CDs, Composers, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, File Under?, S21 Concert, Video

David Smooke takes Requests

On Requests

A guest post for File Under?

Back in 2003, the incredible pianist Amy Briggs (and if you don’t know her playing, you should check out some of her performances of the David Rakowski Etudes on YouTube) was approached by the music department at U.C. Davis to engage in a residency built around the idea of new tangos for piano. As part of the project, they asked Amy to build an entire concert program of tangos, each of which needed to be no longer than three minutes. She could use completed pieces and have others write for the project, and the Davis composition faculty (including Laurie San Martin) all agreed to write new works for her and to arrange for her to record a CD of the entire concert repertoire. Amy chose me, along with several wonderful composers like Hayes Biggs, to write a new tango of no more than three minutes. She toured with these pieces for several years and the entire project is now available via Ravello Records and at Naxos.

When Amy first approached me to contribute to this project, I was both excited and quite fearful. Tangos long ago achieved the status of major cultural achievements, basically functioning as the national musical style of Argentina. As an outsider with relatively little experience of this genre I felt that there was little that I could add. At the same time, it would have been disingenuous to write a generally inspired piece and to cavalierly claim it as a tango, and I very much wanted to work with Amy and to be involved with this endeavor.

After listening to many traditional tangos for various ensembles and several experimental composers’ reinterpretations of this form, this piece began to take shape. I retain the staggered rhythm in the first half of the measure that is the most recognizable element of the traditional form, using it as an accompaniment for a simple and mournful melody that to my mind evokes the mood of the dance. The piece then presents variations on this melody. Perhaps more important than these purely musical impetuses was my attempt to portray the various aspects of the tango itself as though constantly refracting through the emotions of the dancers and the scene itself as viewed by the participants and audience. For this reason, Requests continually presents sudden shifts in mood and affect as the perspective jumps from the internal to the external and between the various perspectives on each level.

Since I knew I was writing for an astonishingly virtuosic player, as I composed this piece I allowed myself to be pulled constantly towards ever-greater feats of pianism, making this short work very daunting for most players. I’m thrilled that ACME has chosen to present Requests on the Sequenza21/MNMP concert and look forward to hearing all the pieces at Joe’s Pub this week.

– David Smooke chairs the music theory program at Peabody. He blogs regularly at NewMusicBox and plays a mean toy piano.

by Christian Carey
Composers, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, File Under?, New York, S21 Concert

Sam Nichols Talks Refuge

Sam Nichols teaches at UC Davis. His string quartet ‘Refuge’ is on the Sequenza 21/MNMP Concert this coming Tuesday (7PM at Joe’s Pub in NYC. Did we mention it’s free?).

In 2009 the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble asked me to write a string quartet. I was happy, for a number of reasons, but mostly because they bring a tremendous amount of oomph to any project. At the time, though, I was working on another piece, a trio, that was giving me a lot of trouble. Make that: a LOT of trouble. Pounding my head against the wall trouble, breaking pencils in half trouble, putting in an accent and then taking it out again trouble. Working on this trio was taking up a lot of time, and I had blown past the deadline. Meanwhile, the deadline for the new string quartet was approaching. So, I set aside the trio—it was already late, and I seemed to be stuck—and started the quartet. I didn’t have a lot of time, about six weeks (and I usually write pretty slowly; there’s usually a fair amount of moving down blind alleys, and retracing my steps sort of thing), and so there was a certain amount of adrenaline involved: I was already mired in one stalled-out project; I really didn’t want that to snowball into an unmanageable situation, where EVERYTHING I was writing was late. Yikes.

The Left Coast were going to play Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge; they asked me to design my string quartet as a sort of companion piece to the Beethoven. This was slightly terrifying—okay, more than slightly. But I tried to ignore that, and started to work. The first thing I decided was: I really couldn’t see my way clear to writing a fugue. But I thought it might be fun to take some of the basic ideas of fugal writing, twist them around, and use that as a jumping-off point. So, for example, instead of writing a traditional contrapuntal texture, I created a blurred, out-of-focus unison line that’s been twisted and tweaked. The four instruments are sometimes playing the same tune, but are ornamenting it differently, or are playing it at slightly different speeds. This results in a rough sort of do-it-yourself canon—anything but strict—where the lines are sometimes piled up very closely, and at other times are separated from each other quite dramatically.

The title, Refuge, started out as a pun. I often use a temporary working title, and once I figure out what I’m doing, I might throw the first title away, and replace it with something better suited to the piece. So, in quickly slapping a title on my string-quartet-in-progress, I chose “refuge:” not a fugue (or “fuge,” to revert to Beethoven’s language), but a re-imagining of fugue/fuge: re-fugue, or re-fuge. And for a few weeks, I left it at that.

But as I wrote the music, a simpler interpretation of the title started to appear. The piece is very episodic: just as one musical structure is established, it’s replaced with another. It’s almost like an Etch-A-Sketch; an image emerges, but then it’s (sometimes quite violently) shaken up and wiped clean. So, over and over, the piece seems to move toward quieter, restful episodes: little in-between bits of music that, until they’re disrupted, offer moments of calm. This pattern, of moving through active, violent sections (including passages which seem to bristle with hostility) toward calmer havens, became one of the basic ideas of the piece. Maybe the title exerted a sort of pull on the music? Or maybe it was a coincidence. Now, two years later, I can see that writing this piece offered me a kind of refuge. It allowed me to escape from the trio I had been writing (which I eventually returned to and finished). But in a larger sense, it helped me loosen up, and find a more personal way of putting together a piece.

by Christian Carey
Composers, Contemporary Classical, File Under?, New York, S21 Concert

Rob Deemer’s Grand Dragon

Rob Deemer

Composer Rob Deemer teaches at SUNY Fredonia. He blogs regularly at NewMusicBox; he’s also a frequent contributor to Sequenza 21. The presenters enjoyed his whole string quartet, but were running short on program time. He was kind enough to consent to our request to present an excerpt as part of next week’s Sequenza 21/MNMP Concert (Oct. 25 at 7 PM at Joe’s Pub).

I’ve heard many composers say that the time directly after they finish their studies is one of the most important periods in their career when they finally feel comfortable to experiment, free from the pressures of being accepted by their peers and instructors. I found myself in that exact position in the two years between finishing my degree at the University of Texas and landing my current position at SUNY Fredonia. During that time, I lived and taught in Oklahoma, and the relative seclusion I had while working there allowed me to dig into some very primal concepts that I hadn’t dreamt of writing about up to that point – death and politics being two of them.

When the MacArthur Quartet at the University of Oklahoma asked me to write a string quartet, I drew upon the paintings of Julie Speed for inspiration. A surrealist painter based in Austin, Texas whose works have been shown throughout the world, Julie’s unique ability to create images that were at once recognizable and pleasantly disturbing had interested me for some time and when the opportunity presented itself to compose a work based on her paintings, I jumped at the chance and created a four-movement work Speedvisions. The individual movements are general interpretations of each painting, and while the other three movements Tea, Military Science, and Diminuendo have been received well in performances, the second movement of the work that ACME will be performing Tuesday evening has always garnered the most attention.

The Grand Dragon Crossing the River Styx on His Way to Hell is glorious in its directness and pulls no punches with its subject matter. With a nod towards Charles Ives, I have interweaved several slave and protest songs (including Hallelujah – I’m A-Travelin’ and I’m on My Way to the Freedom Land) together with a slave owner’s song (Run, N___, Run) and an ostinato pattern fashioned from We Shall Overcome. The movement is one of the most visceral of my works, but with enough tongue in the cheek to not become overbearing.

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The Sequenza 21 Concert is free.

October 25 at 7 PM

Joe’s Pub in NYC

Tickets and Tables are still available by phone.

Call 212.539.8778 to make your reservation

by Christian Carey
Contemporary Classical

Merry Christmas, Glassiacs

Sure, you’ve seen the mesmerizing Godfrey Reggio film KOYAANISQATSI: Life Out of Balance with its breathtaking music by Philip Glass. Maybe, several times. But, you’ve never seen it projected on a huge screen above the Avery Fisher Hall stage while the New York Philharmonic plays the haunting Glass score live.

Now you can. On November 2-3, the NYPhil, Philip Glass, and the Philip Glass Ensemble and the Collegiate Chorale will be doing just that in an extraordinary once–okay, twice–in a lifetime event. The show starts both nights at 7:30.

Equal parts documentary, tone poem and visual concert, this revolutionary 1982 film portrays the relationship between humans, nature and technology. Here’s a preview of coming attractions:

by Jerry Bowles
Chamber Music, Opportunities, Performers, Premieres

That Pioneering Spirit

DZ4: Alicia Lee, Brad Balliett, Alma Liebrecht, Arthur Sato

 

Watching the beginning of a new ensemble is always exciting.  But there’s a difference between a group that sets up camp in known territory — say, in the mineral-rich lands of string quartet literature, or in the breadbasket of Pierrot — and a group that strikes out for the wilderness, to make a repertoire where there had been none.

In the last year, I’ve seen the launch of two groups with this mission.   The Deviant Septet went to that place Stravinsky discovered in “L’histoire du Soldat” but that was never settled by others — clarinet, trumpet, trombone, bass, bassoon, violin, percussion.  They added two new pieces, by Ruben Naeff and Sefan Freund, at their incredibly fun inaugural concert in May.  By next May there will 12 more by 12 new composers, all based on Stockhausen’s Tierkreis.

The DZ4 wind quartet (that’s oboe, clarinet, bassoon, horn) has a similar mission, to build a repertoire from scratch through projects that involve many composers tackling similar projects.  Their debut concert, “One Hot Minute,” featured 20 one-minute compositions by 20 different composers (I got to be one, and was much rewarded by their terrific musicianship and heartfelt enthusiasm).  This Friday they’ll perform their second project, “The Well-Tempered DZ4,” in which 24 composers each take on a different minor or major key.

These groups are doing something that I, especially as a composer, find really inspiring — they’re committing to an unknown music.  Composers, go write for them!  They’re stellar players, great to work with; check out the concert and say hi.

 

The Well-Tempered DZ4
Friday October 21st, 2011
10:15pm
Greenwich House
46 Barrow Street, New York
C Major- Jacob Garchik
A Minor- Bradley Detrick
G Major- Karl Kramer
E Minor- Lauren Winterbottom
D Major- Pauline Kim
B Minor- Jonathan Russell
A Major- Evan Premo
F# Minor- Gareth Flowers
E Major- Eric Wubbels
C# Minor- Jane Antonia Cornish
B Major- James Blachly
G# Minor- Ted Hearne
F# Major- Mohammed Fairouz
Eb Minor- Caleb Burhans
Db Major- Mike Block
Bb Minor- David Byrd-Marrow
Ab Major- Charlie Porter
F Minor- Glenn Cornett
Eb Major- Nathan Burke
C Minor- Matt McBane
Bb Major- Ryan Carter
G Minor- Ken Thomson
F Major- Zachary Detrick
D Minor- Ryan Francis

by Elliot Cole
Chamber Music, Composers, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, New York

The Vanishing Pavilions Redux

We’ve profiled and interviewed composer Michael Hersch before here at S21. Unlike a lot of composers who lineage and influences I get pretty easily, In Hersch’s case there’s something coming from a place that I don’t get. And I tell you now, that’s a good thing. There isn’t a big grab bag of the latest tricks and fashions; the style could almost be called traditionalist. Yet there’s something at work that is so “interior”, an almost hermetic voice that owes nothing to anyone but the composer himself, that makes for a slightly unsettling but endlessly fascinating listen.

And tonight, for the first time since 2001, Michael Hersch himself is coming to NYC to play his own work. His recording of his sprawling, 2-hour piano work from 2005, The Vanishing Pavilions, was pretty highly praised here on its release; tonight Hersch plays his new 1-hour version, at Merkin Hall (8pm, details & tickets here), on a concert with his After Hölderlin’s ‘Hälfte des Lebens’ for viola and cello, played by the always-marvelous Miranda Cuckson and  Julia Bruskin (this piece was premiered at a memorial concert held inside the Pantheon in Rome, just two months after September 11, 2001).

Here’s a small taste of The Vanishing Pavilions, Hersch playing movement 27 of the large version:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=47rqUZ_6k2E[/youtube]

by Steve Layton
Chamber Music, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, File Under?, New York, S21 Concert

Guest post: James Stephenson

James Stephenson


With just one week to go before the Sequenza 21/MNMP Concert, we’re all very excited. Music is being rehearsed, friends and loved ones have been invited, and, for some from out of town, travel plans have been made for a visit to New York. But one composer will be making a particularly long journey to hear the concert. James Stephenson is joining us from the United Kingdom. He tells us more in the following eloquent essay.

When my duo Oracle Night is performed at the Sequenza 21 / MNMP concert on 25 October, it will be my first performance outside Europe.  A work being played overseas – on another continent even – means flights, hotels, jetlag, and – worst of all – funding applications.  This comes as quite a shock to someone who is used to either conducting my own works or, at most, hopping on a train and speeding up or down the (rather small) British Isles for a couple of hours to go and watch a performance.

Writing funding applications might not be the most enjoyable way I can think of to pass a Saturday afternoon, but it does make you reflect on things. After all, as composers it’s not very often that we ask ourselves questions such as “what will you gain from this experience in terms of professional development?” let alone draw up a detailed budget. But in the never-ending quest for the next performance and the next commission, how often do we really think about composing as a career with a plan and a trajectory?

And so, whilst trying not to explicitly mention how much I wanted an autumn holiday in the Big Apple, I filled in my funding applications with reflective paragraphs about exposure and widening my profile, about networks and contacts, about the creative growth and technical development which will surely come from working with such high calibre musicians. However, by the end of it I realised that there was something else I was overlooking, and though the funding agencies might not be too impressed, it is nonetheless a thing of vital importance for the 21st Century composer.

That thing, of course, is the Internet. I am old enough to remember the days before I had my first email account, before we had dial-up internet access at home. But only just – the World Wide Web has certainly pervaded most of my adult life, and I count myself amongst the first generation of composers where the accessibility of information and communication which the Internet brought about has opened up literally a world of influences for each and every one of us. Oracle Night, as an example, makes use of Scottish and Japanese influences. Now it happens that I have visited both countries, but nonetheless the difference between having to travel somewhere to experience indigenous and traditional music as opposed to firing up your web browser and typing in a Google search is remarkable indeed. Every type of music imaginable is at our fingertips – to hear, to read, to analyse and to internalise and incorporate into our own output. And of course, I would never have seen a call for works for this performance if I couldn’t access the Sequenza 21 website from my desk in Manchester.

But beyond information, there is the communication aspect of the web: the social network. My greatest hope for my trip to New York actually isn’t that I will meet people who could be inspiring, influential or otherwise useful contacts. What I’m actually hoping for is to meet as many as possible of the people I know through facebook, twitter, websites and email discussions. A number of musicians who I greatly respect live on the Eastern seaboard – some old friends and collaborators, but many who I’ve only met through the internet, and the chance to meet them, argue with them, buy them a drink and put the world (of music, at least) to rights, that’s what I’m looking forward to most of all.

As a tool for bringing composers and contemporary performers together, as well, the web has opened up unimaginable avenues in recent years. Beyond the websites, blogs and tweets, there’s the interactivity of forums and facebook groups, some of which create rich opportunities for the web-inclined composer (I am writing for an ensemble in continental Europe at the moment, who I met through facebook earlier in the year after they saw a YouTube video of my oboe quartet). What a remarkable thing it is to meet a few of these people, with whom you have exchanged ideas, challenged and supported each other – with whom only 20 years ago you could never in a lifetime have shared a conversation.

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The Sequenza 21 Concert is free.

October 25 at 7 PM

Joe’s Pub in NYC

Tickets and Tables are still available by phone.

Call 212.539.8778 to make your reservation

by Christian Carey
Contemporary Classical

A Gifted Guest and Works by Familiar Faces

The University of Michigan’s new music scene gained a full head of steam leading into this weekend’s Fall Recess with an appearance by Guest Artist Kayako Matsunaga and the Michigan Chamber Players’ first concert of the season. Ms. Matsunaga is an experienced new music pianist from Japan who was invited to talk to and perform for the Composition Department here at Michigan by Bright Sheng, with whom she has collaborated. The recital she delivered last Thursday featured work by many older Japanese composers alongside a piece by Mr. Sheng, Toru Takemistu and two University of Michigan students: Justin Aftab and Roger Zare. Yesterday’s Michigan Chamber Players concert featured work by four faculty composers: Paul Schoenfield, Stephen Rush, Michael Daughtery and Bright Sheng, again.

I am not extremely well versed in the work of contemporary Japanese composers, so I was very interested in what Ms. Matsunaga had to share with us, not only with her playing, but in her pre-concert lecture, as well. Essentially, she discussed and played music by Japanese composers who are heavily influenced by John Cage. However, what each composer’s work drew from Cage differed wildly. The first work, Toshi Ichiyanagi’s Inexhaustible Fountain, begins by repeatedly arpeggiating a three-note sonority from which two more complicated melodic ideas emerge – chordal tremolos that sounded like a riffing electric guitar and a linear passage denoted strongly by its exposed, octave doubling. These sonic characters converse with increasing bravado and drama as the piece progresses, yet, as enjoyable as the music is, its connection to Cage is unclear.

Such was not the case with the second work on the program – Yori-Aki Matsudaira’s Blending – insofar as it was clearly based on Cage-esque chance procedures. The piece is a series of very short, ‘blended’ quotations (he literally mixed the music of Stravinsky and Satie, for example, to create a new snippet of music), which are arranged by chance, leaving some to repeat unexpectedly and others to pass through the audience’s ears only once. To nail the Cage reference even more securely, one of the ‘blended’ pieces is Music of Changes. With that exposition taken care of, the piece is a little hard to listen to because none of the ideas connect, and few are transformed. Even hearing the Satie/Stravinsky nuggets change as they repeat, it is difficult to draw any meaning from the transformation. A similar diagnosis can be drawn on the following piece – Michiharu Matsunaga’s Meditation X – because it cycles through disparate ideas similarly to Blending. However, the same handful of figures returns, and becomes more ordered (though still rather heterogeneous) as time passes resulting in a more meaningful listening experience for me than Blending.

(more…)

by Garrett Schumann
Concerts, File Under?, New York, S21 Concert

Guest post: Hayes Biggs

Hayes Biggs is an outstanding composer, vocalist, copyist, and longtime instructor at Manhattan School of Music. I was delighted when he agreed to help us judge the call for scores for the Sequenza 21/MNMP Concert (which will be on Oct. 25 at 7 PM at Joe’s Pub in NYC). The concert will close with the final movement from Hayes’s String Quartet, a work he discusses in the following post.

If ever a piece required my patience as it slowly taught me what it needed to do and be, it was my String Quartet: O Sapientia /Steal Away. My first sketches for it date from 1996, but it was not completed until 2004. This eight-year span of course included numerous interruptions of various sorts, including time on the back burner while other more immediately pressing projects got done. Even in rare moments of front-burner status I struggled with it, but I remain as proud of this work as of anything I’ve ever composed. The Avalon String Quartet premiered it in 2006 and subsequently recorded it for the Albany label.

The title refers to the quartet’s two main sources of material: my Advent motet for unaccompanied voices, O Sapientia, composed in 1995, and the African-American spiritual Steal Away. It is the latter that is the focus of the third and final movement, the one that will be heard at Joe’s Pub on October 25.  It is in two parts played without interruption: an Epigraph—simply a straightforward presentation of the melody of the spiritual—followed by an extended free Fantasia on that melody.

The quartet bears an overall dedication to my wife, Susan Orzel-Biggs, but this movement carries a separate one in memory of my friend, teacher and mentor, Tony Lee Garner (1942-1998). He was the choral director at Southwestern at Memphis (now Rhodes College), as well as an accomplished singer, actor and director, and he taught me as much about the joys and responsibilities of being an artist as anyone I have ever known. As a freshman member of the Southwestern Singers in the spring of 1976 I sang in a program of American music under Tony’s direction that included William Dawson’s beautiful arrangement of Steal Away. The printed key of that arrangement is F major, but Tony liked the way the choir sounded with it transposed up a half step, so in this movement the tune is always heard in the key of G-flat major.

________

The Sequenza 21 Concert is free.

Tickets and Tables are still available by phone.

Call 212.539.8778 to make your reservation

by Christian Carey
Contemporary Classical

BAM Next Wave Festival: DBR and friends perform a Symphony for the Dance Floor

The BAM Next Wave Festival is upon us right now. There are a ton of exciting things lined up, including what appears to be a thrilling multi-media extravaganza from violinist DBR. Behold: Symphony for the Dance Floor!

 

Known for bringing audiences to their feet with sonic collages of classical, pop and hip-hop sounds, DBR ushers the concert hall and dance club into the theater with Symphony for the Dance Floor.  In an attempt to homogenize all art forms on one stage, it combines exhilarating music, soulful dance, and photographic artistry, all within a theatrical setting, most notably, in the use of on-stage seating.  “Symphony for the Dance Floor speaks to an equality between concert hall and dance club traditions,” explains DBR.  “Growing up in South Florida, I went to school, I played in the orchestra, I danced in clubs.  It was part of the culture   and of the times.  So to me,  they’re all equal.” Centered around the shrieking, singing, and seduction of DBR’s violin playing, the production is augmented with masterful collaborations including: raw, uncompromising photography and video by Jonathan Mannion (best known for his soul bearing portraits of hip-hop icons  Jay-Z, Lauryn Hill, Mos Def and Eminem); choreography by Millicent Johnnie (former resident choreographer of Urban Bush Women); ebullient live dancing; bombastic laptop/turntable soundscapes; emceeing by actor/rapper Lord Jamar (best known for his role    on HBO’s Oz); and the direction of D.J. Mendel. “We’ve created a lovely environment  for the music, dancing, and audience to all coexist in,” explains  DBR.  “A composer, a DJ and dancers can have a  conversation all under the watchful eye of a photographer.  In my world, the last bastion of democracy just might be the concert stage.”

I was lucky enough to ask DBR a few questions about the project:

Symphony for the Dance Floor is a commission from the BAM Next Wave Festival. What did the festival ask you to create, and how do you feel this project contributes to the “next wave” of art to come?

DBR: The festival did not ask me to create anything, specifically, rather I was asked to simply present an idea for a full-evening work. This is the third commission from BAM, and the brilliant and ever-supportive, Joe Melillo, and we have a very gracious and trusting relationship. When I told him my idea for this work, we were both excited by what it could mean for our work, my music, and his audiences. I’m sure how my work contributes to any ideas on art, other than to say, I’m fortunate to have developed a loyal and supportive audience for my work, and a small community of artists to help me develop, perform, and express it.

Symphony for the Dance Floor is about an event during which the concert hall and the dance hall collide. Is there a specific audience you hope the show will reach?

DBR: I think this work is designed for both classical and club audiences. It’s chamber music and chamber dancing. There are wonderful photographs and video installations, and provocative lighting design and costumes. The score is fully reflective of my interests at this time, and include works for violin and electronics, and songs for voice, piano, and violin. I think in today’s climate and ways of communicating, audiences are diverse and highly varied. And they’re also savvy about where they go and what they listen to. My audience, I think, has an age-range of 7-70 years-old, and it seems that many artists have similarly diverse audiences with sophisticated, broad tastes.

This project is about music’s relationship with photography, film, choreography, and lights. All of these things scream Theater! Can you talk a little bit about your love of theatrics?

DBR: I do love the theater, but I wouldn’t label that a love of theatrics. Laurie Anderson’s work has had as much of an influence on my work as  The Wooster Group. I spent nearly a decade working closely with Bill T. Jones, and as his Music Director, I was fortunate enough to be privy to his process of creation, much of which is a brilliant use of the theater, well beyond dance and choreographic elements. Tim Fain, the violinist, recently produced a work called Portals, and it’s a stunning work that uses film, dance, and technology in a very sincere, honest, and fluid way. As a musician, I think Tim is a far more accomplished violinist than I am, but as performance artists, we both have something unique and relevant to offer our audiences, in our individual use of technology. In this, more artists will be able to express the depths of their creativity, in more varied and resourceful ways, using technology to give new perspectives on the old ideas of self-expression.

What are the inspirations for the music in this show? Is the music originating more from the classical spectrum or more from the club?

DBR: I don’t really separate or think about music in that way. One of the works in the piece, called Solo, is for solo violin. It was composed as a dance work for the choreographer/dancer Emily Berry. Other than modest amplification, it’s a work that exists on record, on-line, in the dance world, and now in Symphony for the Dance Floor. As a composer, I generally create the best music that I can for the instruments that I have, and then decide the context of their presentation. Nico Muhly raised the many problems associated with using recorded works by orchestras and other large ensembles, and he was right in that, generally speaking, as an industry, we are limiting the scope and reach of our work as composers by not allowing a more full use of those, dreaded, “archival recordings”. I had hoped to be able to include actual samples of my orchestra work in this piece, but alas, I couldn’t get the licenses for their use. We are in talks to have the Symphony for the Dance Floor score transcribed for performances with chamber orchestras, and I’ll be re-imagining some of the purely electronic works for acoustic instruments. There are so many artists and ensembles doing this, it’s become common-hand for the work of composers. But there’s an entire new field of work waiting for composers where we can use recordings of our music in performance.

Going to a concert is generally about sitting and being entertained. This project, however, is about music that “wants to dance” and “wants to move.” Do you want the audience to be enraptured from their seats or do you want them to feel so inspired they get up and dance?

DBR: Well, some of the concerts I go to don’t have seats! But I understand your point. We have audiences sitting on the stage, and some of them have begun to dance [with me!] during the show. We had a technical glitch in Arizona, and in having to buy some time for the crew to fix it, I invited anyone to dance on stage with me. A young woman took of her shoes, and started a duet with me, that quickly grew to a trio when her friend decided to join us. They weren’t professional dancers, just dedicated members of the audience that night. And we danced, and we danced for everyone there as they fixed that glitch. It was only a few minutes, but in many ways, that moment was emblematic of what I’m wanting to achieve in this work. That the dance floor, the concert hall, becomes the last bastion of democracy where all of us, composers, dancers, and audience, are all equal, are all seen and heard, and share in a moment of grace, humility, and humanity. I’d like the audience to determine whatever it is they need to feel. Just feel something. I remind myself to just feel something everyday.

Check it out and get your groove on!

by Tema Watstein