Spotted this morning across the street from my place here in Seattle. I hear the BMI bangers are tagging all the dumpsters south of Pike Street. Looks like a war is coming…
(I think I’m going to switch to mid-week from here on; people seem to like it.) Our regular listen to and look at living, breathing composers and performers that you may not know yet, but I know you should… And can, right here and now, since they’re nice enough to offer so much good listening online:
Tom Rojo Poller (b. 1978 — Germany)
Born in Osnabrück, Poller began his composition studies in 1996 at the Hochschule für Musik Detmold, continuing with Prof. Walter Zimmermann at the Universität der Künste Berlin (UdK). After an exchange year at the Royal College of Music London in 2003, he received his diploma and returned to Berlin where he’s just finished his postgraduate work. Since 1999 he’s also been studying German Literature, Philosophy and Musicology at the Humboldt-University in Berlin. Last year, as participant of the Global-Interplay-project, he attended conferences in Accra, Ghana.
Tom is especially interested in the temporal aspect of music (including polyrhythmical/polymetrical music); music theater — or more generally, various forms of musical representation; the relation between music and language; the philosophy of music (especially music and the emotions, music and understanding). His music is deeply rooted in the western European musical tradition, but is greatly influenced by its lesser known aspects (e.g. medieval and renaissance music, rhetorical aspects of baroque music).
His website shows off all of these interests; his music page there is especially generous about providing quality listening to his already-amazing pieces (the recordings and performances are generally top-notch). This is someone to keep an eye on in the coming years.
………………….
Tristan Fuentes (b. 1951 — Mexico), Joe Holmquist (b. 1951 — US)
The official word is:
Tristan Fuentes, born 1951 in Mexico City, is the son of a school teacher and barrister. His first ensemble experience was “Cherub Choir” as a five-year-old, and piano studies followed at age six. In the fifth grade he had the opportunity to join the class band. It was denied that he play trumpet but firmly suggested that he play drums. At age fifteen he organized his first combo and started playing professionally.
As a university student he pursued a dual track of classical music and rock & roll. In his mid-twenties he studied percussion, music theory, and composition at the New England Conservatory and suffered under the tutelage of Gunther Schuller. Upon his liberation with a Master of Music degree, he set upon a diverse life of people, places, languages, and art objects. His main compositional influences have been Terry Riley, John Cage, and Frederic Rzewski. His works are primarily for small instrumental ensembles, often including exotic percussion.
Fuentes describes his music as “liberated minimalism”. As a theory and composition student he was trained in the tradition of Paul Hindemith and the later serialists, while outside of class he was listening to and playing rock, jazz, and minimalist music. His works are characterized by catchy melodies and strong rhythms. Harmonically the music is tonal, with dissonance as the main device for creating tension between compositional elements.
Or…
Joe Holmquist was born in 1951 in Benson, Minnesota, a medium-sized community out in the west-central part of the state (in this case, medium-sized means 3,000 souls). There wasn’t much along the line of organized activities for kids, so it was common to participate in music organizations both at school and at church. “…At the time, I didn’t think I was learning anything in particular from those music activities, but I was!…”
His first ensemble experience was “Cherub Choir” as a five-year-old, and piano studies followed at age six. In the fifth grade he had the opportunity to join the class band. It was denied that he play trumpet but firmly suggested that he play drums. At age fifteen he organized his first combo and started playing professionally.
As a university student he pursued a dual track of classical music and rock & roll. In his mid-twenties he studied percussion, music theory, and composition at the New England Conservatory and suffered under the tutelage of Gunther Schuller. Upon his liberation with a Master of Music degree, he set upon a diverse life of people, places, languages, and art objects. His main compositional influences have been Terry Riley, John Cage, and Frederic Rzewski. His works are primarily for small instrumental ensembles, often including exotic percussion.
Holmquist describes his music as “liberated minimalism”. As a theory and composition student he was trained in the tradition of Paul Hindemith and the later serialists, while outside of class he was listening to and playing rock, jazz, and minimalist music. His works are characterized by catchy melodies and strong rhythms. Harmonically the music is tonal, with dissonance as the main device for creating tension between compositional elements.
Hmmm… The truth is what we will, right? And the truth is that Joe’s site, besides highlighting his excellence as a percussionist, kindly hosts a wealth of Tristan Fuentes pieces in MP3. Bright, propulsive and non-cheesily tuneful, They’re well worth getting to know.
(A little early this week, as I might be out on the weekend) …Our regular listen to and look at compositions and performances that you may not know yet, but I know you should… And can, right here and now, since folks are nice enough to offer so much good listening online. Time to sit in on a few “first moments” in musical history:
George Gershwin & Paul Whiteman : Rhapsody in Blue – Original 78rpm Acoustic Recording (1924)
Made shortly after the premiere performance, and a year before the electric microphone came into use. The two records are on different pages: record one is here, and record two here. I can’t do any better than give B. Stockwell’s commentary from the Archive.org site:
“This is an edited performance, with cuts made to fit the 15-minute work onto two 78-RPM discs. Total time is under 9 minutes, but the cuts are pretty smart ones. This work was originally written for a large dance band, the way you hear it here. This isn’t ‘Symphonic Jazz’. It’s authentic 1920’s style — completely different from the bloated ‘violins and cellos’ versions that we’re used to hearing. You can hear the banjos in this version. Gershwin plays the piano part and the performance is fast fast fast. The opening clarinet glissando wails and breaks off into reedy laughter. This is SO different from the the syrupy swooning you now hear. The sound isn’t spectacular — the microphone wasn’t invented until the next year, 1925 — but these 78s are still pretty well transfered. The recording of Rhapsody in Blue was a hit. In 1927 the same group — again with Gershwin but now with a microphone — made another recording. Paul Whiteman had a quarrel of some sort and walked out of the recording session. They recorded anyway, with another conductor — Nathaniel Shilkret, I think — taking over. Whiteman was happy to promote the recording as his own, nonetheless. The electric version is better recorded but it lacks, well, electricity. Everyone, including Gershwin, just punches it harder in 1924.”
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Percussion Music from Lou Harrison’s Collection of 78rpm Acetate Records
An absolutely fascinating audio document, this 1971 KPFA broadcast by Charles Amirkhanian presented extremely rare recordings of percussion music from the composer Lou Harrison’s (1917-2003) personal collection. Especially important are the acetate disks of a concert given by John Cage’s percussion ensemble at the Cornish School in Seattle on May 19th, 1939.
Cornish (still there and going strong; as a college student in 1978 I caught Cage himself at a tribute concert in the same hall, performing some of his Sonatas and Interludes) was where Cage found a job accompanying dancers, and it was there that he founded his first percussion ensemble and experimented with the prepared piano. (The stage in the Cornish performance hall was too small to accommodate all his percussion during a dance performance, so Cage came up with the idea of turning a single piano into its own percussion “ensemble”.) The performers heard include Cage, his then-wife Xenia, and the dancer Doris Dennison. (there has to be at least one more, quite possibly Lou Harrison himself. The photo here shows Lou, John, and Xenia behind, Doris and Margaret Jansen in front).
The pieces on these recordings represent the core of the West-Coast experimentalist group (I know, I know, Harry Partch; but he was off on his own very different journey): Lou Harrison’s Counterdance in Spring, Henry Cowell’s Pulse, two movements from Cage’s own Trio, Johanna M. Beyer’s Tactless and Endless, William Russell’s Three Cuban Studies, and again Harrison with his Fifth Simfony. You just can’t get much closer to sitting in on the roots of this exciting period.
The remainder of the broadcast features a 33rpm disk that captures a 1948 performance of Harrison’s Canticle #3, introduced and conducted by Leopold Stokowski during a concert at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.
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On a personal note, I’ll mention the release of my own new CD, The Composer Plays IV: Works for Imaginary Piano, on the NiwoSound label. Along with my performance of Stravinsky’s Piano-Rag Music, the CD collects a number of my works that feature piano: either solo, doubled, or with recorded sound.
Jumping into the first wave of what I’m sure is to become common practice, no physical copy of the CD will be offered for sale in stores; it will only be available to subscribers at both eMusic and iTunes (the link is to eMusic; the CD is not “live” on iTunes yet, but will be soon — not only in the US, but iTunes Europe, Canada, Japan and Australia as well. iTunes folks can simply search “Steve Layton” to find the complete list of my available CDs in their country). For those who want something in their hand to read, complete liner notes for the CD can be had as a free downloadable PDF file (300 kb) from my own website. Enjoy!
Our regular listen to and look at living, breathing composers and performers that you may not know yet, but I know you should… And can, right here and now, since they’re nice enough to offer so much good listening online:
Katharine Norman (b. 1960 — UK, Canada)
Katharine is a British-born composer, sound artist and writer, currently living about as far out West as you can get on Pender Island in BC, Canada. Prior to this “slightly alarming” (her words) change of direction she was Director of the Electronic Music Studios at Goldsmiths, University of London. She now supports the composing habit by freelance writing and some teaching. She’s composed instrumental music, music combining instruments or voices and digital media, and purely electronic work. Her music makes frequent use of documentary sound – conversation, city sounds, birds etc. – in a way that perhaps invites new appreciation both of the ‘real world’ and of the concert hall. Increasingly, she writes about music, in particular electroacoustic and electronic music. Her book of experimental writings on recent electronic music (of many kinds and approaches) entitled Sounding Art: Eight Literary Excursions through Electronic Music was published by Ashgate in 2004.
“I have been enthralled with sound as a means of expression ever since I discovered my violin playing made my parents cry (for all the wrong reasons). I started composing not long after, and in the last ten years or so have become more and more interested in the sounds that surround us, and what they can mean in different contexts. Although I remain fascinated by what computers can help me to do with sounds, technology is the least of my concerns – I’m trying to get somewhere, although happily the goal keeps moving. I’ll take whatever transport seems appropriate at the time, whether that’s works for sound alone, or piano pieces, or words on paper. But I will probably never write for solo violin.”
Katharine’s very welcoming site has a lot of peruse-worthy nooks and crannies, including some interactive pieces made especially for the web. The MP3 download section is being reworked, but luckily a lot of the recordings are parked at the SONUS website as well.
Ryan Brown (b. 1979 — US)
Ryan is a San Francisco-based composer and performer, most frequently combining the two in the “rock chamber ensemble” OOGOG. His formative years were spent playing rock and jazz guitar in various bands before beginning formal musical studies at the age of 17. These early years continue to heavily influence his approach to composition, “[pushing] the ensemble sound beyond the Western classical realm” (Josef Woodard, Santa Barbara News-Press). He holds degrees in composition from Cal State Long Beach and the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and has studied with Dan Becker, Robin Cox, Michael Gordon, Martin Herman, Scott Johnson, David Lang, Steve Mackey, and Julia Wolfe. Recent commissions include music for violinist Todd Reynolds and the SFCM Guitar Ensemble. His work our friend adam for alto sax, electric guitar, electric bass, and piano received its East Coast premiere on Philip Glass’ MATA Festival at the Brooklyn Lyceum on March 20th.
Ryan’s generous “downloads” page will give you all kinds of listening, including the MATA piece for all you East-coasties who stayed home. (Be sure not to miss hearing the maniacally demented boogie-woogie piano of Oogog Says Hello.)
Settle in for a little history…
Juan Hidalgo (b.1927 –Spain),
Walter Marchetti (b.1931 — Italy),
and Zaj
Most musicians who’ve fallen for John Cage and David Tudor, also know that offspring of the 1960s and 70s, FLUXUS. Far fewer know about the Spanish version, running parallel yet independently. It’s one thing to have gone experimental in, say, England at the time; quite another to have pursued this stuff in the fascist dictatorship of Franco’s Spain. In one you ran the risk of apathy; in the other actual persecution.
In the mid-50s, Juan Hidalgo and Walter Marchetti were both young student composers. Marchetti’s friendship with Bruno Maderna led them to visit the high-modernist mecca of Darmstadt, but it was their encounter with the ideas, music, and above all the actions of Cage and Tudor (along with the general rediscovery of Marcel Duchamp) that resonated with the two.
Explorations began soon thereafter, and in 1964 the loose confederation of artists (also including the likes of Esther Ferrer, Ramón Barce, Tomas Marco and many more), officially were born under the nonsense-moniker Zaj (Castellano pronunciation “thahh“). High-profile events and confrontational polemics would have never worked in Spain at the time, but keeping everything more “guerrilla” and informal seemed to both confuse and lull the regime into thinking these “fools” weren’t worth the effort to crack down on.
For a good decade and more, the members of Zaj staged a wealth of small subversions, and had already stirred the atmosphere among quite a few key Spanish artists for the day when Franco’s death would suddenly open the country’s door to an intoxicating inrush of fresh air (followed of course later by new problems, but hey, that’s life…).
In the 1970s Gianni Sassi’s small, Italian avant-art music label Cramps would document (besides other notables like Cage, Robert Ashley, Cristina Kubisch, Demetrio Stratos, Alvin Lucier and even a free-improvising Ennio Morricone) some of Hidalgo’s and Marchetti’s work on LP, and some of that can be heard on the web, courtesy of the Universidad de Castilla – La Mancha’s Arte Sonoro website.
Juan Hidalgo’s Tamaran (subtitled “drops of sperm for 12 pianos“) is a 40-minute unmoored landscape, layering twelve recordings of prepared piano. Rrose Sélavy (referencing Duchamp’s female alter-ego and subtitled a la Satie “six moldy pieces for six sound sources“) collects six tracks; the first’s single line has one more semi-related line join in on each successive track, leading to a happy cacophony.
Walter Marchetti’s La Caccia (“the hunt”) uses all manner of toys, bird-calls and other improvised sound-making objects, to create a kind of loopily busy virtual “forest”. His Natura morta (“still life”) pays homage to Satie: both to the notorious Vexations (which happens to be a piece Hidalgo and Marchetti have performed), and the idea of musique d’ameublement (“furniture music”). For more than an hour the piano — buried under a huge display of fruit and flowers — plays the same simple-yet-unsettled phrase, the damper pedal constantly depressed.
Like all art movements, interests and allegiances shift, some things focus and some fall apart, time and people move on. Ferrer a well-known artist; Barce and Marco both highly-respected “establishment” composers… Hidalgo and Marchetti remained faithful to the object, action and subversion. Hidalgo turned more to Duchampian artifact, but Marchetti (now resident in Italy) has continued to produce a number of newer musical works mostly with manipulated sound and piano (though still highly conceptual), many of them issued on CD. Mimaroglu Music Sales can provide you with what’s currently for sale by both Marchetti and Hidalgo.
The link on Juan Hidalgo’s name at the top of this post goes directly to his website (where you might want to wish him a happy 80th birthday this year!); Marchetti doesn’t seem to have a full site, but the link on his name will take you to a short but good interview in English from 2000 (and for those who read Spanish, here’s a recent interview with Hidalgo). The link for Zaj will take you to a history kept at UBUWEB.
Our regular listen to and look at living, breathing composers and performers that you may not know yet, but I know you should… And can, right here and now, since they’re nice enough to offer so much good listening online:
Christopher Hopkins (b.1957 — US)
Christopher Hopkins is an assistant professor of music composition at Iowa State University of Science and Technology, where he teaches courses in composition, music technology, sound synthesis and orchestration. He is director of the Lipa Festival of Contemporary Music. As a composer he works in both experimental and traditional forms, with special interests in electroacoustic music, innovative notations and instrumental techniques, and dialectics between historical and contemporary musical forms.
Christopher’s site is rather bare-bones, but what’s there is what matters: the music.
Katharina Rosenberger (b.1971 — Switzerland, US).
Katharina grew up in Zurich, playing piano and singing in choir through her teens. Her formal music studies began at Jazz School Zurich, but she quickly bailed to Boston and the Berklee College of Music for her BA. Jump again to Zurich, then over to the Royal Academy of Music in London for her MA, and finally (?…) hop back over to the States and Columbia for her DMA. Her works, electronic & acoustic, are often inspired and linked with the visual arts, theater and inquiries into perceptual and phenomenological issues.
“Much of my work manifests in an interdisciplinary context and is bound to confront traditional performance practice in terms of how sound is produced, heard and seen. Taking the audience to peculiar places, ambiguous and deceiving, where the usual expectations have to be thrown overboard. Often the instrumentalists are challenged to go beyond an ‘only’ interpretative function; their corporal presence on stage is fully taken into account.”
Under the “index of works” link at her site, you’ll find descriptions of her work, along with both audio excerpts and complete recordings.
Our regular listen to and look at living, breathing composers and performers that you may not know yet, but I know you should… And can, right here and now, since they’re nice enough to offer so much good listening online:
Claus Gahrn (b. 1978 — Denmark); Gahrn Ensemble
Claus is another composer I ran into on Myspace, and we’ve been corresponding for a few months now. Gahrn began his musical studies as a classical guitarist; from 2001 he studied composition and electroacoustic music at the Academy of Music in Esbjerg, Denmark, earning his MA degree with distinction in 2006. That’s Claus on the right in the photo, with his own young ensemble (including his pianist wife Malwina). There are links above that will take you both to Claus’ personal site, as well as that of the ensemble itself. Under “Media” at either, you’ll find excellent MP3 recordings and performances of Gahrn’s often-introspective yet just-as-often-edgy work.
The ensemble (Christina Dahl, voice; Malwina Gahrn, piano; Claus Gahrn, guitar and electronics; Michael Bjærre, percussion; Thomas Bregenborg, cello; Nina Hebib, flute and Julie Christensen, clarinet) formed in 2000, and since has premiered more than 20 new pieces and played concerts around Denmark, Poland and Norway.
Out my (Seattle) way, local composer and Seattle Weekly columnist Gavin Borchert this week offered up something titled “Small Apologies“. A few excerpts:
Not that I have anything against Tony Bennett or Norah Jones or any of the other recording artists whose work is propped up next to the biscotti, but I was wondering when Starbucks would get around to classical music. At last they have, a CD starring the home team: The Seattle Symphony and Starbucks Entertainment have announced their co-release of Echoes, containing newly commissioned works (!) from six composers [Bright Sheng, John Harbison, David Schiff, David Stock, Samuel Jones, Gerard Schwarz, with an older piece by Aaron Kernis], each one asked to somehow rework an older piece he (and they’re all “he”s) loved. As an opportunity for time-travel collaboration, a meeting of musical minds from different cultures and eras, it’s a great idea; as a concession to conservative classical fans who can’t take their new music straight, it’s dismaying. [….]
The fact that Starbucks and the SSO are giving seven living composers exposure is exemplary. What bothers me is the philosophy that seems to underlie the project, one endemic to the classical music business as a whole these days. Composers and performers alike so often present new work, whether strong or weak, innovative or comfy, timid or bold, with a tentative sort of hat-in-hand stance—emphasizing, above any other virtue the music might have, that it won’t be scary. Constant reassurance, even apology, is the tone, in media coverage, program notes, PR material, casting musicians as supplicants and listeners as 3-year-olds who have to be coaxed to finish their beets. [….]
There is an untapped audience for new classical music, but reaching them, I believe, will require a new approach. They’re the people who aren’t averse to classical music, who are interested in the arts in general, but who need a reason to give their time and money to us rather than everything else competing for their attention in our hypersaturated culture. Suppose the wheedling and cajoling with which we serve up music is turning them off. These people aren’t going to attend classical concerts or buy CDs unless they think they’re going to hear something they can get excited about. I don’t mean merely not offended, I mean actively thrilled. Which means, for heaven’s sake, we ought to start talking about something other than nonscariness, ought to start pushing aesthetic virtues other than accessibility.
The floor’s open…
Our regular listen to and look at living, breathing composers and performers that you may not know yet, but I know you should… And can, right here and now, since they’re nice enough to offer so much good listening online:
Ferrer Salat Foundation (Spain)
The Ferrer Salat Foundation was created in Barcelona in 1982 by Carlos Ferrer Salat. Its purpose is to promote contemporary classical music, and concentrates mainly on organizing the Queen Sophia Award for Musical Composition ceremony, held annually, to which the Foundation devotes all its resources.
The winning composer receives a prize of 18,500 Euros, and has the exceptional opportunity of having their work performed by the Spanish Radio Television Symphonic Orchestra in the presence of the Queen. This concert is broadcast live on the classical music station of “Radio Nacional de España” and later appears on Spanish television’s “Conciertos de la 2”.
CDs of the works are also available for purchase on the website, but what’s fun here is that you can listen to virtually all of the winning compositions (at least from 2004 on back) complete as streaming MP3s. Just visit the “Award Winners” links and click on each year, find and click on the little ear and notes just above the text and the piece will start playing in your browser. The entire site is available in Spanish, Catalan, and English; just pick your pleasure from the homepage.
The list of winners has some well-known names, such as Joan Guinjoan, Witold Lutoslawski and Xavier Montsalvatge; but there are plenty of new faces to get to know.
Our regular listen to and look at living, breathing composers and performers that you may not know yet, but I know you should… And can, right here and now, since they’re nice enough to offer so much good listening online:
Caroline M. Breece (b.1977 — UK/US)
Michael G. Breece (b. 1971 — US)
Mike over at Avant Music News this week purely by chance beat me to posting about Caroline. I’d planned showing off her and her husband Michael, ever since I bumped into them on Myspace last summer. A number of married composer couples come to mind, but few if any will have the story that’s Caroline’s and Michael’s. A lot of it may only be known to them, but the part we see shows the real possibilities in what might at first seem the improbable.
Caroline, until recently a British native, has the “official” classical education and experience. Playing, studying and composing from a very early age, touring with the Suffolk Youth Orchestra, degrees from the University of East Anglia… all the standard classical upbringing. Yet there’s something in how she relates these and other details (found in her site’s generous writings), and in how her own music works, that is anything but standard.
Michael on the other hand, starts right out of the gate as anything but standard, and there’s every indication that he should have rightfully just kept careening down that highway to oblivion. Hard life in a tough blue-collar non-musical family, serious emotional hurdles, not much if any financial or educational support… Yet part of that mind, against everything that says culture and environment shape us, grew its own seeds of artistic awareness. Schooled by instinct and the resources of the Indianapolis Public Library, he found something incredibly important in the work of composers from Debussy through Varèse and Cage, all the way up to the avant-garde of today. And something told him that he had to not just listen, but *make* this stuff, using whatever means he had.
The meeting of the two? I don’t have a clue. But somehow the English composer with her fresh MMus degree ran into this thundercloud of a self-made musician, and the next thing you know she’s in America. It’s definitely not a fairytale yet; Caroline and Michael both work as janitors to pay the bills, stealing whatever free time they can to create what they have to create. Yet there’s nothing “poor” about either’s music; there’s an incandescence and a real sense of discovery in there. You can hear for yourself when you visit their websites, since they’re both offering entire CDs for free download (though you can do the right thing and send them a few reasonable bucks for a full-spectrum CDR straight from their hands to your ear). And take the time to read through; nothing I write can tell you anything better about them than a few paragraphs in their own words.