Given that Penelope, a large-scale song cycle composed by Sarah Kirkland Snider and sung by Shara Worden and recorded for the New Amsterdam record label, was my top classical [sic] recording for 2010, it should come as no surprise that I'd be interested in hearing its successor, Unremembered, an even larger song cycle featuring Worden, Padma Newsome, DM Stith and five supporting vocalists. Based on wistful poetry by Nathaniel Bellows, and augmented with projections of his art and animations, the piece was an involving and moving success on first brush - not as instantly assimilable as Penelope, but with depths that urge repeated listening.
Speaking of which, you can hear Unremembered – a work evidently still in-progress, since Snider has said she plans to add several more songs – streaming in full on the Q2 website, along with the Newsome, Stith and Worden songs that preceded it.
Finally, for those aware of the hardships that New Amsterdam endured after Superstorm Sandy blew through last October, some very welcome good news appeared on Thursday, in a blog post on the organization's website.
I almost never take issue with the way that my reviews are edited at The New York Times – after all, this is work made for hire, and subject to approval. But while I won't bemoan the excision of a few references to the program running well behind schedule, which I noted in my review of last year's marathon, I would like to clarify a point that doesn't feel quite so strong in the published essay as it did in my head.
Specifically, I didn't intend to suggest that the lovely set by Angélica Negrón, whose work I greatly admire, was the single most striking point of the marathon. Rather, what I was trying to say was that the vast leap in a single bound from Negrón's set to Ursula Oppens's performance of Memo 5 by Bernard Rands – a bustling, rigorous piece that could in some ways be viewed as the polar opposite of Negrón's airy songs – was the afternoon's most exhilarating stretch: a perfect representation of the stylistic expanse that defines contemporary music, and an illustration of the efficacy and appeal that two very different approaches can have.
Negrón's songs were winsome and sweet, demonstrating the potency of present-day tendencies toward inclusiveness and permeability. Rands's piano work was a personal negotiation of historical lineage and inheritance, yet in Ursula Oppens's hands it had a frisky vitality that suggested spontaneity.
My position, should it be unclear, is that both approaches can be equally valid. Eclecticism does not refute tradition. Improvisatory looseness and rigorous workmanship might be opposing techniques, but in practice they can produce strikingly similar effects. Both paths can lead to expressive, engaging works, so long as inspiration is present.
And here, I'll give a nod to this marathon's practice of engaging pretty much every participating composer in a preliminary interview. True, it's probably the reason that Music of Now has run late both times I've attended. But hearing Negrón talk about willfully shutting out the omnipresent Latin American vernacular sounds that surrounded her in Puerto Rico in order to find her own style, and listening to Rands recount a wooly tale about Stravinsky composing until a bottle of scotch ran dry, added a relatable dimension to each composer. In both instances, the personal introduction helped to provide a context, however slender, for the music that followed.
The citywide Composers Now festival, for which this marathon was the opening event, runs through February 28, and the full schedule is here.
A review of Where (we) Live, the latest multimedia beguilement from So Percussion, who use vivid imagination and a solid grounding in John Cage's music to create a thoughtful meditation on the meaning of home. Be sure to read this fascinating related article by my excellent colleague, Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim.
A notebook about (Re)New Amsterdam, a remarkable show of solidarity in which Chicago's young, vital new-music community participated in an afternoon marathon concert meant to raise funds for New Amsterdam, an invaluable New York City record label and fledgling concert presenter that suffered devastating losses during and after Hurricane Sandy. The details are all in the article, but it's important to note that New Amsterdam can still benefit from your assistance. Read this page for more information, and give what you can.
Hats off to Marcos Balter, Doyle Armbrust and all of the amazing Chicago musicians who participated in this inspiring event. I expect to hear more from all of you.
The Cee Lo Green song is the one you think it was. It was not listed in the Carnegie Hall program, nor were the lyrics were provided. It says something about Gabriel Kahane that the song felt more lived-in than did its predecessor, a Schumann lied, but I'm not sure precisely what.
This new opera, by composer David T. Little and librettist Royce Vavrek, is without question among the most important and memorable pieces I've heard this year. That I hope it has a long life and many repeat performances has nothing at all to do with friendly sentiment, and everything to do with the belief that if opera has a genuine future as something beyond an admirable, comfortable reliquary, it's going to be due to pieces like this one.
In Robert Woodruff, Dog Days had a director who had genuine ideas and wasn't afraid to deploy them; now I'm looking forward to seeing Maya Beiser's multimedia "CelloOpera" Elsewhere at BAM, also directed by Woodruff, even more. It runs Oct. 17–20, and involves music by Eve Beglarian, Missy Mazzoli and Michael Gordon.
Belatedly getting around to posting my bit on the collaboration between Danish art-pop trio Efterklang and the Wordless Music Orchestra, which featured handsome new orchestrations by Danish composer Karsten Fundal and New York postclassical mainstay Missy Mazzoli.
Two items of related interest from The New York Times: Allan Kozinn's article about Limor Tomer and the changes afoot in the Met Museum's Concerts & Lectures department this season, and a post-concert blog post by Wm. Ferguson of The New York Times Magazine. The concert was streamed live on Q2, but evidently is not archived.
Parenthetically speaking, you can always kind of tell what kind of week is underway by how long it takes me to post a link to a published Times review, a process that seldom takes more than 20 minutes when I add comments and links, and far less time when I don't. This has been a rough one so far, but in the spirit of keeping things in perspective, let's say it's been a 7.5 on a 10 scale—which isn't so bad, all things considered.
I've reviewed Moving Sounds performances twice before in The New York Times, once last year and once the year before. Allan Kozinn did the honors the first year, and also reviewed a 2010 performance of Georg Friedrich Haas's String Quartet No. 3 as part of this consistently rich series.
Just back from a brief but badly needed vacation to find the annual New Season issue of The New York Times Arts & Leisure section is out. I haven't had any time to digest this year's epistle, but for years now (since long, long before I became a Times contributor), this feature has been one I've looked forward to throughout the late summer, then used as a directory in the weeks and months that followed.
It's not always easy to find a clever topic that will stand out among the contributions of my excellent colleagues, but this year, I took a different tack: Rather than digging around for trends or themes or other curious linkages, I simply wrote about two composers whose works I'm eager to hear this season, David T. Little and Olga Neuwirth…and conveniently, each had two big events coming up in the months ahead.
From there, though, it was curious and fascinating to find at least a few minor points of commonality between these two composers, whose styles are otherwise sharply contrasted.
Profiling the composer, improviser and teacher Pauline Oliveros for The New York Times was an incredible privilege; the only problem is that it feels like I barely scratched the surface of everything we covered in a long, generous conversation. This piece easily could have been twice as long, or even more. Still, I did manage to cover some important turf, including information about an amazing new 12-CD box set of Oliveros's trailblazing electronic music and details about upcoming performances: on August 21 at the Stone, where she is the guest curator August 17-31; and on September 7 at the New Museum.
When I originally conceived this article, I'd intended to include reflections from Oliveros's associates, protégés and students. That didn't work out in the end, but I'm very pleased to be able to offer, as a Night After Night exclusive bonus track, some insights from Dana Reason, a Canadian-born pianist, composer, improviser and educator based in Corvallis, Oregon. Reason is the director of Popular Music Studies at Oregon State University, and has released 11 albums. From 1998 to 2003, she and Oliveros collaborated in a wonderful trio, The Space Between, which also included the superb shakuhachi player Philip Gelb. Reason will be performing at the Stone on August 28 at 10pm as part of Oliveros's series.
Dana Reason, by Norman Korpi
Night After Night: When and how did you first come to work with Pauline Oliveros?
Dana Reason: I heard Oliveros play the first Bang on a Can festival in NYC when I was 18 years old. The live performance of Sonic Meditations had a profound effect on me. Several years later, I was performing at the Newfoundland Sound Symposium and Oliveros was the featured composer in residence. She conducted several workshops that I attended and I introduced myself to her. In 1995, I went out to Mills College to study composition. In 1996, Oliveros was the Darius Milhaud chair and I had the tremendous fortune of studying composition with her.
After Mills, Oliveros, Philip Gelb (shakuhachi player and improviser) and I formed The Space Between – a trio that literally dealt with the huge tuning gaps between 3 unlikely musical suspects: a just-tuned accordion, a bamboo flute, and a well-tempered piano.
We performed various concerts and lectures (Stanford, RPI, Roulette, U of Colorado, etc.) and would often demonstrate a scale played in “unison” by the trio. The sound was quite thick and cluster-like but intriguing (full of possibilities). The idea with the trio was to place timbre as the focal point for the ensemble. The works were textural, sonically rich and expressive. I would often refrain from playing the piano with conventional fare and would seek alternate sound sources from the body, and inside of the piano. Our work together culminated in 4 CD recordings. Each recording featuring a fourth guest performer such as French bassist Joëlle Léandre, bassist Barre Philips, saxophonist Jon Raskin (from Rova) and the late Matt Sperry on bass. All the albums were concert recordings headed up by David Wessel at CNMAT at UC Berkeley.
Night After Night: What lessons would you say you learned from Pauline, either in a formal setting, in more casual circumstances, or both?
Dana Reason: First and foremost, Oliveros taught me how to listen. Her approach as a composer, performer and improviser is very refined. There is a virtuosic quality to the way she focuses her attention with each note, gesture or silence enacted. Her works could be heard as an extension and perhaps revision of John Cage's contested remark to “let sounds be themselves,” in that she provokes sounds to not only be themselves but also to be extensions of herself. Because of this, the sounds she elicits and emits are implicitly and explicitly connected to her as the originator. The sounds embody and heed Pauline’s sonological DNA.
Night After Night: Lacking the usual "classical composer" model of scores to be performed by other musicians, what form would you say Pauline's enduring legacy might take?
Dana Reason: Perhaps the apogee of Oliveros’ lineage is a body of writings, compositions and performances centered in “The Art of Sounding, Hearing and Listening.” Her works encourage individual and collective sonic actions and identities to form and be transformed. These sonic identities question performance practices ranging from the non-professional or conservatory bound musician to the music-cultural practices of contemporary and improvised music, notation and oral tradition.
Oliveros loosens and challenges western music's historical divisions between performer and listener; performer and composer, composer and improviser, listener and listening.
Dana Reason performs at the Spectrum on August 26 at 7pm, and at the Stone on August 28 at 10pm.
