We’re pleased to announce details for the 2011 Sequenza 21/MNMP Concert featuring the American Contemporary Music Ensemble (ACME). The following entries from the call for scores have been selected for inclusion in the program:
James Stephenson (UK) – Oracle Night
Robert Thomas (NJ) — Sixteen Lines
Jay Batzner (MI) – Slumber Music
Rob Deemer (NY) – Grand Dragon
Sam Nichols (CA) – Refuge
David Smooke (MD) – Requests
Dale Trumbore (CA) –How it Will Go
Laurie San Martin (CA) – Linea Negra
James Holt (NY) – Nostos Algea
The concert will be on October 25 at Joe’s Pub at 7 PM. It will be a free event open to the public.
Thank you to all of the composers who sent in scores and recordings for consideration. You made it very difficult to decide on a final program: there were many strong entries by talented creators.
Thanks too to Hayes Biggs and Clarice Jensen, who joined me in judging the competition, and to Justin Monsen of Manhattan New Music Project, who provided invaluable administrative support. And without the generosity and vision of Jerry Bowles, this project would never have gotten off the ground.
“I’ve never had a grand plan. Never even had an ambition – I still don’t, beyond wanting to write better music,” says Ford. “So I’ve done things as they’ve come along. Of course I also say no to things. I got into writing music journalism because, in 1983 when I came to Australia, I wasn’t, over all, very impressed with the music journalism I read. My radio work really came out of being an academic and gradually replaced it totally.”
Although born in England, Andrew Ford has become associated with his adopted homeland, Australia. He’s one of the most astute commentators on the country’s music scene, hosting “The Music Show,” a weekly broadcast on ABC Radio National since 1995.
“I live in the country, and most weeks I compose from Monday to Thursday. Then on Friday I drive the two hours up to Sydney and my producers hand me a folder full of research and a bunch of CDs relating to the guests I will have on The Music Show the following morning. There are usually four and we try to mix things up: I might talk to a jazz singer, a didgeridoo player, an opera director and the composer of a new string quartet. I do the show live, and then drive home on the Saturday afternoon. I try not to work on Sundays. If I’m writing a book, of course, that might have to take over for a while.”
Ford has written several books, and while most are accessible to a general audience, he’s never shy about exposing his readers to a wide array of adventurous music. He’s also the rare interviewer who’s able to “talk shop” with composers from the vantage point of a fellow practitioner. This is clearly demonstrated in Composer to Composer (1993), an excellent collection of interviews he conducted with many of Australia’s finest composers, as well as composers from elsewhere, such as the UK’s Brian Ferneyhough and Americans John Cage and Elliott Carter. Another one of his collections, Illegal Harmonies, has just been reissued in its third edition by Black, Inc.
Ford says, “Illegal Harmonies was a history of music in the 20th century and began as a radio series in 1997. There were ten 90-minute episodes, one for each decade. The book was published the same year, and this is its third edition. I’ve added a new preface and also there’s a new epilogue looking at music in the first decade of the 21st century.”
Black, Inc. has also recently published Ford’s latest book, The Sound of Pictures. He says, “Funnily enough, the book isn’t really about film scores. I’d say that, more accurately, it’s about films and how they used music and sound in general. It looks – and especially listens – to a lot of films, and finds some connections between them. The way films use sound to plant clues – including false clues – or to undermine, as well as reinforce, what is happening on the screen.”
Those wishing for an entrée to Ford’s own music might start with The Waltz Book, a recent CD release on the Tall Poppies imprint. It consists of sixty one-minute long waltzes performed by pianist Ian Munro. But these are hardly your garden-variety Viennese dance pieces by Strauss. They explore a wide array of sound worlds, using waltz time as a jumping off point for some truly imaginative musical excursions.
Ford says, “The piece was never really about waltzes. It was an attempt to build a single large structure out of a lot of small structures. I felt these small pieces should all be the same size – like a mosaic – but that each might have its own personality and be performable as an independent miniature. A minute seemed the obvious length for each piece, and having decided that, the idea of the minute-waltz followed. Of course, the fact that each minute is a waltz – or at least waltz-related – brings a kind of unity to the hour-long whole, but what interested me above all was two things. First, I wanted to experiment with putting different amounts of music into the minute molds: you can have a minute of furious activity, or a minute of Satie-like blankness. Second, I wanted the overall structure of the hour to be coherent. That’s a long time listening to piano miniatures, and the audience needs to have its attention held: there had to be a sense of a journey or a story being told. You can imagine that at the first performance I was quite nervous!”
Another of Ford’s most recent pieces found the composer working in another medium with a storied tradition: the brass band. The Black Dyke Band premiered his work The Rising at the Manchester Brass festival in January 2011.
Ford says, “Without wishing to make a pun, writing for a brass band was a blast, and especially writing for the Black Dyke Band which is the UK’s finest and has more than 150 years of history behind it. They can play anything – they are total virtuosi. I’d never written for band before. I wasn’t even terribly sure what a baritone horn was. I did my homework, but I confess there was an element of guesswork involved. But the piece came out well. It sounded just as I’d hoped. Better, in some ways, because one thing I’d failed to appreciate was just how homogenous the sound is – it’s like they are all playing different sizes of the same instrument. It was this big glowing mass of sound – the Berlin Philharmonic under Karajan – and I am completely hooked. I would love to write another band piece.”
Which other works would Andrew Ford like for listeners from outside Australia to hear? “I’m very happy with my Symphony (2008). I feel that, perhaps out of all my pieces, you could say this was really typical of me. There are no references, no extra-musical stuff: it’s just my music. And fortunately you can hear (and see) Brett Dean conducting the premiere of the piece at my website. I’ve revised it slightly since then, but nothing major. My opera, Rembrandt’s Wife (2009), is another piece I am very happy with. I had a brilliant libretto (by Sue Smith) and I tried to make it into one long song. I was determined it would be full of real singing from start to finish. It was a joy to write and I’ve never felt so unselfconscious in writing a piece. It felt as though it wrote itself. What else? Maybe Learning to Howl (2001), a song cycle for soprano, soprano sax/clarinets, harp and percussion, to words mostly by women.”
“One long-term project is called Progess. My earliest pieces – when I was a teenager – were rather influenced by Stockhausen’s then current intuitive music. This was convenient, in a way, because I must admit that I didn’t really know how to write everything down. As my technique improved, I have always wanted to return to that, to introduce more freedom into my pieces, but the trouble is I keep hearing them rather clearly in my imagination and I end up notating what I hear. Progress, right from the start, is designed as a fluid piece, with hardly anything pinned down and the players asked to improvise in various ways and based on certain melodic models. The instrumentation is totally flexible and so is the spatial layout. Indeed perhaps the most interesting thing about it is the way it will accommodate itself to the building in which it is performed – literally filling the building (not just the main performance space – even assuming there is one of these), so that it becomes a musical representation of the building. There will also be recorded voices – something I’ve used quite a lot recently – talking about the place, its history, its significance, what was there before it was built, etc. It should see the light of day next year with further performances in 2013, but it’s early in the process, so I can’t say too much more.”
When asked who, apart from Andrew Ford, are the composers born or residing in Australia that should gain more currency abroad, Ford replies, “David Lumsdaine, 80 this year and now living in the UK, is a very serious voice, I think. What interests me in particular is the way in which his soundscapes and his composed works intersect. There’s a new CD – White Dawn – that places them alongside each other. I’m very drawn to Mary Finsterer’s music, especially her latest stuff. It’s always interesting to observe composers in transition. Of course if you’re not in transition, then you’re drying up.”
Illegal Harmonies and The Sound of Pictures can be ordered via Black, Inc.’s website.
San Francisco Bay Area composer/performer Kanoko Nishi wraps up our series of interviews with composers who are premiering new works at the 10th Annual Outsound New Music Summit in San Francisco on Friday, July 22nd. The Friday night concert, entitled The Art of Composition,starts at 8 pm at the Community Music Center, 544 Capp Street, San Francisco. Tickets are available online from Brown Paper Tickets, and you can also buy them at the door. Listeners who don’t want to wait that long can get up close and personal with the composers, and learn about their creative process, at a free Monday night panel discussion at 7 pm on July 18th.
Kanoko is classically trained on piano and received a BA in music performance from Mills College in 2006. Her recent interest has primarily been in performing 20th century and contemporary music on piano and koto, and free improvisation in a variety of contexts. SF Bay Area contrabassist Tony Dryer and guitarist IOIOI, visiting from Italy, will perform Kanoko’s graphic scores as a duo.
S21: How has your classical piano training prepared you – or not prepared you – for improvisation and composition?
I think that one very important element that is particular to musical improvisation as opposed to improvisation in other fields is the role of the musical instruments one performs and interacts with, and classical training for me was just a very deep way of building a relationship with my instruments. What has been helpful is not so much the technique, vocabulary or repertoire, but the time, energy and thoughts spent in the process of acquiring these more concrete skills and knowledge. For me, every improvisation I do is like a battle with the instrument I’m playing, in my case, either the piano or koto, and though I cannot really practice improvising by its definition, it’s only by practicing regularly that I feel I can enrich myself as a person, build my stamina and confidence enough to be a suitable match for my instrument to bring out its full potential. (more…)
Krys Bobrowski is up next in our series of interviews with composers who are premiering new works at the 10th Annual Outsound New Music Summit in San Francisco on Friday, July 22nd. The Friday night concert, entitled The Art of Composition,starts at 8 pm at the Community Music Center, 544 Capp Street, San Francisco. Tickets are available online from Brown Paper Tickets, and you can also buy them at the door. Listeners who don’t want to wait that long can get up close and personal with the composers, and learn about their creative process, at a free Monday night panel discussion at 7 pm on July 18th.
Krys is a sound artist, composer and musician living in Oakland, California. In addition to French horn she plays acoustic and electronic instruments of her own design. Her collection of original instruments includes prepared amplified rocking chairs, bull kelp horns, Leaf Speakers, Gliss Glass (pictured at left) and the Harmonic Slide. Krys received her M.F.A. in Electronic Music and Recording Media from Mills College and her B.A. in Computers and Music from Dartmouth College. In addition to performing her own work, Bobrowski plays with the Bay Area-based improvisation ensemble Vorticella.
Her new work, Lift, Loft, Lull, is a series of short pieces exploring the sonic properties of metal pipes and plates and the use of balloons as resonators, performed by the composer and Gino Robair. The compositions have their origins in Bobrowski’s recent instrument prototyping work for the Exploratorium.
S21: Do your pipes, metal plates, and balloons come with any sound-generating history? Is there any “tradition” behind their use in music?
During my artist residency at the Exploratorium, I began experimenting with alternative resonators for musical instruments. I wanted to create an experience that would allow the listener to hear the ‘sonic bloom,’ the moment a resonator comes in tune and couples to a vibrating object.
As part of this project I started researching resonators in traditional and experimental instruments. I came across an interesting photo from the 1950s of someone playing an instrument made of glass rods attached to a series of inflated plastic cushions. The cushions were acting as the resonators for the glass. Later, I learned that the Baschet brothers, Francois and Bernard Baschet, invented this instrument along with dozens of other beautiful sound sculptures, including an inflatable guitar!
This started my exploration of using balloons as resonators, mostly for instruments made out of various kinds of metal: plates, pipes, bars, odd-shaped scraps. I also came across references to Tom Nunn’s and Prent Rodgers’ work with balloons and balloon resonators in a book by Bart Hopkin, ‘Musical Instrument Design.’ This led me to make a version of the ‘balloon gong’ instrument shown in the book.
The results of my sonic explorations and the ‘balloon gong’ will be featured in my composition, Lift Loft Lull. (more…)
Here’s the first in a series of interviews with composers who are premiering new works at the 10th Annual Outsound New Music Summit in San Francisco on Friday, July 22nd. The Friday night concert, entitled The Art of Composition,starts at 8 pm at the Community Music Center, 544 Capp Street, San Francisco. Tickets are available online from Brown Paper Tickets, and you can also buy them at the door. Listeners who don’t want to wait that long can get up close and personal with the composers, and learn about their creative process, at a free Monday night panel discussion at 7 pm on July 18th.
Andrew Raffo Dewar (b.1975 Rosario, Argentina) is an Assistant Professor in New College at the University of Alabama. He’s a composer, improviser, soprano saxophonist and ethnomusicologist. He’s studied and/or performed with Steve Lacy, Anthony Braxton, Bill Dixon, Alvin Lucier, and Milo Fine. He has also had a long involvement with Indonesian traditional and experimental music. His work has been performed by the Flux Quartet, the Koto Phase ensemble and Sekar Anu. As an improviser and performer Andrew has shared the stage with a plethora of musicians worldwide, both the celebrated and the little-known.
As a member of his own Interactions Quartet, Andrew will premiere “Strata” (2011), dedicated to Eduardo Serón and inspired by the Argentine artist’s 2008 series of paintings, “La Libertad Es Redonda” (“Freedom is Round”). His description tells us that “Through a combination of improvisation and notation, performers negotiate several “layers” of written material, mixing and matching components that are eventually assembled into nested counterpoint.”
S21: You’re traveling quite a distance to premiere your piece at the Outsound Summit but it’s certainly not the first time you’ve been here. How did you become associated with the San Francisco Bay Area new music community?
I lived in Oakland for roughly two years (2000-2002) before heading off to graduate school at Wesleyan University in Connecticut to study with people like Anthony Braxton and Alvin Lucier. My first exposure to the Bay Area community was, if I remember correctly, a two-day workshop with legendary bassist/composer Alan Silva organized by Damon Smith at pianist Scott Looney’s performance space in West Oakland in 2000, which was an excellent experience. After that, I worked regularly — I think it was weekly — in a “guided improvisation” workshop ensemble at Looney’s organized by clarinetist Jacob Lindsay and guitarist Ernesto Diaz-Infante, and separate improvisation sessions with violist/composer Jorge Boehringer, which were both situations where I had the opportunity to play with many great Bay Area folks, like trumpeter Liz Albee and many others, which was wonderful. Around that time I was walking by guitarist/composer John Shiurba’s house with my horn, and he happened to be outside watering his garden. He asked me what kind of music I played, and I think the combination of the perplexed look on my face and my inability to answer his question easily is why we connected that day — he invited me in to chat, and when I saw a framed photo of Anthony Braxton on his mantle (whose work I’ve appreciated since my late teens, and who I’ve had the great opportunity to study and perform with) I knew I was “home.” (more…)
A nanosecond or two ago–at the dawning of the age of aquarius, when my generation’s future was still a bright crazy quilt of dreams and possibilities–my wife Suzanne and I were graduate students at West Virginia University in Morgantown. I had just successfully avoided Viet Nam by signing up for two years of active duty in the Navy Reserve and accidentally getting myself assigned to duty on an icebreaker. I spent most of my contribution to the war effort at McMurdo Sound, Antarctica, staving off death by boredom by feeding beer to penguins who, as my shipmates and I soon learned, make nasty and argumentative, yet amusing, drunks. I later spent several months on the same ship in the Barents Sea spying on the Russians and hoping that the Badgers that came barreling at the ship four or five times a day about 100 feet off the water, sometimes opening their bomb doors, were not serious. I’m sure the Russian pilots thought it was at least as amusing as giving beer to penguins.
In the summer of 1967, my service as a floating office worker and sometime typist for the CIA, having been completed, we moved to Morgantown and settled into a cheap apartment above a downtown flower shop on Pine Street. Suzanne was a graduate assistant in the art department, I was a “gradass” in journalism. We each got paid a couple of hundred dollars a month, free tuition, and I got a regular check under the GI Bill. We had it made but, of course, we didn’t know it at the time.
One day Suzanne introduced me to a thin, bearded, bushy-haired guy named John Vaughan who was picking up a few extra bucks each week by sitting around in a jock strap in one of her drawing classes while art students drew his anatomy. He looked a lot like the image of Jesus that we all know and love but then all the young dudes looked like Jesus in those days. “You’ve got to come hear the band I play with,” he said. “We’re pretty good.” And so a couple of days later we made our way to a grungy joint called Mother Witherspoon’s to hear the Mind Garage, as the band was called. It was the closest thing I’ve ever had to a religious experience. As soon as the five-member band hit the stage and lit into a psychedelic arrangement of Sam & Dave’s “Hold On, I’m Comin'” the place quickly turned into pure pandemonium. Here were five musicians who were symbiotically joined at the hip. They played mainly covers, true, but they understood dynamics in a way that most acid bands of the period didn’t so even covers became original. They knew when to play loud and when to play soft. They were garage band and musically sophisticated at the same time.
A few days later, I wrote a somewhat pretentious, but very enthusiastic, review of the band for the student newspaper which, alas, Larry McClurg, their terrific lead singer and web archivist has seen fit to preserve for posterity here. (The headshot alone is worth the trip.) I don’t think Suzanne and I missed a performance after that first night until we left Morgantown to come to New York (or, in truth, to an apartment we could afford on Staten Island which though technically part of New York City really isn’t) in the fall of 1967. By then I knew the Mind Garage had been encouraged by an Episcopal minister named Michael Paine and his wife to write a rock church service and that it was almost finished. I didn’t know about it at the time but that piece–the Electric Liturgy–was first performed at Trinity Episcopal Church in Morgantown on March 10, 1968. It was the first live Christian Rock worship service ever–basically, what Catholics’ would call a “Mass.” The band performed it live at several other churches in the following months, including at St Stephens of the Incarnation Episcopal Church in Washington, DC and at Princeton University. In April, 1969, the band performed the first nationally televised rock and roll worship service from New York on ABC TV.
Some time in late June 1968 I ran across a piece in the Village Voice by the then arts editor Diane Fisher, a fellow West Virginian, lamenting the fact that she has just been in Morgantown and there was no music scene there. I dashed off an “au contraire” note, with a copy of my review. About a week later, she called me to tell me she had learned that the Mind Garage was performing the mass at St. Mark’s in the Bowery in a couple of weeks. After the St. Mark’s performance (which was terrific, by the way), Annie did an enthusiastic review, generously quoting my silly college review and giving me credit for turning her on to the Mind Garage. It helped me get a freelance writing career going and I’m sure it helped the band land a contract with RCA, for whom they did a couple of albums, before breaking up and fading back into real life in 1970.
What none of us realized at the time was that they were accidentally making history, inventing a musical genre that has become a multi-million dollar business, although the band never made much money at it. (They performed all of the services at churches for free and never really had a big hit.)
A couple of band members managed to go on and build careers as musicians but Larry McClurg, almost singlehandedly, has kept the Mind Garage faith all these years and still believes that there could still be a future for the group. Thanks to Facebook and the web page Larry maintains, the group has more fans today than they did in 1970. There was an outdoor reunion concert in West Virginia in 2007 and there is a new recording of the Electric Liturgy, complete with words and background, available for free download here. There is a petition you should sign and send to the Rock n’ Roll Hall of Fame.
Like so many of us (and here I include myself) who were young in the sixties and had what the horse players call “cheap speed,” too much opportunity before we were ready for it proved to be a curse. I hope Larry is right and there will be a new beginning for the Mind Garage. As for me I’ve already gone through the list of projects I never started or never finished and narrowed it down to the three or four I want to spend the rest of my life not starting or not finishing.
But, as I sit here writing this, my fellow traveler for the past 46 years, now gravely ill, asleep nearby, I can almost conjure up the sense of joy that the two of us shared on that night nearly 50 years ago when we heard the Mind Garage for the first time at Mother Witherspoon’s. Listening to the YouTube video above, my heart did a little dance for the first time in a long time. Thanks Larry and Jack and Norris and Teddy and John. I owe you.
Maya Beiser, everyone’s favorite ex-Can Banging All Star downtown cellist, was an invited presenter at the March 2011 TED conference. The TED site recently released a high quality video of her lecture recital, and it’s already garnered over 80,000 views!
TED’s slogan: “Ideas worth spreading.” We’re glad that Maya’s getting the chance to spread the word about Steve Reich’s Cello Counterpoint and David Lang’sWorld to Come far and wide!
Dither at the 2010 Invisible Dog Extravaganza! Photo by Isabelle Selby
Like the New Music Bake Sale, there’s another great Brooklyn tradition beginning to happen. On Friday, July 8, 7:00 pm to midnight at the Invisible Dog Art Center, Dither will be hosting their second annual “Extravaganza.”
This year they will be featuring an array of experimental sounds, presented by composers and performers notorious for carving out unique musical niches.
In addition to Dither, the lineup includes renowned guitarist Marc Ribot, powerhouse quartet So Percussion, Ches Smith and These Arches (an all-star line-up including Mary Halvorson, Andrea Parkins, and Tim Berne), Ted Hearne and Philip White’s raucous noise group R We Who R We, Sound sculpting vocalist Lesley Flanigan, multi-instrumentalist Nathan Koci, and a multimedia work for suitcase radios by composer Paula Matthusen. Dither will perform works by Phill Niblock, Corey Dargel, Lisa R. Coons, Joshua Lopes, and Travis Just.
Dither’s Invisible Dog Extravaganza!
Friday July 8, 7:00 pm – Midnight
The Invisible Dog Art Center, 51 Bergen St.
F/G to Bergen, 2/3/4/5 to Borough Hall, A/C to Jay
$6 admission
Sponsored by The Brooklyn Arts Coucil and Brooklyn Brewery
www.theinvisibledog.org
www.ditherquartet.com
(and if any of you still can’t get enough of Dither, you can listen to my recent podcast episode with James Moorehere. I’ve also recorded an interview with Taylor Levine which will be available later this summer. You can subscribe for free in iTunes if you’re afraid you’ll miss it.)
Summer’s here and the time is right for dancing in the streets. Or, making playlists. Or something. Some friends who just got themselves a screened-in porch for their house up in Willow asked me to come up with an iPod playlist for sitting around at dusk smoking cigars and sipping brandy. Mostly pop-stuff but offbeat. I decided to go all-female..well, okay, there is one boy-girl duet…because I like girl singers. But, I digress, I had so much fun putting the list together that I thought we ought to have a little playlist contest here. Any genre is ok. You can add to my list or, even better, make your own. Don’t know what the prize will be but I’ll think of something. So, da da, here’s my Woodstock Summer 2011 Mostly Girl Front Porch Chill Mix:
Én Csak Azt Csodálom (Lullabye For Katherine) Márta Sebestyén
Ghost of a Dog Edie Brickell
Things We Said Today Joy Askew
If I Fell Evan Rachel Wood
Walk Away Renee Ann Savoy, Linda Ronstadt
Heart Like a Wheel Kate & Anna McGarrigle
Old Fashioned Morphine Jolie Holland
Blues in D Kate and Anna McGarrigle
House of the Rising Sun Sinead O’Connor
Straight Out of Compton Nina Gordon
Sister Rosetta Goes Before Us Alison Krauss
All Night Sam Phillips
Waiting Around to Die Be Good Tanyas
In Every Dream Home A Heartache Bryan Ferry/Jane Birkin
Song for Ireland Mary Black
Reflecting Light Sam Phillips
Llorando Rebekah Del Rio
Je Reviens Autour De Lucie
Quelqu’un m’a dit Carla Bruni
Mo Ghile Mar Mary Black
Tus Ojas Trieste Rebekah Del Rio
Wayfaring Stranger Anonymous 4
Adieu False Heart Ann Savoy. Linda Ronstadt
Talk to me of Mendocino Kate & Anna McGarrigle
Szerelem, Szerelem (Love, Love) Muzsikás
Blackbird Evan Rachel Wood
The Littlest Birds Be Good Tanyas
Complainte Pour Ste. Cathrine Kate & Anna McGarrigle
Falling (Twin Peaks Theme) Julee Cruise
Riders on the Storm Ahn Trio
Didn’t Leave Nobody But the Baby Juice
I might add that you can listen to any or all of these songs free at Grooveshark. I don’t know how they get away with it so don’t tell anyone.
On Thursday, I’m giving a talk about Milton Babbitt’s life and work to high school composers at Westminster Choir College’s Composition Camp. It seems only fitting to introduce them to Babbitt as part of the week’s activities. He lived near WCC’s campus, attended a number of events at the college, and until it closed some years back, could often be found at the Annex at lunchtime. Many of our students knew Milton best because they’d waited on him there!
Another reason that I want to share my interest in Milton’s music with them: he was the first composer that I met; when I was about the same age as many of the composers attending this week’s camp. And yes, I found his music to be baffling at first; but it made me want to learn more about contemporary music: how it’s made and what makes the composers of it tick. I’ve been at it ever since!
It’s difficult to sum up Milton’s work in an introductory lecture. I’ve limited myself to 12 slides (pun intended).
Kanoko is classically trained on piano and received a BA in music performance from Mills College in 2006. Her recent interest has primarily been in performing 20th century and contemporary music on piano and koto, and free improvisation in a variety of contexts. SF Bay Area contrabassist 
Andrew Raffo Dewar
