Year: 2011

Composers, Contemporary Classical

I think I overdosed on student composers’ music (part 2)

Early this week I posted my report on the 2011 Midwest Composers Symposium, wherein I mentioned the fact I had heard a lot of students’ music in a short amount of time. Well, the 30+ works I wrote about Thursday were just the beginning of my new music marathon because Midwest was immediately followed by last Monday’s student composers’ concert at the University of Michigan. That composers’ forum, the year’s second, was refreshingly brief in contrast to the preceding weekend’s protracted program, yet it contained delicious variety and a few personal debuts by composers I was not familiar with.

Monday’s concert began with an electro-acoustic work by Robert Alexander, an accomplished, technologically oriented composer/sound artist who I saw perform with the MiND Ensemble last Spring. Mr. Alexander’s piece, a line between two spaces (turning and turning and resting), featured composer David Biedenbender at the piano and a host of live electronic devices. As I gathered, the work was mainly improvised, though it seemed like the overall structure – mostly in terms of energy level – had been agreed on beforehand. Most remarkable about the piece is the way in which Mr. Alexander’s electronics interacted with the piano.  At first, the piano’s sound is undistorted, with the first synthesized sounds regurgitating the piano’s music and then shifting the pitch ever so slightly. However, the electronics increasingly gain power over the piano, achieving a beautiful and stunning summit whereby the electronic part actually subsumes the acoustic space of the piano, and the instrument is no longer audible.

The next two pieces were beautiful songs performed by composers David Wolff (tenor) and Michael Schachter (pianist). First came Mr. Wolff’s “Of Mere Being”, an impressionistic setting of Wallace Stevens. With its impulsive musical moods, “Of Mere Being” reflects the text impeccably and expressively without being obvious. Moreover, Mr, Wolff’s performance, for both songs, was fantastic and demonstrative of his impressive musicianship. Mr. Schachter’s Pierrot (Heart), followed and didn’t shy away from the mantle of excellent vocal writing introduced carried by “Of Mere Being”. Pierrot sets a poem by Langston Hughes, and opens simply to establish a somber, contemplative space from which the narrator will tell his story. Like “Of Mere Being”, Pierrot merges the piano and singer into a single dramatic force that illustrates the text without being to transparent. Particularly important to the drama in Mr. Schachter’s work is the aforementioned simplicity of the opening material. This idea’s expressivity grows slowly, only to explode rather gloriously in the song’s captivating climax.

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by Garrett Schumann
Brooklyn, Chamber Music, Composers, Concerts, File Under?, New Amsterdam

Spears and Supko share Galapagos double bill


Due East. Photo: Peter Dressel

Time Out New York’s Steve Smith is sparing with the 5-star CD reviews, but he gave his highest score to Drawn Only Once, Due East’s New Amsterdam release. It features two beguiling multimedia works by John Supko, which feature video, electronics, Due East (Erin Lesser, flute and Greg Beyer, percussion), as well as a number of other instrumentalists and vocalists. These various elements are overlaid in a busy patchwork quilt, sometimes contemplative, at others dizzying: but it’s always a beguiling sound world. Despite the sometimes dense colloquy of events found on Drawn Only Once, the release will likely draw listeners back to fathom its depths in successive hearings.

Lesser and Beyer live in Wisconsin and Illinois, respectively. But on Monday night, they’re bringing Supko’s music to Galapagos Art Space, which will be bathed in the glow of video and the envelopment of surround sound.

Sharing the bill with them is another New Amsterdam artist – Gregory Spears – whose newly released Requiem is his debut CD. This is another disc that’s spent a lot of time in the short stack near my favorite listening spot, ready to be pressed into service for repeated hearings.

Spears combines early music instruments and singers with a 21st century aesthetic sensibility in a contemplation of mortality that eschews both dogmatism and morbidity. Although it’s a far more ambient motivated work than the Fauré Requiem, Spears’ essay in the genre shares a comforting and cautiously affirming demeanor with its predecessor, as well as a sensuousness of sound and intriguing modality that is most fetching.

Doors open at 7:00 and the show starts at 8.

Galapagos Art Space is located at 16 Main St, Dumbo, Brooklyn.

Call 718/222-8500 for more information.



by Christian Carey
Composers, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Festivals, Music Events

I think I overdosed on student composers’ music (part 1)

The positive aspect of having too much of a good thing is that you’ve consumed something good. For me in the last week, the object of my over-consumption has been new works by student composers, not only created by colleagues of mine at the University of Michigan, but the representatives of the University of Iowa, Indiana University and the University of Cincinnati who attended the 2011 Midwest Composers Symposium. Topping off the weekend-long buffet of freshly baked music was Monday evening’s second student composers’ concert of the year here at Michigan (which I will cover in the next installment in this pair of reviews). Suffice it to say, I heard a lot of music in those four days, so I will do my best to cover what passed by my ears.

Midwest (as the event will be dubbed from now on) is an annually occurring conference of student composers held at one of the four member institutions (UM, UI, IU and CCM) on a rotating basis. For more background information check out last year’s post on the symposium. I participated in the Michigan delegation this year and traveled to Bloomington, Indiana (IU was the host this time ’round) with my work for two marimbas “Dark Spiral” (here’s a video). There were four concerts altogether, one Friday evening and three on Saturday offering over 30 individual works to an audience of composers, performers and professors. Intervening between the morning and afternoon concert Saturday was a very thought-provoking discussion session wherein each school elected students to give a brief presentation on a musical topic of their choice. I really enjoyed the interactions spawned by this feature of the event and I hope it is retained and, perhaps, expanded in the future.

I apologize in advance to all those performers and composers I am unable to devote much time to in the forthcoming paragraphs. The extreme volume of music presented to me forces me – understandably I hope – to be uncomfortably brief. Before getting specific I want to emphasize that every school represented themselves extremely well, in my opinion. Each offered a variety of styles and ensembles making the slate of proffered works as diverse as it was ample.

Now to the music.

Friday’s concert featured the “large ensemble” works, including performances by the Indiana University Chamber Orchestra, Contemporary Vocal Ensemble and New Music Ensemble. There were many remarkably beautiful moments in the first two works, Natalie Williams‘ Les Chant du Malador (2011) and Stas Omelchenko‘s Musings… (2011), particularly the third movement of Ms. Williams’ piece, which alludes to tonality in a very refracted way that is convincing and engaging without being too on-the-nose. These chamber orchestra works were followed by two very well-received (at least with my crew) choral pieces: Lindsey Jacob‘s Continue to Exist (2006) and Ji Young Kim‘s Reflections on Waiting for Mama (2011). Ms. Kim’s work is particularly striking in how it uses onomatopoeia to imitate the native language of her text’s subject, Korean. The piece balances the choir’s texture wonderfully, using precisely located solos to convey and magnify the work’s narrative backbone. The final two works on the evening’s program were Paul Dooley‘s Point Blank (which I already reviewed) and Justin Grossman‘s At Last the Secret is Out (2010), pairing very nicely together to conclude the first evening and set the bar very high for Saturday’s music.

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by Garrett Schumann
Chamber Music, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Music Events

Brave New Works Comes to Town

For those of you in the area, the highly-lauded chamber ensemble Brave New Works is returning to their old stomping grounds in Ann Arbor for two performances this weekend.

The first is at Ann Arbor’s beloved Kerrytown Concert House on Friday November 18, at 8 PM. The program will feature works by Joseph Schwantner, Chen Yi and UM’s own Evan Chambers and Bright Sheng. Tickets are $5 for students, $10-25 general admission

The second concert is the following evening (Nov. 19) at 8 PM in the McIntosh theater at the UM School of Music, and features an all-Michigan program of Erik Santos, Michael Daugherty, Kristin Kuster and Paul Schoenfield. This concert is free.

by Garrett Schumann
Bang on a Can

David Lang is Writing a Piano Piece for Four Hands. Two of Them Could be Yours.

David Lang is one of my favorite composers and among a handful of brave souls who created the vibrant new music scene we enjoy today. He and his Bang on a Can co-founders Julia Wolfe and Michael Gordon were writing, producing and getting their music played and recorded long before the coming of the internet, inexpensive recording technology, and a hip club scene made DIY SOP. He reminds me a bit of the hero in the old country song “I Knew Jesus Before He Was a Superstar.”

His latest recording on Cantaloupe, this was written by hand, was officially released yesterday.  The album is made up of two compositions, the title work this was written by hand and memory pieces, both performed by the gifted pianist Andrew Zolinsky, who gave the first performances of both them some years ago. Perhaps because they are played so beautifully on a solo piano, both works have a directness and approachability that make them among the most user-friendly and enchanting that Lang has ever written, IMHO.  What you have here, folks, is a mature composer in total command of his craft and his musical soul.

Ah, but you want to know about those extra hands, right?   One of the works on the album, wed, is  the subject of an online contest that some really talented but perhaps underappreciated pianst will win.  The sheet music for wed is available for free here and you are are invited to download it. Pianists can then post videos of themselves playing the work onto YouTube with the tag “david lang piano competition 2011”. After January 1, all of the submissions will be judged by an all-star pianist panel consisting of Vicky Chow, Jeremy Denk, Lisa Moore, Andrew Zolinsky, and the composer himself. The winner will be flown to New York, and Lang will compose a new work for four hands to be played by him/her and Zolinsky at (le) poisson rouge on May 6. The winner will also play his or her rendition of “wed” at (le) poisson rouge. The full rules can be found here.

Good luck.  I’m pulling for you.

by Jerry Bowles
Composers, Orchestral, Premieres, Scores, Twentieth Century Composer, Video

“Cold Shivers Seem Spine”: Are These Sketches of Sibelius’s Eighth Symphony?

Why did you have to burn your symphony, Jean?
Sketches for an untitled orchestral work dating from the time Sibelius was writing his Eighth Symphony

Big news from Finland: Sketches of what appear to be Sibelius’s Eighth Symphony (long thought destroyed by Sibelius) have emerged. Here’s a clunky Google translation of the Finnish web site announcing this incredible discovery, along with an orchestral reading of those sketches. At the original Finnish link, you can access a video and hear the realization of the sketches. Those of you who don’t speak Finnish will want to jump ahead to ca. 2:00, where the music actually begins. Yes, it sounds like Sibelius, but a more chromatic and fragmented Sibelius than we’re accustomed to.

A more comfortably written article on the discovery and the musicology supporting the claim can be found here.

And a great big Thank You to Sibelius booster Alex Ross, who hipped me to this at his web site.

by Christian Hertzog
Brooklyn, Choral Music, Concert review, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, File Under?, New York

Ekmeles Loves Challenges

Ekmeles at the Italian Academy

Last month at Columbia University’s Italian Academy, I was formidably impressed by an evening of madrigals old and new performed by the vocal ensemble Ekmeles. One of the revelations of the evening began with an idea ofensemble director Jeff Gavett. He thought that the madrigals of Carlo Gesualdo might benefit from Nichola Vicentino’s 31-tone equal tempered scale, most famously employed in the tuning of an instrument of his design, the archicembalo.

While, as Gavett admitted in the concert’s program notes, there is not direct evidence that they were ever performed this way in the presence of Gesualdo, there is some documentary evidence that Vicentino’s writings and an archicembalo were available to the composer. But here, the proof was in the singing. Gesualdo’s music sounds glorious in 31-TET. Indeed some of its idiosyncratic cross-relations and chordal voicings glisten: equally, wonderfully, strange, but somehow refocused.

Ekmeles contains several youngish singers with winsome voices: Gavett, soprano Mary Mackenzie, and countertenor Eric Brenner are notable standouts. Their interpretative maturity and skill in preparing the challenging works on the program bely the freshness of Ekmeles’ sound. The group also brought in a “ringer of ringers” for the second act. New music superstar soprano Lucy Shelton joined Ekmeles for a spirited rendition of Elliott Carter’s late Ashbery setting Mad Regales.

The program also featured several deconstructions of the madrigal aesthetic. Peter Ablinger’s Studien der Natur, in which sounds of nature and commerce alike are recreated using only voices, was a rather charming one-upping of Josquin’s El Grillo. Johannes Schöllhorn and Carl Bettendorf took the madrigal into postmodern, often craggy, territory. Martin Iddon’s hamadryads required the group to play water-filled glasses and employ headsets to grok its very expanded Pythagorean tuning that is notated down to 100ths of a cent! Incredibly challenging to perform. But then, Ekmeles revels to be challenged.

 

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This Thursday, composer Randy Gibson’s work will be in full force on the Music at First series. The concert features the world premiere of Gibson’s Circular Trance Surrounding the Second Pillar with The Highest Seventh Primal Cirrus, The Utmost Fundamental, and The Ekmeles Ending from Apparitions of The Four Pillars (fit that title on a postcard!), a concert length work in just intonation for sine wave drones and seven voices. Also on the bill is a set from Canadian harpsichordist Katelyn Clark.

Performance details

Date: Friday, November 18th 2011
Time: 7:30pm
City: Brooklyn, NY
Venue: First Presbyterian Church of Brooklyn
Address: 124 Henry Street
Admission: $10

by Christian Carey
Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Interviews, New York

New Music for the King of Instruments

Paul Jacobs
Paul Jacobs performs at the Church of St. Ignatius Loyola in New York City this Wednesday, November 16 at 7:30 PM. Famed as an “evangelist for the organ”, Jacobs will play a 20th/21st century program that highlights not only the instrument’s traditional grandeur and sublimity, but also its range of emotion and insight.
John Clare spoke to Paul about the program, teaching organists new music plus composers about the organ, and some new works by Mason Bates and Michael Daugherty: mp3 file
An extraordinarily expressive performer and an intensely intelligent musician, Grammy Award-winning organist Paul Jacobs is helping the King of Instruments retake its rightful place in classical music. He is known for his marathon performances, which sometimes last up to 18 hours, of the complete works of J.S. Bach, Messiaen, and other composers, as well as his presentations of new works and core repertoire. Jacobs was invited to join the faculty of the Juilliard School in 2003, and was named chairman of the organ department in 2004, one of the youngest faculty appointees in the school’s history. He received Juilliard’s prestigious William Schuman Scholar’s Chair in 2007. Jacobs has played with numerous orchestras around the country, including the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the Philadelphia Orchestra. Jacobs’ most recent album is a recording of Copland’s Organ Symphony with the San Francisco Symphony under the baton of Michael Tilson Thomas.
“Sacred Music in a Sacred Space” at the Church of St. Ignatius Loyola in New York City is committed to presenting the finest sacred choral and organ repertoire spanning over 1,000 years of music history. Known for their artistic excellence, the renowned Choir and Orchestra of St. Ignatius Loyola present exhilarating performances of large-scale choral masterpieces as well as more intimate and reflective settings by lesser-known composers. Internationally-acclaimed organists may also frequently be heard on the Church’s magnificent N.P. Mander Pipe Organ, the largest tracker organ in New York City. General admission is $20, with tickets for students and seniors at $15.

by John Clare
Bang on a Can, Competitions, Composers, Contemporary Classical, File Under?, Video

You have til the end of the year

Here’s a contest for pianists with the music of David Lang. Read all about it here.
David explains more in this video: http://youtu.be/BrmQqX_Qs5o

Between November 15, 2011 and December 31, 2011, download the score to wed from David Lang’s memory pieces without charge from http://digital.schirmer.com/lang-contest
Learn the music and make a video of yourself playing it.
Post the video on YouTube.com by midnight (Eastern Standard Time) on December 31, 2011.
**IMPORTANT** you must tag the video with the following phrase: David Lang Piano Competition 2011

I spoke with David when he was in South Texas just last year about composition: http://vimeo.com/11256163

by John Clare