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Bang on a Can Long Play Festival 2022: An Interview with David Lang

Some of the artists at the 2022 Long Play festival

Two years ago, I was editing a 2020 interview with the composer David Lang about the new multi-day festival that Bang on a Can planned for that spring, Long Play, when I realized the significance of the festival title. The year 2020 would be Bang on a Can’s 33rd anniversary. Long Play = LP = 33 rpm. Very clever! Although the festival was delayed for two years, it retains its name.

The inaugural Long Play festival takes place on April 29, April 30 and May 1, 2022 at a half-dozen venues in Brooklyn, including BAM, Roulette, Littlefield, the Center for Fiction, Mark Morris Dance Center, Public Records and the outdoor plaza at 300 Ashland. Over 60 performances are scheduled. Some are free, but most are accessed via a day pass ($95) or a three-day festival pass ($195). Over a hundred performers range from the Sun Ra Arkestra to jazz pianist Vijay Iyer to bagpiper Matthew Welsh (complete list is here).

Lang, along with the composers Julia Wolfe and Michael Gordon launched Bang on a Can in New York City in 1987 with a 12-hour concert in a downtown art gallery. The organization became known for its annual marathon concerts in New York, and later expanded to include a performance group (the Bang on a Can All-Stars), a commissioning program, education programs and festivals at MASS MoCA in the Berkshires, a record label (Cantaloupe), and an on-going extensive online series created when live concerts were cancelled during the pandemic.

Looking back on our conversation on February 25, 2020, most of what Lang and I discussed is still relevant to the rescheduled Long Play Festival. Here is the interview, edited for length and clarity.

Gail Wein Successful marathons have been your signature event for Bang on a Can for 33 years. So what prompted the creation of this differently-formatted festival, Long Play?

David Lang

David Lang Over the last couple of marathons we have tried to expand our reach to different kinds of music and to other kinds of communities. After a while of doing that, we felt like we were inviting people on to the marathon for slots of 15 or 20 minutes that we wished were an hour or two hours. And so we got interested in a lot of other kinds of music and it just seemed like we weren’t spending enough time with them.

I remember thinking – this is at the last marathon – people would come in and they would go, “That was incredible. Why am I only wanting that for fifteen minutes?” What we’re hoping to do with this is to say, we’ve uncovered all these incredible connections between all these different kinds of music. And now we really want to let people go deeper into what those connections do and where they go.

Gail Wein Of course, it’s a much bigger scope. Three days, and a bunch of venues. And instead of the marathon’s free admission, this one is ticketed.

David Lang There’s still going to be a bunch of free things, including some outdoor events, because we really like the idea that we have a wide doorway, that lots of different kinds of people can come through with no barriers. But it’s also true that when you start working with so many hundreds of musicians and so many different kinds of venues, that it’s just not possible for us to fundraise to make the entire thing free anymore. So we came up with this plan that, for essentially the price of one ticket, you get a pass which allows you to see everything and then you’ll just be able to go in and out of performances and check out music from all these different communities.

Gail Wein How does the aesthetic of the performers and the programs and the repertoire differ from that of the marathons?

David Lang I don’t think it differs at all.

We’re still looking for people whose definition of what they do is: they wake up in the morning and tell themselves that they’re innovators. They wake up and they say, there’s a kind of traditional music that’s involved in my world and I’m not doing that. That’s always been the way we’ve judged people to come on to the marathon. We wanted to find people who were pushing their fields. The difference here is that we’re able to go deeper into other kinds of communities like jazz and rock music and indie pop and ambient and electronica and be able to invite more people who are pushing their boundaries.

Gail Wein I was thinking about the longevity of Bang on a Can as an institution. Institutions come and go, organizations come and go, various folks have mounted series, marathons, festivals. But not that many have lasted a third of a century. To what do you attribute Bang on a Can’s longevity?

David Lang, Michael Gordon and Julia Wolfe, the founders of Bang on A Can (photo by Peter Serling)

David Lang I’m sure some of it is just dumb luck. But also we have a kind of hippie mentality about what it is we do, where we want everyone involved in the organization to be as excited and passionate about it as possible. If something comes up that we are not passionate about, we don’t do it. Some organizations, they just begin to think, well, we have a payroll to meet. We’ve got to do this, and this is what we did last year.

One of the things that we’re really proudest of about this festival and also about our sister festival that we started in summer, which is the Loud Weekend Festival at Mass Moca, is that we’re able to change and get excited about other kinds of things and then turn the organization so that it can take advantage of what we’re all really excited about. Everyone who works at Bang on a Can is a musician; we only hire people who are musicians. And so when we talk about these things in the office, we really are sharing ideas of the things that we are all getting excited about. And so when you do something like this, when you say this is a new direction that we’re going in, or this is the kind of music we want to include, or this is a new initiative for something we’d like to do, it’s something that energizes everybody. That’s one of the reasons why we can stay fresh, because everybody understands how committed we all are to the mission of the organization.

Gail Wein I’ve been thinking about this: New York City is already one big music festival every single day.

David Lang It is.

Gail Wein So why do you think New York and New Yorkers need this festival?

David Lang One of the beautiful things about this is the pass, quite honestly. In New York, there are always 500 concerts to see every single night. And you pay your money and you go see it and you stick it out, right? And then you say, I know I’m going to see this one, I don’t know that other kind of music, so I’m going to go see the one I know because I have to pay the money and I have to sit there for the concert.

At Long Play, we have all of this music within a few blocks of each other, all in walking distance, in Brooklyn, all the concerts are scheduled to go on simultaneously. What I’m really hoping will happen is that people with the pass will be encouraged to check out things that they wouldn’t necessarily check out because they have the right to go to that concert. So that’s our thought of how to replace the thing that we loved so much about the marathon, which is to put this kind of music next to each other, so that someone would come out of watching twelve hours of the music at the marathon and having a kind of cross section of a huge swath of interesting innovative things. What we’re hoping now will happen is that because I’ve already bought a pass, I’m going to check it out. And if I don’t like it, I can get up in 10 minutes and go check something else out. I’m not obligated to spend $50 for a concert of stuff I don’t know.

Gail Wein How did you choose and curate the artists and the programs and the venues as well?

David Lang We wanted to find places that were all in walking distance. And of course, that means that we started talking to everybody a year ago in order to get on their schedules. And then we just went to every single person who works in Bang on a Can and asked, what do you want to see? People just thought, what’s the widest, most varied, most exciting bunch of things from a bunch of different musical directions that we can come up with?

Gail Wein What do you hope audiences will come away with after experiencing the Long Play Festival?

David Lang What I’m really hoping will happen is that people will think that the world is full of all sorts of exciting things going on right now. And and that it’s full of creativity and wildness and inspiration and and that the world is very large. You know, I think sometimes when you go to a concert that’s neatly packaged and everything fits and everything makes sense. You go, this is a complete experience andI don’t need anything else. What I’m really hoping will happen is that people will come to this thing and they’ll go. That was unbelievable. And the world is full of all sorts of things that I have to continue to check out.

I asked David Lang which of the artists and programs were his favorite. A message he sent in an email newsletter earlier this month sums up his thoughts about the 2022 festival.

April 5, 2022

LONG PLAY really reminds me of those choose-your-own-adventure books – you get to make your own musical path through each day.

That is why I am going to plot my course through the weekend, very very carefully – I want to make sure I build my schedule around the concerts that I really have to see. Such as:

Stimmung – Karlheinz Stockhausen – It is hard to imagine that a European modernist classic from the 1960’s is in reality a meditation on everyone in the world having sex with each other, but that is what it is. Ekmeles sings at the Mark Morris Dance Center at 5pm on Friday, April 29.

Iva Casian-Lakos plays Joan La Barbara – Bang on a Can introduced these two to each other on one of our Pandemic Marathons last year, commissioning a new work from Joan for Iva’s fiery cello playing. The result was so electrifying that they have made it into a show, and I need to hear how it has grown. At the Center for Fiction at 2pm on Sunday.

Vijay Iyer, Linda May Han Oh, Tyshawn Sorey – Their album UNEASY came out last year on ECM and it has been on heavy rotation in my studio ever since.  It’s tuneful and moody and thoughtful, and I really want to hear them play together, live. At Roulette on Saturday at 8pm.

Eddy Kwon – composer, singer, violinist – their music is so beautiful and flows so smoothly across so many boundaries that is hard for me to even describe it.  The songs feel like the hit arias from the foundational music of a culture I have never experienced before.  Magic.  Sunday at 4pm at the Center for Fiction.

Ornette Coleman – The Shape of Jazz to Come – Coleman was a motivator for so much forward motion in music. This legendary album from 1959 was a big part of that, and it is still pushing musicians to move forward.  I want to be there when six composers show us how with their world premieres. At BAM’s Opera House 7:30pm on Sunday, May 1.

And then I have to figure out how to run between all the other shows, trying to see as much as I can.

Nona Hendryx!  Arvo Pärt!  Sun Ra!  Éliane Radigue!  Zoë Keating!  Galina Ustvolskaya!  Pamela Z!  JG Thirlwell!  Soo-Yeon Lyuh!  Craig Harris!  The Brooklyn Youth Chorus! More!  Much more!

Plus I will try to see my own show (Death Speaks) with Shara Nova on Sunday at Mark Morris, if I can figure out how to fit it in.

Whatever the schedule ends up looking like, I have a feeling you are going to see me there with circles under my eyes, as I run from show to show to show to show to show.

But I know I am going to be super happy.

– David Lang

 

 

by Gail Wein
Bang on a Can, Chamber Music, Classical Music, Composers, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Festivals, Music Events, New York

Live, in person and new: Contemporary music festivals in the Northeast in Summer 2021

LOUD Weekend, TIME:SPANS, Tanglewood and Bard are all back on stage this summer with in-person audiences

Fans starved for live music over the past year and half can rejoice and indulge – many summer festivals are back in the game. In this roundup, we’re mainly covering indoor concerts. As charming as it is to experience a performance under the stars, helicopters overhead, unpredictable weather, distracted audiences and competing bands nearby detract from the artistic experience.

Bang on A Can founders David Lang, Michael Gordon and Julia Wolfe (credit Peter Serling)

When it comes to contemporary music programming, LOUD Weekend put on by Bang on a Can at MASS MoCA is the densest. There are more than two dozen sets over two long days (July 30 and 31), performed by a range of the BOAC marathon’s “usual suspects”, along with some very special guests. This “eclectic super-mix of minimal, experimental and electronic music” (according to their press materials) may be some consolation to those who eagerly anticipated the organization’s inaugural Long Play Festival in New York City in spring 2020. That one was postponed indefinitely along with everything else in the world last year.

Kronos Quartet

BOAC co-founder and co-artistic director Michael Gordon said in a written interview, that the Bang on a Can team decided that regardless of the Covid restrictions MASS MoCA instituted, and however limited the audience needed to be, they were going to go ahead with the festival. “We just had to start playing live again, and having a festival meant that musicians were working. It has been so important to Bang on a Can over the pandemic year, as we presented 10 live-stream marathons and commissioned 70 new pieces of music, to keep the spirits of the creative music community alive and kicking,” he said. “One of the pluses was that the Kronos Quartet, which is usually unavailable due to European touring, was able to join us this summer.

“Everyone is psyched to be playing live,” Gordon continued. “After a year everyone – audience, composers and performers – is a little rusty. Now suddenly people are amazed to be in the same room with a cello or a bassoon.”

Bang on a Can All-Stars

The illustrious folks at BOAC are bringing thirsty audiences a true glut of performances: two programs by the Kronos Quartet, three by the Bang on a Can All-Stars, the pianist Lisa Moore playing a world premiere by Fred Rzewski, who passed away in June 2021, a tribute to the dearly departed Louis Andriessen, and a set of world premieres by young composers who participated in this year’s Bang on a Can Summer Festival (a professional development program at MASS MoCA that has been going on for nearly two decades).  Giving more detail would become a laundry list; there’s plenty more to be excited about and all the details are online. It’s almost too much, like an enormous buffet after months of starvation, but it won’t take long to get used to this new new normal.

At a somewhat more measured pace, TIME:SPANS in New York City also pulled out all of the stops with a drool-worthy lineup replete with world premieres and works written for and realized by an unusual new instrument. The roster at the 2021 TIME:SPANS festival, which is produced and presented by the Earle Brown Music Foundation Charitable Trust since 2015, is anchored by Talea Ensemble and JACK Quartet.

Soprano Tony Arnold

The two programs featuring JACK – one in which the quartet is joined by the eminent soprano Tony Arnold and the other consisting entirely of world premieres of works written in 2021 – are hard to resist. Throw in two concerts performed by Talea Ensemble, another with Alarm Will Sound, and an Anthony Cheung composer portrait concert featuring the Spektral Quartet joined by the flamboyant flutist Claire Chase and the dazzling violinist Miranda Cuckson, and, well, you get the picture. There’s lots to be excited about in these 11 concerts over a timespan of 13 days.

As a prelude to the live concerts, presentations of works composed for the EMPAC Wave Field Synthesis Array, a 3D sound system with 240 small loudspeakers, kick off the festival August 12-16. New works by Miya Masaoka, Bora Yoon, Nina C. Young, and Pamela Z for the system will presumably provide an experience exponentially more immersive than Surround Sound.

Artistic director Thomas Fichter explained in a written interview that they are continuing to deal with Covid-related uncertainties, such as foreign travel restrictions. Also, he said, “We very carefully created a safety protocol for audiences, performers and staff. Audience capacity in the hall [at DiMenna Center] is reduced to about 50% from what we had in other years because of spaced seating.”

Thomas Adés (Photo: Marco Borggreve)

Tanglewood’s Festival of Contemporary Music, usually a weeklong affair, has been hewn to three programs on July 25 and 26. Thomas Adès directs the Festival, and Kaija Saariaho, Judith Weir, Per Nørgård, Sean Shepherd, and Andrew Norman are among the composers whose music is performed by the spectacularly talented fellows of the Tanglewood Music Center.

Nadia Boulanger

And in mid-August, the annual Bard Music Festival chimes in with its typically out-of-the-box thematic programming, this year taking a 360 look at “Nadia Boulanger and Her World”. Programs juxtapose Boulanger’s music with that of her mentors, contemporaries, students and historical influences. Composers represented range from Monteverdi to Gershwin to Thea Musgrave – a dozen chamber and orchestral concerts jammed into two weekends, August 6-8 and August 12-15. For audiences who can’t be there in person, some of the programs will also be livestreamed on the Fisher Center’s virtual stage at Upstreaming.

These ambitious summer festivals are hopeful harbingers of the fall season.

Shifting quarantine rules, the rise of the delta variant, travel restrictions and venue protocols have made it difficult for presenters to plan much in advance. Hopefully, concert-goes will forgive late announcement and last-minute changes, and give all a wide berth of understanding, compassion, patience, and ticket revenue.

by Gail Wein
Contemporary Classical, Festivals, File Under?

Princeton Festival’s Dreaming/Undreaming (Video)

This past weekend, Kosmologia Interdisciplinary Ensemble premiered a multimedia work, Dreaming/Undreaming, at the Princeton Festival. The piece combines dance, video art, and piano music by J.S. Bach and the ensemble’s artistic director Carmen-Helena Téllez. Here is the trailer.

When I learned that it was inspired by two short stories of Jorge Luis Borges, “The Library of Babel” and “The Aleph,” the project piqued my interest. The juxtaposition of Bach with Téllez’s more atmospheric compositions is an intriguing way to underscore the work’s two sources. The two strands of identity allow dancer Alexa Capareda to create two “characters” with distinct movement identities. Pianist Natasha Stojanovska plays assuredly. Her Bach is “old school” in terms of tempo and rubato, but convincing when set alongside the video. Performance footage and images of libraries, architecture, and labyrinthine series of staircases also make the Borges connection clear.

After enduring so many performance videos in the pandemic of dubious quality, it is refreshing to see what Kosmologia’s team has put together, a visually appealing multidisciplinary work that entertains across its several domains.

by Christian Carey
Best of, CD Review, Contemporary Classical, Festivals, File Under?

Scelsi revisited (Best of 2020)

Scelsi Revisited

Klangforum Wien, Sylvain Cambreling, Johannes Kalitzke, conductors

Kairos 2XCD

A number of prominent European composers took part in Scelsi revisited, a festival, documented on this double-CD, celebrating Giacinto Scelsi’s music. Their tribute pieces were based on unrealized tapes of Scelsi playing the Ondiola, a three-octave tube synthesizer that was his preferred instrument for making drafts of his works. Some are incorporated directly into pieces, others remixed and morphed as part of larger electronic designs, and some merely outline materials subsequently reworked by the selected composers. The forces used are often that of Anahit, Scelsi’s piece for violin and ensemble, previously recorded by Klangforum Wien for Kairos.

Michael Petzel’s Sculture di Suono addresses the beating, tremolo, and fading in and out of material often present in Scelsi’s tapes. The piece contains beautifully distressed microtonal bends, particularly among the winds, ornaments by the oboe, and references to Scelsi’s “organ sound,” with its tonal implications and plethora of thirds and sixths. Michel Roth’s Moi (see the article referenced below) also demonstrates beating, including the rhythmical quality found on Scelsi’s tapes, difference tones, and a particularly varied and engaging orchestration.  

Tristan Murail had a long association with Scelsi, performing some of his works with the ensemble L’itineraire in the 1970s. In Murail’s Un Sogno, the composer reworks Scelsi’s tapes, augmenting them with his own electronics and spectral harmonies for the ensemble, creating an imaginative tribute piece. Introduktion und Transsonation, by Georg Friedrich Haas, allows tapes to roll and encourages Klangforum Wien to improvise along with them. 

Nicola Sani’s “Gimme Scelsi” deals with long sustained sounds that are then morphed by microtonal ornaments  and harmonics, made all the more powerful by space in between the utterances. Later in the piece, block harmonies once again recall Scelsi’s “organ sound.” Clocking in at more than 42 minutes, Ulli Fussenegger’s San Teodoro 8 is the most expansive work on the recording. Fussenegger made tapes from Scelsi’s archives for all of the participating composers and he uses a great deal of this material in his own piece, which is also arrayed with original electronic components and melodic material based on monad and dyad formulations. The Ondiola material is front-loaded in a way that is seldomly done in the other pieces.Like Anahit, it also features a violin soloist, but a number of members of the ensemble get a chance to take a solo turn. Á tue tet by Fabien Levy is for nine winds distributed throughout the performance space. It juxtaposes pointillist shards of ricocheting fragments into gradual pile-ups of texture. The second disc closes with Cardinald by Ragnhild Bergstad, who takes the more gentle aspects of Scelsi’s artistry, as well as nature sounds, notably the song of the robin, to create a more placid surface than the other works presented here. An appealing denouement and gentle coda to a fascinating collection of pieces. 

The booklet notes are excellent, including the Scelsi’ “symbol,” a rare photo of the composer, and Ragnhild Berstad’s thoughtful essay on reception history and the revisited project itself. Berstad doesn’t shy away from the controversies surrounding Scelsi’s legacy, notably the article “Scelsi c’est moi” by Vieri Tosattis, one of the musicians who helped Scelsi to transcribe his tapes to musical notation. Of the revisited project, Berstad instead suggests “Scelsi, c’est nous,” pointing out the myriad ways that the composer has made his presence felt here and elsewhere. Scelsi continues to inspire, as the composers and performers on this recording readily attest. One of the best releases of 2020.

-Christian Carey

by Christian Carey
Concert review, Contemporary Classical, Experimental Music, Festivals, Los Angeles

Dog Star 15 – Civil Twilight

The 15th annual Dog Star Orchestra series of concerts concluded with Civil Twilight, held at the CalArts Wild Beast and environs, presenting four pieces of experimental music. Three of the pieces were heard outdoors in the mild evening air, on this the second day of summer. Two of the pieces were keyed to local astronomical events – the setting of the sun and the positions of the stars occurring at exactly 8:00 PM on June 22, 2019. The entire concert was devoted to music that was both understated and sophisticated, inviting the audience to listen closely and carefully.

The first piece was to knowe the sprying of the dawenyng and the ende of the evening, the whiche ben called the two crepuscles (2019), by Ryan Seward. This had to start precisely at 8:10 PM on the outside lawn in order to coincide exactly with the point at which the sun was fully below the horizon. It was timed to last until 8:39 PM, the end of civil twilight – the point when light from the sun is considered to be no longer sufficient for ordinary outdoor activities. The players were scattered singly about the lawn and the audience joined them, having been encouraged to move about to experience the sounds in different locations.

A soft soprano voice was heard, coming from high above on a balcony. The woodwind players began a series of quiet bird calls and small bells were rung. A wide variety of sounds were made by the other players; a horn call, some stones rattling across a patio, a purring from some speakers and some softly spoken speech. By changing positions, listeners would come into hearing range of some players and out of earshot of others, so that the mix constantly changed according to location. By staying on the move, the effect was very much like a walk in the woods at sunset, accompanied by a convincing series of quiet forest murmurs. There was, of course, some ambient traffic sounds, but the ‘virtual forest’ seemed to displace this noise from the hearing. The piece gradually decreased in volume as the sun dipped further below the horizon, finally fading into silence at end of civil twilight. With to knowe the sprying of the dawenyng… Ryan Seward has succeeded using reticence and subtlety to create a tranquil organic soundscape that inspires the imagination despite the more irritating outdoor noises of our urban environment.

More quiet music was heard in the second piece on the program, For 5+ Musicians (2016), by Christine Burke. This was heard indoors and the musicians were arrayed in shallow arc at the front of the Wild Beast. The excellent acoustics of the space and lack of outside ambient noise allowed every detail to be clearly heard. For 5+ Musicians began with the striking of highly pitched cymbals followed by a soft electronic tone from the speakers. A low, sustained flute note floated out into the audience as whistling and breaths of air were heard in accompaniment. All was subdued and hushed, with nothing loud or dramatic. At length, a muted trumpet was heard playing a long tone, and as other woodwinds joined in the dynamics increased, but only slightly. Moments of total silence were often observed, adding to the general sense of tranquility. As the piece proceeded, the woodwinds sounded together in slight dissonance, but this was the only trace of tension. By the finish, air moving through the horns and woodwinds was all that was to be heard. For 5+ Musicians is a peacefully reserved work that exists on the edge of aural perception, inviting the listener to experience new and rewarding sonic territory.

pájaros cargando memorias (2018), by Sergio Cote Barco followed, with the musicians assembled on a high balcony outside the Wild Beast, above the grassy lawn. The audience filed outside in the dark to the terraced sitting area cut into the hillside, directly below the balcony. The piece began as a small cymbal sounded along with quiet musical tones and a soft soprano voice that called out into the night. The subdued mix of sounds created a mystical feel, and the texture was never more than sparse. Often only one or two instruments were heard at a time, and all the musical sounds were almost secretively hushed. The playing at this low level was very disciplined, yet sensitive. At times, the ambient outside noises crowded in and obscured the piece, but this only served to focus the listening and created a sort of adversarial context for the music. The soprano voices, with their sustained and ethereal tones carried well and provided a rallying point for the listening audience. pájaros cargando memorias ultimately prevailed against the banality of the ambient street sounds, drifting peacefully out into the darkness like a cloud of pleasant memories.

The final piece of the evening was Ophiuchus (2019), by Marta Tiesenga, and this was also performed on the outside lawn. Ophiuchus is the thirteenth sign of the Zodiac, representing the constellation of a ‘serpent bearer’. As part of the composing process for this piece, the exact disposition of the stars for the date and time of this performance were worked out, and various angles, vectors and relationships transposed into pitches and tones for the notated score. A group of seven acoustic instruments were situated in a corner of one of the buildings and a computer station with speakers placed a dozen yards away, across the lawn. A low, electronic humming was heard at the opening, followed by the solitary ringing of bells from a walkway high above the grass. As the instruments joined in, their sounds interacted with the electronics to create a series of intriguing and mystical sonic patterns. The crowd caught on to this, and soon arranged itself on the grass between the two sound sources to receive the full effect. The low, sustained notes of two double basses were most effective when they changed pitch slightly to initiate a new set of interactions with the speakers. More players appeared, holding small bells and walking about the space, softly ringing out a series of solitary notes. At times they seemed to congregate in one place and this added a bit of density to their sounds. As they dispersed their ringing diminished until all the sounds faded away. A long and reverent silence followed as the starry night seemed to prolong the musical spell. Ophiuchus is an imaginative work with an inventive composing process that captures the timeless human fascination with the stars.

by Paul Muller
Concert review, Contemporary Classical, Festivals, Los Angeles, Ojai

A Day at the Ojai Music Festival

The 2019 Ojai Music Festival began on June 6 and packed in a wide variety of styles and vintages of new music over four days and three nights. Everything from Haydn and Stravinsky to Catherine Lamb was on the program, along with films, pre-concert talks, picnics and special events that filled up every day from dawn to midnight. Barbara Hannigan served as the 2019 Music Director and this festival marked the final year for long-time Artistic Director Thomas W. Morris.

On Friday, June 7, the early morning concert featured the JACK Quartet performing pieces by Clara Iannottta and Tyshawn Sorey. The SANE Center was the venue, located just across the street from Libbey Park, and while cozy it was agreeably indoors and out of the cool morning mist. The first piece was the US premiere of dead wasps in the jam-jar (iii), by Clara Iannottta, inspired by imagery from a poem by Dorothy Molloy. For this piece the JACK Quartet was augmented by an electronic sound track that played through speakers placed on both sides of the small stage. The composer writes: “While working, I pictured a kind of deep-sea environment, the lowest layer in the ocean, where constant pressure and perpetual movement seem to shape the stillness of time.”

This piece opened with slow, whisper-like scuffing sounds from lightly bowed strings. There was a quiet, almost pastoral feeling to this, and the instruments were heavily subdued with a variety of mutes. This restful atmosphere was broken by louder sounds from the electronics that carried a sense of distant menace. The soft string sounds soon returned, but were again interrupted by a low roaring from the speakers, as if some beast was at large nearby. The roaring had an exotic but primeval sensibility about it, complimenting the calm environment established by the strings. dead wasps in the jam-jar (iii) is hushed and nuanced music, carefully played in this performance by the JACK Quartet to create a unique sound world where the natural environment and its organic processes are thoughtfully realized.

The West Coast premiere of Everything Changes, Nothing Changes, by Tyshawn Sorey followed, a piece commissioned by the JACK Quartet. Christopher Hailey writes in the program notes that “The piece is slow-moving and delicate, never rising above piano. The quartet plays sustained sonorities as a unit, individual voices perceived not as solo lines but as components of gently shifting harmonic textures.” Accordingly, the piece starts out with quietly sustained tones that sound both mysterious and slightly dangerous. Everything Changes, Nothing Changes carries in it a more urban sensibility, as distinct from the open, feral feel of the previous Iannottta piece. The playing here was sensitive and nuanced, with just the right dynamic range within muted boundaries. There was never anything flashy or fast, and the settled consistency throughout was impressive. In Everything Changes, Nothing Changes the exquisite playing of the JACK Quartet and Sorey’s smoothly crafted harmonic textures combined perfectly to keep the audience fully engaged.

(more…)

by Paul Muller
Concert review, Contemporary Classical, Festivals, Ojai

At the 2018 Ojai Music Festival

June 7, the opening day of the 2018 Ojai Music Festival, featured the usual welcome variety of lectures, interviews and pop-up concerts as well as performances of music by two notable mid-20th century Italian experimentalists. The first day of the festival was picture perfect and a large crowd milled about the outdoor venues, meeting and greeting. There was little evidence of the disastrous Thomas Fire of five months prior, and spirits were as sunny as the weather.

At 6:00 PM, Luciano Berio’s challenging Sequenza IXa for Clarinet, played by Vincente Alberola, was heard from the Libbey Park gazebo, to good effect. The amplification and the open spaces were nicely matched and Alberola’s precise articulations and dynamic nuances were clearly heard throughout the scattered crowd. This sensitive and virtuosic performance was received with enthusiastic applause.

At 7:30 PM somewhat larger crowd gathered for La lontanaza nostalgica utopica futura by Luigi Nono featuring Festival Music Director Patricia Kopatchinskaja on violin and Los Angeles-based composer Scott Worthington at the controls of the electronics. The program notes proclaimed: “A dynamic duet between solo violin and spatial amplified sound transforms the Libbey Park into an all-encompassing and immersive aural environment.” A seemingly tall order, but the array of large speakers positioned around the space and the formidable sound system panel looked promising. La lontanaza nostalgica utopica futura consists of 8 recorded tracks and a solo violin, and these were seamlessly integrated into the speaker system so that good hearing in the open spaces of the park was not an issue.

The piece began with the speakers filling the space with the soft sounds of what seemed to be string players warming up or tuning. A few odd words were heard, then some thumps and squeaks before a series of rapidly complex runs in the violin established an air of suspense and uncertainty. The recorded sounds often came from single speakers in opposite corners of the space, and this added spatial perception to the overall experience. The crisp precision of the live violin phrases was helpfully distinct from the recording. There is little form or structure evident in this work – at times the sounds were fast and intense while at other times slower and softly atmospheric. The violinist moved randomly about to a series of music stands located throughout the area, and this served to increase the sense of mystery. The crowd followed Ms Kopatchinskaja in a great mass, cell cameras in hand, but this did not disturb the performer whose furtive movements added to the drama of the moment.

This is complex, nuanced music, with stretches of quiet tension mixed with sharply phrased passages brimming with anxiety. I first heard La lontanaza performed indoors, in a converted warehouse and the atmosphere there gave the piece a sense of tension that was distinctly urban. Outdoors in Libbey Park the music lost none of its power, but rather emerged as more rustic and primal. In Ojai, even the ambient noise from the streets and some quiet talking among the crowd fit right in with the recordings, and actually added to the performance. As the afternoon light faded, Ms Kopatchinskaja became a spirit-like presence moving among the darkened trees. A long, looped final violin note signaled the conclusion of the piece and the crowd slowly dissipated, as if released from a magical spell.

The Ojai Music Festival runs through Sunday, June 10.

Photos courtesy of Bonnie Wright. Used with permission.

by Paul Muller
Boston, Chamber Music, Concert review, Contemporary Classical, Electro-Acoustic, Festivals, File Under?

Tanglewood FCM 2017 – Highlights, Part One

“The Sand Reckoner,”
by Nathan Davis.
Photo: Hilary Scott.

  • This year’s Festival of Contemporary Music at Tanglewood (in Lenox, Massachusetts) was curated by three youngish stars of the new music community: pianist Jacob Greenberg (ICE), cellist Kathryn Bates (Del Sol Quartet), and violist Nadia Sirota (Q2, ACME).  Each planned  a chamber music concert, consisting of commissioned new works and contemporary repertory selections. The curators combined forces with the BSO in selecting pieces for the festival’s finale, an orchestra concert conducted by Stefan Asbury and Vinay Parameswaran.

 

  • Commissioned works included vocal pieces by Nathan Davis and Anthony Cheung, a string quartet (with copious use of water-filled glasses and glass bowls) by Kui Dong, and Clip, a chamber ensemble work by Nico Muhly (for which I contributed program notes). These showed a diversity of musical approaches. Davis and Cheung took postmodern textual compiling as the jumping off point for stylistically varied and technically demanding singing. Dong revelled in glassine textures, both in the strings and with the water glasses themselves, while Muhly presented one of his most rhythmically intricate works to date, in places extending the language of post-minimalism towards the polyrhythms of late modernity.

George Lewis with the performers of “Anthem.”
Photo: Hilary Scott.

  • A standout on the concert curated by Greenberg on Thursday, August 10th was Columbia University professor George Lewis’s first appearance at Tanglewood (at age 65). Noteworthy for his work with AACM and a catalogue of compositions encompassing facets of concert music, jazz, improvisation, and electronics, Lewis was represented by Anthem, a 2012 piece originally written for Wet Ink Ensemble. At Tanglewood, Wet Ink’s vocalist Katie Soper, herself a prominent and creative composer, delivered a supersonic performance of a part written in Sprechstimme to Lewis’s own text about TV talking heads and subversive political commentary. Teddy Poll conducted, Greenberg contributed electronics, and the rest of the players, to a person impressive, were mostly guest musicians from ICE. Imaginatively scored and surpassingly energetic, Anthem was a rousing closer to FCM’s first evening.

Fromm Players perform
Johnston’s String Quartet No. 4, “Amazing Grace.”
Photo: Hilary Scott.

  • Friday afternoon featured a program of string quartets curated by Bates. A detailed and fine-tuned performance of Ben Johnston’s microtonal Fourth String Quartet by the Fromm Players (for which I was fortunate to contribute program notes) loomed large, but Bates introduced other fine pieces to Tanglewood audiences as well.

 

  • Croatoan II for string quartet and percussion by Moritz Eggert, supplied the proceedings with a welcome dose of humor, treating the mystery of a disappearing colony of early American settlers with more whimsy than tragedy. Percussionist Tyler Flynt, using what Bates described as a “suitcase’s worth” of hand percussion instruments, made the quick changes both in tempo and instruments seem effortless. Rene Orth’s Stripped (2015), a piece written in memory of the trumpeter Alex Greene, her Curtis classmate, began with noise-based sound effects and traversed an imaginative pathway to soaring harmonics. Although it didn’t quite gel in the Tanglewood performance, Terry Riley’s G Song is an attractive deployment of all manner of scalar patterns and jazzy cadence-points (look for Del Sol Quartet’s next CD to hear it more authoritatively rendered).

Eggert’s “Croatoan II.”
Photo: Hilary Scott.

  • Violinist Cameron Daly and cellist Chava Appiah performed Lei Liang’s Gobi Canticle, a piece that incorporates material and techniques from Mongolian string music. Liang visited the Nei Monggol region in 1996 to learn more about its music-making. This is deftly demonstrated in Gobi Canticle, which is at turns gently lyrical and boldly dramatic in cast.

 

  • I was most pleased to be introduced to the work of Jack Body (1944-2015),  the recently departed New Zealand composer whose works  synthesize ethnomusicology and composition. The wonderfully fleet and attractive Flurry (2002), in a version for three string quartets, opened Friday’s concert. Led by Bates, this all-too-brief work was immediately encored. One was glad to have the chance to hear it again and, unlike some encores, the performance was just as strong the second time around.

Kathryn Bates leads three string quartets in a performance of
Jack Body’s “Flurry.”
Photo: Hilary Scott.

  • Later this week I will be writing more about FCM, as well as the BSO concerts that coincided with the festival. The article will appear on both my blog and Sequenza 21.
by Christian Carey
Classical Music, Composers, Conductors, Contemporary Classical, Festivals, File Under?, Interviews, Orchestras

Interview: Julia Adolphe

This week, The New York Philharmonic premieres their second commission by composer Julia Adolphe. The first, 2016’s Unearth, Release, was a warmly received viola concerto for Philharmonic Principal Violist Cynthia Phelps. The latest, White Stone, will be premiered July 26th as part of the orchestra’s Bravo! Vail series in Colorado. I recently had a chance to catch up with Adolphe about both of these collaborations, as well as her opera Sylvia. 

 

Who were/are your composition mentors at Cornell and USC? What is something that you’ve learned from each?

 

I’ve had two incredible mentors who’ve inspired me to become a composer. The first was Steven Stucky, who gave me private composition lessons for four years while I was an undergraduate at Cornell. I arrived at Cornell without any formal training in classical music and was very intimidated by the large group of (all male) doctoral students pursuing composition. Professor Stucky made me feel included and welcome, allowing me to take graduate level courses alongside his other students. Steven Stucky essentially taught me how to compose, to go from nothing on the page to crafting a vocabulary, playing with colors, and communicating ideas through music. At USC, I spent four years studying with Stephen Hartke, who taught me an enormous amount about writing for the orchestra and writing opera. With Professor Hartke, I learned how to write larger forms and develop a musical narrative. Hartke encouraged me to embrace my love of storytelling through my music. Most importantly, both Stucky and Hartke taught me specific compositional techniques and tools while encouraging me to trust and believe in my own voice.

 

 

You fashioned both text and music for your opera Sylvia. Tell me a bit about your work as a poet/librettist?

 

My first musical pieces that I wrote as a child were folk songs comprised of my own original lyrics. I always loved writing lyrics and stories as well as acting in plays and musicals. Opera seems like a natural extension of these early passions. I wrote Sylvia in 2012 and it is based on the real life experiences of my best childhood friend. The opera’s content was deeply personal and I wrote the libretto out of a need to tell Sylvia’s story. I love working with living poets and am currently setting a poem entitled Equinox by Elizabeth Alexander. For my next opera, A Barrel of Laughs, A Vale of Tears, based on the novel by Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist Jules Feiffer, I will be working with librettist Stephanie Fleischmann. I am very excited to have such wonderful collaborators!

 

 

I have sung at Bargemusic and it can be a wobbly place to get your bearings. What was it like producing Sylvia there?

 

It was a lot of fun and an incredibly dramatic, yet intimate venue. I think the surreal setting and off-kilter feeling you experience on the boat fit perfectly with the dreamlike nature of the opera.

 

 

There are some great viola concertos in the literature, but the challenges facing composers of them is legendary: balance, orchestration, etc. Was writing for viola and ensemble an upfront part of the commission for Unearth, Release or did you choose to write for these forces?

 

 

The New York Philharmonic asked that I compose a viola concerto for their principal violist Cynthia Phelps. I was extremely excited about the challenge: the viola does not possess the same carrying power in terms of volume and brightness as the violin or the cello. It is a subtle instrument with dark tones and fragile qualities. Yet is has a singular expressive beauty. I worked closely with Cynthia, ensuring that every gesture was idiomatic and communicative for her instrument. During the rehearsals of the work’s world premiere with the Eastern Festival Orchestra, I was able to make revisions so that the viola could speak more clearly over the orchestra. Both Alan Gilbert and Jaap Van Zweden gave me feedback throughout the writing and rehearsal process and I learned an incredible amount about the orchestra along the way.

 

 

Did you know which pieces were going to be programmed alongside yours in Vail? If so, did that impact your composition of White Stone?

 

I knew from the beginning that my piece would be premiered alongside Gershwin and Dvořák, but I chose not to think about that. My goal when I write is to express my own voice and be as true to my own emotions, dreams, atmospheres and sounds as possible. Of course I am influenced by a host of composers, but to purposely seek out composers on the same program would make it harder for me to clarify my own thoughts during the writing process.

 

 

What else would you like for audience members in Vail to know in advance about the piece?

 

A white stone is an object that is both unique yet familiar, a jewel and a pebble, emerging from the dirt to become something treasured. The music rises from dark, murky textures, striving towards brightness and clarity. The cello and timpani are the first to surface from the discord, stirring action in other sections of the orchestra. The percussion serves to rally and activate the music, leading the orchestra upwards towards brighter harmonies and unified rhythms. White Stone captures the struggle to be resilient and powerful in the face of overwhelming obstacles and fear of defeat.

 

 

by Christian Carey
Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Festivals, File Under?, Improv, Interviews

Interview with Robert Morris

On September 15-18 at Spectrum, Collide-O-Scope Music begins its eighth season with a Festival celebrating the music of Robert Morris. A wide range of works will be featured, for electronics, piano, small chamber ensemble, and string quartet. In addition to Collide-O-Scope personnel, there will be guest performers, notably JACK Quartet. I recently interviewed Morris about the upcoming concerts: our exchange follows.

bob-in-lib

How did this Festival of your music come about?

 

Out of the blue, on April 20, 2015, I received an email from Augustus Arnone proposing this festival of my music. I had never met Augustus nor heard him play in person, but I knew of his great pianistic talent and industry in playing the complete works of Milton Babbitt and the complete “History Of Photography In Sound,” by Michael Finnissy. I knew also of his new music ensemble called Collide-O-Scope. He proposed that the festival should feature my piano works (of which there are many), my small ensemble pieces, some of my electronic works, and string quartets, which would be played by the JACK Quartet. The members of the JACK were once students at Eastman where I teach, and two of them had studied composition with me. They have premiered two of my string quartets: Arc (1988) and Allegro Appassionata (2009) written for them. They will also play my most recent quartet called Quattro per Quattro (2011).

 

Why was Spectrum picked as the venue?

 

Spectrum is a New York City performance space that is well known for presenting progressive art and music. Collide-O-Scope has played there many times. In the last five years, more intimate informal performances spaces, by contrast with concert halls, are becoming the norm for new music concerts and events. This is perhaps a tradition that stems from the old NYC downtown music venues of the 1980s and 90s for alternative and improvised music.

 

What will the pieces for electronics be like? How do you think they will resonate in an intimate environment like Spectrum?

 

The electronic/computer music pieces are not that loud as such things go. One of the two pieces called Mysterious Landscape is quite intimate in character, while the other piece, Entelechy 2012 for piano and electronic modification, is sometimes brash and dramatic with subtle, timbreally unique gestures often including microtones, vibrati and glissandi—categories of sound impossible to produce on acoustic keyboard instruments.

 

These two pieces, both composed in 2012, complement each other in other ways. Mysterious Landscape is an improvisational electro-acoustic piece lasting about 30 minutes to be played by one or two performers. It complements my desire to connect music with nature as in my outdoor pieces. Here the sounds and processes of nature are brought inside a performance space so that natural sounds—birds, insects, frogs, mammals, wind, and water-—are mixed together with computer-generated sounds to project a serene sonic environment that reflects on a peaceful relation of humans to nature. I will play the piece with a video slideshow using landscape photographs I took in the southwest and eastern United States, south India, Sri Lanka, and Kyoto, Japan.

 

Entelechy 2012 is quite a bit more abstract in structure and design. It also involves indeterminacy, but of the composed type; in this case, two isomorphic, composed out structures are played against each other in a different coordination from one performance to another. This underlying structure is based on a ring of 24 elements that include all the permutations of four elements once each. This ring guides the timbres, gestures, and pacing of the piece. However it does not produce a sense of stability or unity in any of the performances. Rather the composition is designed to be radically impermanent, providing surprising and novel experiences as it moves on, as much as in jerks or surges as ebbs and flows. Incidentally, The word “entelechy” was coined by Aristotle to refer to the condition of a thing whose essence is fully realized, implying an actuality that directly stems from some potential idea or concept. Augustus will play the piece with sound modifications that are not controlled by a live performer.

 

Both pieces use MAX-MSP patches

 

More on these pieces can be found on my website:

 

http://lulu.esm.rochester.edu/rdm/notes/ml.html

 

http://lulu.esm.rochester.edu/rdm/notes/ent12.html.

 

Do you enjoy being part of the performances of your electronics installations?

 

Yes, I do. I enjoy improvisation, on one hand, and being in control of the nuance of the electronic sounds, on the other.

 

You’ve frequently composed for piano. What draws you to the medium?

 

I began playing piano before I could read music and took lessons.  Even today, I improvise as much as I play written-out compositions; however in recent years, I play for myself only. Thus the piano has been the instrument on and from which I get musical ideas of all sorts, and is often the medium in which I try out new compositional ideas and modes of expression. I like to contrast the percussive and dynamically mobile character of the piano—which you find most prevalently in jazz of all types–with the colorful and intimate resonances found a good deal of new music. You might say, Bartok, Stravinsky and Babbitt versus Debussy, Boulez, and Feldman.

 

The piano program contains the premiere of a new work, Foray (2016). What were some of the compositional ideas you worked with in this latest piece?

 

Foray was directly influenced by Augustus’s playing, which I finally heard live last spring in a Collide-O-Scope concert featuring the music of Milton Babbitt and some younger composers. His remarkable ways of voicing and articulating piano sound made a big impression on me. So in mid-July an idea for a piano piece popped into my head and the character of the piano ideas was something I thought Augustus would like to play, so I dedicated the piece to him. The basic idea of the piece is that an opening series of ten chords arranged in an arc (maybe a rainbow, since each chord is of a different harmonic “color”) each generate music in subsequent sections of the piece. Thus the form is the arc followed by ten sections in different registers and densities. As the music goes on, the derivation of the music from the chords gets progressively more complicated and obscure in the way the music is parsed, registered, and embellished. The process is from isolated objects to mixtures and blends—an entropic process.

 

By the way, the other pianist on the program, Margaret Kampmeier, is also playing music I dedicated to her: from my Nine Piano Pieces.

 

Have your works been performed before by Collide-O-Scope Music? What does their ensemble bring out in your work that perhaps others don’t?

 

Well, not exactly. Some of the players who are members of Collide-O-Scope as well as guest artists on this festival have played and recorded my music. Sunghai Anna Lin (violin), Margaret Kampmieier (piano), Marianne Gythfeldt (clarinet) and Tara O’Connor (flute) were once members of the New Millennium Ensemble that played and recorded my sextet Broken Consort in Three Parts, as well as other pieces over the years. These are wonderful musicians who understand how to interpret the multiplicity of structure and expression in my music.

 

Could you tell us a bit about the ensemble works that will be heard on the festival?

 

Traces (1990) for flute and piano was commissioned by the National Flute Association in 1990 as a contest piece. As the title suggests, the piece moves forward by tracing and retracing various melodic lines in the piano by the flute and vice-versa,

 

Raudra for flute alone was written for Elizabeth Singleton in 1976. It takes its name from the fourth of the nine “rasa’s” of Indian music and dance, connoting the mood of fury and anger. I’m looking forward to Patricia Spencer’s performance.

 

Along A Rocky Path (1993) was composed for the Arlington Trio (violin, clarinet and piano).  Like many of my pieces, Along a Rocky Path reflects aspects of natural landscape—especially less frequented and more rugged terrain. Shortly after completing the piece in January 1993, I came across a poem of the eighteenth-century Japanese poet, Uragami Gyokudo, from which I took the title of my trio.

 

There is no heat on this rocky path,

The sound of the water from a mountain stream is most pure,

By the red leaves, I know there must be a man’s hut nearby;

My traveler’s path is hidden in the white clouds.

Over the twisting path hang the waterfalls of Mount Lu,

The plank roads of Szechwan cross the steep mountains.

There is no need to bemoan the journey:

Wherever I chant my poems is home.

 

Out and Out (1989) was composed for Marianne Gythfeldt in the spring of 1989. It concerns the interplay between the two instruments; the clarinetist and pianist interact to shape the musical continuity, often doubling each other’s notes and rhythms. The resulting demarcation of one musical line by another affects every aspect of the piece, producing exceedingly great reaches of reference, pulling together music from every part of the piece.

 

Drawn Onward (2014) is a recent work for violin and piano written for the Irrera Brothers, an emerging violin/piano duet. The title of the piece involves a palindrome that is embedded in the following longer palindrome: “Are we not drawn onward, we few, drawn onward to new era?” The idea of a symmetry inside another symmetry is at the heart of the composition. For instance, each of the two players has their own musical materials, but the violin material is embedded in the piano material and vice versa. Since the two performers from whom I wrote the piece are brothers, I thought that working with mutually embedded materials an apt way of composing a piece particularly for them.

 

Did the JACK Quartet work with you when they were at Eastman?

 

As I mentioned earlier they did as composition students, but they were not the JACK Quartet yet. You can read about the interactions we have had in the following interview article: “Interview with the JACK Quartet, John Pickford Richards, Ari Streisfeld, Christopher Otto, Kevin McFarland, And Joshua B. Mailman,” Perspectives of New Music, (2014) 52/2.

 

String quartets often are particularly significant pieces in composers’ respective outputs. How would you characterize the quartets that will be heard on the festival?

 

Although I wrote a string quartet in 1976, Arc of 1988 is my official first quartet. Due to the difficulty of the music, I had to wait 21 years before it was played. The JACK decided to learn it in 2008 and have played it here and there since then. The second quartet, Allegro Appassionata, was written for the JACK in 2009 for a special concert at the Tank in NYC. The third, Quattro per Quattro was premiered and recorded by the Momenta String Quartet in 2014 with Benjamin Boretz’s string quartet, Qixingshan. Now I will hear the JACK’s interpretation!

 

Are these quartets significant in my output? I think yes: they are all extended, ramified compositions; each embodies a harmonious relation between singular compositional craft and intense emotional particularity; each is quite challenging for the performers. But as your question implies, string quartets are considered the high-water mark for composers of all stripes. I can only hope my quartets will be appreciated as such.

 

______________

Sep 15 – 8:00 pm

Robert Morris Festival, Concert I – Electronic Installation Works

Augustus Arnone, piano, and Robert Morris, Electronics

 

Mysterious Landscape (2012)

Entellechy (2012)

 

(pre-concert discussion with Morris at 7pm)

 

Sep 16 – 8:00 pm

Robert Morris Festival, Concert II – Music For Solo Piano

Augustus Arnone and Margaret Kampmeier, pianos

 

39 Webern Variations (2010)

Sabi (1998)

Night Vapors (1967)

Wabi (1996)

Lake (2016)

14 Little Piano Pieces (2002)

Foray (2016) ** World Premiere

 

(pre-concert discussion with Morris at 7pm)

 

Sep 17 – 8:30 pm

Robert Morris Festival, Concert III – Music For Mixed Ensemble

Collide-O-Scope Music

 

Traces (1990)

Raudra (1976)

Along A Rocky Path (1993)

Out and Out (1989)

Drawn Onward (2014)

Yugen (1998)

 

Sep 18 – 3:00 pm

Robert Morris Festival, Concert IV – Music For String Quartet

JACK Quartet

 

Arc (1988)

Allegro Appassionata (2009)

Quattro per Quattro (2011)

 

________________________________________________________

 

Spectrum

121 Ludlow St. 2nd fl, New York City

September 15th – 18th

http://www.spectrumnyc.com/

TICKETS: 20$/15$ (students and seniors) OR Festival Pass 50$/40$ (students and seniors)

________________________________________________________

by Christian Carey