Those who’ve read File Under ? for a while may know that, two years ago, my wife and I went on our honeymoon to Tanglewood. We celebrated our first anniversary at the 2010 FCM (composers take note: if your prospective partner doesn’t mind taking in a contemporary music marathon as part of your honeymoon, he/she is a keeper!) Due to work obligations, Kay and I weren’t able to attend the first three days of the 2011 Festival of Contemporary Music. Those who’d like to read excellent coverage of the beginning of the festival should head on over to New Music Box for Matthew Guerrieri’sreview. But we did make it up to Lenox, MA for the final two days of the festival. And our short weekend was action packed; we heard five concerts and saw a play (a rather uneven performance of Romeo and Juliet by Shakespeare and Company).
Kay at Shakespeare and Company.
Pierre Jalbert, Music of Air and Fire: The Boston Symphony often does a contemporary work on one of its concerts during the week of FCM as a nod to the festival. This year, it was Pierre Jalbert’s Music of Air and Fire (2007), which the orchestra, lead by BSO assistant conductor Sean Newhouse, performed at the Shed on August 6.
Jalbert was a Tanglewood fellow back in the 1990s. A professor at Rice University, he’s now in demand as a composer, both of works for large orchestra and for smaller forces, as this month’s NMB profile attests.
This six minute overture was premiered by the California Symphony; it is Jalbert’s first piece on a BSO program. Music of Fire and Air is a lively and well-paced curtain-raiser, with deft writing for percussion and vivid neo-tonal harmonies from strings and winds. Apart from a small excerpt available for streaming on Jalbert’s website, it is as yet unrecorded. Given the bang-up job the BSO did with the piece, dare we hope they’ll commit it to disc sometime soon?
Karchin leads TMC Fellows. Photo Hilary Scott
Louis Karchin, Chamber Symphony: Karchin’s Chamber Symphony (2009) was the closer of FCM’s 10 AM concert on August 7 (one of three given in Ozawa Hall on the festival’s final day). Cast in three movements, its features limpid, flowing francophilic lines, daubed with tart counterpoint, as well brilliantly colorful verticals and bold Straussian horn calls. Despite leading an ensemble comprised primarily of student performers (albeit very talented student performers), Karchin’s conducting elicited a bright and assured rendition that rivaled its premiere by pros that I heard back in 2010. FCM should invite Karchin to return, both to hear his own works performed and to work with the students on contemporary repertoire.
Tonight at 7 PM at the Apple Store on Manhattan’sUpper West Side, Mantra Percussion performs Michael Gordon’s Timber, a work for six percussionists playing 2″x4″s. The event celebrates Cantaloupe’s release of a CD of Slagwerk den Haag’s performance of Timber (which I reviewed yesterday on File Under ?).
Don’t you love the one pound wooden box they’ve packaged the CD in? Don’t you love saying Slagwerk den Haag three times fast?
Below is a video with more information about the piece, including interviews with performers and the composer. If you’re in NYC and want to beat the heat, check out an iPad, and hear six percussionists knock wood, amble on over to Apple tonight.
Book of Ice
by Paul D. Miller with an introduction by Brian Greene
Mark Batty; 128 pages
ISBN: 978-1935613145
Paul D. Miller is probably best known as DJ Spooky, outelectronica artist. But he’s also an eloquent author about DJing and musical aesthetics in books such as Rhythm Science and Sound Unbound. Well versed in contemporary classical music, Miller has collaborated with and remixed music by Steve Reich, Iannis Xenakis, and Terry Riley. His latest project is perhaps his most ambitious and it involves one of the longest field trips and most far flung residencies an artist can make: a trip to Antartica.
In order to do research for Terra Nova: Sinfonia Antartica, a work commissioned by BAM for its 2009 Next Wave festival, Miller travelled to this remote region, soaking in its forbidding landscapes. Book of Ice is a companion to the Terra Nova project, a journal of the work in process. It’s also a travelogue for this most unlikely of destinations. Miller meditates on a complex array of associations – historical, sociological, and imaginational – that humankind has with this principally uninhabited continent.
Along the way, readers are treated to a glimpse of Antartica’s fascinating past and its very uncertain and environmentally unstable future. Miller is a nimble ecological advocate, expounding upon the dangers we face from climate change – underscored by the impact it’s already had on polar ice caps – without ever allowing the book to tread too heavily. He also manages to make what might at first seem to be an unlikely pairing – that of DJ culture and Antartic exploits – cohere into an edifying and engaging read throughout.
Everyone’s favorite online contemporary classical station, Q2 (part of the WNYC family), needs your help. They would like for Q2 listeners to take a surveyto help them gather information that will shape the station’s future programming.
Want more vocal music? Less crossover? Or more programs featuring Olivia Giovetti? Q2 wants to hear all about it!
I heard Kronos Quartet perform Steve Reich’s WTC 9/11 (2010) earlier this year at Carnegie Hall. For three string quartets (two were overdubbed in this live performance) and recorded voices taken from phone calls by first responders on September 11, 2001, as well as interviews with New Yorkers some years later, it doesn’t serve as a nostalgic remembrance. Rather, it’s a dramatic whirlwind of a piece, at times bracing and overwhelming.
For those who’ve tired of the languid sentimentality and unfortunate jingoism that has too often been attached to 9/11 by those who’ve been witnesses from a distance, Reich’s response is an affecting tribute, both to those lost and to the New Yorkers left behind. I’m glad that its recording will see release near the 10 year anniversary of September 11, 2001.
The release also include So Percussion performing Reich 2009 Mallet Quartet and Reich and Musicians performing Dance Patterns (2002).
Thanks to Nonesuch for letting us debut the CD’s artwork.
Maura Lafferty is one of the most astute and social media savvy publicists of classical music around. Since several of her clients have used Kickstarter as part of fundraising campaigns, we asked her to write a guest blog about the platform. Maura’s been kind enough to share some tips for our readers about how to best employ Kickstarter to fund their next project.
Maura Lafferty
I get a lot of questions about Kickstarter and funding commissions through this tool, and have chimed in on a number of Twitter conversations about its effectiveness.
Kickstarter is a threshold giving system: for those unfamiliar with it, an artist or small organization can set up a fundraising campaign through the tool. Kickstarter provides a unique web portal for the giving, and takes a percentage of the fees. No 501(c)(3) tax deduction is offered, rather, the user sets up a series of giving benefits at different levels. For a new music project, this can boil down to basically fronting the money for a CD to make the project possible. The threshold offers a double safety valve to reduce the risk on a project driven by independent artists: the donor’s money won’t be wasted on an unsuccessful project, and the artist won’t be forced to work with insufficient resources.
Despite a number of successfully funded Kickstarter projects, many people are starting to resent seeing a link or request from the site, and this conversation is not unique to the new music community. Theater and other performing arts folks are also debating the challenges and usefulness of a site like Kickstarter. My response to these concerns is that you can’t blame the tool: blame the people whose behavior reflects a lack of understanding, and poor implementation, and, if you’re afraid you might be one of those people, try and figure out how to use it well.
A successful Kickstarter campaign – i.e., one that raises the money needed for the project (whether this is the threshold or a higher goal) – is the end product of successful communicating the value of one’s project, and converting that value into a dollar transaction on the part of the audience. This type of conversion is not unique to this platform: ticket and CD sales also require the same diligence when it comes to reaching audiences. Traditional marketing wisdom says that it takes 10 impressions/interactions with your product or brand before a new audience member reaches that point of conversion.
The advertising, promotion, and fundraising behavior that people resent comes from people who can’t think beyond their immediate circle of friends, colleagues and potential supporters, and just corner them or ask them repeatedly until they wear down. Christian Carey has likened composers sending him a Kickstarter link to the kid knocking on doors selling candy bars to his neighbors (“Well, only after I’d gotten twelve Kickstarter requests in a single day!” – CC).
Let’s be really honest: we all HATE that kid. He’s cute, the money goes to a cause that sounds good at the time, and you basically can’t say no when he’s standing on your doorstep. When you close the door, there’s a good chance you think to yourself: “Now what the HECK am I going to do with a box of 20 chocolate bars?” (Or, if it was my brother on your doorstep, you could basically kiss the money goodbye, because there was a chance that the envelope of money disappeared into the bowels of his completely disorganized desk.) This is why my mother always made me write a note to my neighbors, which I distributed in mailboxes, informing them that I had a school fundraiser, what it supported, and the deadline, and then I had to wait for the neighbors to call me.
This begs the all-important question: how do you find that audience, and how do you accumulate the 10 impressions needed per donor, without driving everyone around you completely insane? Like any good communication, advertising, or traditional fundraising campaign (some might say there is no difference from this latter), accomplishing a Kickstarter goal requires answering some key questions.
Identifying your audience requires thinking beyond your immediate circle and understanding what will motivate the target group of donors. The answer to what makes a YouTube or other Internet video go viral is identical: finding a point of resonance with something the audience already values, and providing something that taps into those values. This doesn’t mean “spinning” your pitch or changing anything you do artistically, but it does require some awareness and thoughtfulness at the outset.
I’ve worked on promoting three Kickstarter campaigns for new music projects, two of which were over-funded, and the most recent doubled its goal. My very first engagement as an independent publicist resulted in Meerenai Shim and Daniel Felsenfeld anchoring Chloe Veltman’sNew York Times article about evolving models of commissioning in January.
In Meerenai Shim’s case, her first Kickstarter campaign was successful because the concept of the project was something that everyone in her new music community on Twitter could get behind: an independent musician was undertaking a big fancy commission purely because she’s passionate about new music, and wanted to pay Daniel Felsenfeld a fair price for his work. The underlying values made this an easy project for the community to get behind. Meerenai had already done a lot of work building up this community online, and translated that work into her promotional pieces to drive the campaign: videos, reward swag like t-shirts, and even engaging a publicist to amplify the message beyond her immediate circle.
Dale Trumbore’smost recent campaign tapped into the communities of family and friends who had known her, soprano Gillian Hollis, and the other members of the project team. We reached out to personal circles that had known us growing up, attended the musicians’ high school and college recitals, which wanted to see the local girls accomplish something great. The video and other promotional materials focused on the members of the team, their talent, and the opportunity that this project represented.
An interesting side-note about Dale’s project: when she set her threshold, Kickstarter asks the artist to “ask for the minimum needed to make the project successful.” This is good advice: I’ve seen users set overly-ambitious threshold goals, which they then struggled to meet by the deadline. Dale took it to an extreme, setting her Kickstarter goal at $15, which meant that everything over that went directly to the project. The threshold does not have to be the fundraising goal: Dale’s real goal was $2,000.
The most challenging Kickstarter project that I worked on that was a challenge was Curtis Hughes’ campaign to fund his recording of “Say it Ain’t So, Joe,” which had premiered a few years prior to this project. I was initially enthusiastic: I could see a lot of potential tie-ins, and he mentioned the buzz that had surrounded the original production. Unfortunately, there were several things that added to the difficulty, and created stress that could have been avoided.
First, Curtis’ goal (and threshold) was significantly higher than any of the other projects I’ve worked on ($11,000). Second, the musicians engaged on the recording did not represent the full complement of the Boston-based Guerrilla Opera Company. Using part of an organization can present its own challenges. If only some are invited to participate, it may limit the rest of the organization’s drive to support the project and to spread the word among their audience. The intended audience I pitched was one that I really didn’t know very well (political writers), and I honestly didn’t know Curtis or the Guerrilla Opera community well enough before leaping into the project. Despite these initial challenges, we learned as we went and there’s a happy ending: the project ultimately did get funded, and I understand that the recording process went smoothly.
Audience awareness is the single biggest answer to any successful effort that an artist undertakes and converting those efforts into the bottom line that makes it possible to dedicate oneself to the project. The more we know ourselves, the art at hand, and the target audience, the more effectively we can communicate and produce results.
Fundraising through Kickstarter: pitfalls to avoid:
– Nagging your audience: whenever you post the link, make sure that there is always a new tidbit, fact, or supporting detail to offer your audience
– Wasting your credit with your support network/audience: make sure this is the project that you want your supporters to devote their attention to
– Setting an unreasonable goal/threshold for the scope of your support network and target audience: know how much your market is willing to give, and ask accordingly. If that means scaling back part of the project, or finding additional sources of funding from other arenas, adjust accordingly.
– Desperate, last-minute begging to reach an absurdly high goal: set your threshold at a comfortable place, so you can accomplish something meaningful, and your efforts aren’t wasted on a goal that you miss.
– Modeling your Kickstarter campaign too closely on others’: offer something distinctive
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.
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!
My parents-in-law have a long tradition of enthusiastic photography. Greta the golden retriever is less than a year old, but she’s already an accomplished model.
To those readers in the United States, I’d like to wish you a safe and happy Independence Day. While there’s a lot of music played on this holiday that is arranged to be “broadly appealing,” Charles Ives was never one to compromise. “Fourth of July” (1904), from the Holidays Symphony, complexly layers a number of patriotic tunes, which move a different speeds and simultaneously appear in different keys.
No one will mistake this piece for John Philip Sousa anytime soon, but it’s Ives’ way of paying tribute to the complex and multifaceted portrait that he saw both as America in the modern age and as the epitome of the American dream. Michael Tilson Thomas leads the Chicago Symphony in the embedded video below.
