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Concert you should go to: Piano Spheres next Tuesday

By Nick Norton | 01/24/2012

On Tuesday, January 31, at 8 pm, Kathleen Supové is playing an all LA premiere program with Piano Spheres down at Zipper Hall at Colburn. GO. Three of the five works have video with them. Supové is a monster player. The thing that excites me most about it, however, is getting to hear Carolyn Yarnell’s piece The Same Sky. I know absolutely nothing about Carolyn Yarnell, but Kyle Gann called the piece “one of the most fantastic keyboard works anyone’s written in the last 20 years,” and he’s absolutely right. Click here to read his blog entry about the piece, among other things. I’ve shown this recording to a lot of friends, and they all seem to be similarly blown away. Even the ones with no interest in classical music as such.

Here’s a recording:

And here’s the poster for the show:

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Out West Arts’ review of Nicholas Deyoe record release party

By Nick Norton | 01/18/2012

Our friends over at Out West Arts were able to make it to the populist records/Nicholas Deyoe CD release party in Echo Park on Monday, and have posted an awesome review of it, with video and such, here:

http://outwestarts.blogspot.com/2012/01/window-dressing.html

Meanwhile, we’ll have an interview up with the label founders sometime in the next couple of weeks. This is an exciting time to be a musician in LA.

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Nicholas Deyoe record release party is tomorrow afternoon

By Nick Norton | 01/15/2012

Slightly late notice, but Nicholas Deyoe‘s record with throbbing eyes, which features Red Fish Blue Fish, The Formalist Quartet, Stephanie Aston, and Brendan Nguyen, is coming out this Tuesday, January 17th. It will be the first release from Populist Records, a new label based in Echo Park, owned and operated by Andrew McIntosh and Andrew Tholl.

The release party will be held on Monday at Machine Project from 1 to 4 pm, and Mr. Tholl mentioned to me that, in addition to performances and Eagle Rock Brewing’s Populist IPA (which is delicious), there would be cupcakes. As such, I highly recommend going, and am again saddened by the prohibitive 9 to 5 lifestyle that I’ve adopted as of late.

I’ll have a review of the record up here soon. But why wait for me to review it when you could go hear it yourself, live, with cupcakes? Complete details are on populistrecords.com.

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Interview: Conductor Chris Rountree on wild Up

By Nick Norton | 01/12/2012 |

Forgive me for hyperbolizing here, but it seems like you can’t throw a stone at a new music event in LA without hitting Chris Rountree. With his extremely busy conducting and teaching schedule, it’s amazing that he has time for anyone else’s shows at all, yet he seems to be there to support his fellow musicians every chance he gets.


Chris is busy indeed. He’s the artistic director/founder/conductor/manager/etc. of wild Up  (who we have mentioned on here quite a bit before, with good reason), assistant conducting in Brooklyn, artistically advising the American Youth Symphony, teaching conducting at UCSB and elsewhere, releasing a record…the list goes on. With wild Up’s show at The Armory coming up this weekend, I’m lucky he found time to answer a few questions.

Right off the bat, you’ve got a show coming up this weekend, and it’s all about birds. Tell me something about that.

Birds! Yes. We’re crazy about them. (and so many composers have been!)

Ha, so they have. Your programming this season is diverse, but every show seems to have a thread holding everything together. How do you go about programming?

We’re interested in exploring ideas and exploring them from a variety of angles. Our main concern is how the audience will feel in the concert — how comfortable or uncomfortable they’ll be and how each piece creates context for the next.

So this time we started with Olivier Messiaen’s piano concerto: Oiseaux exotiques and went — stream of consciousness from there to Charlie Parker, to Haydn, to new complexity composer Brian Ferneyhough to indie rocker Andrew Bird. It’s become a crazy program.

On that front, can you identify anything that makes a piece stand out as being right for wild Up?

There’s some mystery here. I want to be able to feel the music we play in my gut. Visceral is the best description — but that doesn’t altogether do it. Also, it’s how well the piece fits into the program we’re considering — more about the fit actually than anything else.

At wild Up’s last concert I was sitting with Lacey Huszcza, the director of advancement of the LA Chamber Orchestra, when you decided to offer an autographed brick to an audience member whose had an obstructed view. She said something along the lines of “wow, I wish we could do that for our unhappy patrons.” Why do you think your audience is so much more receptive to stuff like that than a traditional classical audience? Do you think it’s about the demographic you’re attracting, or the vibe that you and the band seem to embody?

The Brick! Oh right. So, that was a last minute decision — we saw that three to five seats were very bad at Beyond Baroque. One is shared with a fire-extinguisher, one is a 1.5 person wooden love-seat-pew, one was directly behind a pole, and one was right under a trumpet bell. In honoring the audience we wanted to improve the experience of one or more of the people who happened to end up with those seats. A signed brick (signed bricks and obsolete printer the second night) did the trick.

I hope our audiences have come to expect nothing. Maybe, just to enjoy themselves. So they have to be receptive to things like this — because they didn’t expect tuxedos and coughing. It could be the aesthetic — I’m not sure. As long as it feels like we’re all characters together in some big adventure, I’ll be happy.

We once talked about feeling like we were right on the cusp of becoming professionals. That you, and the members of wild Up, were getting gigs all over town, and beginning to get some notoriety and releasing CDs and even getting paid a bit, but you were still all working extra jobs to make rent. This is a big question, but for you, where’s the line? Are you taking this concert by concert, or working toward a concrete set of goals?

We have goals. To succeed, I believe that’s a necessity. At this point, we’re planning a season at a time and moving toward being presented versus presenting ourselves — which has been wonderful and painful experience — some serious learning has taken place for all of us in the past two years.

You also teach conducting, or at least started to recently. Has teaching influenced your performance practice at all, and your working with your own performers?

I love teaching. In fact, I’ve been doing it for a decade (I’m 28) teaching: high school marching band, youth orchestra, community orchestras, pre-professional orchestras, college orchestras, middle school brass players, private conducting students, partners attempting to cook improperly and most recently students at UCSB.

Through teaching we learn so much — mostly, I’ve found, I learn about psychology — how people learn, how they want to be worked with, what collaboration looks like, what a dictatorship looks like, etc.

I know you guys are working to release a recording of the Shostakovich Chamber Symphony on limited-edition vinyl, which totally gets me nostalgic for NoFX’s 7 inch of the month club. Were you consciously drawing on the punk tradition there? Also, will you please play at Origami Vinyl for the release party?

Yeah, we’re working on releasing our album “Shostakovich and Rzewski, The Salt of the Earth” on vinyl and digitally — actually we have a kickstarter going at the moment. People can help us on Kickstarter and we’ll give them nice gifts!

Punk rock of the month club! Not intentionally, but we’re happy to reference that.

The recording was made live at the Jensen Rec. Center Studio, recorded and mixed by Nick Tipp. We didn’t make any edits, there are still errors on the album. But we mixed the tracks to feel like your head is inside a cello.

What’s next for wild Up?

We have shows in March at Beyond Baroque: Craft: DIY Art Music. Brooklyn vs. LA and in May at the Armory again, a program called: The Armory actually, the music is Stravinsky, Palestrina, and Slayer.

And for Chris Rountree?

I’m teaching in Santa Barbara, composing in Highland Park, Assistant Conducting in Brooklyn, Advising American Youth Symphony in LA and…drinking coffee at Intelligentsia.

And since you are a native, I’m sure readers would love to know about your current favorite:

1. Neighborhood

Highland Park

2. Place to hear music

Walt Disney Concert Hall (one of my favorite buildings, period.)

3. Restaurant

Let’s do a whole other interview about this! But for now: Elf in Echo Park

4. Bar/hang out

Verdugo Bar / Intelligentsia in Pasadena (the official band hangout…and SPONSOR!)

5. Store

Apple Store. RIP Steve Jobs

6. Thing to do/see

….the beach.

Anything else you’d like to add?

More to come, hopefully.

Click here to purchase tickets for wild Up’s next concert, this Saturday, January 14 at the Armory Center for the Arts. To donate to their record campagin, visit kickstarter.com.
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Happy 2012!

By Nick Norton | 12/31/2011

someecards.com - Let's not spend New Year's Eve trying to figure out where to spend New Year's Eve

For 2012, I’ve resolved to interview a bunch of people and write a bunch of features about concerts, record releases, and so forth. It’s been an awesome first few months running the blog. Thanks for reading and being a part of the new music scene in LA.

Have a good, safe, etc., NYE.

Posted in News

#Armada finish their first piece

By Nick Norton | 12/15/2011

#Armada, an international group of composers writing music collaboratively via Twitter, just completed and released the score to their first piece. I’m attached to it, because the project was my idea, but it features another composer from LA who has been interviewed here on the site, Dale Trumbore. This first piece, which is for solo piano, will also be performed in LA early in the new year, although details about that are forthcoming.

Basically, whoever starts the piece writes one bar, then tags someone on Twitter to write the next bar, and so forth, until someone decides to use their tag to insert a final double bar line. The tags get crazy. Here’s an example:

This piece started way back in July, and 29 composers participated. The score and a MIDI version are available at #Armada’s site, hashtagarmada.com. Check it out!

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wild Up are fundraising to release a limited edition vinyl

By Nick Norton | 12/13/2011 |

Well that headline more or less says it all. Wild Up are releasing a record on vinyl and for download called The Salt of the Earth. It will have Shostakovich’s Chamber Symphony, Op. 110A, on it, as well as Rzewski’s Les Moutons de Panurge.

You should help, because these guys are incredible musicians who put on incredible shows, and are really working hard to build a community for this kind of music- our kind of music- outside of the confines of a traditional concert hall situation.

The album art is below. Here’s a link to their blog entry about the record, and here’s one to their Kickstarter page, where you can make a donation.

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Interview: Composer/Percussionist Ben Phelps

By Nick Norton | 12/12/2011

When I started New ClassicLA, Ben Phelps wrote to me almost immediately. Aside from being very complimentary, he told me how excited he was about LA finally forming a proper new music scene, with ensembles like What’s Next? and others performing in clubs and alternative spaces far outside of Disney Hall. Ben has played all over town, from gigs as a percussionist at Disney Hall to a principal position with the American Youth Symphony. The music he’s been writing has been getting him a lot of attention throughout Southern California and beyond.

This Wednesday, What’s Next? Ensemble (of which Ben is a founding member) premieres his new work Six Ways to Be Alone at Royal/T in Culver City. After watching him nearly impersonate an octopus with the percussion parts at their last concert, I wouldn’t want to miss it. Plus they have good beer and cupcakes.

At What’s Next? Ensemble’s concert a few weeks ago, I overheard you talking to a composer about writing for marimba. You said something along the lines of “we need more real composers interested in writing for percussion. Mostly it’s percussionists trying their hand at writing something.” You, however, are both a percussionist and a composer. Tell me about how your two practices influence each other, and whether you have trouble balancing them or making sure you’re in top shape for both.

Well, it’s always trouble, and I’m not sure I ever am in total top shape for both. I tend to be a pretty obsessive composer, so one thing that helps me is that I’m not actually doing both simultaneously most of the time. I find it pretty impossible. If I’m writing a piece, I tend to get consumed and then just have to finish the piece before moving on. The rest of the time, I can practice, or feel guilty that I’m not. Multi-tasking is one of the worst inventions ever, I have massive inferiority complexes about my multi-tasking abilities.
So am I as good a percussionist as I would be if I weren’t also a composer? Probably not. However, I can say that I believe I’m a much better composer for having been so active a player- I’ve learned so much more about music from sitting in rehearsals and actually figuring out how to make stuff work than I ever did in a classroom. Actually, being a percussionist is pretty perfect for this because in a Mahler symphony, say, we tend to play so few notes. There’s a lot of time to sit and listen to how he uses the bassoon.

Talk with me about Six Ways to Be Alone, the piece you’ll be premiering. What was its genesis? What are you trying to do with the piece?

Well, initially I wanted to write some pop songs. I was wondering why the “serious” composer is expected to set poetry, instead of just writing a song (music and lyrics) like Bob Dylan. Also, you can’t be a young hip composer these days without trying to incorporate pop influences into your music. Otherwise you don’t fit into the critical narrative. However, I quickly found that writing pop songs for orchestral instruments can sound pretty lame. So while I liked the idea of saying I was working on a “rock opera,” the finished product might be pretty far removed from this initial conception. What I’m left with are some original songs about love and loss. Like most good songs.

Not having heard it yet, the title implies a very personal meaning. How do you feel about putting yourself into your music? Do you want to represent your own emotions and worldview and such, or let the music take on a character independent of yourself?

It’s not something I actively set out to do, I also don’t set out NOT to do it. It seems crazy to think “nothing of me is in this piece of art,” because one that’s bullshit, no matter how hard you try something about your circumstances and life went into the creation of that thing at that time, and two, I’m not sure the artist should consider that desirable. In any case, it’s pretty hopeless for me. Pieces I obsessed with at the time find their way into my music, as do my life situations and world views, and personality. I don’t fight it, isn’t that one of the things that makes art interesting? That said, music is abstract and it’s not like I set out to write an autobiography. I just want to write music that I find moving and meaningful, and sometimes that becomes more personal and sometimes less so.

With the previous questions in mind, do you prefer to explain and discuss your work with audiences, or let your music speak for itself? I ask because of the minimal (and quite eye-catching) program notes that What’s Next? used at their last concert, and because it seems like there are artistic and experiential implications when you discuss a work before listeners hear it.

Shrug. I’m a little indifferent. I get annoyed when an explanation becomes longer than the piece. But sometimes it’s nice to give the novice listener something to grab onto. Listening to music- really listening- is a learned art and you can’t expect to just throw people into classical music concerts and really understand everything. I hope that my music speaks for itself. I think sometimes you can get more from a piece if you know just a little more about it before you hear it. Or maybe even better after you hear it. I don’t think there will be any explanation for my piece in the program though.

Since you’re both composer and performer, and a very virtuosic and capable one at that, I’d like to know your feelings on the performer-composer relationship, and the role of individual virtuosity these days.

I’ll let you know how it goes when others have attempted my marimba solo. I can and do proselytize about the need for composers to write music that is no more difficult than it absolutely needs to be, but I’m not sure if I listen to my own advice.

What else is on the horizon for you?

I’m writing a string quartet (with trumpet) about Los Angeles. It’s called The Angels. Get it? My new percussion quartet will be premiered by the Los Angeles Percussion Quartet in the spring. And What’s Next? is a lot of work.

As always, since we are in fact promoting LA as place for people to come for music and beyond, what is your favorite:

1. Neighborhood

I’m a Los Angeles Cosmopolitan, not a Balkan.

2. Place to hear music

Hmm. Wherever it’s good? I guess I’m seen most at Disney concert hall, and the Blue Whale in Little Tokyo.

3. Restaurant

Well, I’ll give a plug to Malibu Seafood, in Malibu obviously.

4. Bar/hang out

I liked Wurstkuche before it was cool. My new favorite is BeerBelly, little Tokyo. Apparently they have lucky charms pancakes. I haven’t had those.

5. Store

I’ve never considered having a favorite store.

6. Thing to do/see

Concerts. And climbing mountains. That basically sums it up.
Check out the premiere of Six Ways to Be Alone this Wednesday at Royal/T in Culver City. For more information on Ben and What’s Next? Ensemble, visit benphelpscomposer.com and whatsnextensemble.com.
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It’s Better In The Wind film screening tonight

By Nick Norton | 11/30/2011

While it’s not exactly musical (musical updates are on the way, including a massive four-in-one review of lots of local action), LA-based photographer Scott Toepfer is screening a short film he made about his project It’s Better In The Wind at The Mandrake in Culver City tonight at 9. Scott is also one of the bassists in the band Honest Iago, also based out of LA.

The soundtrack has a few new cuts by Chuck Ragan, of Hot Water Music fame, which are generally awesome. There’s no cover, and inasmuch as we’re trying to build a new music scene, getting to know the other arts around town is pretty important too.

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