Composers

Composers, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Festivals, File Under?, New York

Composers Now: An interview with Laura Kaminsky


Composer Laura KaminskyComposer, arts administrator, educator, and now, festival curator, Laura Kaminsky is exactly the type of advocate contemporary music needs to ensure its survival. Until recently a dean at the Conservatory of Music at Purchase College/SUNY (she remains on the faculty), she’s currently Associate Artistic Director at Symphony Space. Since her arrival, Kaminsky has done a great deal to enhance the music programming at the venue.

“Symphony Space has long been known for its literary events. But in recent years we’ve been hard at work to create an increased role for music in our programming: both in terms of performances and in our educational activities. We’re trying to create a home at Symphony Space for all different kinds of music. I’m particularly pleased with our incorporation of Latin American music into various projects. We are lucky to have both classical composer Tania León and jazz musician Arturo O’Farrill and his Afro-Latin Jazz Orchestra involved in our programs.”

Despite the currently gloomy economic times, she’s helped to organize an ambitious weeklong undertaking spotlighting contemporary music: Composers Now. It all started with a conversation she had with León.

“Tania pointed out that poets and playwrights generally have a much greater public presence than composers. Oftentimes performers become the focus of an event and, apart from their music, we don’t get to know the composers too well. So, we decided to help to organize a festival that gives composers in New York a public face.”

The Composers Now festival has involved dozens of presenters, ensembles, and organizations. And Kaminsky is quick to eschew any notions of single-minded leadership, remarking instead that, “This was very much a team effort. I lived for a time in West Africa and I learned there that it really does take a village. The idea of Composers Now took shape gradually and somewhat informally, beginning as a series of conversations over lunch or a cup of coffee with various area presenters and arts professionals.”

“It seemed as if it was just as we were getting started that the economy took a drastic turn for the worse. For a little while, our informal group of organizers was reluctant to broach the issue, but eventually we started to talk openly about the funding challenges we were all experiencing; about being nervous about the future of our organizations and of this project.”

“I learned something very valuable from those conversations: when people trust each other enough to speak the truth, great things can happen. Once we had had voiced our concerns, we were able to set about finding ways to make Composers Now a reality. By getting creative, we found a solution. The organizers were able to find a week in the ’09-’10 season when we could all commit to programming contemporary music or involving composers in some way.”

Kaminsky and company didn’t look at this as an event exclusively open to composers of concert music. In likeminded spirit to her work at Symphony Space, Composers Now has welcomed a wide range of styles and genres, including Latin American music and jazz. Within the confines of its contemporary classical programming, the composers highlighted have been from a similarly catholic array of styles, ranging from a concert by ‘downtowners’ Bang on a Can to a Composers Portrait of Benet Casablancas at Miller Theatre.

“If all goes well, we want Composers Now to stretch beyond the boundaries of New York City in coming years. I don’t see why this shouldn’t be a nationwide program that raises awareness of composers with events throughout the United States.”

If a village’s worth of arts presenters can achieve what Composers Now 2010 has done in NYC, imagine what arts organizations across the whole country could do?

by Christian Carey
Broadcast, Composers, Concerts

We Get Stacks and Stacks of Letters

Hi Jerry,

Wanted to share two recent interviews:

1. Paul York, cellist and professor at the University of Louisville, has a new CD (Cello Vision – Centaur 2989) featuring new music by Stefan Freund, Aaron J. Kernis, Steve Rouse, Frederick Speck, Paul Brink and Marc Satterwhite.  The Kernis is a world-premiere recording of Ballad for solo cello and seven cellos.  Freund’s Toccata is also a premiere recording.  The interview is here.

2. George Tsontakis was in town last week for a world premiere with the Louisville Orchestra.  Impetuous was commissioned for the LO by a fellow Yaddo board member, Nana Lampton.  The interview with George is here.

One more note, you can hear the premiere broadcast of Impetuous by George Tsontakis on Sunday, February 28 at 6pm (EST) online at www.wuol.org.

Hope all is well!

Daniel
Daniel Gilliam, Station Manager
Classical 90.5 – Louisville’s Fine Arts Station
Louisville, KY 40202
(502) 814-6540

by Jerry Bowles
Commissions, Composers, Contemporary Classical, File Under?, Minimalism

New Sounds Live

I really enjoyed Q2’s broadcast tonight of New Sounds Live, a concert at Merkin Hall by the Bang on a Can All Stars that featured works by Nik Bartsch, Oscar Bettison, Christine Southworth, Michael Nyman, and David Longstreth. The first in a hopefully ongoing series of collaborations between Q2 and Merkin Hall, it was also a featured event in this week’s Composers Now festival.

I particularly enjoyed the Bettison work, The Afflicted Girl, in part because it’s quite affecting; but it also helps that I was able to study in advance and follow along with a perusal score sent over by the kind folks at Boosey. Funded by BoaC’s Peoples’ Commissioning Fund, the piece is what Bettison calls an “anti-pastorale.” Its based on a quote from Peter Ackroyd’s London: the Biography. It describes an afflicted girl frequently found in a busy thoroughfare, seemingly oblivious to the cacophony around her. Or, as in Bettison’s posits in his piece, perhaps she found a kind of music amidst the chaos.

Clangor is Bettison’s daily bread: many of his works employ junk metal percussion. The Afflicted Girl involves copious percussion batteries, prepared piano, a keyboard tuned a quarter tone flat, taped echoes of the ensemble, plenty of electric guitar harmonics, and a Shapey-esque scordatura tuning of the cellos C string – down to G for rumbled slackening. What’s more, all the players double on bicycle bells!

Alternately assaultive and contemplative, rhythmically charged and, briefly, eerily reposeful, its a demanding, challenging, harrowing, and memorable work.

Bang on a Can. Photo: Christine Southworth
Bang on a Can. Photo: Christine Southworth

Sad you missed out on the Q2 broadcast? Fear not: the performance will be featured on a March broadcast of New Sounds.

by Christian Carey
Composers, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Festivals, File Under?, New York

Week long Composers Now Festival starts today!

Tania Leon MORE BGRSure, the recession has caused for cutbacks in the arts. But composers are a resilient bunch. This week, New York City will be the site for the first Composers Now festival. Coordinated by Symphony Space Associate Artistic Director Laura Kaminsky and composer Tania León, the festival involves a host of area venues and organizations.

The activities start Monday morning with a panel discussion and a marathon concert from 12-6. Tonight alone, there are events at Symphony Space, the Schomburg Center, the Morgan Library, the Jazz Gallery, and the Flushing Branch of the Queens Library.

Composers Now will run throughout the week — and so will our coverage on Sequenza 21. Steve Layton’s started things off with an interview of Michael Hersch. I’ll be posting an interview with Laura Kaminsky. We’d love to hear reports from attendees about the various Composers Now events: a truly ambitious undertaking that we hope lots of you will be able to enjoy.

For those readers who won’t be in the New York area this week: take heart. If all goes well, Composers Now hopes to create festivals in many more venues in years to come.

by Christian Carey
Cello, Composers, Contemporary Classical, New York, Premieres, Saxophone

Intimate epics: Michael Hersch’s “Last Autumn”

hersch1There was a fair amount of buzz a couple years ago (including here at s21), when composer Michael Hersch‘s enormous piano canvas The Vanishing Pavilions was released on CD. What the New York Times has written about Hersch’s work in general seems to apply quite well to this two-hour-plus piece: “If the symmetries and proportions of Mr. Hersch’s music evoke the grounded fixity of architecture, its dynamism and spontaneous evolution are those of the natural world. Its somber eloquence sings of truths that are personal yet not confessional… Within the sober palette, the expressive power and range are vast.”

Turns out that this evening-length piece was only the first part of a trilogy of evening-length works — or rather, a “tet-trilogy”… The second part, Last Autumn, is a duo, and it exists in two versions: one for horn and ‘cello, the other for saxophone and cello. The horn/cello version was premiered in Philadelphia back in October last year, at the able hands of hornist (and Hersch’s brother) Jamie Hersch and cellist Daniel Gaisford. About that premiere, the Philadelphia Inquirer’s David Patrick Stearns wrote:

“As great as [The Vanishing Pavilions] is, Last Autumn eclipses it. In the airier, more distilled Autumn, whose emotional riches defy the harmonic limitations of the instruments, the music exploits the instruments in every imaginable way. …Idea and sound were inextricably one, and more viscerally exciting for it. … Long, vigorous applause indicated that Hersch’s more personal and demanding works are no longer appreciated by only a few.”

And now the saxophone and ‘cello version of Last Autumn is getting its premiere this Saturday, Feb 27 at 8pm in Merkin Hall here in NYC. Once again Gaisford is cellist, joined this time by saxophonist Gary Louie.

I had a chance to ask Hersch some questions about the work, the trilogy as a whole, and his motivations. I was also able to get a few questions to Louie, about what it feels like to be involved in a piece of this scope:

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S21: Michael, being a composer myself I know better than to ask you about why these enormous musical expanses have become necessary in your work. Still, even when following what we can’t help feel is the absolutely right path this music is leading us, short (Webern) or long (Wagner, Morton Feldman, Andrew Violette, David Toub, you), was there ever a moment where you had to look at the sheer size of these visions and think “is this crazy or what”?

Michael Hersch: When I first began to compose, many of the works I wrote were quite long. Most of these earliest efforts however are now withdrawn, including my undergraduate recital work which consisted of a single program-length piece (a work for trumpet and strings).  As I progressed through my twenties I felt that I should try and broaden, or in this case contract, the canvasses which I was working with. While there are a few works still in my catalog from those years, most of the pieces I wrote during this period I also am not satisfied with. It wasn’t until my thirties that I felt able to begin to naturally express myself in works of varying lengths – especially in pieces under thirty minutes. It was at this point however that I decided to begin work on The Vanishing Pavilions, which seemed a natural outgrowth of what I had done before. I also recognized that beginning this project was a decision that would necessarily have deep implications on how and what I would write for the foreseeable future. I certainly knew that a work of this scale would have little chance of ever being programmed. That said, most anything a composer writes in our age suffers this reality. If their were performers who could play this particular work or its later siblings, they would have to commit vast amounts of time and energy to learning a piece that they rarely, if ever, would be asked to perform. For The Vanishing Pavilions, my intention was to write, premiere and record the work myself. For Last Autumn, I was remarkably fortunate to have found performers beyond myself willing to commit the necessary time to the piece. It has been a surreal experience to witness the kind of selflessness they have brought to the task of learning the music.

You asked if I thought it crazy to write music on this scale. There is certainly precedent for composers embarking on journeys like this in the past. In my case, I think I felt at a certain point that due to life’s uncertainty, my time was best spent following what seems that absolutely right path you mentioned.

S21: Do you see the piece as an evening-length work from the outset, or does it only become apparent after starting the composition?

MH: I knew that the three works of this cycle would be in the neighborhood of 3 hours each from the outset. Writing each piece has been a slow, deliberate, years-long process, with unexpected turns along the way. The Vanishing Pavilions took over four years to write, Last Autumn three years. When I complete the last work in the cycle, the entire undertaking will have taken some ten years.

S21: Certainly unique among ‘epic’ compositions has to be that the whole almost-three hours of Last Autumn is a duo for two solo melodic instruments. Was there ever a temptation along the way to add another voice or two to the mix?

MH: When I decided to write the work, I knew that the specific performers I was writing for were capable of remarkable things on their respective instruments. The cellist, Daniel Gaisford, is able to solidly convey the resources of a cello, viola and violin, creating if called upon the illusion of a string trio.  In saxophonist Gary Louie, I knew I essentially had access to a quartet made up of horn, saxophone, clarinet and oboe. In the case of my brother Jamie, I knew he was capable of creating the illusion at different times of a bass trombone, tenor trombone, horn and trumpet. Ultimately, in both cases I felt I was writing for not a duo of two melodic instruments, but in fact a septet.

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by Steve Layton
Composers, Concerts, Conferences, Contemporary Classical, Minimalism

Blängen the Schlingen with Charlemagne Palestine

palestinePwyll ap Siôn is a composer and Senior Lecturer in music at Bangor University in Wales (UK). His strong interest in Minimalism (he’s written a book on Michael Nyman) led to his co-hosting of the first International Conference on Minimalist Music in 2007. He also made his way across the ocean for the second iteration of the conference, held last September in Kansas City, MO.  Pwyll asked if S21 might like to print a few of his reactions and thoughts from the conference, and we said sure thing:

At the Second International Conference on Minimalist Music last September, hosted by the University of Missouri at Kansas City, part of the evening events led me to the Grace & Holy Trinity Cathedral to hear composer, performer and improviser Charlemagne Palestine.  He is something of an enigma; when John Adams attended a rare performance in the 1980s, Palestine walked out after twenty minutes, leaving the audience baffled. Even those who have already seen him have no idea what to expect.

I enter the dim glow of the cathedral and notice two things: first, the sound of a drone — two notes, a fifth apart (a little like La Monte Young’s infamous Composition 1960 No. 7: two notes with the instruction ‘to be held for a long time’). The drone is low in dynamic but high in register, its reedy timbre adding a slight edge to the ambiance, but this is otherwise a rather inauspicious introduction. Secondly, there’s a merry gaggle of teddies and puppets neatly arranged on a table near the entrance, all of which appear to be wearing scarves or ribbons. I am told that this is de rigueur in the eccentric world of Palestine. But nothing quite prepares me for what follows.

We are politely informed that the performance has already begun despite the fact that the audience is milling around, chatting casually or ambling up and down the aisles. The atmosphere is relaxed, however, and we are told that the unpredictable Palestine is (literally) in high spirits, on his second (large) glass of cognac, and has extended an invitation to members of the audience to visit the organ loft situated at the rear of the cathedral. We have to take off our shoes to do this – a complicated process since it is almost completely dark at the back of the nave – and just as we are about to be ushered by an assistant up the staircase, there is a frisson of activity from above, and the man himself appears, wine glass in hand, wearing a panama hat and dressed in bright, colourful clothes.

He strides purposefully past us towards the altar, raising his voice to speak. Rather like the drone, which continues to sound in the background, his voice is high-pitched and nasal. He announces that he will be playing Schlingen-Blängen, which has not been performed (spoken ostentatiously) ‘in the United States of America’ for decades. But he’s rambling on incoherently, maybe the cognac’s starting to take effect, and I’m starting to doubt all the hype. This increases as he proceeds to produce a ringing sound by rubbing his finger around the wine glass while emitting a series of pitches in a childlike voice.

With the performance rapidly descending into banality Palestine stops singing, abruptly turns on his heels down the aisle and back up the organ loft. Seizing the opportunity the Belgian musicologist/critic Maarten Beirens and I follow him up the stairs. Oblivious to the fact that we’re there, he is entirely absorbed in his own sound world and starts to perform.

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by Steve Layton
Classical Music, Composers, Recordings

Seeing what was coming right from the start

Composer Sir Arthur Sullivan (1842-1900, of Gilbert & Sullivan fame) happened to be one of the earliest voices captured, in 1888, by Thomas Edison’s then-new wax-cylinder recording machine. Invited to dinner at Edison’s London outpost, Little Menlo, Sullivan recorded this small but prescient speech (which you can hear thanks to the Thomas Edison National Historical Park):

” . . . For myself, I can only say that I am astonished and somewhat terrified at the results of this evening’s experiment — astonished at the wonderful power you have developed, and terrified at the thought that so much hideous and bad music may be put on record forever. ”

[Thanks to wonderful pianist Seda Röder for the tip. The complete Edison archive can be found here.]

by Steve Layton
Choral Music, Composers, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, New York

Concordance later, but first a saxy song

New and specialized ensembles, groups of composers and performers banding together, DIY concerts and record labels… All the stuff of now. But let’s pay a little respect to New York’s Composers Concordance, who’ve been DIY-ing it for a good 25+ years now.

Their latest outing is a marathon show, Jan. 31st (6:00 pm doors, 7:00-10:00pm performance time at the club Drom, 85 Avenue A, between 5th & 6th, New York, NY. 212-777-1157)

No less than 23 composers are on the bill: Roger Blanc, Thomas Bo, Luis Andrei Cobo, Charles Coleman, Dan Cooper, Larry Goldman, David Gotay, Patrick Grant, Franz Hackl, Don Hagar, Arthur Kampela, Alon Nechushtan, Daniel Palkowski, Milica Paranosic, Akmal Parwez, Joseph Pehrson, Gene Pritsker, Paola Prestini, Jody Redhage, Kamala Sankaram, William Schimmel, Andrew Violette, and Theodore Wiprud.

Gene Pritsker, Composers Concordance co-director, talks about the concept for this presentation:

“We are exploring the relationship composers have with their instruments and how they go about writing music in which they know that they will be the performer. Dan Cooper and I talked about assembling a large group of composers and requesting a four minute composition from each. We are programming them back-to-back in a marathon setting and constructing a performance that highlights the composer as a performer: short compositions as vehicles for direct expression, from the composer’s mind to body to the audience.

We selected 150 composers and e-mailed them all on a secretly chosen day and time. The first 23 to respond to this e-mail were programmed for the event. We created a random criterion as opposed to a competition for choosing the participating composers, though all 150 candidates were composers whom we, the Composers Concordance directors, knew and respected.”

Tickets are $10, but there’s a two-drink minimum, so the later pieces are likely to start sounding all warm and fuzzy…

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If you really want to make Jan. 31st a full-music day in the city, at 3pm prior you could head to St. Ignatius of Antioch Episcopal Church (552 West End Avenue at 87th Street) to hear The New York Virtuoso Singers, The Raschèr Saxophone Quartet and conductor Harold Rosenbaum take on a concert of works for winds and choir. On the program is the US premiere of BMI Young Composer Award recipient Rafael Nassif ‘s piece for for three choirs and three trombones [wait, I thought we were talking saxes here?…], and a world premiere by our own S21 contributor and great pal Rob Deemer, plus works by Stefan Thomas and Jouni Kaipainen.

Tickets: $20; Students and Seniors: $15 TDF vouchers accepted. Tickets available at the door one hour and 15 minutes before concerts, or call Ticket Central at 212-279-4200. And there’s a 2pm pre-concert talk for you earlybirds, with the Raschèr Quartet.

by Steve Layton
Books, Canada, Composers, Contemporary Classical, Interviews

Talking with composers, Canada and beyond

Each generation of composers coming up through college is always a little dismayed to find their music history survey books fizzling out in their descriptions current composers. Maybe one compressed chapter at the end, with a jumble of names or the barest of thumbnail sketches. Half are already only half-remembered, and the other half are musicians you desperately want something, anything more from or about!  Yet often somewhere out there beyond the curriculum, there’s another kind of book; one some dedicated fan, critic or participant created,  providing fuller sketches and often interviews with the people that matter most to them in the here and now (one such that mattered greatly for me in the 1980s was John Rockwell’s All American Music).

Another of my little quirks is a strong liking for a number of recent and contemporary Canadian composers. I have no idea how it happened — other than perhaps years of government funding and a certain image of some “outsider” isolation and independence — but to my ears Canada has produced a remarkably large group of surprising and creative musicians.

So I was very happy to see that one of the latest “catch-up” books on composers comes from a Canadian perspective. Paul Steenhuisen, a fine Canadian musician in his own right, has recently published Sonic Mosaics: Conversations with Composers (University of Alberta Press, 2009), a collection of interviews with (mostly) living composers from America, Europe and Canada.

We asked another Canadian musician and journalist, John Oliver, to review the book:

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Sonic Mosaics is a book of interviews conducted by composer Paul Steenhuisen over a three-year period from 2001-2004. Over half of the interviews were commissioned by Toronto’s monthly, short-run music publication WholeNote on the occasion of a composer’s presence in the city for a premiere performance or CD release. Two were originally published in Musicworks magazine and the rest were conducted by Steenhuisen afterward to complete the book and attempt to represent more Canadian composers.

Steenhuisen gets full marks for disclosure: he reveals the shortcomings and strengths of the book in the introduction. Although the book contains a large number of interviews with Canadian composers, the author admits that it is by no means representative of the entire country. The reader is treated to six interviews with non-Canadian composers, three of which occur as a result of a composer’s appearance as a guest of New Music Concerts. Five are with the most senior generation of international contemporary music “stars”: Pierre Boulez, George Crumb, Mauricio Kagel, Christian Wolff and Helmut Lachenmann; the sixth is UK composer Michael Finnissy.

Equivalent Canadian senior composers include R. Murray Schafer, John Weinzweig, Udo Kasemets, John Beckwith, and Francis Dhomont. Yet equivalent senior composers of Quebec and the rest of Canada are not represented. The rest of the interviews give a glimpse into the creative minds of primarily composers who reside in the province of Ontario. Place-of-residence analysis reveals that, of the 26 Canadian interviewees, 16 reside in Ontario, 6 in Quebec, 3 in British Columbia, and one in Alberta: not an accurate proportional representation. The reader may also note that over half of composers represented here teach at universities, an understandable bias given the author’s background and the general tendency in Canada for composers to gain a livelihood from teaching. If this represents only a subset of important Canadian composers, the reader’s curiosity will be aroused to seek out information about more as a result of reading this book. A second volume is in order.

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by Steve Layton