Network plays Chamber Concerto

Network for New Music gave an excellent performance last night of my Chamber Concerto. This is not an easy piece – I wrote it for the hyper-virtuosi of Speculum Musicae, with Allen Blustine as clarinet soloist – but the Network ensemble pulled it off in style. Soloist Ben Fingland had full command of the part, not only the rapid flurries of notes, but the most delicate nuances, including some uncannily soft high register tones. The players relished the jazzy parts of the last movement. My one small regret was that I don’t feel I tweaked some of the synthesizer patches quite properly; Linda Reichert covered the part just fine, but if the piece is done again I would make some of the patches a little more resonant, with longer decays and capable of a wider dynamic range. Besides Ben and Linda, the players were Paul Arnold, violin; Tom Kraines, cello; Mary Javian, double bass; Christopher Deviney, percussion; and Charles Abramovic, piano, with Jan Krzywicki conducting.

The other works on the program were performed to the customary high Network standard – Paul Arnold’s violin was alternately dancing and lyrical in Judith Shatin‘s Penelope’s Song; Hirono Oka, Burchard Tang and Thom Kraines were an exceptionally refined string trio in Paul Lansky‘s As If. (It’s odd to realize that I was a tech person for the premiere of the Lansky in 1981 at Columbia University – “tech” only in the sense of being assigned to move speakers around.)  Arne Running gracefully commanded the sleight-of-hand narrative of Mario Davidovsky‘s clarinet Synchronisms.

Network’s Third Space festival continues, with programs at Temple U on Sunday night, at Community College of Philadelphia on Monday, and with a reprise of the Sunday program at Haverford College on Friday. Read more details at the Network website.

In addition to tomorrow’s Network concert, you will want to be present for the premieres of works by Melinda Wagner and Richard Brodhead at Marcantonio Barone’s piano recital this Sunday, sponsored by the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, and presented at the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia.

Empyrean on iTunes

You can find downloads of performances by UC Davis’s Empyrean Ensemble here. Composers include Davidovsky, Melinda Wagner, Lee Hyla, Xenakis, Cage, Wayne Peterson, Kurt Rhode and more.

Matthew Greenbaum on Kickstarter

My colleague Matthew Greenbaum is raising money on Kickstarter for a concert by violinist Mari Kimura as part of Matthew’s Amphibian series in NYC on April 25 Kimura will play her own fascinating interactive pieces (using IRCAM technology, etc.), Mario Davidovsky’s 9th Synchronism, and premieres by Eric Chasalow and Matthew. The concert takes place at HiArt Gallery in Chelsea.  Go here to support the concert. Another post about Matthew here. Here is Mari in action with a robot guitar:

Secret Geometry in Birmingham

Pianist Jon-Luke Kirton (at left) will play my Secret Geometry for piano and electronic sound this Wednesday in the  Adrian Boult Hall, Birmingham Conservatory. This is the first performance in the UK.

Secret Geometry was the first piece I made in the Presser Electronic Music Studio at Penn. It dates from 1993, and used the midi technology of the time, including a DX7, a Proteus, a few other synths, and a couple of samples triggered from an Akai sampler, including my favorite – the sound of hitting a metal music stand with a pair of pliers. Sequencing was done with what was then simply called Performer (now Digital Performer) and sounds were edited with Opcode’s Galaxy universal librarian/editor (would that there was a truly functional such program on the market today – I’ve been disappointed in Unisyn and MidiQuest.)

The piece is in three movements, sort of a short sonata. (Jargon Alert. Skipping to the next paragraph is perfectly reasonable.) The opening is a set of variations, and is the first time I tried a procedure that I subsequently used in a couple of other pieces: it’s a twelve-tone piece, with 12 transpositions of a row stated in an essentially monophonic texture. The same music is then counterpointed with a similar succession of derived rows, forming aggregates. This music is repeated one more time, but now with four rows going. From the point of view of the overall form, it is like playing three choruses of the same tune. Rhythm and dynamics are treated freely. All this is rather simple by the standards of  composers more seriously invested in 12-tone possibilities. The point is not that I think a bell goes off in your head when you hear the 12th note of an aggregate – I find that a little silly. Rather, it is a way of saturating the music with a few motivic cells. As George Perle said to us in class one day, Schoenberg’s Op. 33a isn’t about 12-tone rows, it’s about four chords. The second movement is not twelve-tone, but floats a few motifs over  slowly changing clustery chords that gradually expand in register, then contract. It’s back to a simple 12-tone procedure in the last movement, a toccata that is basically a very fast single line, with a few moments where the line coalesces into three-note chords.

My point of departure for the idea of combining piano and tape is the Davidovsky Synchronism model: a tight interweaving of electronic and live sounds.  I was not particularly interested in novelty of timbre for its own sake although I have tried to employ an attractive palette of colors.  The function of the electronic sound varies throughout the piece: sometimes it fuses with the piano; sometimes it provides a subsidiary accompaniment; sometimes it is an equal partner, like a chamber music collaborator or an orchestra accompanying a concerto soloist.   As I was working on the last movement, I felt a need to bump up the tempo, just to kick it along a little more. The new tempo (sixteenths notes at quarter = 180) that sounded pleasingly lively when played by the computer turned out to sound omigod fast when played by a live pianist. Aleck Karis, who premiered the piece, handled this challenge, indeed the whole piece, brilliantly. You can hear this on the CRI recording of the piece. CRI (Composers Recordings Inc.) is out of business, but theoretically New World Records has the catalog, and will burn the CRI cds on demand, though I have to say I haven’t tried this yet.

As for the title, the phrase “secret geometry” is used by art historians to describe the play of forms in certain paintings, referring to structural patterns that are employed to organize the pictorial elements.  Since the electronic medium permits a composer to focus on the micro-structure of individual sounds, as well as more customary concerns with patterns of pitch and rhythm, it seemed appropriate to choose a title that emphasizes the careful shaping of every compositional element.  But this is not to neglect the spiritual impulse of the work.  After all, the obscure motion of the Holy Spirit herself describes a secret geometry, what Thomas Merton called “a hidden wholeness”.

Boston Adventure, part two

After Saturday morning’s rehearsal with Emmanuel Music, I had a great lunch at 29 Newbury with Ryan Turner (Emmanuel Music Director) and Pat Krol (Emmanuel executive director). (Check out the tomato soup and the pulled pork sandwich.) After a long walk in the Public Garden (amazing tulips) I made my way over to Brandeis where the 2011 BEAMS Electronic Music Marathon was in progress. Twelve hours of electronic and mixed media works! I caught nearly half the event, arriving – regrettably – too late for music by some familiar names, among them: David Felder, James Dashow, William Coble, Kaija Saariaho, Hans Tutschku, and Dennis Miller – and some not so familiar names: Ferdinando De Sena, Jeremy Podgursky, Michel van der Aa, Malin Bång, and a good many others. The unfamiliar names were mostly European, and one of the good things about the mix of pieces was the inclusion of music from Europe that is not often heard in this country. There was a chronological mix as well including older pieces such as …sofferte onde serene… of Nono, from 1976 (has not worn well) and Mortuos Plango, Vivos Voco from 1980 by Jonathan Harvey (still sounds fabulous, especially nice to hear it in a hall with a multi-channel setup). There were a lot of pieces that involved live processing, but much of this mostly just involved putting a live player through a laptop that served as a sophisticated stomp box providing variations on delay. There seemed to be a limited array of compositional options: either the processed version accumulates the notes as though the piano pedal was depressed (the homophony strategy); or something that was just played gets repeated, looped or not (sort of canon at the unison). Pieces for what we used to call “instrument and tape” – now the expression is “instrument and fixed media” – were also heard. Performances were at a very high level throughout the evening. A few standouts:

the forgotten dialect of autumn by Heather Stebbins – memorably lyric violin lines played by Krista Buckland Reisner, with live electronics.

Winter Fragments by spectralist master Tristan Murail – the Boston-based group Sound Icon playing with live processing, plus video imagery by Herve Bailly-Basin – mostly aqueous images, sometimes crystalline, mostly responding to the music in a direct way, and therefore suggesting a high end  iTunes visualizer. (Just as the laptop ends up being a fancy stompbox. Fancy technology does not always mean a fancy result.)

Rope and Chasm by Matthew Greenbaum –  Re’ut Ben Ze’ev, mezzo soprano, narrating, singing, and interacting with a video. The piece is based on Nietzche’s Also Sprach Zarathustra; one memorable moment was when the mezzo reached up her hand to a wounded figure in the video, casting her hand’s shadow onto the screen – a simple gesture, but quite touching.

Strange Autumn by Steven Kazuo Takasugi – a theater piece with narration, electronic sound and a percussionist making amplified noises with various pieces of paper. Something oddly moving about making a piece with such impoverished means.

Scuffle & Snap by Eric Chasalow – an heir to the Davidovsky tradition, Brandeis faculty member Chasalow, who curated the marathon, offered another one of his finely crafted studies in, as he put it in a program note, “building heightened dramatic structures around traditional instruments”. He continues, “I like to use a wide variety of sound sources, recontextualized, but very resonant with memories.” Chasalow’s work is important because he is not just an electronic music composer, he is an electronic music composer; the way he carefully shapes musical gestures and their interaction was a welcome contrast with much of the music heard that day.

The last piece I heard was Davidovsky’s Synchronism No. 12, played with her customary verve and lively array of colors by clarinetist Jean Kopperud. This is the most recent in the series of pieces for instruments and electronic sound by the original maestro of the medium. Here is Jean just before playing the piece:

By now it was getting close to midnight, and time for me to go get some sleep before the next morning’s church service with my motet at Emmanuel. More soon.

Bravo, Mario

Mario Davidovsky is best known for his work in the electronic medium, with his series of works for live instruments and electronic sound called Synchronisms serving as exemplary models for the genre. But Mario, who was my mentor during my days as a Columbia University doctoral student, has mostly worked in instrumental music for a number of years. There were samples of instrumental, vocal, and electronic works heard at Friday’s all-Davidovsky concert at Miller Theater in New York. The performances by the International Contemporary Ensemble were very strong, although the dry acoustic of Miller robbed their playing of some of its vibrancy. The ninth and twelfth Synchronisms were heard, played respectively by violinist David Bowlin and clarinetist Joshua Eubin. There were three purely instrumental works from the ’90s as well. All this music continues to dazzle, not just for the scintillating rapid gestures, but for the intensely lyrical lines that constitute the heart of the piece – “heart” both in the sense of telling affect, and of inner structure.

I think one reason Davidovsky’s instrumental music is less widely known than it should be is that his music resists ready labeling. Although he is usually bracketed with so-called “uptown” composers such as Babbitt, Wuorinen, and Martino, his music stands a bit apart from those masters because it is not really serial music – twelve-tone (fully chromatic), yes, but rather more non-systematic than genuinely serial works. (Or should I say “even more non-systematic”?) Good luck trying to trace rows, etc. in Mario’s music.* There are games with hexachords (go through the piano Synchronism), and strategies involving the deployment of registers. But Mario, though he admires the surfaces of various kinds of serial music, relies on different forms of rigor than someone more closely aligned with serial techniques.  It is a rigor that springs more exclusively from the play of forms, the interaction of motifs, from the fantastical patterns woven from vivid, passionate gestures.

The most memorable performance of the night was given by soprano Tony Arnold, who lent her clear, pure sound to Mario’s settings of Spanish folk poetry, Romancero. The final song in the set is about King David lamenting Absalom. Here the accompaniment is very spare, with hushed cantillation from the violin. Tony’s singing was utterly heartbreaking, all the more powerful for the restraint of Mario’s setting.

Interviews with Mario here and here. Three works can be heard at Art of the States. Picture above taken at last Friday’s concert.

*It is interesting that Joseph Straus omits Mario from his collection of short analyses of music by 37 twelve-tone composers in his recent book on the history of twelve-tone music in America; I would say he is the most important composer left out. Of course, Straus couldn’t cover everyone of importance, and if anyone can figure out the technical aspects of Mario’s music, Joseph Straus can. But still, I wonder if the non-systematic nature of the music played a role in Straus’s choice.

Wednesday afternoon miscellany

-The Pew Fellowships in the Arts, a program of the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage, has begun a blog. Check out the “100 Fellows” video here.

- Mario Davidovsky gets the Composer Portrait treatment – a full evening of his music – at Miller Theater on the Columbia University campus in New York this Friday. I’ll be there, will be blogging about it.

-Marilyn Nonken plays the music of Tristan Murail at Delaware County Community College in suburban Philadelphia this Sunday, March 6.

(at left: Mario Davidovsky)

Wednesday Night Miscellany

- Orchestra 2001 concerts are coming up this weekend – info here.

- Opera Today has interesting interviews with composers I like, including some with Penn connections: my faculty colleague Anna Weesner, and alums Pierre Jalbert and Steve Jaffe.

- YouTube has an interview with Mario Davidovsky – there are four parts, begin here.

Notes-and-Rhythms

Anthony Tommasini’s Arts and Leisure essay in the Times today speaks about the end of dogma in programming new music, citing an evening by the Ensemble ACJW at Poisson Rouge to make the case.  Tommasini mentions the stylistic debates that dominated the lunch table during his time as a student at Yale, but it is not news that those arguments have quieted down.

More interesting to me in the article is the staying power of the high modernist composers that everybody is supposed to hate (the article mentions Babbitt and Davidovsky among others). It turns out that the music is less about compositional ideology (Davidovsky in particular is the most asystematic of uptown composers) and more about – among other things – a celebration of virtuosity. Since a performer is always happy to play something that makes him/her sound brilliant, it is not surprising that Ensemble ACJW would program Davidovsky’s Synchronisms #9 or that the Jack Quartet would advocate for Xenakis, or that the superb violinist Miranda Cuckson would issue first-rate discs of music by Shapey and Martino (about which more in a future post).

The other point of interest for me is one that Tommasini makes, but then backs away from as a “passing worry for now”, and this is the problem of the neglected “notes and rhythms” composer, to use the playful phrase of John Harbison that the article quotes. Tommasini mentions Hartke, Stucky, Rouse, Melinda Wagner, Currier, and Tower as (quasi-)mainstream  voices that may be “slipping from the view of young musicians and audiences”. (I say ”quasi-mainstream” because “mainstream” is a pretty vexed concept today. Also, check the composer links at right if you want to add more names to the list.) Part of the problem here is that these composers offer journalists or publicists little on which to hang a story – nothing about identity politics, technology or violent rebellion against mentors – merely excellent music.  (The exception on that list being Sebastian Currier, whose impressive use of multimedia has not yet received the recognition it deserves.) If these composers are “slipping from view”, it is because their pieces all too often “slip away” after the premiere – the problem of the 2nd performance that I wrote about earlier. This is not a “someday” problem, as Tommasini suggests; rather, it is a problem now. Shouldn’t there be a dozen flutists planning to play Melinda Wagner’s Flute Concerto? Shouldn’t there be young groups touring with the string quartets of Harbison or Currier? In a healthier musical climate, repeated performances would mean the merely excellent would remain squarely before us instead of slipping from view.

Mario!

I’m looking forward to the 75th birthday concert for my teacher, Mario Davidovsky, being presented by the New York New Music Ensemble at Merkin Hall in NYC, Monday November 23. NYNME’s near telepathic sense of ensemble is a perfect match for the mercurial wit and passion of Mario’s music.