Contemporary Classical, File Under?

On Brains, Babbitt, and the End of the Year

Last Saturday night I saw a concert that paired, more closely than any before, technology with the living composer. The debut performances of the MiND (Music in Neural Dimensions) Ensemble at the University of Michigan this weekend left its audience in awe as the performers used “advanced neurofeedback technology” in conjunction with live electronics to produce an evening of music controlled – literally – by their brain activity. Propelled by its uncharted level of novelty, the concert was a dramatic exploration of music’s relationship with our mind and spirit unified but a spirit of interactivity that extended beyond the neurofeedback to audience participation and elegant live electronics.

MiND is made up of graduate composers David Biedenbender, Suby Raman and Sam Richards along with Robert Alexander, Dan Charette, Laura Gaines and Annlie Huang. Unlike most contemporary music ensembles where composers often work behind the scenes, Mr. Biedenbender, Mr. Raman and Mr. Richards participated actively in the performance as instrumentalists and narrators. Given that their instrumental prowess was limited, the pure musical elements were simple and serene, if not a little cheesy at times. This trance-like character, however, did not detract from the evening’s overall affect, which used meditations led by local T’ai Chi Master Washentha Young to set a tone of connectedness between mind, body and spirit.

The performance’s zen-like mien was a wise creative choice because beating the audience over the head with the science of everything would have desiccated the performance like overcooked chicken. To be honest, it was not always clear how or what part of the music was being influenced by the neurofeedback at any given point. Though on multiple occasions the MiND musicians explained the types of brain data they were using to alter the music, it was not possible to completely discern how much of what we were hearing was live and pre-recorded.

This lack of transparency rested in the primitive quality of the neurofeedback devices, or “brain hats” as the MiND Ensemble members called them. In fact, Friday and Saturday’s performances were as important to the world of music as they were to the scientific research of the brain. I couldn’t resist relating the concert’s equitable significance to science and music drew me to Milton Babbitt’s famous article, Who Cares If You Listen? (I prefer his original title, The Composer as Specialist) wherein the late champion of total serialism compares the state of contemporary music – in 1958 – to the social standing advanced mathematics and science.

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by Garrett Schumann
Contemporary Classical

The New Synthetists

There’s something happening here.  What it is has become a bit clearer (to me, at least) with the simultaneous arrival on my desk of new CDs by Todd Reynolds, the Kronos Quartet, the Now Ensemble and Build. Listened to back to back, ther family kinship is easily recognized. They have lots of cousins out there in the marketplace already and each month brings new examples.  So, what’s happening here?  Is it a new…sound? Impulse? Musical category? Dare we call it a “movement?”

But, wait, let’s back up for a moment.  There hasn’t been a major new music movement since minimalism and, let’s face it, those cats are getting a little gray around the whiskers. For the past few decades, “contemporary classical” (our favorite oxymoron) has been pretty much a free-for-all. Even more so since the Internet came along and provided an inexpensive distribution platform.  There have been only a relative handful of composers who have broken through to the commerical mainstream–spirtualists like Arvo Part, John Taverner, Eric Whitacre, Morton Lauridsen, world travelers like Osvaldo Golijov and Tan Dun, new romantics like Aaron Jay Kernis, flavor of the months like Nico Muhly.  But, what they have in common is that the music they create has little in common with each other.

Not so, the new…what shall we call them?  Let’s borrow a word from the post-impressionists who wanted to distinguish themselves from the original impressionists:  synthetism.  The New Synthetists are all searching for the same Holy Grail:  a blend of classical, rock, electronics, pop and world music that is both serious and fun and will build an audience for the future. They are mostly young, conservatory-trained musicians and composers, and they frequently work in collectives designed to bring players and composers–quite often they are both–together. What they write and play is mainly a new form of chamber music that is often amplified, played on “hybrid” instruments, and has a contagious melody, or hook, and a backbeat you can’t lose.  It is music designed for people who grew up on rock and is designed to sound as good in a roadhouse beer joint as in a concert hall.

Many of the Synthetists are entrepreneurs and marketers and their godparents are the Bang on a Can founders–David Lang, Michael Gordon, Julia Wolfe–who realized many years ago that if they wanted to hear their music played they were going to have to build the production and marketing infrastructure to do it themselves.  Basically, BOAC succeeded by working around the record company/concert hall music establishment.  That is the model many of the new kids want to take.  The “hot” new record label–New Amsterdam, founded three years ago by composer Judd Greenstein and members of the Now Ensemble–describes itself as:  “…a non-profit-model record label and artists’ service organization that supports the public’s engagement with new music by composers and performers whose work grows from the fertile ground between genres.”

This sort of “between genre” music is frequenty played by established supergroups like Ethel, eighth blackbird, Alarm Will Sound and Kronos Quartet, which has been plundering sounds from the Third World for nearly 40 years now and always seems to be where the action is. It is played even more regularly by So Percussion, Now Ensemble, Newspeak, Icebreaker, JACK Quartet, Chiara Quartet, Victoire, Build and many others.

Its composers mainly belong to the past two generations although they seem to have absorbed all of music history and quote from it liberally. The latest generation to emerge–musicians centered around New Amsterdam Records and the Estatic Festival–includes composers like Missy Mazzoli, Judd Greenstein, Jefferson Friedman, Bobby Previte, Darcy James Argue, William Brittele, Matt McBane,  Sara Kirkland Snider.  The mostly older and longer established generation is more connected to the Bang on a Can/Cantaloupe/Innova/Ethel bloodline and includes Caleb Burhams, Neil Rolnick, Phil Kline, Tristan Perich, Evan Ziporyn and Todd Reynolds.  Especially Reynolds.

The ageless (try to find it in his bio) Todd Reynolds is the Eric Clapton of the electronically souped up violin. As a founder of Ethel in 1998 and a soloist, he has been one of–if not the–driving force behind the growth of synthetism.  His debut 2CD album Outerborough (Innova) is a dazzling display of genre-bending music and individual virtuosity. CD1 is devoted to Reynolds’ own compositions; CD2 contains pieces by other composers, including David T. Little, Phil Kline, Michael Gordon, and the Books’ Nick Zammuto.  Click on the first cut on CD1–Transamerica–and you immediately find yourself dancing down trip-hop lane as Reynolds lays some magic riffs over a groove from beatboxer Kid Beyond. It only gets better. Smoking, contagious, make up your own adjective. Outerborough is Reynolds’ Layla.

The same sense of contagious, genre-bending optimism fills the room when you cue up the opening track of the Now Ensemble’s sophomore album Awake. Judd Greenstein’s Change opens the set with a seductive and insistent flute line that is gradually grabbed and mashed up by the entire ensemble. If you’re not smiling by the end, try Prozac.  Patrick Burke’s Awake melds Javanese gamelan music with Western harmonic and formal techniques and builds to a frenetic ending. In a piece titled Burst, guitarist/composer Mark Dancigers asks the age-old musical question: What would happen if you melded the pentatonic guitar patterns of Ali “Farka” Touré with the counterpoint of Mozart?   The answer, of course, is synthetism.

Build’s second album–Place is a more demanding and coherent effort which is to be expected since all of the pieces were written by the violinist/composer Matt McBane. McBane’s writing, and the band’s playing, have both gotten a lot tighter since their debut EP. McBane uses not only the group’s standard instrumentation of violin, cello, piano, bass and drums, but also a 3-part trio for cello, piano and drums (Swelter); and a quintet (Anchor) that uses extensive arco bass, and vibraphone and concert bass drum instead of a drum set. The kickass piece on the album is called Cleave in which what sounds like a siren drone floats above a simple, repeated piano line and a funereal march on the drums.

Finally, for now anyway, there is the venerable Kronos Quartet’s musicial tsunami Uniko (Ondine), a seven-part work by the Finnish composer/amplified accordian virtuoso Kimmo Pohjonen and percussionist/sampling guru Samuli Kosminen. (If Todd Reynolds is the Clapton of the souped up fiddle; Pohjonen is the Hendrix of the souped up accordian.) The piece was premiered at the Helsinki Festival in 2004 and has been performed by Kronos and its composers several times since but it has just now made it to a recording, mixed BTW by Bjork’s producer Valgeir Sigurðsson. (Are those old dudes in the Kronos cool or what?) You have to hear Uniko to believe it but imagine that Phil Spector exploded over the North Atlantic and sent a 90-foot wall of sound hurtling toward Brooklyn.  I don’t know what that means either but let’s keep going.

While there is a lot of stylistic variation in how each of the musicians and composers mentioned here write and play music, they are bound together by a common ambition to redefine “classical” music for the 21st century by speaking to new audiences in a language they understand.  The infrastructure is coming together.  Bridges are being built.  Great music is being created and heard.  I have not been this optimistic about new music’s future in a long time.

Note: I made a few edits to correct a couple of sloppy facts pointed out by Matt Marks in the comments.

by Jerry Bowles
Contemporary Classical

No Exit

Life is about conflict, and so is opera. And what could be a more dramatic subject than the French Revolution when keeping your head wasn’t an abstract issue, but a life and death one. Francis Poulenc‘s 3-act grand opera Dialogues des Carmelites (1953-56) was acclaimed as a masterpiece at its 1957 La Scala premiere, and it’s easy to see why. It gets at the heart and soul of its subject through the person of a high strung girl from a rich family, Blanche de la Force, who decides to become a Carmelite nun to escape life, and her internal revolution – or enlightenment–from not knowing who she is or what she wants, to full knowledge and decisive action–is a perfect match for the external one. The inevitable is set in motion.

Why inevitable? Because from the first note to the last the forces of history drive the piece forward and, in Poulenc’s very Catholic view, God has preordained the outcome. None of this would matter if the  music failed to make Georges Bernanos’ fine book and its characters come alive, and come alive they do, in an extremely varied yet conversational style not unlike that of the Debussy of Pelleas (1893-95, 1901-02). Dialogues is also the biggest installment in Poulenc’s series of sacred works, from the chorus only Litanies a La Vierge Noire (1936), to the chorus with large orchestra Stabat Mater (1950), and Gloria (1959), which an expert cast delivered here with power and point.

The role of Blanche, whose mood swings are all over the place–one moment she’s impulsive, the next calm, scared to death, childlike, sincere–can’t be easy, but soprano Sarah Meltzer, in one of several roles not doubled here, made these aspects fuse, her delivery solid, varied, her technique secure. The role of her best friend Sister Constance who’s cheerful, but not shallow, was superbly sung by light soprano/ soubrette  Elise Kennedy, her clear as a bell tone, diminutive stature and strong stage presence a welcome contrast to Meltzer’s, and the rest of the cast in this great but largely dark piece. (more…)

by Michael McDonagh
Contemporary Classical

Free Workspace for 8 NYC-Based Composers

Exploring the Metropolis, an organization that helps  performing artists get workspace, administers  a 3-month musicians’ residency for composers based in NYC.   Composers who are selected receive three months of free workspace at a cultural or community facility and a $1,000 stipend.  This year, the organization is expanding the program to 8 NYC-based composers and four facilities in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens.

Heading into its third year, the Con Edison Musicians’ Residency: Composition Program serves three constituencies: composers, who get consistent, long-term, private creative space; host cultural facilities, who fill underused space and also present the composer in a public program; and, the community, which  is invited to at least one free program – a master class, an opera-in-progress, etc.   All composers must complete one public program in cooperation with the host facility

If you’re a composer and this sounds like something you’d like to do, you’re invited to apply.  The guidelines and online application are here.

by Jerry Bowles
Contemporary Classical

The Premiere of Bernard Rands’s VINCENT: Operatic Meditations on the Life of An Artist

It is a dangerous business to write new operas, but equally thrilling to produce them. Bernard Rands’s VINCENT, a work exploring the life and art of Vincent van Gogh, was premiered last Friday April 8 and 9 at the Musical Arts Center of Indiana University in Bloomington. Two other performances are scheduled for next April 15 and 16. The production was a major success for the university’s Jacobs School of Music, offering to the world something for which it is uniquely suited. A major center for musical performance and research, the Jacobs school has an unmatched capability for producing and testing new works with very high production values.  Even though the School has not embraced this role in a regular manner, its trajectory has been distinguished by ambitious productions of new works and collegiate premieres. The list includes the famous microtonal operas of MacArthur-award winner John Eaton (Danton and Robespierre, The Cry of Clytemnestra, The Tempest); the collegiate premieres of John Corigliano’s The Ghosts of Versailles, William Bolcom’s A View from the Bridge, and John Adams’s Nixon in China. (I still think that their airplane arrival in the first scene of Nixon is the best ever….). Besides the main stage productions in the Musical Arts Center, the School has presented collegiate premieres of Adams’s opera-oratorio El Niño, and Osvaldo Golijov’s Ainadamar, along with the premiere of Gabriela Ortiz’s video-opera ¡Unicamente la verdad!.

The premiere of Vincent represented another kind of breakthrough for the Jacobs School Opera Theater.  Known for the size of its stage and for lavish scenery built in its own workshops, this time the Jacobs School designed a new style of production for Vincent that focused on projections and digital images. After seeing two performances of Vincent with both casts, I had pre-scheduled to go to Chicago to see the last performance at the Harris Theater of Death and the Powers, the well-received opera by Tod Machover. This gave me an opportunity to gain yet another perspective on Vincent. I will not comment on Machover’s wonderful work here, except to say that it also featured original technological components in the form of musical robots and light sculptures expressing aspects of human thought and emotion. Clearly, digital technology is gaining ground as an expected expressive element in opera and other interdisciplinary genres. Soon it will need to be contemplated as a regular element in the training of musicians, especially since other musical genres beside opera are beginning to be treated in an interdisciplinary manner.

Bernard Rands’s Vincent will be judged unavoidably from diverse perspectives. As a conductor a new operas, I have been aware of the complexities of the reception of new operatic works, and I have concluded that success depends as much on a game of audience expectations as on the intrinsic structural characteristics of the composition. During the panels on the future of opera arranged around the world-premiere of Gabriela Ortiz’s ¡Unicamente la verdad!, certain tensions became apparent. For some opera fans, opera is about a dramatic narrative with a continuous musical architecture that carries the listener to a point of climax and a denouement, and that (most importantly!) features singers in the central expressive role. This concept arguably peaked in the late 19th and early 20th century with the works of Verdi, Wagner and Puccini.

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by Carmen-Helena Tellez
Composers, Contemporary Classical, Dance, Houston, Opera, Premieres

Interview with Opera Singer Misha Penton


Opera Singer Misha Penton as Klytemnestra (photo by Kerry Beyer)

(Houston, TX) Houston based opera singer Misha Penton opens her unique performance space Divergence Vocal Theater this Friday, April 15th. Located at Spring Street Studios, home to many of Houston’s finest visual and mixed media artists. Divergence Vocal Theater will bring together Ms. Penton’s team of singers, musicians, composers, dancers, and lighting and costume designers to present new chamber opera repertoire. Klytemnestra, a collaborative opera dance theater work featuring music by composer Dominick DiOrio, sung text by Misha Penton, spoken text by John Harvey, and choreography by Meg Brooker, is receiving a great deal of positive press in advance of its premier April 15th and 16th at Divergence Vocal Theater.

Ms. Penton’s mission is to subvert the social mores and business paradigms preventing singers from creating their own works. In the wake of reality after graduate school, more and more classical instrumentalists are creating their own business and career models, going further and further out into what is, for many musicians, uncharted territory. Violinist Todd Reynolds, the ensemble Alarm Will Sound, and Houston based pianists Jade Simmons and Kris Becker are a few examples of musicians who are each developing a sustainable means for commissioning, performing, and deriving an income from playing contemporary classical music. Their approaches are as varied as their personalities, and there is much to discuss when it comes to what is actually working for one musician as opposed to another. But in the near future, these intrepid instrumentalists are going to find that more and more singers, including Misha Penton, are “out there” with them.

Misha and I met shortly after my relocating to Houston and I quickly recognized a kindred spirit. This interview took place via email in advance of the premier of Kyltemnestra.

Chris Becker: In a recent interview you said: “One of the things I want to do…is restructure the way people think about who does opera, how it’s done, who makes it, and who performs it…What I do with Divergence is…create my own works and I sing in them. It’s very much something actors and dancers do, but singers are not encouraged to create their own products.” Do you think this model that you’re describing is the future of classically trained musicians?

Misha Penton: Actually, I do – but it’s already happening. And it really isn’t anything new…instrumentalists in particular have been savvy to this model for a long time – the success of independent ensembles like Eighth Blackbird comes to mind immediately. Some conservatories are starting to take entrepreneurship seriously. Opera America has a great feature about entrepreneurship in its spring magazine and about singer-led initiatives, and entrepreneurship is the theme for the conference this year as well. Obviously rock and jazz musicians work this way and always have. I’m seeing more classically trained singers take on their own projects, but it doesn’t seem to be as encouraged by the vocal teaching tradition as it could be…but again, that is all changing. The more opportunities we, as artists create, the better we’ll be able to define success for ourselves. As a singer, I’m only partly an interpretive artist. I’m a theater artist and writer too, so I’ve always done creative work. I think of myself as an independent artist who happens to create work collaboratively.

Opera Singer Misha Penton (photo by Kerry Beyer)

CB: Who are some of your peers among singers that are doing something similarly subversive?

MP There are more and more small opera companies popping up that singers are joining forces to create – that’s absolutely fantastic. And classically trained singers are branching out into all sorts of music projects. I meet singers all the time who say, “Hey I have this idea for a project” – I just love that. Go do it!

In general, I question the traditional company and nonprofit structure – so I’m not sure that’s the best survival tactic nor the best creative model. There are so many options for funding work now without forming a nonprofit (fiscal sponsorship, crowdfunding, etc). The last thing I want on my back is an “organization”. I work project-to-project and I’m aspiring to a Robert Fripp-ian model – a “small mobile intelligent unit”.

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by Chris Becker
Chamber Music, Commissions, Competitions, Concerts, File Under?, Music Events, New York

Cuckson on the Cutting Edge



I’m looking forward to hearing violinist Miranda Cuckson premiere a new chamber concerto by Jeffrey Mumford tonight at Symphony Space.



Cuckson is a tremendous talent. Her recent CDs of music by Ralph Shapey, Donald Martino, and Michael Hersch are required listening for anyone interested in post-tonal chamber music.


The concert also includes works by Harold Meltzer, Victoria Bond, and Brian Ferneyhough. Cuckson is joined by the Argento Ensemble; the Da Capo Chamber Players will also perform (details below).


Cutting Edge Concerts New Music Festival Program
Monday, April 11, 2011, 7:30 pm; $20/Seniors $15
Leonard Nimoy Thalia Theater in Peter Norton Symphony Space
Ticket information here

Jeffrey Mumford: through a stillness brightening (world premiere)
Argento Ensemble

Commissioned by the Argento New Music Project through the generosity of Marianna Bettman (in memory of Judge Gilbert Bettman) and Sonia Rothschild.

Brian Ferneyhough: La Chute D’Icare
Argento Ensemble

Harold Meltzer: Exiles
Da Capo Chamber Players, Mary Nessinger, mezzo soprano

Victoria Bond: Instruments of Revelation (NY premiere)
Da Capo Chamber Players

by Christian Carey
Contemporary Classical, New York, Strings

ETHEL!

ETHEL, acclaimed as America’s premier postclassical string quartet, will be giving a great show at Le Poisson Rouge tomorrow night. The concert is part of the Meet the Composer’s 3 CITY DASH FESTIVAL, and it features music from composers from San Francisco. Below is an email Q+A with Ralph Farris, ETHEL’s magnificent violist.

S21 Q + A w/ ETHEL:

ETHEL focuses on the repertoire of the the past four decades. While all of that music is classified as “contemporary,” it is extremely diverse compositionally. Is there any particularly style you prefer personally or as a group and enjoy working on?

We do love tunes that groove! If there is some infectious rhythmic element in a piece, it’s probably going to spark something with us.

We particularly enjoy working in person with composers. Having the experience of being together with a composer as the music comes to life is very special.

And of course, we are always thrilled to present the work of young composers!

Despite the extreme variety in contemporary classical music, do you have one sort of goal you hope to communicate generally with all the music you play?

Music is a language, a profound connector of cultures and ideas.

With our work, we aim to link people together in a shared experience, to inspire and celebrate our common humanity.

Along that line, when you receive a new work by a composer, likely something you’ve never heard or seen before, do you approach each piece differently, or with a sort of rehearsal routine?

We endeavor to learn as much as we can about a composer before we read their work, in an effort to open our ears, minds and hearts.

On the nuts-and-bolts side, we prefer to receive both a score and parts. And a MIDI file or recording is always helpful.

As to rehearsal routine, there are some tried-and-true techniques that we advocate:

•           If there’s a measure that is giving us trouble, we’ll put an imaginary repeat sign around it and loop it until the physical feel of it is locked.

•           Slow practice is invaluable, of course, but we also spend good amounts of time at medium speed, galvanizing ensemble and overall feel.

•           Once a piece is almost feeling solid, but just needs a little push, we may turn ourselves away from each other for a run or two, in an effort to feel each others’ lines and intentions. Pretty tough exercise, but it has helped us greatly.

Do you approach pieces primarily with a sort of ETHEL quartet style? The group is notoriously charismatic– how do you translate that into an extremely minimalistic piece, for instance?

LOL. We are four people having a great time making music together. I would hope that this translates through any music that we approach.

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by Tema Watstein
Contemporary Classical

Help Wanted: Composer-in-Residence, Opera Company of Philadelphia

Hello Jerry Bowles,

Kyle Bartlett here, I am a composer and also the New Works Administrator for the Opera Company of Philadelphia. I am hoping you may post information about our Composer In Residence search (press release attached). In short form, the selected composer will be given free access to the resources of the Opera Company of Philadelphia, Gotham Chamber Opera, and Music-Theatre Group, for the purposes of learning and experimentation, as well as a salary of $60K per year plus benefits, for three years. For real.

The deadline for entries is coming up very quickly: April 22, 5PM Eastern time.

Here is the call for entries : http://www.operaphila.org/about-us/call-for-entries.shtml

If you have any questions or need more information, please be in touch.

Thanks very much,

Kyle

Kyle Bartlett

New Works Administrator

Opera Company of Philadelphia

www.operaphila.org

by Jerry Bowles