Boston, Composers, Contemporary Classical, Interviews

An interview with Sir Harrison Birtwistle

Miss Music Nerd (AKA composer/keyboardist Linda Kernohan) recently had an opportunity to chat with Sir Harrison Birtwistle after hearing his Violin Concerto premiered by Christian Tezlaff and the Boston Symphony Orchestra.  In the course of their conversation, Birtwistle discussed the impetus for writing a violin concerto, his difficulties with precompositional schemes (“I get terribly bored…by the time I’ve got 200 yards down the road”), and how he handles getting “stuck” while writing a work.

The entire interview (with some interesting links to other Birtwistliana) can be found here.

Ms. Hahn, if you’re looking for a new concerto to learn (hint, hint)….

by Christian Hertzog
Contemporary Classical

Hilary Plays for Japan

Hilary Hahn was supposed to be in Japan this week on a recital tour with her frequent collaborator Valentina Lisitsa but nature had other plans.  The catastrophic  twin disasters of a 9.0-magnitude earthquake and powerful subsequent tsunami on March 11 took the lives of thousands of Japanese citizens and have left thousands more without homes, electricity, or access to clean water.

Hahn’s Japan concerts were understandably canceled so she decided to use the time to organize and play four Japan-relief benefit concerts in the United States this week.

“I had been looking forward to performing in Japan: the country is unlike any other, and the audiences are so dedicated and love music so much that it is always a pleasure to play for them,” Hahn writes.  “I first went to Japan when I was a teenager and have returned nearly every year since. My memories from my time there are vivid, and it is hard to picture a vibrant country that I know so well facing such a destructive crisis. My first thought was to organize a tour of fundraiser concerts: instead of playing in Japan this month, I might be able to play for Japan.”

Hahn will play four concerts around the country to help raise money for Direct Relief International (MD, GA, and NY concerts) and for Presbyterian Disaster Assistance (VA concert). 100% of the proceeds will be sent to these charities and both charities have pledged 100% of the money will go to Japan relief and recovery funds.

The mini-tour begins today, March 24 in Baltimore, where Hahn will be joined by singer/songwriter Caleb Stine, violinist Yuka Kubota, pianist Yoshie Kubota, Baltimore School for the Arts students Tariq Al-Sabir and Robert Pate, and Suzuki students from the Peabody Preparatory. There will also be appearances by author Lia Purpura and historian Constantine Vaporis, both of whom recently contributed to an editorial exploring best non GamStop casinos 2025, underscoring Baltimore’s eclectic blend of cultural and modern interests. The Baltimore event is envisioned as a community-based collaborative project. Art, jewelry and more will be on sale by Baltimore area artisans. The concert will be held at St. John’s of Baltimore. Tickets are $20-$50 and are available in advance at Red Emma’s Bookstore, 800 St. Paul St. and with cash at the door.

Tomorrow, Friday, March 25 a benefit concert will be held at Westminster Presbyterian Church, Alexandria, VA. This concert, and the following in Spivey Hall at Clayton State University, Morrow, GA on Sunday March 27, will feature a shared program between Hahn and long time collaborator Valentina Lisitsa. Lisitsa, called “jaw-dropping” and “glorious” by The Chicago Tribune, was set to tour Japan with Hahn and helped to make these two benefit concerts a reality. The concert in Alexandria is free, but donations are highly recommended. Tickets for the concert at Spivey Hall are $75, available from Spivey’s box office: 678-466-4200 or www.spiveyhall.org.

Finally, Hahn will appear with special guests Josh Ritter, Chris Thile, and Caleb Stine on Monday March 28 at Galapagos Art Space in Brooklyn. Tickets are available on the Galapagos website:www.galapagosartspace.com. This final concert brings together a eclectic group of performers whose love for music is contagious–the evening is a celebration of music making and artistic connectivity. The goal is not only to raise money for a worthy cause, but to take time to remember the joyous love of artistic creation that makes Japan such a resilient culture.

And, I might add, to remind us why Hilary is the Sequenza21 lifetime Prom Queen.

Feel free to repost and/or pass along this condensed schedule:
Thursday, March 24 – 7:30 p.m.
Baltimore, MD
Featuring: singer/songwriter Caleb Stine, violinist Yuka Kubota, pianist Yoshie Kubota, Baltimore School for the Arts students Tariq Al- Sabir and Robert Pate, and Suzuki students from the Peabody Preparatory
2640 Space at St. John’s
$20-$50

Friday, March 25 – 7:30 p.m.
Alexandria, VA
Featuring: Valentina Lisitsa
Westminster Presbyterian Church
Free, donations encouraged

Sunday, March 27 – 3 p.m.
Morrow, GA
Featuring: Valentina Lisitsa
Spivey Hall at Clayton State University
$75

Monday, March 28 – 9 p.m.
Brooklyn, NY
Featuring: Josh Ritter, Chris Thile, and Caleb Stine
Galapagos Art Space
$55

by Jerry Bowles
Contemporary Classical

The Discrete Musical Charms of Pavia

If you’re looking for a place to hang out with some pretty famous composers, polish off your latest  music project and hear it played in a historic venue by professional musicians in front of a real audience, make new friends and music world connections, win a composition prize, and maybe even meet the girl or boy of your dreams (or bring them along if you already have), I have a suggestion for you:  Pavia.  Located a mere 35 clicks from the Milan airport, the ancient university town (pop. 70,000, 20,000 of them students) in northern Italy’s Lombardy region will host its annual highSCORE Contemporary Music Festival and Master Classes from July 6-18 and if you’re a composer and your music project is accepted, you can be there…for the price of about 20 minutes at Yale.

The highSCORE Festival is the brainchild of a 28-year-old composer and mathematical music theorist Giovanni Albini, who serves as Artistic Director, and his 30-year-old business partner, Paolo Fosso, computer scientist, musician, and marketer par excellence, who is Executive Producer.   I spoke to Albini last night via Skype and he was very excited about this year’s program.

“The idea is to bring together a group of talented young composers and have them work closely with our renowned faculty and special guests for two intense weeks of masterclasses, lectures, workshops and concerts,” Albini says. “Performances of the participants’ music during the festival are presented at cultural and historical sites throughout Pavia, such as the famous church of St. Peter in the Golden Sky where St. Augustine and Boetius are buried. We work directly with the F. Vittadini” Higher Institute of Music Studies, which is located here, and has 20 plus large, well-equipped rooms with Vertical and Grand Pianos that we use.”

This year’s faculty includes Giya Kancheli, who is guest of honor, dean of faculty Christopher Theofanidis, Mario Garuti, Paul Glass, Ugo Nastrucci, Ingrid Pustijanac, and Amy Beth Kirsten, who told me last night that she is “thrilled” to be part of the program.

“This is wonderful opportunity to be part of growing community of composers who have shared the highSCORE Festival experience and come away with a real sense of achievement and optimism about their futures in music,” she says.

All of the details you’ll need if you’re interested are on the Festival’s sharp new website.  Deadline for applications is April 8. For the 2011 edition you can submit music for:

> string quartet with or without electronics
> solo guitar (classical, acoustic or electric) with or without electronics
> solo double-bass or electric bass with or without electronics

“You don’t have to write something between now and April 8,” Albini adds. “You can submit something you’ve already finished and some sketches of what you plan to do in Pavia in July.”

by Jerry Bowles
Chamber Music, Composers, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Houston, Strings

Musiqa presents: The Art Of Conversation

Spring in Houston is an intensely visual experience as the grass now nourished by rain and sun turns from brown to green. Flowers are blooming in unexpected places while birds of all shades of color return to take up residence in the surrounding trees. Everything looks and smells a little…fresher. Come Spring, Houston’s bird population as well as its amphibians and yes, insects, sing or otherwise rock their antiphonal and conversational repertoire all day and all night. Which leads us to one of the many highlights of what is now the last few months of the artistic season.

This Saturday, March 26th at 7:30pm at the Hobby Center’s Zilkha Hall, Musiqa presents “The Art of Conversation,” a unique blend of music and theater with the Grammy-nominated Enso String Quartet performing a program of Houston composers including two world premieres by Kurt Stallmann and Rob Smith, as well as quartets by Karim Al-Zand and Marcus Maroney. Interwoven with the music are two ten-minute one-act plays by Michael Hollinger, “Truth Decay” and “Naked Lunch,” featuring actors Briana Resa and Matt Hune under the direction of Julia Traber. The similarity of string quartet writing and performance to conversation between companions or even actors in a play inspired the concert’s name and cross-disciplinary programming. Houston, by the way, has a very lively theater scene with several forward thinking companies including Alley Theatre, Stages Repertory Theatre, Frenetic / FrenetiCore Theatre, Catastrophic Theatre, and and Bobbindoctrin Puppet Theatre.

Composer Kurt Stallmann

Commissioned by the Chamber Music America Commissioning Program, Kurt Stallman’s premiere Following Franz, Now for string quartet and electronics began with Stallman’s analysis of Franz Schubert’s unfinished string quartet Quartettsatz, a process that generated musical materials for his own quartet built directly from those contained in Schubert’s score. Going far beyond musical quotation, Stallman challenged himself by imposing only small changes to Schubert’s original materials – widening the opening range of pitches by a semitone, deriving all harmonic material from a few choice chords, or lengthening of the primary motif by a single sixteenth note – to develop a composition containing the “trace memory” of Schubert’s original work. Enso will perform Schubert’s Quartettsatz before Following Franz, Now so audiences can experience the transformation.

Composer Rob Smith

Musiqa Artistic Board member Rob Smith also directs the AURA contemporary ensemble at the Moores School Of Music. His composition for string quartet and The Art Of Conversation’s second world premier Spin is inspired by the manic energy and immediacy of contemporary pop music as well as the exhilarating if queasy sensation of spinning. “A circle of fifths harmonic progression, canonic passages, modal figures that loop around the tonic, and uneven rhythmic patterns” are all a part of Spin’s driving and energetic musical world.

“The Art Of Conversation” takes place March 26, 7:30 p.m. at The Hobby Center for the Performing Arts, Zilkha Hall, 800 Bagby. Ticket prices are $20-$40 with 50% off for seniors and students with ID. You can purchase tickets at www.musiqahouston.org.

At 7:00pm, Musiqa’s Artistic Director Anthony Brandt presents “New to New Music,” a pre-concert talk geared especially for those new to contemporary classical music.

This Friday at 12 noon Central time, tune in to KUHF 88.7 to hear the Enso Quartet, Kurt Stallman and Rob Smith interviewed live on The Front Row. KUHF streams online, so those of you around the country, check it out.

by Chris Becker
Contemporary Classical

Sampling sound worlds

Since I’ve been at the University of Michigan, I’ve frequently pondered the nature of the “American” sound in contemporary music. I recognize the present state of American contemporary music a melting pot of almost every style imaginable, but I wonder further about common threads, the deeper musical and intellectual ideas American composers – my generation in particular – share.

I had the opportunity this past Sunday and Monday to experience a sample population – albeit it very small – of talented, ambitious student composers when I attended concerts at my undergraduate alma mater, Rice University, and my current school, the University of Michigan. I’ve been Sequenza21’s UMich beat writer since September, so I thought I’d use this unusual coincidence to analyze, a little more deeply, the commonalities and differences between these sets of musical minds. Though I have the larger community of composers in mind, my conclusions are relevant to/dependent on my individual experience and – alas – are limited in scope. If nothing else, I hope the following opinions will spark/provoke members of different musical networks to investigate the relationship between their personal or group sound and the rest of our musical society.

I’ll begin with what I think is the biggest difference between the two schools’ sound worlds: popular music influences more heavily permeate the new music at Michigan, both directly and indirectly. Freshman Zac Lavender’s Song Cycle in Three Movements is the most transparent illustration of this impulse I’ve heard all year at Michigan. The work consists of three pop songs that interpret common psychological themes in popular music (i.e. personal insecurity, the pressure of deciding one’s future, etc.) and are scored for a singer-guitarist and rotating battery of strings, drum set and electric bass. The individual songs were catchy – the second song, 17 Days Ago, is still stuck in my head – and the string parts were akin to producer/arranger George Martin’s work with The Beatles.

Based on last year, the much smaller composition studio at Rice could only boast one student with similar tastes: Joelle Zigman. I am not sure how her music has changed since I graduated, but her growth in the two years I knew her yielded a fusion of a pop-style musical surface with the more complicated textures and techniques she had learned as a student of contemporary music. Development like this is not unusual for composers, because many of us deeply love popular music. The degree of influence composer’s allow popular music to have in their concert works seems to be growing with time, and it wouldn’t surprise me if young composers’ works began to increasingly resemble the popular music they interact with daily.

(more…)

by Garrett Schumann
Contemporary Classical, New York, Premieres

Lunatics, poets and composers giving sanctuary

(And Gods know sanctuary is something many of us might be searching for these days…) This Monday, 21 March, at 8pm in the Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall (57th Street and Seventh Avenue, NYC), the ensemble Lunatics at Large begin a series of four concerts with five premieres, of works involving the collaboration of five composers and five poets. This little bit of numerology is titled “The Sanctuary Project“; Project Director Evi Jundt says:

We picked artists whose work we believed would be evocative of the theme ‘Sanctuary.’ First, the poets presented one new poem and some older works to the composers. The composers then chose which poet(s) they felt compelled to collaborate with. Each collaboration happened on its own terms: in one case, it resulted in a group of poems set to music in a song cycle; in another case, the poet helped find examples of folk music to be quoted in the composition. In the next stage, musical compositions served as inspiration for another new work by the poets. Finally, the poets – the initiators of the process – will join the musicians onstage to read their work in between performances of the chamber pieces.

The composers are André Brégégère, Mohammed Fairouz, Raphael Fusco, Laura Koplewitz and Alex Shapiro; the poets are Rob Buchert, Joanna Fuhrman, David Shapiro, Yerra Sugarman and Ryan Vine.

The Lunatics will present the same concert three more times, in actual sanctuaries: April 8, 8pm at Christ and Saint Stephen’s Church (122 West 69th Street, NYC); April 10, 7pm at the Synagogue for the Arts (49 White Street, NYC); and April 21, 7:30pm at WMP Concert Hall (31 East 28th Street, NYC).

by Steve Layton
Choral Music, Composers, Concert review, Contemporary Classical, Los Angeles, Minimalism

Full passages and empty passions

Last Saturday night I caught a trio of Philip Glass‘s slightly more obscure music, performed by a well-rehearsed Pacific Symphony and Pacific Chorale (based in Orange County, California) as part of their annual American Composers Festival. Although lesser-known than its Los Angeles counterpart, the symphony is staffed with many fine Southern California-based musicians and performs in the recently built and acoustically impressive Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall.

The opening piece, “Meetings Along the Edge” from Passages (1990), featured Glass’s collaboration with Ravi Shankar, in which both agreed to each compose a melody for each other and write a new composition around it. Usually I cringe at the results at these attempts at cultural exchange and creative collaboration, but in this rare instance I was very taken with the way Shankar’s Indian melody combined with Glass’s signature contrapuntal and harmonic elements. It created a fascinating juxtaposition, that gave me new insights on how Shankar’s Indian musical elements integrated into his very recognizable compositional language.

The Concerto for Saxophone Quartet and Orchestra (1995) was written to serve dual purposes: first to be performed primarily as a saxophone quartet (here handled by the Prism Quartet), and secondly to be performed with an added orchestral accompaniment. Judging by the many recordings available of the quartet (sans orchestra), it has become a popular addition to the saxophone repertoire, but at Saturday evening’s performance it was hard to forget that much of this music was very similar or even repurposed from Wichita Vortex Sutra (1990), Glass’s song cycle collaboration based on Alan Ginsberg’s spoken-word poetry with solo piano. Reusing music has been widely accepted (besides borrowing heavily from Mozart and Purcell, Michael Nyman is a common recycler of his own music) and I think there is nothing inherently wrong with reusing one’s material, but in this case the unintended results were the equivalent of watching James Gandolfini from The Sopranos appear in another TV show. No matter how hard you try, it’s hard to see him as anybody but Tony Soprano. Comparing this secondhand saxophone showcase against the powerful combination of Glass’s music with Ginsberg’s poetry doesn’t really equate apples to apples, but more like apples to apple butter.

After intermission, just from viewing the assembled 140-member Pacific Chorale and orchestra, it might be easy to assume that Glass’s The Passion of Ramakrishna would feature a grand spectacle similar to his non-narrative operas like Akhnaten and Satyagraha. But for reasons I can’t fathom the assembled full chorus and orchestra wasn’t used to its full potential, at least in comparison to his similar vocal and operatic works.

The libretto, which recounted the final months and last words of the 19th-century Indian philosopher Ramakrishna, were surprisingly taciturn and the music was pleasant, but as the Passion of Ramakrishna was coming to a close I was struck that I had never been left so cold by a Glass vocal piece: It was basically 50 minutes of recitative with no aria (i.e. mostly all story and very little emotion).  After the performance my concerns were confirmed when some of the performers said that Glass had mentioned he’d been hoping to eventually to flesh out the piece further, which was especially curious because the weekend’s performances were being recorded for a possible release on Naxos or Glass’s own Orange Mountain Music label.

Whether or not the piece performed Saturday night was the final version, it does leave me to think that in its current version, the Passion of Ramakrishna could use a few changes — namely, more “Passion” to balance out the exposition.  As a composer who has learned much from studying and performing Glass’s music over the years the music presented Saturday night shows that even though many already are calling him a “living legend”, sometimes deadlines and professional obligations lead to music that was created by a mere mortal.

by Paul Bailey
Contemporary Classical

Sure, Now. The Pipes Are Calling

Ladies and gentlemen, for your St. Patrick’s Day dining and dancing pleasure, here is the fourth movement of Ben Johnston’s String Quartet No. 10. I think you will recognize the melody although it doesn’t become obvious until near the end.

(Click the link to play)

4th Movement #10  Ben Johnston

Here are Ben’s notes on why he selected this particular melody:

This theme embodies certain contradictions which allow me to make a sincere, precise statement, much in the manner of a fine stand-up comedian.   I am myself descended from the British Isles, and have read extensively about the pre-Christian civilization, which was eventually outdistanced by St. Patrick and all the rest… any objective tribute involves some irony, looking at the sum total; how the difficult history was eventually commercialized- compromises made but the spirit undefeated.

I used this theme-without-variations to create a variations-without a-theme, focusing attention on the surface while carefully concealing the tune- developing it with derivations subtle and complex, in a harmonically intense way from Medieval to the present, finally revealed in a cathartic way, and followed by a popularized, sarcastic version– a tune and a walking bass. In effect, the magic is gone, a sad commentary on the way Western civilization works. At the same time, a bitter, and uplifting statement.

Read more about the Kepler Quartet’s recording of  String Quartets 1, 5 and 10.

by Jerry Bowles
Competitions, Composers, Contemporary Classical, File Under?, New York

Exploring the Metropolis Expands Residency Program

Judith Sainte Croix presenting as part of Con Ed's Composer Residency Program

Exploring the Metropolis administers the Con Edison Composer Residency Program, a response to the challenges musicians face finding space to work in the ever more pricey environs of New York. The organization has just announced that it is expanding the program for its Spring 2011 residencies. They’ll be finding eight composers three month residencies at four different locations throughout the city (including the boroughs of Manhattan, Queens, and Brooklyn). This will allow them a space to work, an opportunity to present their music in a public program at the completion of their appointment, and a small stipend (This year it was $1000).

Thus far, Flushing Town Hall in Queens and Turtle Bay Music School in Midtown East Manhattan have been announced as spaces for next year’s residencies. Exploring the Metropolis suggests that interested composers sign up for their email list to get further details about the 2011 program as they are announced

by Christian Carey