Composers

Chamber Music, Composers, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Events, Music Events, Percussion, Premieres, Washington D.C.

When Music and Art Collide

Detail of Terry Berlier's "Stair Drum," one of three percussive sculptures for "The 41st Rudiment"

On Friday, April 30, 2010, my ensemble, Great Noise Ensemble, will present the last concert of our 2009-10 concert season.  The program, presented at Ward Hall, on the campus of the Catholic University of America at 7:30 p.m. (Visit www.greatnoiseensemble.com for tickets if you’re in the Washington region this Friday), is a unique program featuring a new work for mixed ensemble and sculpted percussion by composer D.J. Sparr in collaboration with artist Terry Berlier of Stanford University.  The 41st Rudiment, named after the 40 “rudiments” that percussionists study as they develop their craft, represents one more rudiment indicative of the experimental nature of Berlier’s instruments.  It was written for percussionist Christopher Froh, of the San Francisco Contemporary Chamber Players, and Great Noise Ensemble.

D.J. Sparr initially pitched the piece that would become The 41st Rudiment to Great Noise Ensemble’s board some five years ago.  “The idea came through wanting to work with Chris Froh,” he says, “whom  I had seen out on an amazing concert in Ann Arbor years back. I was in the Bay Area, so we went out for drinks, and over the course of the conversation we talked about finding instruments at a hardware store… and somehow, collectively we came up with the idea that we should ‘build something.’  From there, we started talking about what that would be, who might be interested collaborating with us, etc.”  After searching for an appropriate collaborator it was Froh who suggested that they work with Terry Belier.  “Terry and I worked on another project together a few years ago with the Empyrean Ensemble and Italian composer, Luciano Chessa.  I played one of her sculptures then (an earlier “panlid gamelan”) and fell in love with her aesthetic.  When D.J. and I first started talking about this project some five years ago, I suggested asking Terry to be involved.”

“A few years ago,” writes Terry Berlier, “ I was working on a piece called ‘Two pan tops can meet’ (2003) which was based on the homophobic Jamaican saying ‘Two pan tops can’t meet.’  (I had worked in Jamaica for two years as a Peace Corps Volunteer from 1995-97.) That first piece used thrift store pan lids as speaker housings that played a sound piece. But while I was sifting through the pan lids, I started setting aside the pan lids that resonated strongly.  These eventually became Pan Lid Gamelan I in 2003 and gallery viewers were invited to play it.

In 2008, Composer Luciano Chessa wanted to compose this sculpture/instrument into one of our collaborations (Inkless Imagination IV) and I was excited to have a professional percussionist, Chris Froh, play them. A few years later, Chris asked if I would like to work with him again on making sculptures specifically for him to play and work with D.J. Sparr.”

D.J. Sparr has been building a reputation for many years now as a composer of rhythmically charged and energetic music  (the Alburquerque Tribune once referred to his piece for eighth blackbird, The Glam Seduction as “Paganini on coke”) that merges classical conventions with rock idioms.  The 41st Rudiment is no different, although the rock influence this time is far subtler than in the works that gained Sparr his early reputation.  “I am always influenced by the drama of a rock-and-roll concert, and in this work, the drummer is the superstar… he engages the other players in ways to entice them to join in with him in gestures and call-and-response melodies…much the same as would happen in a rock-band scenario where guitarists, drummers, and bass players trade solos.  This work,” however, “is heavily influenced by the baroque concerto grosso form as the large scale form is comprised of many short movements. There are elements of Bach and Vivaldi, but there are also elements of other things: Satie Gymnopédies; Spanish barcaroles; improvisatory structures such as Zorn’s Cobra; and many cadenzas and improvisation.”

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by Armando Bayolo
Composers, Contemporary Classical, Music Events, Opera, Participation

Make it so

Dennis Báthory-Kitsz has been a great friend of new music, a great friend of S21, and a great friend of myself personally for about as long as I’ve been online. Justly (semi-) famous as the “Kalvos” half of the long-running institution that was Kalvos & Damian’s new Music Bazaar (now continued as Kalvos & Damian In the House!), Dennis has never let his rather remote Vermont location interfere with spreading the word about living composers and their music, whether through regular radio and online broadcasts, a steady stream of writings, and endless creative projects. At the same time, he’s also never let all these activities slow down his own personal composing schedule. Yet not every composition written has seen the full light of day, the most notable example being Dennis’ opera upon his indirect ancestor Erzsébet Báthory, the legendary Hungarian “Blood Countess”.

Recently Dennis has taken some steps to attempt to remedy that situation. He has a chance to see the work finally come to life, but the opera must be finished for premiere in the 2010-11 season of the Vermont Contemporary Music Ensemble. Basic funding for the ensemble’s regular season is already available, but support is needed for the singer, additional musicians, staging, costumes, lighting, and time to complete the remaining 40 minutes of the opera. So Dennis has turned to a newer online site, Kickstarter.com, to actively seek the financial support to make the performance a reality. We’re not talking the NEA or Ford Foundation here; we’re talking you and me, the little-guy music-lover with a few spare bucks in their pocket. I asked Dennis a few questions, just to get the whole fascinating (and often frustrating! ) backstory:

Steve Layton: Tell me about the whole long genesis of the idea and travails over the years?

Dennis Báthory-Kitsz: Yes, it is long! I’ll tell you everything. The genesis began shortly after Boston College professor Raymond McNally published “Dracula Was a Woman” in 1983. A state politician was doing an interview tour of Vermont entrepreneurs — I had founded a small computer company back then — and came to my home office. He knew my name, McNally was an old school buddy, he put the two together, and arrived with a copy of the book. I hadn’t paid much attention to the family history, but reading McNally’s book jogged something my grandfather Bathory had said — that the family had an evil female ancestor who killed people and fought with priests.

A few years later my company went under during the tech shakeup, and I started thinking about the Erzsébet Báthory story again as a distraction. Here was a countess rumored to be the world’s worst serial killer with some 600 servant victims — yet with normal kids, great intelligence, superior negotiating skills, and fluent in many languages. She was also supposedly bisexual and ended her life walled into her own torture tower. What a story! What opera!

Those were also the years of some pretty big works of mine, particularly “Mantra Canon” for orchestra, chorus, two pianos, six percussionists and descant soprano. By 1988 it had had two performances, so I was lit up with large-scale possibilities. The Bathory tale would make a fantastic production, maybe a huge opera of some kind.

In 1989, I wrote an overture in the form of a piano csárdás and about the same time heard that NPR poet Andrei Codrescu was writing a biography of Erzsébet. I got in touch and proposed the idea that he write the libretto. He thought it was a great idea — and he had supposedly seen her diaries, diaries that recounted the actual murders! Codrescu and I kept in touch, but things went sour. His book ended up being a novel. I hated it, and we had a falling out. After we patched things up a little, he was more famous and working on a film … meaning now the libretto would cost money I didn’t have.

I started sketching my own plots for three different-sized versions. It was still idle sketching with no real possibilities. But connections are funny. Back in the computer company days, I had become friends with Zoltan Radai, a tech entrepreneur in the “New Hungary” before the fall in 1989. When my family and I moved to Europe in 1991, I contacted him. He not only knew the Bathory story, he also knew how to find the castle and spoke Hungarian and Slovak. I remember that ride very well, in a rented Fiat Uno stuffed with five of us, going on torn-up roads from Budapest to Trencin.

The castle inspired me, a great hilltop ruin in a town nobody had ever heard of. This was before the great vampire craze really hit the marketplace, before European Union funds even put up decent road signs. I took photos and wriggled around the sunken castle arches and even squeezed into the “death tower”.

By the time we returned to Vermont in 1992, Codrescu’s “The Blood Countess” was out and vampires were interesting to legions of teenage girls. But I was broke and couldn’t consider an opera, even though another big orchestral piece called “Softening Cries” was performed that year. It was real cognitive dissonance for my compositional soul!

Then the web hit. I put up an “Erzsébet: The Opera” website in 1996. Microsoft’s old home page featured it and I had millions of hits in one week. Folks submitted articles, artwork and even novels for the site, and I put them all up along with buckets of my own research. Magazines wanted interviews; the first article on my opera work was published in “Requiem” in France in 1998.

But no money. No grants, prizes, investors sponsored by the best investment newsletters, nothing came out of it. The huge bandwidth costs for the website were out-of-pocket. In 2001 a team from The Travel Channel found the website and sent me back to Cactice in Slovakia for a show called “World’s Bloodiest Dungeons”. The Discovery Channel asked to do a segment in 2004, again sending me to Slovakia — but this time I asked if I could write an opera scene specifically for the show. The Australian producer Chris Thorburn was actually enthused, and he and the production team came to David Gunn‘s home here in Vermont where a group of us performed it — singer Lisa Jablow as Erzsébet and a small ensemble including David on percussion and Marco Oppedisano on guitar. A clip showed up on “Deadly Women”, which airs worldwide at least twice a year.

More authors were riding the vampire wave, Hollywood was churning out crappy knockoffs, yet my inability to market just about anything kept me from funding the opera. People wanted to work on it. Prague sculptor Pavel Kraus wanted to do set design. Atlanta graphic artist Bob Hobbs wanted to recreate the castle for a virtual or video version. Singers and musicians across Europe and the States were interested. Many site visitors offered help. Juraj Jakubisko‘s studio in Slovakia even contacted me about his film “Bathory” — though they wanted marketing help, not a composer.

So despite cheerleaders, it looked like it was never going to happen. I thought the project was history and decided to move on.

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by Steve Layton
Composers, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Los Angeles, Microtonalism, New York, Piano

Pianos East and West, tuned and retuned

We may have missed the first volleys of southern California’s MicroFest — concerts devoted to tunings other than our standard, boring old 12 steps to the octave — but there’s still plenty of time to get your octave-tweak on; events will be running all the way to the end of June. Composers represented include Cage, Harrison, Partch, Crumb, Lachenmann, Tenney, Alves, Corigliano, Gosfield, Haas, Ives, Wadle, Schweinitz, McIntosh, Kriege,  etc. etc… Quite a constellation of stars. For all the details head over to their website.

But I wanted to draw your attention to the MicroFest concert happening this weekend, since it involves an old pal and S21 alum. On Saturday April 24, 7:00 PM at the Steinway Piano Gallery (314 N. Robertson Blvd., West Hollywood), pianist Aron Kallay with Grace Zhao will be giving a concert of music for “quartertuned+” pianos. In addition to pieces by Charles Ives, John Corigliano, Bill Alves, Georg Haas, Annie Gosfield and my internet friend “Down Under”, Kraig Grady, Kallay will be giving the premiere live performance of Jeff Harrington‘s monstrously difficult Prelude #3 for 19ET Piano. It’s taken a lot of years for someone to step up and take on one of Jeff’s preludes, many of which we’ve known and loved for years only through Jeff’s own MIDI realizations. It’s going to be fun, I’m telling you. You can hear part of the piece in this KPFK interview with Kallay.

Then on Sunday April 25th, back NYC -way, our long-time contributor Elodie Lauten is celebrating the 2-CD release of a whole passel of her piano music from the last 30 years, PIANO WORKS REVISITED (Unseen Worlds), with a performance at the Gershwin Hotel (4PM, 7 East 27 Street, $10).  Elodie herself will perform the Variations on the Orange Cycle (cited by Chamber Music America as among the 100 best works of the 20th century), and some of the early piano tunes that featured on WNYC as early as 1981;  also the Sonate Modale, released for the first time on these CDs. The Gershwin Hotel main lobby provides a beautiful grand piano and a colorful and elegant environment for this special venue, and there’ll be refreshments. So come on out and cheer the home team!

by Steve Layton
Composers, Contemporary Classical, New York, Opera

La Commedia or, my dinner with Louis

Jeroen Willems as Lucifer. Credit: Gary Friedman/Los Angeles Times

Thursday, April 15 marked the New York premiere of Louis Andriessen’s latest opera, La Commedia at Carnegie Hall.  I was lucky enough to make it up to New York for this event.

— Full disclosure: part of my trip to New York was to meet with Andriessen to discuss my plans for performing his 1984-88 opera, De Materie in Washington, D.C. this coming October.  I’ll be blogging a lot about that process in the coming weeks, so stay tuned. Frankly, I am as addicted to Andriessen’s music as the composer is to garlic (which I found out over bread and some very strong garlic dipping sauce over lunch) so I was glad to live within easily-traveled distance of New York and be able to attend this performance.  Anyway, this is all by way of a caveat that what follows may not be the most impartial review; I hope you’ll forgive me.

Andriessen’s work can be divided, somewhat, into periods based on one or two large works which define his compositional interests over the span of a decade or so.  De Staat, the work that brought him to international prominence in the 1970’s, provides a framework for the politically radical works that drove him in the decade of ca. 1968-1978/79.  De Materie frames his work of the 1980’s within the context of metaphysics and the spiritual world that culminates in 1996-97’s Trilogy of the Last Day, which overlaps with (and is unfortunately—at least in the U.S.—overshadowed by) Andriessen’s operatic collaboration with Peter Greenaway in Rosa (1994) and Writing to Vermeer (1997-98).  La Commedia, likewise, reflects Andriessen’s principal interests in the first decade of the 21st century and, in a way, bridges the Trilogy’s preoccupation with death with the theatricality of the Greenaway operas.

La Commedia is a “film opera” based, loosely, on Dante’s Divina Commedia.  Its production is by the American film director Hal Hartley, with whom Andriessen collaborated on other theatrically hybrid projects like The New Maths (2000), Passeggiata in tram in america e ritorno (1998), and the opera Inana (2003).  Due to budgetary constraints it was presented without the film in a “semi-staged” concert version on Thursday night.   While this is unfortunate in depriving the New York (and, earlier in the week, Los Angeles) audience(s) of an important aspect of the work, the abstractness of Andriessen’s treatment of his subject may very well be enhanced by the concert presentation, for this is not traditional opera by any stretch of the imagination and stretches the definition of the genre beyond the composer’s earlier work with Peter Greenaway (in fact, it has more in common with the earlier De Materie in terms of formal presentation than it does with Writing to Vermeer or the surreal romp, Rosa).

In La Commedia, only two of the four lead vocal parts retain a specific role.  Claron McFadden, in the role of Béatrice, was a revelation.  Her voice truly heavenly in the role with each of her disappointingly few moments on stage highlight some of the most beautiful music Andriessen has ever written.  Perhaps the most beautifully magical moment in all of La Commedia, however, belongs to Marcel Beekman in the tiny, surprising role of Casella.  Casella, a friend of Dante’s youth who died, unexpectedly at a relatively young age and who was himself a musician and composer who’d set, according to Purgatorio, canto 2, a love poem from Dante’s earlier work, “Convivio”.  As Dante arrives in Purgatory he hears his friend singing this familiar song and Andriessen’s setting of this moment manages to capture the ethereal beauty of that moment early on in Dante’s poem.  Beekman’s voice, emerging Thursday night from within the audience (surprising those sitting next to him), possesses a sweetness rare among tenors and his aria, joined briefly at the end by Jeroen Willems’ (at the moment) Dante, was, for me, a highlight of the evening.

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by Armando Bayolo
Composers, Concerts, Conductors, Contemporary Classical, Festivals, File Under?, New York

NYPO’s Contact! at Symphony Space

The New York Philharmonic has made significant strides to renew its commitment to contemporary classical music this season. Curated by composer-in-residence Magnus Lindberg and conducted by music director Alan Gilbert, April16th’s Contact! series performance was a compelling program stirringly performed.

Sean Shepherd‘s These Particular Circumstances proved a vibrant opener. A bassoonist as well as a composer, he’s a fine orchestrator. Its also clear that, while at Cornell for his DMA, he learned a lot about Lutoslawski from Steven Stucky, as his language incorporates insights from both composers. Shepherd’s music has a wonderful way of making the orchestra shimmer. He took advantage of the chamber orchestra’s lither scoring, providing deft contrapuntal passages for winds and solo strings. At the same time, These Particular Circumstances displays considerable power in its tutti passages, reminding us that the ensemble for Contact! is a formidable assembly.

Nico Muhly made a point of complementing his former Juilliard classmate from the stage, pointing out that Shepherd’s high-lying passages create such a signature sound that, when he learned he was following him on the program, he decided to ‘give the violins a break.’ True, with a darker hued string section led by the violas, his work Detailed Instructions takes on a sound world that stood apart from the other pieces on the program. Muhly is post-minimal in orientation. And while a couple of the composers in the audience who sat near me groused at intermission that his work is ‘indebted to Philip Glass,’ what they didn’t seem to hear was Muhly’s playful departures from mainstream minimalism.

Instead of Glass’ symmetrical use of ostinati, Muhly’s repeating figures dart in and out of the ‘expected phrase lengths,’ creating delightful surprises and heady syncopations. In the more reposeful central section, he channeled an appealing lyricism from his recent pop-based excursions into a spacious orchestral mold. The third section gave the NYPO musicians a chance to up the bpm quotient, in a breakneck paced, dazzling finale. Make no mistake, Muhly is no mere retro-minimalist; quite the contrary, he’s a compelling new voice on the scene.

Matthias Pintscher composed Songs from Solomon’s Garden for the NYPO’s artist-in-residence, baritone Thomas Hampson. A setting of texts from the Song of Solomon in Hebrew, the work was simultaneously sensuous and inquisitive. Pintscher deftly juxtaposes cantabile passages with spikier ones, creating an impressively varied orchestral palette. And while Solomon’s Garden never even flirts with neoromanticism, it has a far more lyrical impulse than some of Pintscher’s other, in this writer’s opinion less congenial, vocal writing. Hampson sang the challenging, chromatic, and wide ranging  part with commitment, subtlety, and musicality. At a stage in his career when he certainly needn’t take on learning new works, Hampson’s willingness to participate in Contact! so enthusiastically is admirable.

Alan Gilbert and Thomas Hampson (photo: Stephanie Berger)

Gilbert has done a remarkable job in a short amount of time crafting a fine contemporary ensemble with these Philharmonic members. He elicited powerful, clear, and engaging performances throughout the program. Its worth noting that the NYPO is getting into the spirit and has been very supportive of Contact!. The organization went all out to publicize the show, in the process making a zealous case for new music’s relevancy in the broader cultural life of the city. And they did a good job incorporating multimedia into the PR mix; we posted some of the flipcam videos on the front page in advance of the performance.

Enlisting WNYC’s John Schaefer as host and onstage interviewer was a nice touch. Schaefer kept things moving breezily while eliciting both bon mots and aesthetic observations from each artist and composer. WNYC/WQXR’s contemporary internet station, Q2, will be broadcasting the concert on Thursday, April 22 at 7 p.m. or Saturday, April 24 at 4 p.m.

After the concert, the whole audience was invited to stay and chat at a reception.  Everyone was even treated to a free beer. What’s not to like?

by Christian Carey
Composers, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Uncategorized

Music inspired by World War II

There are many compositions dealing with the horrors of World War II. Some of them, like Penderecki’s Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima, have little to do with the war–Penderecki changed the original title of the work from 8:37 after hearing its first performance. Others, like Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony, achieved notoriety during the war, but their status in the repertory is still debated. (I can’t stand the Seventh, but find his Eighth Symphony one of the most moving works to arise from the war).

Then there is that genre unto itself, the Holocaust piece. An Israeli colleague of mine once solemnly claimed that if an Israeli wrote a piece about the Jewish Holocaust, they would get a performance by an Israeli orchestra. No joke–he had composed such a work and had a tape of said performance.

There is a curious paucity of works from the actual time of World War II which deal with the subject. Artists always claim to be mirrors of their own time, yet where are all the great reflections of the most turbulent era of the last century? One of the few contemporary composers who called out the Nazis and created a lasting work of art at the same time was Michael Tippett in his A Child of Our Time.  Dallapiccola’s Canti di Prigionia is another powerful piece written during the war, although performances are fewer than Tippett’s oratorio. Britten, the self-proclaimed pacifist, during the war years produced–Paul Bunyan? A violin concerto? Peter Grimes?

There has been plenty of music resurrected by composers who perished in Nazi death camps–most of it, to my taste, not worth the effort of programming. The greatest work composed in a Nazi concentration camp was written by a French prisoner of war at Stalag VIII-A, the Quatuor pour la Fin du Temps by Messiaen, which is less about the war then an expression of the composer’s faith.

For works about the camps, of course there is Schoenberg’s A Survivor From Warsaw, a good piece, yes, but I find the 1920’s/30’s neo-Expressionist language of Schoenberg a little over the top. It’s as if F.W. Murnau did a silent horror film about Auschwitz–effective but at the same time curiously dated and overstated.

For years I found Nono’s Il Canto Sospeso to be the most intense, emotionally powerful work inspired by WWII, with its texts drawn from letters of imprisoned Resistance fighters terrifyingly matched to the searing drama of Nono’s music. But for the past 2 decades, I have been fascinated, captivated, and horrified by Steve Reich’s Different Trains. I heard a good performance of this recently, and you can read my thoughts at the link below.

http://www.sandiego.com/arts/connections-chamber-music-series

by Christian Hertzog
Composers, Concerts

Sequenza21 Concert in Peru? ¿Por que no?

Caught up with our old amigo Marco Antonio Mazzini on Skype the other night and discovered that he has been touring the U.S. with his Belgian group, Thelema Trio, promoting its new Innova recording Neither From Nor Towards…, and that he’s moved back to Peru and founded a New Music ensemble called  LiPiBRePe whose debut concert next Friday, April 23,  will feature the Peruvian premier of “In C” by Terry Riley, as well as “Charisma” by Xenakis,  Steve Reich’s “Clapping music” and La Monte Young’s “Composition 1960 #7.”   Marco is, indeed, an adventuresome lad.

He and I had talked a couple of years ago about the possibility of doing a Sequenza21 concert in Belgium but it never happened for one reason or another.  So, the other night we decided to do a makeup with a change of venue.  Assuming our pool of composers can come up with some good stuff, Marco has agreed to dedicate a future (probably October) LiPiBRePe concert in Lima to music from the Sequenza21 community.

Here’s what you have to work with:

  • Violín
  • Viola
  • Cello (doubling electric guitar)
  • Flute
  • Bb Clarinet
  • Clarinet bass clarinet, conductor
  • Fagot (doubling alto saxophone)
  • Soprano
  • Theremin (doubling flute and electric bass)
  • Bb Trumpet (also C trumpet)
  • Small percusión (drums available and we can get marimba)
  • Piano
  • Electric bass
  • Laptop, controller

“We are looking for a second violin, oboe and French horn player,” Marco said.  “A charango and Pna flute player will be added to our group too. This is the first ensemble dedicated to New Music in Peru and we will only perform new music and free improvisations.”

The rules are:

– a minimum of 3 musicians, in any combinations
– pieces structure like “Les Moutons de Panurge”(Rzewski) or “In C” (Riley) are very welcome!
– stretches/graphics for improvisation are welcome too.

“We can prepare an instructional video about the possibilities of the Charango, pan flute and theremin, in case someone wants to write something,” he adds.

Lot of resources to play with there so if  you’ve been wanting to channel your inner Golijov, this is an opportunity.  Questions and scores to Marco at marcomazzini@clariperu.org

Who’s game?

by Jerry Bowles
Composers, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Premieres

Dillon’s baby comes home

Fresh off its German premiere, composer and S21 blogger Lawrence Dillon‘s newest string quartet begins making its rounds of the U.S. this week, under the completely able fingers and bows of the Emerson String Quartet.

From the Invisible Cities String Quartet Cycle, String Quartet No. 5 combines elements of chaconne, passacaglia and theme-and-variations. The piece takes the Welsh tune “All Through the Night” through, as the Lawrence writes, “a dizzying and dazzling journey from twilight to twilight.”  The movements are Twilight – Variations; Dream – Chaconne; Dream – Passacaglia, and Variations – Twilight. The piece was commissioned by the Emerson Quartet and an anonymous donor, in honor of the University of North Carolina School of the Arts.

The U.S. premiere performances will happen Saturday, April 10, 7:30 PM at Watson Chamber Music Hall of University of North Carolina School of the Arts (1533 S. Main Street in Winston-Salem) and then Wednesday, April 14 at Meany Hall, the University of Washington (15th Ave, NE and NE 40th St., Seattle). The programs will also include works by Schubert, Barber, Ives and Dvorak.  Future performances of the Quartet are scheduled for the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. and State University of New York at Stony Brook.

Here’s wishing this particularly well-travelled baby a bright future.

by Steve Layton
Birthdays, Composers, Concerts, Contemporary Classical

Happy Geburtstag Helmut!

Helmut Lachenmann, 75 years old this year. How does the news strike us? If a composer in Europe, a better than 60%-70% chance that this is an important milestone. If a composer in America, less than 40%-30% chance of the same reaction. As a mainstream American classical concert-goer, the number is probably closer to 10% or less.

In the last couple decades, the influence of Lachenmann upon all kinds of composers has been immense, as have been the names of Franco Donatoni, Brian Ferneyhough, Beat Furrer, Gerard Grisey,Tristan Murail, Wolfgang Rihm, Kaija Saariaho… Yet the other thing they all share is how little they appear on the general American concert stage, and so the practically non-existent impact they’ve made on the minds of the average concert-goer.

To which the average concert-goer responds “I don’t know, it’s all just horribly weird sounds to me”;  The unsympathetic composer responds “that’s because it sucks”, or “that’s just that elitist Euro-formalist bullshit.”

I tell you, it’s enough to make me think of Teabaggers and Green Party folks! In the end, if someone were to sit down — without their piled baggage of cultural assumptions blocking all ingress — and just listen, they’d find the common thread: all of these people just write music, some combination of sound and idea that totally engages their heart and mind, and can also that of  anyone else who opens themselves to it. From a short interview a couple years ago, here is the “Euro-formalist” speaking about what is truly important in his music:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNTqGRykmCo[/youtube]

These aren’t the words of the hermetic formula-maker locked in the laboratory; they’re the words of a man simply in love with music, its history, instruments, people and ideas.

Lachenmann’s birthday is getting some respect in the form of a series of concerts devoted to his work:

Last Thursday SIGNAL, with the JACK Quartet, cellist Lauren Radnofsky and Lachenmann himself as both soloist and speaker, kicked off their celebratory “march” through New York in Buffalo, Friday hit Rochester, and Saturday were on to Troy (review)– all this to culminate Thursday, April 1st in NYC’s Miller Theatre (116th St. & Broadway on the ground floor of Dodge Hall, 8PM, $25/15, 212-854-7799). The event includes an onstage discussion between Lachenmann and Seth Brodsky, as well as five works: Wiegenmusik (1963), Pression (1969-1970), Ein Kinderspiel (1980), String Quartet No. 2 “Reigen seliger Geister” (1989), “…Zwei Gefühle…” (1991-1992).

Coming up on the flank, this Tuesday March 30th the East Coast Contemporary Ensemble will make their own contribution to the festivities, at Good Shepherd Church (152 West 66th Street, NYC, 8PM, $20/10, 212-877-0685), with a number of chamber works featured.

If you’re curious to finally catch up but not in the area, there are a lot of recordings of Lachenmann’s music available; one of the best bets is to get an introduction from the good folk at La Folia. Dan Albertson’s 2004 survey is an especially good starter, and a quick search on their site will provide you with many more perceptive reviews for further listening.

by Steve Layton
Cello, Click Picks, Composers, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Video

Composing and Listening Out Loud

Saturday, March 27th at 7:30pm CDT, anyone in driving range of Birmingham, Alabama should be paying UAB’s Hulsey Recital Hall (950 13th Street South) a visit. Back last year, Meet the Composer’s Met Life Creative Connections Program gave some funding for a program of new compositions by three composers (Connecticut-based Alphonse Izzo, Aleksander Sternfeld-Dunn from Washington State, and Alabama resident Craig Biondi), all written for the fantastically able chops of cellist Craig Hultgren.

What’s that, you say you’re not going to be anywhere near Birmingham just then? Why son, you’re as close as that little screen in front of your face! That’s because the concert will be streamed live courtesy of USTREAM; all you have to do is click that link I just gave you and you’re there (they’ll also be streaming the pre-concert discussion, slated for 6:00pm CDT).

The program’s title is Listen Out Loud, and what made the run-up to this one so interesting is that for the past few months, each of the composers has been blogging about their experiences while composing their respective piece. At the blog Composing Out Loud, you can follow the genesis and fruition of each of the composer’s ideas.

Each composer will present a work for solo cello, and a work for cello with ensemble. Izzo’s solo cello piece The Madcap Laughed is the composer’s surrealist tribute to Syd Barrett, the late founder of Pink Floyd. Hultgren is joined by Katherine Fouse on piano and Denise Gainey on clarinet for the premiere of Izzo’s Memory Theater.

ASO English horn player Erica Howard and Hultgren engage in an intimate dialogue in Aleksander Sternfeld-Dunn’s “...and I will love the silence…”. Dramatic contrast follows with the premiere of the light hearted solo work Snap! Crackle! Pop!

Biondi will present a haunting work for solo cello, Adrift.  Then Fouse and Hultgren are joined by Soprano Kristine Hurst-Wajszczuk and percussionist Gene Fambrough for the premiere of Biondi’s improvisatory Two Psalms.

So between all of the great, intimate  background information, brand-spanking new works and a concert itself brought close no matter where you may live, here’s beautiful example of what a concert in this century can be. I know I’ll be in the ‘audience’, even here in Houston!

by Steve Layton