Summer officially began on June 6th, when I mailed the score and parts of my new orchestra piece, Invisible Overture, to Paris for the
Acanthes Festival, where I will be a composition fellow this coming July.
Until then, my work regiment precluded the possibility of doing almost anything except work and sleep with one notable exception: To celebrate the opening of the Stanton Chapter, a new art gallery on the Lower East Side in New York, I participated in a 24-hour improvisation session with my artist/musician friends Bryce Hackford, Viktor Timofeev, and Ian Campbell. (I only made it to the last 12 hours due to the orchestral deadline). When I arrived about halfway through, the others had settled down for quiet hours of loops and tape delays in the middle, but we re-energized for the finale, with everything from tambourines to Japanese flutes to bass guitars and slowed-down LPs generating an explosive and live finale.
I'm constantly inspired by my artist friends' conception of music because it is so similar in motivation to my own, but with such a different background. To them, Stockhausen and CAN go so naturally together, much more than CAN and Britney Spears or Stockhausen and Mozart, that the whole thing flows from genre to genre, and the effect achieved is very natural, but extremely different from the slow, agonizing process of "composing." But to me, as a composer, these sort of things are extremely valuable to inspire the work that I do, even if it sounds completely different.
Here is a summmertime treat, a brief "piece" of mine composed over the last year, which has not yet found a home on a concert, but it may wind up as part of a larger work, or colllection of electronic works. It is based on a field recording I took in Charleston, SC, while staying with some friends in the New Music Collective, a wonderful group of musicians out there. Tentatively titled Flence*, I include it here for your listening enjoyment.
*From whence, Flence? Allora, Qui:
"I told him, only half joking, about how I imagined the soul of each person, myself included, as being a sort of flexible neon tube inside. [...] So when people I like do something terrible," I said, "I just flense them and forgive them." "Flense?" he said. "What's flense?" "It's what whalers used to do to whale carcasses when they got them on board," I said. "They would strip off their skin and blubber and meat right down to the skeleton. I do that in my head to people -- get rid of all the meat so I can see nothing but their souls."
--Kurt Vonnegut, Bluebeard
May 6, 2008
The end of an academic semester always reminds me a bit of what it must feel like to be Wile E. Coyote when he's chasing the Roadrunner and suddenly runs off of a cliff: he keeps on going and going and going -- and when he finally looks down, there's nothing beneath him.
The semester ends with such an odd combination of a bang and a whimper (so much work and yet so little sense of conclusion) that I barely noticed it. But certainly the highlight of the last weeks of this semester has been this past Thursday when I had the opportunity to present my music to a jury of music and architecture critics at the Yale Architecture School final critique and to follow it up with a performance of Morton Feldman's Piece for Four Pianos at 2 in the morning.
Let me explain: Recently, a few other Yale composers and I had the opportunity to consult some architects in Frank Gehry's class at the architecture school. Their project, which was an overhaul of the New York Philharmonic's current Avery Fisher Hall, resonated strongly with all of the composers (and I would have to guess anyone who has attended a concert there). In particular, I wanted to see a hall that would destabilize the sense of proscenium so common in music theaters, thus opening up the hall to a multiplicity of performing situations (spatialized works, players in the audience, etc) rather than defining the performer-audience relationship as fixed from the get-go.
This seemed to resonate very strongly with all the architects, and in fact, one of the students, Santiago del Hierro, had already designed a hall that would allow performers to be in at least seven different places in the hall. Since several of my most recent works have been spatial in setup, it seemed an ideal situation for a collaboration.
Therefore, when he presented his new design this past Thursday (to the awe-inspiring panel of Gehry, Alex Ross, Peter Sellars, Jean Nouvel, Zarin Mehta, among others), he presented Reading a Wave in the context of hall with a speaker setup simulating the work's spatial setup. I can only hope that my work resonated with the panel, but as, Peter Sellars put it (roughly), "to actually hear a new work in the context of talking about music all day long put the project in a whole new perspective."
After all this, I immediately rushed to get ready for the Yale IGIGI marathon concert (IGIGI is the undergraduate composers organization who has been hosting an all-night concert of new music every year since the 80s; these concerts were the inspiration for the Bang on a Can marathons we all now know and love) where Daniel Vezza, Andrew Norman, Matthew Wright and I performed Feldman's epoch-making Piece for Four Pianos to a sold out crowd of 11 at 2 in the morning. At which point, I looked down and the semester was over.
On the next: a short orchestral work for the Orchestra National de Lorraine to be performed at this summer's Acanthes festival, where I will be in residence and studying with one of the great masters of the late 20th century: Salvatore Sciarrino.
April 10, 2008
I've posted a new recording of Reading a Wave in the music section (to replace the grainer one from the premiere) which is fresh off the press from its performance last week at New Music New Haven. I highly recommend listening to it with headphones; the recording projects the
spatial setup of the players and the space in the hall much better when you can hear the panning.
One of the nicest things about living a double life as the co-director of a new music ensemble and as a graduate student at Yale is that I have the opportunity to have almost everything I write performed twice. This affords me the opportunity to tinker around with all of the things I didn't like about it on the first go-round.
I feel very lucky to have the chance to do this. Too often, I think, young composers blame themselves for the faults of their piece if the premiere goes poorly because they only have the recording of one performance. If anything, I think pieces only begin to become themselves after 2 or 3 or 4 performances; how can someone possibly understand all the complexities of their own work in a single performance? Especially with the often limited number of rehearsals new pieces receive?
Speaking of multiple performances, the amazing Daisy Press will be performing my Requiem for K.V. on the 18th and 19th of April. Check out the events section for more information.
March 20, 2008
One of the most rewarding experiences that I've had recently has been working with the ensemble I co-direct, Red Light New Music, on a series of adaptations of Stephen Foster songs. The project had its genesis in a radio show that Red Light was participating in in Louisville, Kentucky. Given the theme of the show, "Lunchtime Classics," the radio station had asked us to put some "normal" music on the program.
So instead of simply throwing a Bach cello suite onto the program, we opted to rework several Stephen Foster songs (Foster in particular seemed like a good choice since so many of his songs reference Kentucky). The project had the added bonus of introducing audiences perhaps unfamiliar with contemporary music to extended instrumental techniques and elements of indeterminacy in a context they were familiar with. My realization of Beautiful Dreamer is here (as performed by Red Lighters John Popham, Jessie Marino, Natacha Diels, Kevin Sims, with guest soprano Emily Albrink):
In addition, fellow Red Light composers Vincent Raikhel and Kyle Hillbrand had a phenomenally clever arrangement of Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair. This and the rest of the program (which features works by Reiko Fueting, the aforementioned two composers, and Derek Muro) can be found archived here. The whole show, including the Foster songs, will be performed live tomorrow in Charleston and on Wednesday, March 26 in New York at the Tank. More info on that here.
If you're going to be in New Haven on April 2, my piece Reading a Wave, for 9 instruments spatialized around the audience will be given its NH premiere as part of New Music New Haven, Yale's New Music series alongside works by Bryan Senti, Angel Lam, Yoshi Onishi, Andrew Norman and guest composer Ellen Taafe Zwilich.
February 14, 2008
The Red Light concert this past Sunday was about as close to perfect as a concert could get. Full house, press from Alex Ross and the NY Times, and an amazing performance of my new piece, Reading a Wave, which was really well received. But I think what was most special was that this concert was to me the moment when Red Light after three years has really came into its own as a group (composers' collective? ensemble?). What's amazing to me about the group is that it puts forth the idea that music can be both sophisticated without being pretentious. The pieces on the concert were musings on the words of Plato, Rumi, Margeruite Yourcenar, and Italo Calvino. But the works were not antagonistic to an audience either. Many of the pieces were quiet and quite gorgeous soundscapes. But they also offered new sounds and ideas.
