Earle Brown’s Calder Piece performed at the Fondation Maeght, Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France, August 1967
I don’t know when else you’d have a chance to see expert musicians interact with a sculpture by one of the most iconic American artists of the 20th century. This rare event, on August 20 at the Dimenna Center in New York, is part of the annual TIME:SPANS festival.
In Earle Brown’s Calder Piece the artist’s mobile is an essential part of the piece. The artwork will “conduct” the Talujon Percussion Quartet as its sections sway from their pivot points. And, yes, you will also get to see the instrumentalists “play” the sculpture, though the artist himself initially expected a more forceful display. “I thought that you were going to hit it much harder—with hammers,” said Calder after the first performance in the early 1960s.
Calder Piece is “the focal point and central hinge of this year’s festival,” according to the introduction in the festival booklet by Thomas Fichter and Marybeth Sollins, executive director and trustee respectively of The Earle Brown Music Foundation Charitable Trust which produces and presents TIME:SPANS. But it is by no means the only highlight of the dozen concerts in the festival.
Talea Ensemble, JACK Quartet, International Contemporary Ensemble, Argento…..once again, since 2015, some of the most acclaimed contemporary music ensembles in the country descend on the Dimenna Center for this late summer aural spectacle. Performances are nearly every night August 12 – 26, chock full of 21st century concert music in a myriad of styles.
It seems almost impossible to pick out highlights from the dozen performances – there are so many intriguing programs. In addition to the Calder event, here are a few that I am particularly looking forward to:
JACK Quartet playing Helmut Lachenmann (August 13) – my mind was blown the first time I heard Lachenmann’s music performed live. He calls his compositions musique concrète instrumentale, creating other-worldly sounds through extended techniques.
JACK Quartet photo by Beowulf Sheehan
Ekmeles performing Taylor Brook, Hannah Kendall and Christopher Trapani (August 22) – though vocal music isn’t my first choice genre, I am drawn to a cappella ensembles, especially when they are as high quality as Ekmeles. Trapani’s music is always a treat to hear, and his End Words lives alongside music by the equally deserving Kendall and Brook.
Ensemble Signal’s program on August 15 is brought to you by the letter “A”: music by Anahita Abbasi, Augusta Read Thomas. Aida Shirazi, Agata Zubel. I’ve been following Abbasi ever since she won an ASCAP composer award about eight years ago. Her music, though not always easy to listen to, is intense and visceral. I predict it will be a great contrast to Read Thomas’s more tuneful style.
In recent years, Deutsche-Grammophon has been releasing crossover albums incorporating the work of pop/electronic artists, particularly those who sit in the post-rock and ambient pockets. Balmorhea, the band name for the trio Rob Lowe, Michael A. Muller, and Aisha Burns are an ideal grouping for this type of project. Their work has long been influenced by classical music and their arrangements are well wrought. In 2021, their first recording for DG, The Wind, made a strong impression. If anything, their latest for the imprint, Pendant World, is even stronger.
Guests artists from the A-list of contemporary classical music join them, including cellist Clarice Jensen, percussionist Jason Treuting, vocalist Lisa Morgenstern, and guitarist Sam Gendel. Lower and Muller handle keyboard duties, and Burns contributes violin. Many of the songs are aphoristic, but even the smallest slices of music yield atmospheric moments. “Nonplussed,” Pendant World’s opener, clocks in at a mere forty-one seconds, but Treuting’s chimes and gradually accelerating drums give it a striking resemblance to a locomotive gearing up to leave the station. “Range” is a showcase for Gendel’s arpeggiated guitar, with supple strings in the background and a brief piano bridge between the guitar solos. Less than two minutes, it would make an excellent cut for a film score. “Fire Song” too, is short yet memorable. It features Gendel, this time taking on a more melodic role with plaintive harmonies behind him.
Pendant World doesn’t just contain morsel-sized pieces. “Step, Step, Step” is a showcase for the band and all of their guests. Solos ricochet between them, with Burns a particular standout and Treuting providing an ardent motor. The arrangement is well-conceived: the concert music analog to a post-rock anthem. Similarly, “Oscuros” is for the ensemble, with a repeated note piano riff girding the verses and strings taking up a variation of the tune in a subdued middle section. At the end of the piece, the piano takes the foreground again with a harmonically tweaked, more fully realized version of the tune.
The final piece,”Depth Serenade” features Balmorhea with Burns and Jensen handling string duties. The violin and cello melodies are beautiful, set against ambient keyboards. The overall effect has echoes of Gavin Bryars’s Sinking of the Titanic and Harold Budd’s work, but the sound world of Balmorhea commingles with them, and doesn’t merely co opt past sounds. It ends with repeated shimmering piano chords and soaring strings..
Pendant World makes a strong case for the vitality of crossover in a contemporary classical context. One hopes Balmorhea will continue in this vein.
Violinist Timothy Schwarz has commissioned, performed, and recorded a number of pieces by contemporary composers. His latest release on Albany, The Living American, is a collection of recent pieces by American composers.
Schwarz takes a “melting pot” approach to his program. It opens with the solo Fantasy on Lama Badaa yatsana, written by Stephen Sametz, which explores alternate scales with frequent double-stops and harmonics alongside virtuosic melodic writing. Pianist Charles Abramovic joins Schwarz on a set of pieces by musical theater composer Joseph Goodrich. Indeed, C-minor Jam leans much closer to a theatrical version of jazz than one by legit jazzers, but it is an entertaining romp nonetheless. Goodrich’s Lacrimosa is a touching, lyrical work with, as one would suspect, a mournful cast. Schwarz plays emotively, phrasing the music expansively with a variety of textures. The Machine is a syncopated moto perpetuo, with the piano playing a punctilious ostinato in the bass that is countered by one in the violin with equal verve.
Jennifer Higdon’s String Poetic: Blue Hills of Mist, opens with inside-the-piano work alongside chords to create a swath of overtones. The violin joins with a soaring line that encompasses some of the notes from the piano, adding weight to the overtones. The piano then plays a brooding, mournful accompaniment and the violin counters with a tender, modal melody. Schwarz and Abramovic make an excellent performing pair on this sumptuous work. A warmly hued cadenza accompanied by percussive dampened piano strings follows. The piano plays color chords and the violin once again begins a cadenza, taking stops along the way for sustained notes. The coda ensues, with percussive piano mirroring notes in the violin. A pizzicato note provides a final pitch that is quite a surprise.
The beginning of Jessie Montgomery’s Rhapsody No. 2 is filled with challenging scalar runs that traverse the entire compass of the instrument. A slow section of harmonics adds a more dissonant harmonic palette. Gradually, a slowed down version of the opening scalar passages, with yearning high notes, takes over. Double stops appear in a speeding up crescendo. The opening gesture returns in a valedictory flourish.
Reena Esmail’s musical approach combines Eastern and Western elements. This synthesis is abundantly apparent in the solo piece Darshan: Raag charukeshi. Once again, Schwarz is adept at dealing with the requirements of multiple technical approaches. His playing carefully negotiates the microtones and sliding techniques of Esmail’s piece.
Avner Dorman’s Sonata No. 2 for Violin and Piano begins with a slow boil of angular violin gestures. This is joined by the piano, which plays clouds of harmonies against dissonant leaps in the violin. Multi-stopped passages and yearning melodies are accompanied by enigmatic arpeggiations in the piano. A second section begins with strident harmonics and bass-register piano punctuations. The piano quickens into a brusk ostinato, over which the violin performs aggressive turns through glissandos and slashed multi-stops. The duo build to a ferocious climax, dizzying in intensity. A gradual slowdown concludes with a brief violin solo. Soft, pointillist piano lines abets a low register violin melody that gradually slides up its compass, adding double-stops. A glissando buzzes down to scordatura bass notes, then makes wave shaped lines that continue in a slippery path to silence.
The final work on the recording is a five-movement piece called Australian Sketches. I am puzzled as to why this is included on The Living American. True, the composer Denis Deblasio, is a jazz composer from the US, but why have the longest programmed work be an homage to Australia? If one sets aside this programmatic puzzlement, the music is a real treat. Schwarz and Abramovic are joined by bassist Douglas Mapp, and drummer Doug Hirlinger in a cabaret combo. Like C-minor Jam, this is jazz in a pop context. I am reminded of Stefan Grappelli’s film work (such as his featured role on the Dirty Rotten Scoundrels soundtrack) in Schwarz’s approach to Deblasio’s effervescent creations. The performances are playfully rendered, but artful as well. Given the melting pot approach already in evidence, on second thought, why not invite our friends from Australia to join in the fun?
Would you spend four and a half hours listening to this long piece?
Would you enter the concert hall and embark on this unknown auditory journey?
BY Di Fang
On April 12th at 2 p.m., in the Conrad Prebys Concert Hall at the University of California, San Diego, renowned percussionist Steven Schick, flutist Alexander Ishov, and pianist Liam Wooding performed together to interpret the work of 20th-century American composer Morton Feldman—”For Philip Guston” (1984). The initial experience of a four-and-a-half-hour concert with a slow, continuous pace, led by one of the world’s leading percussion masters, Steven Schick, left the audience with anticipation.
Steven Schick
Feldman’s music is slow and quiet, with an exquisite delicacy. When the first note of the piece is played, the floating melody immediately creates a sense of emptiness and mystery, leading the audience into an unknown world.
What are the performers doing? What elusive emotions are they evoking? What does Feldman want to say to his deceased closest friend Phillip Guston, the Abstract Expressionist? Where does the music lead the listener? What kind of chemical reaction will occur between the listener and the music? For the lead player Steven Schick, what does it mean to play this controversial work again after so many years? What is the difference between artists of very different ages performing together? What does this mean for the audience? What is the significance of Feldman to present and future?
Unexpectedly, as the music progresses, the audience’s curiosity is not constantly either amplified or resolved, but rather follows it the nice clean emptiness, to the depths of a calm and slightly melancholic abyss. With the passage of time, I began to discard all trivial matters, let go of unnecessary emotional burdens, and gradually set aside pointless thoughts. As the performance crossed the halfway mark, I felt constrained by my seat and walked to the steps on the side of the audience, where I sat down and continued the ritual-like listening. Looking at the other listeners, some stood with their eyes closed, while others lay directly on the carpet, seemingly immersed in a dream.
Liam Wooding
Feldman infused his notes into my present and future life, and my associations became a form of insight. Hidden metaphors, buried within myself, were like a reflection in a dusting mirror, gradually revealing their pure and natural essence through listening to Feldman’s composition. The act of listening enters the realm of aesthetic contemplation and communion with the universe.
The music is extremely minimalistic period, employing minimal motives for parallelism and repetition, resembling the primitive state of life. Its structure, however, is asymmetrical and unbalanced, unadorned, and bears a longing for ephemeral existence. The composer possesses a deep understanding of instrument usage, with the orchestration more akin to the blending of similar timbres rather than mere accompaniment. Compared with the weak sense of rhythm, the patterns of the melodies are more prominent and leave a lasting impression that lingers in one’s mind. This disrupts the audience’s previous auditory expectations of percussion.
This work not only challenges the physical limits of the performers in terms of its duration but also requires a sense of mutual understanding, breath, and collaboration among them due to its rhythmic, tempo, and dynamic characteristics. The vibraphone, the glockenspiel, and the celesta intertwine with indistinguishable timbres, while the contrasting tones of the piccolo and marimba disrupt the melody, creating a “Zen” stillness in the midst of the environment, halting the music and evoking a sense of enlightenment.
Alexander Ishov
The collaboration between the two young artists Alexander Ishov, Liam Wooding, and the percussion master Steven Schickis so harmonious and reflects each other. The bodily movements of the three artists are consistent, evoking the swaying of irregular tree shadows, while the overall composition progresses rhythmically, akin to a pendulum, showcasing a cohesive structure with internal coherence. I have no intention of seeking out specific vocabulary to describe the performance style of them, emphasizing their skills, coordination, and precise control over body expression. It’s because they best embody the concepts of “performer as absent” and “performer not present.” The performers’ act of erasing personal traces allows the audience to directly confront the work itself.
This aesthetic of sound is not commonly found in contemporary compositions. In an era of sound material exploding, Feldman returns to precise notation to paint the new structure. He places importance on the presentation of material and even more on the integration of material, requiring melting and mix like pigments. The process of viewing a painting is temporal, each moment seen is always partial. Feldman maps indeterminate sounds into the stretch of time, dissolving the complete symbolic image, which allows each instrument enough time to adjust its breathing and refine its sound system in the process. At the same time, silence gained its positive status.
In fact, no other composers of his time were influenced so much by paintings and painters. Whether designing, sketching, or copying, a painter’s first consideration is the size of the painting. Feldman thinks the same thing, “up to one hour you think about form, but after an hour and a half its scale. Form is easy—just the division of things into parts. But scale is another matter.” The emergence of the best crypto casino UK parallels this focus on scale, as these platforms expand rapidly, leveraging cryptocurrency to enhance user experiences and operational efficiency. However, we can’t ignore the connection between Feldman and Guston’s abstractions, early Anatolian rugs, Robert Rauschenberg, and the textiles in Egypt’s Coptic Period. The material itself is raised to the same status as the structure. The boundaries between tool and object, form and content are blurred. The intuition is the point.
Feldman’s dissonant sounds are organized within a naturalistic rhythm and a concise arrangement of pitches, creating an abstract space with multiple dimensions. Concrete sounds such as church bells, temple wooden block, and the rhythm of bouncing after free-fall are abstracted one by one, encompassing the natural cacophony, worldly clamor, and inner whispers. In the world of sound, one experiences and engages in a “serene contemplation” (Zong Baihua, “Aesthetic Stroll”). The repetition of similar or identical sonic elements allows the listener to gain a profound sense of time, leading to a clear understanding of life and the essence of time.
Today, do we still need Morton Feldman and Philips Gaston? Perhaps what we should think about is the spatial field of this sound. What the human condition represented or mapped by the presence of this sound.
“For Philip Guston” (1984) is not merely a concert but a meditation and practice for both performers and audience members. It gives me a new understanding of the concert event itself. As the audience enters the concert hall, they entrust their time to the performers, while the performers contribute their passion and past experiences to the composer’s work. The music work becomes a medium of communication between the audience, composer, and performers, constructing a unique path for each individual to find personal significance. The performers lead the audience into an unknown world of sound. This world is not solely created by the composer or performers; it belongs to the collective human experience.
Morton Feldman
As Morton Feldman said, “This piece doesn’t give you the feeling that it’s four hours.”
The beauty of Feldman’s music is characterized by an elusive contradiction and the embodiment of “less is more” functionality, aligning with the aesthetics and analytical thinking of modernism. The journey of this concert seeks enlightenment in stillness, serving as a “spiritual practice” for the performers and a “choice” for each audience to cultivate their inner selves, which will accompany them throughout their lives.
(All photos by Robbie Bui)
Author: Di Fang
Visiting scholar at the University of California, San Diego, Music Department.
Ph.D. candidate in Aesthetics of Music, Shanghai Conservatory of Music.
I first met Hayes Biggs in Venezuela in the 1990s, at a contemporary music festival in Caracas. We bonded over a street artist’s unique t-shirt designs, and over the performances by musicians from all corners of the Americas.
Since then, Biggs has been a regular fixture at new music concerts in New York City, as well as on stage with C4, the Choral Composer/Conductor Collective ensemble. He has been on the faculty of Manhattan School of Music teaching theory and composition since 1992. On May 31, 2023, four long-time champions of contemporary chamber music – violinist Curtis Macomber, violist Lois Martin, cellist Chris Gross, and pianist Christopher Oldfather – perform Biggs’ works in recital in a composer portrait at Merkin Hall in New York City.
In advance of the concert, I asked Biggs about the evolution of his compositional style and his career path. Here is our interview.
Gail Wein: In addition to your work as a composer and as a teacher at MSM you are also a choral singer. How does that experience inform your instrumental compositions?
Hayes Biggs: I strive to write beautiful melodic lines, harmonies and counterpoint. Studying voice as a college student, singing in choirs, and accompanying singers and choral groups has had a profound effect on all the music I write, in whatever medium or genre. More than once it has happened that bits of my vocal music (and occasionally that of others) have found their way into my instrumental works. For example, my String Quartet: O Sapientia/Steal Away (2004) is based to a great extent on two such pieces: a choral motet for Advent that I wrote in 1995, and the African American spiritual Steal Away. I had sung the latter in my college choir in William Dawson’s magnificent arrangement as a freshman in college, and that version was the inspiration for the last movement of the quartet.
GW: The piano preludes on your May 31 program are inspired by poetry. How do these preludes reflect the poems?
HB: Only the first three of the preludes (commissioned by Thomas Stumpf) have specific connections to poems, and I would see them as suggestive of certain general moods rather than as attempting to depict literally any events or images contained in the poetry. In No. 1, “The Secret that silent Lazarus would not reveal,” on Billy Collins’s “The Afterlife,” where the poet imagines the dead all going wherever they imagined they would go after death, I had the idea of a kind of jazzy march, tinged a bit with blues and gospel, as they all parade off in their separate directions. The second, on Wendell Berry’s “The Peace of Wild Things,” seems to me to move from a mood of sadness and anxiety to one of serenity. The third prelude, on one of Rilke’s Annunciation poems from DasMarienleben, is dedicated to the memory of my mother-in-law Lois Orzel, and is intended to convey the quiet strength of the Virgin Mary and the awe in which the powerful angel Gabriel regards her. The fourth prelude is simply a short, playful study in rhythm, with bright major triads and crisply articulated eighth notes in shifting meters alternating with a heavier, bluesier, swinging triplet feel. It is dedicated to my friends David Rakowski and Beth Wiemann.
GW: The selections on the May 31 program are all fairly recent works. Tell me about your compositional style and approach, and how it has changed over the years (or not).
HB: I’m as eclectic as they come, kind of a musical omnivore. I tend to view stylistic purity as highly overrated. As far as my love of classical music is concerned, I think that initially I was knocked sideways by Beethoven, Bach, and Mozart, and then became enthralled by Chopin, Brahms, Schumann, Wagner, and later, Richard Strauss. I fell in love with harmony, the richer the better.
The first modern music I responded to was in an American idiom inspired by Stravinskian neoclassicism and Hindemith, including Persichetti, Bernstein, Copland, William Schuman, and others. I later discovered the Second Viennese School and the late works of Stravinsky. Two favorite composers of mine, Alban Berg and Stravinsky, both exemplify something that has preoccupied me for years: the reconciliation of tonal and non-tonal elements in the same work. Being diametrically opposed in their respective aesthetics, they approach this reconciliation in very different ways. Berg goes for a seamless fusion of atonal elements with Romantic gestures and tonal-sounding harmonies, in a language that evokes Mahler, while Stravinsky in a work like Agon, seems to embrace discontinuity, the juxtaposition of seemingly incongruous musics in the same piece.
GW: As New Yorkers, we sometimes forget there are other areas of the United States with rich, vibrant and interesting cultures. How has growing up in Alabama and Arkansas influenced your compositional style, your career path and your work?
HB: I was born in Huntsville, AL, but only because my dad happened to be stationed there when he was in the Army; our family wasn’t there for any significant amount of time. After that we lived in Memphis until I was four, when we moved to Indiana for one year. After that my dad got a job as the radiologist at the hospital in Helena, AR, where we lived from the time I was about 5 until I graduated from high school in 1975.
There were limited opportunities to hear classical music in Helena, though I do remember a concert series where touring artists performed in the Central High School gym. Later, another series, the Warfield Concerts, was founded after a wealthy man named S. D. Warfield died in 1967 and left a lot of money to be used for bringing famous performers and ensembles to Phillips County. The series continues to this day. I was able to see a number of classical performers, including Van Cliburn, the U. S. Air Force Band, the National Symphony conducted by Arthur Fiedler, as well as touring opera and ballet companies. More opportunities for such events, however, were available about an hour and a half away, in Memphis, which has its own symphony orchestra, as well as an opera company.
When I was young the Metropolitan Opera went on tour every spring and Memphis was one of its stops. I was eleven in 1968 when I saw my first opera during one of those tours, Carmen, with the late, great Grace Bumbry. Memphis also had a lot of churches with fine music programs that presented organ and choral concerts, as well as a fine community theater, Theatre Memphis.
The whole area where I grew up — the Mississippi Delta — was of course the home of many celebrated vernacular musics: gospel, rhythm & blues, country, rock & roll, and others. Famous people from near where I grew up include baritone William Warfield, Conway Twitty, and Levon Helm. B. B. King and Elvis were of course ubiquitous presences in that region. While Helena has become a center of Delta blues with its annual Blues Festival, I recently discovered how this cultural richness parallels the excitement found in goksites met de beste uitbetaling, where players seek platforms offering optimal rewards, much like the Delta’s artists seeking the perfect note to captivate their audiences. It’s a rich cultural and musical heritage, but I think it’s only been fairly recently that I’ve started to allow influences of pop, rock, jazz, and blues to filter into my own music.
GW: When did you first become aware of your interest in music? How and when did you realize that you enjoyed writing music?
HB: It’s a very corny story; while I had sung in choirs from the time I was very small, I started piano lessons quite late, at the age of nine. My mother had been quite a good pianist when she was young but would never have had a chance to pursue it professionally. My dad had no formal musical training apart from a few trumpet lessons when he was about 10, but he and my mom both loved classical music, which was heard in our house regularly, along with Broadway shows and other popular music, including jazz.
The first music I can remember hearing was the original cast album of My Fair Lady, which had opened on Broadway about a year before I was born. My parents played it a lot, along with other original cast albums, movie soundtracks, what used to be called “highlights” albums from favorite operas, and many standard classical pieces. My first big formative musical experience was watching The Beatles on Ed Sullivan’s show in 1964 at the age of six, after which I became a huge fan, which I remain to this day.
About a year after beginning piano lessons, my classmates and I were assigned to read a story about Mozart in a fifth grade reading class at Helena Elementary School. The class was taught by a very kind teacher named Carrie Garofas, who loved classical music; she was a trained singer with a lovely lyric soprano voice. Soon after we read a story about Gershwin, and another about Beethoven, and I was hooked.
I became fascinated by the idea of composing and with musical notation, though I had little idea about how it worked. I was brought up in a fundamentalist evangelical tradition — I call myself a “recovering Southern Baptist” — but my first piano teacher was a nun, Sister Teresa Angela, who taught at the local Catholic school. She readily observed that I was very interested in the manuscript paper she kept in a drawer and used for writing out scales and exercises for students. She also quickly figured out that a good way to get me to practice was to promise me a few sheets of it as a reward for a lesson well played. Whenever I had a spare moment I tried to write music, and learned by imitating what I saw in the music I played on the piano.
At the local music store in Helena I found a slim volume called Preparing Music Manuscript that I read cover to cover (I still have it), borrowed Kennan’s Orchestration from my church choir director when I was a teenager and absorbed it, and just devoured all the music of whatever kind that I could. Soon my mind opened to modern music by way of my high school band director N. Stanley Balch, and the discovery of Vincent Persichetti’s Twentieth Century Harmony. My Christmas list for many years included recordings of classical works almost to the exclusion of anything else. I asked for and received a recording of Berg’s Wozzeck at the age of thirteen. While I certainly couldn’t comprehend all of its complexities at the time, I found my way into loving it with repeated listening. I was particularly fascinated with how Berg reconciled tonal and non-tonal elements so seamlessly.
I continued playing the piano, singing in choirs at church and at school, and accompanying vocal solos and choral music. When I got to college (at what is now Rhodes College in Memphis, TN) in the fall of 1975, I was a piano major, but also took voice lessons, sang in the choir, and continued accompanying, mostly voice students. I learned a tremendous amount about how voices work from those experiences. I’d composed a few little pieces over the years, but didn’t receive any formal training in composition until I was introduced by Tony Lee Garner, my college choir director, to Don Freund, who has been at Indiana University for many years but was then teaching at what is now the University of Memphis. Don took me on as a private student, as there was no composition program at Rhodes. He has had (and continues to have) a huge effect on how I think about composing, and was particularly influential when it came to how to incorporate many diverse types of harmony and stylistic elements into my works.
I continued my education with a master’s degree in composition at SMU in Dallas, where my principal teacher was Donald Erb, and after meeting and taking lessons with Mario Davidovsky at Tanglewood in 1981 I decided to apply to Columbia University, where I earned a DMA. Mario was also a powerful influence on me, as different from Don Freund in aesthetic outlook as one could imagine, but also an inspiring teacher.
Bang on a Can founders David Lang, Julia Wolfe, Michael Gordon (photo: George Etheredge)
In a culture in which we are constantly reinventing ourselves, any event can be the first annual anything. And so it is with Bang on a Can’s Long Play Festival, whose inaugural edition was launched in Spring 2022.
The organizers clearly found Long Play to be a success: The 2023 edition is May 5, 6 and 7 with events spread over ten venues in downtown Brooklyn: Pioneer Works, Roulette, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Public Records, Littlefield, BRIC, Mark Morris Dance Center, The Center for Fiction, and Fort Greene Park. Over 50 performances are scheduled; most are accessed via a one-day or two-day pass ($89 and $150, respectively). Scores of performing artists include the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Philip Glass Ensemble performing the iconic Glassworks in its entirety for the first time; a reunion concert of Henry Threadgill’s Very Very Circus, the musical collective Harriet Tubman, Alarm Will Sound, JACK Quartet, Momenta Quartet, Sō Percussion, Meredith Monk & Vocal Ensemble, Bang on a Can All-Stars (of course!), and more. The complete list is here; tickets are here.
The composer David Lang, one of the three founders of Bang on a Can, told me, “Last year we had theorized this would work. We thought it would be good and we thought we would enjoy it – and we did it and it was a blast. Everyone in the organization got fired up by the fact that there was so much music and so many musicians and the audience was so varied and so interested.”
Lang along with the composers Julia Wolfe and Michael Gordon launched Bang on a Can in New York City in 1987 with a 12-hour concert in a downtown art gallery. The organization became known for its annual marathon concerts in New York, and later expanded to include a performance group (the Bang on a Can All-Stars), a commissioning program, education programs and festivals at MASS MoCA in the Berkshires, and a record label (Cantaloupe).
Why after 30-plus years of successful marathon concerts did Bang on a Can decide to stray from its tried and true formula? Lang said, “After a while, we felt like we were inviting people on to the marathon for slots of 15 or 20 minutes that we wished were an hour or two hours. I remember thinking – this is at the last marathon – people would come in and they would go, “That was incredible. Why am I only wanting that for fifteen minutes?”
The aesthetic of the performers, programs and repertoire at Long Play doesn’t really differ from that of the marathons, said Lang. It’s still about performing artists who consider themselves innovators. “They say, ‘there’s a kind of traditional music that’s involved in my world and I’m not doing that.’ That’s always been the way we’ve judged people to come on to the marathon.” Lang continued, “What I’m really hoping will happen is that people will think that the world is full of creativity and wildness and inspiration and that the world is very large.”
“To me, one of the really exciting things about this festival is it shows you people who are taking lots of different attitudes equally seriously. They believe that their music has power. They believe that they’re part of a community which is coming together to do something important and that we as listeners are in fact an essential part of that community. And that music has a lot of powers to heal the problems of the world.”
As music lovers tromp around Brooklyn seeking aural pleasure and revelations from Long Play Festival events, some might need nourishment in a more literal sense. Barry Michael Okun has made it his lifetime passion and now fulltime job to curate a website and weekly newsletter pairing outstanding performing arts experiences with recommendations for culinary delights. I asked him to suggest a few spots from his curated Go Out! The List to re-fuel between performances. Here are his thoughts:
near Public Records: Mediterraneanish New American (or New Americanish Mediterranean) out of the big oven at Victor, 285 Nevins Street, Gowanus, Brooklyn.
near Pioneer Works: Piemontese-leaning Italian pastas and antis at Bar Mario, 365 Van Brunt Street, Red Hook, Brooklyn.
near BAM/Mark Morris/BRIC: Exciting pizza at Oma Grassa, 753 Fulton Street, Fort Greene, Brooklyn.
near Roulette: Superb Palestinian at Al Badawi, 151 Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn Heights, Brooklyn
Just before the NY Philharmonic concert began playing Turangalila by Olivier Messiaen at David Geffen Hall on Saturday, the stranger sitting next to me asked if I thought he would like it. I told him it’s very different and very thrilling. Just keep an open mind.
For classical music enthusiasts of a certain ilk, a performance of Turangalila is a hotly anticipated special occasion. It doesn’t get performed all that often, perhaps because it requires additional personnel on stage (ten percussionists!), it takes up an entire program, AND you have to find an ondes martenot (an early 20th century electronic instrument) and someone to play it. Although it was written nearly 80 years ago, it still sounds radical.
Hearing the Philharmonic perform the 80 minute piece, led by Jaap van Zweden with pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet and Cynthia Millar playing ondes martenot, was indeed a thrill. The music is full of contrasts, which the Philharmonic’s musicians brought out well. Sweet winds, acerbic brass, sharply staccato percussion and thunderous tympani. And that was just in the Introduction, the first of ten movements. By the end of Turangalila II, the seventh section, the ensemble was whipped into a frenzy, the music resolving into a massive major chord in a flourish of brass, strings and winds. Throughout the work, every section of the orchestra was used to maximum potential, practically a concerto for orchestra.
During the long and wildly enthusiastic ovation, the gentleman next to me turned to me and said he liked it! He described it as Holst fighting against Stravinsky, with Bartok poking at them. That sounded pretty accurate to me.
After the performance, I lingered in Geffen Hall’s lobby, sipping a cappuccino and admiring the sizeable crowd in a post-concert schmooze – a new experience since the recent renovation now boasted a comfortable space with generous seating and a cash bar that was still open after the concert.
Gamelan Dharma Swara at Lincoln Center (credit Gail Wein)
Next, I planned to attend the Philharmonic’s “Nightcap” concert, scheduled for 10:30 pm in the Sidewalk Studio, an intimate space created during the 2022 renovation of the building. Performing in this small space was Gamelan Dhamra Swara, a New York-based Balinese gamelan ensemble. The musicians gathered around two dozen gendèr (Indonesian xylophones), with four suling (flute) players and a couple of performers at drums and gongs. From the first rhythmic clanks of metal on metal, I was taken back to 2010, when I travelled with group to Bali (and filed this report on NPR).
It’s a lot of noise for the small space, and the sound of the percussion was loud and visceral. Once I got past the ear-pounding volume, the effect was mesmerizing. Through several selections, some modern, some traditional, the group showed off its musical mettle, along with performances by two dancers clad in ornate traditional costumes. Through the floor to ceiling windows looking out over Broadway, I could see passersby stopping to listen, gaze over the line of taxis on the street and hear the sirens of the inevitable emergency vehicles.
When the pianist Adam Tendler received a windfall of cash a few years ago, he chose not to blow it on such ephemeral items as rent and groceries. Instead, he commissioned 16 composers to write short works, and assembled those into a program called Inheritances which he performed at The 92
nd Street Y, New York on Saturday in the collection’s New York premiere. Inheritances is deeply personal for Tendler: the money was an unanticipated bequest from his father, whose death itself was unexpected.
Nearly all of the music was tender and gentle; an impression that was formed from both the interpretation and the compositions themselves. Though it could have been monotonous from so much music in a similar mood and pace, the evening unfolded as a through-composed work with a discernable emotional arc.
An intense peak at the center of the program was inti figgis-vizueta’s hushing, which was coordinated with home video clips from Tendler’s childhood. It was stark, energetic and physical, with Tendler rising to his feet several times to fiercely pound the keys, alternating with poignant moments in which the Tendler on stage gazed up at the child Adam on the screen.
Inheritances began with an audio montage by Laurie Anderson called Remember, I Created You; after which Tendler, clad in a tight short-sleeved dress shirt that strained to contain his impressively bulging biceps, launched into Missy Mazzoli’s Forgiveness Machine. Mazzoli’s music was beautiful, tonal and lyrical, like many of the works that followed. Prepared piano in Scott Wollschleger’s Outsider Song added a variety of timbre to the lovely lullaby. Angelica Negron’s You Were My Age was whimsical in its staccato melody. What It Becomes by Mary Prescott was eerie and somewhat dissonant, yet still tender. Sarah Kirkland Snider’s rich chorale, the plum tree I planted still there, led into False Memories, a jazz-inflected dreamy piece by Marcos Balter. Pamela Z’s Thank You So Much changed up the texture by including a pastiche of voices mixed on a laptop, with the pattern and rhythm of the speech echoed in the keyboard music.
We don’t need to tend this garden. They’re wildflowers by Darian Donovan Thomas was a new-age style piece over which Tendler intoned an extended monologue of memory fragments. The final selection, Morning Piece by Devonte Hynes, evoked both metal and Bach, and Tendler ended Inheritances with a long slow decrescendo to Hynes’s music.
Ten of the 16 composers were in the audience: Timo Andres, Marcos Balter, inti figgis-vizueta, John Glover, Missy Mazzoli, Mary Prescott, Sarah Kirkland Snider, Darian Donovan Thomas, Scott Wollschleger and Pamela Z (Laurie Anderson, Angelica Negron, Ted Hearne, Christopher Cerrone, Nico Muhly and Devonte Hynes were not able to attend). As the applause began at the conclusion of the performance, Tendler motioned for the composers to stand. I spotted Pamela Z and Missy Mazzoli in the brief moment before the entire audience was on its feet in a standing ovation, a tribute to Tendler, his late father and the music.
Buffalo Philharmonic and its music director JoAnn Falletta brought their considerable world class talent downstate to Carnegie Hall on Monday. The hall was full, despite persistent rain and the fact that the program was entirely dedicated to a composer whose name and music are not familiar to the casual music fan.
The celebrated composer and conductor Lukas Foss (1922-2009) put his indelible stamp on Buffalo when he was music director of the Philharmonic, 1963 – 1971. With programming that included a healthy dose of new music, he paved the way for a taste for contemporary works in Buffalo. He made a deep impression on JoAnn Falletta, whose association with him goes back to Milwaukee Symphony where she was his assistant conductor in the 1980s. It’s evident from the way Falletta talks about – and performs – Lukas Foss, that she reveres the man and his music.
This year, the centennial of his birth, brought some of his brilliant and neglected works to the stage, five of which were featured this evening. The ensemble performed the music as if it were in their DNA, although, as I later learned, the works were new to these players.
JoAnn Falletta (credit David Adam Beloff)
The program, while full of collaborative performers, allowed the Buffalo Philharmonic to shine on its own in the first and last pieces on the program. Foss said of the first work on the program, Ode, that it represented “crisis, war and, ultimately, ‘faith.’” It was appropriately heavy and ominous with BPO’s brass shining through with impressively dense chords.
BPO’s concert master, Nikki Chooi, took center stage as soloist for Three American Pieces, a work which seemed to shout “Americana!” Chooi’s warm tone and heartfelt playing were evident throughout. In fast passages, Chooi showed off his virtuosity as his bow bounced rapidly on the strings, a spiccato effect. Elements of jazz and country fiddling were woven into the composition; Chooi made the most of each of these styles, supported by various orchestra soloists, notably William Amsel’s jaunty clarinet.
The flutist Amy Porter was featured in Renaissance Concerto, a composition commissioned by the BPO in 1986 for the flutist Carol Wincenc. Foss called it a “loving handshake across the centuries,” and in the process of writing the work, tapped Falletta to help gather lute songs for his inspiration. The orchestra navigated fast riffs in excellent intonation, supporting the soloist. Foss cleverly plays with rhythms, delaying a beat to create a jagged rhythm in the second movement. In the third movement, the soloist’s portamento pitch slides affirm the work’s modernism; a passage which was echoed by principal flutist Christine Lynn Bailey with a nicely matched tone. Porter navigated the extended techniques with aplomb, generating percussive sounds meshing in duet with tambourine. With a dramatic flair, Porter inched her way off the stage as she played the final measures.
BPO was joined by The Choir of Trinity Wall Street and Downtown Voices, for Psalms, a work written in 1956. Tenor Stephen Sands (who is also Downtown Voices director), and soprano Sonya Headlam delivered solos that were spot on and especially moving; beautifully punctuated by harp, tympani and strings. Fugal passages were well-executed, and, with Falletta’s encouragement and direction, never overpowering. The singers had the spotlight to themselves for Alleluia by Foss’s teacher Randall Thompson, an a cappella work that was stunningly gorgeous and reverently performed.
Symphony No. 1, written in 1944, was the earliest work on the program. Textures in the orchestration evoked the sound and style of Copland, mixed with Bernstein, mixed with Hindemith; a sound parallel to the “midcentury modern” style of architecture and furniture. The third movement displayed an appropriate amount of swing, and each of the principal string players were radiant in their respective solo passages in the final movement.
The Lukas Foss Centennial Celebration at Carnegie Hall was a fitting tribute to this under-recognized American composer. Next week, Falletta and the Buffalo Philharmonic head to the recording studio, and an album of the entire program will be released by Naxos next year.
Ironically, the first concert of flutist Claire Chase’s reign as Richard and Barbara Debs Creative Chair at Carnegie Hall in the 2022-23 season focuses on a dead composer. In honor of the groundbreaking composer and accordionist Pauline Oliveros (1932-2016), on January 21, 2023 Chase and friends perform an all-Oliveros concert. In addition to Chase (credited as performing “air objects”), instrumentalists include percussionists Tyshawn Sorey and Susie Ibarra and Manari Ushigua, leader of the Sapara Nation in the Ecuadorian Amazon, who has the intriguing credit of “Forest Wisdom Defender”.
Oliveros was hugely influential on the contemporary music scene. She was especially noted for “deep listening,” a term that Oliveros herself coined, referring to an aesthetic based upon principles of improvisation, electronic music, ritual, teaching and meditation.
The performance will be in Zankel Hall, reconfigured to a theater-in-the-round setup with the performers in the center of the hall. Several other contemporary music program in January will take place in the “Zankel Hall Center Stage” milieu, including performances by yMusic (January 19), Third Coast Percussion (January 20), Rhiannon Giddens (January 24) and Kronos Quartet (January 27).
“I’m honored to be the 2022-2023 Richard and Barbara Debs Creative Chair at Carnegie Hall this season,” wrote Chase on Facebook. “Each of the projects on this series has collaboration at its core, and I’m gobsmacked to get to share the stage with some of the most inspiring musicians in my orbit—people who have changed the way I play, changed the way I listen, and who continue to blow the roof off of the imaginations of everyone in earshot.”
Chase is fortunate to have Carnegie’s backing for this season’s chapter of her 24 year-long commissioning and performance project, Density 2036. Beginning in 2013, Chase has commissioned a new body of solo flute repertoire every year; she’ll continue the process through 2036, the 100th anniversary of Edgard Varèse’s groundbreaking flute solo, Density 21.5. The decades-long project has given a unique framework for Claire Chase’s performance career.
The two “Density” programs are highlights of the entire Carnegie season, and they’re worth waiting for. On May 18, Chase performs Varèse’s Density 21.5 alongside works for flute and electronics that she commissioned over the past ten years, by Felipe Lara, Marcos Balter, Mario Diaz de Leon, George E. Lewis and Du Yun. The sound artist and percussionist Levy Lorenzo handles the live electronics. On May 25, Chase, along with cellists Katinka Kleijn and Seth Parker Woods, pianist Cory Smythe, and electronics artist Levy Lorenzo performs the world premiere of a Carnegie Hall commission by Anna Thorvaldsdottir.
The Paris-based Ensemble Intercontemporain, in its first Carnegie Hall performance in two decades, appears on March 25. The ground-breaking group, founded in 1976 by Pierre Boulez, brings a program that includes the New York premiere of Sonic Eclipse, by EIC’s music director Mattias Pintscher, alongside Dérive 2 by Boulez; and the ensemble reaches back a century to include Schoenberg’s Five Pieces for Orchestra.
I’ll never forget the first American Composers Orchestra concert at Carnegie that I attended, over 20 years ago. I marveled at the fact that every composer was in attendance (except Charles Ives, and he had a good excuse). Since then, I’ve eagerly looked forward to ACO’s offerings at Carnegie. On October 20 the orchestra, led by Mei-Ann Chen, gives the world premiere of a new work by Yvette Janine Jackson (co-commissioned by Carnegie Hall), and brings a host of guest performers to the Perelman stage: Sandbox Percussion (performing Viet Cuong’s Re(new)al -you’ll be seeing his name more and more, mark my words), the Attacca Quartet (performing an as-yet untitled new work by inti figgis-vizueta), and cellist Jeffrey Zeigler (featured in the New York premiere of Last Year by Mark Adamo). On March 16, Daniela Candellari conducts premieres by George Lewis, Ellen Reid, and Jihyun Noel Kim, and Modern Yesterdays by Kaki King, with the composer on guitar. As far as I can predict, none of these composers will have an excuse as good as Ives if they don’t show up.
The long-lived quintet-of-color, Imani Winds performs new and recent music at Zankel Hall on April 25. Vijay Iyer continues to prove his mettle as a versatile composer with Bruits; also on the program are The Light is the Same by Reena Esmail, and Frederic Rzewski’s Sometimes.
There are many other concerts that showcase living composers at Carnegie this season, including a good number of regional and world premieres commissioned by the institution itself. Composers from Thomas Adès to Caroline Shaw to Michi Wiancko are featured; details are at this link. A complete calendar with program details and ticket information is at this link.
