The Original New Music Community
Orpheus Chamber Orchestra announced the winners of the Project 440 competition tonight. The four winners will create new works for Orpheus to be premiered in 2012.
They are (clockwise from top left) Alex Mincek, Clint Needham, Andrew Norman, and Cynthia Wong:
The first University of Michigan Composers’ Forum concert of the 2010-2011 season took place in the evening on Monday, October 11. Earmarked by the department as a preview for the upcoming Midwest Composers Symposium in Cincinnati, I had been looking forward to this event for over a month as my first opportunity to experience the creativity of my colleagues here in Michigan. Like most music schools, our Composers’ Forum is organized and performed by students and viewed as an arena in which the composers studying here may test concepts and solidify their ideas before moving on to a more professional setting.
Anyone who has pursued a degree in music composition has most likely experienced a similar concert; they can be long and inconsistent in terms of the overall quality. While the composers here at Michigan proffered thirteen works spanning nearly two and a half hours, there were no stinkers on the program. Every piece displayed the strength of its creator in a different way and each composition brought something unique to the table, producing an aural narrative full of twists and turns and leaving a delightfully heterogeneous resonance in my mind’s ear.
The first piece on the program was Will Pertz’ philosophy, rhetoric, anarchy, nostalgia, klang!! for solo violin. Mr. Pertz’s product on Monday was dazzlingly brief insofar as it contained a single pizzicato note. It took more time to read the title of this work than hear it, which disarmed me because Emily Graber, the soloist, returned backstage before I could look up from the program. Initially, I found the piece off-putting, and reasoned it was a poor attempt at hyper-intellectual slop, but I was wrong. As pointed out to me by Professor Erik Santos, Mr. Pertz’ title is an anagram for “prank”, which gives philosophy, rhetoric, anarchy, nostalgia, klang!! a completely different character. Like Erik Satie’s Furniture Music, Mr. Pertz’s composition is playful mockery of music’s high academia and I salute Mr. Pertz’s cleverness even though I am embarrassed I didn’t pick up on it by myself.
Next down the line was Donia Jarrar’s composition for two pianos, Cairo, Bahibik (Cairo, I love you). The first of several programmatic works that evening, Cairo Bahibik opened with a contemplative piano sound along the lines of Federico Mompou’s Musica Callada and quickly departed to a upbeat world of hocketed ostinati, mixed meter and free-flowing, folk-like melodies flying from one pianist’s hands to the other’s. After filling the hall with high energy, Ms. Jarrar led her listeners back to the reflective opening mood, which was transformed both literally in her score and figuratively as a result of the preceding activity. Cairo, Bahibik succeeded at both creating a portrait of Ms. Jarrar’s programmatic subject and refracting this image through the prism of her musical intuition. In other words, she discarded potentially trite surface details to focus on base impressions, aromas, echoes and shadows of her experience in Egypt, producing in my mind the flickering sensation that I had been to Cairo, as well.
Today is the 20th anniversary of Leonard Bernstein’s death. He would be 92 if he were still alive. His son, Alexander, has written a 
nice tribute published at dot429 this morning:
It seems impossible that twenty years have passed since my father (Leonard Bernstein) died. Or perhaps, I should write, I haven’t seen my father for twenty years! Sometimes I feel as though he is on tour again and will be back at any time now…
My father traveled a great deal. When he was home, though, he was really home. As a composer, he didn’t have an office to go to like the other dads. He would stay up very late working and then wake up very late. He would always be there when we came home from school, ready to play (or at least not minding if we played quietly in his studio while he worked). In the summertime we had him all day long for swimming, tennis, sailing, or just eating six ears of corn apiece. Sometimes he would play something for us as soon as he finished writing it and would ask our opinions. Undoubtedly, it was always “terrific” because he had such faith in his work and played with such joy and energy. You can read the rest here.
The music season has definitely kicked into gear all across the country. Sure, I will always love and find inspiration via New York City; I just received a great CD from a new friend in Brooklyn and the other night skyped for the first time with another NYC friend and collaborator who helped lead Burnt Sugar in a recent musical tribute to James Brown at the Apollo Theater (Salon Series at the Apollo is looking really, really cool. Miller Theatre, you have been warned…).
But I’m excited by the music new I’m reading from all the coasts (and Midwest). Here’s yet another great concert event taking place in my new home – Houston, Texas.
This Saturday, October 16th, Houston’s contemporary music group Musiqa launches its 9th season with the world premiere of composer Stewart Wallace’s chamber piece for She Told Me This composed for and performed by Mezzo Soprano Zheng Chao with a libretto by Amy Tan. Sara Jobin, Assistant Conductor of the San Francisco Opera, conducts. A native Houstonian, Wallace is best known for his opera Harvey Milk , which premiered in Houston in 1995. Zheng Chao’s recently diagnosed and current battle with lung cancer in part inspired Wallace to compose this piece especially for her. You can read more about Chao and her story here.
Saturday’s program also includes a world premiere dance performance by Dance of Asia America to works by Lei Liang and Lou Harrison as well as two pieces by composers Anthony Brandt and Todd Frazier commissioned for the recent anniversary of Rice University’s Richard E. Smalley Institute for Nanoscale Science and Technology.
It all takes place Saturday, October 16th, 2010, at 7:30 p.m. in Zilkha Hall of The Hobby Center for the Performing Arts. A pre-concert screening of a film about Stewart Wallace and Amy Tan’s collaboration takes place at 7:00 p.m. You can purchase tickets at www.musiqahouston.org
There are a few more concerts happening in New York this week that you should know about, and then I’ll give the concert updates a rest for a while. Promise.
Tonight (Tuesday, October 12), is your last chance to see the New York premiere of Kraft by Magnus Lindberg. 7:30pm, New York Philharmonic, Avery Fisher Hall. If you somehow haven’t heard about this, you can read the s21 posts about it here, here, and here; the New York Times articles and videos here, and here. You can even find some info over at Huffington Post. Check on ticket availability here, and see you tonight!
Thursday (October 14), like most nights here, is full of fantastic concerts to check out. Here are two that I strongly recommend: Option #1, Transit presents So Percussion, Tristan Perich, and Corps Exquis (a collaboration between Daniel Wohl and six video artists) at Galapagos (8pm). Option #2, Talea Ensemble is presenting a concert called KINETICS (also at 8pm at the Rose Studio at Lincoln Center); they will perform music by Philippe Leroux, Luciano Berio, Frank Denyer, Manfred Stahnke, and a world premiere by Alexandre Lunsqui appropriately titled Kineticstudies. Good luck choosing!
Friday (October 15) is the season opener for the American Composers Orchestra (7:30pm. Zankel Hall). Their program is called “Mystics & Magic” and they will present John Luther Adams, Jacob Druckman, Wang Jie (winner of ACO’s 2009 Underwood New Music Readings Commission), Alvin Singleton, and Claude Vivier. And they will also be welcome two truly amazing soloists: soprano Susan Narucki (for Claude’s piece), and pianist Ursula Oppens (for Alvin’s piece).
Saturday (October 16) I’ll be checking out A House in Bali over at BAM. Of course, this is actually being presented the 14-16th, so take your pick. There’s no need to go into details about it here, you can read my earlier post for more information.
I first heard about the Long Now Foundation a couple years ago from friend and former bandmate Daniel Magazin. I remember visiting their web site and thinking that San Francisco was the perfect place for such an entity. “The Long Now Foundation hopes to provide counterpoint to today’s “faster/cheaper” mind set and promote “slower/better” thinking,” the web site declares. “We hope to creatively foster responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years.”
Such a perspective seems custom-made to partner with the minimalist and conceptual streams of contemporary music. UK-based artist, musician, and composer Jem Finer thought so too. He first discovered Long Now through reading about the Foundation in Brian Eno’s book, A Year With Swollen Appendices, and thereafter became a close friend and artistic collaborator.
Finer began conceiving of his 1,000-year composition, Longplayer, in the mid 1990’s when he was “struck by a general lack of long-term vision” as the turn of the century loomed. “Longplayer grew out of a conceptual concern with problems of representing and understanding the fluidity and expansiveness of time,” he says. “While it found form as a musical composition, it can also be understood as a living, 1,000-year-long process – an artificial life form programmed to seek its own survival strategies.”
Longplayer has indeed survived. Since it began performance at midday on December 31st, 1999, in the lighthouse at Trinity Buoy Wharf, East London, it has been going on continuously at several global locations and, of course, online.
This Saturday, October 16th, Long Now organizers will offer a live segment of Longplayer to accompany the Foundation’s seminar, Long Conversation. Live musicians, equipped with 365 Tibetan singing bowls, will perform the 1,000-minute excerpt from 7:00 a.m. to 11:40 p.m. in the Forum at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. The six-hour Long Conversation, featuring nineteen thinkers from many disciplines, runs from 3:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. at the nearby Contemporary Jewish Museum.
One ticket, priced at $28.00, secures admission to the concert and the seminar. For more information, contact Danielle Engleman at the Long Now Foundation.
Remixers start your … laptops. Some hot-off-the-presses news about a contest beginning at noon TODAY!
Pulitzer Prize–winning composer Steve Reich, Nonesuch Records, and Indaba Music have launched a search for collaborators to remix the third movement from Reich’s 2×5. Paired with his Pulitzer prizewinning Double Sextet, the work appears on Reich’s new Nonesuch CD.
For four weeks beginning October 12, 2010 at noon, remixers can visit Indaba’s website to create their own version of the movement.
From November 9 to 23, fans and a panel of judges including Reich will review the submissions. Winners will be announced on December 7th. In addition to a grand prize and 2 runners-up selected by the jury, 10 honorable mentions will be selected by the public.
All jury selections will receive prizes, as follows:
Grand Prize (1)
$500
Signed copy of Double Sextet/2×5 CD
Signed copy of Double Sextet score
One-year free Platinum membership to Indabamusic.com
Runners-Up (2)
Signed copy of Double Sextet/2×5 CD
Signed copy of Double Sextet score
3-month Platinum membership to Indabamusic.com
Honorable Mentions (10)
Signed copy of Double Sextet/2×5 CD
Signed copy of Double Sextet score
3-month Pro memberships to Indabamusic.com
__________________________________________________________
Written for the Bang on a Can All Stars, 2×5 is Reich’s most overt foray into rock instrumentation to date. In my preview of the album, I noted that Reich’s collaboration with BoaC was “An intergenerational summit – minimalist elder statesman meets post-minimal/totalist ace performers – that, in terms of importance, is more or less the Downtown version of Duke Ellington and John Coltrane.”
Now, another layer of creators will season the mix – I’m excited to hear the results!
When Christopher James Lees (pictured to the right), conductor of the University of Michigan Contemporary Directions Ensemble (CDE), challenged the literal meaning of “contemporary” before the group’s concert last Wednesday, he imbued the performance with special significance. The concert, dubbed “homage to the masters”, aimed to explore certain works’ and composers’ relevance, chronology notwithstanding, and featured Morton Feldman’s Madame Press Died Last Week at 90 (1970), Toru Takemitsu’s Air (1995), George Perle’s Six Celebratory Inventions (1995), Benjamin Lees’s Piano Trio no. 2 (1998) and Gyorgy Ligeti’s Chamber Concerto (1970) (additionally, Elliott Carter’s Gra (1975) was supposed to be played but the soloist was indisposed by illness).
I was surprised by the unwitting timeliness of Maestro Lees’ comments in relation to the faculty recital I attended the night before, a performance by Stephen Rush of a handful of works for piano and drum set. Rush is the director of the University of Michigan’s Digital Media Ensemble, and an acclaimed composer, jazz pianist and music author. Though he has worked with traditional genres, Rush’s music is decidedly unconventional and avant-garde, epitomized Tuesday night by a free-flowing mixture of improvised and composed-out materials. For this reason, I cannot tell you exactly what he played that night because the program was determined on the spot.
The music on both concerts was certainly modern, but which pieces were more contemporary? Pure chronology is a dangerous guide in this argument because “recent” and “contemporary” are not perfect synonyms. Rather, contemporariness springs from how an item or individual fits within the present, a distinction noted by Maestro Lees when he insisted that composers should not lose their cultural relevance once they die. The degree to which a piece of music represents the time in which is was written is hard to gauge in an era of music history without strict stylistic rigor. My opinion here is, of course, limited by my personal knowledge, but the most clearly outdated work between these two concerts was Ligeti’s Chamber Concerto. The work’s pervasive sound mass textures are representative of when it was written; further, the momentum of Ligeti’s musical development leaves little doubt that the Chamber Concerto is an ascending step along his career path, not its culmination.
My tweet right after the concert on Thursday: “Magnus Lindberg’s Kraft: some very beautiful passages + intriguing spatial effects amidst a joyously chaotic maelstrom of sound.”
It’s a fascinating piece and a gutsy one for the New York Philharmonic to present. I do question the wisdom of programming it alongside Joshua Bell playing the Sibelius Violin Concerto. It threw some of the more conservative ticket-holders a curveball, as they had no idea (unless they’re checked out the promo videos on YouTube) what the Lindberg had in store for them.
There were far more than the “handful” of walkouts Anthony Tommasini noted in his otherwise superlative review in the New York Times. From where we were sitting in the Third Tier of Fisher Hall, we had a birds-eye view of a steady exodus of disgruntled patrons: perhaps 10-15%.
On Friday, I talked about the walkout phenomena with my analytical studies class. One issue we discussed was the notion that many orchestras seem to have of “one audience” vs. the possible lifesaving way forward of cultivating “many audiences.” The former notion seems pretty entrenched at the Phil. I’m glad to see that Alan Gilbert and some of the folks in the press office are exploring ways to curate and cultivate multiple kinds of music-making at the NYPO and leverage social media to find new audience sources. Last year, Ligeti’s Le Grand Macabre was a terrific example of that.
But Thursday’s concert seemed to me to be a holdover of the former way of thinking. Get people to come to hear Joshua Bell, and then have the conductor give a lecture explaining why they should like a loud piece with oxygen tanks and multiple gongs in the midst of the audience. I don’t entirely blame the folks who stormed out for being upset, although I do wish they’d taken the hint and left after the concerto if they weren’t up for an adventure.
Still, for those who stayed, it was quite an adventure. Here’s Lindberg discussing the piece.
How often does a promo video (and indeed, program booklet) from the NY Philharmonic namecheck experimental industrial postpunk collective Einstürzende Neubauten? This is perhaps the first time! But one can really see the connections between the group’s aesthetic and Magnus Lindberg’s Kraft in the videos below: check out their percussion setup!
There’s one more performance of Kraft on Tuesday. If you’re in New York, I heartily recommend checking it out!
It’s a cliché to say Texans like things BIG although a mid morning drive on Houston’s freeways will do little to dispel this notion. However, many incredible opera companies in Houston presenting cutting edge programming and embracing fresh approaches to audience outreach are relatively small operations. But that doesn’t mean these companies and their ambitions aren’t growing.
Viswa Subbaraman is the Founder and Artistic Director of Opera Vista, Houston’s innovative contemporary opera company. October 15, at 8pm at Zilkha Hall (located in the Hobby Center for the Performing Arts) maestro Subbaraman and company present the world premiere of composer and Bangkok Opera artistic director Somtow Sucharitkul’s The Silent Prince. Billed as a “Bollywood Opera,” The Silent Prince tells the Buddhist tale of Temiya Jataka, a Buddha who has been reincarnated as a prince. When forced to choose between committing terrible karmic deeds and disobeying his father, Temiya withdraws from the world into silence.
After visiting Sucharitkul’s website to hear samples of his music and blog to read his first hand accounts of composing and conducting music in Thailand, I reached out to Viswa Subbaraman with a few questions about next Friday’s premiere and the future of opera:
What are the connections between Bollywood and The Silent Prince? Does the Bollywood connection have to do with the production’s staging and choreography as well as the appearance of a live elephant?
The Bollywood connection has primarily to do with the staging, dancing, and costuming. In a lot of ways, I see this as a throwback to to the Bollywood movies I remember watching with my parents. When I was really young, it seemed as though my parents could only find Bollywood movies that had been out for at least 5-10 years. It wasn’t as prevalent to find Bollywood movies in the US back then. Those old movies had a very operatic element to them. I think the Bollywood connection in this opera harks back to that type of Bollywood film.
Musically, the work tends to be a very eclectic piece. There are moments that strike me as being old-school Bollywood. There are also times that I’m reminded of Sondheim, Wagner, Bernstein and a score of other composers. What I find extremely successful is that it does not sound piece meal. There is a definite unity between the various musical styles.
The score for The Silent Prince combines Western and Indian instruments. What Indian instruments are used? Does the score incorporate instruments from other parts of the East as well?
The Indian instruments in Somtow’s score include Tamburas and Harmonium. In the original conception, there were ideas to use Indian percussion and a variety of Indian instruments, but in the end, it seemed as though Somtow pared things down to create a much cleaner texture. One could make the argument, however, that he uses the violins and flute in a very Carnatic way at points. There is a definite South Asian connection in the instrumentation. Somtow uses a number of tam-tams, gongs, and antique cymbals, so there is a “gamelan” influence. Granted, those instruments tend to be so common in the orchestra that we don’t consider them as exotic any more. That being said, there is a definite nod to eastern traditions in the way those instruments are used.
From your perspective as a conductor and director of an opera company, where do you think contemporary and yet-to-be-written opera in the 21st century is headed? Are the costs of production stifling the development of this tradition of music? Or are more and more people like yourself discovering innovative ways to keep this particular genre of music and its audience growing?
This is an interesting question in that these days I see a ton of new opera. Opera Vista runs an annual competition for new opera (The Vista Competition), and since our focus is primarily opera by living composers, we also receive a number of perusal scores. When I started Opera Vista, I was wary of what we would receive in the way of submissions for the competition, and I was also curious to see what the state of new opera was. I can honestly say that we should be excited by all the great opera being written by living composers. I think opera, much like other areas of contemporary composition, is marked by eclecticism. I don’t know that you can say that there is a specific style or direction that marks contemporary opera. We’re seeing every manner of opera under the sun. There seems to be almost no subject area that is taboo. There also doesn’t seem to be a musical style that is necessarily in vogue right now.
Costs of production are probably the biggest hurdle. I have literally hundreds of ideas for new productions of new opera as well as a variety of directions we could go to help composers develop their art. That being said, it is still difficult to convince potential donors of the necessity of donating to support new music. New music still scares people. This is an area that I guess I could write a book about now. I love all types of music, but as Artistic Director of an organization that is still in its infancy, there is no doubt that I have tabled some productions that I think would be amazing to explore – Elliott Carter’s What Next? comes to mind – because I need to develop my audience base as well as their faith that new opera can be interesting and not scary. I really want Opera Vista to develop a consistent donor base and to be able to truly afford its staff and musicians before pushing the envelope too far – although a Bollywood opera with a live elephant really does feel like pushing the envelope! In some ways, that is the beauty of The Vista Competition.
The Vista Competition for new opera has been an amazing way to introduce living composers and their music to audiences. Every year, I have thought that there might be a piece in the mix that is “above the audience,” and to my amazement it does extremely well in the competition. The Vista Competition is run in an American Idol style. We perform 6-10 minute excerpts of the opera to give the audience a flavor of the work. The jury then asks the composers questions about their work, and in the end, the audience votes for the winner. Because of the interaction between the jury and the composers and in the finals directly between the audience and the composers, there is an opportunity for the audience to learn about the piece in fun and hopefully not-so-scary manner. It has been a building process. I’m excited each year by the number of people who return for the competition and bring friends. We are slowly finding a way to overcome the “opera” and “new music” stereotypes that scare people.
I think there are a number of groups that are working towards fostering new opera. It takes time and a ton of effort. It truly is a labor of love initially. It’s an exciting time for new opera. I really believe in the work we are doing. I know there is now the Microscopic Opera Company in Pittsburgh, Bluegrass Opera in Kentucky, and a number of others are growing.
The Silent Prince by Somtow Sucharitkul, performed by Opera Vista, Viswa Subbaraman conducting, will premiere October 15, 2010, 8pm at Zilkha Hall at the Hobby Center for the Performing Arts, 800 Bagby St., Houston, TX.