Magnus Andersson: Precision and Clarity

Magnus Andersson performs at JiB 2011

Among the special guests at June in Buffalo this year is Swedish performer Magnus Andersson.  Andersson is one of the most renowned guitarists in the contemporary music field, and has played an important role in the creation of the instrument's modern repertoire.

Andersson studied at London's Trinity College of Music and later at the Viotti Music Academy in Vercelli, Italy.  He was awarded the Composers Union Interpreter Prize in 1983, received the Swedish Gramophone Prize in 1985 and 1986, and was nominated for a Swedish Grammy in 1992.  In 1984 he was awarded the Kranischsteiner Prize at the International Summer Courses for New Music in Darmstadt.  That same year he founded Darmstadt's guitar class, which he taught until 1996.  He currently teaches at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm, and was artistic director of the Stockholm New Music Festival in 2006 and 2008.  Andersson is a founding member of the chamber music group Ensemble SON, and has toured widely in a trio with cellist Rohan de Saram and bassoonist Pascal Gallois.  He has performed the premieres of numerous important contemporary works including Ferneyhough's Kurze Schatten II (1989), Franco Donatoni's Ase (Algo II), James Dillon's Shrouded Mirrors (1987), Sven-David Sandström's Away From (1982), and Mark Applebaum's DNA, as well as guitar concertos by Pisati, Sandström, and Donatoni.

Among the works Andersson will perform at June in Buffalo are Stefano Scodanibbio's Dos Abismos, another work composed especially for him, and one marked by a number of difficult techniques (one-handed harmonics, contrapuntal hammer-ons, etc.).  Andersson will also perform two works by Josh Levine:  Former Selves (2007) and Glimpses (1986).  Levine, a guitar player himself, describes his approach to the instrument in the former piece:  

The second movement, "Bridges in the middle of the ocean," begins with the solo guitar playing quick, ephemeral gestures and fragments of indistinct melodies as it journeys through a mostly silent space.  Mere vestiges of the instrument’s typical sonority characterize its strange, veiled sound world:  high residual pitches produced when the string strikes the fret, each accompanied by the woody thud of the  finger hitting the fretboard.

Finally, Andersson will join Dal Niente for a performance of Hans Abrahamsen's Winternacht, an earlier piece in that composer's oeuvre which Poul Ruders has described as "very precise and dreamingly poetic [...] almost classical in terms of clarity and discipline in orchestration and form."  Such a description seems an apt representation of Andersson's own approach to his instrument, which is always marked by a firm technical precision that does not eschew the 'dreamy' or impressionistic.  Indeed, this is why composers as varied as Ferneyhough, Scodanibbio, and Applebaum are continually drawn to write for him, and what makes him well-equipped to perform the music of Levine and Abrahamsen.  We'll look forward to his performances this week!

Josh Levine: Imagination and Memory

June in Buffalo has been an international festival since its inception, attracting composers, performers, and other artists from around the world.  Its aesthetic has always been a broad one, where one is likely to hear American experimentalists programmed alongside the European avant garde.  It is for this reason, that Josh Levine makes a perfect addition to the JiB faculty, as he is an American composer with significant international ties, and a broadly cosmopolitan aesthetic.

Josh Levine

While he was born in Oregon, Levine originally trained as a classical guitarist in Basel, Switzerland.  He continued his musical studies in the same country as he switched to composition, studying with Balz Trümpy.  He later studied at the Paris Conservatory with Guy Reibel, and worked at IRCAM, later returning to the US to earn his PhD from UC San Diego, where he studied principally with Brian Ferneyhough.  Since then, his music has been internationally recognized and has received several awards, including First Prize and a Euphonie d'Or at the Bourges International Electroacoustic Music Competition.  His works have been commissioned by widely-recognized soloists including Aiyun Huang, Marcus Weiss, and Jürg Wyttenbach, as well as ensembles such as the soundSCAPE Trio, Calliope Duo, Ensemble Contrechamps, and Les Solistes de l’Ensemble Intercontemporain.  He currently serves as Assistant Professor of Composition at Oberlin.

For Levine, music is a locus where the unity of imagination and memory can be found.

The musical work is, for me, a site where the irrational and the rational, the sensual and the conceptual, and, most basically, sound and silence, spar and dance and transcend their seeming dichotomies.  Through ever-evolving interpretations of recurring musical materials, I explore the unity of memory and imagination—remembering as an act of imagining, and imagining as an act of remembering.  My composing is inspired by movement and the contemplation of change, whether in the physical world or in the psyche.

Despite the abstractness of such conceptual imagery, Levine's music is dynamic and rooted in the concreteness of the physical gesture.  "The physicality of musical performance and our emotional identification as listeners with its energy, gestures, and implicit drama are among its further driving forces."  His early work in the field of electroacoustic music led to an interest in temporal fluidity and harmonic nuance, as well as an attention to detail that seeks to bring "a richer resonance to every moment."  Such temporal and timbral examination can be heard in Levine's recent acousmatic piece, Oneirograph, which uses violin samples as its source material, but pulls open these sounds, finding vast resonant soundscapes within.  The piece's title refers to an instrument for measuring dreams—dreams, of course, being another site in which the divisions between memory and imagination become suspect.

This year's festival will see the performances of three of Levine's pieces.  The Slee Sinfonietta will present two of these.  The first, Four places, many more times (2011), is a percussion quartet which revolves around twelve specially tuned metal pipes.  Continuing Levine's interest in flexible perceptions of time, the composer describes the work as a series of "'sound objects' [which] shift and spin through space and different time zones in a kind of timbral kaleidoscope."  The second, Former Selves, for solo guitar, ensemble, and electronics features JiB special guest Magnus Andersson.  Approaching the idea of memory from a different angle, this work incorporates elements from several of the composer's earlier works, both as musical gestures articulated by the performers, as well as samples which are transformed by the electronics—even to the extent of incorporating recorded material from the piece's own 2007 premiere.  Levine describes the relationship between the soloist and ensemble:  

[The ensemble's music moves in largely homophonic blocks, like forms emerging from a void and receding again for no apparent reason.  The guitar does not participate in their creation, but passes between them.  As the homophony gradually unravels, the guitar in its turn begins to find openings into the ensemble, eventually (re)discovering there the full sound of its voice.

Levine, Former Selves (2007)

Finally, the Uusinta Ensemble will open their program with Levine's Glimpses (1986), an earlier work which reverses the play of memory found in Former Selves:  rather than pulling from previous works, Glimpses consists of material that would preoccupy the composer for years to come—that is, musical ideas that would be continuously remembered.  "The listener 'glimpses' moments of parallel musical narratives, aural images whose incompleteness leaves their possible pasts and futures to the imagination.  Much of the material is heard again in new contexts, but it rarely seems the same."  This work also features Andersson on guitar, who whispers a description of this material during the work's own performance, referring to them as "points of embarkation on a bankless river."

As a guitarist himself, it is no surprise that Levine's work often emphasizes that instrument, and as a performer, Levine has performed with the likes of Ensemble Contrechamps, the Basel ISCM Ensemble, the Nouvel Ensemble Contemporain, SONOR, and members of the sfSoundgroup.  He has recorded works by Mark Applebaum and Kristian Ireland on the Innova label.

As a dedicated teacher, Levine takes great joy in hearing the different approaches the students embrace in their own music.  As he explains:

I love it when a student comes in to the lesson, puts the music on the music stand, and it may be—in fact, it's almost surely going to be—in a style, or with a particular aesthetic orientation that doesn't correspond to what I personally would write.  But it's so fascinatingly done—it explores in such a beautiful way certain ideas, instrumental colors, or sounds that I've never quite explored in that way, and yet that I can empathize with and communicate with both through the score and through my personal relationship to them.

There is perhaps no better place for Levine to encounter the varied aesthetic orientations of young artists than at June in Buffalo, and we are excited for the composers who will learn from their dialogues with him, as they reckon with their own imaginations and memories.

Dal Niente: Young Punks and Established Masters

Ensemble Dal Niente

This year, among the resident ensembles at the June in Buffalo festival will be a Chicago-based ensemble the New York Times has called a "superb contemporary-music collective", Dal Niente.  The ensemble's evocative name ("from nothing") comes from Helmut Lachenmann's Dal niente (Interieur III), a work whose "revolutionary style" has served as an inspiration to its members.  The name also refers to the group's humble beginnings:  initially formed as a collective of graduate composers at Northwestern University, the ensemble's introduction to the international music community was quickly boosted during their Darmstadt residency in 2012, at which they became the first ensemble to be awarded the prestigious Kranichstein Music Prize.  Since then, Dal Niente has made it their mission to present new works in ways that "redefine the listening experience and advance the art form", through "immersive experiences which connect audiences with the music of today."  They have been quite successful with the latter, as the Chicago Tribune has described them as "a model of what contemporary music needs, but seldom gets, to reach and engage a wider public."

Dal Niente are nothing if not active, and have built a reputation for exciting and prolific programming.  Some recent projects include "Canciones", a three-week tour of Latin America, including stops in Colombia, Mexico, and Panama which featured four world premieres, as well as the Chicago premiere of Georg Friedrich Haas's in vain, widely recognized as one of the early masterpieces of the 21st century.  The ensemble's varied concert series have included Proximity Portraits, which seek to introduce local audiences to international composers whose music is rarely performed in the group's native Chicago (a series which has thus far featured music by Andriessen, Ligeti, Stockhausen, and Claude Vivier), and Punks, a project which "celebrates composers whose independent spirit has led to musical experiences that are uniquely original and ambitious in reinventing the art form."  The latter series has featured music by Raphaël Cendo and Natacha Diels, and a collaboration with Greg Saunier of the band Deerhoof, who arranged the Deerhoof Chamber Variations for the ensemble.  This latter collaboration eventually led to the ensemble's most recent project, a collaboration with Deerhoof for a recording of Saunier's Variations, as well as a new work composed by Marcos Balter.

Dal Niente is known locally for their Hard Music, Hard Liquor series, which features music that requires extreme virtuosity from its performers.  Other recent projects include the audio/video concert Coming Together, which featured works by American composers enhanced with live video art by the new media artist Alejandro Acierto.  One of the centerpieces of this program is Assemblage by trombonist/improviser/composer George Lewis, which can be seen below:

At June in Buffalo, Dal Niente will perform a program that will feature works by faculty composers, including Chinary Ung's Singing Inside Aura and Winternacht by Hans Abrahamsen.  No stranger to the former's music, the ensemble performed the Chicago premiere of Schnee in 2014, which Ensemble Signal will present at this year's JiB (for more on that performance, see our profile on Signal).  The program will also feature David Felder's Rare Air, for bass clarinet, piano, and electronics.  The four-movement work, originally composed for Jean Kopperud's Rated X project, is a collection of miniatures that feature an exotic menagerie of virtuosic extended techniques that create a strange-but-enticing sonic environment.  Finally, the ensemble will present Joshua Fineberg's Paradigms, for ensemble and electronics.  This latter piece is based on compositional models, as the composer explains:

I recorded several passages of instrumental music [which] were then analyzed; not, however, in the ordinary manner […].  Instead, I sought to extract the essence of the color, sound and motion not of these passages in their abstract existence, but of their realization.  To find a model in which each individual instrument playing in a precise way is fused together in one global timbre.  This global timbre then, once understood, could serve as my new model, to be re-interpreted, re-evaluated and again transformed into a new musical structure.

Dal Niente has made educational outreach an integral part of its mission, and have participated in composition workshops and masterclasses at a number of colleges and universities.  Since their formation in 2004, the ensemble has developed a particular skill for helping composers realize their visions, whether they be young punks or established masters.

Composer Josh Levine travels in from Oberlin College to present his music

We’re looking forward to hosting prominent Oberlin-based composer Josh Levine for a lecture and discussion later this month on Wednesday, March 27th, when he will present his music and share his recent projects. Levine has enjoyed an exciting and productive career as a composer, and won awards, prizes, and fellowships from a wide variety of international festivals and competitions, including the Bourges International Electroacoustic Music Competition (Premier Prix and special jury prize), Darmstadt Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik (Stipend Prize), both the Gluck and Weill Fellowships for Composers at the University of California, San Diego, a lengthy composer residency at the Foundation Patiño/Republic of Geneva in Switzerland, and many more.

More information about Josh Levine’s work and career can be found in his biography, included below:

Josh Levine

“American composer Josh Levine (b. 1959 in Corvallis, Oregon) trained in Switzerland as a classical guitarist before studying composition there with Balz Trümpy. Further studies took him to the Paris Conservatory (1985-86 with Guy Reibel) and IRCAM (1994-95). After several years working in Europe as a freelance composer and guitarist, he earned his Ph.D. from the University of California, San Diego, where his thesis adviser was Brian Ferneyhough. From 2000 to 2008, he lectured in composition, electronic music, and music theory at San Francisco State University and has also taught composition at UC San Diego and Stanford University. Currently he is Assistant Professor of Composition at the Oberlin College Conservatory of Music.

           

“Josh Levine’s tape composition, Tel, received First Prize at the Bourges International Electroacoustic Music Competition in 1987 and a Euphonie d’0r in 1992. His music has been commissioned and performed internationally by prominent new music soloists and ensembles, including Magnus Andersson, Aiyun Huang, Marcus Weiss, Jürg Wyttenbach, the Arnold-Huang-Rosenkranz trio, Calliope Duo, Ensemble Contrechamps, Les Solistes de l'Ensemble Intercontemporain, and the Ensemble Intercontemporain under David Robertson. Numerous other excellent musicians have performed his music in venues ranging from IRCAM and the Cité de la Musique in Paris to Merkin Hall in New York, and from festivals in Melbourne and Los Angeles to World New Music Days in Stockholm.

“In addition to his composing and work as an educator, Josh Levine has long been active as a guitarist in new music ensembles. He participated in many concerts and broadcasts with the noted Swiss ensembles Contrechamps and the Ensemble der IGNM-Basel, and, more recently, performed as soloist with the Nouvel Ensemble Contemporain. He has also played concerts with members of the sfSound Group (San Francisco), SONOR (San Diego) and in the Akoe quartet for improvised music.”

Below is a video of a great performance of Josh Levine’s work, Breathing ritual (Inflorescence V), commissioned for the soundSCAPE faculty trio, and premiered at the 2012 soundSCAPE festival in Maccagno, Italy, by soprano Tony Arnold, percussionist Aiyun Huang, and pianist Thomas Rosenkranz. More of Levine's music can be heard on his website.

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Much more to come in the Spring 2013 season at the Center!

We’re almost midway through the 2012-2013 season at the Robert and Carol Morris Center for 21st Century Music. We’ve already had two exciting Slee Sinfonietta concerts featuring Robert Treviño, Yuki Numata, Daniel Pesca, and Daniel Bassin, a visit by composer James Romig from Western Illinois University, a tribute to documentary filmmaker Bruce Jackson featuring original music by David Felder, a recent residency by new music ensemble Norbotten NEO, and a slew of other concerts, performances, and projects.

We’re really looking forward to the next half of the season, which will feature one of our largest Slee Sinfonietta concerts ever, including guest performances by some of contemporary music’s leading musicians, including Ensemble SIGNAL, conductor Brad Lubman, soprano Laura Aiken, bass-baritone Ethan Herschenfeld, and percussionist Tom Kolor. The Spring Slee Sinfonietta concert will feature the premiere of David Felder’s Les Quatres Temps Cardinaux, a large work for about thirty musicians and ten channels of electronics, and which is Felder’s second commission from the Koussevitsky Music Foundation. We asked Felder about the commission, and he was kind enough to let us in on some of the details, “An interesting aspect of the piece is that I have audio recordings of the poets reading their poems, and can use their voices as source material. Most of the readings will be substantially electronically transformed... Often the phonemes from the spoken poems will be translated into instrumental analogues, or processed into bell sounds or other timbres. The texts will also be carried, to a large degree, by the singers. It’s been a really big project – projecting to be about 40-45 minutes.”

Ensemble SIGNAL

Many other events will be happening in the spring: we’ll have a visit from French composer Phillipe Hurel, a brief cameo by composer Josh Levine, hailing from Oberlin, Ohio, a visit from University of North Carolina composer and UB alumn Alejandro Rutty, and a guest appearance from percussionist Patti Cudd from the University of Wisconsin. We’re also looking forward to a residency from the terrific French new music ensemble Court-circuit, who will offer a fresh concert of new music pieces as well as perform UB graduate composer works.

Most important, of course, will be June in Buffalo 2013, which will be the inaugural year of the June in Buffalo Performance Institute, and which will feature an exciting performance faculty comprised of cellist Jonathan Golove, pianist Eric Huebner, the virtuosic and tremendously popular JACK Quartet, percussionist Tom Kolor, and the incredible Talujon Percussion Ensemble. This will be the first year for young performers of new music to study, workshop, and collaborate with some of the leading interpreters of contemporary music at June in Buffalo.

A lot more will be happening in the upcoming months, and we'll be sure to keep you posted. Details on the University at Buffalo Spring Season, June in Buffalo 2013, and other information about the Center's events posted below:

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