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Posts by Nick Norton

Meet The Furies ahead of their show at Art Share

On Thursday, December 20, contemporary violin duo The Furies, along with their friends Joanna Lynn-Jacobs, Rhea Fowler, Theodosia Roussos, Grecia Serrano-Navarro, and Jordan Curcurturo, present A Cure For Hysteria at Art Share. A Cure for Hysteria is a performance piece that explores the history and relevance of the gendered word ‘hysteria’—its social connotations and consequences—through the lens of contemporary music. This fits right in with The Furies’ mission to bring intersectional feminism into the concert hall through immersive performance experiences that challenge their audience and community, encourage audience members to demand more diverse programming from their musical institutions, and to learn more about the histories of women in a white male dominated canon. We caught up with violinists Maiani da Silva and Kate Outterbridge to talk about their new project.

How did you two meet, and what was the impetus for starting The Furies?

Kate: It was totally love at first sight; I was visiting Bang on a Can Summer Festival, when Mai was a fellow/ the summer before I moved to LA, and we chatted briefly about living in Los Angeles, and when I got out here, we just started hanging out all the time! It was so great to be in a new city, know nothing about what I was doing, go through some shit, and have a friend that was there for me in so many ways. I think that made it really easy for us to work together as musicians; we are just on the same page about a lot of things, so when we decided to play together, it just came really naturally.

When The Furies was starting out, we both just had a common interest in exploring music explicitly by composers that identify as women and non-binary, but since then, we have really transformed our vision to be something that really is about experiences and issues.

You are of course extremely skilled violinists. What do you mean by immersive performance experiences, though?

Maiani: Several collaborations, both in our past and present-day lives, have made us more curious and open to exploring new ways of performing. For instance, Kate and I both studied dance very seriously in our teens and into our early 20s, so our relationship to performing goes beyond the traditional classical music form. Another example is that both Kate and I are Blackbird Creative Lab alumnae (‘17, and ‘18, respectively), and as we all know, Eighth Blackbird is super innovative and inspiring when it comes to incorporating other aspects of performance into their concerts. At the Lab, we were lucky to also work with choreographers Mark DeChiazza and Ros Warby. Another inspiration for diving into the experimental performance realm is performance artist Taylor Mac. I’ve been extremely fortunate to work with Taylor for almost three years as a violinist in the band, and Kate has also performed with Taylor and the band here in L.A.  But the opportunity to create something personal came to fruition thanks to the generous and fantastic Elizabeth Baker, who gifted us “A Cure For Hysteria” last spring! We are hoping this will be the beginning of many performative-type collaborations with other composers and fellow performers.

I normally try to avoid any mention of gender in interviews because work should speak for itself and there’s usually no reason to point it out (aside from calling out bias). In your case, however, you explicitly state that bringing intersectional feminism to the concert hall is key to the ensemble’s mission. Could you discuss, in broad terms, how you do that?

Kate: Yeah, I think that is an important question. To us, The Furies is really about the process of creating performances that express issues and experiences that are important to us. Our aim in calling ourselves intersectional feminists is to call attention to the fact that classical and contemporary classical music isn’t always inclusive, and we want to hold ourselves accountable and ask questions: how are we perpetuating problems within our community, how can we listen better, how can we avoid tokenism and be super transparent about what we want to achieve?

Maiani: We challenge ourselves and each other to ask lots of questions, and listen with care in approaching all things #life. We do this as people and as friends, so naturally this seeps into our Furies work. It’s our foundation, really. It’s a lot of homework, and it’s very rewarding.

And how about for this concert? Am I right in remembering that “a cure for hysteria,” referring to masturbation, was the Victorian equivalent of “you should smile more”? How do the pieces you’ve programmed relate?

Maiani: That’s an interesting perspective, I hadn’t made that connection. Yes, with both we’re reminded to exist in a fashion that makes others at ease, that puts others’ needs above our own. If we show how we really feel, we’re considered unwell and are thus in need of intervention, whether by a modern-day strange man on the street, or a Victorian (male) “doctor” holding a vibrator to our clits.

Kate: When we decided to use Elizabeth’s piece, A Cure for Hysteria, as the centerpiece for this show, it was because the complexity of the term hysteria really reflects something that many marginalized people have to put up with: that feeling of never fully feeling like you can be yourself, that feeling of needing to appear to act a certain way, to make sure everyone around you is always at ease at the expense of your own comfort, and also how we are at a point where more and more people are saying “enough.” Being explicit about being intersectional feminist performers is empowering to us, it feels good to stand up and say LISTEN TO US, THIS IS OUR EXPERIENCE, but also keeps us honest about what it means to listen to others’ experiences in the process.

Maiani: Elizabeth’s work is centered around what it meant to be a hysterical woman in Victorian England. What we strive to convey with the other pieces in the program is the many layers and nuance of the term “hysteria.” In classic Mai-and-Kate style, we dug deeper to know how our friends and family felt about the term “hysteria.” By sampling the recorded one-on-one interviews, ThunderCunt created a track that will be premiered at our concert!

Details on the show are at facebook.com/events/2240445589321248

WasteLAnd talks with A(sh)perture ahead of this Friday’s show

On Friday, November 16th, wasteLAnd will present a guest-curated concert at ArtShare combining the incredible work of Aperture Duo and Ashley Walters.  Aperture and Ashley have each commissioned new pieces for this concert, from Erin Rogers and Trevor Bača, and have created a wonderful evening of solos, duos, and trios.

After our last WasteLAnd interview with Katie Young, I asked the WasteLAnd directors if they’d like to make a regular thing of interviewing their guest performers and composers. I think it’s illuminating to hear musicians interviewed by the people they’re working with; they have a far more detailed understanding of their projects than any outside journalist will. This is an ongoing project and one I hope to include other series and organizations in, so some details and formatting may change…but enough of me! The concert on the 16th at ArtShare is free and starts at 8, with free parking in the lot across Hewitt Street from the entrance.

Below are a few questions from wasteLAnd to Aperture and Ashley as well as a few questions to from the performers to composers Erin Rogers and Trevor Bača.

Questions from wasteLAnd to A(sh)perture

wasteLAnd: All of us at wasteLAnd are big fans of the work you do in your separate projects as Aperture Duo and Ashley as a soloist. You’ve obviously played together a lot in wild Up and in other mixed chamber settings. What has it been like to work as a trio on a project where the curation is left to you? Flow of the evening, rep decisions, the rehearsal process, etc?

Ashley: I have long admired Aperture’s performances and their repertoire choices; it was a pleasure to be involved in this process with them!  As three performers who value working with composers — performing on a series that promotes new works and also values collaboration — we thought it was appropriate to commission new pieces for this concert. Both Aperture and myself chose composers (Erin Rogers and Trevor Bača) with whom we already had a personal connection. Aperture will perform two works as a duo and I, two solos; these sets showcase each entity’s aesthetic. Choosing trio repertoire was quite easy! We all had a mutual love for the episodic writing of Apergis’ trio and the lush writing of Gubaidulina. Because we have performed together in the past I think we had a vision of what pieces would suit this ensemble. Thank you wasteLAnd for bringing us together!

wasteLAnd: Aperture as a duo, and Ashley in solo performances both have strongly formed identities. Everything feels decided and cared for to me. I’ve never seen Aperture or Ashley perform something that didn’t feel to me like you had already made it your own. How was the process of bringing your approaches together for the Gubaidulina and Aperghis trios that you’ve included on this concert?

Aperture: We’ve had so much fun working on these trios with Ashley! We all share an attention to detail, an eye for large shapes and structures, and a curiosity for sound. These traits have led to very productive and satisfying rehearsals. We have been able to really dig into this repertoire together, as Ashley is so well versed in the languages of the composers that she performs. As a duo, we each fill many musical roles in our repertoire. But with a third player, our roles are much more “tried and true” with high, medium, and low registers. Exploring this has been very enjoyable for us and we can collectively play so much louder, which is a treat!

wasteLAnd:Would you share a bit about your relationship with Erin Rogers and Trevor Bača and their world premieres written for this show?

Aperture: We met Erin Rogers in 2016 while sharing a bill with her saxophone/percussion duo Popebama at the Home Audio concert series in Brooklyn. We were blown away by their theatricality, virtuosic musicality, and communication as performers. We were smitten, and we’ve been following Erin’s work as a performer and composer ever since. She has since worked with Nicholas Deyoe and Ashley Walters, and this WasteLAnd show felt like the perfect opportunity to premiere her new work for us.

Ashley: In March of 2017 the Formalist Quartet presented the west coast premiere of Trevor’s work Akasha on the Monday Evening Concerts series. This challenging, 30 minute quartet has a large arc full of complex and beautiful sounds that shift subtly from one to the other. I was particularly taken with Trevor’s writing for the low range of the cello, which is highlighted in his new solo cello piece, Nähte. My experience working with Trevor was moving and memorable and I have since hoped that we would have the opportunity to work together again. I am honored that he has written Nähte for me.

The process of learning Nähte has been a true joy. It requires experimenting with sounds and crafting gestures, and then weaving one to the next. While the outward virtuosity of the Xenakis’ solo cello piece, Kottos, is in the left hand and its extroverted sounds, the virtuosity in Trevor’s piece is in the right hand and in the subtlety of sounds transitioning from one to another.

Ashley Walters – Deyoe – another anxiety

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ygmUiPqmNHs

Questions from A(sh)perture to Erin and Trevor

Aperture: Can you tell us a little about this piece?  What is it like to write for a duo as a member of a duo yourself?

Erin Rogers: Travelogue (2018) was written while touring Europe on a series of planes, trains, and buses. The title is a tribute to Joni Mitchell’s album of the same name, featuring an extensive collection of her songs that have been orchestrated. Theatricality is built into the piece through staging, text, and actions, both players doubling as train commuters and practicing musicians, while encountering a variety of notational geography.

Composing for duos is fulfilling. As a member of a duo myself, there is an accountability that comes from being 50% of a team and a fully committed band-member. The level of difficulty can increase, especially technically and rhythmically. Knowing that the musicians will rehearse with a familiarity of process and of each other, typically results in a dialogue and synchronicity not common in larger ensembles.

Ashley: What can you tell us about the process of writing, or the inspiration for, this piece?

Trevor: Collaborating with Ashley on the new cello solo — Nähte, the title is one of the German words for “stitches” — for the concert in November grew out of our work together last year when Ashley’s quartet — the Formalist Quartet — did the LA premiere of Akasha, my first string quartet, at the Monday Evening Concerts. The string quartet retunes the cello’s lowest string from C down to A, and it was during our rehearsals together then that I came to understand just how intensely Ashley’s cello — and her technique — glow, especially in the lower compass of the instrument’s range. I knew even then what materials I wanted to write the next time we worked together, and I knew too the sort of gestural (and even choreographic) language I wanted to invite Ashley into when it came time to work on a new piece. Fast forward to this year and Nähte is the result. The materials in the piece derive from some very precise workings-out of how the speed of the cello’s bow can be made to make very fast gestures even faster, and also from suffusing that type of thinking about the physics of the instrument with imaginings of Ashley’s body moving in, near, over and around the instrument: Ashley moves like a dancer when she plays, and so I wove a certain type of back-and-forth negotiation between left hand, right hand, arms, elbows and torso into the materials of the piece. When you listen to the music and watch Ashley at the same time, you’ll hear (and see) these wisps of very delicate sound flying from the lowest part of the instrument’s range, something like watching sparks or aerial contrails from a blue flame. The ‘tailoring’ of the music in this way was an important part of our working together, with the reward coming in the ways Ashley effects the music’s materials with both precision and a deep commitment to the sensuousness of the way the music moves.

wasteLAnd – A(SH)PERTURE at ArtShare-LA on November 16th is free, thanks to wasteLAnd successfully meeting the first tier of their fundraising goal. If they reach the next goal, the entire season will be free to all.

Oneohtrix Point Never’s MYRIAD, performed live, is a schizophonic joy

Oneohotrix Point Never's MYRIAD at Walt Disney Concert Hall on October 22, 2018. Photo credit: Angeline Woo

Oneohotrix Point Never’s MYRIAD at Walt Disney Concert Hall on October 22, 2018. Photo credit: Angeline Woo

Every now and then someone comes along and smacks you in the head with something you already knew. Sometimes this hurts, like when a teacher calls you out on a skill you know is weak, or when congress validates your fears about the state of the union by confirming a sexual predator to the supreme court (again). Thankfully, however, this isn’t always a negative experience. Once in a blue moon an artist finds a way to show you your own world in a new light. Oneohotrix Point Never’s MYRIAD, performed at Disney Hall on Monday, did just that.

I’ve enjoyed Oneohotrix Point Never’s work since first hearing the artist on their (his?) album Replica back in 2011, but the concert experience they’ve crafted with MYRIAD is a tongue-in-cheek, hyper self-aware hour of complete joy if you get it—and still genuinely interesting music if you don’t—that relies on its ability to illuminate our usually unconscious schizophonic experience of music. Let me unpack that a bit for you.

Schizophonia refers to the separation of sound from source that became possible with early recording technology. The mere concept of “recording-to-play-back-later” is a very basic example. When you record a cellist playing Bach, and then listen to the recording the next day, the cellist (the source) is no longer there, only the electronically reproduced sound. This is, of course, so basic to the way we listen to music in our daily lives as to be invisible and hardly worth commenting on. We walk around all day listening to music in headphones or through our car stereos. We only really notice it when something goes wrong, for instance in an amplified live concert setup where the left and right sides get switched and a performer on the right side of the stage has their instrumental sound coming from the left. It does rely on visual information as well; you can see this at home by plugging in your TV speakers backwards and trying to watch a sitcom while sitting directly centered in front of your screen. It kind of breaks your brain.

When an artist uses schizophonia as a tool rather than a given, however, and goes in with the assumption that most of their audience has quite a bit of musical knowledge (much like a painter assumes that most viewers aren’t colorblind…and let’s be honest, Oneohotrix Point Never isn’t really for Top 40 listeners), the results can be profound. MYRIAD began, as many electronics-heavy shows do, with the lights out, complex drones, and psychedelic video projections that reminded me of the wormhole sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey. That transitioned pretty smoothly to the four piece band onstage, two members surrounded by synths, with the other two at a grand piano and a drum set. Music descended from 80s pop and modern day autotuned R&B (Frank Ocean, anyone?) gradually took over, though the effect was one of disorientation with oddly misaligned phrase lengths from the pop sounds blending in and out of the ongoing drones.

At this point I was under the impression that we’d be getting a through-composed set without any breaks. Then the band stopped and said thanks to the audience like so many arena bands do (both my date and I were caught off guard by this) before launching into what could have been a twisted Toto cover with DX7 brass sounds and a synth flute from a keyboard that sounded like it would fit in mid-90s Celine Dion track, accompanied by a drum beat of sliced up extended technique string samples accompanied by Han Bennink-esque stick rolls on shells in the drums and a pre-recorded upright bass line.

As the lights moved around the stage (musicians were generally lit in a way that reminded me of Depeche Mode or Kraftwerk),  however, I was struck by both the lack of an upright bass onstage and the fact that the drummer didn’t seem to be playing any of those stick rolls, instead keeping to trigger pads for basic synth drums. Why bring a grand piano and a drum set and then pre-record bass and drums in a production that obviously cost a lot of money? This is where the schizophonic confusion really started, though I was holding out hope that it wouldn’t be laziness or lack-of-understanding underlying it, though, and was thankfully proven right a few songs later when the same stick rolls returned, this time being played live by the drummer.

This is the moment when it started to hit me that Oneohotrix Point Never was, rather than playing music, playing with the entire concept of live performance. WHOA, I thought. They just moved from recorded to live in a way that SOUNDS identical. Fascinating. It’s almost like they’re commenting on how live performance in our current era of technology is really just for show. Wonder if that will continue. And oh boy, did it continue, and morphing into a near-satire of big budget pop concerts. A troupe of dancers appeared in the aisles during one track (song? piece?) dressed a bit like USC cheerleaders if USC cheerleaders wore cowboy hats decorated in caution tape and surgical masks, but proceeded to repeat a few pretty simple dance steps as they marched around the hall for what couldn’t have been more than three minutes, never to return. For the last two pieces of the evening a cellist joined the band onstage, but played first only a few extended techniques that were indistinguishable from the previously mentioned extended technique string track now backing her again, and then a pretty well worthless string of whole notes for the final number.

Let me clarify that: the notes and the performance of said notes was perfectly good, but in the context of a sample-filled electronic concert, having her appear live was more like the band saying “see? this doesn’t really add anything, but it’s pretty to look at,” in a takedown of the low-hanging fruit “live with orchestra” tokenism that so many bands use to build cultural capital for themselves. Is this the other side of the coin for classical pieces that add a four-on-the-floor drum beat to try to prove their own relevance? I believe so. Had it been in a standalone piece, the appearance of the cellist may have been merely pointless and confusing (as it often is in electroacoustic concerts). In the context of a concert using sonic and visual confusion as a narrative, her mere appearance onstage hammered home the band’s point about live performance. It almost would have been more effective to have her sit there and do nothing.

This may all be speculation on my part, of course, and the problems of the intentional fallacy in this reading of the show’s content are myriad (ha). During that cellist’s appearance at the end, however, came a projected rotating skull eating a VHS tape. Like Nathan Fielder’s glance at the camera in the season finale of Nathan For You when a mark pointed out that “this is all for a TV show,” that skull eating a VHS tape screamed “the old way of doing concerts is dead. You just watched us kill it. And wasn’t it fun?”

This summer I heard composer Martin Bresnick give a talk on the idea that modern composers will really, really have to reckon with the loudspeaker in their work. It’s an idea I’ve been thinking about a lot, and I’m pleased to hear bands like Oneohotrix Point Never who are reckoning with it in their own creative ways. After seeing MYRIAD I dare say this band is on the forefront of a musical future we should all be excited about. If they are touring anywhere near you, get tickets immediately.

The Isaura String Quartet on Machines and Strings

On October 24, the Isaura String Quartet performs Machines and Strings at REDCAT. Billed as “an immersive concert experience,” the program features works by artists including Chrysanthe Tan, Stephanie Smith, Ajay Kapur, Sarah Belle Reid, April Gerloff, and Jules Gimbrone performed in collaboration with interactive lighting and projection by alumni artists from the 2018 CalArts Expo creative team. The evening also includes the world premiere of Ulrich Krieger’s completely revised quartet Up-Tight II and a new work by Amy Knoles featuring the KarmetiK Machine Orchestra, directed by Ajay Kapur, who also created the custom-built robotic musical instrument Lydia.

I caught the original version of Ulrich’s piece when Isaura played it back in February at Human Resources and was really taken with the piece and their approach to it. Here’s a video from that performance:

Needless to say, I’m excited to hear the revised version and hear and see everything that the quartet is promising us for the 24th, so asked if the members would be down for an interview. Violinists Madeline Falcone and Emily Call and cellist Betsy Rettig kindly answered my call. Here’s our conversation:

You just performed at CalArts and are now bringing Machines and Strings, Part II to REDCAT. The show has been billed as an “immersive concert experience.” I know you’ve got a deep interest in production. Could you talk a bit about what, beyond performing music, this program is all about?

Madeline: These concerts are about community, musical language, and elevating voices that we believe are important. Many artists are struggling with the current state of art and struggling to contextualize their art within the current social and political climate, and it is wonderful to find these ways in which we can support each other. We feel very proud of our team of amazing artists including performers, composers, lighting designers, video artists, and technological innovators. We have learned from each of these artists over the course of this production and the quartet has expanded our musical language through the process of working on each of these pieces.

We have developed an interest in production because we are used to self-producing, which is how most of these shows featuring experimental sounds/weird ideas/emerging artists tend to happen, but also because production relates directly to the music. The audience experiences sounds, lights, energy—all of those are essential to bringing the thing to life. For both of these concerts we have been working with Lauren Pratt as a producer and mentor, and she has been wonderfully supportive.

What attracts you to the work of the composers you’ve programmed?

Emily: When we started thinking about putting together a program featuring strings and music tech, the theme of order and disorder kept coming up: strings as disorder—going out of tune, breaking a bow hair, the natural human nature of playing an instrument where error is a factor—and machines as order, completing tasks, following functions, the precision with which a machine can act. At the same time, you can think of strings as orderly and machines as disorderly. Disorderly machines have actually come up quite often during our preparation for this concert! We kept this idea in mind when we were looking for composers and pieces to perform, and that idea has really shaped the program. We’re excited to showcase so many composers who are using technology and strings, sometimes together and sometimes not, in really innovative ways.

I know Isaura has a heavy focus on working with local composers, and that you’ve also taken quite a few gigs in the rock and popular music world, such as your residency at Emo Nite LA. How do those performance practices inform each other in your work? Do you approach them very differently as players?

Betsy: In many ways all of these different musical worlds need each other, and musically, we use the same tools for approaching every genre. As an ensemble we work together the same way to communicate time, expression, musicality, intonation, etc. Most of the pop and rock projects we have been part of have involved the artist specifically wanting players who were well-versed in a variety of playing styles and extended techniques.

Our crossover experience has been particularly helpful in our work with Ulrich Krieger, developing his quartet Up-Tight II. When he approached us about playing this piece, it was because of a prior collaboration with opera singer Timur called Love, Honor, Obey. Ulrich arranged an Elvis song for that project and really wanted us to go crazy with it. Up-Tight II is dedicated to Lou Reed and inspired by the Velvet Underground. We’ve been working a lot in rehearsals developing the physicality of the piece, which is so often present in rock music.

What are your favorite concerts you’ve attended in LA in the past year?

This is an almost impossible question to answer because there is so much exciting music happening in this city all of the time… but a few stand-outs include:

Emily: James Tenney’s Changes: Sixty-Four Studies for Six Harps presented by SASSAS at The Box last November and Dog Star 14’s concert of pieces by Eric Heep, Corey Fogel, and Erika Bell. (Side note: Eric Heep is actually one of the co-creators of Lydia, the robotic piano featured on our concert!).

Madeline: Matmos at The Broad’s Summer Happenings; Dolores: Our Lady of the 7 Sorrows with Ron Athey and Nacho Nava; and Quartetto Fantastico with visuals by Jesse Gilbert for the Mars Festival earlier this month.

Betsy: Michael Webster and the Breath Control Orchestra, Nice Day for the Races from a radio play by Samuel Beckett at the Box, and Southland Ensemble: Ruth Crawford / Ruth Crawford Seeger at Automata

Can you tell us more about Lydia?

Madeline: Lydia is a modified mechatronic instrument built on an upright piano created by CalArts students and faculty in 2013 under mentorship of artist and MacArthur fellow Trimpin. The instrument uses motors rather than hammers to create sound on the piano strings, and also includes other tools such as a saw that scrapes against the bottom of the instrument to introduce new piano sound worlds. We have enjoyed getting to know her as our chamber music partner over the last couple months.

What’s next for the quartet?

Emily: We will be ending 2018 with a few recording projects, and we have some exciting collaborative projects for 2019 in LA and New York, which we look forward to announcing soon!

Anything else you’d like to add?

Betsy: Thanks for chatting with us!

Tickets for Machines and Strings are available at redcat.org/event/machines-and-strings.

Track premiere: Alexander Elliott Miller’s “Zanja Madre” from To….Oblivion

Composer/guitarist Alexander Elliott Miller‘s debut solo album, To….Oblivion comes out everywhere on October 20. The record and historical photography project deals with lost spaces in Los Angeles, and to celebrate the release Alex is playing three sets at the Bendix Building that day as part of the LA Conservancy‘s architecture walking tours. A few standing room tickets are still available.

I first heard To….Oblivion in its nascent stages at a What’s Next? Ensemble show a few years ago, and then caught the full piece at Oh My Ears! in Phoenix back in January. My favorite track/movement was the “Zanja Madre,” which is the original aqueduct that brought water to El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles del Rio Porciuncula (L.A. is a useful abbreviation, isn’t it?). I asked Alex if we could premiere the track when the album was ready, and he said yes. So, feast your ears!

Alex also had time for some interview questions about the project. Here’s our conversation:

Okay, so talk to me about To….Oblivion

To….Oblivion is an album all about historic landmarks in Los Angeles.  It’s for solo electric guitar, which I play myself, with electronics and a video slideshow.  The electronics include both live processing of the guitar as well as recorded sounds which aim to capture an impression of the acoustic environment of each site.  The album will be released along with videos of the recording with the slideshow both projected behind me and intercut directly.

There are six historic sites: the Belmont Tunnel, Dunbar Hotel, Zanja Madre, Tower Records, Long Beach’s Pike Amusement Park and Anaheim’s Center Street.

When you were writing the pieces for the record, were there any direct or obvious connections between the places and your composing (for instance, tracing the curve of the LA river in a melody), or was each location more of a loose inspiration for your work?

There’s nothing as literal as tracing the curve of the river and interpreting it as a melody.  With each movement, I found myself wanting to make the slideshow and soundtrack first, finding the right order for the photographs to convey the story of each site, then matching up the sounds to those images where appropriate.  Usually the guitar part was the last thing to be written, almost like a film score, though I usually had pretty strong ideas of what I wanted beforehand.

Some of the movements suggested particular types of guitar playing or sound worlds.  Certainly the movement about the Dunbar Hotel, at the hub of LA’s mid-20th Century jazz scene gave me a chance to try my own take on jazz as a composer, and the Tower Records movement let me return some classic rock guitar playing that I grew up with.

The Belmont Tunnel, about an abandoned subway tunnel from the early 20th Century suggested certain sound effects: there’s an effect I create with an eBow and some pitch shifting that is a heavy, loud, roaring sound that reminds me a train, there’s a ton of reverb, almost like the echoes I imagine down in that abandoned tunnel.

Was there anything in particular that acted as a deciding factor in whether or not to use a location? Did any places not make the cut?

I was interested in locations that either seemed like symbols of larger issues in the city, or perhaps had interesting sonic or even musical implications.

The Belmont Tunnel, for me, is a symbol of public transportation’s role in shaping the city, and presents a great “what if:” what if LA’s original subway had been allowed to grow, in place of or in addition to expansion of the freeways, how would the city have been different?

The Zanja Madre movement was written at the heart of the drought, and deals with LA’s complicated relationship with water.  I also liked that the original Zanja Madre was a project that dated from 1781, constructed within weeks of the original establishment of the city.  It was right there at the beginning of Los Angeles, and dealt with our major problem: water.

Two movements venture further outside downtown LA, to Orange County and Long Beach, but these are also two of the sites to which I have a more personal connection.  “Anaheim’s Center Street” looks at urban blight and redevelopment, and has a scene were the heart of the old downtown is demolished with bulldozers.  I loved the idea of including bulldozers in the soundtrack, and felt that scene, perhaps more than anything else in the piece, captured the sadness of the title “To….Oblivion.”  I live on Anaheim’s Center Street and got to know my own neighborhood much better by doing this piece.  The Long Beach movement tells a similar story of urban decay, but I left out the violence of the bulldozers in this movement, and focused more on the happy memories of the old amusement park.  I’ve worked in Long Beach for six years, and I think this movement is probably the most hopeful in the set, being a sort of expression of my gratitude to the city.

Alexander Elliott Miller performing To....Oblivion!

Alexander Elliott Miller performing To….Oblivion!

Then there are two sites in which music itself is an important part of the historic site’s identity.  The Dunbar Hotel was at the heart of LA’s Central Avenue jazz scene.  This location also has a complicated history representing the status of race relations in LA, as the Dunbar was one of the few hotels were African American celebrities were welcomed.  One has mixed feelings about it: on one hand, it’s an exciting cultural focal point where numerous jazz heroes were present (Duke Ellington, Louie Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Ray Charles, countless others all stayed there), and yet, a regrettable place, existing primarily because of segregation laws.  Secondly, the Sunset Strip’s Tower Records obviously represents a kind of celebration of music in its day, but also may have become, since its closing, a kind symbol of all of the changes the music industry has experienced in the last two decades.

When I first started the project, I think there were some other historic sites that I considered very briefly, but the shape of the piece with the six now part of the final version emerged quickly.  Still, other locations that I may have considered at the beginning which didn’t make the cut included the Nestor Film Studio (the very first ever movie studio in LA), the Pan Pacific Auditorium (which burned to the ground and is now the site of Pan Pacific Park), and, of course, the Ambassador Hotel.  I discovered Gabriel Kahane’s album “The Ambassador,” after this (it’s an album I love and one which shares an “LA location” concept with my project), so honestly, I’m glad I didn’t include it.  I already had a hotel in the project anyway, in the Dunbar Hotel.

You once told me that when you visit places you like to enter via different modes of transportation to give yourself a different perspective or idea of “home base” for a city. For instance, coming into LA on the 10 from the desert is a very different experience than taking the train down from Nor Cal to start at Union Station or arriving by boat in San Pedro. Could you talk a bit about your perspective on LA now that you’re often coming up from Anaheim, or your take on the city as a person raised in the midwest and northeast?

Well, I was born in Boston and raised in Kansas City.  I still have family in both places, and I’m fortunate to have lived in other places as a student or for temporary jobs in my twenties, but most of my life as an adult has been here in the greater LA area.  I’ve never taken a boat into San Pedro or Marina del Ray, but obviously driven, flown and taken trains into LA many times; I think I see all the same problems that everyone else does, first the strangeness of its location coming out of the desert when you drive here from the east, and then once you’re here, the high rents, homelessness, gentrification, traffic and access to water.

On the positive side, LA has always seemed like a place that is what you make of it (or how much you’re able/willing to drive through it). Maybe what I mean, more specifically, is that LA is a place where I feel I’ve met many people who share my interests – like you if I may say so – a place where I feel I’ve been welcomed into a communities both with musicians in the city and the schools where I work.  I haven’t had the opportunity to live as an adult, work, pay rent, and be a working musician or teacher in Boston or Kansas City so couldn’t compare those experiences.

Composer and guitarist Alexander Elliott Miller

Composer and guitarist Alexander Elliott Miller

Lastly, part of the joy of writing this piece really had to do with exploring LA itself.  Much of the time when I’m composing, I’m isolated at home with a computer, piano or guitar.  This piece presented an opportunity to get out into the city, partly because I wanted to hang out at each site a little bit, but also because I needed to record so many sounds of the city for the soundtrack and wanted to do everything authentically.  So for the Belmont Tunnel, for example, I found a Saturday to take a handheld mic and record subway sounds while circling the system all day, exploring new neighborhoods all the while.  For the Dunbar Hotel, I took that mic to a jazz club and recorded ambient crowd noise during a set change between bands.  The water sounds in Zanja Madre are actually the LA River in Los Feliz, and the sounds of the Sunset Strip were actually recorded on Sunset near Tower Records’ site, with some of the sounds of CDs clicking against each other recorded at Amoeba Records.  For Anaheim’s Center Street, I went to a mall at 1:00am where an old Macy’s was being demolished and recorded bulldozers; the amusement park sounds for Long Beach were a mixture sounds of the Santa Monica Pier, Knott’s Berry Farm rollercoasters and the Griffith Park Merry Go Round.  The whole thing took years, but experiencing LA in so many places and different ways was one of the things that made the experience of writing this piece so much fun.

Who are you working with to present this project live?

On the day of the album release, Oct. 20th, I’ll be performing the work as part of an event co-presented by two organizations: Synchromy and the LA Conservancy.

The LA Conservancy organizes frequent walking tours of various neighborhoods in the city, exploring historic architecture.  This October, their Walking Tour will go through the Fashion District downtown, and include the Bendix Building.  My performance, which will be on the penthouse floor of the Bendix, will essentially be a stop along that tour, so I’ll be playing selections from the album all day long for various groups coming and going.  The tours themselves are sold out but a limited number of concert-only tickets will be sold.  It was the idea of Synchromy’s director, our friend Jason Barabba, to get in touch with them about this project.

Two weeks later I’ll be playing selections from the album in San Francisco at the Center for New Music.  I’m splitting the program with a wonderful guitarist in the Bay Area, Giacomo Fiore.

What’s next for you? Although the album is finished and coming out this month, are you continuing to add tracks to the project?

I think I’m happy with where the project is now.  I like the six movements I have, I’m not opposed to adding more but am not ready yet.  Also, once, the idea occurred to me that I could, instead writing new movements about new locations, perhaps revisit these same locations in ten years or so to see how they’ve continued to change.  Just a thought….

I will say this is the first work I’ve done that had a video component, and even though it is a simple video consisting of a slideshow, I did greatly enjoy having that element to further the storytelling potential of each work.  I don’t have plans for new video works, nor plans to collaborate with a video artist, but that’s something I’m interested in.  And the electric guitar, that will remain an important part of my voice as composer.  That ain’t going anywhere.

Anything else you’d like to add?

I got a lot of help on this project!  Rychard Cooper, my colleague at CSULB, recorded the project and edited the final video, and there are also a number of other musicians who play on the soundtrack in the background of the movements about the two “musical” locations.  On the Dunbar Hotel, underneath my guitar playing, you’ll hear recordings of jazz musicians: that’s Jamond McCoy on piano and Zaq Kenefick on saxophone.  And in the Tower Records movement, you’ll hear Tom Kendall Hughes on drums as well as some singing from Mikey Ferrari.  I recorded all of them, giving them minimal instruction, and they definitely all gave me a ton of inspiration, steering me in particular directions for my own guitar playing.

Lastly, thank you, Nick, for the interview and everything you do for our new music community on this site and around town!

Keep up with the release over at Alex’s website, alexanderemiller.com.

WasteLAnd’s Featured Composer Katherine Young Interviewed by Artistic Director Nicholas Deyoe

Katherine Young, WasteLAnd's season six featured composer. Photo by Deidre Huckabay.

Katherine Young, WasteLAnd’s season six featured composer. Photo by Deidre Huckabay.

WasteLAnd‘s sixth season kicks off tonight at ArtShare tonight with a concert focused on this year’s featured composer, Katherine Young. Katherine makes electroacoustic music using expressive noises, curious timbres, and kinetic structures to explore the dramatic physicality of sound, shifting interpersonal dynamics, and tensions between the familiar and the strange. As an improviser, Katherine amplifies her bassoon and employs a flexible electronics set up for solo and collaborative performances. The LAPhil’s Green Umbrella series, Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s MusicNOW, Ensemble Dal Niente, Third Coast Percussion, Spektral Quartet, Weston Olencki, Nico Couck / Internationales Musikinstitut Darmstadt, Fonema Consort, others have commissioned her music. She’s excited about coming-soon projects with Lucy Dehgrae for Resonant Bodies Festival, WasteLAnd and RAGE, Distractfold Ensemble’s Linda Jankowska, Callithumpian Ensemble, and Yarn/Wire. She’s releasing new music this year with Michael Foster & Michael Zerang, Wet Ink, and Amy Cimini (as Architeuthis Walks on Land).

Ahead of the show, we got WasteLAnd artistic director Nicholas Deyoe, who has a lot of experience with Katherine’s work, to interview the composer. Here are Nick and Katherine:

Nick: Some of the following questions relate to your monodrama When stranger things happen and the three pieces that it draws from: Earhart and the Queen of Spades, where the moss grows, and just water, no lemon. Would you share a little bit of the background on this project?

Katie: Sure! All of four of the pieces – the three concert pieces and the monodrama – are inspired by a short story called “The Girl Detective” by Kelly Link, which is a noir meditation on loss and a creative coming-of-age-story that follows a girl detective on various cases / adventures. The story takes a very fragmented, nonlinear form, and contains lots of lists of lost objects, references to myths of femininity (Nancy Drew, fairytale princesses, Demeter and Persephone, etc.), and a noir atmosphere. Each of the pieces in my cycle formally explore experiences of loss and modes of detection and creative reassembling.

For Earhart & the Queen of Spades, all of the guitar preparations – fans, bobby pins, keys, jewelry, etc. – are drawn from a list I compiled of lost items the girl detective comes across, plus things that the performers involved in the premieres had lost. So, for example, the fans are a reference to Amelia Earhart (mentioned in the story), and several of the performers told me about losing pieces of jewelry that had lots of personal significance.

It’s funny – I actually borrowed the title for Underworld (Dancing) from “The Girl Detective,” too. So I’d been thinking about that story for a long time!

Nick: While learning the Earhart, I developed my own emotional attachment to all of these objects and how they interact with my guitar.

On Friday night, we’re presenting a world premiere (BIOMES 1.0), something relatively new (Earhart & the Queen of Spades, 2016) and something “old” (Underworld (Dancing), 2008). You mentioned the other day that you feel a certain connection between these three pieces. Would you tell us a bit more about the connections that you feel between these pieces?

Katie: Listening to the rehearsal of Underworld (Dancing) it occurred to me that each of these pieces to different degrees and in different ways blur out of a linear “musical” forms and into sonic meditations through the use of drone, saturating textures, and/or spatialization.

Nick: You are an active improviser, and you also produce meticulously notated scores full of nuanced details. Looking at Friday’s program, BIOMES 1.0 is driven by improvisation between you, Matt, and Weston; Underworld (Dancing) is fully notated, but filled with freedom between the euphonium and the Wurlitzer, and Earhart is very clear in its instructions, but often feels like you’re inside of a structured improvisation including recurring fragments. All of the styles feel very much like “Katie Young,” despite the range of approach. What are the differences in your own mindset when you work in these different realms?

Katie: I think I’m always looking for ways to infuse a little bit more surprise into my notated scores – to give them the energy of real-time exploration that is one of the things I love about improvised music. As you point out, that can be achieved in a lot of different ways and to different degrees. Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about the function or need the piece is serving for the people I am making it for / with, and then I use whatever notation is best for making that happen. There are things you can achieve with open forms that are really difficult to get from hyper specified notation, but there are things that that notation can make happen that more open forms can’t. But in all cases I start with the people and the sounds and go from there.

Details for tonight (October 5, 2018) are available at wastelandmusic.org/biomes, and the series is currently running a fundraiser with stretch goals of making every concert this season free. You can support their work at wasteland.wedid.it/campaigns/5108.

William Brittelle’s Spiritual America should have headlined at the Hollywood Bowl

Sunday evening found me listening to the familiar rumble of bass frequencies through walls as I passed through security at The Hollywood Bowl. William Brittelle, Wye Oak, and the Metropolis Ensemble had just begun their set, a collection of songs exploring secular spirituality titled Spiritual America that Brittelle composed in collaboration with the band, the ensemble, and an impressively long list of presenters and producers.

Three days previously I had played a set opening for Metropolis Ensemble’s bassist, Evan Runyon, whose bowed strings were now being broadcast to the 17,000 in attendance, largely drawn by Bon Iver’s collaboration with TU Dance. Being far more used to the not-at-all-hard-to-get-into venues associated with the experimental and contemporary classical music scenes, I was a bit embarrassed to have misjudged my arrival and missed the first song. But even hearing the bass from a contemporary music ensemble cum indie rock band cut through the walls at a venue like the bowl felt in many ways like a win for this scene under the underground.

It was tragic, then, upon entering, to find Spiritual America beset by the fate that befalls most openers at large scale rock concerts. Audience members in the bowl’s box seats had their backs turned to the stage to finish their meals. A reviewer from another publication, seated next to me, first asked “what is this, music?”, then if we were all smoking something. This was in response to what I thought to be an extremely clever use of the seagull effect for cello harmonics set against an 80’s new wave style delay effect on what sounded to me like a TR-909 drum machine. That, and many other juxtapositions in the songs comprising Spiritual America, were, in a word, awesome. When Wye Oak singer Jenn Wasner announced that there was one song left on the set, this reviewer said she was glad that there was only one left, because this music was not her style.

The tragedy here was in the pairing, because Spiritual America was fantastic, rich with both nuanced writing (technically and thematically) and indie emotional sensibility, while grammy darling Bon Iver’s collaboration with TU Dance, Come Through, which pulled the crowd, was a phoned in mess and though admirably ambitious and a worthwhile exploration for the artist mainly served to cause me to continually ask myself “what the hell did I just watch?” and regret leaving my car in stacked parking.

To be clear, I’m a big fan of Bon Iver. 22, A Million was one of my favorite records of 2016, and it’s been gratifying to listen to Justin Vernon’s work develop from the college days of torrenting For Emma, Forever Ago to now. I love Vernon’s other band, Volcano Choir, as well. The previous two times I’ve seen Bon Iver I’ve been impressed, with the exception of those moments where they reach for sound worlds that they seem to have little to no experience working in. Bon Iver’s music, and in this case the accompanying video art, thrives on mood, while dance, writ large on a stage like the bowl’s, often requires music with some narrative direction. The result of the pairing, in Come Through, felt as if the collaborators didn’t know what to do with each other, with Bon Iver seeming to back down from every opportunity to take his music anywhere in order to give the dancers space to create, and TU Dance’s choreographer and dancers making a valiant effort to give narrative life to what were, in essence, a bunch of loops that sounded like B-sides and scratch tracks from 22, A Million. A spoken word ending having something to do with Martin Luther King and the new (or old? it wasn’t clear) Jim Crow laws, while incredibly prescient in our current cultural climate, felt tacked on with the “I’m not sure how to end this so I’ll add something new” of an undergraduate music student. The “video art,” which looked a bit like what you might do by the end of an Apple store class on how to use iMovie if you’re a person who is into memes, seemed to exist in order to keep your eyes off of the dancers.

I don’t wish to demean artistic exploration like this, though. The composer Ted Hearne, a New Amsterdam labelmate and post-genre brother in arms of Brittelle’s, said in an interview that he thinks “it’s OK, even preferable, for art to be problematic. We live in a problematic world. Artists should own that. It’s the loose ends and unanswered questions, and even the misfires and unintended consequences, that provoke the best questions about what art is doing in the first place.” Although “Bon Iver writes for dance,” in this case, ended up a bit like Taylor Swift’s out-of-place rap in Shake It Off, there were a few gracefully executed moments (in particular a trio for three male dancers accompanied by not much more than a drum machine and, for the only time during the set, a mellow backdrop). I very much believe that with more time spent collaborating and refining his work with dancers and multimedia artists, Justin Vernon will give us something spectacular.

So let’s talk Spiritual America. With this collaboration it feels like Brittelle’s working methods and interest in cross-genre or post-genre collaboration have come to a head. Perhaps it’s that he, unlike Bon Iver with regard to dance, is steeped in many traditions. When he writes for Wye Oak, it sounds like an authentic indie rock songwriter exploring ways of bringing other sound worlds into the fold because he is an authentic indie rock songwriter bringing other sound worlds into the fold. When, in the interludes between songs he aims for some of the extended techniques of the contemporary classical world (there was, in fact, feathered bowing), you hear a contemporary classical composer doing his thing, because he is that composer, too. How open Brittelle’s ears are is impressive. Choosing indie rock as a vehicle for his explorations of American spirituality makes perfect sense as the norms of the genre are so largely based on traditional songwriting, blues forms, and the not-often-enough discussed basic connections between the European traditions of folk song and traditional harmony and the slave spirituals and dances that make American vernacular music its own form of genre synthesis. Brittelle smartly uses the genre synthesis not as the point of his work, but as the medium.

Spiritual America is a lovely piece of work, that deserves to be performed in better conditions than as an opening act in front of a crowd of seemingly disinterested Bon Iver fans. Yes, the Hollywood Bowl is a get for this band, but perhaps lacks the personal connection to performers and performance that is so integral to the genres Brittelle pulls from. A record of the piece is on the way (a crowdfunding campaign for it is here). I, for one, hope that the next time they tour the piece in LA they’ll consider visiting The Echoplex or The Wiltern so we can really sing along.

Welcoming Miller Wrenn to New Classic LA

Bassist-composer-improviser and new New Classic LA writer Miller Wrenn

Bassist-composer-improviser and new New Classic LA writer Miller Wrenn

I’m pleased to announce that bassist/composer/improviser Miller Wrenn is joining the team of writers here at New Classic LA. You may have seen Miller’s review of WasteLAnd’s most recent show at REDCAT earlier this week.

Miller frequently performs and records with his own ensemble, Escapist, as well as the Vinny Golia Sextet, EnsembleVómma, Off Cell, and many others. His compositions and performances are primarily concerned with the tangibility of artistic intention and unifying elements of composition and improvisation into one essential whole.

Speaking of Escapist, they released their debut album, Alternates, a few weeks ago. Here’s an embed:

Welcome aboard, Miller!

 

Daniel Corral on Polytope

NOW Festival week 3 REDCAT 8-3-2016

On March 18, Daniel Corral’s latest work, Polytope, premieres at Automata as part of this year’s MicroFest, who have named their season after it. We were lucky that Daniel had a minute to answer some questions about this piece, which he will also be performing on March 23 at Seattle’s Wayward Music Series and March 25 at the Center for New Music in San Francisco. Here’s Daniel:

Tell me about Polytope.

I describe Polytope as a multimedia microtonal performance existing somewhere between a string quartet, Kraftwerk, James Turrell, and an Indonesian dhalang (master shadow puppeteer). Another apt description might be to call it an electronic mixture of Arnold Dreyblatt’s Orchestra of Excited Strings and Philip Glass’ classic Sesame Street video, Geometry of Circles.

Onstage there are four MIDI controllers on a small stand and a single video camera directly above the center, pointed straight down. The controllers are not traditional keyboards, but 8×8 grids of buttons that are turned 45° to make diamond shape rather than squares. One musician stands before each controller. The performance happens in the dark, and the overhead camera captures the interaction between the controllers’ colorful grids of lights and the fast-moving silhouettes of the musicians’ hands. This live feed video is projected in the space, creating a larger than life, colorful multimedia experience inspired by Light and Space art that also acts as an evolving visual score.

Polytope will premiere on Sunday, March 18 at Automata as part of MicroFest. MicroFest liked the piece enough to name the 2018 festival season after it, so I hope that might bring people out. The following weekend, we’ll also play it in Seattle at the Wayward Music Series and San Francisco at Center for New Music.

Was there a collaborative aspect to the composition for this quartet, or was it you delivering parts to be played?

I love collaborations, and have a few in the works right now. However, Polytope came entirely from me, for better or worse. I started working on it in early 2017 during a residency at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. Since then, I’ve slowly developed it in between other projects. I had people in mind that I thought would be great to work with (Erin Barnes, Cory Beers, Andrew Lessman), and once they agreed to play Polytope I completed it with them in mind.

Do you feel that it’s a further exploration of your work on, say, Diamond Pulses, or were you more in a mindset of trying something new and different here? I ask this without intending to put a value judgement on either option.

Polytope absolutely builds on what that I started exploring with Diamond Pulses in 2015. I’ve long been intimidated by knowing so many incredibly knowledgeable composers of microtonal music, and Diamond Pulses was the first microtonal piece that I felt confident sharing. In developing more multimedia pieces that build on Diamond Pulses, one thing that has gotten more sophisticated (or complicated, at least) is the projected visual metaphor/score. Diamond Pulses progresses in one direction through a single visual metaphor of expanding and contracting tonality diamonds. Comma, which premiered at REDCAT in 2016, built on Diamond Pulses by exploring a Pythagorean grid through several different visual metaphors (some go up, some go down, some go in circles, etc.). Polytope builds on Comma by expanding it from a solo piece to a quartet, and by using a more complex tuning system. In contrast, my recent piece One Line (which Vicki Ray will play at Pianospheres on April 3) takes the opposite approach by using a mere 8 buttons in a single horizontal row. It’s important to me that each piece is informed by the successes and failures of past work, even if it’s drastically different.

When I was prepping these questions I was thinking “Daniel’s body of really does defy the concept of genre,” and then I read your bio which says almost exactly that. Is this variety something you actively pursue, and is there some sort of artistic mission associated with it? Or is it more just a consequence of your being a curious and open minded musician?

The musical multiverse is a weird and wonderful place! One of my favorite activities is going to the library and checking out a stack of music that I’ve never heard of. Most of it is depressingly adequate, but occasionally you find something either terribly amazing or amazingly terrible, and suddenly the world is a little brighter. It’s also a product of being in Los Angeles, where there are so many music communities existing right next door to each other that often don’t even know the others exists. It can be very exciting to move between them, like travelling between planets in a solar system.

In addition, the question makes me think of an essay by Trevor Dunn, which was published in one of John Zorn’s Arcana books. In it, he declares the platypus to be the spirit animal of the 21st century musician. My sloppy summary is that much like the diverse appendages of the platypus, a modern musician needs to be literate in the idiosyncrasies of a wide swath of styles and genres.

Have you noticed different audiences reacting to different aspects of your work? If so, how?

I used to consider Whitman’s “I contain multitudes” quote to be a bit of a cop out, but it has become very relevant to my musical identity. I think I’ve both won and alienated various audiences by the diversity of what I do. Some people love the caricatured drama of my music for Timur and the Dime Museum, while the LA Times once referred to an electroacoustic piece of mine as an “antidote” to sentimentality. I can only hope that audiences will recognize meaningful qualities in the music regardless of what manifestation it takes. For most of my work, I try to include multiple points of entry and levels of engagement. The multimedia format of Polytope came out of this approach. Audience members can follow along with the musicians’ fingers playing the projected “score,” or they can listen with informed ears to the tuning, observe the tech setup, or just enjoy the music as a surface-level experience.

What other LA musicians/composers/artists are you into right now?

Wow, this list could go on forever! I’m going to try to keep it relatively short, and refrain from listing groups I play in (like Qamar, Featherwolf, or Timur and the Dime Museum)

Dog Star Orchestra
Timothy Maloof and Rahman Baranghoori duo
Corima
Joanna Wallfisch
Carmina Escobar
Southland Ensemble
The Accordionaires
Los Angeles Electric 8
Emily Lacy
Dorian Wood
A Horse A Spoon A Bucket
Anna Homler’s Breadwoman
Ray/Kallay Duo
Burning Ghosts
Alan Nakagawa
Hex Horizontal
Eric Kiersnowski

Anything else you’d like to add?

Thanks for the thoughtful questions, and for New Classic LA keeping a keen eye on contemporary classical-adjacent music in LA! Many other similar websites have come and gone (including my own Auscultations blog), and it’s great that New Classic LA is still going strong.

Also, I hope people will come out to Automata on March 18 to check out Polytope! I’ve put a lot of work into it and am quite pleased with how it has turned out.

Tickets for that show are available at artful.ly/store/events/14666. Follow Daniel and hear more of his work at spinalfrog.com.

Nadia Shpachenko on her collaboration with People Inside Electronics and an upcoming album

Pianist Nadia Shpachenko

Pianist Nadia Shpachenko

LA scene regulars likely know pianist Nadia Shpachenko, whose tireless concert and recording schedule is a model to live up to. Nadia has premiered more than 60 works by Elliott Carter, George Crumb, Daniel Felsenfeld, Tom Flaherty, Annie Gosfield, Vera Ivanova, Leon Kirchner, Amy Beth Kirsten, Hannah Lash, James Matheson, Missy Mazzoli, Harold Meltzer, Adam Schoenberg, Lewis Spratlan, Gernot Wolfgang, Iannis Xenakis, Peter Yates, Jack Van Zandt, and others. This Saturday, March 10, she teams up with People Inside Electronics for a show at Throop Church in Pasadena featuring both premieres and works from her upcoming album, Quotations and Homages. Nadia had a minute to answer some questions, so we asked some:

PIE’s concerts tend to focus on the interaction between human performers and electronics. Do you have a background in this type of performance, or is this new ground for you?

I have been performing pieces with electronics for many years now, this is an area of great interest for me! I love to explore how composers use their imagination to complement the acoustic instruments with all kinds of additional timbres and sound sources. I think the very first piece with electronics that I commissioned was Airdancing by Tom Flaherty. Airdancing was written for my first album of brand new works titled Woman at the New Piano. This piece was written for me and Genevieve Feiwen Lee on piano and toy piano, and has since become quite a favorite with performers and audiences! I have performed works with live electronics and with fixed media. The works on Saturday’s PIE concert will include diverse approaches to electroacoustic writing, from Annie Gosfield’s bold and wild Phantom Shakedown featuring malfunctioning short-wave radios, grinding cement mixers, and detuned and prepared piano samples, to Isaac Schankler’s poignant and heartbreakingly beautiful Future Feelings, featuring gentle piano passages reinterpreted through ambient synths and filtered noise, to Alex Temple’s captivating incorporation of pre-recorded interviews with her friends, colleagues, former students and family members sharing very personal and at times extremely painful experiences. Also, my husband Barry Werger is a recording engineer and a roboticist. When we met in Boston more than 20 years ago, he was working on his PhD at Brandeis University and part of his artistic output was touring the world with his robotic theatre troupe. The plays often featured my performances and robot actors, so the interaction between human performers and AI was an interest for me even then, although in a form quite different from what I will presenting this Saturday.

I see some old friends and some new ones on this program. What do you look for when you’re programming a concert?

This program features many composers who I worked with closely on multiple projects, and also some composers whose works I haven’t played before. When I commission pieces, I usually perform them dozens of times (often as many as 40 times for each commissioned piece), especially when the pieces are recorded and I then tour the programs to promote the works and the albums. Since I often create thematically inspired programs, it can be challenging for me to program single compositions not already part of my larger projects. My upcoming PIE concert presented me with a great opportunity to both showcase the works I commissioned most recently, and also to select works by composers with whom I did not collaborate before, all united by the common inspiration of the electronics component in the music. Tom, Annie, Vera, and Jack all wrote pieces for me that I premiered in the past. I was eager to work with Isaac Schankler for a long time now, and finally I got a new piece from him that I will be premiering on Saturday, inspired by Isaac’s baby boy, noise music, Romantic/teen angst, the melancholy of Chopin, and the composer’s worries and hopes for alternate future possibilities. This concert will be my first collaboration with Alex Temple and Julia Wolfe.

Vera’s piece is the only one that lists multimedia. What can we expect from it?

Vera’s piece exists in several versions and at the PIE concert it will be performed with all possible components – projections of the text of the poems over images, and the fixed audio part, which interjects the piano part. The fixed audio part makes use of original recordings of the poems (The Echo, In the Fog, Wind, and The Lake Isle of Innisfree) read by the poets themselves (Anna Akhmatova, Herman Hesse, Boris Pasternak, and William Butler Yeats). Overall the multimedia is created to bring back the presence of these poets and to connect the text of the poems directly to the music. And there will be one more piece with multimedia. Jack Van Zandt wrote his Sí in Bhrú for my upcoming Poetry of Places album, which will be released on Reference Recordings in Spring 2019. My Poetry of Places album will feature newly-written works by Amy Beth Kirsten, Hannah Lash, James Matheson, Harold Meltzer, Andrew Norman, Lewis Spratlan, Nina C. Young, and Jack Van Zandt, all inspired by unique buildings. Jack’s piece was inspired by the oldest building in the world, built in Ireland during the Neolithic period, about 5000 years ago. This building, Sí in Bhrú (or Newgrange in English), is fascinating on so many levels. Like the passageway and the interior chamber of Sí an Bhrú itself, the electronic elements of the work (created in dozens of layers from several sources) resonate at a frequency of 110 hertz in support of the piano part that does the same. I will perform this work with an accompanying video that features images of this unique stone age monument.

Looks like you have a consortium commission on the concert, which seems like a great way for performers to bring new works into the world. Could you talk a little about how that process works, for our readers who may not be familiar with it?

The consortium commissioning is somewhat common in orchestral, wind band and choral worlds, but is relatively new for solo music. It was realized through the Global Premiere Commissioning Consortium, an organization which accepts applications from composer/performer teams and a group of commissioning consortium members who split the composer’s and the project leader’s fee. This approach makes it affordable for the selected teams to commission new music. A relatively small commissioning fee allows the consortium members to secure the premiere performance rights on their respective territory for a fixed amount of time and help the composer to get his/her work performed globally. It is a great project which is focused on promoting the composer and his/her performers. We currently have 25 members who will premiere Vera’s new piece in 10 countries and 16 USA states.

Tom Flaherty’s piece is on your upcoming CD, Quotations & Homages. Want to talk a little about the album?

My upcoming album Quotations and Homages will be released on Reference Recordings in early April (next month). This album features newly-written works inspired by a variety of earlier composers and pieces, from Mozart to Brahms to Stravinsky to Messiaen to Carter to Ustvolskaya to The Velvet Underground. It’s a program that’s both serious and lighthearted. Older works are brought to new light through piano/s, toy pianos and electronics by living American composers Tom Flaherty, Missy Mazzoli, Peter Yates, Vera Ivanova, Nick Norton (you!), Adam Borecki, Daniel Felsenfeld, and James Matheson. At my PIE concert on March 10 I will be performing the two works with electronics from my album. The first piece, written for me by Tom Flaherty, is titled Rainbow Tangle. It captures the otherworldly ecstasy of the seventh movement of Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, using live electronic delays, transpositions, and reverberation to expand the sonic palette. I will close my PIE concert with Tom’s Igor to Please, a piece constructed using only the notes of Stravinsky’s “Augurs” chord from the Rite of Spring (an unusual spacing of an Ab harmonic minor scale). This piece exists in multiple versions for solo piano, solo toy piano, duo piano, and the original version for two pianos four-hands and two toy pianos, each with pre-recorded electronics. My album features the original version of this piece for 6 pianists, recorded with my amazing colleagues Ray-Kallay Duo, HOCKET, and Genevieve Feiwen Lee. On Saturday I will be performing the solo piano and electronics version of Igor.

What’s next on your schedule after this one that readers can look forward to?

After this week, which is keeping me busy with 2 days of recording sessions and six concerts (four of them at ArtNight Pasadena on Friday, previewing my PIE program, I will be going to Canada to promote the upcoming album release. Local performances next month will include collaborations with the Los Angeles Percussion Quartet, bassoonist Judith Farmer, and clarinetist Edgar Lopéz (performing Gernot Wolfgang’s Trio WINDOWS, which we will be recording in May). My concert schedule is updated at nadiashpachenko.com/event and interested readers can subscribe to my newsletter to be invited to future performances at nadiashpachenko.com/contact.

Tickets for this weekend’s show are available at peopleinsideelectronics.com/nadia-shpachenko.