Composer Blogs@Sequenza21.com
Jeff Sackmann is a composer, saxophonist, and bandleader with an embarrasing affection for bubblegum pop.

In an effort to create serious music for his 15-piece jazz orchestra, Oy Christina!, he has combined baroque fugue with Justin Timberlake, introduced serialism to Eminem, and spiced up dance mixes with Coltrane changes. For his trio Single White Female, among others, he has written several dozen pieces for small jazz ensemble that occasionally bridge the gap between chamber music and traditional combo playing.

As a saxophonist, Jeff spent several months performing with Clyde Stubblefield, the original funky drummer. He plays with a variety of rock bands in New York City and spent three years as the music director for the swing band Little Red and the Howlers.

Hailing originally from Spokane,Washington, he spent his undergraduate years at New York University, did graduate work in English Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison,and studied music at Berklee.
10.06.2006
Mikel Rouse, The End of Cinematics

I've never really liked going to a performance and not understanding half of what I see right in front of me...but I'm getting used to it. All the better if the music is the focus: that I can usually make some sense out of.

That was what was going through my mind for about the first 20 minutes of Mikel Rouse's new opera, "The End of Cinematics," currently in a week-long run at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Harvey Theater. It's the third in a trilogy, following "Failing Kansas" and "Dennis Cleveland" (neither of which I've heard or seen). Somehow I had gotten to this point in my life without hearing a note of Rouse's music; luckily, I've read enough of Kyle Gann's stumping for him not to miss this chance.

Initially, "Cinematics" is a visually bewildering experience. The opera opens with movie previews. (Really. Real ones, including a teaser for the Simpsons movie.) Quickly it gives way to three layers of images: a film on a screen the width and breadth of the stage, live performers behind the screen, and six more screens behind them. Sometimes the front screen is empty or see-through; other times it is showing a pre-recorded scene; still others it shows a different angle on one of the performers on stage.

Because of this, there are always multiple things going on onstage; it only becomes less overwhelming due to familiarity. This is by design: more than anything else, the overall effect is like that of a music video. Quick cuts, movements limited by the width of a screen, and incomplete stories. The performers rarely move their feet, dancing and singing as if an imaginary camera has pulled in for a close-up.

Of course, the performance partly invokes music videos because virtually all of the sound for the 75-minute performance is music. Rouse's songs for "Cinematics" defy categorization; I've seen it described by multiple critics as a "pop-opera," which I suppose is as good as you're going to do if you limit yourself to eight letters and a hyphen.

To me, the music sounded like an impossibly good Moby album. Imagine something halfway between a Bang on a Can creation and Moby's "South Side" and you've got a pretty good idea. Rouse is obviously a composer of enormous talent. It's not immediately evident if Cinematics is your first exposure to his music (as it was for me), but the sum total of so many impeccable, interestingly textured pop songs is impressive. One listening certainly doesn't do it justice; if my weekend wasn't packed (including another trip to BAM for Steve Reich tonight) I'd go back and see it again.
posted by Jeffrey Sackmann

9.29.2006
Minimalist Free Improv

Lately, I've been getting together with a drummer friend of mine and playing improv duets. We met through a shared interest in (among other things) Morton Feldman, and in our playing, we've decided to aim for something more Feldman-esque than free improvisation usually turns out to be.

As with just about everything involved in the creation of free improv that doesn't suck, this is harder than it sounds. (Even if you've never done much free improvisation, you probably know this, because you've heard so many horrible examples of the form.)

It's particularly tough for me: like most musicians my age (and saxophonists of any age), I learned to improvise playing bebop. I started drifting in the direction of the avant-garde before I even knew what it was, but no matter how far afield my improv became, it was always based on the idea of narrative. I had always been taught that improv at its best should be compositional--variations on a theme, developed linear ideas, etc.--and that seemed more important than ever when there's no established form. Most of the free music I played with friends in college was all about the narrative: work off of each others' ideas, build toward a climax, then stop and do it again.

This, of course, is what a great deal of free improv is--and some of it is very good. But there's no way to reconcile that approach with a goal of meditative, overtone-focused, drama-free results.

Yesterday, we made some breakthroughs, in part due to an unlikely source. Instead of alto sax, I played clarinet. Even my crappy Yamaha student model blended better with various cymbal sounds and the overtones in snare rolls. Because more interesting sounds came out, I didn't feel the same need to play more. It also helped that I'm not a very good clarinet player, so it made more sense to play long tones and simple patterns.

Next week, I'll probably go back to the saxophone--at least part of the time--but with a new sense of how drum/reed duets can work. As far as I know, Feldman wrote no music for the saxophone. But I hope to at least figure out how he could have.
posted by Jeffrey Sackmann

9.11.2006
Rhys Chatham Returns

All of us have had one or two formative new music experiences that, if nothing else, keep us going to concerts to see new works, composers, and bands we'd never heard of. My love for minimalism really took off when I saw a performance of Steve Reich's Tehillim. I'd only heard Music for 18 Musicians before, and I was simply blown away. To some extent, every time I go to a show, I hope it'll be as good as that. (Lucky for me: last February's premiere of Michael Gordon's "Who By Water") was indeed that good.)

The second of my two mind-blowing new music experiences was last March, when Rhys Chatham came to town. Fortunately, I had recently read Kyle Gann's book of collected columns, so I knew a little about Chatham, but had never heard his music, just that he was mildly Branca-esque.

I wish I could explain how incredibly f'ing cool it is to hear several guitars play one note to a rock beat for fifteen minutes. Either you get it or you don't--though it's a lot easier to get it if those guitars are in the room with you, at a volume just barely below the threshhold at which you'd have to leave.

If you've never heard Chatham's Guitar Trio, do yourself a favor: go to his MySpace page and listen to it. Turn the volume up as high as it'll go, but understand that this is music that simply must be heard live.

As my title suggests, Chatham is back in the US. (He's lived in France for years.) He's touring with a band called "Essentialist" playing "drone metal" ...basically doing to metal what he originally did for rock. I saw Essentialist in Philadelphia on Friday night--the music doesn't pack quite the visceral thrill that the 1970s compositions do, but it's still endlessly interesting.

If you're in New York, you can hear Chatham's new band at Tonic (along with offerings from Phil Niblock and Tony Conrad) Thursday night. Better still, Chatham is playing his 70s music at the Issue Project Room this evening. Perhaps I'll see you there.
posted by Jeffrey Sackmann

3.23.2006
Bang for the buck

I spent the last couple of days with an odd dilemma. I've been looking forward to the Kronos Quartet's concert tomorrow night at Zankel Hall, featuring a Michael Gordon premiere, ever since the season schedule came out. But, contrary to my fervid hopes, the concert never went on Carnegie's Student Rush Ticket list, so I would (gasp!) actually have to pay full price. In this case, that's a modest $35 for the good seats, $28 for the not-as-good ones.

It's a bit ridiculous, now that I think about it, but I can't remember the last time I spent that much for a concert ticket. Maybe my tab topped $35 at the Blue Note when I went to see the Charlie Haden Liberation Music Orchestra several months ago, but that's the best I can do. See, I've gotten hooked on day-of obstructed view seats, community rush, student rush, and just about any other way to keep my concertgoing expenditures under $10 or $12 per night.

Put another way: I've been seeing some of the best classical and new-music performances New York, each one for less than it would cost me to walk down the street and see "V for Vendetta" tonight. By myself. No popcorn. So, of course, I knocked some sense into myself and not only bought my ticket for tomorrow night, but sprung for a full-price ticket for Kronos's performance on April 7th, as well.

Having regained my senses and my priorities, I tried to remember times I've opted out of similarly appealing performances due to frugality. There have certainly been plenty of nights I've stayed home when I might've enjoyed a concert, but rarely have I said no to a "must-see." Maybe, were I awash in greenbacks, I would've splurged recently for the Vienna Philharmonic, or maybe one of those $192 orchestra seats for Simon Rattle and Berlin; I might've checked out Anthony Braxton's new group at Iridium last week, and I suppose if I were really riding high, I wouldn't be going to Zankel tomorrow, I'd be spending the week in L.A. for the Minimalist Jukebox festival. But for the most part, a cheap bastard like myself can see great stuff in New York just about every night of the week.

Armed with a student ID, one can get $10 tickets to a substantial number of Carnegie Hall performances, as well as most everything programmed by Miller Theater or the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. Any Lincoln Center Presents events are doable for $20. The Kimmel Center in Philadelphia offers $10 community rush for anybody--on consecutive days a couple weeks back I saw both the Boston Symphony and Mavis Staples that way. The Met even has a limited student program--well, that triggered my memory: I parted with $35 for An American Tragedy. American Tragedy, indeed.

Just about every smaller organization has some sort of student discount, as well. Off the top of my head: Speculum Musicae's recent performance at Merkin was free for students, as is most everything at Julliard. Roulette is $12, and you don't need a discount at Tonic or The Stone, where admission is usually ten bucks a set. Even where I'm relying on a student discount, the full-bore ticket prices (should it ever--egads!--come to that) are in the $20 range.

Amazing, then: for the price of a front-row ticket to Wicked, one can spend a month going to four concerts a week. (Actually, I got my front-row ticket to Wicked via the lottery for $25, but that's neither here nor there.) And while $100-$150/month isn't chump change, it's a hell of a deal for the (cliche alert) smorgasbord of musical variety it buys you.

Even if you do occasionally have to break the bank for a $35 ticket.
posted by Jeffrey Sackmann

3.05.2006
Framing Opera

It wasn't my intent to construct a mini-festival, but I saw two new operas in the space of 24 hours this weekend: on Friday night, the America Opera Projects' production Darkling, and on Saturday afternoon, Wallace Shawn's "play/opera" The Music Teacher. Both were excellent and thought-provoking, especially in their implications for the opera form. And as a side note, those of you who read my recent post about intermissions will be glad to know, for my sake, that neither show had one.

Darkling, directed by Michael Comlish, composed by Stefan Weisman, and based on a poem by Anna Rabinowitz, is non-narrative, built from fragments. Rabinowitz's poem is drawn from pre-Holocaust letters she found in her parents' home, and its content spans the old world and the new, relentlessly focusing on the struggle to survive in both. The production reflects this harshness in everything from the lighting to the translucent cage that separates the stage from the audience.

Even beyond the lack of a narrative structure, Darkling is not we most commonly think of as opera. The music is secondary to a theatrical realization of the poem, which includes spoken passages, pre-recorded background sounds, and sung passages that would more typically turn up in a performance art piece. For an adaptation of a modernist or post-modernist piece, it seems to me the creators of Darkling have taken a much more fruitful path: instead of letting the opera form dictate their production, they use it as a jumping-off point.

What fascinated me most was the active integration of the original poetry. Of course any operagoer is accustomed to having the text of the piece thrust in their face: that's what titles do. (And it's why, at the Met, I switch them off.) Darkling, however, didn't have typical titles. Most of the sung words appeared: some were projected onto the screens enclosing the stage, others were displayed against the back wall in ornate frames, silent-movie style.

However, the pace of the singing didn't determine the delivery of the titles: the poem did. Usually, it was a stanza at a time, presented (I'm assuming) as the stanzas were shown in the book, giving us more insight into the aspects of Rabinowitz's poem than typical titles would offer. Toward the end of the show, about fifteen lines were thrust on the screen at once, and they stayed there until the singer had caught up--probably close to two minutes of singing, with nothing else of interest happening onstage. That I found this segment among Darkling's most compelling suggests something about the show: the ideas that drove it were perhaps more interesting than their realization.

I don't have a lot to say about the music, in part because it was secondary to other aspects of the production. Weisman's text-setting was skillful, and I suspect a second listening would reveal much more in it. The Flux Quartet provided instrumental background, which was most often just that: if you've heard Michael Gordon's "Weather," take out the electronica and you've got a pretty good idea of what the quartet music sounded like, both independently and behind the vocalists.

For all the suggestive aspects of Darkling, I found myself even more enthralled by the structural implications of The Music Teacher. Written by Wallace Shawn (always Mr. Hall in Clueless to me) with music composed by Allen Shawn, the opera part of this play/opera serves what could be considered to be an entirely functional role. Like the more traditional play-within-a-play, the opera-within-a-play in The Music Teacher is more interesting what it tells us about the characters who wrote and produced it than as an independent work of art.

Mr. Smith, our main character, is a fifty-something professor looking back on his twenties, when he taught at a small boarding school. He focuses on his last year at the school, in which he and two of his prize students, Jane and Jim, collaborated on the writing and production of an opera. Jane wrote the libretto and Mr. Smith wrote the music. We learn most of this through Mr. Smith's and Jane's alternate narration, though some non-musical scenes are shown in the present tense, with the role of Mr. Smith sometimes played by Tom Cairns (the older version), other times by a younger actor with Cairns watching.

Approximately a half-hour into the show, we're suddenly watching the opera. It's set in ancient Rome and centers on a love triangle involving Alcimedes (played by Smith), Aeola (played by Jane), and Chronilos (played by Jim). So, like any self-respecting play-within-a-play, the subtexts and double-entendres steal the show. During the intermission of the opera, we return to narration from Mr. Smith and Jane, followed by the second act, before the play concludes with another 30-minute non-musical series of scenes.

What struck me most forcefully during the opera-within-a-play was that, unlike in any other opera I've ever seen, I was actually interested in what would happen next. Typically, the combination of interesting music and the glacial narrative pace convince me to give up the story--and, of course, I've turned off my Met titles. But functional opera...that's a different story. At the risk of gratuitous oversimplification, watching an opera-within-a-play provides some insight into what drives part of the academic Wagner industry: it's fun to psychologize about the composer of an opera, especially when--in Jane's opera as in Wagner--the psychology is so close to the surface.

I imagine that anyone who has ever thought much about the challenges of the opera form doesn't need my prodding to come up with dozens of ways to exploit the device of opera-within-a-play. Shawn has plenty of fun with the idea. After all, this is a high school production with a libretto written by a seventeen-year-old: it can't be that good. Case in point: a comically melodramatic exchange in which Aeola asks Alcimedes (repeatedly) how he likes his breakfast. Another: Aeola's four servants writhe around the strapping Alcimedes, singing about what they'd like to do, but can't.

Like Darkling, The Music Teacher watches like it was conceived by someone other than the composer. (In The Music Teacher, this is almost certainly the case; in Darkling, I don't know.) I suspect an opera/play of this sort, as envisioned by an opera composer, would relegate the non-musical scenes to a more transparently framing role, whereas I think more than half of this show was spoken dialogue. If Shawn's ratio of dialogue:opera:dialogue was 3:4:3, I'd be tempted to try for 2:7:1. Along the same lines, Allen Shawn's music is even more unobtrusive than Weisman's: it is accomplished but bland; even slightly gnarly passages are only gnarly in that ominous-film-score way. This, of course, is also partly functional: Shawn's music, within the play, was written by a boarding-school music teacher.

By now, self-reflexive genres--plays within plays, novels within novels, poems within poems--are little more than cliches. But given the less obvious literal content of musical forms, an opera-within-an-opera or a symphony-within-a-symphony is far from that point. I doubt that particular branch of musical postmodernity will become as prevalent as the equivalent verbal forms, but The Music Teacher suggests a fascinating way in which a musical form can have a functional role. It may be that the fictionalized interplay between opera and its creation is best presented in this type of hybrid. I'm interested to see what comes of that, especially once a composer bites into it and makes such a project his or her own.
posted by Jeffrey Sackmann