Concerts, Contemporary Classical, S21 Concert

Notes for the Concert

Over the next few weeks you’re going to be hearing a lot from the composers on the upcoming Sequenza21 concert. We’re all pretty chatty around here, and these posts are going to be one of our little publicity stunts. Here’s a sample of the sort of thing you might be seeing.

Piece: Pause Button Excerpt

Composer: David Salvage

Performer: Thomas Meglioranza

Poet: Kevin Davies

About two years ago I was looking for a text for a song-cycle for baritone and piano. Having set Christina Rossetti and Rupert Brooke, I felt obliged to find a contemporary poet. I found much poetry that I liked and even began some settings of Yosef Komunyakaa. But nothing felt right. Then a friend of mine mentioned a poet whom I had never heard of: Kevin Davies. I rummaged around online (Davies being too obscure for most bookstores) and came upon his volume “Pause Button.” After reading about two pages, I knew that, even though I didn’t know what he was talking about, there was music here.

After much deliberation, and gaining permission from Kevin (a new music fan, by the way), I decided on a passage from the book’s second half and began to write. Early sketches resembled Berg, with a thick, chromatic piano part and the voice assuming an integral – rather than dominant – role. But as I pressed forward, the feeling that I was just writing dumb notes began to bother me. So I started paring down the piano part until, one day, after having listened to György Kurtág’s “Hölderlin Gesänge,” I decided to chuck the piano part altogether and a write a solo.

Two years later “Pause Button Excerpt” is seeing the light of day. And what a day it’s seeing. Last winter, completely out of the blue, baritone Thomas Meglioranza e-mailed me having read about the piece on my Sequenza21 Wiki page. He was looking for solo baritone music and wanted a copy. Tom won last year’s Naumburg competition and is not only a stupendously gifted singer, but a real Mensch as well. Go to his website, and you’ll learn that the best way for anyone to chalk up frequent flyer miles is to attend his performances. (There are lots of them, and they’re all over the place.)

It’s a thrill to dwell here on the musical side of this concert. Being the point man on this thing mostly means figuring out how to get the marimba in the building and making sure we have access to all the electronic equipment the (other) composers require. Preparations, in all honesty, are going shockingly well. Just gotta keep certain committee members from killing each other. But folks, this is going to be awesome.

P.S. But can our concert possibly be as awesome as this apple pie?

by David Toub
Classical Music, Composers, Los Angeles, Orchestras

Last Night in L.A.: Brett Dean (Part 1)

Six years ago, Sequenza21 published an interesting interview with Brett Dean.  The violist who was once the youngest member of the Berlin Philharmonic was beginning to be recognized as a composer.  This was about the time he made his first appearance with members of the LA Philharmonic in a “Green Umbrella” concert of new music, performing his work “Intimate Decisions” for viola.  S21, typically prescient, gave a lede to the interview stating that if you hadn’t heard of Dean yet, “You will.  You will.”

This season Dean is the first contemporary composer to be given a spotlight by the LA Phil, in two programs.  Yesterday’s subscription concert featured Dean’s “Viola Concerto” (2005) with the composer as soloist and the full orchestra conducted by Salonen.  Salonen brought out a microphone to introduce Dean to the audience, commenting on how rare (these days) it is to hear a composer performing his own concerto, much less to be so accomplished in both performance and composition. The Phil was one of the co-commissioners for this significant work.  Dean relates that it was initially written as only two movements, but that he then felt the piece needed an introductory movement to provide a frame-setting for the musical ideas.

The first movement, “Fragment”, establishes Dean’s sound, quietly growing in space.  “Pursuit” then places the solo viola in a chase with the orchestra.  Dean’s notes for the work refer to this movement as what could have happened if Paul Hindemith had played in a band with Tom Waits, an interesting idea.  There are occasional respites from the chase, including a lovely and technically-demanding cadenza which also includes elements of bird calls.  The relationship to Australia’s spaciousness and to its birds is a recurring element in several of Dean’s compositions.  “Veiled and Mysterious” returns us to space and quiet of the first movement.  The viola seems to meditate, and then it leads the orchestra into a re-examination of ideas of the first two movements.  The viola, finally at peace, enters into a closing dialog with the English horn.

Dean made great use of sonic color from his orchestra, and the sound in Disney Hall was responsive.  In the third movement, for example, a solo cello begins the orchestral accompaniment, with tremolo from violas; a second solo cello joins in, then a third, then a fourth.  Other strings join the tremolo and then add their own lines.  Bowed percussion add cool, metallic sounds to color the interactions.  This is attractive music, music willing to be introspective as well as active, music able to take advantage of quiet as well as to build sound.

The program for the concert built in color.  Haydn’s Symphony 82 (“The Bear”) began the program.  Following intermission, Salonen conducted a sonic spectacular bringing out every possible color in Ravel’s orchestration of “Pictures at an Exhibition”.

On Saturday, the LA Opera did a really good job of community outreach.  They presented two performances of a new work “Concierto para Mendez” with music by Lee Holdridge and libretto by Richard Sparks.  This is a musical celebration of the life of the trumpeter Rafael Mendez; it combines elements of documentary, opera, and concerto for trumpet.  Soloists from the Opera provided the singers and the LA Opera Orchestra provided the musical continuity and support.  Mendez had an amazing life:  dragooned into Pancho Villa’s revolutionary army as a trumpeter at the age of 10; immigrant to the United States as a laborer at 20; discovered as a musician and becoming a member of the Russ Morgan and Rudy Vallee orchestras; injured in an accident and having to readjust and retrain his embouchure; first chair trumpet for the MGM Orchestra, the best of the studios, at 35; starting a life as soloist and teacher at 40.  Six local trumpet students were selected to appear as his students in the work.  The performances were free. 

by JerryZ
ACO, Classical Music, Concerts, Contemporary Classical

Some of the Notes and Rhythms I Love

corey.jpg  For all the allusions to chaos and complexity in the American Composers Orchestra’s Orchestra Underground concert at Zankel on Friday night, the evening was a surpisingly mellow–dare I say it, even melodic–affair.  If new music is going to be this much fun to listen to there is a real danger that people are going to start coming to concerts.  

This is not to say the program was not adventuresome, just that it contained some unexpected crowd pleasers.  The guy sitting next to me, a visiting pianist/composer from St. Louis named Ken Palmer who came strictly for the Ives opener (Ken had written his dissertation at Yale on the Concord Sonata), even allowed that he would like to hear a couple of the pieces again and ventured that this weird Corey Dargel dude could be some kind of “breakthrough something or other” hit.

The evening began with orchestrated versions of Charles Ives’ Four Ragtime Dance, Nos. 2 and 4, originally composed for piano.  The thievery from Scott Joplin and Hubie Blake would be offensive if it were not so disarmingly obvious and re-mixed with church songs and marching band ditties with such consummate wit.  By the time we got to “Bringing in the Sheaves” (or “bringing in the sheep,” as we sang just to be naughty when I was a kid), everyone in Zankel Hall had a grin on their face.

The chaos part of the evening was supplied by Brad Ludman’s Fuzzy Logic, four short movements of dazzling electronia augmented by Lauren Bradnofsky on amplified cello and various orchestral instruments, as well as a dandy video by Boom Design Group.  I liked the way each of the movements began on a confident, assertive trajectory, became more convuluted and accelerated until they split apart, and then dissolved with a kind of a whimper.  Not sure what it means except maybe it doesn’t matter where you begin you’re going to wind up lost anyway so you can stop anywhere.  Silvestrov does that, too, although his music starts out tentative before it totally wimps out.  

Michael Gandolfi’s two-movment piece As Above was also a video collaboration (with Ean White), with the first short movement called “Touch” based on natural images and the second called “Electric” based on more urban images.  Touch was more chaos, a kind of jerky musicial cubism, based on the science of fractals, but Electric drew from vanacular musical languages, including rock, blues and some super-infectious “flying down to Rio” Latin rhythms.  It had a beat and you could dance to it.

The major complexity element of the evening was supplied by Michael Gatonska’s After the Wings of Migratory Birds, a brilliantly rendered tone poem based on the composer’s re-imagination of the sounds made by swallows gathering in migratory flocks–the way they sound when they move at the same time, the way they all flap their wings in unison, the way they suddenly fall perfectly still at the same time.  The orchestration was dense and often breathtaking, with some stunning moments of pure beauty in the strings.  I don’t think it is an exaggeration to say that this is a La Mer for the age of complexity.

Susie Ibarra did a piece on a drum set which was short and not too loud, qualities I appreciate in a drum solo.  The evening ended with Evan Ziporyn’s Big Grenadilla, a concerto for bass clarinet, which he performed admirably himself with impressive breath control.  Ziporyn’s music is so competent, so assured, so well-constructed that I really, really hope to like it someday.  I’m sure the fact that it leaves me cold is my failing, not his.

One of the several fun points of the evening was the beginning of the second half when a recording of Charles Ives hammering away at a piano and singing some hardy patriotic World War I ditty was played for the amusement of those assembled.  The recording was a little blurry but I could have sworn Ives said “That sucked” at the end.  It couldn’t have been that, although the sentiment was certainly accurate.

And, of course, the hit of the evening–the peoples’ choice–was our own boulevardier Corey Dargel, who brought down the house with a tres amusant song called All the Notes and Rhythms I’ve Ever Loved about composer boyfriends who, knowing that he can’t orchestrate, steal his stuff and use it in their own pieces which is a kind of “sadistic, back-handed compliment.”  It was the usual Corey brilliant mix of satire and truth. 

My new friend Ken in the next seat over is right;  Corey is destined to become some kind of “breakthrough something or other” hit.   Anybody need an intellectual Peter Allen?

by Jerry Bowles
Classical Music, Composers, Contemporary Classical, Uncategorized

4 sentences about classical music that I don’t mind reading

There seemed to be an universal agreement with Soho the Dog when he posted his famous 8 sentences, but on half of them, he was either being way too literal or just wrong.  

“Jazz is America’s classical music.”
Yeah sure, Johns Adams & Corigliano and their peers are this continent’s contributions to the field of classical music, but this, dear fellow, is what we call a metaphor. In this case, it applies to the fact that jazz is an aesthetic that is entirely unique and has risen to the serious-minded plateau of traditional classical music. Why is that so hard?

“Mozart and Beethoven were the popular music of their time.”
There is no 200-year-old equivalent of Justin Timberlake. The pop star is a 20th century creation of a nascent mass media. These composers were, by any measure, more important to their contemporary cultural life than anything that exists today in the classical community. The estimates are that somewhere between 20 and 30,000 people flocked to Beethoven’s funeral. Franz Stober even painted the thing:
 

Lady Di, sure. But can you imagine people turning out like this when Philip Glass checks out?

“Orchestras need to do away with tuxedos because they’re stuffy and outdated.”
Not to mention that they’re utterly absurd. Orchestras started wearing this crap because that’s what the audience wore (There’s a lovely scene in the old movie ‘Tales of Manhattan’ that perfectly illustrates the sartorial peer pressure which gave rise to this tradition). But when do you ever see an audience in white tie these days? In what universe does it make sense for an orchestra to continue to dress this way?

“Composers today only write music for other composers.”
An absurd generalization, of course, but it does put its thumb on the fundamental issue that arises out of classical music being so cloistered: there is no general audience for new classical music in America.

by Jodru
Click Picks, Contemporary Classical

Steve’s click picks #2

Continuing our weekly listen to (and look at) a few composers and performers that you may not know yet, but should… And can, right here and now, since they’re nice enough to offer a good chunk of listening online:

Andreas Weixler (b. 1963 / Austria)

Composer, media artist and university lecturer, Weixler takes a strong interest in integrating digital and visual elements into his work, often in interactive, fluid situations. The site offers a good sampling of recordings (and some video), whether acoustic, electroacoustic, or multimedia (the last with plenty of description and images as well as sound).

Simon Steen Andersen (b. 1976 / Denmark)

A look at Simon’s site will show you a busy guy: the work list says he’s been extremely prolific, the concert list says a lot of people want to play his stuff, and there’s a half-dozen new works in progress as I write this. Much of what you’ll hear when you click that speaker graphic on his main page is pretty virtuostic, with a love for instrumental high-drama.

Nadia Sirota (b. 1982 / US, NY)

Nadia’s a young violist whose path seems almost ridiculously “fast-track”, throwing herself into as much in the last ten years than most do in two or three times that. Yet she’s never simply given herself over to the big-classics star-route; Nadia seems to be investing just as much energy and real enthusiasm in performing works by her close contemporaries. On her “sounds” page, new work by Ryan Streber, Nico Muhly, Marco Balter, Judd Greenstein and even another Sirota (Robert) stand every bit as proudly beside the Hindemith, Ligeti and Bergsma.

by Steve Layton
Composers, Experimental Music

What, Edgard Varese as sideman?

Paul Griffiths gets off one zinger of a closing paragraph in the October 6 2006 issue of the Times Literary Supplement (London). The book under review is: Felix Meyer and Heidy Zimmermann (editors), Edgard Varese: Composer, sound sculptor, visionary (500 pp., Boydell and Brewer, 25 pounds sterling).

” … Unlikely as it must seem to anyone familiar with the old myth of the lonely pioneer,” Griffiths writes, “Varese did indeed work with jazz artists, including the trumpeter Art Farmer, the saxophonist Teo Macero and the drummer Ed Shaughnessy. We have the evidence, as [Olivia] Mattis tells us in perhaps the most tantalizing sentence of the book: ‘Recordings of several of these sessions, which also survive in the Paul Sacher Foundation archives, are astonishing.’ Perhaps, before scholars descend to wear these tapes out, the Sacher Foundation could release them on CD. Varese swinging: that would be something to hear.”

Note the “also” in the passage above. Question: So who else has these tapes?

PS. See amplification by Steve Layton and Micah Silver below in “Comments.”

by Richard Buell
Uncategorized

Concert Fund-raising Update

Hey Folks,

Just wanted to offer an early thanks to those who recently helped us reach our fund-raising goal of $2000.

We’re going to keep the PayPal link open just in case any of you out there still feel generous. The money may not go to this concert, but (believe it or not) there’s already been a little whispering about the next Sequenza21 concert, and it would be nice to have a little piggy bank to draw from. And who knows? Maybe some unbelievably horrible disaster might occur between now and concert time that would require us to hunker down and cough up a little cash.  Of course we hope not:  but, as today certainly proved, rainy days do happen!   (Just referring to the weather now, don’t worry.)

So thanks once again, and we’ll see you at the concert! 

by David Toub
Classical Music, Concerts, Music Events

Dispatch from the Used Book Cafe

Tonight’s joint performance at the Used Book Café by Hilary Hahn and Chris Thile was an essay in the satisfactions of virtuosity. Any concert-goer who can no longer thrill to the sound of lightning-fast fingers should go his or her way and leave the rest of us to our fun. For sure technique is not all. And for sure the steps to acquiring a technique that can thrill are becoming more brutal and inhuman to mount by the year. And, also for sure, much that is essential to extraordinary music making is often lost on the climb. Some may even grumble that Hahn and Thile fly only so high as they do because they travel light.

But tonight, sitting through solo and duet renditions of Bach, Tartini, Bob Dylan, Fiona Apple, and others, one happily forgot the old complaints about virtuosity and sat back contentedly in the rush of arpeggios, trills, tremolos, and scales. One smiled at the clear joy Hahn and Thile took in collaborating with a fellow musical athlete of the first caliber, someone who could play along tight no matter how blazing the tempos dared. This isn’t to say the country whiz kid winging his way through the classics and the conservatory prodigy tentatively testing the waters of folk music always made for an effortless couple: Thile’s Bach got pretty runny, and Hahn’s bluegrass was a little green. But the super-abundance of talent on display more than made up for the moments of musical awkwardness. Hahn and Thile charmed and dazzled through the evening, and we all cheered. Both artists have new CDs out, and let’s hope they both sell lots and lots of them.

P.S. On a more somber note, Tower Records is officially breathing its last. I’m not up for a eulogy tonight (lectures yet to prep); but the “Going Out of Business” signs in the windows of the grand store by Lincoln Center are making me feel a little bummed.

by David Toub
ACO, Classical Music, Composers, Concerts, Contemporary Classical

The Year of Brad Lubman

Brad Lubman has been involved in the new music scene for nearly two decades but this looks like his breakthrough season.  Conductor/composer Lubman makes his guest conductor debut at the helm of the  American Composers Orchestra Friday evening at  Zankel Hall at Carnegie Hall, when the ACO kicks off its 30th season with its first Orchestra Underground Composers OutFront! concert.

In addition to leading the orchestra in music from Michael Gatonska,  Evan Ziporyn, Michael Gandolfi, Susie Ibarra,  Charles Ives and our own wunderkind Corey Dargel,  Lubman will conduct the world premiere of his own Fuzzy Logic, for woodwinds, brass, percussion, synthesizer, piano, and amplified cello and video. Lauren Radnofsky is amplified cello soloist and Boom Design Group creates the visual designs.

The program will be repeated at the Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Philadelphia on Sunday, October 15 at 7:30pm.

If you miss those shows, Lubman’s  new music group Electric Fuzz will be gigging Friday, October 20, starting at 7 pm, at Joe’s Pub Electric Fuzz was formed in 2006 by performers and composers who played together as members of the Musica Nova Ensemble at the Eastman School of Music.  The group is currently collaborating with Boom Design Group, a team of virtuoso visual artists and web designers, who draw on their own performance backgrounds to produce improvised and interactive video installations.

The Joe’s Pub event will feature the premiere of a new Lubman work named for Electric Fuzz; plus Jumping to Conclusions, a quartet with electronics; and several pieces for violin, cello and synth that Lubman has co-composed with ensemble member Lauren Radnofsky. Music by David Lang and Pierre Boulez rounds-out the event.

Lubman has enjoyed a busy and multi-faceted career, but is probably best known among new music insiders as a gifted utility infielder who can deliver a superior performance from any world-class orchestra or ensemble on a moment’s notice, a talent honed by having been Assistant Conductor to the mercurial and (in my view) inexplicable Oliver Knussen at the Tanglewood Music Center from 1989-94. 

This is his well-deserved chance to bat cleanup.

by Jerry Bowles
Boston, Classical Music, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Experimental Music

The Callithumpians are Abloom Again

The Callithumpian Consort is at work again at 8:30 pm tomorrow night at NEC’s Jordan Hall  in a slightly premature celebration of the 80th anniversary of Earle Brown’s birth (it’s actually December 26).

They’ll be playing Brown’s Sign Sounds, a rarely heard masterpiece of open form from that resides somewhere on the frontier between serialism and improvisation.  They will perform the piece several times, and have assured us that no two performances will be alike.

And they’ll also be continuing their exploration of Alvin Lucier with his  Ever Present, for saxophone, flute, piano, and sine waves (which they describe it as “infinitely slow expansion of the music between your ears”) and John Luther Adams’s songbirdsongs, a JLA masterwork from the 1970s. 

The Callithumpian Consort has just recorded the complete songbirdsongs under the direction of the composer. Watch for the CD release.

And don’t miss Evan Johnson’s review of the latest Earle Brown recording on the CD Review page.

by Jerry Bowles