Contemporary Classical

Band Music, Composers, Contemporary Classical

Three Evenings With John Mackey

Last week at the University of Michigan School of Music, Theater and Dance saw a visit from renowned band composer John Mackey. Accurately described as a young hotshot, Mackey’s transformation from an unknown dance-music composer in New York to a wildly successful creator of band music began with the 2004 wind ensemble arrangement of his orchestral work, Redline Tango. Since then he has received countless performances from high school, college and professional groups and has earned stunning national popularity best illustrated by his estimable total of 5,000 Facebook friends.  Though he came to Michigan for the October 1 performance of his trombone concerto, Harvest, Mackey’s interaction with the composition department took place over three evenings, starting with a casual outing to a local Ann Arbor bar on Wednesday, September 29.

I was immediately struck by Mackey’s affability, which exceeded any estimate I could have made prior to meeting him. As the night wore on, I realized – via Mackey’s own admissions – that appearing “cool” to the young people who so often perform his music is a critical part of his image as a professional musician. Armed with an electrifying personality, Mackey knows how to fill a room and endear himself to strangers. He is self-deprecating and open, and these qualities were probably the mot valuable elements I drew from his visit, given how closely they tie into his marketing success.

Mackey’s business sense is truly admirable. He takes advantage of social networking and other online resources to get his name out into the market and self-publishes his works, allowing him to control the distribution of his intellectual property and pursue copyright infringements when necessary. Though primarily known for his compositional achievements, he recently partnered with a marketing agency to produce a guide to new online casino platforms in Canada, further showcasing his entrepreneurial reach. For these reasons, I think Mackey epitomizes much of what the modern composer should be. Instead of submitting to the esoteric proclivities of our profession, he has found a way to update the social potential of composers within a given network. While I have met other composers with strong local presences, I have not met one with a following as strong and widespread as Mackey’s.

Of course, Mackey’s music is at the center of his success, and it serves him excellently given the market he targets. Highly rhythmic, laden with percussion and infused with progressive rock and other popular influences, his compositions are ideally suited for collegiate bands who are attracted to strong grooves and loud dynamics. In our composition seminar on Thursday, he explained that his non-band compositions sound the same, so it would seem wind ensemble is a perfect setting for the kind of music that comes easily to him. Interestingly, the night before this Mackey admitted he is a poor composition teacher, and the next day he told our seminar that he usually does not write without a commission. Thus, I did not find Mackey’s visit to Michigan a very informative experience on an artistic level. Nevertheless, hisprestige is undeniable seeing that his expansive popularity makes him a critical connection between thousands of musicians and the world of American contemporary music.

As I mentioned before, Mackey’s residency culminated in the Michigan Symphony Band’s performance on his trombone concerto, Harvest. Unfortunately for us composers, the previous day’s seminar included the most recent recording of Harvest, which had been played by at the University of Texas with New York Philharmonic Principal Trombonist Joseph Alessi only a few days earlier. I call this “unfortunate” because Alessi’s performance was super human, and it made the Symphony Band’s delivery on Friday underwhelming. David Jackson, Friday’s soloist, played valiantly, but the score was stacked against him. At moments when Alessi’s power penetrated clearly on the recording, Jackson was buried by the supporting sound. Perhaps further spoiled by the recording, I found the texture static and dull, and I yearned for a moment when the trombone would have acoustic space in which to saunter, liberated from the weight of the backing ensemble. In spite of these factors, the Symphony Band’s performance was definitely a success, and I left Hill Auditorium entranced by all the works I heard. The rest of the program featured an arrangement of Leornard Bernstein’s Overture to Candide (1956), Vittorio Gianni’s haunting Variations and Fugue (1964), Ricardo Lorenz’s El Muro (2008) and Florent Schmitt’s Dionysiaques (1913).

Both Mackey’s music and presence left me with the impression that wind ensemble and band music is the music of the future, and these other compositions did not change my mind. Capable of high energy and subtle sensuality, wind ensembles are a perfect platform for the diversity and dynamism of contemporary music, as consummated by his works from Harvest to Asphalt Cocktail. Moreover, while orchestral genres came of age at the pen of European masters, writing for wind ensemble gives living composer a direct conduit to oft-forgotten American stalwarts such as Vincent Persechetti and William Schuman.

Above everything else, Mackey was very matter-of-fact during his visit to Michigan, and in no other area was he clearer than in describing the advantages of writing for band. In a world where composers struggle to get any attention from orchestral conductors, band directors receive contemporary works for wind ensemble with great enthusiasm and often perform the pieces more than once.  Mackey’s personal success is emblematic of how much bands and wind ensembles can afford composers both in terms of finances and notoriety. As refreshing as it was to experience his humorous, sociable and pragmatic qualities, I was equally awed by the momentum of his cultural relevance. If nothing else, I learned from him the value of self-promotion and generating enthusiasm for your musical product. Regardless how much I integrate these concepts into my career, my standard bearer for how a composer should be his own advocate and spokesperson will always be John Mackey.

by Garrett Schumann
Contemporary Classical

Letters, We Get Letters, We Get Stacks and Stacks of Letters

Dear Jerry:

I am extremely interested in educating myself on the trends in new “downtown” as well as much “uptown” music (e.g. the music, methods and processes of; yourself, David Lang, Meredith Monk, Nico Muhly, Toru Takemitsu, Steve Reich, Morton Feldman, Carl Ruggles, Charles Ives, Lou Harrison), and I am in search of resources online to meet this end.  I want to know them the way you do, or the way a composition professor would.  The online resources of which I am aware are The New Grove Dictionary, Music Theory Spectrum, The Society For Music Theory, and Sequenza21.com.

I have a BA in music, so I can read and understand most things about art music.
I want to acquaint my thinking with the culture and methods of these great composers.  Can you recommend some resources for me?  I thank you very much for whatever time you take with this.
JL
by Jerry Bowles
Contemporary Classical, Electro-Acoustic, Experimental Music, Flute, Houston, Improv, Percussion, Performers, Sound Art, Women composers

Houston Mixtape #5: Back To Imagined Spaces

Pyramid and Michelle Yom at Labotanica (Houston, TX)

This Friday, October 1st at 7pm, Michelle Yom will present her sound performance installation Back To Imagined Spaces at Houston’s alternative arts and music venue Labotanica located at 2316 Elgin Street. This is a part of Labotanica’s ongoing Hear/Her/Ear series spotlighting women in experimental music.

I got a chance to hear Michelle last month in a solo vocal set at Avant-Garden where she recorded and looped her singing in real time to additively build a series of haunting chorales. Michelle is perhaps best known as a flautist with a strong classical technique and the skills and imagination of a great improviser. Her flute and drums duo Doggebi features Michelle with drummer Spike The Percussionist – a musician I name checked in my Houston Mixtape #3: The Epicenter Of Noise – freely and (almost) breathlessly improvising music that is somehow stark yet filled with a minutiae of details.

Back To Imagined Spaces imagines the human body as a collection of cells that sing and are heard in a “self-imposed timeless space” contained within the pyramid Michelle has constructed inside Labotanica. Regarding the music she will perform, Michelle writes: “The first set is a series of staccato vocalizations with syllables from the mantra, Asato Ma Sad Gamaya, processed through seven delays. The second set will be a live performance of tonal pieces titled Heart, Ears, Kidney, and Stomach, also using vocal sounds. The pieces are intended to capture a version of imaginary but prudent sounds, much like taking a microscope and focusing the lens into singing, living cells.”

Also on Friday’s program are performances by artist, vocalist and electronic composer Melanie Jamison and Labotanica’s tireless curator, visual and sound artist Ayanna Jolivet McCloud.

There is a $5 cover charge for the show. All proceeds go to the musicians. Michelle Yom’s installation will be up October 1st through October 9th, 2010.

by Chris Becker
Composers, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Music Events

Field Reporting from Ann Arbor, MI

There are few institutions in America with a richer history than the University of Michigan School of Music, Theater and Dance and the composition department there has a particularly impressive tradition. With past and present faculty and students including Michael Daugherty, Bright Sheng, William Bolcom and George Crumb, UM composers have had a hand in much of contemporary American music history including the homegrown Once Festival and other movements such as Bang on a Can.  Moreover, with alumni currently holding faculty positions at premiere music schools across the country (including  UM), it seems safe to say that – despite the impossibility of pinpointing the best composition department in the country – Michigan’s legacy is gilded with rare prestige.

I am not here to sell the UM to Sequenza 21 readers, but Michigan’s reputation in composition is a quietly held secret, becoming increasingly obscured in recent decades as the landscape of American music education gained more parity. The test of time proves Michigan is neither an aging dinosaur nor a flash in the pan, and my experience here – though a brief three weeks – has evinced further proof that the UM’s prowess in music is no accident.

With all this pomp, you may think the UM has cast a spell on me, but that is not the case. Just like any other music school, Michigan has limitations and specialties, but its environment is very special. Ann Arbor is extraordinarily supportive of the arts, particularly in relation to its population (114, 024), and in the last week I have gone to four remarkably well-attended concerts, namely because three featured contemporary compositions.

The first concert offered a selection of French organ and harpsichord music from the late 17th and early 18th century, which was followed later that evening by the Michigan Chamber Players’ performance of two homegrown compositions: Andrew Bishop’s The Juke Joints in Burgundy (Blues in Burgundy) and Paul Schoenfield’s Ghetto Songs. The former was an exercise in timbre (scored for flute, harp and contrabass) and merging diverse influences. As Bishop explained in his program note, Juke Joints alludes to various French musical sources, but has a clear jazz orientation and climaxes with an extended jam between the three players. Ghetto Songs was decidedly more serious in tone, setting holocaust-era Yiddish poetry in a tastefully versatile musical landscape, which was at once evocative, suspenseful and somber.

To have Schoenfield and Bishop’s compositions featured on a Michigan Chamber Players concert is not unusual because both are faculty members at the UM School of Music. More remarkable is that Juke Joints and Ghetto Songs shared the stage with Charles Martin Loeffler’s Two Rhapsodies for Oboe, Viola and Piano (1905) and Johannes Brahms’ Trio for Clarinet, Cello and Piano (1891). Perhaps in larger cities, classic repertoire is frequently juxtaposed with contemporary music, but one can’t forget we are in Ann Arbor, MI with just over 100,000 residents. Moreover, two orchestra concerts from this last weekend also programmed recent compositions along side more standard pieces. Coming from my undergraduate in Houston, a city of more than 2,000,000 with an orchestra whose 2010-2011 season’s most recently written offering is Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky, I am stunned in the best way possible that the Ann Arbor community so enthusiastically receives modern music.

Of course, cultural centers like Boston, New York, Los Angeles and Chicago can provide similar experiences for young, learning composers. But, there is one thing Ann Arbor has that most other places don’t: pride in their own. As cheesy as this sounds, I think it lies at the heart of the community’s receptive attitude towards a repertoire other audiences would scoff at. As evidence I give you Sunday’s Ann Arbor Symphony concert so-called “Made in Michigan”. Here, Shostakovich and Saint-Saens sat second fiddle to Bill Bolcom, William Albright and Michael Daugherty and – with the help of command performances like flautist Amy Porter’s delivery of Daugherty’s concerto, Trail of Tears – the audience received their music with respectful avidity. Two nights prior, I witnessed an astounding display of the Ann Arbor community’s musical perspicacity as they recognized the high quality with which the University Symphony Orchestra performed Chen Yi’s Percussion Concerto and were not fooled by the familiarity of Berlioz’s Roman Carnival and Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances, both of which were not performed as well, and the audience’s reaction reflected the difference.

I am sure, by now, you are all wondering why this makes Ann Arbor a special place. The University of Michigan is like a jewel to the state, and its products, whether football or composers are always treated with respect by the Michigan community. The ability to hear a wide range of music on a regular basis is, by itself, no special quality, but when paired with the intimacy of Ann Arbor, the cultural environment of the University of Michigan becomes rather extraordinary. At worst, Ann Arbor is a close second to the country’s brightest cultural hotspots, but I imagine these locales don’t deliver the same nourishment of a tight-knit and supportive intellectual ecosystem. Again, I do not think this makes Michigan any better than the other places a composer can get an education these days, but it provides a rare platform for any young musicians burgeoning talents. I look forward to reporting more about his exceptional dot on the American musical map as my time here progresses.

by Garrett Schumann
Contemporary Classical

Loud and Clear sfSound

Musical programs come in all shapes and sizes, just like people. But getting a program to make sense is what separates the quick from the dead. The San Francisco-based new music chamber group sfSound usually puts on provocative programs, and their latest one, on Sept 19th at our town’s Community Music Center in the Mission, presented different kinds of musical energies, and made perfect sense.

It’s never wise to serve something heavy before the main course, and Swiss composer Beat Furrer’s 5 minute Ayer (1991), though not exactly lightweight, didn’t tax its audience unnecessarily. Sure, it was somewhat demanding–for the players–but also mercurial, with linear and disjunct material, plus a broad range of colors, which Matt Ingalls, clarinet, Christopher Jones, piano, and Monica Scott, cello, dispatched easily.  The succeeding 9 minute group improvisation by John Ingle, saxes,  Jones again on piano, and Kjelll Nordeson, percussion, was thicker in texture, but not especially memorable.

Hans Thomalla’s 14 minute Lied (2008), which the composer described in truly informative program note, made a far stronger impression. It didn’t sound particularly Germanic–meaning Angst-ridden or drily didactic–but was instead carefully balanced–the sections functioned like strophes in a song–and full of sonorous contrasts, especially in the tenor sax part–John Ingle again–which had a long slow sequence of closely related pitches. The piece wisely avoided closure–is anything ever really resolved?–which made it doubly poetic, with Ingle capably supported by Nordeson, vibraphone, and Jones, piano.

Matt Ingalls’ Improvisation for Solo Clarinet (2010) was both minimal–constructed from the most basic elements like scales and detached notes–and more complex musical ones like difference / combination tones, which thudded at unexpected intervals from the speakers on the stage floor.  And, like any good improv sounded both spur of the moment and composed, and Ingalls’ easy virtuosity held the audience spellbound for 17 uninterrupted minutes.

Philip Glass is famous–some would say notorious–for pieces of long duration, and his first opera with Robert Wilson, Einstein on the Beach (1975), which lasts over 5 hours,  is easily one of his most seminal works, and a landmark work in recent new music. And the entire ensemble here–with the addition of Stacey Pelinka, piccolo, Kyle Bruckmann, oboe, Matthew Goodheart, electric ogan, Hadley McCarroll, electric organ and voice–she served as Glass the conductor by nodding her head dramatically before the next complex figure–and Diana Pray voice, made Train 1, from Act 1, go by in a flash , even thought it lasted 25 minutes. Glass’ work requires perfect ensemble and the ability to play, evenly, at breakneck speeds –it begins at met. 92, and moves up to met.126. The carefully prepared modulations and textural changes were breathtaking, and joyful. And it was an unalloyed pleasure to hear the great composer working his magic, and the audience respond with way deserved cheers.

by Michael McDonagh
Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Events, Festivals, Music Events

Sweetness is my weakness!

Of all the press releases I received over the summer, none made me happier than the one saying that, yes, there would be another New Music Bake Sale this year.

It’s happening this Saturday, September 25, at the Irondale Center (85 South Oxford Street, Brooklyn) from 5-11:30pm and will be emceed by hosts from WQXR/Q2.

It looks like this year will be even more delicious than last year with more performances, more baked goods, and a silent auction.  All of the ensembles with tables have been invited to offer special items for auction (with all the money going directly to the ensemble); look for updates to the auction items here.  Want a piano lesson with Kathy Supové or a custom album written and recorded just for you by Loadbang?  The silent auction is where you’ll have the chance.

There will also be a bunch of performances, and by incredibly diverse groups: the Respect Sextet, Wet Ink, Kathy Supové, MIVOS quartet, Matthew Welch, DITHER, Todd Reynolds, Mantra Percussion, and Anti-Social Music.  Unbelievable.  $15 gets you in the door, includes 2 drink tickets, and you can come and go as you please.

I said it last year, and I’ll say it again:  even if you don’t care for all the music, it’s hard to deny the sense of community from having so many different groups all in the same room – we are all in this together! Tip of the hat to Newspeak, Ensemble de Sade, and the Exapno New Music Center for making it happen.

Finally, I’m not totally sure if you can still reserve a table as an ensemble, but if you are interested I would ask.  If you are interested in helping out I’m sure they would love to hear from you as well: info@newmusicbakesale.org

New Music, Beer, and Cookies.  Seriously, what else could you possible ask for?!

by James Holt
Contemporary Classical, Houston

Music With Camera

Joachim Koester, Still from Tarantism, 2007, 16mm black-and-white film installation. Courtesy of Galleri Nicolai Wallner, Copenhagen, and Greene Naftali, New York.

2010-11 marks Houston based Musiqa’s seventh year of presenting free “loft” concerts at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. Each of these informal, intimate concerts is produced in conjunction with a different exhibition.

On Thursday, September 23, 2010, at 6:30 p.m., in conjunction with the museum’s exhibit Dance with Camera, Musiqa presents a collaborative “loft” concert with video artists BeJohnny that will merge live music and video. The Thursday program includes Alvin Lucier’s Queen of the South and Frederic Rzewski’s To the Earth, featuring Craig Hauschildt and Luke Hubley on percussion.

I wrote about Musiqa and their May 2010 Hand + Made concert in my first Houston Mixtape for Sequenza 21. Musiqa percussionist Craig Hauschildt’s solo performance of Vinko Globokar’s primal piece of performance art Corporal was one of the highlights of that program, and I can’t wait to see what he and the rest of the ensemble have cooked up for this Thursday’s concert.

by Chris Becker
CDs, Contemporary Classical, Hilary Hahn, Media, Recordings

Bringing new meaning to “double concerto”

Jennifer Higdon and John Clare in Dallas for her Violin Concerto performance in May 2010

It is a huge day for new music new releases tomorrow, Tuesday, September 21st. Last month you might remember I interviewed Nico Muhly about his new releases before he spoke in LA about the works on the Decca label and featured an in-store performance. Tomorrow those discs will hit the stores as well as two major works by another composer, Jennifer Higdon.

What is astounding about Higdon’s cds are that they are by two different labels (Telarc & DG) and by two different violinists (Jennifer Koh and Hilary Hahn) of two different violin concertos, written closely together: The Singing Rooms and the Violin Concerto. I was curious about how all of this came together for Jennifer.

Listen to the interview: mp3 file

by John Clare