On August 9, Christian Wolff’s Changing the System (1973) was performed by the new experimental music group Southland Ensemble, in the heart of historic China Town here in Los Angeles. About 40 people filled Automata, a small space at Chung King Court dedicated to the experimental arts, to hear Wolff’s politically charged and innovative work that utilizes graphical scoring designed to inspire a kind of consensus-driven interpretation from the players. Enlarged reproductions of the score were hung on the walls and the audience was encouraged to walk about and inspect them during the performance.
Christian Wolff is the last surviving member of the New York School of experimental composition that famously included Morton Feldman and John Cage. In fact it was Wolff who gave John Cage a copy of I Ching , stimulating that composers use of random processes in composition. And Wolff himself, according to the program notes, sought “to turn the making of music into a collaborative and transforming activity…” allowing the players to work out the realization of the piece within the guidelines of the score. (more…)
Tuesday night’s Prom concert, by the BBC Philharmonic, conducted by John Storgårds, included, as part of a commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the Queen’s coronation, Edmund Rubbra’s Ode to the Queen, performed regally by Susan Bickley. Rubbra’s music is close to being completely unknown now, but in its day was rather successful; in 1961 on the Third Program, what is now BBC Radio 3, there were more of his pieces played than works of Berg, Copland, Ives, Janacek, Messiaen, or Tippett, according to the program notes for this concert. That all was changed by William Glock, who, apparently, when he took over as comptroller of the BBC, decreed that no more of Rubbra’s music would be played, and that had its effects on the possibilities for the music’s dissemination. I have to say that absolutely nothing about Ode to the Queen seemed to indicate that that was a bad move. Occasional pieces are usually not the best indication of a composer’s music, but although somewhere in all of Rubbra’s music (and there seems to be lots of it) there must be something to support Adrian Boult’s remark, quoted in the program, that Rubbra “goes on creating masterpieces,” this wasn’t it. The program started with Walton’s march Orb and Sceptre, which was written for the coronation; which seems to me to be far less successful than Crown Imperial, the march he wrote for the previous coronation.
The program also included another work which ran afoul of stylistic fashion, the Symphony in F#, Op. 40, of Erich Wolfgang Korngold. By the time Korngold finished his symphony and it was played, in 1952, he had already been more or less forced by events
If there were a contest for hardest working man in New Music, my choice for a winner would be Sean Hickey. The personable 43-year-old Detroit native is not only a husband and father and a top classical music industry executive with a serious day job, he is a prolific composer of eloquent, stately music that manages to engage (or, at minimum, not enrage) the post-modern crowd through the sheer originality and persuasiveness of its musical ideas–without sending the blue hairs scurrying for the exits. Like his original inspiration, Igor Stravinsky, and well-known contemporaries like Daniel Asia, Michael Daugherty, Aaron Jay Kernis, Libby Larsen, Lowell Liebermann,Paul Moravec, and Osvaldo Golijov (Have we forgiven him yet?), Hickey writes music that is enjoyable to listen to. Not easy. Enjoyable.
He also arranges music, writes travel articles, helps any friend who needs it and occasionally mows lawns on big estates in Westchester.
The release of his Concerto for Cello and Orchestra and Concerto for Clarinet on Delos has solidified his reputation as a formidable new classicist whose work demonstrates where American music might have gone had the heirs of neoclassic Stravinsky, Ravel, Hindemith, Milhaud, Martinu, Honneger and their tuneful ilk taken over music academia in the 50s and 60s instead of the mathematicians.
Hickey’s route to a music career is a familiar one for talented kids of his generation –he got himself a guitar and learned how to make it talk. (more…)
The common plight of the self-publisher is the issue of distribution. Sure, we all have access to professional-grade notation software and binding equipment but these tools do not help us get our work into the hands of performers nor do these tools help us find potential interested groups and expand our music into the larger world. The internet has been a boon for distributing other self-developed media, be it Bandcamp, Tunecore, CD Baby, Soundcloud, Vimeo, or YouTube. In recent years similar sites have been popping up to assist with the distribution of printed materials. Lulu.com is marketed towards self-published authors and provides storefront tools for selling any bound printed materials. Music is certainly possible on this site but two sites are interested in selling their services to self-published composers. The publishing firm JW Pepper launched its “MyScore” service about a year ago and more recently the site ScoreStreet.net has popped up to offer a similar service: give composers a place to distribute and sell their scores with the promise of reaching a larger audience.
MyScore and ScoreStreet both describe their services as ways to get your music to more people with less hands-on fuss. Each place takes over the printing and shipping of printed material, both offer digital sales, and neither site requires an exclusive contract with them. In other words, if you want to put some of your scores up on MyScore, some on ScoreStreet, and see which one works best for you then you are encouraged to do it. (more…)
The 60th birthday of John Zorn! Who would believe it? I guess 60 is the new 30. On Saturday, the Lincoln Center Festival celebrated with a concert devoted exclusively to all of Zorn’s string quartet music, a total of six works from 1988 to 2011. Zorn is such an enigmatic, eclectic musical persona and many-hat-wearer—Avant-garde enfant terrible, jazz-punk provocateur, saxophonist, improviser, unorthodox arranger, japanophile, experimental music impresario, klezmervangelist, record producer, and book series editor. He is also at least as enigmatic as a composer. Recently, some supporters announced a new ICO to fund a documentary exploring the evolution of Zorn’s compositions, spotlighting his boundary-pushing approach to creative expression. So it occurred to me that an evening of his string quartets might be just the ticket to put his creative oeuvre—his compositions at least—into perspective, to be perceived in the context of today’s contemporary composition scene. I was right. Over the course of this one evening, I gained a much fuller and presumably more accurate picture of Zorn’s musical thought: exactly what I hoped for.
In this case much credit goes to the skillful and committed performers. The miraculous JACK Quartet was on hand for the first half, while the polished Alchemy Quartet took up the second half, joined by the JACK and Brooklyn Rider Quartets for the concluding Kol Nidre quartet which was performed in triplicate (three to a part). (more…)
Liquid Skin Ensemble teamed up this weekend with the dance company Naked With Shoes for an evening of new music and choreography at the AndrewShire Gallery in the vibrant Koreatown area of Los Angeles. Two concerts were given – July 5 and 6, 2013 – consisting entirely of works by Steve Moshier and featuring the premiere of a new piece, Guilt of the Templars. Original choreography was provided by Jeff and Anne Grimaldo, and also dancer Mary Stein. The AndrewShire art gallery is an intimate space – holding maybe 40 people – and the arrangement of audience seating, musicians and dance space, while imperfect, was the best that could be done. The sight lines and acoustics in this venue are not ideal, especially given the dynamic power of Liquid Skin, but this did not detract significantly from the performance. The dancers also coped well with the limited space.
The Liquid Skin Ensemble has been a presence in the Los Angeles new music scene for over 13 years and their trademark rock-solid playing is a happy consequence of the stability of the personnel – the seven members of this group have played together for a long time and it shows. The mix of guitars, keyboards, saxophone, electric bass and Moshier’s vibraphone make for a balanced combination of percussion and sustained sounds that were used to good effect throughout the concert. Works dating from 1981 up to the present were included in this concert and gave a sort of historical arc to the programming.
The music of Steve Moshier falls squarely within post-minimal/neo-tonal tradition with propulsive percussion and driving rhythms such as were heard in the opening piece Shakeout (1981). The dancers here responded accordingly with a sort of fight scene that mirrored the high energy in the music. This was followed by Hidden Face (1990), a slower, more introspective piece that felt much more fluid and relaxed. Hero of the Blast Furnace (1983) featured more fast and hard rhythms with the dancers artfully including chairs in their choreography. Lost Souls (1991) gave the dancers another workout with chairs and a strong beat. The call and answer between the saxophone and vibes was particularly effective here and at the end the dancers were fully extended across the chairs, exhibiting an enviable agility and athleticism.
Two Liquid Skin pieces were offered without choreography. Cross the Wounded Galaxies (1985) has a light, airy texture that starts in the vibraphone and is variously joined by guitar, woodwind and keyboards. Different combinations of the instruments pass the theme around and the swelling tutti sections, when dominated by the saxophone, are especially effective. Leaving Paphos Ringed with Waves (2010) was probably the most serene piece in the concert – quiet, simple and almost chant-like.
This set the stage for the premiere of Guilt of the Templars: for the Liquid Skin Ensemble (2013) and this was accompanied by dancers Anne Grimaldo and Mary Stein. The title suggests some sort of dark, medieval thundercloud of a piece, but it is actually a light, cheerful work that begins with the dancers bouncing two large rubber balls back and forth in a sort of game. Gentle and disarming, the piece quickly acquires a child-like charm. The two dancers are both very tall women and this piece was subtitled ‘Too Long Ladies’ – a truth that was ironically disguised by their costume and playful choreography.
About midway into the piece the accompaniment by Liquid Skin Ensemble ceased and the dancers sang out several of the tall cliches that they must have been endured growing up: “How is the air up there?” and “My, you are a tall drink of water!” – a sort of cathartic release that generated an empathic response from the audience. They then sang several of the old Doublemint Gum tunes – a parody put down of the old sexist jingle that invites you to ‘double your pleasure, double your fun’ – and this was received with a knowing laugh by the audience. A video followed, projected on the wall, showing the ‘Too Long Ladies’ outdoors on sidewalks, streets and curbs performing dance steps on everyday objects underfoot. The video was accompanied by Liquid Skin, and as is the case with music skillfully written and performed for a film or video, you forget that the musicians are even in the room. The dancers may have stolen the show in this piece, but Guilt of the Templars was a fine finish to an evening of good music and skillful dancing.
The Liquid Skin Ensemble is:
Jannine Livingston – Electric keyboard
Ruth Cortez – Electric Keyboard
Mark Gordillo – Amplified Acoustic Guitar
Hai Truong – Electric Guitar
Susanna Hernandez – Electric Bass
Michael Lassere – Saxophones
Steve Moshier – Vibraphone
More information about the AndrewShire Gallery is here.
Berkeley Symphony, in cooperation with EarShot, invites applications for the 2014Under Construction Reading Series. Three emerging composers will be selected to participate from a national candidate pool. Each will compose a new 10-minute work for orchestra that will be workshopped, rehearsed and read under the baton of music director Joana Carneiro, in two reading sessions on February 2-3 and May 4-5, 2014 in Berkeley, CA. Composers will receive artistic and career guidance from the Symphony artistic staff, orchestra musicians, and mentor-composers, Robert Beaser and Edmund Campion. Composers will also participate in professional development workshops and feedback sessions.
Each accepted composer will write a new work, not to exceed 10 minutes duration, scored for the following instrumentation: 2 flutes; 2 oboes; 2 clarinets; 2 bassoons, 2 French horns, 2 trumpets, 2 trombones (one tenor, one bass), timpani + 1 percussion, piano, and strings: 8, 6, 5, 4, 2. (The following woodwind doubles are permitted: piccolo, English horn, and bass clarinet.) Attendance is required for both sessions, and each composer is responsible for delivering professional quality score and parts. Travel and accommodations will be provided.
Applicants must be either a U.S. citizen, permanent resident, or student studying full-time in the U.S. Applicants should be composers at the early stages of their professional careers and must not have had a work performed (other than a reading) by a Bay Area professional orchestra, nor have had a substantial history of works performed by professional orchestras at large. Composers who have applied previously for an EarShot Reading are eligible to apply. Applicants must submit a signed submission form, representative work sample orchestral score, resume, works list, and letter of recommendation. Incomplete, illegible, or late applications will not be considered.
What’s the most important factor in becoming a successful contemporary composer? (By successful, I mean a composer whose work gets played regularly in public venues, recorded, and written about in the music press). Talent? Sure. Determination? Of course. Hard work? Maybe. Strong relationships with musicians who inspire and play your work?
Dobrinka Tabakova, the 32-year-old Bulgarian/English composer whose debut ECM CD, String Paths, will be released in the U.S. on June 18, has all those qualities in spades but her career illustrates just how important that last social aspect of building a career are. Tabakova’s music is a textured blend of modern and ancient, familiar and unknown, tonal and modal, eastern and western, folky and formal. Her big musical gestures are bold and assertive. Among post-modern composers only John Adams and a handful of others write opening “hooks” that grab the listener as seemingly effortlessly.
When Tabakova was 11, her father, a medical physicist, took a position at Kings College Hospital and moved his family from their native city of Plovdiv, Bulgaria, to London. For Dobrinka, a quiet, only child with still rudimentary English skills, it was an opportunity to immerse herself even more deeply into the world of classical music.
“I had started taking piano lessons in Plovdiv when I was 7 and I continued them in London,” she says. “I was lucky enough to have teachers who didn’t seem to mind that I sometimes improvised when I came to a part I didn’t know,” she says, with a laugh. She applied and was accepted into the Junior Academy of Guildhall School of Music and Drama, which provides specialist training Saturday training to promising young people between the ages of 4 and 18.
“By the time I applied to Guildhall, I was improvising more and more and writing down sketches that I was pleased with. I took along a couple of those to my entrance exam and was accepted to study composition.” She ultimately graduated from regular Guildhall and then earned a doctorate in composition from King’s College, London.
Her first “big break” came at the age of 14, when she submitted a piece to the Fourth Vienna International Music Competition and won the Jean-Frederic Perrenoud Prize & Medal.
“I had seen an advert in the corridors at Guildhall and submitted a piece as a kind of lark,” she says. “I was stunned when I learned I had won.” Other opportunities quickly followed. She received a scholarship to attend the Centre Acanthes. Xenakis was guest composer and Messiaen’s widow Yvonne Loriod was giving lectures. Heady stuff, indeed, for a 15-year-old. (more…)
The 2013 Ojai Festival continued its look at American composers with a performance of Suite for Symphonic Strings by Lou Harrison on Saturday, June 8 in the Libbey Bowl. A 24-piece orchestra comprised of the Mark Morris Dance Group Music Ensemble and the American String Quartet filled the stage with a strong presence. Joshua Gersen conducted.
Suite for Symphonic Strings is an assemblage of pieces composed at various times in Harrison’s career, and is loosely based on allusions to the Greek gods. One of his most-performed pieces, Suite for Symphonic Strings reflects a diversity of influences. The dance-like first movement Estampe and the fourth, Ductia: In Honor of Eros, clearly betray the Asian influences that Harrison absorbed as a West Coast composer. Other sections, such as the second, Chorale: Et in Arcadio Ego provide a warm, open sound full of lush harmonies. Still others such as number five, Lament and nine, Nocturne are poignant and quiet while number three, Double Fugue: In Honor of Heracles, has a anxious edge. It is a piece that is rich with a variety of feelings and emotions and these were put across effectively by the string orchestra.
During some of the quieter moments in the piece the inevitable outside noises of kids playing in the park, or the band playing in a nearby bar could be heard, but these did not detract decisively from a fine performance of Harrison’s lovely music.
After a short intermission For Lou Harrison by John Luther Adams was performed by the same string ensemble, but this quickly became problematic. Full disclosure – I am a big fan of this piece and was excited when it was programmed for this year’s festival. This performance, however, suffered from too much sound coming from the big orchestra. The beginning arpeggios washed over the listeners like a tidal wave and became relentless as the piece progressed.
The notes and tempo were correct – and what I heard certainly resembled the piece I love – but too much of the intimacy and sweetness of the piece was lost in the translation to larger musical forces. It seemed to work best when at the lower dynamic levels and there were occasional flashes of the beauty that this piece contains. But much like the sacred music of Bach, For Lou Harrison is too much the chamber piece to be scaled up to the level we heard in this performance. Additionally, the outdoor venue became quite chilly in the late evening after a long day of warm temperatures and this didn’t help the concentration of the listeners or the conditions for the musicians. The length of the piece, with all the players playing most of the time, eventually became wearing and the audience was visibly restless as the final chords sounded.
A much more satisfactory outcome was heard the following morning with the performance of songbirdsongs, another outdoor piece by John Luther Adams. The venue this time was Meditation Mount, a local Ojai landmark about 5 miles out of town. The location was high along a narrow winding road and buses were required to take the listeners up to a small promontory that overlooks the Ojai Valley. About 200 early-risers packed themselves into a performance space just a few dozen yards across. Red fish blue fish and two brave piccolo players formed the smallish ensemble. Percussion stations were scattered around the area and the players moved about as necessary for each section.
Written over several years (1974-79 and revised in 2006) and as the title indicates, songbirdsongs is a series of musical realizations of bird calls. As the program notes describe, the players are to “play with the free intonation and inflection of bird songs, not in exact temperament. Time should also be free and fluid…”
The nine sections of the piece are titled after the names or characteristics of various birds and evoke a wide variety of natural sounds. The piece proceeds with a back and forth calling of rapid, bird-like phrases between the piccolos. Other percussion pieces join in, generally at a low dynamic, and convincingly portray the familiar landmarks of a woodland or meadow. The music and the surroundings actually seem to merge together in the mind of the listener.
There are regular pauses in each section – and with the audience sitting stone silent – the natural sounds of the environment became part of the performance. This was remarkably effective – as a city fellow I don’t pay much attention to the sounds of nature – but during the pauses in this piece I suddenly become aware of all of the birds in the surrounding trees calling back and forth. I am no naturalist but it seemed to me that some of the local birds were actually answering the piccolo calls. I talked later to one of the piccolo players who said that a bird swooped down and buzzed by her head during one passage.
The integration between performance and nature was virtually seamless and the audience agreed that this was an experience far beyond that found in the average concert hall. Music, intention and venue met successfully in this performance of songbirdsongs and it makes a powerful case for the direction John Luther Adams has taken with his art.
More information about the 2013 Ojai Festival is here.
It’s still so unbelievable and so marvelous, that John Cage would be able to perform such a piece on national television, on a game show! It’s the sort of thing that was not supposed to be possible before the Internet, but there it is, and at the time it was shown there was little chance that the federal government knew who was watching it.
“Water Walk” seems to me to be convivial, like a party, with the same aesthetic values as “Living Room Music,” something that friends should enjoy together in an intimate setting. It can be performed by anyone with the time and equipment to prepare and an inclination for quick thinking and good humor. I think Jenny Q. Chai has most of those qualities, but she’s a busy musician with many demands on her time, and in the living room concert venue, Spectrum, on May 7, she was a little flustered and a little rushed as she checked the running time on her iPhone and moved from object to object. Practicing the piano is one thing, setting up and knocking down all the bric-a-brac on tables, and doing it again and again, is a challenge on time that I don’t image Cage expected many musicians to undertake.
But in the context of the concert, and in the Spectrum setting with books lining the walls and easy chairs and couches, it was a convivial encore, a trick at the end of a good party. The party was a collection of old and new pieces, set together into short suites. Chai is known for her playing and her programs that demolish distinctions between past and present and show that the Western classical tradition is an endless flow, no part of it beyond the reach of any composer or the ears of any listener. The program was called Acqua Alta, the music having in some way to do with water.
She’s not the only musician who does this — most prominently in my mind is Marino Formenti — but she does so without didacticism, which is unusual and compelling. She plays the music with great skill, intelligence and commitment, but she doesn’t belabor her points or our need to hear what she hears, and as a critical listener I have utmost respect for that. I don’t think all the music she played in Aqua Alta was successful, but I was left feeling that everything she played was offered as it should be.
The opening suite sandwiched Kurtag’s “Hommage à Scarlatti,”, a couple Scarlatti Sonatas, and Gibbons’ “The Italian Ground” with premieres from Milica Paranosic and Nils Vigeland. Scarlatti’s are some of the finest keyboard works in the literature, and Chai played them with accuracy and insouciance, an ideal combination. All the older works put the new ones in difficult contrast, their combination of craft and the focussed exploration of controlled ideas set an example that Paranosic’s underdone, programmatic and overlong minimalism couldn’t match, Vigeland’s “I Turisti” sounded great, but the result didn’t match his own description, the composition too clear to encompass the sound of chattering tourists that was somehow supposed to drown out the music.
The large scale piece on the program was a new work from Michael Vincent Waller, “Acqua Santa,” that started modestly but grew into an ambitious and attractive work. Waller’s basic pulse both lengthens and picks up the pace as the music moves along, the structure builds from monophony to homophony, and there’s some of the pleasantly mesmerizing quality of watching waves from the shore. It’s essentially minimal without being minimalist in the repetitive sense, and the appearance of whole-tone scales develops an impressionistic aesthetic that elided nicely with the closing set of pieces: Ravel’s “Une Barque Sur L’océan,” Debussy’s prelude to “La cathédrale engloutie,” and Liszt’s “La lugubre gondola,” finished off with Marco Stroppa’s effective adaptation of a traditional lullaby, “Ninnananna.” This whole stretch of the concert was involving and powerful. While even the most sensitive, intelligent listener has to navigate their way through how a brand new piece should go, it’s easy to hear exceptional Ravel, Debussy and Liszt. Chai is great in this music: she has the technique to pull it off, the power to play it with expression and confidence, and the intelligence to make it coherent and meaningful. There are few musicians who can play both Scarlatti and Liszt naturally and convincingly — Formenti is one, there’s Mikhail Pletnev — and Chai does it. She plays Cage well too, and probably no one but the man himself can pull off “Water Walk.”
On August 9, Christian Wolff’s Changing the System (1973) was performed by the new experimental music group Southland Ensemble, in the heart of historic China Town here in Los Angeles. About 40 people filled Automata, a small space at Chung King Court dedicated to the experimental arts, to hear Wolff’s politically charged and innovative work that utilizes graphical scoring designed to inspire a kind of consensus-driven interpretation from the players. Enlarged reproductions of the score were hung on the walls and the audience was encouraged to walk about and inspect them during the performance.
