IPSA DIXIT – a stunning breakthrough in the reality of postopera
It was a warm Sunday afternoon, with Long Beach Opera set to host their closing matinee of “Ipsa Dixit” at the Art Theatre on Retro Row. Billed as a philosophy-opera, Kate Soper’s monumental work became a Pulitzer finalist back in 2017, and now, it looked for new life with the beloved experimental opera company. With James Darrah directing, Christopher Rountree as music director, and Jane Eilber choreographing a duo from the Martha Graham Dance Company, the synergy and quality of the production was undeniable from the very start.
I can think of no better place for this show than the iconic Art Theatre, history rich in its walls as the oldest single-screen hall in the city. Every detail of the Art Deco space was exemplified by clever production choices by LBO, from the dramatic lighting and the use of exit doors, to the abstraction of silent black-and-white film and the obfuscation of picture with bold blue lines. Even the dancers’ elaborate costumes were reminiscent of the prohibition era. One can only equate this unique viewing experience to a live debut screening of an experimental foreign film.
As you enter the theatre to look for your seat, you find yourself intruding upon a dance rehearsal on the satellite stage. To the delight of the audience, Leslie Andre Williams and Anna Souder can be found practicing their choreography in concert black, talking it out and making adjustments right in front of you. At this point, any preconceived notions you may have about opera were instantly obliterated. This subtle detail was powerfully engaging and proved to be a cautionary tale, a tone setter for the rest of the program, one that encourages to forget everything you knew about opera. I found their “rehearsal” was effective in making the overall experience more accessible to a less frequent crowd.
As soon as star soprano Anna Schubert sang her first words, one could not help but be mesmerized and stay that way for the entirety of the 90-minute show. “Sing” is truly an oversimplification. Beyond the role of an opera singer, Schubert was asked to be a philosopher, a narrator, a lover, a conductor, a Dadaist speech puppet, and even Socrates for a movement or two. More importantly, she was the driving force behind this high-octane, tongue-twister of a soprano part, one that she handled with brilliant lyricism and unparalleled conviction. Not to mention, she actually played almost every single instrument on stage as well.
Each member of the supporting ensemble were carefully chosen, with just three heavyweights replacing an entire orchestral pit. Playing their trained instruments was no longer the sole challenge here. Beyond tackling virtuosic moments, they were each asked to push the limits of extended techniques, all the while having to shadow Schubert with their instrument and voice or engage with her verbally in theoretical debate. As the opera descended into themes of love and tragedy, flautist Rachel Beetz demonstrated her technical prowess on more than one type of flute, filling each of them with sharp slices of air, colorful bites of overtones, and keeping toe to toe with Schubert through extremely fast and difficult speech. In the midst of well-timed chaotic images behind them, the duo showed outstanding chemistry and timing in this spiraling portray of madness and despair.
In perhaps my favorite role, percussionist Sidney Hopson emerged into the character Crito, Socrates’ wealthy Athenian friend, reinterpreting their famous conversation in an attempt to convince Socrates to escape prison. Hopson and Schubert were placed on opposite sides of the marimba, against a luring backdrop of a purple dream, a vision that Socrates had before his day of execution. Carefully pacing back and forth around the keys, the duo acted out an elaborate and verbose scene with stunning ease, interspersing dialogue with hypnotic marimba lines.
Finally, it was violinist Mona Tian’s turn to shine. In the very last duo with Schubert, Tian exhibited massive stage presence on par with that of a rock star, mastering sound, placement, and choreography to support Schubert in her rhetoric and (de)construction of language. Tian can be seen shredding on her violin as Slash would on his guitar, whipping her bow like a samurai after a kill, and moaning with anguish and vibrato in the upper register of her instrument, building significant momentum for the final climax of the piece. The finale was supported by the Martha Graham dancers performing the same routine as their earlier “rehearsal”, this time with full dresses, before they changed into something even more extravagant, wandering through the crowd and confusing everyone with popcorn and soft drink in their hands.
“Ipsa Dixit” was completely transformed by Long Beach Opera in a way I’ve never seen before. A stunning examination of philosophy and art, this breakthrough opera itself can be seen as a gold standard to the genre of postopera, a term first coined by Jelena Novak to describe the reinvention of opera through new media, de-syncrhonization of image and sound, and the redefinition of sex-gender-voice relationships. However, I would argue that Soper’s masterpiece moves beyond Novak’s foundational research and goes further to ask these meaningful questions: What is opera? What makes an opera good or bad? What separates opera from other musical forms? What role should opera strive for in order to survive the rapidly changing landscape of classical music? It seems as if the closest one could get to these answers is the singular inimitable experience that is LBO’s phenomenal production of “Ipsa Dixit”.
newclassic monthly #2 (a letter from the editor): july 2024
i like setting expectations at an achievable level; i think i did that here by starting a monthly series then promptly forgetting to do the second month. sorry!
i just flew back from new york where I attended a music educator conference, and in 10 days I’m heading back out to massachusetts to attend the Bang on a Can Summer Festival; it’s an unusual amount of summer activity for me, since the last time i flew on a plane was in 2019. since i spent a lot of time on planes and in airports, I’ve been checking out a lot of new releases, so I decided to write up a series of mini reviews; new-ish releases in the contemporary-classical/improvised/experimental sphere that you should be aware of. not strictly ordered but the ones at the top are great.
Tashi Wada – What is Not Strange?
instrumental, art pop/post rock, slowly evolving textures while somehow largely inhabiting the 4-5 minute “song” track length. the synth work is awesome, particularly on track 2 “Grand Trine.”
Yarnwire – Currents Vol. 9
the yarnwire currents series showcases their incredible body of commissions over more than a decade, including and especially the layered textures in “Pitiless as the Sun” by Jordan Dykstra, which draws comparisons to the yarnwire commissions from Klaus Lang and Øyvind Torvund, which are also personal favorites. nothing is bad on this album, nothing is less than great, even.
Leilehua Lanzilotti – the sky in our hands, our hands in the sky
wollschleger’s on my mind since i just performed’s scott’s “american dream” last month but the parts i love about these pieces remind of the writing in “american dream;” repeated gestures at varying tempi, pitch bent percussion, teasing unisons with strings, and glacially paced piano. the muted flowerpot(?) on “sending messages” is incredibly captivating; i could listen to that alone for 45 minutes.
Scott Wollschleger – Between Breath
tasty string writing and terrifying trombone sounds. after living inside his “american dream” i’ve come to know scott’s musical language pretty well, “Between Breath” seems to “run” more, with fewer interruptions between sections
Caroline Shaw / Sō Percussion – Rectangles and Circumstance
pretty nice; scratches the ‘tigue’ itch (i miss you tigue)
tristan perich – Open Symmetry
it does what you’d expect a tristan perich piece for 3 vibraphones and 20-channel 1-bit electronics to do. if you’re not into it, it can feel same-y. if you’re into it like i am, it’s exactly what you want.
and here are some releases i didn’t get to, but will this coming month; i do have at least another 12 hours on planes to look forward to
Sarah Hennies – Motor Tapes
fuubutsushi – meridians
rhodri davies – Telyn Wrachïod
lucy liyou – +82 K-Pop Star
SAWYER’s newest batch
chris cohen – paint a room
thanks for reading!
MOLLY PEASE presents ERDE DREAMS on mental health & nature / a workshop of memories for a new audience
Summer is calling and another school year is coming to a close. As I look ahead to spending more time in nature, an opportunity presented itself to me and my colleagues at Pasadena Waldorf High School to expose our young creatives to a level of music making never experienced before, one which dabbles with open-minded improvisation and slots neatly into our collective pedagogy. It should be no surprise that the colleague I worked with to bring this field trip to fruition is Richard An, editor of the words you’re reading now, and of all the other reviews here at New Classic LA. It also helps that Ted Masur, the director of music at Waldorf, only (coincidentally?) hired instructors from CalArts to round out the program, the third being Alexander Noice. Together, we share a strong inclination to radicalize music education and free it from its shackles of longstanding elite traditions. In other words, we sought to mobilize our students to embark on a journey of off-campus excursions to engage with the new music community.
The first result was magical – a special Tuesdays @ Monk Space outing curated by Shalini Vijayan, featuring Molly Pease, M.A. Tiesenga, and Miller Wrenn, in an evocative exploration of mental health examined through essential relationships with nature. Molly proceeded to wow the audience and Waldorf visitors with an achingly gorgeous solo set in the first half. “luminescent waves” was especially vivid and giving, with the help of some clever pre-recorded vocals behind a flurry of playful ad libs. From skinny dipping with dancing plankton to innocent giggles among amorous tides, this movement truly felt like a sanctuary away from the male gaze, life reflecting off bare skin from each and every direction. Molly ended her set with “deep ocean”, creating an atmosphere of depth and tension using a variety of extended vocal techniques and abstractions. I closed my eyes and felt so strongly the distant influences of artists like Sophie, Kevin Abstract, and Pamela Z, climbing into what I could only imagine to be a new era of post-grunge / post-jazz sound, yearning to break free.
In the second half, Molly brought M.A. and Miller to the stage for a set that proves to be even more experimental, with “a leaf to stand on” being a personal favorite. Part of four “seeds” of ideas that served as loose structures for improvised opportunities, the trio showcased a blend of chemistry in sensitive moments of tutti lament, often taking turns to depart from the rest with unique expressiveness. Patterns shifted subtly, and beauty evaporated into new ideas. Miller proceeds to bury this second seed gently and lovingly with ethereal harmonics. “water mirror” is the seed that follows, and here, we are faced with an unsettling moment of suspense, a stark confrontation of the dynamic challenges within the struggles of mental health. M.A.’s contributions were significant, gracing the opening with a influx of wind sounds and overtones, possessing an uncanny ability to reify Molly’s grief while interposing new perspectives to the topic at hand. Needless to say, the crowd left the night with a renewed focus on their own mental health, as well as a deep appreciation for the physiological effects of music and nature.
A few days later, we invited the trio into our instrumental class for a demonstration, workshop, and Q&A based on “erde dreams”. Our students asked meaningful questions about open improvisation and its role in jazz, as well as questions to Molly regarding her overall aesthetic choices and themes for the concert. Miller added insight to the limitations of genre labeling, shunning industrial giants like Spotify, all the while giving a hilarious micro lecture on sibilances. Next, the trio encouraged an improvised group activity using only their voices, taken from the swaying landscape just outside our classroom window, piquing the interests of the students. And finally, Miller introduced the concept of conduction (editor’s note: “conduction” distinct from “conducting,” see Butch Morris), furthering the experience they had of a guided improvisation piece I programmed in my first semester here, “Form the Fabric” by inti figgis-vizueta. It was beyond heartwarming to see how bold and curious our students were in championing new ideas and taking musical risks in uncharted waters, responding to every breath of inspiration.
I am so grateful for Molly, M.A., and Miller – three insanely talented musicians who feel so strongly in progressing new music with innovative programing and inclusive pedagogy. I am also overjoyed to have like-minded colleagues and a community in Waldorf that show immense interest, support, and funding to provide our students with the chance to dive deeper into the music community of greater Los Angeles. This is, without a doubt, classical music and education for a new audience. This is the start of something new.
WILD UP x 24 —> 24 x ARTHUR RUSSELL
FULL DISCLAIMER : This was not a classical concert. This was a disco party. And what a party it was – fully equipped with an open dance floor, a hefty disco ball shimmering above, and of course, complete with sweaty bodies. So instead of the usual stuffy review with complicated lexicon foreign to your typical household (written by yours truly), I will now attempt to do something never done before. I will craft the most serious of reviews for you by sharing some pictures from my phone, in hopes you may embody the revolutionary spirit of disco as you indulge with me (you’re welcome).
PS: This was the second sold-out performance of this show, and the first in a series of what looks to be an intriguing exploration into the many lives (and names) of Arthur Russell. I cannot wait to go back for more. Away we go!
newclassic monthly #1: may 2024
dear nc.la readers,
hello! trying out a new monthly write-up of some of our favorite listens for the previous month; some are new releases, some not.
Leslie Ting – What Brings You In (2024, People Places Records)
a dutiful introspection of self through a vicious swirl of suspension & outpour, pressed in a rare format of both stereo & binaural versions; eventually, it paralyzes into a stasis of vulnerability & honesty, which we could all use a little more of in this moment…this album isn’t quite a substitute for therapy, but it’s close.
Violet Tang
Alessandro Rovegno – Everything Loose is Traveling (2024, self released)
Alessandro Rovegno’s, Everything Loose is Traveling re-appropriates nostalgia as a tender ephemerality: forgoing romanticized mush for glitchy field recordings, stuttering synths, and fragmented melodies. The past is neither idealized nor lost, but a phantom stream flowing alongside the present. Rovegno invites us to take a dip under a mid-September’s sun.
Jack Herscowitz
Shuttle358 – Field (2018, 12k)
Recently, I’ve been relistening to an old favorite of mine that I hadn’t spent time with in a long while. I first discovered “Field” by Shuttle358 (aka Dan Abrams) while working a summer job at the UT Austin library back in 2018, just by chance. It’s one of my all time favorites. Each track sounds quite simple at first blush, but every time I sit down and really listen closely, there’s always something new to discover. He creates these simple yet intricate worlds of sound that you can dive into and get completely lost in if you wish. My favorite track from the album is “edule”. It’s a bit of an oddball, because Shuttle358 takes a synth solo about halfway through. An interesting oddity that doesn’t really occur much in the rest of his body of work.
Eric Lennartson
Erykah Badu – But You Caint Use My Phone (2015, Motown and Control Freaq)
I’ve been hooked on “but you caint use my phone” (mixtape) by erykah badu ever since I saw it in a Kyle Abraham piece last month at the Music Center. It’s such a fascinating, fun, and groovy concept album.
Anuj Bhutani
I recently met the producer who did the Atmos upmixes for a bunch of Frank Sinatra recordings, and they are unbelievable sounding. I was into Sinatra as a teenager, and it’s been rad to revisit these songs. Start with Come Fly With Me, and get yourself a pair of headphones that can handle binaural properly before you do.
Nick Norton
Smother My Ears: Kevin Drumm, Daniel Menche, Carlos Giffoni + Alex Pelly, and Peter Kolovos at 2220 Arts and Archives
Experimental music series/labels, Carlos Giffoni’s “No Fun Productions” and Peter Kolovos’ “Black Editions Group,” teamed up to present four sets at 2220 Arts and Archives on March 23rd, 2024 (with rare Southern California appearances from Kevin Drumm and Daniel Menche). Capricious, intoxicating, glacial, and prickling: the curation provided something for anyone willing to risk their ears succumbing to pummeling sheets of sound.
Peter Kolovos
Kolovos runs Black Editions Group, condensing the music of three previous label projects under a single roof and organizing concerts for Los Angeles based and The Rest of the World based experimental musicians. He also rips on the guitar. The ideas move in rapid fire: a timbral terrarium explodes into being only to collapse onto itself as Kolovos assembles another. These ecosystems last only for seconds, but are rich in texture, gesture, and color. Moments of immense sustained drones lull us into a sense of safety, only for Kolovos to rip them away and slingshot us elsewhere. This is uncompromisingly blazing music in its display of integrated guitar-pedal virtuosity. And damn was that tone delicious…
Carlos Giffoni + Alex Pelly
Giffoni has been active as an electronic musician and curator on both coasts since the early 2000s and Pelly is a Los Angeles-based live music visualization performer and longtime dublab affiliate. Tonight, they teamed up for easily the most convincing non-narrative audio-visual performance I’ve seen. Giffoni’s modular synth and Pelly’s modular video systems gelled so effortlessly that for the first half of the set, I couldn’t tell who was making sound and who was controlling the visuals. Pulsing overdriven oscillators informed dancing geometric streaks, but Pelly has clearly set up a largely autonomous system not limited by its musical input. As Giffoni and Pelly performed, I experienced a genuine counterpoint between video and music with my attention moving back and forth between the two. The form felt like a series of short stories, each held together by a short wobbly rope bridge: an immediate, but still substantive transition. Giffoni plays his modular brilliantly, and it was a delight to have his throbbing bitcrushed melodic clouds dance around my eardrums.
Daniel Menche
Menche, like all of the night’s performers, is a musical polyglot. Portland-based and active since the late 80’s, he has made sounds in just about any way imaginable over the past 35 years. Whereas Giffoni’s and Pelly’s set was the Calvino collection of semi-related stories, Menche’s set was the epic novel condensed into 25 minutes. It felt like something in the air had changed, as a glacial wind had fully rolled in. Metallic tones folded onto themselves to create a glimmering sonic tapestry, growing rusty as a distortion slowly kicked in over the course of the set. Each knob turn gently sailed us elsewhere, but not too far away as we traversed over Menche’s sonic topography. By the end, the distortion had morphed into a full enveloping wall until receding into a final gust of wind. In the distance, I swear I could hear a melody.
Kevin Drumm
Drumm is the only artist on the show whose work I was previously familiar with. He’s a long-time Chicago-based computer musician, tabletop guitarist, and modular synth player, so I was ready for a sonic tidal wave in whatever form deemed necessary. Today it was two laptops, in front of Drumm on an elevated stage a good 10 feet behind where the other performers had been. I didn’t realize my brain was itchy until the opening laser point 12+ kHz tones gave it the scratch that it craved. As Drumm massaged my nervous system, the audio spectrum slowly began to fill out until these pinpoint tones enwrapped my entire being. This fullness of the sound left me with the wisdom that there are many ways to saturate the audio spectrum and that noise does not necessarily imply a timbral monolith. And we sat in this fullness, with small changes jostling the texture. These modulations never appeared to threaten the soundscape’s structural integrity, but as Drumm slowly replaced part by part, I came to the realization that he’s rebuilding his sonic Ship of Theseus. I truly could have marinated in any moment of this performance for hours. And then suddenly, with a swipe of a fader and a slap of the hands on the table, it’s over. I love when pieces end like this: no coda, no spoon feeding, no bullshit. With Drumm’s facetious “booooo” at an encore chant, 3 hours of sonic smothering had come to a close.
The show reminded me that “noise music” is not an easily connotable aesthetic signifier, but rather a community: adorned with lofi scuba tanks made of pedals, synths, patches, and contact mics and committed to diving into the depths of the fully saturated audio spectrum. They’re off the deep end, but that’s because the shallows are so boring.
Kevin Drumm, Daniel Menche, Carlos Giffoni + Alex Pelly, and Peter Kolovos at 2220 Arts and Archives
No Fun Productions + Black Editions Group
March 23, 2023
Dave Longstreth on composition, Song of the Earth, and playing Dirty Projectors shows again
It’s been a while since I sat down with a composer to talk about an upcoming LA Phil premiere, but when I saw that one of my favorite artists, Dirty Projectors’ founder and leader Dave Longstreth, was premiering a massive piece for the orchestra at Disney Hall on March 2, I thought it was a good time to jump back in. Dave and I had a lovely and wide ranging talk via Zoom about his processes and how he’s developed as an artist in the twenty years he’s spent with his band, and of course dug into the new piece, Song of the Earth. Enjoy our talk below.
I heard the Song Exploder interview on Up In Hudson a really long time ago, in which you mentioned that you had come up with a beat by trying to remember another beat without checking to see how close you were. And then I found out you had done the same thing, in a sense, for the Black Flag record, so I’ve got a two-parter based on that. First, if you could just talk about what attracts you to that process because you’ve done it more than once, and second, if creating compositional challenges for yourself to generate material or drive what you’re doing is also something you dig. If so, do you have any others that you use regularly?
Yeah, wow, great question. And thank you. We’re just diving in. So yeah, I mean, I think that memory is such an interesting part of creating. The way that our memories are subjective, the way our memories are imperfect, the way over time our memories become imbued with, you know, with our sensibility, with our… world view, maybe, makes writing that way compelling to me.
First of all, I have what feels like a vivid memory of this thing, maybe this beat that I heard on the radio in 2003, or this Black Flag album that I loved when I was in middle school. I have a vivid memory of it because it made such a strong impression on me in the first place, and in a way, maybe both of these things were sort of formative for my worldview, for my outlook, for my sensibility. And what has happened since then in the sort of internal mechanisms of my emotional brain? That sort of distortion is really compelling to me.
Actually, I don’t think I had really connected how similar those two sort of prompts were.
Oh, that jumped right out at me!
Well, yeah, and then the second part of your question. Can you remind me what it was?
Yeah, it’s just whether creating prompts or challenges or restrictions for yourself is a way that you like to generate material, or force yourself to come up with ideas or anything like that when composing.
Yeah, I could think it’s less of a prompt and more like just a game, or even just something that starts circling around in your head and you just get a desire to explore it, to go further. It arrives, maybe as you’re saying, in the form of a question. Yeah. Exploring things I can’t quite figure out is one of the things I love about writing music.
I think we agree about that actually. So as far as getting into being a composer, slash artist, slash et cetera. I saw that you briefly went to Yale, which is known as an elite classical music kind of school. I wondered about your decision to leave. Was it an artistic thing?
Well, I did finish school. I lived for a while with every intention of not returning and then when I was gone was when I released the first Dirty Projectors records. It became sort of popular lore that I had left. But I did go back.
Oh? Gotta update your Wikipedia…
Oh man! So yeah, it’s funny. I love…I love the music, you know? I love the music of the classical canon. And I love the textures. And I love the melodies. I think it’s just such a rich sort of history and such a rich tradition. And there’s just such an unbelievable amount of just amazing music. I think when I was in school I had a little bit of a chip on my shoulder about it being a closed canon, about that history having elapsed… that history having finished, and I was very eager to go out and get started.
I consider the university a place where things are sort of dissected and autopsied as opposed to being a place for something more living. More alive. So I was just eager to get out of there. I think I was essentially unteachable, but I am grateful to have actually learned a lot about orchestration when I was there.
What do you think made you unteachable?
Well, just what I’m saying. I had a chip on my shoulder. I was ready to go out there and play shows in Greenpoint in a basement to eight people. That’s what I wanted. That’s what I was ready to do. And I was just very eager to do that.
I think, though, maybe I’m underselling my reverence for… certainly the rules of counterpoint. I was passionate about it. At the same time I held it with a deep grain of salt. The study of music theory, the study of orchestration, the study of counterpoint, I took everything with a big grain of salt.
That makes a ton of sense. Since you mentioned basement shows and the whole DIY world…a lot of people refer to your earlier stuff as lo fi. I get into a little trouble around this with my own music because some of it exists in that lo fi sound world but I really, really care about clarity at the production level. Stereo image is important! Anyway, since you produce your own music, and the sound world is incredibly clear and direct, I wonder if you see a kind of path from the DIY basement vibe to the more sonically refined work you do now, or if that’s a conscious contrast, or…
Yeah, I mean, that’s an interesting question. I think of it as a continuum. And I agree with, I think, one of the things that you just said, which is that it’s a very detailed stereo image!
You can make choices about fidelity. You can make textures that are a little bit ambiguous. Those are colors. Those are beautiful colors, especially when you’re using them as it sounds like you are, thoughtfully and with intention. Then we’re just using a very wide canvas, and can aim at textures that are less defined, or hazier, and have more ambiguity in them, or we can aim at textures that are very clear and very recognizable. Why not use that whole range, that whole spectrum?
I think with some of those earlier records I just had what was available to me, and so that’s a bit lower fi than what I have available to me now, but it is also what it was.
You know? I love it. I love it. That tradition of indie rock too, you know. Guided by Voices and Pavement, and home recording artists I love. I think those early Dirty Projectors records were in dialogue with them. I considered myself in that sort of tradition, in dialogue with that music.
So as you’ve kinda gotten—I don’t know if the right word is resources or access or fancier gear, or more production skill, or—
Not being such a punk about it?
Yeah, that’s it. What I wondered is if your approach to writing has changed much as you’ve had access to more resources.
One way or another, every album, every body of work that you make is just different. It’s a different moment in your life. It’s a different moment in our culture’s relationship with technology. One way or another, the tools have ended up being different every time. And you’re a different person, of course.
Every record is just a different thing. I’ve actually been marveling a little bit at what feels like a moment of cyclical return for me on Song of the Earth [Dave’s piece with the LA Phil]. I feel really connected now to the way I thought about songs and the possibilities of music when I was starting out in my teens and twenties, and it feels interesting.
Was there something that kind of removed you from that feeling in the interim? I mean, you’ve been in a touring band for a long time…
Since I became a professional musician? Of course considerations of what works on stage, or even passive or unconscious considerations of an audience’s expectation, begin to sit there in the room with you.
Because Song of the Earth began in a pandemic moment, and also in a moment when I had just had my daughter, it really just felt like some of those edges were softer. Some of those lines had dissolved, and I made something that surprised me, and confounded me a lot. And so it’s been really rewarding to make this piece.
It’s gotta be exciting. Since we talked about memory earlier, is a similar process sort of going on here with Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde?
Absolutely. As I’ve continued to write and revise the piece, the connections between the Mahler and this one have become softer and, in a way, other aspects or connections to that piece have become stronger.
In a conscious way?
No, unconsciously. I really love the Mahler orchestral songs, the Rükert-Lieder and Kindertotenlieder, particularly with Janet Baker singing. I love those recordings so much. And those orchestrations, too, are so, so wonderful, so beautiful.
Two or three years ago I hadn’t really spent that much time with Das Lied von der Erde. I found it imposing and just so dense that it was difficult to have it open for me. And then it did, and I got super into it. And I love that. It’s this meditation on the impermanence of all things. On a very simple, basic level. I just like that. And I like that phrase, “the song of the earth.”
I think honestly just that simple aesthetic appeal is what kept bringing me back to Song of the Earth, to Das Lied von der Erde for a while. And then, there’s something with that title. What is that title? It’s grand, even grandiose. It’s portentous. And then this huge work with this big title ends up being so much about fragility and the passages of things from growth and bloom into a sort of wispy autumnal character. And then passing. I just thought it was really beautiful.
It seems like the medium in which you’ve been creating has included chamber and orchestral music more and more often, at least over the last decade. Was getting back into the classical world a deliberate decision?
I think that I’ve always been interested in writing scored music, and I think that for most of my professional life I’ve been so focused on Dirty Projectors, that everything I’ve written has gone through the prism of the band. There are a fair number of string arrangements and that sort of thing all over the Projectors records. But they’re tucked into a strong fabric. You might notice them less. And so I think in the last couple of years I’ve really…been changed. My attitude is a bit about just allowing things to live outside of the band, to do other things and have more streams open to me, and to write dedicated concert music seems so fun to me. And so this is that.
Does that feel freeing?
Yeah. Or it’s certainly a new challenge, a different thing than what I have been doing.
So regarding doing band stuff then, how do your bandmates learn your parts? Dirty Projectors songs are often super hocketed and extremely technical. I wondered if you have had to notate it for people to learn it.
No, we don’t do any scored stuff in the band. And you know Olga [Bell], who’s playing in Song of the Earth and was in the band on the Swing Lo [Magellan] tour cycle is a virtuosic classical pianist. So she’s very comfortable in and familiar with the notated page. And Maia [Friedman] is to some extent as well. But no, with the band it’s always just listening. Listening and practicing.
You start slow. You speed up over time. And it’s just a lot of rehearsal, people practicing individually, then us coming together and rehearsing for a long time.
That makes sense. I mean, I find when you learn stuff by rote, it’s the best way to lock in a group.
For sure. And for hocketing specifically. I just think there’s nothing like muscle memory.
So for the show with the LA Phil, they’re billing it as songs from across the entire Projectors discography. Since you’re focused on newer pieces, what’s your relationship like with those older songs when you play them live?
We’re gonna play a set of music from all different eras of Projectors. It’s great to go back to the older material. It always feels different. I think, particularly in this context, it’s going to feel really fresh. I’m really looking forward to it because between having kids and the pandemic and everything, it’s really been a minute since the Projectors played. So I’m really excited to go back to play material from across the records.
That’s awesome. I just have a couple of quick questions left, because I know you’ve gotta get back to mixing. One of my best friends—this might seem weird—you’re his favorite musician/producer. He even commissioned a portrait for his studio—
Whoa! I wanna see that.
I will send it over!
I asked my friend what I should ask, and he wanted to know when we might hear the Alarm Will Sound live recordings of your piece The Getty Address.
Oh, it’s on a hard drive! When I’ve shown Song of the Earth work in progress to my brother, he’s like “dude, this is Getty Address part 2.” So this stuff is very connected to that piece.
I think what happened is that I just got impatient by the time we had done those shows. We did get the recordings of them, but by the time we had done it I was ready to move on to the next thing. And they’re just sitting on a hard drive. They’re beautiful performances. Maybe we’ll reissue the record at some point and include those as sort of additional material. That would be cool… thanks for asking. Thank your friend for the idea.
What’s your musical obsession as of late?
Oh, wow! Well, let’s think here. I listen to different music at different times of day. [long pause] If I think about what I’ve listened to a lot recently, the gagaku music from the court of Imperial Japan has been really resonant with me. I’ve been pretty obsessed with Parsifal, the Wagner opera. And then this earlier Reich piece, from the 70s, one for mallets, women voices, and Farfisa [Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices, and Organ]. I’ve been listening to that because it’s just such an insane recording. I never spent that much time with that one, but it’s just really, really amazing. And then 70s Brazilian music as well. That’s fun to listen to with my daughter.
Same question, but about gear.
Oh, dear. We have got a 1969 Yamaha baby grand piano in our living room, and that’s really changed my relationship with music. I love to play that thing. I like to write on it—a lot of the music I’ve written lately has been on it.
And to close: what’s a musical love of yours that you wish more people knew about or listened to?
Oh, that’s an interesting one. Perennially underrated. Okay, I would say Little Wings. He’s a songwriter, lives down here in Southern California. Just such an amazing lyricist, and it’s such an incredible kind of universe he’s continuing to spin out for everyone. I wish more people knew his music.
Well, thank you! I’m really excited for the show.
Thank you so much. I know, me too. Yeah, I can’t wait.
The March 2 show also features opener Mount Eerie. Info at laphil.com/events/performances/2879/2024-03-02/dirty-projectors-with-the-la-phil.
WildUp and LACO explore the composer-curator model in a weekend of performances
Last Friday, I drove through a brisk Beverly Hills evening to get to TreePeople, an environmentalist center located deep in the Hollywood Hills. Later I would learn that TreePeople had existed for fifty years in Los Angeles, planting thousands of trees in fire-stricken areas in southern California, but it was my, and many others’ first time there. Not unlike WildUp’s previous co-productions with floating at the Audubon Center, this event placed a chamber-sized configuration of WildUp in an atypical concert setting; the audience set up chairs, blankets and yoga mats beneath trees surrounding a performance space, two chairs and a table staged against a now pitch black Los Angeles skyline. I claimed a spot on the dirt as Mattie Barbier and Ashley Walters began playing Barbier’s no dirt to call for prepared brass and cello. Alternating long tones from both instrumentalists dovetailed into one another, reveling in the delicate composite texture of hair-on-string and reed-on-brass; I hope I mentioned that Barbier outfitted their euphonium with (what looks like) a saxophone mouthpiece in place of the standard euphonium mouthpiece. Barbier’s score explored the limits of this construction, dancing on the razor’s edge of playability, each sound seemingly a Herculean task of balance as the two halves of the instrument, built without considering the other, were coerced to play together. Walters provided a dependable but equally considered counterpoint, an anchor for the more delicate brass tones to blend into.
Mattie Barbier performed the other two pieces on the program solo: Ellen Arkbro’s Chords for brass and fixed media electronics, and a performance of Phil Niblock’s A Trombone Piece which was presented for solo trombone and pre-recorded trombone choir. The latter was offered as a tribute to the composer, as Niblock had passed earlier this month, and had had a large impact on Barbier’s music making from an early age. Both pieces were singular, loud, encompassing, and unrelenting; I (admiringly) use the word “indulgent” for this music, pieces which pick a compelling musical idea and insist on it for its entire duration. After the show a light rain started to fall, and I listened to its continuous thrum on the roof of my car as I drove home.
By Saturday, the drizzle had evolved into a downpour as I fought Long Beach traffic to get to the Museum of Latin American Art (MOLAA) for CURRENT: [INTI]MATE, an evening of chamber music curated by inti figgis-vizueta, a composer whose recent music has Carnegie, Spoleto and REDCAT under the hands of the Attacca Quartet, American Composers Orchestra, and Andrew Yee. The program weaves together music from composers of the Latine diaspora, including arrangements of Violeta Parra’s Anticuecas, culminating in a new work from the curator herself. These were the highlights of the program; a clear love of melody is evident in the folkloric Anticuecas, and an equally strong affinity for texture and timbre are present in figgis-vizeuta, Negrón and Balter’s selections. The arrangements were clever, and the program’s structure (loosely alternating older and newer pieces) worked well.
The presentation was marred by some other circumstances; the guitar was curiously unamplified, and the pieces with electronics were imaged oddly (they were played through small pre-installed speakers in the gallery drop ceiling). Half-concert and half-gala, quiet sections of music were interrupted by attendees getting up to get food and wine, rain-soaked shoes squeaking across the slick floor. These are perhaps the necessary growing pains of a new series foregrounding contemporary music in new curatorial models, in untraditional venues which eschew the admittedly sometimes-stifling, sometimes-confusing standard concert etiquette. Though I know I’m comparatively sensitive to extraneous noises, and some hiccups are bound to happen in any concert environment, it’s just a bit of a shame when they affect how the music is presented.
That said, both events are demonstrative of a curatorial model that I enjoy; an organization putting time and resources behind a young contemporary musician in untraditional ways. Other Los Angeles new music organizations like Synchromy and Monday Evening Concerts have done the same, to recent successes, and I hope others continue to follow suit.
For more information about these events:
https://endless-season.wildup.org/2023-24/event/barbier-arkbro/
On Patience and Sustenance: Microtonal Brass Works by Ellen Arkbro and Sarah Davachi
Slow, barebones music engenders highly attentive listening. Each breath becomes a gesture and every compositional decision bears immense responsibility. In this music, details do not support a gesture: they are the gesture. So on Sunday December 17th, 2023, I was delighted to hear many of Los Angeles’ finest brass players perform a program of patiently glacial chamber works in just-intonation at Automata Theater in Chinatown.
The program began with Ellen Arkbro’s clouds, originally premiered in 2022 by the tuba trio Microtub. The audience encircled an ensemble donning the slightly altered instrumentation of Mattie Barbier on euphonium, Luke Storm on tuba, and Mason Moy on tuba. From the first chord, the immense resonance of the two tubas and euphonium, amplified by Automata’s reverberant interior, shook my organs like Jell-O. The richness of the low brass amplified the quivering beating patterns of Arkbro’s precise overtone-derived harmonies to epic levels. For the duration of the work, it was as if I was inside of a colossal church organ.
As compared to the pieces of Arkbro’s with which I am familiar, often based in sustenance of a single idea, clouds has a more dynamic narrative structure. Three blocky structures define the 20 minute performance: unison chords, layered harmonies with delayed entrances, and a concluding sustained drone with a shifting bassline. This coda is unique: in much of the piece, the upper two voices shift over a sustained bass pedal-point, while here, Arkbro reverses those roles. Barbier’s and Moy’s superb circular breathing brings this culminating drone to stillness, as Storm delicately places and replaces the bass. Here, Arkbro brings attention to the ability of a singular voice to recontextualize and reimagine a static harmony. A drone is perhaps less fixed than we might imagine.
After a short break, we resituated our chairs into a multi-directional tangle to orient ourselves towards the spatially organized ensemble for Sarah Davachi’s Long Gradus (brass). Situated in the four corners of the room, the ensemble now surrounded the audience. Davachi offers some insights into the piece in her liner notes on Bandcamp. She originally composed Long Gradus for the microtonal string quartet specialists Quatuor Bozzini for the 2020 Gaudeamus Muziekweek in Utrecht. COVID delayed the premiere, which allowed Davachi the time to expand the work into its patient hour-long form. Although originally composed for string quartet, Davachi opens the instrumentation to any quartet of instruments with the ability to alter their intonation. This rendition of the piece was performed by the newly formed Diapason Brass Quartet of Nev Wendell on trumpet, Nick Ginsburg on horn, Mattie Barbier on trombone, and Mason Moy on tuba.
Throughout the work, the slowly pulsing lights in Automata cast a sequence of shifting shadows on the floor: a dynamic tapestry of ghostly limbs fading into and out of existence. This seemingly inconsequential detail serendipitously focused my listening towards shadows and patterns as an essential element of Davachi’s piece. The successive repetitions constituted a cubist rendering of a phrase’s shadow, until five minutes passed and I suddenly realized that I was no longer listening to the same shadow. Breath was equally vital. An undulating textural density of sustained tones created a pointillistic tessellation: fragmented, as if by four phantom asynchronous delay pedals. Unisions felt like a happy treat, as did silences. This allochronic meter allowed this brass-quartet version to differentiate itself from the sustained string quartet version beyond timbre (as I suppose bows do not need to breathe). The ensemble’s steadfast stability in their non-vibrato longtones over the course of the hour constituted a remarkable feat of musical/physical endurance. The resonance of the space allowed for the combination tones to tickle my eardrums, especially when Moy brought in a cavernous bass note. Davachi’s commitment to deliberate change did not lead my ear to a clear resting point, but rather demonstrated a devotion to metamorphosis. There is no “home” or V-I, but rather a diasporic wandering to elsewhere. A piece like this reminds me of one of my favorite literary quotes, from Octavia Butler’s’ Parable of the Sower: “God is Change.”
Davachi and Arkbro show us that work employing the harmonies of the overtone series need not to obsess with the harmonies themselves, but rather engage the altered processes of listening that such tunings beget. These are trans-temporal works: drawing from the non-metric monophony and hocketing polyphony of plainchant, Renaissance and Baroque temperament, and the stripped down non-expressive minimalism of Wandelweiser. The night’s expert brass performers brought out every detail from this ostensibly simple music, highlighting the underlying complexity of a long-tone. I am grateful that such investigative and patient art exists to grant me the curiosity to examine the details of our world. Maybe through such thorough investigation, can we begin to rearrange those details into something new and more just.
this may be the most ethically compromised review you’ll ever read: Yarn/Wire at FRANKIE presented by Monday Evening Concerts
Yarn/Wire is a quartet composed of two percussionists (Sae Hashimoto and Russell Greenberg) and two pianists (Laura Barger and Julia Den Boer). They presented two beautiful concerts earlier this month in large warehouse space FRANKIE in the Arts District, presented by Jonathan Hepfer and Monday Evening Concerts.
Yarn/Wire is also my favorite chamber ensemble. I have attended their summer Institute twice. I have my own 2pno/2perc ensemble based largely on the work they’ve done, taking advantage of their large commissioned body of work. I have another mostly-piano ensemble in which ALL of the members have attended the Institute. They have played my music, and I have played theirs.
I also work (as Associate Producer) for Monday Evening Concerts, the longest running new music ensemble in Los Angeles, about to enter its 85th year, and helped produce these programs (and run live sound). I’ve known Jonathan Hepfer from our overlapping stays at CalArts, since 2017.
Though I’ve never made any claims otherwise, I feel like it’s only right that I tell you that this may be the most ethically compromised review you’ll ever read. I tend to get involved with lots of new music orgs here in Los Angeles, so to find a concert that I’m completely agnostic to is a bit of a challenge. But even so, it’s almost funny to find myself this intertwined in a production.
So, in order to ease any (assuredly mostly self-directed) claims of unfair bias, the format of this review will need to change. Instead of offering an opinion, I’ll take you through a bit of my day as I work through the two concerts.
The audience were seated in a round, surrounding the ensemble, with speakers at the perimeter of the room facing inward, and around the ensemble facing outward. The first concert began with a work by Tyondai Braxton in which (in its recorded version) it is difficult to discern who is playing what, when, and where. Its title gives you hints (“music for ensemble and pitch shifter/delay”) and when seen live (here in a rare performance and its West Coast premiere), you can see how much the electronics are playing with the ensemble – not under, or against. The program notes (which hilariously are written by me) note how the live processing fills in the gaps horizontally (hocketing against the instrumentalists) and vertically (filling in registers, especially low ones, that the musicians themselves are not playing). I love the ambiguity of what is “played” and what is processed in the recorded version of this piece, and my goal as the live sound engineer in presenting it was to try to replicate that experience for the audience that would most likely be hearing it for the first time.
After a moment for applause, the piano lids were closed with small microphones placed inside; Sarah Davachi’s “Feedback Studies for Percussion” relies on the performers’ ability to manually balance their own sounds constructed by overtone reinforcement and acoustic feedback, aided secondarily by the microphones at each instrument. The closed piano lids create an acoustic chamber, in which certain resonant frequencies are encouraged to gather by the size and shape of the open space in the pianos. This, combined with the ringing metals played by the percussionists, creates a composite mass of sound that, at its best, is just on the edge of spilling over into “too much.” The performance functions on multiple parameters of this feeling of “spilling over”; I was told, as the live sound engineer, to push the sound as loud as I could before feeding back. The performers are doing this ‘manually’ as well, using their ears and pacing sensibilities to keep the machine whirring without letting the built up energy expire or crest too quickly. There is even a physical analogue to this in the ringing metals; gongs and some other large metal idiophones have a kinetic actuation point; you hit it a little too hard, and overtones spill out of the instrument and the quality of the sound changes drastically. There is a feeling of control, balance and sustain, coupled somehow non-paradoxically with a sense of “leaning forward” through its roughly 20-minute run time.
Andrew McIntosh’s “Little Jimmy” closes the program, a delicately constructed piece obituarizing the trees in and around the Little Jimmy campsite in the Angeles National Forest on Mt. Islip. The field recordings used in the piece are part of the collective memory of Little Jimmy which burned in the 2020 Bobcat Fire; the psithurism here is one of few ways left to experience the trees (that word is “the sound of the wind through leaves”, a word I must have picked up from from McIntosh himself). “Little Jimmy” loves high metals and scraped stones, pairing them alternatingly with a marching 16th note piano statement, and bowed metals. The piece exists in a mirror form, at the heart of which sits a slowly-unfolding hum of bowed piano which grows over ten minutes into a roar, with Yarn/Wire wailing on bell plates and the lowest notes on the piano. After the dust settles, we think we hear birds and the wind through the trees again. The field recordings exist sometimes at the edge of audibility; before the concert, I asked McIntosh how I should balance the field recordings to the quartet, to which he said “like it’s a quintet” and walked away.
The second concert began two hours after the sunlight had left the room; the large globe lights above the audience were dimmed, the centre lights completely shut off, with four paper lanterns added surrounding the ensemble to provide local light. The atmosphere seemed to pull the audience in closer to listen to the first piece of the second program, Klaus Lang’s “Molten Trees.” This is a favorite Yarn/Wire commission of mine; superballed bass drums punctuated by antiphonal claves is just somehow a perfect sound. It begins the piece, which then gives way to a forest of triangles, then a continual exploration of sustained sounds. The warbling of a vibraphone motor, the hum of an e-bow on piano string, the hammering chords on a piano all work to create a cloth of different textures; the sections of “Molten Trees” change slowly enough to draw your attention into the details, how the rhythm of one sustain is just barely faster than the other. How the chime attacks blend together smoothly while the drier piano material continues to run on top. Somehow, in glacially moving chunks of sound, each interaction between instrumentalists creates a vibrant composite inner rhythm. Then, click, claves return. It is an unbelievably effective marker of a recapitulation; it is a little baffling at how much like “home” that material feels after listening to sound masses of different densities and textures for twenty minutes.
Sarah Hennies’ “Primers” closes both the program, and Yarn/Wire’s residency in Los Angeles. The program note, which, again, sorry, was written by me, explains: “Primers, like much of Sarah Hennies’ music of this time, is constructed in clean, discrete durational blocks which intersect, overlap, interrupt and dovetail. A hocketing musical gesture in one half of the ensemble persists, unchangingly, yet somehow still feels vibrant when the other half interrupts three minutes later. Frankly a masterwork in pacing and structure, Primers is simultaneously placid and rapid, slow and frenetic, unchanging yet continuously evolving. Primers invites both detailed listening and zoning out, and delivers a musical line which simultaneously intrigues, perplexes and captivates the listener.“ Yet another West Coast premiere (the fourth of the night), this piece was foundational to the programming of the evening since the very beginning of the production cycle; other pieces were added and stricken from the list, but Hennies was included since day one, months ago. My program note gives away some of my incredulity at the effective simplicity of the material, the piece works remarkably well; perhaps because of its simple construction, not in spite of it. The same musical material persists unchangingly for minutes at a time, giving you just enough time to wonder what’s coming next, yet still shock when it does.
I heard a few concert-goers expound afterwards, with the recurring thought that putting Hennies and Lang on the same program may have been a programming error, and may have taxed the audience with its similarities. To me, this pairing was brilliant; both pieces share an affection for long stretches of material, registral extremes, and love of dry, percussive events. However, its shared characteristics may cloud each piece’s strong individual identities; where one stays on a single sound for minutes at a time, the other constantly morphs through added layers. Where one revels in continuous gridded rhythm, the other explores motion through dovetailing lines of music. The friction in this juxtaposition shows you how different two pieces with the same ingredients could be; the push of two opposing magnets that you know should belong together, I mean they look the same, don’t they?
YARN / WIRE – ‘MOLTEN TREES’
GUEST ENSEMBLE RESIDENCY
TWO PROGRAMS :
DECEMBER 9, 2023 | 4PM and 8PM
at FRANKIE, LOS ANGELES | 300 S MISSION RD, 90033
https://www.mondayeveningconcerts.org/
https://www.yarnwire.org/