Composers, Contemporary Classical, File Under?

Interview with Richard Ayres


Since 1989, British composer Richard Ayres (born 1965) has lived and worked in the Netherlands. He currently teaches composition at the Royal Conservatoire in Den Haag: an institution where he did his graduate studies with Louis Andriessen. His compositional style reveals a profusion of influences, from Ives and Kagel to Ades and Janacek. Above all one notices his interest in dense counterpoint, frequently deployed in multi-layered structures; as well as a concomitant flair for testing the limits of playability, often with an eye towards cultivating a “melancholically humorous” ambience. 

One of his favorite mediums is the “noncerto:” a composition for soloist and orchestra in which the soloist isn’t a heroic individual who overawes both orchestra and audience. Instead, the soloist’s role is quite the opposite: a Beckettian antihero: frequently asked to explore the barely possible or, indeed, the impossible. There are antecedents for the noncerto – notably in works by Carter, Feldman, and Kagel. By turning the concerto paradigm on its head, Ayres creates an affecting exploration of the individual who feels inarticulate: out of step with society. Doing so while creating compelling music (that attracts non-soloists) is no mean feat! But Ayres’ noncertos are becoming increasingly in demand. 

This year he’s received a great deal of buzz in Europe. His new CD for the NMC imprint, Noncertos and Others, has received accolades from many corners, including critical praise from venues not ordinarily known to be sanguine about contemporary classical music. Perhaps the disc’s biggest coup to date is landing the coveted “Editor’s Choice” distinction from Gramophone magazine. 

Despite the plaudits overseas, Ayres isn’t a household name yet here in the United States. Indeed, during the course of our wide-ranging discussion, he mentioned having not yet been programmed by an orchestra the United States. One hopes that this oversight is quickly remedied! 

Christian Carey: How did you come up with the idea of the ‘noncerto?‘ Who first performed one of your noncertos? Have soloists been receptive to the idea of this type of piece? 

Richard Ayres: I saw a program on the TV that was about a trombonist with some sort of Alzheimer’s disease. He was holding an electric razor and thought it was a trombone. He became very upset when he couldn’t work out how to play it. This broke my heart, and I wanted to write a little piece out of sympathy or as a tribute to this guy. This piece became the first noncerto for small ensemble and alto trombone. The Schoenberg Ensemble from Amsterdam commissioned it. I became attracted by the idea of outcast against the crowd, and four more noncerti followed. 

Soloists need a melancholic sense of humor (humor not comedy), and an amazing technique to play these pieces. In spite of being underdogs, the solo parts are obviously virtuosic. I like to think that anyone that is attracted to the melancholia of Charlie Chaplin, or the excess of Terry Gilliam would like to play my noncerti. This is certainly just vanity. 

CC: Each time I listen to No. 37B for Orchestra, I’m struck by what I hear as a kinship with the music of American composer Charles Ives: the overlapping of orchestral lines in a sort of collage, the frequent shifts of focus, and the wondrously pungent dissonances. Of course, I might just be listening through my own set of repertoire filters, but I wondered- is Ives at all influential on the music you’re composing?   

RA: Oh yes! I heard Ives’ 4th symphony when I was a student and this gave me permission to write “far too many notes” sections in my pieces, and generally to roam around musical history. Actually these seemingly complex textures are rarely more than five musical lines…any more than 4 musical lines seems to be heard as a texture. I’m glad I listened in that particular counterpoint class! 

CC: Who are some other touchstone composers you might point to?  

  

RA: Oh, far too many to mention. I devour all music. Contemporary music loves range from Jerry Hunt right through to Tom Ades. I listen to loads of folk and rock music, just about anything. If I had to pick out some especially important classical composers then, apart from Ives, the music of Janacek, Sibelius, Beethoven, Mozart, Purcell, Rameau, Verdi, Strauss has been a massive influence on my composition. 

I am just as, if not more, influenced by film. Fellini, Guy Madden, Terry Gilliam, and the great Charlie Chaplin have all played a part in shaping my creative taste. 

CC: Would you tell us a bit about your numbering system for pieces?   

RA: Three reasons for the numbers: I don’t have a lot of imagination for titles, and the ones I have made up were pretty awful; I find it easier to remember which piece is which (although this is no longer true. As I get older and the number of pieces increases, I find I can’t remember which is which); I forget now which painter said “a title is as important as a color in a painting”. Was this Jasper Johns? Whoever it was, I agree entirely. A title determines, or colors the listeners perception of a piece of music. I don’t want to pollute a listener’s experience unless it is absolutely necessary. At the moment I am playing with a juxtaposing literary and musical narrative, and am writing extremely long movement titles that are very evocative, and either concur with, or contradict how we experience the music’s emotional world. 

CC: Noncertos and Others (NMC) has gotten a terrific reception, both in Europe and the US. Has this been a surprise, albeit a pleasant one?  

  

RA: I wish I could be cool and knowing and say that it was what I had expected. I can’t, and I am extremely surprised. When I opened my copy of Gramophone magazine and saw my CD was editor’s choice I immediately ran to buy a copy to send to my mother. I’m very happy. 

CC: For those whose introduction to your work comes via this CD, where would you send them next to learn more about your oeuvre?  

  

RA: That is a bit of a problem as this is the only commercial recording, and so far my music has been played all over Europe but not in the states. I’ve never been there either, but I will get there one day! 

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by Christian Carey
Choral Music, Composers, Contemporary Classical, Dance, Interviews, Los Angeles, Recordings, Signings

iDrink @ iTunes

Nico Muhly is set to appear at the Santa Monica Apple Store on the Third Street Promenade Wednesday, September 8th to mark two new releases from Decca. “A Good Understanding” will be released exclusively on iTunes on September 7, with physical copies available on September 21 alongside “I Drink the Air Before Me”.

Composer Nico Muhly

Muhly along with Los Angeles Master Chorale conductor Grant Gershon will take part in a Q&A session – where Muhly will demonstrate how he creates his compositions with GarageBand on his MacBook Pro. The talk will end with a performance by members of the Los Angeles Master Chorale featuring two works from “A Good Understanding” and two related works, “Like as the Hart” and “Wayfaring Stranger”.
John Clare spoke with Muhly about the works and event: mp3 file
Nico Muhly and Los Angeles Master Chorale conductor Grant Gershon appear at the Santa Monica Apple Store on Wednesday, September 8, 7:00 p.m.
Bonus – listen to the rest of the conversation as Muhly interviews Clare: mp3 file

by John Clare
File Under?, Opera

Movies go to the Opera

Poul Ruders has composed an opera based on Lars von Trier’s 2000 film Dancer in the Dark. The work will be premiered by the Royal Danish Opera next week (on 9/5). You can check out a teaser video below.

Dancer in the Dark is one of several recent operas based on films; but there are countless films yet to be adapted for the operatic stage. Which films would you like to see re-imagined as an opera?

by Christian Carey
Contemporary Classical, File Under?, Radio

Paola on Q2

Our friends at Q2 are featuring the work of Paola Prestini today. the festivities include Prestini commenting on featured tracks at the top of every hour and this nifty live cut (available for download on the Q2 site):


and this video:


[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3DlPvXLU2k&feature=player_embedded#![/youtube]

by Christian Carey
Contemporary Classical

Binarium Sound Sound Series and Trills this Sunday, August 29th, in Houston, TX

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9BoplwcaaI&hd=1[/youtube]

Trills Flavia. (Music and Film by Jonathan Jindra. Dancer: Paola Georgudis. 
Girl in TV: Valentina Canastaro. 
Assisted by: Simon Pena)

Jonathan Jindra’s weekly experimental music concerts Binarium Sound Series continues 8pm Sunday nights here in Houston, Texas at The Mekong Underground, 2808 Milan Street (right next to Kohn’s bar). This is a wonderful series where you will hear intimate performances by local and visiting artists performing composed, improvised, electronic, and acoustic experimental music.

This Sunday’s August 29th Binarium program features Jonathan’s electronica project Trills. Trills is manifested in Jonathan’s live performances as well as several online digital releases – many being collaborations with other similarly minded artists. His recent full length split with Glasgow artist Dissolved entitled PH:14 has been his most successful release to date with over 43,000 downloads in its first month of release. Trills’ repertoire to my ears is rooted in the music of groundbreaking electronic artists like Tangerine Dream, Vangelis (especially his soundtrack to Bladerunner) and Popol Vuh.But Jonathan has name checked for me a handful of more contemporary artists as influences, including Boards of Canada, Pan Sonic, and Autechre.

I’ve listened to a bunch of Jonathan’s music and still feel like I’ve only scratched the surface of his talents and repertoire. And I don’t want to pigeonhole Trills with only a cursory familiarity of countless 21st century electronic artists that flood the web trading digital files of original groundbreaking music the way I traded cassette tapes of the same back in the day. The best thing to do is go to the Trills website and enjoy the music and video samples, and then forget what you’ve heard when you check out this Sunday’s show. Jonathan’s set will be accompanied by custom video projection. About This Product joins Trills on this bill.

by Chris Becker
Contemporary Classical

The Proms–Mosolov, Watkins, Cage, Cardew, Skempton, Feldman

The Prom concert on August 20, by The Philharmonia Orchestra and Esa-Pekka Salonen, began with The Foundry (1927) by Alexander Mosolov. This is a four minute bit of Russian avant-garde constructivism, portraying in the most realistic way possible with an orchestra…well, a foundry. It was first performed in Lenningrad in 1927 at a concert celebrating the tenth anniversary of the Revolution. The Foundry was originally intended to be the first of four movements or music for a ballet, which was never produced, to be called Steel. The other movements, which have been lost, were called ‘In Prison,’ ‘At the Ball,’ and ‘In the Street.’ It became celebrated and much performed in the US and Europe in its day. Henry Wood performed it on Proms concerts seven times between 1931 and 1940. It makes a hell of a jolly industrial racket; the best moments were the two times when the eight horn players stood and blared out a unison ‘tune’ over the general din, the second time to the accompaniment of one of the percussionists whacking away at a metal sheet.

The concert of August 17, which began with the Pärt Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten, included the first performance of Huw Watkins’ Violin Concerto, a BBC Proms commission, played by Alina Ibragimova, with the BBC Symphony, conducted by Edward Gardner. Watkins, who is a professor of composition at the Royal College of Music, is at least as well known as a pianist (and he is a formidable one) as he is a composer. In the composer portrait concert which preceded the Prom, he played his Four Inventions for piano, joined one group of students from the RCM in performing his Sad Steps for piano and string sextet, and conducted another group in a performance of Gig, a seven minute work for the same combination as the Ravel Introduction and Allegro.

The Concerto starts with a sort of bang which generates a lot of energy. The soloist alternates playing agitated arpeggiated music which helps to contribute to the maintenance of this energy and longer lyrical lines which float on top of it. The first movement of the piece is the composing out of the gradual unwinding of the activity generated by its beginning, and finally unfolds itself into the second (the three movements are clearly meant to proceed without a break; it was unfortunate for its effect that the performers chose to make fairly long breaks between them), which is a gently rocking song-like piece. The third movement, not completely successfully, it seemed to me, was intended to regain the energy of the first and carry it further before ending once again with a quiet coda representing its final conclusive dissipation, making all three movements one span. The Concerto, like all of the pieces on the composer portrait, was tonal, with lucid harmony and transparent textures and was thoughtfully made and appealing. As an encore, Ms. Ibragimova, who is a champion of Watkins’s music, played the last movement of his Partita for solo violin, which is an attractive, energetic, and snappy piece.

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by Rodney Lister
Opinion, Orchestras, Support

Breaking bubbles, orchestral edition

photo by Keith TalleyFriend, trumpeter, Co-Artistic Director of ANALOG arts and S21 pal Joseph Drew, today on his own ANABlog space shared a few more thoughts on the economic realities of today’s orchestra. Joe had already written some about this earlier this year, but was prompted to bring it up again after spotting a post by the Music Director of the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra, Bill Eddins, over at his own blog.

An excerpt from Joe:

Sounds like other folks are starting to wake up to the reality of the orchestral labor market. Last April, in response to the argument that salary cuts at major orchestras will prompt their members to flee to better-paying jobs, I argued: …where exactly are all these top-flight musicians going to go? To one of the other 17 full-time orchestras with a yawning budget deficit? The market for orchestral talent is hardly dynamic. There is far more supply than there is demand, and the dirty little secret is that the players aren’t what makes the orchestra great (see NY Phil: great players, underachieving ensemble). Buried in that BSO announcement last month is the fact that they are actually replacing two professional seats with amateurs from Peabody. What matters in an orchestra is who’s on the podium and who’s leading the sections. There’s plenty of room for fair to middling talent in even the great orchestras. […] For now, I’d just point out that what you are generally seeing in Baltimore, Detroit, Philly and other orchestras in similar straits is a dim recognition on the management’s part that the party might just be over, and a determination on the players’ parts to rebuild the bubble. Given their druthers, I get the impression that both sides would be happy to return to their Quixotic days inside the bubble, and that fundamental delusion is the biggest problem facing these institutions.

And an excerpt from Bill:

Two interesting situations are developing that on the surface may not seem connected but are actually deeply related. For better or for worse. Detroit. Charleston. One’s a biggie.  The other’s a … not so biggie … though I’m sure that the musicians in Charleston who rely on those jobs to make a living would argue otherwise, and I can’t really blame them. What they have in common is that for years no one has taken adequate responsibility for the long term health of these organizations. Now they’re paying for it. […] While the big boys were jacking up their salaries over the past 40 years, and everyone else was trying to Keep Up With The Joneses, some serious systemic imbalances got contracted into the picture. No one seemed to mind deficit after deficit after deficit. But, unfortunately for us, only the Government has license to print money. The general economy is retrenching and the orchestra business isn’t going to be far behind. The admittedly excellent orchestras like Detroit are now in the position where decades of deficit spending and endowment raiding are going to come home to roost. Whether we like to admit it or not, we musicians have been complicit in this debacle. At some point the long-term health of an organization must be more important than how much the salary will increase during the next year of the contract.

So, how long until we’re a country with maybe 1000 living-wage musicians in 10-15 orchestras in only the biggest cities, and everybody else scraping what they can from wherever; and does that mean that most folk would be fools to invest years learning instruments that so few will pay them to play?

by Steve Layton
Contemporary Classical

Pärt on the Proms

Among the events being commemorated in this year’s Proms season, is the 75th birthday of Arvo Pärt. This celebration kicked off on August 17 with a concert by the BBC Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Edward Gardner, which began with Pärt’s Cantus in memoriam Benjamin Britten, and which followed Britten’s Four Sea Interludes from Peter Grimes. The intention was that the Britten would follow without a break; the program actually said that. But as it turned out, the body language of both the conductor and the orchestra told the audience at the end of the Pärt that something had stopped, and the audience responded with applause, so that particular idea didn’t exactly work.

The Cantus was one of the first works written in Pärt’s tintinabulum style, in which a stepwise melody entwines with and is surrounded by the notes of a triad. It is said that Pärt developed this system (whatever it is) out of his disillusionment with the twelve-tone system (whatever that is). This narrative conforms to the current historiography of post-World War II music which can be summed up, paraphrasing Animal Farm, as “twelve-tone bad–-anything other than twelve-tone good,” which wants to represent “twelve tone music” as a sort of cruel and unnatural Stalinist dictatorship that was out for the complete and crushing domination of the musical world, and oppressed composers and audiences alike with an iron fist, until it was overthrown by a few brave souls, but in this particular case, if not any other, the story is more complicated than that.

Pärt and a number of his contemporaries in the Soviet Union enthusiastically embraced “serialism” as a political statement, so they saw it not as being a means of their intellectual and musical oppression, but in fact just the opposite. “Twelve-tone music” and “serialism” are terms that are hardly ever defined, and they have varieties of meanings even if they are, so it’s always a little hard to know exactly what anybody who says or said they are or were writing twelve-tone or serial music might actually be or have been up to, although it would seem likely that whatever it is or was, it would involve a music which would be heavily chromatic–or chromatic, anyway. In any case, when Pärt turned away from whatever it he was doing that he thought of as serial, he was not signaling some kind of return to or affirmation of a former status quo, but among, other things, moving to an equally, possibly more, subversive political statement, since it involved a language and techniques which evoked religious practices. He was developing a style which was much more pared down and diatonic and whose rhetoric and grammar was, if anything, probably more “modern” by means of its simplicity.

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by Rodney Lister
Awards, Bang on a Can, CDs, Chamber Music, Composers, Contemporary Classical, Downtown, File Under?, Minimalism, New York, Video

We Love Advances

Steve Reich’s latest Nonesuch CD recently arrived, sans artwork in a little cardboard case. The disc features Double Sextet and 2×5, his collaborations with Eighth Blackbird and Bang on a Can. The former piece won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize in Music. The latter is his most explicit use of rock instrumentation to date.

According to the Nonesuch site, it’s still in the “pre-order” phase of activities, so we’ll be good and hold off on a proper review ’til it’s closer to the actual release date (9/14).

Suffice it to say, if you’re a regular visitor to Sequenza 21, you’re likely going to want one, possibly three, copies of this recording. An intergenerational summit – minimalist elder statesman meets post-minimal/totalist ace performers – that, in terms of importance, is more or less the Downtown version of Duke Ellington and John Coltrane.

Here’s some footage of Reich rehearsing BoaC:

by Christian Carey
Chamber Music, Composers, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, File Under?, New York

Interview with Frank J. Oteri

This Thursday evening, the Locrian Chamber Players are presenting a concert at Riverside Church in New York City. The program features music by Harrison Birtwistle, Judith Shatin, John Luther Adams, and Frank J. Oteri. Frank is a fixture on the NY scene. He’s the composer advocate for the American Music Center and is Founding Editor of their web magazine New Music Box. Frank is indeed a persuasive advocate on behalf of other composers, but he’s not asked about his own music nearly often enough. In the interview that follows, we focus primarily on Brinson’s Race, the piece that appears on Thursday’s concert. But along the way, we are given a window into Oteri’s approach to composition and his harnessing of a veritable smorgasbord of musical interests and influences.

Photo credit: Jeffrey Herman

CC: First, let’s talk about the dedicatee. Who’s Robert Overstreet? How did you meet him?

FJO: Robert Overstreet was a fascinating man who collected art and taught for many years at Auburn University in Alabama where he was Professor Emeritus of Communication and founded The Reader’s Theatre. All his students called him “Doc.”  After he retired, he moved to back to where he grew up, in rural Georgia where he maintained a small farm. We first met in 1996 and since then had had countless conversations about art, literature, music, travel, and martinis–he had at least one every day. He wrote tremendous letters (all handwritten). He was one of the last people with whom I maintained a mail correspondence; although I regret that I was far less prompt in answering his letters than he was in answering mine. He died in December 2005.

Could you tell us a bit about Brinson’s Race – the place? How did you come to decide to write a work about this location?

Over the years I had the pleasure of making several visits to his country home, an estate called Brinson’s Race, in Emanuel County, one of only two counties in Georgia to vote against secession prior to the American Civil War. Overstreet’s family lived on this land since that time and the land even includes a family cemetery. Since Robert Overstreet’s death, his daughter Laura Overstreet Biering has maintained Brinson’s Race as a family farm as well as a retreat. She set up a nice website for it that gives some more detailed history of the place and even talks about my piece of music (http://www.brinsonsrace.com/).

Trumpet plus string quartet is an interesting combination – one that you don’t see on concerts too terribly often. How did you decide on the instrumentation?

Every year Robert Overstreet used to present a chamber music concert in nearby Twin City which consisted of works from the standard repertoire.  After hearing a recording of my 1985 song cycle Two Transfers for tenor and string quartet, he asked me to write a piece especially for one of his concerts scored for trumpet and string quartet. As far as anyone knows it was the first world premiere in Twin City. While the trumpet and string quartet idea was completely his, I think clash between a solo brass instrument and a closely-related group of strings is an interesting sonic metaphor for the clash of me, the ultimate city dweller, discovering a place that is so deeply rural.

The way you use it reminds me in certain places of Ives’ Unanswered Question. Not necessarily linguistically, but in terms of having the trumpet ‘work against’ or run ahead of the strings in certain places. Was Ives a touchstone for the piece? Were there others you’d like to mention?

Ives has always been one of my personal heroes. There are many other role models for this piece, among them, believe it or not: Arnold Schoenberg, Milton Babbitt (the first movement actually incorporates a serial approach to duration, albeit one that does not sound as you might expect it to), Philip Glass (the early strict additive process pieces), John Cage, Pauline Oliveros, Henry Cowell, Conlon Nancarrow, Elliott Carter and Johannes Brahms, to some extent though admittedly it might be hard to hear their influence in here, and even Ornette Coleman and J.S. Bach.

But perhaps the biggest touchstone for me about this piece is that it was the first new piece I started and completed in the 21st century and, in retrospect, it marked a new phase in my composition. It was the first piece I composed after my performance oratorio MACHUNAS and the first lengthy piece of instrumental chamber music I had composed in a very long time.

Also, Brinson’s Race was the first substantial new piece of music I conceived of after starting to work at the American Music Center. In my first year at AMC, I had a lot less time to compose and I was still trying to complete the vocal score for MACHUNAS. Then I had a very heavy case of writer’s block for musical composition. The amount of music I was being exposed to was daunting and rather intimidating. The polystylism of Brinson’s Race I think is a direct result of being exposed to such a variety of music. In addition, it began a new interest in very formal design that has remained a hallmark of almost all the music I have composed since then.

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by Christian Carey