sound expanse

I had two parallel experiences within the past month.

On the bus ride home from New York, I was tired and uncomfortable. Finally I realized the discomfort was of an aural sort. Someone a row ahead of me had decided to make all of her phone calls during the four-hour ride, and it was irritating me no end. I pullled out the CDs I had gotten the day before from Michael Pisaro after quite a wonderful performance of his new piece at Experimental Intermedia. Several of them involved quite a lot of silence, and that was not going to help me in this situation. But then there was hearing metal 1: three pieces, all made from sine tones woven in with recordings of a tam-tam played by Greg Stuart. I put it in my laptop, put on my (early Christmas present) Bose headphones, and in a moment realized I was not stuck on a bus hearing someone's conversation. I was traveling through one incredibly beautiful and complex sound world after another. The closest visual experience I can think of is walking through fresh snow. There is a sameness, but you can watch how it settles in different contexts and how the light hits it, and how you impact it by being in it. That afternoon on the bus, I fell asleep in this world (I really needed to sleep), woke up and listened with that special waking-listening, heard it through to the end, started over, and over, and stayed right there until we pulled in to South Station.

Last Tuesday, nothing was going smoothly. Everything that might have happened seemed blocked, or delayed, or just too difficult. Finally I had to leave the house in the mid-afternoon to drive to one meeting and then another. I brought a CD called Over Shadows. Rhodri Davies was playing his own piece on harp, using EBow throughout. Normally road noise is a huge obstacle to hearing what is happening in the music that interests me most. But these sounds carried beautifully, and made the drive (up Route 128 through rush hour traffic near Boston) totally beautiful and interesting. The ways that Davies layers the sounds, and pulls off them one from another and combines them towards other effects are really masterful. I put it on just now to try to find a better way to describe it and realized two things: that I can't, and that I can't bring myself to turn it off. (The review included in the title link is much more descriptive.)

These two CDs have something else in common beyond using limited materials and completely turning my day around: they're both available in the US through erstwhile records. Primarily a label for electroacoustic improvised music, it has also become a very successful US distributor for wandelweiser CDs, among others. Worldwide distributors for Pisaro's recordings are listed on this Edition Wandelweiser directory. In Europe, you can get most of Davies' CDs at Sound 323. In reading about Sound 323's history, I finally learned about the origins of a beautiful and fascinating book and DVD that I got hold of a couple years ago, Blocks of Consciousness and the Unbroken Continuum.

Since this post has morphed into a listing of helpful distributors, I'll go ahead and mention one that I just learned about that is quite close to where I live--miramoglu music sales, based in Porter Square in Cambridge, MA. They don't happen to have the CDs in stock that I wrote about, but they have other work by both Pisaro and Davies, as well as many other artists that you're not likely to find on Amazon.

I've been thinking of starting a new "finds" category here on sound expanse--sites, pages, videos, resources, etc. that are mostly self-explanatory. I have a good cross-section now--a list that has been waiting and growing for some time.

1) Piano Repertoire Project.

This is a research project that aims to document much of the newest repertoire for solo piano as part of a Northwestern University doctoral thesis. The specific goal is the creation of a reference guide to solo piano music written by composers born since 1970.

For reasons of scope, the project is limited to American composers and those living or studying in the United States. (Maybe someone will want to do a similar project in another country in the future.) I know a lot of interesting composers who have submitted their work, and I know Jonathan Katz is approaching the project in a committed and responsible way.

The deadline for submission is February 1st, 2010. That's soon, so if you're interested, now is probably a good time to act on it. There's a thorough description and FAQ section on the site.

2) Available online is an experimental music series curated by Jason Brogan called calculations. I'll say for practical reasons that there is quite a lot of silence involved. So if you don't hear anything on a track for some time there's not likely a problem with either your speakers or the site. There's some very fine work on there, often with pdfs, videos, and links to more information available. The idea of an online, curated space for experimental music is great too. I'd be really pleased to see more of them.

3) Michael Pisaro has written a long and wonderful history (also available in German) of the wandelweiser group. (Take a look through the rest of the content on erstwords as well.) I love reading about how this international collective has emerged, developed, and thrived over time.

4) I wrote over a year ago about Laurence Crane's Come back to the old specimen cabinet John Vigani, John Vigani, part 3. Since then, I've come across a video of a different performance of it by plus-minus, with the same cellist, Alex Waterman.

And here's the link for the second video, to finish the piece.

In looking up plus-minus I found a whole treasure trove of videos and recordings I hadn't seen or heard before, including pieces by Ablinger, Ashley, Bailie, Cardew, Crane, Harrison, Ligeti, Parkinson, Reinholdtsen, Saunders, Shlomowitz, Stockhausen, Torvund, and Trunk.

5) Phil Minton's Feral Choir. This is brilliant. I won't say anything more.

6) Last year I wrote about Wet Ink's Peter Ablinger concert in New York. They have released two videos from the concert:

Verkündigung by Peter Ablinger from Sam Pluta on Vimeo.

Cecil Taylor (from Voices and Piano) by Peter Ablinger from Wet Ink Ensemble on Vimeo.

Enjoy!

I'm thinking about a number of trips I want to take this year, mostly for concerts and festivals. I've found some new resources for finding cheap flights since my last post on the subject, which was well over a year ago. (Some of those sites no longer exist, and others have been outdone.)

Here's my current strategy:

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Graham McKenzie, the director of the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, has made the point that he does not like to assign themes to festivals, but prefers to watch patterns emerge during the event itself. For me, one of major patterns I saw on all sorts of levels was community and dialogue--from the institutional level--between organizations like the festival and the university--to the interactions between musicians--improvisers in particular--onstage. So much is made possible when independent, forward-thinking people work together within the context of an event.

Alvin Curran has been exploring various ways of involving local communities in his pieces, from the Maritime Rites installations and performances to the community bands of Oh the Brass on the Grass, Alas. His piece, OH MAN OH MANKIND OH YEAH was called "A Community Sing," which included the Huddersfield Choral Society, the University Choir, instrumentalists from the university, and vocalise, "the Festival's new vocal group for young people." Curran writes,

The work is about singing, transforming ponderous mass into weightless matter, singing invisibly together, singing in reckless conflict and sweet harmony, singing with you... so join in at the end if you like!

The performances were all quite strong, but the kids stole the show. They were having so much fun up there on stage, and they were totally engaged in their various noisemaking activities.

Curran, along with Frederic Rzewski and Richard Teitelbaum, is also a member of Musica Elettronica Viva, which has been in existence since 1966. As they themselves put it,

Part myth, part reality, part dream, Musica Elettronica Viva in its 23rd year continues to resist retirement and greatly enjoys its one gig a year.

In the name of the collectivity, the group abandoned both written scores and leadership and replaced them with improvisation and critical listening. Rehearsals and concerts were begun at the appropriate time by a kind of spontaneous combustion and continued until total exhaustion set in.

In a totally enjoyable conversation and Q&A session after their performance, the friendship of these three Americans expatriates in Rome was obvious. Rzewski responded at some length to one question, and Teitelbaum then said, "I completely disagree with Frederic." In their performance, they were at many times so remarkably in sync that I might have thought it was a piece that had been composed and rehearsed. But learning more about the background of the group and the (in)frequency of their performances made it clear that it wasn't. These are long-standing friendships that play out in music as well as in life. They made the point in the conversation afterwards that they have used fewer and fewer instructions as they have continued to work together.

Quite similarly (though to a very different effect), on the day of fORCH's performance, Richard Barrett said in an interview with Graham McKenzie that over the last few years,

the amount of notated material has gradually gone down until for today's performance there's very little left... this collective of people has developed its own musical personality and become its own composer, so to speak.

Barrett wrote in the program notes that "The framework ... is intended not to enclose improvisatory spontaneity, but to create a point of departure for it." The players, who that night included Phil Minton and Ute Wassermann (voices), FURT (Richard Barrett and Paul Obermayer, electronics), Anne La Berge (flute, electronics), John Butcher (saxophones), Aleks Kolkowski (viola, musical saw), and Rhodri Davies (harp), are overwhelmingly creative in the sounds they find and explore in their instruments. FURT plays an interesting role, sewing together, splitting apart, amplifying, distorting, and otherwise manipulating the sounds produced by the rest of the group. Their performance at the hcmf and the material I have heard on their myspace page are like nothing else. I'll hold off on writing more about the individual members' other involvements for some future entries. What they are doing is too interesting to squeeze into an already-long post.

Another partnership is crucial to all of the events that I've written about in these last five posts, as well as the many others that I did not cover, and that is the partnership between the University of Huddersfield (including CeReNeM) and the hcmf. The mutual benefit is substantial. That is not just for the obvious practical reasons of venues for the festival, exposure for the university, etc. All of that would be trivial if it were not for the fact that both the festival and the faculty and students involved with new music have a similar and complementary orientation towards... (It's dangerous to try to codify this too much, but I'll make a first stab) ... highly creative work that lies well outside of the mainstream. The students and faculty that I've had a chance to get to know have a huge diversity of interests and approaches, but they have quite a lot to say to one other. It was great to see that in the three masterclasses I attended, the nine pieces were remarkably different from one another, but Liza Lim, Jonathan Harvey, and Rebecca Saunders had really insightful things to say to the students about each of them. The programming of the whole festival was similarly vibrant, free of aesthetic branding, and rich with opportunities for thought and discussion. What more can I say? If it continues to be this strong, and on this schedule, I'll be missing many more Thanksgivings. Something really special is happening in Huddersfield.

There are several pieces and performances I've wanted to write about from the Huddersfield festival that don't fit under a single umbrella. This post will be a sort of catch-all for them.

Rebecca Saunders' disclosure, played with real sensitivity and power by MusikFabrik, was informed by a Beckett quote: "I still see, sometimes, that waning face disclosing, more and more clearly the more it entered shadow, the one I remembered." Thinking about the piece and the quote in relation to each other helps me to understand each of them better. The focus at the opening was on the transition from the very local-level timeline for any player between not playing (add a hyphen if you like) and playing. Silence was not really a factor, nor was controlled sound. The focus was on everything between the two. The playing moved suddenly to sounds which were on the other side of the controllable playing range (beyond it), and then pulled back to a compelling violin solo, powerfully played by Juditha Haeberlin. Saunders' vocabulary of sounds is enormous, and the form of the piece was enigmatic. I'm sure I would make something else of it on a second or third hearing. (By the way, there is a very useful, brief interview with Saunders from 2002 on the Ensemble Modern site.)

James Weeks conducted the New London Chamber Choir in a wonderful performance of Jonathan Harvey's The Summer Cloud's Awakening. It was a rich piece and, at 35 minutes, a truly immersive experience. I find it difficult to talk about, but fortunately Harvey describes it well:

"Everything is based on the relationship of a brief phrase from Wagner's Tristan and Isolde to the Buddhist vision of reality. The Wagner phrase is stretched out from 12 seconds to five minutes - the 'longing' of the Wagnerian phrase so achingly long that it seems almost motionless."

"The sound is chopped up at speed and flung around and above the listener, often in canonic formations. Huge clusters of sound ('clouds' and 'mists' are created from the voices and instruments. Some sounds are recorded, but many are created in real time."

Oliver Coates' stage presence was quite unassuming, but his performance, both on this piece and on Saariaho's Sept Papillons was tremendous. On the Harvey, he used a second cello with two G and two C strings, all tuned an octave down. Harvey aptly describes this as "a deep, strange, heiratic sound." Weeks also wrote a very useful article about the piece and its preparation that was posted on the hcmf site.

Sebastian Berweck launched the first CD (Extended Piano) of the new label HCR (Huddersfield Contemporary Records) with his recital for piano and analogue electronics that included pieces by Michael Maierhof, Benjamin Lang, Thomas Wenk, Johannes Kreidler, and Enno Poppe. (The CD also includes a piece by James Saunders.) HCR is curated by CeReNeM, the Centre for Research in New Music at the University of Huddersfield. I will be following the label's releases as well as CeReNeM's other activities with interest. Berweck's recital posed fundamental questions about what the piano is, and what it is that a pianist does. In his program note he speaks of "Five ways to get out of the historical straitjacket ... as diverse as can be":

Maiherhof decides to use the piano as what it is: a huge soundboard with a fake reverberation device.

Benjamin Lang decides to use the piano as what it is: an instrument that makes sound everywhere and writes a piece that barely uses the keys at all.

Johannes Kreidler extends the piano with a tape -- a tape that destroys the piano rather than enhances it by bringing sounds from our daily dosage of media entertainment into the concert hall.

Thomas Wenk turns back to the analogue.... Taurus CT-600 is certainly not a piano piece. But a piece for piano player maybe?

Enno Poppe uses the pianist for what he is: someone who can play keyboards. In Arbeit (Work) Poppe uses a virtual rendition of the Hammond B3 Organ.

Each of the pieces was provocative in a different way, and Berweck played them all with real skill and commitment. You can see part of an earlier performance he did of Thomas Wenk's TAURUS CT-600 at the opening of this youtube video, and part of one of Maierhof's splitting pieces at the 3:06 mark.

A number of other sound samples are available on Berweck's own site. I also recently came across this documentary about another piece by Johannes Kreidler that is quite interesting. Kreidler's answer to the objecting audience member is so articulate that I think he may have been planted there. But in any case, it's a piece that asks some very cutting questions.

There was tremendous energy in both Matthew Shlomowitz's Theme Street Parade and its performance by the Quatuor Diotima. Shlomowitz chose not to write a program note, but in an interview about the piece he said that “The basic premise is a formalistic treatment of vernacular material." I enjoyed my own shifting reaction to the piece. In a festival situation in particular (when so much music is presented) it's easy to start making an assessment about a piece from its opening moments. This opening was so straight-forward and conventional that I was puzzled. I couldn't figure out what he was trying to do. Then the musical materials were broken apart horizontally and vertically, repeated, examined, distorted. After the violist's string broke a few minutes into the piece, we got another chance to hear how the material was toyed with. Shlomowitz speaks about "taking very familiar musical themes and doing unexpected things with them.... It’s that pulling-the-rug-out thing that I’m interested in." The actual material used was quite short. Shlomowitz loops back on it to an extreme point, raising questions about what repetition is and what it does. This piece will be broadcast on BBC's Hear and Now on January 9th and will be available for the week following. It's really vibrant and packed with innovation--well worth a listen. In the meantime, I'll post one more video: a performance by Parkinson-Saunders of one of Shlomowitz's Letter Pieces. They are all quite interesting, but I'm attached to this one since I was one of the members of the audience that bust up laughing at a performance of it at Listen/Space in New York. How they carry it off in such a deadpan performance is beyond me.