Sequenza21/The Contemporary Classical Music Weekly

Pieces Are Played

Last night, Kronos Quartet played the first of its three concerts scheduled for this weekend. I had planned to arrive safely early for the event at 8 pm � instead, I was quite late to a 7:30 concert. I shelled out $28 for the mezzanine, which for the night also doubled as the nap area for a few of my fellow attendees.

Kronos played the somber program with their usual aplomb. The first piece was Alexandra du Bois� String Quartet No. 3, �Night Songs�. Unfortunately due to my lack of time-telling skills I missed the first half of this piece, and was forced to listen to the second half as I waited outside the door. What I heard was deeply felt music inspired by the writings of Ether Hillesum, a Dutch Holocaust victim. Hopefully someone else can write more in the comments.

The second piece was the premier of Michael Gordon�s �The Sad Park�, a four-part quartet that set Kronos against recordings of children who witnessed 9/11. It was very dark and minimalist in nature as one might expect, with the children being manipulated to sound like anything from ambient noise to a dying giraffe. The piece built to a distorted and terrifying finale, which was exactly what it needed. Gordon received an enthusiastic round of applause afterwards, and it was well deserved.

The finale work on the program was the U.S. premier of Henryk Gorecki�s third quartet, ��songs are sung.� The title comes from a line of a Velimir Khlebnikov poem, which reads, �When people die, they sing songs.� Appropriately, a majority of the 5 movements were grief-stricken and funereal. Most or all of the sections featured cadential silences, slow pulses in the viola and cello, and a strong undercurrent of uncertainty. Only the middle movement of the 52 minute quartet was played at a tempo faster than an adagio, but I never found it to be dragging or uninteresting. Gorecki is capable of writing some of the most unabashedly beautiful music around, but often it is tinged with nostalgia or melancholy. Personally I didn�t find the final movement to be quite as affecting as those that preceded it, but the point was made successfully anyway.

The entire concert lasted about two and a half hours, but miraculously remained consistently interesting. $28 dollars and all, I enjoyed the event greatly � though I�m still kicking myself for arriving late. Forgive me, Miss Du Bois. I doubt many people were snapping their fingers and whistling the themes of the evening afterwards, but I for one left quite moved.

posted by Trevor Hunter 3/25/2006

Last Night in L.A. - Minimalism, European Style

This weekend offers two programs in the Minimalism Jukebox festival, each program being given twice. All of the music is being recorded for release on the iTunes Store. An announcement last night said that the editing will be completed for release of the music on Tuesday, April 4. This is a great start to a new venture.

The second installment of the Minimalism Jukebox festival changed continent and decades--from California in the Sixties to Europe in the Seventies (and last year). The featured composer was Louis Andriessen , and the program included the U.S. premiere of a new work, Racconto dall�Inferno(2004). The work was supported by the conductor and the soprano from the world premiere in Cologne, Reinbert de Leeuw and Cristina Zavalloni, respectively. It is a setting of extracts from Dante�s �Inferno� in which a portion of the descent into hell is guided by ten devils who are called out by name. The soprano is accompanied by winds and percussion, with just a few strings: 3 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 A clarinets, bass clarinet, contrabass clarinet, 2 trumpets, 2 trombones, 2 pianos, cimbalom, guitar, bass guitar, loads of percussion and about ten strings, without violas. Lots of color. To my ears, the music was a major shift of Andriessen�s style, and if a style had to be named, it would be post-minimalism, or, possibly, post-Stravinsky. This is a dramatic work, and it was beautifully played and sung by a singer who deserves comparison with Cathy Berberian. If you download only one work from last night�s concert, get this one. It�s a feast for ears.

The concert began with Arvo Part's beautiful Tabula Rasa (1977) for two violins, prepared piano, and strings. The two violinists were Geoff Nuttall and Barry Shiffman, co-founders of the St. Lawrence String Quartet. The two made the music a real dialogue between the two violins.

The evening closed with Andriessen�s De Staat (1976). The times have long passed in which we would hear politics in Andriessen�s music or think of him as a political radical. I found it surprising to read of his attacks against the Concergebouw, attacks in print and in disruption of a performance. Andriessen has now become an establishment icon himself and it�s hard to hear De Staat now as any kind of protest. The extracts from Plato�s �Republic� against which Andriessen argued, merely seem sounds produced by four sopranos, not political ideas. Disney Hall shows surtitles making the text of lyrics quite legible, but the text is separate from the sound. (One of the stylistic changes in Racconto is that the music amplifies the text.) Nevertheless, the music makes Staat remain an important work. It surges and churns and has emotion.

This should be a good lead-in to the afternoon of music by Steve Reich which we have ahead of us on Sunday.

posted by Jerry Zinser 3/25/2006

Honey I Shrunk the Program

The New York Miniaturist Ensemble, a collective of NY musicians dedicated to performing and premiering music of tiny dimension, but vast ambition will perform Monday, March 27th at 8:30 PM on Frank Oteri's 21st Century Schizoid Music series at the Cornelia St. Cafe. directions. They seek music with one startling quality, the piece must contain 100 or fewer notes. Composing within these constraints and for this ensemble is something composers all over the world have been doing for 2 years now, including Karlheinz Stockhausen who recently wrote 1st NATURAL DURATIONS for piano for them as part of his new cycle KLANG. Yours truly will have a piece, Betwyxt for 2 violins and flute, premiered at Monday's program. Please come if you're able and say hello, or consider writing for this outstanding ensemble. More information on how to submit music is at their website.

posted by Jeff Harrington 3/25/2006

Friday, March 24, 2006

The Ballad of the Sad Park

Margaret Brouwer is the winner of the 2006 Academy Award in Music from the American Academy of Arts & Letters. The award honors outstanding artistic achievement and acknowledges the composer "who has arrived at his or her own voice." Better late than never, say I, to not exactly coin a phrase...Here's something to write in your calendar for next year; William Bolcom�s rarely performed Songs of Innocence is being performed in Minneapolis in April 2007.

Jeffrey Sackmann contemplates spending $35 to hear Kronos do Michael Gordon's new piece at Zankel Hall tonight. I already sprang--for the mezzanine at $28. Michael's piece is called The Sad Park and he's been working on it over the past four years. It uses recordings of children, ages 3 and 4, who were direct witnesses to 9/11 and its aftermath, that were made by Loyan Beausoleil, Pre-K teacher at University Plaza Nursery School in Lower Manhattan, between September 2001 and January 2002. (Michael's son Lev was in Ms. Beausoleil's class during this period. (Her ongoing work with these children is chronicled at www.youngestwitnesses.com)

Gordon's Decasia is being performed in Los Angeles as part of the Minimalist Jukebox Festival on Tuesday March 28, accompanied by Bill Morrison's fantastic film.

By the way, Jeff, bummer about Gonzaga...Lawrence Dillon has some wise words from Ada Louise Huxtable...Jay C. Batzner has some more thoughts on the "composer/hobbyist" debate...Anybody besides Rodney have trouble getting to Tom Myron's page?

posted by Jerry Bowles 3/24/2006

Thursday, March 23, 2006

Dog Sled Envy

We're envious because Kyle Gann is in Alaska to check out John Luther Adams' new sound installation at the University of Alaska Fairbanks' Museum of the North and got to take a sled dog ride. Especially adorable is the photo of Kyle looking like he's just been bundled up by his Mommie to go outside and play on a cold winter day...For those of you who have been following the thread under Jerry Zinser's post below, Robert Gable has a roundup of opinion on Terry Jennings' String Quartet at L.A.'s Minimalist Jukebox festival.

Here on the ranch, I missed Anthony Cornicello's full report on the Spark Festival. Check it out...We don't seem to be doing so well in identifying the mystery composers in Tom Myron's photo quiz. Take a look.

And it looks like we've pretty much exhausted David Salvage's jazzy title post. Who's got a new topic?

posted by Jerry Bowles 3/23/2006

Wednesday, March 22, 2006

There Stands the Glass

The joint was packed for Capital M's world premieres extravanganza at The Cutting Room last night. Granted, it's not a huge room and many of the attendees seem to be friends of one or another of the seven composers whose works were presented--Jennifer Fitzgerald, Stefan Zeniuk, David Claman, Capital M capo Ian Moss, Monika Heidemann, Bradley Kemp, and Frank J. Oteri. But, there was tremendous enthusiasm and receptivity for the new pieces which suggests that the kind of experimental, genre-bending music that Capital M is pioneering holds great promise for audience-building for "serious" music among people who cut their musical teeth on rock. The program was extremely daring and diverse--like watching circus perfomers walking the high wire without a net--but never less than thoroughly engaging. The composers all took risks and the Capital M gang played with genuine commitment. This stuff is not easy to play and they did a superb job.

My one critical observation is that the pieces that worked best were those that displayed rock attributes--primitive, free, loud, dissonant--rather than those that simply adapted conservatory techniques to traditional rock instruments. The piece that best captured the rock spirit was Frank J. Oteri's Imagined Overtures, especially the third movement which employed three guitars--one tuned regularly, one tuned a sixth tone higher and the other, a sixth tone lower--to create the ugliest, rawest, most dissonant chord yet heard on Planet Earth. Backed by a pounding, relentless drum beat, the piece built to a shattering, earth-moving (you should forgive the word) climax. It was sophisticated without sacrificing the raw power that gives rock its inherent strength.

And, it was the only piece that made me want to scream afterwards: "And there ain't nothing I can do about it."

posted by Jerry Bowles 3/22/2006

Tuesday, March 21, 2006

Last Night in L.A. - Minimalism

The Los Angeles Philharmonic�s Musical Jukebox festival began last night with a meditation and ended with a celebration, programmed and performed by CalArts and Dean David Rosenboom. The meditation was the String Quartet (1960) by the then 19-year old prodigy Terry Jennings, a shooting star, now almost forgotten, whose brief creative period placed him at the birth of minimalism. La Monte Young, whose work is unfortunately absent from the festival, wrote for the program notes:

Terry Jennings and Dennis Johnson were the first musicians to understand the unique tonal language, sustained tones, silences, and extended duration format of my works for Brass (1957), for Guitar (1958), and, in particular, the Trio for Strings (1958). Both Terry and Dennis utilized harmonic material based on my four-pitch "Dream Chords," which were the underlying harmonic basis for these works and later became the entire tonal content of my work, The Four Dreams of China(1962).

In 1960-1961, Young held a series of concerts in Yoko Ono�s New York City loft. Jennings was the first of the composers to be showcased in this series, and a recording of the String Quartet was played for the audience there in 1960. The first live performance of the quartet in New York was not until 1989, when it was performed at a Terry Jennings Memorial Concert. Last night was the first live performance in California.

The String Quartet is austere, almost religious, in its focus on a series of single sounds. The score for the 28-minute work is contained on a single page. Each player may have 30-some notes to play in that period, in dynamics ranging from pianissimo to pppp. Each note, and each rest (since the pauses are an integral part of the work --- Jennings had studied Cage), is timed, and each player uses a stop watch to time each note and each pause. The challenge for each player is to produce as pure a tone as possible, with no vibrato, to produce each level of the limited dynamics distinctly, and to begin and end each note precisely with another player when Jennings calls for a chord rather than a single note.

The audience (which appeared to number about 1800) was attentive and quiet, but their reactions at the conclusion of the Quartet indicated that most seemed unprepared for the piece, even if they had read and thought about the program notes. This work called out for some comments from the stage to introduce the work and to let the audience know a little of what to expect. We just don�t hear music so pared down, we don�t hear sounds in such isolation. I was prepared and able to fall into the state evoked by the music, so that the work seemed much shorter than its 28 minutes. Unprepared, however, it would have been easy to wonder �What is happening? What am I missing?� Some in the audience didn�t return after intermission.

The few who left missed an absolutely rousing performance, by 120-some musicians, of In C (1964) by Terry Riley. The performers were students, faculty, graduates, and friends of CalArts. The instrumentalists included a dozen guitars of various persuasions but only a few orchestral strings, a good crew of woodwinds and of brass, the range of pitched percussion, a harp, three accordions, two dozen in a vocal chorus, three upright pianos with two players each as performers, two grand pianos providing the ostinato, and instruments I couldn�t identify.

Among the guests participating in the performance were Katrina Krimsky, pianist in the first recording of In C and Stuart Dempster, professor emeritus from U of Washington, performer in the premiere of In C, and organizer and performer in the first recording of the work.

The performance was probably more structured and guided than usual, understandable with this many people. Rosenboom, as violinist and conductor, had 53 numbered cue sheets to show to the performers to keep things close to the same path. While most of the themes evolved, coordinated by the cue cards, by pre-arrangement, some of the themes were introduced by sections performing in unison; a theme might be introduced by the brass, or the winds, or the chorus. This was effective. Rosenboom also provided occasional guidance of the dynamics. The audience loved it. Can there ever be a �definitive� performance of In C? This may not have been definitive, but it was sure fun. What a great start to a festival.

posted by Jerry Zinser 3/21/2006

There's Something Happening Here

If you can't make it to the CapitalM gig at The Cutting Room tonight because you woke up this morning and inexplicably found yourself in Fairbanks, Alaska, despair not. Fairbanks has its own happening event this evening--the opening of John Luther Adams' The Place Where You Go to Listen, a permanent sound and light environment created for the Museum of the North at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

John describes it as "an ever-changing musical ecosystem, a place for hearing the unheard vibrations of the world around us. Controlled by real-time streams of geophysical data, The Place Where You Go to Listen gives voice to the rhythms of daylight and darkness, the phases of the moon, the seismic vibrations of the earth and the activity of the aurora borealis."

Hmmm...music based on geophysical data, music based on stock market movements and, wait, there's more. This morning I got an e-mail from English composer Richard Garrett about his Weathersongs project; music created from the ever-changing patterns of the weather as recorded by an electronic weather station near his home in Wales. Richard says his installation composes music in real-time or it can produce musical interpretations of both real-time data and data collected over days or even months.

Somebody explain what's going on here.

posted by Jerry Bowles 3/21/2006

Monday, March 20, 2006

Your Amazing Internet

Here's something I stumbled across today:

Emerald Suspension records experimental music compositions. Conceptual audio arrangements by Emerald Suspension are structured based on patterns created by the stock market, economic indicators, algorithms, and other data sources.

The most recent work by Emerald Suspension is titled Playing the Market. Playing the Market is a collection of experimental music based on the stock market and other economic data. More information on the project, including sound clips and CD information can be found here.

posted by Jerry Bowles 3/20/2006

Evan Johnson On the Record: Applebaum, After Ferneyhough

Mark Applebaum: 56 1/2 ft.
20, Agitprop, Sum=Parts
St. Lawrence Qt.; Stanford Jazz Orchestra, cond. Fredrick Berry; inauthentica, cond. Mark Menzies; Applebaum
Innova 646

In his 1984 article �Il Tempo Della Figura,� Brian Ferneyhough argues against the effectiveness of appropriation of musical styles, gestures, and mannerisms native to music of the past, writing that their impact is wholly dependent on context and that �ripping such units out of the contexts which gave them being leads to a fatal debilitation of their innate expressive powers at the same time as their integration into new montage forms demands precisely this unimpaired semantic impact in order to support and bring out the envisaged innovatory impact of their juxtaposition.� Instead, Ferneyhough believes that, however unitary and seemingly self-sufficient a given musical gesture might be, its power and expressiveness is denied unless it is fully integrated, formally, motivically or in terms of Ferneyhough�s preferred quasi-geological force-fields, into both a local and global context.

I bring up this rather extreme position because Mark Applebaum is known, still, as Ferneyhough�s most successful American student, the best-known product of the elder composer�s twenty years of university teaching in California, a stint that began shortly after �Il Tempo della Figura� was written. And yet, by virtue of the works on the present recording, one can reasonably claim that Applebaum�s work stands in precise opposition to these ideas � that, far from denying the aesthetic and formal validity of stylistic or affective reference, his music makes it a fundamental motivating force.

This is not to say that the music on this disc is pastiche, some sort of collage of �found materials� with the postmodern aim of expressing a fundamental parity and interchangeability between all musics; what is going on here is far more subtle. Within all these works, there is a veritable forest of outward-pointing arrows � this music exists contextually � but, with rare exceptions, those arrows are so small and so nearly transparent that one could easily miss them, and one�s experience of the music would not be too much poorer for it.

20, for string quartet, is a compelling example of Applebaum�s infinitely subtle acknowledgement of musical context. It comprises twenty linked miniatures, only the last of which is much more than a minute long, whose expressive ambitus and formal function within the whole are defined by affective descriptors: �rhythmic�; �atmospheric, sparse�; �lyrical�; �polyphonic, contrapuntal�. The whole, Applebaum tells us, is defined by the emotive poles of �Aquarian and Existential modes,� which can be defined respectively as (to excerpt Applebaum�s prodigious list of adjectives) �the reflective, the nostalgic � the conventionally beautiful � the expressively sincere� and �the savage � the anxious � the hermetic � the expressively cynical.�

Crucially, though, the result of this adjectival structure is not collage; the seams are subtle, the transitions smooth, the juxtapositions defined contextually rather than for the fact of their juxtaposition. This music stands or falls on its own terms, not as a gloss on Music, nor as an exclusively outward-looking commentary. 20 acknowledges context and reference without being devoured by it. The result is a graceful, involving, varied and beautiful work that gradually over its twenty-five minutes comes to describe the boundaries of an unusually wide rhetorical universe without the listener ever realizing it.

Agitprop features Applebaum on the mousketier, some sort of �electroacoustic sound-sculpture� of the composer�s invention, accompanied by the intrepid Stanford Jazz Orchestra. There is very little jazz going on here, but Applebaum�s outward-pointing arrows are a bit bolder and a bit more brightly colored, with drum fills and other instrumental figures that are in fact �cut and pasted� from other musical traditions and environments. To me, this is a far less effective strategy than that employed in 20, but the piece is not without its zany effectiveness, and some of the collectively improvised textures are quite earcatching in their own right.

It is in the last work on the disc, though, that the fundamental referentiality of Applebaum�s music comes most strongly to the fore. Sum=Parts is composed of a set of independently performable brief chamber pieces entitled 56 � ft., Authenticity, Integrity, Depth, Merit, and Seriousness. As if the titles were not enough to clue us and the musicians in to the relation of these pieces to outside �forces,� each measure � yes, each measure � of 56 � ft. is supplied with a fairly lengthy quotation from one of a bewildering variety of literary and musical sources, from Kundera to Partch to Ferneyhough to Stuart Saunders Smith to Simone de Beauvoir to Galileo. The relation to the music is not clear, but I can�t imagine that it is meant to be, really; in any case, the entire set of citations is given in the booklet for the listener�s (simultaneous?) reading pleasure.

As with 20, the wit and self-awareness that mark every non-musical element of the piece are assimilated into the music with a great deal of subtlety, almost gentleness. The opening piece of Sum=Parts, 56 � ft., is a dizzying and exuberant collection of gestures for chamber orchestra, involving unexpected and disorienting repetitions, pauses, shouted (and indecipherable) exclamations from the players, and a general inability to stay in one place. To hear the piece, it�s not surprising that every bar has its own extramusical baggage, but nor is it blindingly obvious. Uncharitably, the piece could be heard as a disordered collection of modernist gestures, but I give Applebaum more credit than that, and it is possible to hear a tenuous, tangled, knotted thread.

The rest of the pieces that comprise Sum=Parts are for smaller ensembles, each of the members of the opening piece�s chamber orchestra reappearing once in the set of �companion pieces,� and each taking up and reinflecting material from 56 � ft. Each, aside from its quite obviously tongue-in-cheek title, is provided with �peculiar character markings derived from the labels of various consumer goods,� such as �fast-lighting, longer burning, multi-purpose, heavy duty� (Integrity) and �fast acting, pain relieving, calorie-free, disposable� (Seriousness).

Once again, none of this is particularly audible in the music. The smaller-ensemble pieces that make up the central section of Sum=Parts (the collection ends with a reprise of 56 � ft., which sounds quite different due to various indeterminacies in the score) are lighter and more gesturally single-minded than 56 � ft, and their status as offshoots is clear. The whole piece, like 20 and like Agitprop, is in one sense a bit of a mess � but also, in another, an exuberant and subtly humorous collection of musical characters that see no need for the doctrinaire Modernist�s axiom of cohesion, that takes as its motivating force not the desire for a perfect structure but the planting of a forest of arrows.

All in all, this collection of Applebaum�s recent works is a little bit strange, a little bit self-conscious, a little bit undisciplined � but also consistently interesting, undoubtedly honest, and well worth your attention. There is a strong creative personality at work here, and those who find the intellectual and cultural apparatus of Applebaum�s imposing teacher or other rhetorical Modernist boogeymen too much to take seriously would do well to experience Applebaum�s uniquely refracted take on his educational inheritance.

posted by Evan Johnson 3/20/2006

I Didn't Know What Time It Was

Violinist Yulia Sakharova will premiere a new work for violin and piano by Sean Hickey, at Steinway Hall (109 West 57th Street) tonight at 7 pm. Mark Berry has details...Is it kosher for a piece that has been played in concert several times out there in Red State America to be billed as a "world premiere?" Everette Minchew ponders the question...Alan Theisen's new group Trioesquisse, a woodwind trio comprised of himself (alto saxophone), wife Misty (flute), and Marc Ballard (soprano saxophone and others) makes its world debut this Friday...Elodie Lauten has a brief interview with electro-acoustic violist and composer, Martha Mooke...Don't expect too much innovation from conservatories, Lawrence Dillon writes. They're not exploratories.

And, don't forget Capital M's 1st Annual World Premieres Extravaganza tomorrow night at The Cutting Room, 19 West 24 Street. Lots of details here. Showtime is 8:30 pm. Be there or be square. I'll be the old dude who looks like he's up past his bedtime.

Update: David Toub has posted a terrific review of new music from Daniel Lentz, Payton Macdonald and Melissa Hui.

posted by Jerry Bowles 3/20/2006