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Beebop Tango by Frank Zappa
arr. by Geoffrey Burleson, piano
Grand Sonata by Michael Sahl
1st Movement
2nd Movement
Mary Rowell, violin; Geoffrey Burleson, piano
Ten Children by Michael Lowenstern
Michael Lowenstern, bass clarinet & electronics
#5
#1
Ancient Cabaret Songs by William Bolcom/Arnold Weinstein
Joan Morris, mezzo soprano; William Bolcom, piano
On a Statue of a Runner
Unlucky Eutichus
An Encaustic Painting
Timomarchus's Picture of Medea in Rome
Praxiteles" Aphrodite
Three Pieces for Violin & Piano by Preston Stahly
Todd Reynolds, violin; Lisa Moore, piano
#3
More music at: myspace.com/newyorkartensemble
June 6, 2009
MUSIC REVIEW | AMERICAN CONTEMPORARY MUSIC ENSEMBLE
New Music, Many Styles at a Festival in TriBeCa
By ALLAN KOZINN
Recession or not, music festivals of various sizes and persuasions are plentiful now, as they are every spring. The TriBeCa New Music Festival is modest in scope: its four concerts are presented at the Flea Theater, which seats only 75. But from a programming point of view, it has big ambitions, reflected in a handful of young, energetic ensembles and music by nearly all the hottest New York composers under 40.The American Contemporary Music Ensemble (better known by its acronym, Acme) opened the festival on Thursday evening with four inventive works in the prevailing eclectic style.
The curtain-raiser was Caleb Burhans’s “Down to Earth” (2003), a brief, quirky solo cello piece that takes a while to find its voice, then finds it with a vengeance. Its opening pages are a repetitive, slowly evolving figure cast in an unvaryingly steady rhythm. Just before that rhythm wears out its welcome, Mr. Burhans offers a distraction: he splits the cello line into bass and treble melodies, effectively transforming the single strand into a dialogue.
Then he abandons the squared-off rhythm entirely, turning the bass line into a chunky chord progression overlaid with a flighty, pointillistic top line and countered by a stamped beat slightly at odds with the music’s pulse.
Clarice Jensen, the cellist, played the music without inflection at first, but her playing came to life as the music’s complications multiplied. Ms. Jensen had a busy evening: she was the only performer heard in all four pieces, and the remaining three occasionally put the cello into the spotlight as well.
In Ryan Streber’s trio “Dust Shelter” (2005), Ms. Jensen was joined by Nadia Sirota, the violist, and Kelli Kathman, the flutist. Mr. Streber seems fond of the angularity and chromaticism of the atonal school but tempers those qualities with a hefty measure of harmonic lushness and emotional warmth. He included some oddly compelling effects here as well. The flute, for example, sometimes darted around the viola and cello lines as you would expect it to, but more typically Mr. Streber gave the instrument music low in its range and softly played, so that it sounded almost like a third string line.
Nico Muhly’s “Stride” (2006) covers ample stylistic ground in a mere eight minutes: you hear a bouncing chordal figure that calls to mind Sibelius’s Second Symphony early in the piece, a Philip Glass-style undulating major second not far into it and patches of Neo-Classical elegance and Tchaikovsky-like lugubriousness in the home stretch. Mr. Muhly’s achievement is making this parade of styles into a coherent whole with his own recognizable thumbprint.
Ms. Jensen, Ms. Sirota and the violinists Miranda Cuckson and Benjamin Russell closed the concert with Jefferson Friedman’s String Quartet No. 3 (2005), a vital, imaginative 30-minute score, packed with unusual timbres, unabashedly rich melodies (played meltingly by Ms. Cuckson and Ms. Sirota) and carefully worked-out themes.
Mr. Friedman’s quartets are finding plenty of performances; they already deserve to be heard as classics of this decade.
The TriBeCa New Music Festival continues through Sunday at the Flea Theater, 41 White Street, TriBeCa; (212) 226-2407, theflea.org
June 4, 2009
“The central notion behind the Tribeca New Music Festival,” “is that modern classical music is for everyone, not just an anointed elite. The reigning aesthetic, dubbed “the emerging avant pop” by executive and artistic director Preston Stahly, welcomes a wide variety of composers, united by creative engagement with popular culture.”
--Steve Smith, TimeOut New York
He Sings The Body Eclectic
New York
Flea Theatre, 41 White Street
September 14, 2008 -
New York Art Ensemble presents The Economic Engine
music by Neil Rolnick:
A Robert Johnson Sampler (1987, rev. 2005) – Neighborhood Ears (2002) – Shadow Quartet (2003) – The Economic Engine (2008)
Music From China: Wang Guowei (erhu), Helen Yee (yanguin), Ann Yao (guzheng), Sun Li (pipa) – Todd Reynolds String Quartet: Todd Reynolds, Benjamin Russell (violins), Nadia Sirota (viola), Ha-yang Kim (cello) – Neil Rolnick (laptop and computer), Victor Schultz (violin)
Cindy Ng Sio leng (video), Adam Kendall (video processing and performance), Scott Smallwood (audio production), Todd Reynolds (Musical Director)
The music of Neil Rolnick is almost suspiciously diverse. Those aware only of his reputation might question not only his fecundity but his eclecticism. The composer is a pioneer in computer music, and his American inspirations range from classic blues to jazz to street-sounds, minimalist harmonies, chamber music and the usual concerto forms. But where other composers have specialized in a particular “exotic” music (Lou Harrison for Chinese, Colin McPhee for Balinese, Bruce Gaston for Thai music), Neil Rolnick (no relation to this writer) has worked from modalic Balkan music, and Indonesian gamelan to the Chinese music in the final work on this four-part concert at Flea Theatre in the West Village.
That aforesaid suspicion is understood for those wishing their composer to be in a “school” or a box. Theoretically, Rolnick’s music could wander all over the globe. In practice, he has a consistency which is as unique as any serious composer today. Briefly put, Rolnick’s music has a pulse, a throbbing dancing energy which never stops. This pulse can be hidden, partitioned into arpeggionic particles or a quantum wave. It can swing from one instrument to another, but it is always present.Perhaps the never-stopping rhythm is like a Balinese gamelan, but Rolnick’s music doesn’t simply exist for the form: it dances.
A standing ovation for Neil Rolnick's Economic Engine
Note that this is not a stressful series of beats. The basic tonality (and sudden modulations) givesit a lightness, no matter how serious the subject. But one always feels that each measure is urgent, that the notes, whether from a single computer sampling or the complex nonet of the final work, is inevitable, that a mere transition would be a waste of the listener’s time.
This started simply with an early work based on the unique blues singer Robert Johnson, played on computer keyboard. It begins with a few introductory blues passages, but gradually increases in “effects” the usual sampling reverbs, lines repeating each other, a few Johnson vocals which are duplicated like a funky church choir. But never is the energy missing.
(Well, I say “never”, but a minute of wretched church-organ music in the middle seems somewhat out of place. Rolnick has his reasons, but I couldn’t fathom them.)
The following work, Neighborhood Ears, was based upon the sounds of Rolnick’s Washington Heights streets, with the blurred, patchy yet somehow affecting video of the G.W. Bridge. Energy was of course implicit here, but Rolnick had the ideal partner in the sounds of a pile driver, which not only served as percussion, but was transformed into an engaging tune toward the end.
(It brought me back to a childhood visit of our school class to John Cage’s Greenwich Village sound-proof basement apartment with a window on the sidewalk. “And what kind of music do you like?” he asked our class. We answered jazz or Richard Strauss or Mozart, and he said, “Well, this is what I like.”
(Cage then opened the sidewalk window an inch, and we could suddenly hear cars, walking, screeches, a dog barking. After three seconds, he closed the window and we were sound-proofed again!)
Rolnicks’s Shadow Quartet is an homage to his Texas father, and the electronic string quartet with computer played—or danced—through a series of songs and rhythms, where even the adagio of the second movement had an almost visceral movement.
The Flea Theatre audience wanted to know, though, what Rolnick would do with the Chinese music of The Economic Engine, which he wrote during his fourth visit to China, at the Shanghai Conservatory. Here, not only the string quartet, but a Chinese quartet of plucked, bowed, fretted instruments, and the video of Cindy Ng Sio leng would play four movements. Would we have a Tan Dun-style alteration of styles? A movie score of kitschy synthesis?
Rolnick never took the easy path out. The Chinese music was played with the same virtuosity as the string quartet, but the sounds---more metallic, more resonant, even jumpier—offered that diversity in which Rolnick excels.
The movements—“Traffic”, “Farm To Factory” (beginning with pure Chinese folk melodies), and “Opaque Air” each had their own vibrancy. But “From Hutong To High-Rise” (hutong is a traditional Beijing courtyard-house) was special. It started as a barn dance, and quickly turned into a Chinese version of Aaron Copland’s Rodeo. Not literally, but if Copland needed to compose for these instruments, he would have arrived with the same syncopated folkish energetic finale.
Some months ago, I read Rolnick’s essay on visiting China, and specifically recall a paragraph where he mentions that the Chinese students and practitioners seemed to master almost everything—except composing music for the beauty of the music itself. Those of us who lived any time near China had the same feeling. But Rolnick, in his years of expertise, humor and appreciation, has actually turned the synthesis of Chinese and European instruments into a thing of wonderment and, above all, joy.
Harry Rolnick
Wall Street Journal
Classical Musicians Learn to Improvise
By Corinna Da Fonseca-Wollheim
The Sirius String Quartet at the Tribeca New Music Festival
Bach employed it at the request of kings, Beethoven used it as a weapon in duels, and women swooned when Liszt got carried away. But at some point in the early 20th century, improvisation disappeared from classical-music performance. Now a new generation of composers and performers is rediscovering it as a central part of the creative process -- and, quite possibly, as a remedy for the shrinking of classical-music audiences.
For Preston Stahly, a composer and 1982 winner of the Charles Ives Prize, it's one of the most important issues in music today. He uses the term "avant-pop" to describe his own music and that of a heterogeneous group of other composers who grew up playing rock and jazz while studying counterpoint and 12-tone music in college. The wall separating the two worlds turned many composers away from academia and into an alternative music scene that is driven by composer-performers and chamber-music ensembles capable of playing and improvising in a number of styles.
At the Tribeca New Music Festival in downtown New York earlier this month, curated by Mr. Stahly, a musical anthropologist might have studied some of the vital signs of this new scene: a jungle of cables connecting instruments to slim notebook computers, string quartets whose members perform standing up (and, at times, walking about), appreciative whoops from the wine-sipping audience in response to an improvised solo. And an audience that was, on average, younger than the performers.
One of the highlights of the festival, and an example of the melding of improvisation and progressive music, was the concert by the Sirius string quartet of compositions by two of its members, violinist Gregor Huebner and cellist Mike Block. The String Quartet No. 3 by Mr. Huebner, a German jazz violinist who traces his roots to Central European gypsy fiddlers, was inspired by New York, with each movement representing a different place in the city: Times Square was noisy and brash, Red Hook revealed its gypsy contingent, 125th Street pulsed with incandescent jazz solos.
The effect of these improvised passages felt far from random: Bound into a tightly constructed -- and unmistakably modern -- musical architecture, each breakout solo seemed as inevitable as it was spontaneous. Interestingly, a look at Mr. Huebner's score reveals few notes and many verbal cues to the performers. The final movement, in fact, ends with the single word "CHAOS" written across the last measure.
Not every classically trained musician would know how to respond to such instructions. Dutch composer Jacob ter Veldhuis -- whose "Take a Wild Guess" for string quartet and electronically distorted taped speech made many a hip-hop artist look sedate when it received its world premiere at the festival -- recalls his own frustration when he began using improvised elements in the 1970s: "I found out that when you tell a classical musician to improvise you get strange results. . . . One guy played the Dutch national anthem!"
A consequence has been the growing number of composer-performers. In a way, this, too, is a return to the origins of concert music, when composers like Bach, Mozart and Chopin wrote, played and improvised their own music. The separate profession of the performer is a result of the 19th-century emergence of a middle class that fostered a greater demand for live music while at the same time canonizing the masters of the past. Eventually, performers stopped writing -- let alone improvising -- their own cadenzas in concertos, while some composers began to write music for instruments of which they had little practical understanding. Improvisation, meanwhile, became intellectually suspect.
Today, it is increasingly back at the beginning of the creative process for composers, many of whom use computer software to record, notate and then edit a piece. When Michael Lowenstern, a bass clarinetist and composer from Brooklyn, received a commission from Meet the Composer to write a violin concerto for Todd Reynolds, he began by asking the violinist to improvise.
"I told him, improvise something that sounds country. And I would love it if you could do it in D. And I'd like it even better if you could do it in 90 beats per minute," the composer said. Mr. Reynolds recorded the result and Mr. Lowenstern worked with it.
As more composers expect instrumentalists to be able to improvise, music colleges are adjusting their curriculums. The National Association of Schools of Music, an umbrella organization that sets standards in music education, added improvisation to its list of required subjects for the bachelor's degree in the early 1990s. At the Manhattan School of Music, improvisation is part of a new graduate program in contemporary music, and is open on an elective basis to all classical-music students.
Justin diCioccio, the school's chairman of jazz studies, says that "improvisation calls on you to be not only a performer, but a composer, editor and arranger, too." As such, it is not just important in training instrumentalists for the demands of new music, but for developing listening skills essential in any kind of ensemble work.
At Mannes College and the Curtis Institute, improvisation for classical musicians is taught by Israeli pianist and composer Noam Sivan, who incorporates improvisations into his concerts, for instance following a performance of Bach's "Goldberg Variations" with his own extemporization on the theme. "You learn music by always playing what is given to you," he says. "But how do you learn to be an artist if you don't practice that aspect of making up your own music?"
More pragmatically, colleges also have to prepare musicians for the changing realities of the business. Where traditionally the goal of most students was to land a job in an orchestra, the shrinking number of such positions calls for a new flexibility. Training in different genres, and an ability to play -- and improvise -- nonclassical music makes an instrumentalist more employable. Nadia Sirota, a violist on the faculty at the Manhattan School of Music who sometimes performs with rock bands and songwriters, puts it this way: "The kiss of death for your career is when you turn up and say: 'Oh, I don't do that.'"
That Ms. Sirota, as a violist, is at all active in popular music highlights the other side of the coin. As classical music takes on some elements of pop, composers of indie rock are dipping into the classical-music tool box, using such traditionally uncool instruments as oboe and French horn to enhance their sound. "It's a development that bodes well for the song genre," says Ms. Sirota. "And as for us classical musicians, let's be honest: We all secretly want to be rock stars."
Ms. da Fonseca-Wollheim is a writer living in New York.
September 25, 2007
New York Times
MUSIC REVIEW
Cabaret Conversation in Three-Part Harmony
The New York Art Ensemble presents
The Complete Cabaret Songs of Bolcom & Weinstein
The longstanding duo of William Bolcom and Joan Morris seemed very much like a trio at the Flea Theater on Sunday. Ms. Morris sang; Mr. Bolcom had written all the music and was playing the piano. But the afternoon’s collection of 29 cabaret songs was just as much about Arnold Weinstein’s words as what Mr. Bolcom and Ms. Morris did with them.
So delicate was this three-sided demonstration of balance and equilibrium that it was hard to tell who led whom. Was it Ms. Morris? Her mezzo-soprano is not very strong these days, but helped by a small performing space (about 100 seats on risers), she reminded listeners that diction and comic timing are not derived from muscle.
Was it Mr. Bolcom pulling his colleagues along? He is a marvelous pianist and a flesh-and-blood encyclopedia of musical styles. Look up any entry from “barroom” to “Bayreuth,” and Mr. Bolcom could give you brief meditations in the manner of Messiaen, playful updates of old-style pop-music harmonies and inventive disruptions of steady, on-the-beat timekeeping.
Musically speaking, Mr. Weinstein was the silent partner here, but he got my vote for leader of the pack. As social scientist, he captures Manhattan imagined by wistful provincial eyes, and as storyteller makes us both wince and smile at sexual adventures turned violent.
In “Song of Black Max,” the balladeering poet makes the mysterious laugh-out-loud funny. Elsewhere the daring metaphors work, and as a connoisseur of lopsided phrases, Mr. Weinstein repeatedly throws us off balance but then lands us on our feet.
Mr. Bolcom’s deft music became equivalent in sound to the texts presented with it. Ms. Morris could not have had material more sensitive to her talents.May 11, 2006
New York Times
MUSIC FESTIVAL REVIEW
'Emerging Avant-Pop': From Charles Ives to Frank Zappa
By ALLAN KOZINN
This year's incarnation of the Tribeca New Music Festival, at the Flea Theater, is devoted to what the program book calls "The Emerging Avant-Pop," or music that draws its energy from both popular music and classical forms.
That description is a bigger catchall than it might at first seem: at the Sunday evening performance by the violinist Mary Rowell and the pianist Geoffrey Burleson it included Charles Ives's "Three-Page Sonata" (1905) and Vincent Persichetti's Sonata No. 12 (1982): arguably avant, in their day, and pop, after a fashion, but hardly emerging.
Still, both works are couched in complex rhythms, with attractively simple melodies sometimes swimming through them. And Mr. Burleson played them with the energy and passion of a jazz player at the densest moment of a solo. He brought a similar power, as well as an improvisatory imagination and a few minor sound effects (knocking on the piano, giving the strings a couple of strums) to Frank Zappa's "Bebop Tango."
Ms. Rowell's solo moments included a sweetly angular "Elegy" (2005) by Carol Alban and "Try to Believe," a short but wide-ranging score for violin and computer by Randall Woolf. Ms. Alban's work, originally for flute, is a memorial to the victims of Hurricane Katrina and was expanded for Ms. Rowell. The violin version has passages in double stops that, at least as Ms. Rowell played them, evoke Cajun fiddling.
Mr. Woolf's work, a movement from a set called "Bodegas," puts the violin against an electronic drumbeat and samples originally played, hip-hop style, on turntables and included in the computer track. There are few boundaries here: Minimalism morphs into a dense, electric blues solo and then into a single line that has the character of a Bach prelude.
The works that Ms. Rowell and Mr. Burleson played together were Michael Sahl's Grand Sonata and Preston Stahly's Three Pieces for Violin and Piano. They have elements in common. Both allude to a competing pair of Romantic traditions: long-lined, lyrical melodies, particularly for the violin, and overt virtuosity for both instruments. Both also reach into pop music's rhythmic arsenal, with Mr. Sahl pulling out tight syncopations for his sonata's closing Rondo, and Mr. Stahly using pointed jazz rhythms in his opening movement, and something closer to the insistent energy of rock in the last two.
The Tribeca New Music Festival continues with a piano recital by Kathleen Supové, on May 14, and a performance by the Electric Kompany, on May 21, at the Flea Theater, 41 White Street, Lower Manhattan, (212) 234-4325.
April 10, 2006
Concert Review excerpt from
Night After Night
Flaming Youth
By Steve Smith, assoc. editor, TimeOut NY
Afterward, I headed downtown for the first concert of the fifth Tribeca New Music Festival, mounted by composer Preston Stahly's New York Art Ensemble in the cozy Flea Theater. (Performing on the set of a current Off Off Broadway production, the musicians seemed to be playing in someone's living room.) This evening's installment, titled "Generation-Y," was devoted to music by emerging composers in their 20s and 30s. The first work on the program, Michael Brown's Echoes of Byzantium, was inspired by Yeats's poem Sailing to Byzantium. A still, hushed opening based on Byzantine chant opened into a lush, modal reverie, confidently handled by violinist Wayne Lee and pianist Yalin Chi. Pieces of Things, by Matthew Briggs, presented an animated conversation for percussionists Gregory Landes and Dave Roth, who seemed to complete one another's sentences as they paired on marimbas, triangles, crotales, woodblocks and bongos. Briggs, a percussionist, writes boldly for his instrumentarium; some passages were clearly almost impossible to execute. Landes and Roth did an altogether laudable job of managing the composer's challenges.
Pianist-composer Sebastian Chang played six of his twelve Etudes for Piano, each of which was based not on a standard key signature, but rather on a trichord built on a root note and two additional pitches -- for example, the opening piece, "Soliloquy (025)," was based on a chord built from a root note, the note two pitches higher, and the note five pitches higher than that. Performing with no score and lights lowered, it was easy to imagine that Chang was freely improvising his six intricate miniatures, which summoned in equal measure impressions of Debussy, Prokofiev, Nancarrow and Keith Jarrett. Listening to his profusion of stream-of-consciousness melodies and counterpoint, you couldn't help but smile along with the performer as he visibly enjoyed his own prowess at tricky fingerings and cross-handed passages. Someone should pass along Chang's e-mail address to Lang Lang, quick.
Robert Farren's Climix "Redux" was something of a live remix of an earlier work for solo cello, performed here by violist Daniel Stewart as the composer tweaked his sound with an impressive array of vintage rock-guitar effect pedals and other implements. The manner in which these two players interacted onstage -- particularly the way Farren lurched and swooned as he punched buttons and turned knobs on a foot pedal -- was something you'd sooner expect to see during a set of improvised noise at Brooklyn's No Fun Fest; still, it was easy to discern the handsome contours of the composer's original conception, and the electronics added rich resonances.
The concert ended with the evening's most substantial piece, Judd Greenstein's Sonata for Cello and Piano. Performed by cellist Jody Redhage and pianist David Hanlon, the work was cast in three movements -- reportedly at the insistence of Greenstein's teacher at Yale, Martin Bresnick. The repeated melodic cells of the opening movement, subtitled "(sometimes I imagine)," hung in stasis, suggesting a sort of spiritual inertia. In the second movement, "(she is still)," surging triplets and sextuplets attempted to provoke some kind of development. Surprisingly, the finale resolved into a soulful gospel melody -- a boldly direct resolution for so mysterious a piece. Redhage demonstrated exceptional technical command in managing Greenstein's ghostly melodies, and Hanlon lent the piece a handsome flow. (You can hear two different performances of the piece by downloading MP3s from Greenstein's website, here.)
This review is posted at the following sites:
http://nightafternight.blogs.com/night_after_night/2006/04/flaming_youth.html
and: http://netnewmusic.net/reblog/
e-mail: nyae@aol.com