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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
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 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