Sequenza21

I’m so glad you asked!  TAFTO is Drew McManus’s “Take a Friend to the Orchestra” month–a month dedicated to bringing new fans into the fold.  As always, Drew is marking TAFTO with a series of essays by hot, industry-savvy writers — how-to guides, analysis of the contemporary situation, and so on.  The first two essays went up yesterday and today, and you should check them out.

Both of my fans (hi mom!) will want to know that my own contribution will be going up on April 12th, and the rest of you will want to know that you can see a list of the other contributors (including the likes of Frank Oteri and Leonard Slatkin) and other timely TAFTO information right here.  Why, I’m reading it right now!

Seriously, this is good stuff and if you’re interested in discussions about the future of the classical music industry these essays will be worth reading.

New York, NY, March 29, 2007.  I’ve been a fan of Evan Ziporyn’s music since six or seven years ago when I first heard his work in a concert of piano music at Dartmouth College. (I think it must have been “Pondok,” in a recital by the fabulous Sarah Cahill, but I can’t seem to find evidence to support that conclusion. Sarah, if you’re out there. . .) Ziporyn is a fixture at Bang On A Can, and a member of the Bang On A Can All Stars where he plays a mean clarinet; he’s also a member of the music faculty at MIT and the founder of Gamelan Galak Tika. Last Thursday, Ziporyn teamed up with cello-percussion duo Odd Appetite (Ha Yang Kim and Nathan Davis) and bassist Robert Black (another Bang On A Can All Stars member) for two sets at The Stone, John Zorn’s Alphabet City new music dive.

Ziporyn opened the set with “Partial Truths” for solo bass clarinet, from his 2001 album “This is Not a Clarinet,” which weaves together percussive sounding tongued notes, cycles of leaping figures that outline lovely contrapuntal lines, melodies sung through the instrument in harmony with the clarinet sounds themselves, and a variety of other extended techniques that pushed at the far edges of the acoustic properties of the instrument. The fullness and richness of the texture was remarkable given the limitations of a single, ordinarily monophonic instrument.

The atmosphere was very relaxed and informal as the remaining three members of the quarter took their places for the remainder of the concert, and Ziporyn explained that while some of the pieces they were about to play had titles, they were really just working titles and so we weren’t going to be told what they were. But they were all good.

The first piece with the quarter, for example, started with a devastatingly beautiful texture of rich descending lines and then slowly went haywire. The consonant harmonies of the beginning slowly went dissonant, and the notes themselves were played with harsh extended techniques. This was to be a common structural feature of the remaining works—clean, organized music that gradually broke down in fascinating and simultaneously beautiful and ugly ways. Talking with Nathan Davis afterward learned that about 30% of the concert was improvised, and most of that improvisation took place in the parts where things “get weird.” I also learned that while the first piece for the quartet was through-composed the performers were instructed to add harmonics and other effects to dirty-up the sound. The cello and bass would essentially play with deliberately sloppy technique in order to introduce the kinds of artifacts that one ordinarily avoids. Ziporyn’s clarinet would make the kinds of shrieks and howls that I remember making by mistake when I was first learning the saxophone in elementary school. But in this context those “ugly” sounds simply added to the character and to the beauty of the music. Other pieces switched seamlessly from one time signature to another, in the same effortlessly disorienting way that the best Philip Glass music does, and layering different time signatures over each other. Following the music by counting becomes impossible, but once you let go you drift above the grid carried by the chaotic beauty of the sounds.

And all that remains is to note that the performers themselves were uniformly excellent. All four have impeccable technique, and Davis and Kim are both skilled composers themselves which presumably enhanced the level of the improvisational components of the evening. I suspect all four will be heard on this summer’s Bang On A Can Marathon, so mark your calendars.

If you know this gentleman or his work and have some original thoughts about same,

and you want to write (for real, now) a decent sized post about said mystery person and work,

and you are not Frank J. Oteri or Samuel Vriezen,

leave your reasons for wanting to write said post below with your mailing address (or if you’re squemish about the internets, send me an e-mail.

Winner will get in the mail about three pounds of CDs of said person’s work.

It’s funny how our own personal preferences can make it so difficult to review concerts objectively. Take Monday night’s American Composer’s Orchestra concert, at Zankel Hall in New York – all seven pieces were good, often impressive, sometimes subtle and complex. But the things I want to rave about were not, I suspect, the things that most of the audience would have raved about when they got home.

Min Xiao-Fen’s Blue Pipa, for voice and the lute-like Chinese instrument named in the title, opened the concert effectively. Min performed the piece herself in a pool of light on an otherwise dark stage, and the combined vocal acrobatics and impressively virtuosic pipa playing made for a lovely and exciting piece. One audience member told me during intermission that it could have gone on for another five minutes and still been exciting.

Tania León’s Indigena combined the Cuban carnival music of her youth with quasi-tonal modernism in her trademark style. Her great skill lies in making this marriage organic—not so much seamless as deeply integrated, and never condescending to either tradition.

Speaking of integrative skill, Harold Meltzer’s Virginal performed the same feat with Renaissance stylings in a similarly modernist, quasi-tonal context. The contrapuntal music felt deliberate and rigorous in the same way that a 17^th century fugue or an early 20^th century serialist piece does.

But for all their virtues, and in spite of how well the audience liked them, none of the first three pieces excited me in the way that two sections of Vijay Iyer’s Interventions did. Perhaps a third of the way in, the orchestra drops out and Iyer, who was playing the largely improvised piano part, lets loose with a set of rippling riffs while pre-processed drum and hi-hat loops bounce back and forth in the speakers. I’m not convinced that the section really fit with the rest of the piece, but I have difficulty really minding. The piece’s long, static denouement was, for me, the heart of the piece. Most of the orchestra starts snapping their fingers in a steady slow rhythm, while the piano and strings give a long, droning, steady chord. It’s funny at first—you expect them to break into “boy, boy, crazy boy”–but as it continues the snaps reclaim their independence and provide an unusual sounding grid while the percussionist plays a slow pattern on a suspended cymbal. The cymbal patter sounds regular, but out of sync with the snaps, but if it was truly regular I couldn’t figure out the pattern. The overall effect was gorgeous and entrancing, and I didn’t want it to stop.

After intermission, Andrew McKenna Lee played his solo guitar piece Arabescata, which weaves together rock and classical language. It worked very well as a compliment to Blue Pipa from the first half—again sometimes pretty and sometimes impressively virtuosic. Kurt Rohde’s White Boy/Man Invisible was the least memorable segment of the concert for me, but as I recall the audience response was one of the most enthusiastic of the evening.

Rounding out the theme of integration of different musics, Steven Mackey played guitar for his Deal, a concerto of sorts for electric guitar and orchestra. Much of the first half of the piece didn’t engage me, although Mackey did a remarkably skillful job of combining the guitar with the orchestra in an organic way. As with Vijay Iyer’s piece, however, the final sections made the whole concert worthwhile. Most of the orchestra drops out, and Mackey sets up some looping grooves with his effects pedals against, surprisingly enough, recordings of what sounded to me like chickens, playing slowly evolving chords and countermelodies over it, building gradually over several minutes. By the time the orchestra came back, I was sold, but again it was some of the least spectacular music that did it. Maybe I just like the wrong things.