Sequenza21

On Saturday at 2:30, Tanglewood’s Festival of Contemporary Music continued with its second concert. The FCM performances contain generous helpings of music. While established composers such as George Benjamin, David Rakowski, and John Corigliano were included Saturday, curator Augusta Read Thomas programmed a great deal of music by the “emerging” generation and by composers underrepresented on US concerts. Some highlights:

Jacob Bancks’ Rapid Transit, for mixed chamber ensemble, received its premiere. A TMC commission, the piece started out slowly, alternating nervous percussion flurries with chorale-like pan-modal verticals. Eventually, the winds picked up the percussion’s rhythmic ideas, and the ensemble was off to the races. Bancks created a clever amalgam of ‘transit sounds,’ using brass for car and train horns and percussion for the various noises that routinely besiege commuters. The faster sections also employed a more chromatic pitch field to further ratchet up the tension. While some details of pacing between the ‘slow’ and ‘fast’ sections might be rethought, Bancks’ compositional language is attractive and the overall impression was quite promising.

Judd Greenstein inverted the famous Boulez essay title, “Schoenberg is Dead,” to create his own work title: Boulez is Alive. In this piece for solo piano, Greenstein detached and deconstructed the modernist elements of his postmodern aesthetic. As the composer acknowledges in his program note, he wrestled with modernism during his training, ultimately rebelling against it. The surface of Boulez is Alive contains evidence of this struggle, with Notations-like angularity pitted against an insistent, gradually emerging tonal center and ostinato figuration. If the piece served to exorcise some demons for Greenstein, it also proved to be a fine performance vehicle for the excellent pianist Makiko Hirata.

Another performance highlight: Pianist Gregory DeTurk played the hell out of three piano etudes by David Rakowski. He reveled in the quick arpeggiations and repeated notes of E-Machines, gave a jaunty rendering of Taking the Fifths, and created a wonderful, lyrical ambience on Les Arbres embué. For anyone who thinks that Rakowski’s etudes are all about mixing jocularity with virtuosity, they need only listen to the latter piece to hear an example of considerable depth and poignancy.

This is the second time I’ve heard Akrostichen-Wortspiel by Unsuk Chin, and it is a piece well worth revisiting often. Korean-born and based in Berlin since the late 1980s, Chin draws upon a host of reference points, ranging from her own background to studies with Ligeti, work in electronic music, and an interest in the writings of author Lewis Carroll. (more…)

The opening concert on Tanglewood’s 2009 Festival of Contemporary Music on Friday featured several works by established composers and a TMC commission. This year’s festival is curated by Augusta Read Thomas. Rather than creating a unified theme for the five days of performances, Thomas has put together a varied group of offerings. In her opening remarks in the TFCM program booklet, she emphasizes,”This is not a festival with a house style.” Instead, what has thus far unified the proceedings are well-prepared, dedicated performances by youthful yet artistically focused musicians.

Christopher Rouse‘s percussion ensemble piece Ku-Ka-Illimoku is a great curtain-raiser: splashy, noisy, and abundantly virtuosic. Based on Hawaiian ceremonial drumming, it provides metric twists, turns, and overlays aplenty. Rouse hasn’t composed a piece for percussion ensemble since Bonham back in the late 1980s; one wishes he’d return to the genre.

Matthias Pintscher‘s Lieder und Schneebilder proved a tougher nut to crack. These settings of e.e. cummings poems for soprano and piano (sometimes prepared) are almost willful in their angular deployment. While cummings’ idiosyncratic typography seems to invite close attention to phrasing and line breaks, Pintscher’s use of ellisions and sprechstimme often seemed problematically placed. Still, Pintscher excels at creating evocative timbres and complexly hued harmonies.

Flutist Brook Ferguson, who was one of the leading lights at last year’s TFCM (devoted to Elliott Carter), was the soloist in Pierre Boulez‘s mémoriale (…explosante-fixe..Originel). Once again, Ferguson wowed with impressive control, beautiful tone throughout the flute’s compass, and attention to the score’s myriad details. The ensemble made the piece sound effortless (which it certainly is not) under the fine direction of Gergely Madaras.

While David Lang has certainly subsequently eclipsed Illumination Rounds, one of the earliest pieces in his catalog, one can see why it often gets played. Violinist Katherine Bormann and pianist Brett Hodgdon reveled in its con fuoco opening, which juxtaposes repeated unison notes and secundal dissonances. The piece’s inspiration tends to lag a bit in the middle; but the performers here made a great case for its sudden return to the opening material, rallying to end with a flourish. (more…)

One fateful morning in the fall of 2004, I opened the door to pick up my New York Times and found instead a wooden basket containing a pale homo sapien wearing large black glasses who appeared, at first glance, to be a nerdish cousin of Edgar Winter but, as it turned out,  was a young  graduate student named David Salvage, fresh out of Sweet Apple, Ohio.   David was pursuing a Ph.D. at CCNY while earning a few bucks on the side as a loneliness counselor at the late, lamented Tower Records classical shop.

This is about the time that I had decided to transform Sequenza21 into something more substantial than a pretext to get some free CDs and began switching the site to a blogging community. I recognize free labor when I see it and David was eager to help. He began doing reviews and writing posts and bringing other bright young composers and musicians into the family.

By 2006, the site was doing pretty well and David (along with another odd young man named Galen Brown) took the lead in organizing the first ever Sequenza21 live concert, persuading CCNY to lend us a space, and organizing musicians and all that.  It was roaring success despite the fact that it ran so long we didn’t get to eat David’s mother’s cookies and I got stuck with a $300 post-concert bar/restaurant tab because nobody would go home.

David and Galen were also the prime organizers of two terrific Sequenza21 concerts last year, in partnership with the Lost City Ramblers…what?  Oh, the wonderful Lost Dog Ensemble–one in Queens and one Manhattan.  I am happy to report that none of the Sequenza21 concerts involved any effort from me other than mailing the occasional check.

I talked to David dad at this year’s Manhattan concert and got some sense of what it is like for a perfectly normal, non-musical, Frank and Dino-loving, middle-class family from Sweet Apple, Ohio to be invested with a spooky kid who climbs up on the piano bench and starts noodling Bach at five-years-old and whose piano teacher tells you after a few months of training that “he’s got to have a better piano.”  Dad is still reeling from the sticker shock.

Dad has reason to be pleased now because David finally has a real job.  After a couple of busy years of indentured servitude for CCNY in Brooklyn, David finished and successfully defended his dissertation (on the other Hungarian, not Ligeti), got his doctorate, and is leaving New York this week to begin his new tenure-track position as an instructor in theory and composition at Hampden-Sydney College, located, oddly enough, in Sweet Apple, Virginia.

He assures us that he is not abandoning Sequenza21 and will be contributing from time to time and possibly even organizing a Sequenza21 concert in Washington,  which is the closest civilization to Sweet Apple.  Any co-conspirators in the DC area are invited to co-conspire.

All kidding aside, I have come to love David.  He’s done terrific things for Sequenza21, the concerts would not have happened without him. We wish him all the best.

From:  Eve Beglarian

hi my friends,

some of you already know that I’ve developed an obsession with the Mississippi River and its place in American culture, politics, and geography. I’ve spent the last several months getting ready to journey down the river at a human-powered pace, investigating what the river means at this particular moment in our shared lives. I’ll be starting at the headwaters at Lake Itasca, Minnesota on August 1 and expect to arrive in New Orleans in late November or early December. I’ll make work in response to the journey, and then next season I imagine traveling back up the river retracing my path, performing the work I’ve made in response to the first trip.

I have designed the trip not as a solo journey but as a shifting set of collaborations with various friends and colleagues who will be traveling with me for shorter or longer periods, shaping my perspective in varying ways depending on their passions and interests. My first two collaborators are the linguist and historian Richard Steadman-Jones, with whom I will be working on a project called Archive of Exile, and Mac Walton, a musician and adventurer with whom I share many interests that will undoubtedly take shape in some fun way I can’t yet predict.

we will be making the trip by a combination of kayak and bicycle, with a backup car carrying our gear. the three of us just spent a couple of days in Minneapolis getting outfitted with a kayak, (see below for evidence) and we’re leaving tomorrow for Lake Itasca, and I am so excited about all this I can barely speak!

I won’t be sending email announcements like this very often if at all over the next few months, so before heading out, I’m inviting you to follow along with me on the blog I’ve set up at http://evbvd.com/riverblog/

I think it’d be really great if we can create a community of virtual wayfarers or something like that! you can also follow me on twitter (evbvd) and/or facebook (eve.beglarian) if that’s your thing. and if you want to meet up in person along the way, let me know! while part of this trip feels like some kind of quest or pilgrimage, I don’t imagine it as a retreat in any sense, but an engagement, a seeking, and I invite you to join me in whatever ways might be meaningful to you, whether vicarious or actual.

in the meantime, I hope you have a great rest of your summer!

xoxox

evb

Only if it’s not likely to

Can the believed-in happen.

                       James McMichael