Posts by Nick Norton
Sounds: Similar Fashion: Words Aren’t Things
We recently reviewed a killer new record/project/thing from Desert Magic, and their saxophonist Logan Hone has already sent me a new recording from his own band, Similar Fashion. And it rocks! Give it a listen here:
The full album is available from pfMENTUM records, on bandcamp at loganhone.bandcamp.com/album/logan-hones-similar-fashion
Similar Fashion will be on tour up and down the west coast in January. Not all the details are locked yet, but here are cities and what’s available so far.
Jan 21: Bakersfield, CA: Dagny’s
Jan 22: Oakland, CA: Studio Grand w/Weiner Kids
Jan 23: Arcata, CA: The Sanctuary w/Jonathan Kipp
Jan 24: Seattle, WA: Cafe Racer Cry & Roar 6
Jan 25: Portland, OR
Jan 26: Boise, ID
Jan 27: Provo, UT: Writ & Vision w/It Foot It Ears
Jan 28: Ephraim, UT: Snow College, Clinic + Concert
Jan 29: Las Vegas, NV: The Dispensary Lounge
Jan 30: Los Angeles, CA
More info at LoganHone.com
Sounds: Jason Barabba: Lettere da Triggiano
Composer Jason Barabba just posted a video of the premiere of his huge piece Lettere da Triggiano, and it’s great. What’s Next? Ensemble, joined by actor Kalean Ung and singers Elissa Johnson, Anna Schubert, Amy Fogerson, and Sarah Lynch, put on a semi-staged performance directed by Doug Oliphant.
Of the piece, Jason says,
I inherited a small stack of handwritten letters that grandmother had kept until she died. They were from her sister-in-law, written between 1948 and 1951 and are half of a conversation between my grandmother in Los Angeles and my Great Aunt in Triggiano, Italy. The letters cover a period of time when my grandfather was dying and end about a year after his death. They are very personal and heartfelt missives from a woman who was not able to make the trip to visit her brother as he was dying on the other side of the ocean. I felt there was a good piece in there, so I’ve taken Carmela’s letters and broken them up. They are not presented complete, nor in order. I cannot even begin to know how to summarize the narrative. I never met Carmela, but I feel like I’ve gotten to know her through these letters. I cannot overstate how grateful I am to everyone that had a hand in getting this piece to the stage in October. I am in awe of the performance presented in this recording. I feel like a very lucky composer.
Welcoming Brin Solomon to the team
I’m pleased to announce that writer, composer, and bassoonist Brin Solomon will be joining the team here at New Classic LA. Here’s Brin’s bio:
Brin Solomon
Brin Solomon is a Los Angeles-based bassoonist and composer with an interest in music theatre. A recent graduate from Yale University — where they studied with Joshua Rosenblum and Kathryn Alexander, among others — they write music full of metric vigor, open harmonies, and flowing, lyrical melodies. Their original full-length musical, Window Full of Moths, has been praised by reviewers for its “extraordinary soul stirring songs” that “add magic to otherwise common lives”. They are an active believer in the ideal of the performer-composer, and recently gave the première of his bassoon sonata, Rotational Games in the fall of 2015. Their works have been performed by the Yale Concert Band, the Harkness Tower Guild of Carillonneurs, and members of Chicago’s Fifth House Ensemble, among others. They currently work as an assistant to Michael Feinstein, and have arranged several American standards for Mr. Feinstein to sing in concert at Carnegie Hall.
Welcome to the team, Brin. Glad to have you aboard.
Sounds: Isaac Schankler: Pheromone
Flutist Meerenai Shim recently released the first album on new label Aerocade Music, and title track honors have gone to LA composer/musician/electronics guru Isaac Schankler. We’ll have a review of the full record up soon, but in the meantime you can enjoy the aforementioned title track below.
Go to this: People Inside Electronics present Accordant Commons
Almost a year ago Isaac Schankler and I — and a bunch of other LA composers — were up in San Francisco for the New Music Gathering, when we experienced David Coll’s piece/sound installation/thing Position, influence. Immediately after hearing it Isaac said he wanted to find a way to do it in LA. Thankfully he co-directs People Inside Electronics, who have the power to get things like that done here. Here’s a video of the piece:
So, this Saturday, come hear the new vocal group Accordant Commons perform this piece, alongside works for voice and electronics by Michael Edward Edgerton, Chen-Hui Jen, Jon Christopher Nelson, and Pauline Oliveros, and a world premiere from Odeya Nini.
Full details and tickets are at brownpapertickets.com/ref/1184466/event/2273118. See you there.
HOCKET Interviews Composers, round 4: Alex Weiser
HOCKET
On November 21, HOCKET will be presenting a FREE concert of new commissions at the Brand Library & Art Center in Glendale, CA (concert information available at www.HOCKET.org). Leading up to the performance, HOCKET has been interviewing the four commissioned composers of this concert and discussing their newly written works. Here is HOCKET’s final interview with Alex Weiser where they discuss his piece water hollows stone.
Tell us about water hollows stone.
water hollows stone is a three movement work for four hand piano. The four hand piano repertoire is largely known for modest pieces, often written for amateurs, but for this work (in no small part inspired by the virtuosity you guys, HOCKET, bring to the table), I went for something much more ambitious. I thought of having four hands instead of two as magnifying the possibilities of the solo piano, almost akin to having a player piano. The result is some incredibly challenging and intricately interlocking passagework. The first movement explores the resonance of the piano with huge waves of sound, bell-like interjections, and harmonies and textures emerging from misty resonance, the second movement saturates the keyboard in a breakneck scherzo of cascading canons, and the final movement offers a wistful goodbye song exploring the sonic world inside decaying resonance.
What does the title mean and what is its significance in the piece?
The name water hollows stone comes from an ancient Latin proverb found in Ovid’s Epistulae ex Ponto, which reads “gutta cavat lapidem” – “a drop of water hollows a stone.” Later it was expanded: “non vi, sed saepe cadendo” – “not by force, but by continuously dripping.” Through its quiet persistence water does the seemingly impossible. My piece seeks to work in the same way, building up its material through insistent waves of sound, changing gradually but ultimately, I hope, making a big impact.
The second movement of water hollows stone, is a series of complex interlocking canons that literally covers the entire range of the piano. What was the inspiration for this movement?
Michael Gordon, one of my favorite composers and one of my teachers, wrote an incredible solo piano piece called, “Sonatra” which is built out of these incessant arpeggios up and down the whole piano. In the program note he said, “I wanted to use all of the keys on the piano and use them often,” and I just love this idea of maximizing the sonic possibilities by using all of the keys. Along those lines I was also inspired by the genre of “black midi” wherein popular songs are arranged for midi piano to use the maximum number of notes possible, saturating the score and turning it black. With these ideas in the back of my mind I revisited Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations and was totally floored by this incredible canonic arpeggio that bursts out in the 19th variation. For the second movement of water hollows stone I took this material as a launching pad, changed the harmony, expanded the canon from two voices to four, and then hit the ground running, leaving Beethoven behind and developing the material as if it were my own.
The third movement explores dissipating resonances in the piano. What drew you to this technique?
I first encountered this technique when I heard Helmut Lachenmann’s delightful set of pieces Kinderspiel, and I loved it as a way of reimagining the sounds possible with the piano. In the final movement of water hollows stone I use this technique as a metaphor for fading away. After having built up a big mass of sound in the first movement and played with super saturated interlocking canons in the second movement, the piece bids a farewell song as its sound evaporates, and fades away with each successive chord.
We spent time together in residence at the Avaloch Farm Music Institute workshopping and putting this piece together. Can you talk about our collaborative process, and how it affected the piece?
We workshopped the piece at Avaloch making dozens of fine-tuned adjustments to get all of the pacing just right, and to finesse the intricate choreography of the four hand interplay. The opportunity to tweak details like this over the course of a week together is something I have never experienced before, but I can’t imagine how we could have put this piece together without it. I’m very grateful to Avaloch for allowing us to have that time together.
As a New York based composer, do feel that this piece is a representative of the kind of music coming out the New York right now?
One of the things I love about New York City is the incredible diversity of activity – people here are writing complex music, simple music, music that looks forward imagining a new future, music that looks backward reimagining the past. I’d like to think that my music does a bit of all that.
Anything else you would like to add?
I’m coming out for this show and it’ll be my first time in Los Angeles. Come say hello and tell me where I should visit! I hope this is my first trip of many; there seems to be a lot of exciting new music happening in LA.
[editor’s note: damn right there is!]
HOCKET Interviews Composers, round 3: Ryan Harper
HOCKET
On November 21, HOCKET will be presenting a FREE concert of new commissions at the Brand Library & Art Center in Glendale, CA (concert information available at www.HOCKET.org). Leading up to the performance, HOCKET will be interviewing the four commissioned composers of this concert and discussing their newly written works. Here is HOCKET’s interview with Ryan Harper where they discuss his piece A 19.
Tell us about A 19.
A 19, for two toy pianos, takes its name from a work by the artist László Moholy-NagyThe piece explores a sustained gesture in which the melodic range and rhythmic structures are gradually constricted, leading both the performers and audience inexorably toward a single point.
László Moholy-Nagy: A 19
What about the painting by László Moholy-Nagy inspired you?
I was intrigued by the fact that no matter how I looked at A 19, I found my eyes drawn to a point of convergence. There’s a translucent circle hovering over the intersecting lines, but like the audience it seems to be a spectator to the events occurring below it.
How do you feel this painting is represented in your piece?
The painting and the piece both maintain a formal detachment to the depicted gesture that nevertheless is the reason for the work’s being. I think structure is paramount in both.
What drew you to two toy pianos as the instrumentation for this piece?
In addition to the fact that it’s not everyday you get to write for a group like you guys on the Schoenhut Piano Company Artist Roster, I looked at the limited melodic and tonal range of the toy piano as a kind of challenge. I was interested in exploring how to portray extremes within a narrow set of parameters.
You have lived in both New York and Los Angeles, two major cities with very different musical scenes right now, how has this affected your music?
I think the longer I spend in New York the more I become drawn to the idea of an economy of means. It’s impossible to yell longer or louder than the city, so you have to figure out how to make what you say count in some other way. There’s definitely some great music happening in both cities right now though.
Anything else you would like to add?
Have a good concert! I wish I could be there.
Sounds: Tholl/Fogel/Hoff: reasonable strategies for tense conjugation
Populist records just posted a new record from Andrew Tholl, Corey Fogel, and Devon Hoff, entitled CONDITIONAL TENSION. As populist points out on their site, the record is a great step forward for them, as it’s their first release of entirely improvised music. It’s also their 10th record (congrats!), and they just got a great review and profile by Will Robin on Bandcamp, which you can read at blog.bandcamp.com/2015/11/10/creating-a-wide-platform
The record is available for pre-order now, and comes out on November 20. The track above is my favorite of the two extended improvisations, but the whole thing is just fantastic.
HOCKET Interviews Composers, round 2: Emily Cooley
HOCKET
On November 21, HOCKET will be presenting a FREE concert of new commissions at the Brand Library & Art Center in Glendale, CA (concert information available at www.HOCKET.org). Leading up to the performance, HOCKET will be interviewing the four commissioned composers of this concert and discussing their newly written works. Here is HOCKET’s interview with Emily Cooley where they discuss her piece Phoria.
Tell us about Phoria.
It’s a single-movement piece that is about seven minutes long and commissioned by you guys, HOCKET, who are great friends and colleagues of mine. It contains a little nugget of musical material that has appeared in several of my recent pieces. You can hear it most clearly at the end of the piece, when it’s repeated over and over by Sarah on the piano 1 part. The whole piece basically grew out of that singsong-y, music-box-like melody. But the way it appears in the piece, I ended up putting everything else first – every variation on that little idea occurs before the original idea, which is only heard towards the end. So in a sense, the events of the piece reveal what the piece is actually about.
“Phoria” is when two eyes are unable to look at the same object. How is this represented in your piece?
That’s the technical definition of the word, and it plays out in my piece in the sense that the two players are often doing slightly different things. The musical material they play is related, but in an unbalanced, off-kilter way; during the fast music in the middle of the piece, they’re literally playing in two different keys. But beyond the word “phoria” as a noun, I was also thinking of it as a suffix – as in the words “euphoria” and “dysphoria.” To me, different moments in my piece embody each of those words. There is some joy, but also some deep unease. And at the end of the piece, maybe some sadness at the fact that joy is often inhibited by unease. A lot of my work has to do with language and identity, and with trying to musically express some of the emotions surrounding those things.
How does writing for piano-four hands differ from writing for solo piano or any other chamber ensemble at that?
This was my first piece for piano-four hands, and actually my first piece in a while that involves piano at all. I had been writing mostly for strings, so it was fun to dive back into keyboard writing. Obviously there are some technical challenges, in the sense that the keyboard can get pretty crowded with four hands on it. You guys helped me work through some of that by finding really ingenious ways to avoid hand collisions in what I had written – so I was very lucky in this collaboration.
We spent time together in residence at the Avaloch Farm Music Institute workshopping and putting this piece together. Can you talk about our collaborative process and how it affected the piece.
I loved our time together at Avaloch – what a perfect working environment! It allowed us to workshop and experiment with the really fine details of the piece. I remember us doing a ton of work with pedaling – not the first element of the music a listener might notice, but in four-hands writing and in this piece I think it was really critical. You guys had so many useful things to suggest and contribute, and I loved that all of us in the room were both composers and pianists (although I’m a very bad pianist).
You, Alex Weiser, and Ryan Harper are three of the five composers of Kettle Corn New Music. How do these colleagues inspire your music and is there a unifying element to the music you guys compose?
I don’t think there’s one unifying element to our music, although I know we all have some common influences. I think we all produce very distinct music from one another. The great thing about Kettle Corn New Music is that although we’re primarily a presenting organization, we’re also all composers and we have certain common perspectives. As the youngest in the group, I feel as though I’ve literally come of age, musically, with the other members of Kettle Corn by my side. Alex and I have been trading music and giving each other feedback for almost 7 years now. It’s incredibly rewarding. We have such vastly different musical tastes and sensibilities, and yet we’re able to help each other too.
HOCKET Interviews Composers, round 1: Aaron Holloway-Nahum
HOCKET
On November 21, HOCKET will be presenting a FREE concert of new commissions at the Brand Library & Art Center in Glendale, CA (concert information available at www.HOCKET.org). Leading up to the performance, HOCKET will be interviewing the four commissioned composers of this concert and discussing their newly written works. Here is HOCKET’s interview with London based composer Aaron Holloway-Nahum where they discuss his piece Remember Me?.
Tell us about Remember Me?
Remember Me? is a forty-minute extravaganza for two pianists, one piano, two toy pianos and an array of other toys and props. It’s a set of variations on Dido’s Lament, broken up into four parts that can each be played individually, or together in one sweep as half of a concert. The first part takes place entirely on the keys of the piano, ending with the slamming of the piano lid. The second part is played on and in the piano, but the pianists never touch the keys. The third part is a kind of mirror set of variations to the first part, but here its distorted because the music is played on one piano and one toy piano. The fourth part (which was the first to be performed, as is the part you can currently hear on HOCKET’s Soundcloud page) is for two toy pianos.
What lead you towards Dido’s Lament from Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas as the source material for this large-scale variations?
There are some technical things about the piece that make it very good source material (the passacaglia, the familiarity, the rich variety within the already repetitive structure, etc…) but it’s hard to say exactly what drew me to this music because I wasn’t really thinking about those things at the time. I think I just found I’d often get the music stuck in my head and had found myself daydreaming variations on it in the past.
The history of the large-scale variations for piano is such a strong tradition – – Bach’s Goldberg Variations,
I’ve heard from a lot of composers that when they’re composing a certain kind of work (like a string quartet, say) they avoid listening to any other pieces like that because it makes it impossible for them to work. I’m exactly the opposite of this. It’s more like a writer who, when writing an essay on a particular topic will read loads of other things on that topic, looking for interesting tidbits, seeing what people have said already, etc…
I include score study in my daily routine of composing and I literally had all three of the scores you mention here (along with many others) on my desk while I was writing Remember Me? Another book that lives (always) on my composing desk is Austin Kleon’s Steal Like An Artist. One of my favourite quotes in it is this:
“If you have one person you’re influenced by, everyone will say you’re the next whoever. But if you rip off a hundred people, everyone say you’re so original!” (Attributed to cartoonist Gary Panter)
So all this score study is about soaking in the sum-total of what’s been made and said in this genre so far. Sometimes this leads to something like a direct homage (there is one in Remember Me? to Rzewski, and one to Beethoven) but more often I’m trying to steal loads and loads of little things that I stack up in new ways that are interesting to me.
Part II of Remember Me? doesn’t touch a note of the piano and is an incredible exploration of extended techniques. How did you go about discovering and creating the sound world for this section of the piece?
So part of this is wrapped up in the previous question. I listened to a lot of music that used a lot of really varied extended techniques. When I heard things I liked, I would find a score and make a note in my notebook of how the composer had done this. Many of these sounds, though, are now found in contemporary piano music so often that they really sound like cliches to my ears. So I’d try layering up two or three ideas together, or to reimagine how I could get a similar sound in a different way. I think the most unusual thing to know about the second movement – for me as a composer anyway – is that I wrote it without ever actually going to a piano and trying to make these sounds myself. I wanted to be led by my imagination rather than what I could physically accomplish on the instrument.
Part III and Part IV or your piece feature the toy pianos and push these instruments to previously unexplored areas. What drew you to the toy piano?
To be honest it was your passion for the instruments that did this. All of my music is really inspired by and about specific musicians whom I respect and adore, and many of my pieces just begin as conversations where I’m asking “what do you like to play?” and “what do you wish composers would do more often?” We were putting on a sort of “extra-curricular” concert at the Aspen Music Festival where we played Rzewski’s Coming Together and Thomas brought along a toy piano (and a melodica, which also makes an appearance in Remember Me?) And I saw the instrument there through his eyes and the possibilities were so wonderful I just felt I would be foolish to leave it out.
We have worked very closely with you on putting this piece together, can you talk about the process of collaboration with us.
Well, what I’d really say is that working with the two of you has firstly been a lot of fun: you’ve been so open to any idea, and so helpful in thinking about how to accomplish something. Let me give you a really specific example: I had been in NYC working with ICE Ensemble and seen them perform with Pauline Oliveros, and there was this great concert filled with great music but there was this one thing that totally blew me away: at one point as she was improvising she let all the music die down and was just running her hands over the keys of the accordion. And I thought: that is a sound I have to put into the piece. But I had no idea how to write it down, or even how to describe it. So I wrote something approximate and then ended up sending Thomas a video and literally just said this is the sort of sound I want, what is the best way to make it on the Toy Piano?
And there’s loads of things like that in this piece. From working out the best place to make a sound, or how long the resonance of the toy piano lasts, or whatever. The collaboration has been totally built on this joy we all share in making music and the piece is so much stronger for that.
Anything else you would like to add?
Well I’d just like to say thank you to both of you for the countless hours of practice you’ve put in on the piece. I’m so, so sorry I won’t be there for these premieres because I just know how wonderfully you play every single bar of it and I can’t wait to get together and work on the recording in June. All power to your fingers, HOCKET!