Cello, Composers, Contemporary Classical, New York, Premieres, Saxophone

Intimate epics: Michael Hersch’s “Last Autumn”

hersch1There was a fair amount of buzz a couple years ago (including here at s21), when composer Michael Hersch‘s enormous piano canvas The Vanishing Pavilions was released on CD. What the New York Times has written about Hersch’s work in general seems to apply quite well to this two-hour-plus piece: “If the symmetries and proportions of Mr. Hersch’s music evoke the grounded fixity of architecture, its dynamism and spontaneous evolution are those of the natural world. Its somber eloquence sings of truths that are personal yet not confessional… Within the sober palette, the expressive power and range are vast.”

Turns out that this evening-length piece was only the first part of a trilogy of evening-length works — or rather, a “tet-trilogy”… The second part, Last Autumn, is a duo, and it exists in two versions: one for horn and ‘cello, the other for saxophone and cello. The horn/cello version was premiered in Philadelphia back in October last year, at the able hands of hornist (and Hersch’s brother) Jamie Hersch and cellist Daniel Gaisford. About that premiere, the Philadelphia Inquirer’s David Patrick Stearns wrote:

“As great as [The Vanishing Pavilions] is, Last Autumn eclipses it. In the airier, more distilled Autumn, whose emotional riches defy the harmonic limitations of the instruments, the music exploits the instruments in every imaginable way. …Idea and sound were inextricably one, and more viscerally exciting for it. … Long, vigorous applause indicated that Hersch’s more personal and demanding works are no longer appreciated by only a few.”

And now the saxophone and ‘cello version of Last Autumn is getting its premiere this Saturday, Feb 27 at 8pm in Merkin Hall here in NYC. Once again Gaisford is cellist, joined this time by saxophonist Gary Louie.

I had a chance to ask Hersch some questions about the work, the trilogy as a whole, and his motivations. I was also able to get a few questions to Louie, about what it feels like to be involved in a piece of this scope:

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S21: Michael, being a composer myself I know better than to ask you about why these enormous musical expanses have become necessary in your work. Still, even when following what we can’t help feel is the absolutely right path this music is leading us, short (Webern) or long (Wagner, Morton Feldman, Andrew Violette, David Toub, you), was there ever a moment where you had to look at the sheer size of these visions and think “is this crazy or what”?

Michael Hersch: When I first began to compose, many of the works I wrote were quite long. Most of these earliest efforts however are now withdrawn, including my undergraduate recital work which consisted of a single program-length piece (a work for trumpet and strings).  As I progressed through my twenties I felt that I should try and broaden, or in this case contract, the canvasses which I was working with. While there are a few works still in my catalog from those years, most of the pieces I wrote during this period I also am not satisfied with. It wasn’t until my thirties that I felt able to begin to naturally express myself in works of varying lengths – especially in pieces under thirty minutes. It was at this point however that I decided to begin work on The Vanishing Pavilions, which seemed a natural outgrowth of what I had done before. I also recognized that beginning this project was a decision that would necessarily have deep implications on how and what I would write for the foreseeable future. I certainly knew that a work of this scale would have little chance of ever being programmed. That said, most anything a composer writes in our age suffers this reality. If their were performers who could play this particular work or its later siblings, they would have to commit vast amounts of time and energy to learning a piece that they rarely, if ever, would be asked to perform. For The Vanishing Pavilions, my intention was to write, premiere and record the work myself. For Last Autumn, I was remarkably fortunate to have found performers beyond myself willing to commit the necessary time to the piece. It has been a surreal experience to witness the kind of selflessness they have brought to the task of learning the music.

You asked if I thought it crazy to write music on this scale. There is certainly precedent for composers embarking on journeys like this in the past. In my case, I think I felt at a certain point that due to life’s uncertainty, my time was best spent following what seems that absolutely right path you mentioned.

S21: Do you see the piece as an evening-length work from the outset, or does it only become apparent after starting the composition?

MH: I knew that the three works of this cycle would be in the neighborhood of 3 hours each from the outset. Writing each piece has been a slow, deliberate, years-long process, with unexpected turns along the way. The Vanishing Pavilions took over four years to write, Last Autumn three years. When I complete the last work in the cycle, the entire undertaking will have taken some ten years.

S21: Certainly unique among ‘epic’ compositions has to be that the whole almost-three hours of Last Autumn is a duo for two solo melodic instruments. Was there ever a temptation along the way to add another voice or two to the mix?

MH: When I decided to write the work, I knew that the specific performers I was writing for were capable of remarkable things on their respective instruments. The cellist, Daniel Gaisford, is able to solidly convey the resources of a cello, viola and violin, creating if called upon the illusion of a string trio.  In saxophonist Gary Louie, I knew I essentially had access to a quartet made up of horn, saxophone, clarinet and oboe. In the case of my brother Jamie, I knew he was capable of creating the illusion at different times of a bass trombone, tenor trombone, horn and trumpet. Ultimately, in both cases I felt I was writing for not a duo of two melodic instruments, but in fact a septet.

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by Steve Layton
Contemporary Classical

Around the block

In case you’ve been getting in the habit of just clicking on the main page, taking a quick stare and then waltzing off hither and yon… Judith Lang Zaimont tells us what it’s like to get a little too close to the wrong kind of news, and the positive power of music even then… In case you’ve missed it, Christian Carey‘s trouble with eighth blackbird’s $50 entry fee for some lucky composer to get a performance has been racking up the comments, both very yea and very nay… Lawrence Dillon asks if being an eclectic composer is such a sin, really… Jay Batzner is taking on the challenge of writing an album’s worth of music in a month, and so far failing gloriously… Elodie Lauten wonders what’s going on with funding criteria these days… Paula Mlyn has been able to get back to tending our Naxos blog, and there’s all kinds of new news & interviews there just now…

In the wings: Tom Myron is itching to pen mucho new bon mots as soon as we get his blog upgraded [it’s coming Tom, hold yer horses!], James Holt has more great performer interviews from all over coming down the pipe, as does our pal Chris Becker, I’m putting together an interview with composer Michael Hersch in advance of an amazing premiere a couple weeks from now, CD reviews continue apace… Etc etc, blah de blah, this is just a gentle reminder to not forget to scroll, snoop, click on down past the main page once in a while, hear?  And now, one last quick shout-out:

bruceThe photo is from the 1974 Pasco (WA) High School Swing Choir. The hairy Prince Valiant who’s lost all the buttons on his shirt is me (hey, we’re talking the 70s here, remember? I was in a rock band and had an image to uphold!). The other bright-eyed fellow in front of me, with the Art Garfunkel hair, is Bruce Neswick. Bruce and I were in classes together in our beloved podunk hometown, from 3rd or 4th grade all the way through high school, and have touched bases from college ’till now. Bruce was one of those kids who had music in his veins since birth; playing keyboards was as natural for him as breathing. It didn’t matter whether it was the Carpenters or Jean Langlais (which Bruce treated me to in an impromptu two-person visit back then, at the little tracker organ in the chapel at St. Martin’s College in Lacey, WA) — Bruce took one look and the music just flowed from his fingers.

While my path wandered off into the world of composition, Bruce headed off into performance, specifically organ and liturgical music. Studies both here and in Europe followed, then teaching/performance/directing gigs everywhere from Buffalo, to Geneva, to the National Cathedral in Washington D.C. He’s made some wonderful recordings over the years, and is a truly phenomenal improviser at the organ.

But many of you regular S21 readers don’t have to travel so far to see and hear Bruce; the last year-and-a-half he’s been happily ensconced as Director of Music at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine right there in New York City. An amazing journey and achievement for my old friend, one I hope only continues…

by Steve Layton
Concerts

Music & Tragedy: The Killings in Huntsville

This weekend at U of Alabama Huntsville there was to have been a two-day symposium built around my second piano trio, ZONES. (The piece would  be performed on Friday evening, paired with the Ravel Trio in a  concert by Trio Appassionato.)  But  Friday afternoon,  just as I was driving in from the airport, came the terrible  murders on campus, shocking  the city to its core.

I was emotionally dumbstruck by  this tragedy – and  the campus was  closed after   an hour-long lockdown.

What to do? … Concert organizer Dr. Royce Boyer and the performers  decided to hold a truncated concert at a local church.  I agreed to participate  if  it were possible for me to speak with the audience first  — and to add a   ‘musical offering’ to open the program, music very  different from the dramatic works  already scheduled.

After a rushed run-through of my  five-minute Serenade with violinist  Marta Szlubowska,  I spoke to the audience about how the University’s fabric of cordiality had been so horribly torn apart four hours earlier,  and  how  wrenching it was for us to compose ourselves to play that night — but also how key it is for a creative artist to take on one of our most essential  roles, that of providing the emotional documents through which  societies register  moments of  shared  high emotion.    And that such  ‘emotional documents’ can — in addition to providing an outlet for extreme feeling — begin the communal process of regaining balance.     What the University community needed, I believed,  was a way to express great sadness  and yet  get beyond the shock  by entering  a ‘zone of serenity’ as a step towards understanding and acceptance.

Serenade turned out to be  essential to this evening on this day.  Over and over at the reception  people spoke of how helpful this music  was  (and the words), and how powerful the piece was to them, hearing it at this moment.   While  they admired and responded to the trios,  what they talked about as essential was Serenade.

It’s Sunday morning, and I’m back home –  still in shock about the campus shootings, and the well of out-of-control emotion that prompted them.   I will not write any music today.

by Judith Lang Zaimont
Concerts, San Francisco

Fits and Starts — sfSoundSeries

sfsound

Music has always come from two basic sources, and served two quite different masters — thought and emotion. The Western tradition, especially in its modern and contemporary permutations, has given the upper hand to thought, as if it was superior to feeling, and therefore inescapably deep. Hence our worship of Bach’s “pure” architectural lines and use of forms, and Schoenberg and his Second Viennese School and their satellites’ obsession with 12-note sets, have driven the wedge between the two even deeper . And that’s why some composers have claimed that that their music is music better than it sounds because it exists as “pure” thought on paper.

But most of the music by the 10 Bay Area-based composers on sfSoundSeries “Small Packages ” at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music’s handsome and warm-sounding Recital Hall 23 January , which revolved around a rare performance of Ligeti‘s 1970 Chamber Concerto, seemed to focus on  feeling as not being divorced from thought, or vice versa. This wasn’t paper music. And one had the distinct sense, to paraphrase Dorothy, that we weren’t in Vienna any more.

Music always plays with time, and the 10 pieces here, which ranged from a little over 2 minutes to a whopping 6, teased one’s sense of duration as each filled its space with different kinds of weights, lines, and densities.  The physical character of sound , which is of course a central modernist concern, also varied widely from piece to piece. Tom Dambly‘s Chamber Concerto, op. 3 (second movement) for 8 players, including the composer on trumpet, even had 12-note stretches, as well as a delirious sense of shifting tonal anchors. Nick Bacchetti‘s String Trio, which obviously evokes Schoenberg’s late masterpiece in this form, was expertly delivered by Graeme Jennings, violin, Alexa Beattie, viola, Monica Scott, cello, and Christopher Jones, conductor. Canner MEFE‘s witty Pen and Pencil Drawer, played here by Kyle Bruckman, oboe, and Matt Ingalls, clarinet, with its rapid glissandi, sounded like a virtuosic series of hockets/canons both elegant and forceful.

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by Michael McDonagh
Commissions, Competitions, File Under?

20 composers X a $50 dollar application fee = a self-funded commission

I have the utmost respect for Eighth Blackbird as musicians and new music advocates. In fact one of my fondest dreams as a composer would be to have them perform my chamber Sextet. But I was very disappointed to learn that the ensemble’s new Call for Scores requires composers to pay a $50 application fee to have their scores considered. While, as one of my colleagues put it, this may convince composers to be ‘a bit self-selective’ in their submissions, it’s also a handy way to self-fund the commission of a new work for the ensemble.

As much as I’d like to have Eighth Blackbird consider my work, I don’t want to participate in a process that feels exploitative.

Thoughts on application fees? The comments section is open!

by Christian Carey
Contemporary Classical, Festivals, Participation

Calling all Ludwig lovers

lvbMy guitarist friend in Mexico, Alexandra Cárdenas, passes along a request received from a German accordionist Eva Zöllner:

Dear friends, I need your help for a project I will present at RADAR festival in Mexico City in March. As part of a new version of Mauricio Kagel‘s LUDWIG VAN I am working on a collage of Beethoven fragments.

I’d like to ask you to contribute to this project by recording a Beethoven tune for me, preferably in an unusual manner (for example singing under the shower, whistling bits of the viola part of the Egmont Overture backwards, ….. whatever you feel like…).

I need your recordings (they can be very short, don’t even think about practising all the cello sonatas on your bass recorder… 😉  by email to eva (at) eva-zoellner.de until February 20.

I look forward to your ideas and I’d be happy to have many of you join this little project. Please don’t hesitate to contact me if you have any questions or forward this to some friends.

Many thanks, Eva

by Steve Layton
Composers, Concerts, Conferences, Contemporary Classical, Minimalism

Blängen the Schlingen with Charlemagne Palestine

palestinePwyll ap Siôn is a composer and Senior Lecturer in music at Bangor University in Wales (UK). His strong interest in Minimalism (he’s written a book on Michael Nyman) led to his co-hosting of the first International Conference on Minimalist Music in 2007. He also made his way across the ocean for the second iteration of the conference, held last September in Kansas City, MO.  Pwyll asked if S21 might like to print a few of his reactions and thoughts from the conference, and we said sure thing:

At the Second International Conference on Minimalist Music last September, hosted by the University of Missouri at Kansas City, part of the evening events led me to the Grace & Holy Trinity Cathedral to hear composer, performer and improviser Charlemagne Palestine.  He is something of an enigma; when John Adams attended a rare performance in the 1980s, Palestine walked out after twenty minutes, leaving the audience baffled. Even those who have already seen him have no idea what to expect.

I enter the dim glow of the cathedral and notice two things: first, the sound of a drone — two notes, a fifth apart (a little like La Monte Young’s infamous Composition 1960 No. 7: two notes with the instruction ‘to be held for a long time’). The drone is low in dynamic but high in register, its reedy timbre adding a slight edge to the ambiance, but this is otherwise a rather inauspicious introduction. Secondly, there’s a merry gaggle of teddies and puppets neatly arranged on a table near the entrance, all of which appear to be wearing scarves or ribbons. I am told that this is de rigueur in the eccentric world of Palestine. But nothing quite prepares me for what follows.

We are politely informed that the performance has already begun despite the fact that the audience is milling around, chatting casually or ambling up and down the aisles. The atmosphere is relaxed, however, and we are told that the unpredictable Palestine is (literally) in high spirits, on his second (large) glass of cognac, and has extended an invitation to members of the audience to visit the organ loft situated at the rear of the cathedral. We have to take off our shoes to do this – a complicated process since it is almost completely dark at the back of the nave – and just as we are about to be ushered by an assistant up the staircase, there is a frisson of activity from above, and the man himself appears, wine glass in hand, wearing a panama hat and dressed in bright, colourful clothes.

He strides purposefully past us towards the altar, raising his voice to speak. Rather like the drone, which continues to sound in the background, his voice is high-pitched and nasal. He announces that he will be playing Schlingen-Blängen, which has not been performed (spoken ostentatiously) ‘in the United States of America’ for decades. But he’s rambling on incoherently, maybe the cognac’s starting to take effect, and I’m starting to doubt all the hype. This increases as he proceeds to produce a ringing sound by rubbing his finger around the wine glass while emitting a series of pitches in a childlike voice.

With the performance rapidly descending into banality Palestine stops singing, abruptly turns on his heels down the aisle and back up the organ loft. Seizing the opportunity the Belgian musicologist/critic Maarten Beirens and I follow him up the stairs. Oblivious to the fact that we’re there, he is entirely absorbed in his own sound world and starts to perform.

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by Steve Layton
Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Flute, Interviews, Music Events, Podcasts, Seattle

Seattle Chamber Players | On the Boards

0910_scp_lgThose of you who are familiar with the contemporary arts scene in Seattle know that there are two organizations which have been dedicated to presenting new and interesting works from around the world for over 20-years: On the Boards and the Seattle Chamber Players.  And those of you who are familiar with me know that I have a special love for Seattle and all the interesting musical and artistic projects that are embraced there.  So, if you are in Seattle I would encourage you to check-out some upcoming SPC performances at OtB (especially since I can’t be there!).

February 26-28: SCP will be performing five concerts in three days featuring new music from Italy, Hungary, Russia, Ukraine, Denmark, and Iceland.  It is all part of their Icebreaker series and this set of concerts is subtitled “Love and War” – all the details can be found here.

And then…

March 4-6: SCP return to On the Boards for special collaboration with Pacific Musicworks in a theatrical production of “Songs of War I Have Seen” by German composer and director Heiner Goebbels.  More information about these performances can be found here.

There is no question that the Seattle Chamber Players founder and flutist, Paul Taub, has been one of the most influential figures in Seattle’s contemporary music scene for a long time.  I was able to get Paul on the phone for a few minutes back in June and I’m happy to finally share it with all of you now.  Like most of my interviews with musicians, we talked about composer-performer relationships, but it’s also interesting to hear him speak a little about the Seattle Chamber Players’ dedication to contemporary music from Eastern Europe and countries of the former Soviet Union.  You can download or listen to the audio here.

by James Holt