On November 3rd,
composer Eric Moe visits the Center for a masterclass with graduate
students and a talk about his compositional work. Currently Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Composition and Theory at the
University of Pittsburgh, Moe has been active as composer, pianist, arts
administrator, and curator for decades. His work has been recognized by many of the most
prestigious honors available to an American composer: a Guggenheim Fellowship, an
Aaron Copland Award, and a Lakond Award from the American Academy of Arts and
Letters, and commissions from the Barlow Endowment, Fromm Foundation (twice),
Koussevitzky Foundation (twice), Meet the Composer, New Music USA, and the
Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. After graduate studies at the University of
California at Berkeley, he taught at the University of California Santa Cruz
and San Francisco State University before joining the faculty at the University
of Pittsburgh in 1989.
Moe’s compositional work explores a range of formats—acoustic and
electroacoustic, instrumental and vocal, concert music and theater (often with
video). Moe writes that “I am fascinated by virtuosity, and showcase different flavors
of it in solo compositions, concerti, and in concert.” The composer’s 2007 clarinet-piano
duo Grand Prismatic illustrates his
project of a multifaceted virtuosity. While conventional notions of virtuosity often
emphasize speed and volume above all else, Moe cultivates a much broader range
of virtuosities in his duo. While parts of the piece invoke a conventionally extroverted,
assertive virtuosity, other passages foster an introverted, delicate
virtuosity, particularly in the rapid hushed passages at the work’s end. Moreover, the
work’s approach to virtuosity extends beyond mere execution of
passagework, to more holistic aspects of live ensemble performance. The piece also invites a virtuosity of interpretation from its performers, requiring unusually detailed attention to phrasing (for instance in near-repetitions of
rapid melodic figures) and agility in navigating rapid-fire shifts in
character. Moreover, the piece’s dovetailed rapid rhythmic figurations
encourage heightened nimbleness in ensemble coordination. The work was commissioned by UB clarinet professor Jean Kopperud. Her
recording of the piece with pianist Stephen Gosling, a frequent guest artist at
the Center, is below.
Moe’s compositional interest in virtuosity is informed
by his parallel activities as pianist. The composer has been active premiering,
commissioning, and performing solo and chamber works with piano. A founding
member of the San Francisco-based EARPLAY ensemble, he also keeps busy with solo
projects, such as the CD The Waltz Project Revisited
- New Waltzes for Piano featuring
waltzes for piano by two generations of American composers. Gramophone magazine
praised the solo CD, writing that “Moe’s command of the varied styles is
nothing short of remarkable.” Other recordings featuring his playing are
available on the Koch, CRI, Mode, Albany, New World Records and Innova labels. A video of the composer performing his own composition Grand Étude Brilliante is available online:
Also active behind the scenes as an administrator and
curator, Moe is co-director of the University of Pittsburgh’s “Music on the Edge” concert series.
The series has produced numerous ambitious, innovative concerts over the years,
and often partners with the Center for 21st Century Music to bring highly
regarded ensembles and soloists from Europe to the US. This year, the partner institutions will present concerts and workshops by the Parisian Ensemble Court-Circuit
in April.
On October 24, the Center for 21st
Century Music’s resident chamber ensemble, the Slee Sinfonietta, presents a portrait
concert of Bernard Rands, as the composer
receives an honorary doctorate from the State University of New York (ticket
information is available here).
The concert features two large-scale works by Rands, together with works by his
former teacher, the late Luciano Berio, and by his former student, Center for
21st Century Music Artistic Director and SUNY Distinguished
Professor David Felder.
Rands is among the most
lauded living composers. He won the Pulitzer Prize (1984), a Grammy award
(2000), the Kennedy Center Friedheim Award (1986), and was inducted into the
American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2004. His work has consistently been
featured by the most prestigious art music institutions globally. He was
composer in residence with the Philadelphia Orchestra for seven years, and his
works have been conducted by the likes of Barenboim, Boulez, Davis, Eschenbach,
Maazel, Marriner, Mehta, Muti, Ozawa, Rilling, Salonen, Sawallisch, Schwarz,
Slatkin, Spano, von Dohnanyi, and Zinman, among many others, and commissioned
by Suntory Concert Hall in Tokyo, the New York Philharmonic, Carnegie Hall, the
Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Cincinnati Symphony, the Los Angeles
Philharmonic, The Philadelphia Orchestra, the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the
National Symphony Orchestra, the Internationale Bach Akademie, the Eastman Wind
Ensemble, Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the Cleveland Orchestra.
In 2014, Rands’s 80th
birthday was marked by the premiere of a piano concerto by Jonathan Biss, with
the Boston Symphony Orchestra conducted by Robert Spano, followed by repeat
performances by Biss with the Leipzig Gewandhausorchester conducted by Sir
Andrew Davis, and with the BBC Scottish Orchestra conducted by Markus Stenz at
the BBC Proms. That year, the BBC also devoted its three-day FOCUS festival
entirely to Rands’s music, the Tanglewood Festival presented the premiere of Folk Songs (also featured on the Slee
Sinfonietta’s upcoming concert), and Bridge Records released a CD "Bernard
Rands – Piano Music 1960 – 2010" featuring the playing of Ursula Oppens
and Robert Levin.
In 2014, Rands also
appeared as faculty composer at June in Buffalo, where numerous large-scale
works were presented: his complete piano preludes, two ensemble works, and his
orchestral piece …where the murmurs die….
Rands has a decades long history appearing as faculty composer at June in
Buffalo, where he has appeared particularly frequently (2006, 2009, 2010, 2014,
2015) since the formation of the Center for 21st Century Music.
The Slee Sinfonietta portrait concert
will feature two Rands works, “now again”
– fragments from Sappho and Folk
Songs, both for voices and chamber orchestra. “now again”(2006)sets poetic fragments of ancient Greek
poet Sappho for three voices and chamber orchestra. Fanfare magazine writes that the piece presents “a
montage of fragments [that] somehow coalesces to create a portrait of Sappho
and her ancient world…it's a puzzle that comes together to form more puzzles.”
The work has been widely praised in high-profile newspaper reviews, with the Philadelphia Inquirer writing that “as with all great
pieces, so much was implied by so little,” while the Chicago Sun Times praising
its “welcome marriage of precise technique and sensuous lyricism and scoring.”
Also on the program is Rands’s recent Folk Songs(2014), nine re-imaginings of folk songs in their original languages; the
composer calls the work “semi-autobiographical” because each song originates in
a region where he has spent significant time: Bavaria, England, Ireland, Italy,
Mexico, USA, and Wales.
The
program also features works by Rands’s former teacher Luciano Berio and former
student David Felder, connecting Rands’s lauded works in a broader historical
context and connecting them to the Center for 21st Century Music.
Berio’s Linea (1973) is a virtuoso
work for two pianos and percussion emphasizing constant and often drastic variation
of a simple melody. David Felder’s Coleccion
Nocturna (1983) for clarinet
(doubling on bass clarinet), piano, and tape also takes processes of variation
as its point of departure, presenting five variations on what the composer
describes as "a wholly self-contained musical object" from his piano solo
Rocket Summer. Significantly, the
piece was the final piece written during Felder’s doctoral studies with Rands
at UCSD.
The concert also commemorates Rands’s role in the revival of
June in Buffalo in the late 1980s. Started in 1975 by then Edgard Varèse
Distinguished Professor Morton Feldman, the festival had since lapsed into inactivity
in the years before the festival’s current director David Felder arrived at UB.
Felder restarted June in Buffalo in 1986, expanding it with opportunities for
student composers to have works performed at a professional level (a model that
his since been adopted by new music festivals worldwide). This format was based
on an earlier festival Felder had spearheaded while Visiting Professor at California
State University—Long Beach in the early 1980s, a festival which had featured
Rands and Felder’s earlier teacher Donald Erb as faculty composers. Rands
played an integral role in the transplantation of this model to UB, lending
energy, time, and expertise by setting up contacts with funding agencies,
sending students to the festival, and talking up the festival throughout the
new music world.
On Saturday, October 14, the Center for 21st
Century Music presents a performance of Karlheinz’s Stockhausen’s
acclaimed concert-length work Mantra,
featuring UB piano professor Eric Huebner and guest pianist Steven Beck. Performed only rarely due to its length and logistical complexities (see below), Mantra is a historically significant
piece, particularly notable for augmenting the piano with percussion and live
electronics and for pioneering a new musical style that is both melodic and modernist.
The 65 minute work for two pianists (each also with woodblocks and
crotales) and live electronics (primarily ring modulators) was completed in 1970. Mantra marks a striking
shift in Stockhausen’s style, and more broadly, as Robin Maconie writes, it
“defines Stockhausen’s aims for the 1970s” and beyond, presaging the melodic
structures that form the bedrock of LICHT,
the cycle of seven operas that preoccupied the composer from 1977 to 2003.
While many of Stockhausen’s works from the 1960s feature extended playing
techniques (Mikrophonie I) and
unusual sound sources like radios (Kurzwellen),
Mantra features equal-tempered
pitches on pianos. Likewise, while many of his 1960s works explored notational
indeterminacy via open form (Momente),
open-ended symbolic notations (Plus-Minus),
and verbal prompts for “intuitive music” (Aus
den Sieben Tagen), Mantra is a
through-composed score in staff notation.
The work’s title refers to a 13 note melodic cell (heardnear
the work’s outset) that forms the piece’s foundation: the entirety of the piece can be related to it through audibly traceable processes of repetition and
variation. The pitch, rhythmic, and textural
attributes of this cell function as “kernel” for piece as a whole, in a
synthesis between the serial procedures of Stockhausen’s 1950s music and 18th-19th
century practices of organic thematic transformation. See below for a video of
the composer explaining the work’s construction in detail.
Both pianists bring to the performance extensive
backgrounds in new music and classical music. Eric Huebner is currently
Associate Professor at the University at Buffalo, pianist of the New York
Philharmonic, and adjunct faculty at the Juilliard School. After making his
debut with the Los Angeles Philharmonic at age 17, he has appeared at
prestigious venues such as the Ojai Festival, Monday Evening Concerts, Carnegie’s
Zankel and Weill Recital Halls, Miller Theatre, Merkin Hall, (le) Poisson
Rouge, and Roulette. From 2011-12 he was a member of the award-winning chamber
ensemble Antares, and he has also appeared with numerous NYC-based contemporary
music ensembles, including the International Contemporary Ensemble, Talea, New
York New Music Ensemble, American Contemporary Music Ensemble, Manhattan
Sinfonietta, So Percussion and the American Modern Ensemble. His performances
have been broadcast on PBS, NPR, WNYC (New York), Radio Bremen (Germany), ORF
(Austria) and the BBC, and recorded on Col Legno, Centaur, Bridge, Albany,
Tzadik, Innova, New Focus Recordings and Mode Records.
Huebner will be joined by Steven Beck, a frequent guest
performer at June in Buffalo. As soloist, Beck has appeared with the National
Symphony Orchestra, the New Juillliard Ensemble (under David Robertson), and
the Virginia Symphony. He has performed at prestigious venues such as the Kennedy Center, Alice Tully Hall, Carnegie Hall’s
Weill Recital Hall, Merkin Hall, Miller Theater, and Tonic, Aspen Music
Festival, Lincoln Center Out of Doors, and Bargemusic, and with respected
ensembles such as Talea Ensemble, Speculum Musicae, the Da Capo Chamber
Players, the Manhattan String Quartet, the Pacifica String Quartet, The
Metropolis Ensemble, the New York New Music Ensemble, the Orchestra of the
S.E.M. Ensemble, and the American Contemporary Music Ensemble.
The performance has been in the works for a long time.
Huebner writes that “it's
been my dream to play Mantra since I
first learned of the piece in high school.” Inspired by a recording featuring
former UB professor Yvar Mikhashoff, Huebner came close to mounting a
performance while a student at Juilliard but did not have access to the
requisite resources. As Huebner explains, the piece is very much a team effort,
requiring a range of highly specialized tasks in performance as well as behind
the scenes. UB music department music technology director Christopher Jacobs will
run sound, while the department’s piano technician Devin Zimmer built
custom crotale mounts to fit inside the pianos. Percussionists Tom Kolor (UB
Associate Professor of Music), Daniel Druckman (New York Philharmonic), and
Greg Zuber (Metropolitan Opera Orchestra Principal Percussionist) assisted in procuring
the necessary crotales and wood blocks needed for the piece, some of which are
not commonly used. Additionally, Huebner and Beck will use an electronics
interface designed by pianist Ryan MacEvoy McCullough, integrating the
original analog electronics into iPads connected to laptops, controlled
directly by both performers. Huebner
writes that, “I'm extremely grateful for the support of the Robert and Carol
Morris Center for 21st Century Music and its director, David Felder for making
this performance possible…[Steven Beck and I] are hoping our performance at UB
will be the first of many.”
From Jonathan Golove, UB Associate Professor of Cello and Composition:
I'm writing to let you know about a concert that I've been working toward for over a year. This Friday night at 7:30, a group of UB performers and professionals from the region will play a program of music by composers associated, both currently and formerly, with UB Music. We're thrilled to have Moshe Shulman and Robert Phillips represented on the program, both of whom received doctoral degrees in composition at UB. Moshe is well known to many in the area for his tango exploits, and he'll be conducting his wonderful Seven Prophetesses for soprano, harp, and string quartet. Moshe was commissioned by the Fromm Foundation for this work, and you'll hear that he really delivered! Outstanding soprano Tiffany DuMouchelle, newly appointed at UB, will sing.
Robert Phillips
Robert Phillips recently returned to Buffalo to manage the Center for 21st Century Music, following several years in Berlin, and we're delighted to welcome him back by performing his Larghetto Rubato for guitar, cello, and bassoon. It's a really intriguing and beautiful work composed for an all-star trio of European musicians (Magnus Andersson, Rohan de Saram, and Pascal Gallois) who were at UB for a visiting residency back when Rob was earning his degree. Sungmin Shin, UB guitar faculty, leads our performance of the trio.
Belgian composer Henri Pousseur was in Buffalo from 1966 to 1968, serving as Slee Professor of Composition, giving a series of "lecture recitals," and living in the Delaware building now known as "The Mansion." During that time, he was working to finish his magnum opus, an opera in collaboration with French novelist Michel Butor, who had also been on the UB faculty several years before. They referred to their work, Votre Faust (Your Faust) as a "variable opera," and it was a compendium of music that could be shaped by its performers in many ways, but was also open to the intervention of the audience, who would determine, among other things, the way the story ended! Votre Faust was premiered in a concert version in March 1968 at the Second Buffalo Festival of the Arts Today (at the Albright Knox), and this is the (near) 50th anniversary we are celebrating. Pousseur adapted his music for the opera into a series of works he called "satellites," and we will be playing some of these Friday night. The performers are Tiffany DuMouchelle, pianist Eric Huebner, flutist Emlyn Johnson, and myself. This music is unrecorded, and the chances to hear it are quite few.
In addition to the concert, which begins at 7:30pm in Lippes Concert Hall (Slee Hall), we will have two related events. The first is a lecture on Thursday at 5 given by visiting composer and Pousseur scholar Andre Brégégérè (NYC). The second is a panel discussion including Brégégérè, UB Music's own Jamie Currie, and Romance Languages and Literatures Professor Fernanda Negrete. Thursday's lecture will be be held in Baird 327, and the panel, which will include live music, will be at 4 on Friday in the Music Library. While you're there, be sure to spend some time looking at the tremendous exhibit curated by the Music Library's John Bewley on Pousseur in Buffalo! The concert and panel discussion are funded by the University Library's Wolf-Steger Fund and by the Center for 21st Century Music. The Wolf-Steger Fund supports the presentation of the work of Buffalo composers through an endowment from the late UB music faculty member Muriel Wolf and her husband, bassist Albert Steger, a longtime member of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra.
During 2017, PhD students at the
Center for 21st Century Music have received national and
international recognition through festival appearances, grants, awards,
commissions, performances, and curatorial activities.
Music by Center PhD students appeared at festivals
around the US, Canada, and Europe this year. Weijun Chen was selected for two prestigious
national residencies—the Atlantic Center for the Arts (with faculty composer
Derek Bermel) and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.Matt Sargent’s music
was featured on Columbia University’s “Re-embodied Sound” Symposium, the first event of
its kind examining possibilities with transducers in music and sound art. Jessie Downs appeared as both composer and vocalist at Longy School of Music's Divergent
Studio and
Loadbang's Contemporary Chamber Connection; the former presented a performance
of her composition Shadow a Thing.
Downs was also a featured composer at Vocalypse's Opera from Scratch
Workshop
in Halifax, Canada, and was selected to attend the upcoming Royaumont
Contemporary Voice workshop with Juliet Fraser. Matthew Chamberlain recently returned home
from the Royaumont Voix Nouvelles (New Voices) Composition Workshop in France, where a new piece was performed by Quatuor Tana and Ensemble Multilatérale, leading to a commission for a new work for pianist Claudia Chan in 2018. Matthew’s appearance at Royaumont was part of the inaugural year of an exchange program
between Voix Nouvelles and the Center’s June in Buffalo Festival.
Matthew Chamberlain’s
commission from Royaumont was one of a number of prestigious commissions, grants,
and awards received by Center PhD students during 2017. Matt Sargent was awarded
a commissions from the Hartford Independent Chamber Orchestra and the Switch~ Ensemble. The
latter project was awarded a New Music USA Project Grant, to support the ensemble touring the piece across upstate NY in Winter 2018, including a local stop at
Buffalo State College. Recognition of Center PhD students' work has been not only national but also international: Igor Coelho Arantes Santana Marques’s Escenas,
arranged for string orchestra and piano, was a finalist in the 4th Música Hoje
National Composition Competition in Curitiba, Brazil.
In 2017, Center PhD students
received performances across the US, Canada, Europe, and South America. Two PhD
students are beginning to develop a long-term collaborative relationship with
the rising Ensemble Mise-En: Meredith Gilna’s Gravity Shuffle will be performed by the ensemble October 5, and a
new work of hers, written especially for the ensemble, will be premiered by
the group on October 16; Matt Sargent’s piano solo Going, gone was also
written for the ensemble, who have programmed it multiple times, most recently
in April. Sargent’s works were also programmed at EMS Stockholm (Sweden),
Reykjavik Art Museum (Iceland), on the cutting-edge music series Indexical (at
the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History), and on UC San Diego’s new SlowSD Festival
of Slow Music. Other notable performances of works by Center PhD composers
include the Spektral Quartet’s performance of Weijun Chen’s Canoe at Western Michigan University and
Michael Matsuno’s premiere of a new work for flute and electronics at
Harvard University.
Numerous Center composition students are also active
as curators, performers, and conductors, seeking to be directly involved in the
performance and presentation of their own works and those of fellow living
composers. Matthew Chamberlain has been active as a conductor, premiering Center PhD alumnus Nathan Heidelberger’s Faust Project, a theatrical adaption of Faust with live music for an ensemble (supported by UB’s Creative Arts Initiative), and conducting premieres of student pieces at June in Buffalo. In October, Matthew will conduct the Slee Sinfonietta in two pieces by Bernard Rands on a concert to celebrate his receiving an honorary doctorate from SUNY (stay tuned for a future post about this concert). Next spring, Oberlin Conservatory has invited Matthew to be artist in residence, where he will conduct Du Yun's Pulitzer Prize winning opera Angel's Bone as well as work with the Conservatory's contemporary music ensemble and Sinfonietta on a new piece commissioned by them.
Null Point, an
initiative for new music and sound art led by PhD candidate Colin Tucker, gave the world premiere
of PLACE, a previously unrealized extended outdoor piece written in 1975 (!) by
David Dunn, who is now a highlyrecognized figure in American experimental music. Supported by New York State Council on the Arts and UB Department
of Music, the project was co-curated by Tucker and
Center PhD alumnus Ethan Hayden, both of whom also performed in the piece alongside current Center
PhD students Jessie Downs, PhD alumnus Zane Merritt, and former June in Buffalo
guest artist (and UB music student) Jonathan Hepfer. The project received press attention internationally in the The Wire as well as locally, and will be the subject of a special issue of the journal Sound American in Winter 2018.
Tucker was also part of a team who curated an exchange project
with Norwegian musicians which culminated in 2017’s June in Buffalo Festival. As
this publication described in a previous post,
Tucker, together with Center
Director David Felder and Norwegian Academy of Music Professors Henrik Hellstenius and Kjell Tore Innervik, Norwegian
ensembles Cikada Trio and Bifrost Ensemble and Norwegian composers Henrik
Hellstenius and Eivind Buene appeared at this year's June in Buffalo. The Bifrost
Ensemble—a group of graduate performance students at the Norwegian Academy led
by Innervik—presented a concert of world premieres of works by Center PhD
students Roberto Azaretto, Derick Evans, and Colin Tucker and Norwegian Academy graduate students. The new pieces were also performed at NYC's Norwegian Seamen's Church and will be performed in the near future in Oslo. The exchange between the Center, the Norwegian Academy, and Cikada, will occur again in 2019, when it will be expanded to include more student composers from both UB and the Academy.
Sotto Voce Vocal Collective, led by PhD student Jessie Downs, celebrated its first full year as an ensemble, with five self-produced concerts and notable guest appearances. Sotto Voce performed on the Burchfield Penney Art Center’s retrospective of the music of former UB graduate composer and Creative Associate Julius Eastman (previewed in a widely read New York Timesarticle), and joined Null Point as featured artists in the inaugural event of a new performance series at Buffalo’s newest arts space, the Cass Project. Among its members are Center PhD student Brien Henderson and PhD alumnus Ethan Hayden.
The Center for 21st Century Music welcomes Robert Carl on September 29 for an
artist talk and masterclass with graduate students. Currently chair of the composition
department at the Hartt School of Music, University of Hartford (CT), Carl’s
distinguished career began with an especially varied and extensive education,
followed by performances at venues like Carnegie Hall, IRCAM, and New Music
America, and awards, fellowships, and residencies from a surprisingly
exhaustive list of major institutions.
Carl’s degree studies took place at Yale University, the
University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Chicago. He also received a
Lurcy Fellow for study at France’s highly regarded Conservatoire Nationale Supérieure
and Université Paris-Sorbonne in 1980-81. His principal teachers included Iannis Xenakis, Betsy Jolas, Ralph Shapey, George
Rochberg, Jonathan Kramer, George Crumb, Richard Wernick, and Robert Morris—an
unusually diverse group of composers, both aesthetically and geographically. He
has received awards and fellowships from most major national American granting
institutions (American Academy of Arts and Letters, National Endowment for the
Arts, Chamber Music America, and Tanglewood, and residencies from many of the most prestigious national and
international residency sites (Copland House, Camargo Foundation, Bogliasco
Foundation, Rockefeller International Study Center (Bellagio, IT), Youkobo
ArtSpace, Tokyo Wonder, Site Yaddo, Djerassi Foundation, Ragdale Foundation, Ucross
Foundation, and the MacDowell and Millay Colonies).
Carl’s early compositions cultivated dialogue between contrasting historical
styles, perhaps most strikingly in the 1992 saxophone quartet Duke Meets Mort. This worktakes harmonic commonalities between
the musics of Duke Ellington and (former UB professor) Morton Feldman as a
point of departure, imagining Ellington’s Mood
Indigo in the musical voice of Feldman. In the video below, Carl speaks
about this work.
In Carl’s recent work, reference to historical styles is less explicit
and less specific. The 2008 Fourth
Symphony constructs wave-like accumulations and dispersals of kinetic
energy. The music emphasizes shifts in kinetic energy through interaction between
textures distinct in rhythmic and melodic momentum; by approaching these two
parameters, as well as harmonic rhythm, in counterpoint against each other, the
piece achieves a multidimensionality of directional energies that is rare in
post-tonal music. In the symphony, historical referentiality is hardly absent
but is more diffuse than in the composer’s earlier work: Fourth Symphony converses with generalized symphonic conventions
like four-movement form, figural/orchestrational topoi, and sweeping gestural rhetoric.
A common thread throughout Carl’s oeuvre is a focus on temporal experience. While the symphony
emphasizes momentary shifts in density and momentum, the earlier saxophone
quartet explores the implications of slowing down a historical musical
material, subjecting it to (creatively imprecise) temporal magnification. In
his artist statement, Carl writes that:
My work has always been concerned with time. At first this meant
inventing musical techniques and forms that allowed for a peculiar flow of
musical events, dynamic yet not always straightforward. Later, my
"pre-musical" background as a historian reasserted itself, bringing
more and more artifacts of my earlier life, earlier music, and other eras into
my music, in a play of memory and shadow.
The
composer thinks about time and temporal experience through concrete, even
tactile metaphors:
For me, time is a substance both malleable and “crystallizable”. By
shaping form in a manner similar to making a sculpture, I have found that I am
able to create an ever-broader sense of space in my pieces, even when they are
information-rich. As a result I hope that by creating a sense of amplitude into
which the listener can enter, and trying to synthesize diverse historical
elements, I can create something of a model for how s/he can cope with our
increasingly fragmented, intense, and vertiginous experience of life today, and
find a sense of energizing peace.
That
“spatialization” of time is now allied in Carl’s practice to his exploration of
harmony over the past 15 years (of which the Fourth Symphony is a prime
example). He writes:
Tied into this sense of space, of rendering even complex
events clear, is the way I’ve come to conceive of harmony in the last decade or
so. I’ve been using “screens” of overtones from which to derive new harmonic
combinations, and whose common partials create links for modulation. So far--it
my ear at least--the result is a sound that’s fresh and satisfying. It also
sounds “natural”, whatever that means. I do feel, however, that the flow and
shape of my pieces is closer to natural phenomena than ever before, and the
music is more “itself” than ever, with less need to symbolize something.
And
having begun this practice with harmonic structures that follow overtone
relations but remain in equal temperament, the composer as also begun a series
of recent works to “unmask” the true relations with works that follow the same
strategies but use just intonation.
Also
active as a writer on new music, Carl has completed two books: an in-depth study
of (former UB Creative Associate) Terry Riley’s minimalist masterwork In C, and a collection
of essays on composition and new music entitled Survivable
Music: The Emerging Common Practice. He also regularly contributes to Fanfare magazine
and New Music
Box. As editor, he completed his former teacher Jonathan Kramer’s Postmodern Music, Postmodern Listening,
left unfinished by the late composer, and edited an issue of Contemporary Music Review on historicism
in late 20th century American music. Carl’s writing spans a range of
approaches, from academic musicology to more open-ended speculation on the
realities of being a working composer:
One world I live in is more scholarly, so it demands
research, references, footnotes. Another is critical, intuitive and usually
focused on a particular piece, artist, or some mix thereof. [Survivable Music] is something in
between. …I’d like to think this is criticism in an elevated sense of the word,
an examination of current musical practice, aesthetics, and possibilities,
attempting to draw conclusions, and maybe shed some new insights…The form is
the essay, the tone is that of a lecture, often very much off-the-cuff. Or
perhaps it’s more precise to say these are journalistic dispatches from the
aesthetic front.
To
learn more about Robert Carl’s work, check out his interview with New Music Box
below, or visit his extensive website.
The Center for 21st Century Music welcomes Ensemble Signal on September 19 for a performance of Steve Reich’s
concert-length Music for 18 Musicians.
Please note that the concert begins at the later-than-usual time of 9pm; it
will be preceded by a talk by Signal’s co-artistic directors Brad Lubman and
Lauren Radnofsky at 8:15pm. Previously, this blog examined long-standing
collaborative relationships that led to the concert: between Signal and Steve
Reich, and between UB’s music department and the composer. In this post, I
introduce the piece itself and contextualize it within a broader history of
minimalist music.
Completed in 1976, Music
for 18 Musiciansis often understood as a turning point within Reich’s compositional development, as a pivot from his strictly-composed, experimental early works to his more conventionally “musical” later works. It also functioned as a pivot in Reich's reputation, catapulting him to widespread renown within both art music and pop music worlds—orchestral
commissions followed it, while the ECM recording of the piece sold over 10,000
copies and a live performance of the piece sold out the New York nightclub The
Bottom Line.
To understand where the piece came from, it is productive to consider the intensive earlier musical investigations of Reich and fellow minimalists. Historically, minimalism could be understood as an attempt to
negate tonal modes of listening through the use of a limited palette of musical material. While
numerous composers of the 1950s (John Cage, Milton Babbitt, Karlheinz
Stockhausen, Iannis Xenakis) tried to challenge tonal listening habits by expanding
and exhausting bandwidths of material, the younger minimalists attempted to achieve a similar end result through opposite means. If the former
composers used discontinuity to overwhelm listeners’ capacities for syntactic
listening, the latter use repetition and prolongation to underwhelm this mode of listening, instead encouraging a listening focused on the here and now of live performance.
The degree zero of early minimalism might be LaMonte Young’s X for Henry Flynt (1960), in which a
heavy sound or cluster is repeated uniformly, regularly, and for a long period.
This is music in extreme close up; there is no possibility of zooming out to
orient oneself through anything resembling musical syntax. The piece’s restricted
space simultaneously closes and opens: it impedes the possibility of tonal
listening, but activates intensified focus on the particulars of the repeated
sound’s envelope and spectrum, its interaction with acoustic space, and its status in listeners’
perception and memory. Two successive repetitions of the sound are never identical; the piece frames repetition as a guise for focused perception of subtle differences.
Was the most recent repetition of the sound different from the last? If so, did
I merely perceive it as being different? In this case, did my ever-changing
memory bank of sounds play a role in reframing my perception? In encountering
this piece, listeners listen to their own listening. The music does not have
“objective” content that exists independently of the act of listening, as in
tonal music; its content is the act of listening. Thus while listening in tonal
music requires decoding "objective" content; listening in X for Henry Flynt invites open-ended exploration of ambiguous
boundary spaces—between same and different, between sound object and
perception, and between perception and memory. These broad parameters of
listening pertain to much later minimalist music.
For early minimalist composers Terry Riley, Steve Reich,
Philip Glass, Tony Conrad, and Young, a key challenge was that of orchestrating
duration. How can the composer “keep the ball in the air” without resorting to
tonal approaches to time? How long must repetition and/or prolongation proceed
to disorient tonal listening expectations; at what point does an
aesthetically unproductive boredom set in? How can the composer create decisive
shifts of perspective even while maintaining the continuity necessary to keep
listening in the here and now?
Terry Riley (a former UB Creative Associate) answered these questions with bottom-up variation processes applied to looped melodic cells, while Young and Tony Conrad (a former UB professor) answered these questions through harmony based on resonance. For the younger minimalists Reich and Glass, these
procedures perhaps too closely resembled traditional “composerly” decision
making, and yet at the same time may have seemed quite arbitrary. In the mid to
late 1960s, both Reich and Glass both sought out deterministic algorithmic processes that
could determine the unfolding of melodic/rhythmic cells.
While Glass worked with processes of melodic growth and decay,
Reich worked with a stricter, deterministic method, focusing on “phasing”—of graduallymoving two identical sonic loops out of phase, incrementally changing the phase difference until the material comes back into
phase with itself. This provided a strikingly economical way of encouraging listeners to listen to a simple, short sonic object with perpetually changing focus. As Reich explained in his essay “Music as
a Gradual Process,” the anonymous, controlling nature of these processes
appealed to him; their transparent nature allowed them to shift
attention away from syntax and related tonal categories, towards the “impersonal, unintended, psycho-acoustic by-products of the
intended process.”
Reich's phasing pieces first employed recorded samples of voices--It’s Gonna Rain (1965) and Come Out (1966)--and then later used live instrumentalists. After working exclusively
with phasing for five years, he developed additional ways to vary fixed cells
of material: “gradually substituting beats for rests (or rests for beats)
within a constantly repeating rhythmic cycle,” “the gradual changing of timbre
while rhythm and pitch remain constant.” These techniques feature prominently
in Drumming, where they allow the
composer to explore a concert-length duration.
In Music for 18
Musicians, Reich further expands his collection of variation processes,
allowing for greater scope and flexibility in varying fixed rhythmic and
melodic cells. Notably, certain more "conventional" musical possibilities excluded from
his previous music take on a prominent role in this piece: harmony, dynamics, and core orchestral instruments (violin, cello, clarinet, bass clarinet).
The piece employs the largest ensemble Reich had used to date—his trademark
keyboard instruments constitute the core of the ensemble (6 percussionists on
marimba, xylophone, and vibraphone without motor and 4 pianists), augmented by melodic instruments (violin, cello, 2 clarinets/bass
clarinets) and voices (4 female voices).
Like Reich’s earlier work, Music for 18 is built around a central melodic/rhythmic cell, introduced
after the piece's introductory section. (This cell is rhythmically identical
to that used in Reich’s earlier piece Clapping
Music.) This cell, like a similar one used in Drumming, is 12 pulses long; beneath its surface syncopations, it
poses a deeper ambiguity to listeners: is the cell as a whole divided in 3 (3
groups of 4 pulses) or 4 (4 groups of 3 pulses)? While in earlier works, Reich
presents traces of two incompatible ways of metrically interpreting a rhythmic cell, in Music for 18, the cell is accompanied by sustaining instruments alternating between two harmonies; the timing of harmonic changes momentarily tips the scales towards a single metric interpretation of the figure.
Indeed, harmony is more to the fore in Music for 18 than in any prior Reich piece. Broadly, the work uses
sonorities reminiscent of tonal harmony but decontextualizes them from
directional syntactic implications through frozen non-chord tones, unusual registral orderings, lengthy
prolongation, and by oscillating between pairs of non-functionally-related
chords. While in the domain of rhythm, the work explores contrasting metric
interpretations of a 12-pulse rhythmic cell, in the domain of harmony, the work
explores contrasting harmonic interpretations of a melody built from the tones
of the A major scale. Each of the work’s 11 sections is based on a limited
chord or harmonic field, each proposing a unique pitch center orienting the
tones of the A major scale: section 1 implies D Lydian, section 2 B Dorian,
section 3 F# Aeolian, and so on. (The sequence of 11 chords is also played
at the work’s beginning and end, animated with regular pulses.)
Significantly, where Reich's earlier pieces approached form as
the gradual unfolding of a linear process (i.e. phasing), form in Music for 18 is more exploratory and
flexible, presenting a non-teleological sequence of perspectives on a common rhythmic/melodic object. Music for 18
thus evinces a broader aesthetic shift in Reich's work: while the early phasing pieces use
deterministic processes to uncover possibilities that might elude a more conventional
composerly intuition, Music reintroduces some of these considerations into the new
approaches to structure and listening developed in the earlier works.
The Center for 21st Century Music is delighted to welcome
Ensemble Signal on September 19 for a performance of Steve Reich’s
concert-length Music for 18 Musicians.
Please note that the concert begins at the later-than-usual time of 9pm; it
will be preceded by a talk by Signal’s co-artistic directors Brad Lubman and
Lauren Radnofsky at 8:15pm. Coming on the heels of the release of Signal’s
acclaimed recording of the piece, the performance marks the culmination of partnerships
between Signal and Reich and between the Center and Reich, detailed below. This
blog will publish another post in the coming days introducing the piece itself.
Released in 2015, Signal’s studio recording of Music for 18 Musicians has been praised widely
and effusively. Awarded the prestigious Diapason d’Or Award (given by reviewers
of the French Diapason magazine), the recording received high praise from the composer himself, who wrote that “Signal
has made an extraordinary recording of Music for 18
Musicians. Fast moving, spot on
and emotionally charged.” Critics have given the album similarly glowing praise, with David Weininger of the
Boston Globe writing
that “two excellent recordings of Steve
Reich’s epoch-making “Music for 18 Musicians” exist already…[including] one by
Steve Reich and Musicians…But this new version, by the New York-based Ensemble
Signal, bests them both.” The album is available to stream on Spotify; a clip of a live performance of the piece by Signal is available here.
Signal’s commitment to Reich’s music goes far beyond this piece.
In 2016, the ensemble was involved in 80th birthday concerts of the composer's music
at the Miller Theatre, Guggenheim Museum, Carnegie Hall, and Cal Performances,
playing Reich’s early works, recent works, and everything in between. This season, Signal has premiered a new Reich work entitled Runner, with upcoming repeat performancesat Carnegie Hall and Washington Performing Arts.
Signal’s music director Brad Lubman brings an even more
extensive engagement with Reich’s work. Among the many world premieres Lubman has conducted,
four are Reich works: Three Tales, Daniel Variations, Radio Rewrite, and Variations
for Vibes, Pianos and Strings. Lubman went on to record Radio Rewrite--inspired by songs of the rock
band Radiohead--with Signal. The conductor has written and spoken extensively
about Reich’s music: in an article on the
composer’s website, in an interview
with the Rochester City Newspaper, and in an extended audio conversation with
Reich himself moderated by WXXI’s Brenda Tremblay (see below).
The UB Music Department’s relationship with Reich goes back
even further, to the 1970s, when Reich was on the cusp of his present-day
fame. The Creative Associates—an ensemble consisting of fellows at the
department’s Center
of the Creative and Performing Arts—took Reich’s early work Clapping Music on its 1975 European
tour, which included engagements at the BBC, West German Radio, and Warsaw
Autumn Festival. The next year, at the second-ever June in Buffalo Festival,
then-director Morton Feldman featured the younger composer’s music, which may
have had a subtle influence on Feldman’s later explorations of repeated and
nearly-repeated patterns. (This period of vibrant activity in the department has
since been documented in detail in the book This
Life of Sounds: Evenings for New Music in Buffalo, written by former
managing director of the Center of the Creative and Performing Arts, Renée Levine
Packer.) Reich has since been invited to June in Buffalo as composition faculty—in 1987, 2000, 2003, and in 2010, when he received an honorary doctorate from the university. A range of his works have been performed at June in Buffalo: everything from large-scale works like City Life and Three Tales (the latter piece for film and ensemble was part of the 2003 festival’s “Music and Image” focus), chamber works like the Pulitzer-prize winner Double Sextet, and rarely performed works like Six Pianos.
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