my own music! For some reason, I had kept my parallel careers as a violist and composer as separate as possible. I think I started performing my own work out of convenience; the inflections and articulations are hard to notate, and it was easier just to do it myself. When I realized how rewarding it was, I started working on a repertoire of works I could perform. Today, most of the playing I do is my own music.”
Traditional instruments, even repurposed ones like Bunch’s amplified viola/fiddle, are one way to go in new music. Another is to find or create new instruments altogether. Such is often the pathway of composer Oscar Bettison. He enjoys incorporating unconventional instruments, such as those made from found objects or junk metal, into his scores.
Bettison says, “This was all a result of moving to Holland to study in the early 2000s. Before that, I had written a lot of music for traditional forces and I wanted to get away from that: to stretch myself as a composer. So, I started to play around with things, even going as far as to build some instruments; percussion mostly, but later on I branched out into radically detuning stringed instruments – there’s some of that in the guitar part of O Death. These things I called “Cinderella instruments: the kind of things that shouldn’t be ‘musical’ but I do my best to make them sing. And I suppose as a counterpoint to that, I shunned traditional instruments for a long time.”
Cinderella instruments, as well as references to popular music of many varieties, are signatures found in his work O Death, which will be played on SONiC October 19 by the Dutch Ensemble Klang.
Of O Death, Bettison says, “It was written for Ensemble Klang between 2005-7 and is my longest piece to date. It’s about 65 minutes long and I wrote it very much in collaboration with the group. We were lucky enough to have a situation in which I was able to try things out on the group over a long period. This was very important in writing it. The piece is in seven movements and is a kind of instrumental requiem, which references popular music elements (especially blues) and kind of grafts them on to the requiem structure. It’s something that I fell into quite naturally. This I think is tied to my idea of ‘Cinderella instruments:’ eschewing the “classical” tradition somewhat.”
Bettison continues, “The thing that a lot of people don’t know about me is that I come from a very strict classical background. I was a violinist; indeed I went to a specialist music school in London as a violinist from the age of 10. My rebellion to being in a hot-house classical music environment was getting into metal, playing the drums and listening to avant-garde classical music that was seen as outside the ‘canon’ and I think that carried on into my music. So, to psychoanalyze myself for a minute, I think I’ve done both things in a response (quite a delayed response!) to the classical tradition precisely because I feel so at home in that tradition.”
Whether it’s a gesture of critical response or one of inquisitive exploration, crossover between musical traditions is nothing new per se. But today, genre bending, such as Bettison’s references to blues, metal, et cetera, is celebrated. True, there was a time when a gulf existed between “high” and “low” art, at least in some people’s minds (particularly those of the parochial and/or polemical bent). Increasingly in recent years, genres are blurring. Classical composers frequently incorporate materials from pop, jazz, and ethnic musical traditions. Correspondingly, a number of musicians primarily known as pop artists are exploring concert music, creating hybridized works from their own particular vantage point. And musicians like Bryce Dessner, who have significant pedigree in both genres, prove such distinctions largely meaningless today. Dessneris probably best known as the guitarist for the rock band The National. But he also has a Master’s degree in Classical Guitar Performance from the Yale School of Music and performs regularly with the “indie classical” ensemble Clogs. As a guitarist, he performed at the recent Steve Reich celebration at Carnegie Hall, joining members of Bang on a Can for their performance of Reich’s recent foray into rock instrumentation: “2×5.”
Bryce Dessner. Photo: Keith Klenowski.
Dessner says, “I think my electric guitar-playing has informed my composing and my classical training has in turn benefited my work with the National. I don’t consider my activities to be two separate pursuits; they’re both aspects of the same goal: to make creative music that pays attention to detail.”
Most of Dessner’s own instrumental compositions have an extra-musical source of inspiration, from visual art, mythology, or literature. St. Carolyn by the Sea is inspired by a section of Jack Kerouac’s 1962 novel Big Sur.“Big Sur has this sense of sweep and variety of mood shifts that evokes, in a way, a kind of orchestration. I’ve created a work that employs the entire ACO but, at their suggestion, also incorporates two electric guitar parts: these will be played by my brother Aaron and me. I want to stress that our role is really as members of the ensemble: this is not a guitar concerto. We have little solo passages here and there, but then so do many other players in the orchestra.”
“I’ve been fortunate to have the opportunity to write for chamber orchestras in the past, but this work for the ACO will be the first time that I’m getting the chance to write for a full orchestra. It’s such a rare opportunity. Even today, it’s still challenging to get orchestras to program new music. And, of course, it’s very expensive to rehearse and present a new piece. What the ACO does in presenting so many composers’ work is truly an unusual situation.”
It’s heartening that so many composers and performers are going to be included in the “unusual situation” that is SONiC. Despite their disparate backgrounds, they are brought together by a fascination with sound and a determination to make the concert hall an adventurous and engaging place to be: one filled with a fresh sense of discovery.
Composer Christian Carey is Senior Editor at Sequenza 21 and teaches at Rider University in Lawrenceville, New Jersey.
About to turn the ripe old age of 8, Matt McBane‘s crazy idea of a 20-something composer/performer creating an annual new-music festival in a bump in the road north of San Diego has not only survived but thrived. Something about a last late-summer outing, to an idyllic village parked right at a Pacific beach, seems to consistently draw a crowd from both Los Angeles to the north and San Diego to the south for this three-day affair. And, well, maybe it’s just a little about the music, too… Excellent string quartets, pianists and ensembles mix it up with rock bands, ethnic groups, open-air jams and units that fit into all and none of the above. Given that Matt’s main going concern is the genre-melding group BUILD, all this variety turns out to share threads of the same impulse: “Mr. Classical-Gorbachev, tear down this wall!!”
This year marks the biggest change to date: for the first time the entire Festival will be held completely in the Village of Carlsbad. As Matt tells it, this
means we can present a broader array of music than in the past: from the thoroughly modern classical music of the Calder Quartet and pianist Vicky Chow, to the chamber-music inflected indie-rock of My Brightest Diamond, to the genre-crossing music of Build, Florent Ghys, Lukas Ligeti, Sarah Kirkland Snider and Shara Worden, to the African electronica of Burkina Electric, to the site-specific installations of Red Fish Blue Fish and Terry Riley’s In C. Yet, while the scope of the music presented has expanded, the Festival maintains its traditions that I have found most appealing: the hand-picked artists, the tradition of musicians from different groups collaborating, the Composers-in-Residence (5 this year!), and the commissioning and presenting of new works.
Speaking of composers and commissioning, The video at the top of this story shows this year’s Composers Competition winner, Jacob Cooper. His Big Black Bottom Kind will be part of the grand-finale concert given by the Calder Quartet, which also includes quartets by Thomas Adès and Jacob TV.
Matt, you have a few more words?…
In addition to its hand-picked programming, a big part of the Festival every year is the interaction with the community. Prior to the festival weekend, many of the festival musicians give always-hugely-popular performance-demonstrations for music students in the Carlsbad middle and high schools. This year with the Festival’s new format there will also be many free events open to everyone including the Music Walk and the Picnic Concerts, and there will be many performances by musicians from the community around the Village throughout the weekend.
It all kicks off this Friday, September 23, running through Sunday, and everything you need to know about the who’s, what’s and where’s can be found here.
Take a seductive voiced art-pop singer and a post-jazz/alt-classical trumpeter. Add fragments of nineteenth century classical melodies, electronics elicited by a “mutantrumpet” controller. Then add influences ranging from ancient Greek mythology to the Hudson River Valley. What you have are the intricate yet intimate sounds on an evocatively beautiful new CD: Songs for Persephone.
The Persephone legend is one of the oldest in Greek mythology, with many variants that provide twists and turns to the narrative and subtext of the story. In the myth, Persephone, daughter of Zeus and the harvest goddess Demeter, is kidnapped by Hades, god of the underworld. During her absence, vegetation is unable to grow in the world; fields fall fallow and crops cannot be harvested.
To break this horrible time of famine, the gods come to an understanding with Hades. Persephone is eventually freed, but on the condition that, if she has eaten anything while in Hades’ realm, she must return to his kingdom for a certain length of time. Thus, each year she must remain in the underworld one month for each pomegranate seed that she has consumed. This serves to rationalize, in mythic terms, the change of seasons, times of decay and renewal, shifts in light and weather; even the autumn foliage and the falling of the leaves.
Vocalist Mimi Goese and trumpeter Ben Neill have updated the Persephone story, while retaining its iconic essence, on their new recording Songs for Persephone (out now on Ramseur Records). As one can see from the pomegranate on the cover, (a visual designed by Goese), the duo is mindful of the legendary Persephone’s history; but they are not hung up on providing a linear narrative.
In a recent phone conversation, Goese, who wrote the album’s lyrics, said, “The artwork that I did for the cover, featuring the pomegranate, is one acknowledgement of the myth of Persephone. And there are other images that I found in the lyrics. But we were interested in using what was evocative about Persephone to create our own story. That’s sort of how the myth evolved too – one storyteller picks up the thread from another down through the years.”
They started work on this music some five years ago, but originally presented it as part of a theatrical production by the multimedia company Ridge Theater, starring Julia Stiles. In 2010, it was produced at Brooklyn Academy of Music as part of the Next Wave Festival.
The theatrical presentation and the mythological story behind it are only two strands in a disparate web of influences that resonate with Songs for Persephone. Both Goese and Neill make their home in the Hudson River Valley. Both for its stunning natural surroundings and its history as a home for artists of all sorts, the valley is rich with reference points. Neill feels that these are subtly imparted to the music.
In a recent phone conversation, he said, “I found myself particularly interested in the Hudson River School of painters. These Nineteenth Century artists depicted the local landscape and the changing of season with a dimensionality and symbolism that seemed to have an affinity with what Mimi and I were after in Songs for Persephone.”
For Neill and Goese, these extra-musical influences – artwork, nature, and theater – are an important part of the music’s genesis. But the polystylistic nature of their music making adds still another layer to the proceedings.
Goese says, “I started in dance and theater and later moved to performance art. Singing came along later. But I don’t have the musical background or training that Ben has – I’m self taught.”
She doth protest too much. Goese’s voice provided the steely, dramatic center to the work of late eighties band Hugo Largo. One part art rock and another dream pop, the group incorporated bold theatricality and ethereal experimentation, releasing two memorable full lengths, Arms Akimbo and Mettle, and the Drums EP, an alt-pop connoisseur’s delight. She’s also collaborated on several occasions with Moby and, under the moniker Mimi (no last name) released Soak, a solo album on David Bryne’s Luaka Bop label.
Goese is a powerful singer, but Songs of Persephone brings out the lyricism her voice also possesses. Cooing high notes and supple overdubbed harmonies are juxtaposed with the more muscular turns of phrase. Experience plays a role in Goese’s tremendous performances on the disc. But she also credits the musical creations of her collaborator Neill with spurring on her inspiration.
“Ben has been a terrific person with whom to work,” Goese says. “He’s inventive and willing to try new things. From the moment we first performed together, at a concert nearly a decade ago, I’ve felt an artistic kinship with him.”
One can readily hear why Neill’s music would be an engaging foil for Goese. His background as a producer, and his years of work designing the mutantrumpet, have encouraged Neill’s ear toward imaginative soundscapes. His 2009 album Night Science (Thirsty Ear) is an example of Neill’s nu-jazz arrangements and soloing at their very best.
On the current CD, Neill’s playing remains impressive; but his arranging and collaborative skills come to the fore. There are intricate textures to found, on which Neill’s trumpet and electronics are abetted by strings, bass, and drums, but it’s the melodies, floating memorably past, one after the other, that are most impressive here. Some of the melodic lines he crafts are imitative of the voice in their own right: it’s no accident that some of the most inspired music-making on Songs for Persephone are when Goese and Neill create duets out of intricately intertwined single lines.
Neill says, “The classical materials that I used as the basis of the compositions on Songs for Persephone were melodies from the Nineteenth century: from opera and symphonic music. Many of them were from relatively the same era in which the Hudson Valley painters worked. I found it fascinating to juxtapose these two genres that were in operation more or less at the same time.”
He continues, “I’d describe the material as fragments of melodies: small excerpts rather than recognizable themes. None of them are treated in such a way that most listeners will be able to say, ‘Hey that’s Berlioz,’ or ‘That sounds like Schumann.’ They were meant to be a starting point from which I would develop the music: it’s not a pastiche.”
At 7:30 PM on September 27th, Goese and Neill will be having an album release party at the Cooper Square Hotel, part of Joe’s Pub’s Summer Salon series. Goese says, “It’s an interesting space – we’ll have glass windows behind us, which is unusual as compared with a more conventional stage. But it’s fun performing in non-standard venues. It allows you to try different things and to bring different elements into the mix in terms of theatricality, lighting, and the way that you play off of each other. I’m excited to see how Persephone changes as we take it into various performing spaces.”
-Composer Christian Carey is Senior Editor at Sequenza 21 and a regular contributor to Signal to Noise and Musical America. He teaches music in the Department of Fine Arts at Rider University (Lawrenceville, New Jersey).
Fred Ho, Fanfare for the Creeping Meatball: This brief yet buoyant brass fanfare got played at the beginning of every FCM concert. But its jazz noir ambience, jocular rhythms, and even its campy “B-movie scream” (which, on Sunday night, caused unsuspecting Tanglewood fellows assembling onstage to leap out of their seats!) never wore out their welcome. New music gatherings tend to take on a somber demeanor and earnest programming needs to be leavened with a bit of humor. Ho’s piece fit the bill perfectly.
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Milton Babbitt, It Takes Twelve to Tango and No Longer Very Clear: During the Festival of Contemporary Music, Tanglewood celebrated recently deceased composer Milton Babbitt (1916-2011) with several performances in his honor. Alas, we arrived too late in the week to get to hear Fred Sherry’s rendition of the late cello composition More Melismata. But judging by Babbitt memorials earlier in 2011 at which Sherry has shared the work, we would have gladly heard it again.
It TakesTwelve to Tango (1984) was Babbitt’s contribution to Yvar Mikhashof’s tango collection. Pianist Ursula Oppens included it on her FCM solo recital on August 7th. The piece is more explicitly referential of a regular dance rhythm than is Babbitt’s usual wont; even more so than the veiled references to swing era jazz that sporadically occur throughout his catalog. Still, the piece provides plenty of twists and turns that upend the usual tango form in favor of bustling counterpoint and playful misdirection. And yes, true to the punning title’s promise, Babbitt doesn’t dispense with dodecaphony, allowing his rigorous approach to commingle with a bit of witty humor in this occasional work.
At the morning concert on Sunday, August 7th, Soprano Adrienne Pardee and a small ensemble led by conductor Stefan Asbury performed Babbitt’s No Longer Very Clear (1994), a setting of a poem by John Ashbery. This piece isn’t heard as much as some of Babbitt’s other vocal pieces: a pity, as it a thoughtful and nuanced treatment of an intriguing poem, with shimmering instrumental textures and a delicately spun vocal line. Pardee, a TCM fellow, demonstrated a lovely tone, impressive control, and rapt attention to the score’s myriad details: wide-ranging dynamics, tricky rhythms, varied articulations, and abundant chromaticism. Both she and the instrumentalists did so well that Asbury, remarking that it was, after all, a short piece, asked them to repeat it; which they did, making the work’s charms even more abundantly clear.
David Fulmer plays his Violin Concerto at FCM. Photo: Hilary Scott
David Fulmer, Violin Concerto: Written in 2010, Fulmer’s chamber concerto revels in complexity. Those who have heard his performances of the music of Brian Ferneyhough or that of his teacher Milton Babbitt, which sizzle with hyper-virtuosic playing, can readily understand such predilections. Fulmer’s performance as soloist on the Sunday morning FCM concert (on 8/7) was imbued with similar intensity.
Compositionally, it’s an abundantly promising work: but it isn’t perfect. Occasionally, one feels that a bit of crowd control might be brought to bear on the thickly scored busyness of the orchestration, to better clarify the angular counterpoint that propels the proceedings. Also, the inclusion of three keyboard instruments for one player – piano, harpsichord, and celesta – (without terribly extended parts for either of the latter two) seems an impractical choice that may limit the number of ensembles who will mount the piece. That said, Fulmer’s compositional language and performance demeanor exemplify an edginess and gutsiness notably in short supply among many of his contemporaries in the emerging composer realm.
Marie Tachouet plays the solo part in Felder's Inner Sky. Photo: Hilary Scott
David Felder, Inner Sky: Tanglewood is blessed with excellent student performers. And while there were a number of fellows who distinguished themselves on the festival, the standout for me was flutist Marie Tachouet. A member of the New Fromm Players, Tanglewood’s SEAL Team Six equivalent for contemporary music, Tachouet played on several FCM concerts. But she took her solo turn on its finale, an orchestra concert held in the evening on Sunday, August 7th.
The flutist was featured in David Felder’s Inner Sky. Composed in 1994 and substantially revised in ’99, this piece requires the soloist to perform on four flutes: piccolo, concert, alto, and bass flute. The trajectory of the piece is charted by the move from high to low flutes, which is registrally mimicked by a supporting quadraphonic electronics part that features both distressed flute samples and synthetic sounds. An “analog” surround effect is also created by an even distribution of strings and percussion across the stage.
Inner Sky is an immersive listening experience. It’s also a highly sophisticated colloquy between soloist, ensemble, and electronics; one that achieves a carefully choreographed balance of elements, both acoustic and musical: a balance that is all too rarely found in works for orchestra plus electronics. It certainly helped to have Tachouet’s sensitive performance and Robert Treviño’s fine direction of the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra.
Later this year, Inner Sky sees release in both stereophonic and surround-sound formats. I’m looking forward to checking it out again (hopefully in both versions!).
“Magical” is a pretty cheesy way to describe anything, particularly one’s time at a music festival. Yet, something – at least – special happened during yesterday’s Aspen Festival Orchestra performance of Samuel Barber’s Violin Concerto and Gustav Mahler’s Symphony no. 5. Gentle rolls of thunder began to accompany violinist Robert McDuffie’s dramatic journey through the first two movements of the Barber, growing louder as the orchestra approached the thrilling conclusion of the work. It seemed as if the weather was a presage to the ominous clamor of the Mahler, and more amazing was its harmonious transition from thunder clouds to a soothing light rain right as Festival Music Director Robert Spano reached the downbeat of the symphony’s yearning Adagietto movement.
I’ve seen many such examples of concert music and nature coming together in my first week as a student at the Aspen Music Festival. It is an honor for me to be among the accomplished, ambitious and talented musicians – professionals and students – who, every year, congregate in this mountain town to showcase and expand their abilities in music performance, conducting and composition. Though I won’t bore you all with grandiloquent, Thoreau-esque meditations on the “vibratory hum” uniting music and nature, I am excited to report on the many wonderful performances of contemporary music I will attend over the next four weeks.
The first event I went to was a recital by the superb pianist Jeremy Denk, which featured an unusual pairing of Ligeti’s Etudes for Piano and Bach’s Goldberg Variations, in that order. Almost all the other student composers here came to the concert, and we wondered if these two heavy, complex and extremely contrasting works could complement each other. Mr. Denk’s reasoning behind the program was clear enough: he said he wanted to feature what he thought were the earliest and latest “titanic” masterpieces for solo piano. Yet, we were still a little intimidated by what lay before us. To his credit, Mr. Denk’s charisma was infectious and he did a wonderful job warming up the audience to the material he was about to present.
San Francisco Community Music Center, July 20 – 23, 2011
The first sound of the festival’s Wednesday night show was, perhaps appropriately, nothing. Theresa Wong started offstage, down front, with just a microphone. She circled it in front of her face, no sound coming out of her pursed lips. Fluid looping gestures, but no vocal to be heard for perhaps two minutes. Then, a “Woo.” Silence, the mic passing back and forth. “Hoo,” silence, then another and another. Hoots and cuckoos, then a low-flutter “Wo – wo – wo – wo” for thirty seconds, then putting the mic to ear and droning (can throat sounds pass out the ear canal?), long high tones splintering off whistling multiphonics, static noise, razzes, gulps, and hums, more microphone manipulation for Doppler effects, then an episode of something close to song-singing, ending on a slow tremolo submerging into underwater warbles.
Theresa Wong stands at a deeply resonating node where a number of Bay Area new music waves converge, and is thus an emblematic artist for the Outsound Summit. Wednesday night’s all-vocal concert was titled “Face Music,” and the audience was faced with four singular solo approaches to the first instrument. Wong’s approach comes from a deep human connection to music and a direct, unaffected performance mode. When she took up her ‘cello for the second piece, even the most “abstract” sound worlds somehow evoked song-based territories. The instrument itself, when bowed, seemed to sound directly as her voice.
Aurora Josephson went even deeper during a short, ritualistic reading of John Cage’s Experiences No. 2. All in black, kneeling among candles on the floor in front of the stage, she conjured a dark and mournful atmosphere. She allowed herself long pauses between phrases, giving the listener time to savor her exquisitely precise enunciation and powerful delivery which, unamplified, rocked the room.
Joseph Rosenzweig, whose set closed the first half, delivered a choppy, harsh live sample-driven piece, a Hiss Concerto as it were, all glitchy and jarringly loud much of the time, causing the audience to jump in their seats when he’d suddenly pop a scream. His digital manipulations would seek out the hidden harmonic artifacts within his scratchy drones and, at one point, he pulled out the always useful “reverse glottal fry.”
Raising “Face Music” to its multimedia apex for the evening, bran(…)pos, aka Jake Rodriguez, erected a makeshift projection screen out of an umbrella and some diaphanous cloth, and placed it between his rig and the audience, Wizard of Oz-like. All paid attention to this Man Behind The Curtain, for his face filled the screen while wet vocal pops and kisses danced around the room from loudspeaker to loudspeaker. Cheap electronics are one of his main soundwells, and, even though the materials and visuals suggest mass violence, escalation, and propaganda, it’s all somehow delivered in a cheerfully demented style that comes off as no more threatening than a swarm of angry pixies. Eventually, after a well-crafted arc of electronic disaster movie re-enactments, bran(…)pos’s face melted from the screen (replaced by a butterfly), and Jake stepped out from behind to take his bows.
On Friday night, local composer/performer Polly Moller curated “The Art of Composition,” featuring works by Krystina Bobrowski, Andrew Raffo Dewar, Kanoko Nishi, and Gino Robair. Showcasing the huge range and robustly idiosyncratic heuristics of the Bay Area new music scene is not an easy job, but Moller’s selection cut a deep slice, if not the widest possible range (although the latter could fairly be claimed for the festival as a whole).
Mr. Robair demonstrated his centrality to many of the sub-scenes that populate the worldwide out-sound landscape, being on stage for three of the four groups and performing diverse roles with nonchalant virtuosity throughout. First, he assisted composer and instrument inventor Krystina Bobrowski in “Lift, Loft and Lull,” which employed amplified balloons as resonators for thick steel plates and long tubular bells. The first part was a slow underwater procession, with the composer blowing a mournful kelp horn while Robair did the balloonatics; the second part, with the pair playing the long tubes, gradually expanded its phrasing and language into a kaleidoscope of bongs, scrapes, rubs and singing gong-like tones. The second piece had Bobrowski moving to the Gliss Glass and Robair applying his wet fingers to a set of wine glasses.
The Gliss Glass is Bobrowski’s most complex and compelling instrument: three open-topped vessels partly filled with water, suspended on height-adjustable tripods and connected with valved tubing. Using the principle of water seeking its own level, the glasses can be struck or finger-bowed then moved up or down, causing the tones to change as the water travels among the different vessels. The resulting sounds are guaranteed to haunt the ears for days afterward, and the set provided a bang-up opening to the night.
Andrew Raffo Dewar, formerly a Bay Area stalwart (now based at the University of Alabama), is a saxophonist and composer whose Interactions Quartet has performed in San Francisco before. Robair, again on percussion, was joined by Dewar on soprano saxophone, Kyle Bruckmann on oboe and English horn, and John Shiurba on nylon-string guitar. Typically for Dewar, every new composition for the group is miles away from its predecessors in sound and form. “Strata” sounded as if impressions of Dewar’s recent jaunt to far-off Ghana had rubbed off, the slow opening moments hovering between pointillism and hocketing, all in simple pentatonic harmonies. As it gathered speed, dissonance and density — settling into a sort of pulse for the middle section (Robair and Shiurba stomping feet, ankles wrapped in bell shakers), then moving beyond a simple pulse into polymetric, panchromatic complexity — the piece stayed suspended, timeless, as if one were swimming in adjacent dimensions of streaming gossamers.
Gino Robair led his own Ensemble Aguascalientes to finish the Friday concert through a suite “based on the politically charged engravings of … Jose Guadalupe Posada.” As with many of his compositions, Robair’s conducting [see the video above, from Robair’s I, Norton workshop and concert footage @ the CAID (Detroit) and The Heaven Gallery (Chicago)] using hand cues and relying on the players’ spontaneous responses to the cues and the score, ensures that no two performances sound as kin. Shiurba was back on guitar, along with Scott Walton on bass, Joel Davel and Jim Kassis percussion, and Ms. Moller on bass flute, flute headjoint, and two sizes of ocarina. The choice of ocarina is a pivotal one in realizing Robair’s conception. “I definitely want to get away from standard tuning in this piece,” he says. “It’s all a bit unstable, pitch-wise. Which I happen to like.” The ocarina’s fragile tone and nomadic pitch —negatives in the European tradition — might be said to represent a “village” or even “revolutionary” approach (in the anti-imperialist sense), to music-making. If improvisation posits a direct-democracy alternative to the imperial composer/conductor/ensemble hierarchy, then the ocarina fires a sonic shot across the equal-temperament bow. Forgive the tortured analogies — such are the deep thoughts that Outsound concerts regularly evoke. (Besides, it’s Bulwer Lytton season.)
Kanonko Nishi’s piece (some explanation of her aims and methods may be found here), a graphic score realized by bassist Tony Dryer and guitarist IOIOI, seemed to be all about punishment of the ears, aided and abetted by a sound engineer who blasted the audience not once but four times with feedback before the thing even got started, then pegged the levels of Dryer’s droning bass-feedback section at stadium-rock levels — maybe fifteen minutes’ worth, although it went by like hours. IOIOI followed Dryer, dropping stuff on her electric guitar and banging on it occasionally, which was a little softer but more piercing and unpredictable. At least their racket drowned out the party carrying on next door. Somebody must’ve liked it — from my bunker I heard applause after it was over.
Saturday night of the Outsound Summit was dedicated to instrument makers. Co-curated by Outsound founder/quarterback Rent Romus and Edward Shocker, of the Thingamajigs group, the evening proved the maxim that the inventor is not always the most winning exponent of his or her invention. (Another point, demo’d by Walter Funk: It may not be the best idea to put a lasagna pan full of water onto a stage bustling with electric wires, computers and effects boxes, etc.) Among the presenters were new-instrument stalwarts Bart Hopkin and Terry Berlier (Her instruments are often quite beautiful sculptures). David Michalak played them in place of Ms. Berlier; unfortunately, the most impressive-looking one, a wooden dodecahedron riddled with sound-tubes and slapped with spatulas, was a sonic dud), Tom Nunn with Michalak and Stephen Baker, Brenda Hutchinson and Bob Marsh, Sasha Leitman and Walter Funk, and Sung Kim with Dan Ake. Ms. Hutchinson manipulated and sang into her long tube, enhanced by electronics and field recordings while Mr. Marsh, having donned a full-body suit covered in sliced-up water bottles, performed a pantomime to Ms. Hutchinson’s sounds that suggested Godzilla waking up to find he’s been genetically spliced with a jellyfish. It worked.
The highlight performance of the evening belonged to Tom Nunn, supported by Michalak and Baker. Mr. Nunn has been doing what he does for a very long time; he may be fairly said to be one of the granddaddies on the sonic sculpture family tree. His instruments are always a treat to look at and a delight to the ear. He favors nonharmonic, complex resonances such as are generated by metal rods and plates. His Skatchboxes generate insect and electronic sounds from mundane materials like combs, screws, and washers. Nunn debuted a new instrument on this night, a 3’ by 3’ stainless steel plate suspended by balloons in buckets and vibrated by cardboard tubes. Somehow the varying lengths of the tubes make different tones possible when rubbed along the steel. Mr. Nunn’s performing style is deeply rooted in his long, lanky body, never showing any doubt that he knows exactly what sound he wants and how to get it. The groaning sounds coming from the plate plunged the room under a mile-deep glacier, where blue echoes lightly glanced off the icy, inching walls.
Outsound.org’s New Music Summit has been around ten years, and granters like SF Friends of Chamber Music and The Zellerbach Family Foundation are just now beginning to pay attention. The programming that Outsound practices is vital in supplying fresh ideas and energy into the Bay Area’s music culture. Emerging and difficult-to-classify artists are given a forum. The value of these services cannot be overstated. Here’s to ten more years of Outsound.
Judith Berkson performing “Vor an Sicht” (Photo courtesy of Elizabeth Reddin)
