Midterms: This Will Hurt Someone
With election day just a week away, Tuesdays@Monk Space offered Midterms: This Will Hurt Someone, a concert program devoted to contemporary music with a political viewpoint.
Grab it, by Jacob TV opened the show, preceded by a recorded track of coarse street talk that blended into an equally angry video. The four hands of HOCKET accompanied, and the raw stream of words was perfectly matched by a dense and powerful outpouring of piano notes. The music reflected the passionate resentment of those caught up in the wheels of a system intent on punishing the small time street criminal. Scenes of prison life and enraged inmates gave way at the finish to a hymn-like stretch that spoke hopefully of a life reclaimed after incarceration. Grab it is a stark reminder of the failings of American justice and how it perpetuates a violent underclass.
This Will Hurt Someone, by the late Matt Marks followed, arranged by pianist Thomas Kotcheff who accompanied vocalist Gregory Fletcher. The text for this piece is the final statement of R. Bud Dwyer, State Treasurer of Pennsylvania, asserting his innocence upon conviction of bribery in 1987. The music has an easy, sweet feel, and the entrance of a toy piano played by Sarah Gibson added a childlike innocence to the words. Fletcher sang calmly and gently, navigating the higher registers with a steady confidence. The music turned darker at times with lines such as “But in this nation, the world’s greatest democracy, there is nothing they can do to prevent me from being punished for a crime I did not commit.” Yet the placid character of the music continued, underlining the disconnect between the reality of conviction and Dwyer’s enduring sense of innocence. “This will hurt someone” were the last words spoken by Dwyer before committing suicide on-camera during the press conference. This piece is Matt Marks’ testament to an often misplaced confidence in our judicial system.
Counterpundit by Ian Dicke was next, a work that for piano and video performed by Aron Kallay. This opened with a quietly introspective piano line that attained a nostalgic sensibility at times. As the tempo increased, the music became more active and the video displayed a flag waiving in the breeze. Strong percussive beats were heard on the sound track of the video as the images became halting and choppy. As the piece proceeded, images of Hulk Hogan became increasingly intermingled with the flag until the video was dominated by wrestling personalities striking patriotic poses. Counterpundit was written during the 2016 election campaign and is an astute observation of how spectacle has replaced reasoned political discourse. The outcome of the election and the subsequent behavior of the present administration only amplifies Dicke’s central premise from 2016. The piece ended with a quiet introspective feel that seemed to be longing for a return to a more enlightened past.
Following the intermission Tonality, a ten-voice choir that specializes in music about justice issues, took the stage to perform “Her beacon-hand beckons”, the third movement of Caroline Shaw’s To the Hands. Lush four-part harmonies filled Monk Space with beautiful a cappella sounds and a peaceful sentiment. This perfectly matched the text, a freely paraphrased version of the inscription on the Statue of Liberty. The final line, “I will be your refuge…”, was particularly moving.
Philosophy of Furniture, by Natalie Dietterich followed, performed by speaking percussionist Derek Tywoniuk. A video projected a series of statements – ostensibly on the ideology of interior decoration and fashion – accompanied by loud, primal drum strokes. Tywoniuk shouted out the texts as they appeared on the screen, punctuating them with booming blasts and sharp raps. The contrast with the previous piece could not have been greater and the thunderous percussion created a compelling emphasis on the otherwise mundane stream words on the screen. The drift of the argument seemed to be that contemporary taste is overly influenced by money so that expensive furniture invariably acquired a higher status. “We proceed on false principals and imagine we have done a fine thing…” All of this unfurled seamlessly and Tywoniuk’s dexterity of was on full display as he attended to the many percussive elements while shouting out the spoken words at the correct instant. The text then took a most interesting turn. By describing the same processes that are at work in fashion, money was shown to similarly exert a decisive leverage on one’s political opinion. Philosophy of Furniture combines the quiet of subtle reasoning with explosive percussion to make a telling point.
Two pieces from widely known contemporary composers completed the concert program. “Which Side are you on?” the second movement of Four North American Ballads by Frederic Rzewski, began with a recorded vocal rendition of a Harlan County miners’ protest song. Rzewski’s take on the song, arranged for piano, followed immediately, full of strong chords and a sturdy texture that was ably realized by Thomas Kotcheff. The complexity and power of the music seemed to increase with each variation on the simple folk tune, filling the cozy Monk Space with a robust militancy and ending with a vigorous crescendo that drew cheers from the audience. Tonality closed the concert with Make Peace by David Lang, a composer known for his sensitivity and a strong sense of empathy. The close harmonies and delicate balance in the music were complimented by the house acoustics and excellent intonation by the singers. Make Peace was a gracefully tranquil ending to an often raucous examination of our current politics through contemporary music.
Midterms: This will Hurt Someone was a carefully curated and timely collection of diverse musical commentary on our political culture.
Dausgaard with LACO Make the Case for Traditional Programming
On October 27th, the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra brought a program of Sibelius, Pärt, Grieg and Nielsen to Glendale’s Alex Theatre. Led by conductor Thomas Dausgaard, the ensemble sounded exceptional—crisp and intimate, but equally able to swell and saturate the hall when needed. Starting the evening with Grieg’s Two Norwegian Airs, Dausgaard demonstrated an immediate and deep connection with the strings, weaving together moments of drama and restraint with impeccable taste and timing. The musicians of LACO must have felt similarly because they met his every move with astounding cohesiveness, not only in the opening airs, but throughout the entire night.
Nielsen’s Clarinet Concerto featured Anthony McGill, who brought so much personality to his performance that it was easy to miss the incredible amount of virtuosity required to navigate the clarinet passages. Compositionally, the Nielsen was the most difficult, not so much for its instrumental passages as for its disparate and sometimes confusing layering. But the soloist and ensemble approached even the most impervious moments with a sense of ownership and direction, and as a result the piece offered a fun, if challenging, display of McGill’s incredible technique and musical intuition.
In the second half, Dausgaard (I assume) made the decision to move seamlessly from the patient, meditative iterations of Pärt’s Silouan’s Song into Sibelius’s Symphony No. 3 with such conviction that most of the audience was moved to applaud at the end of the first movement of the symphony assuming the Pärt had contained some hidden inner movement. But the applause was well-justified if misplaced, as the strength of the shared musical ideas between conductor and ensemble was as strong and tight as any I’ve heard. Moreover, the ensemble inhabited the sound world of each piece with an easy confidence that highlighted what a traditional programming format can be at its best: old and new, refined and showy, serious and fun. It was each of those things, with each work standing on its own—greater than the sum of its parts, but not built around supporting a single centerpiece. Had any single piece not been performed so brilliantly, the same program might have felt passively formulaic. Instead it made the case for the formula.
Mälkki Leads Massive Mahler and New Reich at the LA Phil
Thursday was the opening performance of a concert featuring Susanna Mälkki leading the Los Angeles Philharmonic in the world premiere of Steve Reich’s new work for orchestra, as well as in Mahler’s massive Symphony No. 5. Reich’s Music for Ensemble and Orchestra offered the driving, minimalist soundscape that you might expect from his music. The repeating two-chord pattern in the piano that initiates the piece is revealed occasionally during the ebbs of his thick, sparkling textures, facilitated by Mälkki’s attention to balance and pacing. Reich’s music taps into something so fundamental about why and how we experience musical excitement that any moments of predictability have a friendly familiarity rather than any sense of cliché.
If there was anything to criticize in the performance, it was some slightly opaque moments in the middle; it was difficult to tell whether the performance was dragging or if the piece had written in some details that did not quite translate. It was interesting to see how committed both Mälkki and the musicians were during the Mahler, and while obviously the Mahler calls for much larger forces, I still felt that some of that emotional investment might have benefitted the Reich. In both cases, a few of the, let’s say, weirder moments—particularly during transitions—were allowed to be awkward without an attempt to find some detail or nuance to connect it to the rest of the work. Granted, those passages are in some ways a feature of Mahler, but with a program consisting of only these two works, I would have wished for some defining attention to those moments.
Overall, though, this program balanced ambition with direction in a way only the LA Phil could. It was performed well by the principles and members of the philharmonic, and Mälkki seems to be connecting ever more deeply with the audience here in Los Angeles. If these first few weeks of the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s 100th season are any indication, this season will be as special as promised.
Joep Beving @ The Lodge Room
Joep Beving’s towering stature and flowing beard command a certain attention that is softened by his charming, slightly awkward, stage demeanor. The Dutch composer/pianist gained a formidable following after the 2015 release of his debut album, Solipsism—a collection of intimately personal music curated into bite-size chunks. Two years later, the release of Prehension suggested a promising development of style; a little more minimalist and a little less Chopin, but maintaining Beving’s accessibility and a more-polished version of his soft-pedal, compressed piano sound throughout. The projects he has since embarked on with Rahi Rezvani (music video), and with the various artists tasked with re-imagining his music on his latest album, Contatus, offer insight into the allure of his sound world: In a time of loaded, impassioned rhetoric, Beving’s offerings are stripped-down journal entries, unencumbered by any specific intention for conclusion or definition. His music defines its emotional narrative by looking inwards and backwards from within a culture obsessed with pointing outward and forward.
The spirit of his performance at the Lodge Room on October 23rd embraced the branding so carefully promoted by his promoters and reviewers—one of a reflective, if reclusive, lumberjack, plucked from obscurity for his grand resonance among a generation of online music anthropologists. There is certainly some truth to the myth, evidenced by a few especially enthusiastic audience members, but the implication of his “genius” and the insistence on his role as a bridge to classical music completely misses the mark: the potency of his work lies in its utter simplicity, its transportive removedness from intellectualism, it’s transparency as music for his own enjoyment. The audience connects with Beving because some part of us can imagine ourselves hovering over a late-night piano, repeating a sentimental chord progression with just the right amount of eeriness to perpetually warrant one more pass. Where classical form usually takes us on a journey of discovery, this music lies patiently in wait, attaching to passing feelings and memories before itself moves on.
My difficulty with Beving’s performance is that this type of music doesn’t always lend itself to a full concert by itself. Admittedly, the sound at the Lodge room was excellent, and Beving’s decision to pair groups of pieces together without intermittent applause was smart. The piano could have been cleaner had Beving treated his louder/denser passages with a bit less pedal or reverb, but the larger issue was that in Beving’s sound world, the melody is more an artifact of the chord progression than a vocal-type line that drives the texture and development. This isn’t an issue in itself, but it means that after a while the pieces start to blend together, and the mellow respite quickly becomes a taxing exercise in zazen. There is some (subtle) variety of texture in Beving’s catalogue, but those moments were saved for the final two pieces—one which used live processing to add a warped, nostalgic atmosphere, and another which featured a distinct physicality and momentum through rapidly alternating chords between hands. Those works might have been better placed in the program order to introduce a more interesting overall shape to the concert, but I think the whole performance would have benefitted from additional media—even just some simple accompanying video or audio content from his computers—scattered throughout the evening.
Instead, at moments it felt that the only play borrowed from the “classical” book was the expectation on the audience to sit quietly and pretend to ignore the rumbling from the dishwasher in the back of the bar. For me, that is too much to ask of this set and this music; traditional concert halls are built specially for people who want to participate in that expectation and still those performances fail regularly at curating an ideal concert experience. Moreover, while I appreciate the impulse to suggest musical credibility through the classical bend of his branding and representation, the relationship of Beving’s music to the classical tradition is surface-level at best; which isn’t at all a criticism (in fact, quite the opposite) but I think many may find the connection an empty and unnecessary gesture (especially given the trend of highly-trained musicians away from “classical” self-branding at the moment). If I see Joep Beving perform again—and I sincerely hope I do—I hope his performance abandons that misguided adoption of classical performance practice and instead finds creative ways to mirror the distinct ambience, intimacy, and reflectiveness of his music. His musical genuineness deseves a concert experience like-mindedly personal.
Oneohtrix Point Never’s MYRIAD, performed live, is a schizophonic joy
Oneohotrix Point Never’s MYRIAD at Walt Disney Concert Hall on October 22, 2018. Photo credit: Angeline Woo
Every now and then someone comes along and smacks you in the head with something you already knew. Sometimes this hurts, like when a teacher calls you out on a skill you know is weak, or when congress validates your fears about the state of the union by confirming a sexual predator to the supreme court (again). Thankfully, however, this isn’t always a negative experience. Once in a blue moon an artist finds a way to show you your own world in a new light. Oneohotrix Point Never’s MYRIAD, performed at Disney Hall on Monday, did just that.
I’ve enjoyed Oneohotrix Point Never’s work since first hearing the artist on their (his?) album Replica back in 2011, but the concert experience they’ve crafted with MYRIAD is a tongue-in-cheek, hyper self-aware hour of complete joy if you get it—and still genuinely interesting music if you don’t—that relies on its ability to illuminate our usually unconscious schizophonic experience of music. Let me unpack that a bit for you.
Schizophonia refers to the separation of sound from source that became possible with early recording technology. The mere concept of “recording-to-play-back-later” is a very basic example. When you record a cellist playing Bach, and then listen to the recording the next day, the cellist (the source) is no longer there, only the electronically reproduced sound. This is, of course, so basic to the way we listen to music in our daily lives as to be invisible and hardly worth commenting on. We walk around all day listening to music in headphones or through our car stereos. We only really notice it when something goes wrong, for instance in an amplified live concert setup where the left and right sides get switched and a performer on the right side of the stage has their instrumental sound coming from the left. It does rely on visual information as well; you can see this at home by plugging in your TV speakers backwards and trying to watch a sitcom while sitting directly centered in front of your screen. It kind of breaks your brain.
When an artist uses schizophonia as a tool rather than a given, however, and goes in with the assumption that most of their audience has quite a bit of musical knowledge (much like a painter assumes that most viewers aren’t colorblind…and let’s be honest, Oneohotrix Point Never isn’t really for Top 40 listeners), the results can be profound. MYRIAD began, as many electronics-heavy shows do, with the lights out, complex drones, and psychedelic video projections that reminded me of the wormhole sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey. That transitioned pretty smoothly to the four piece band onstage, two members surrounded by synths, with the other two at a grand piano and a drum set. Music descended from 80s pop and modern day autotuned R&B (Frank Ocean, anyone?) gradually took over, though the effect was one of disorientation with oddly misaligned phrase lengths from the pop sounds blending in and out of the ongoing drones.
At this point I was under the impression that we’d be getting a through-composed set without any breaks. Then the band stopped and said thanks to the audience like so many arena bands do (both my date and I were caught off guard by this) before launching into what could have been a twisted Toto cover with DX7 brass sounds and a synth flute from a keyboard that sounded like it would fit in mid-90s Celine Dion track, accompanied by a drum beat of sliced up extended technique string samples accompanied by Han Bennink-esque stick rolls on shells in the drums and a pre-recorded upright bass line.
As the lights moved around the stage (musicians were generally lit in a way that reminded me of Depeche Mode or Kraftwerk), however, I was struck by both the lack of an upright bass onstage and the fact that the drummer didn’t seem to be playing any of those stick rolls, instead keeping to trigger pads for basic synth drums. Why bring a grand piano and a drum set and then pre-record bass and drums in a production that obviously cost a lot of money? This is where the schizophonic confusion really started, though I was holding out hope that it wouldn’t be laziness or lack-of-understanding underlying it, though, and was thankfully proven right a few songs later when the same stick rolls returned, this time being played live by the drummer.
This is the moment when it started to hit me that Oneohotrix Point Never was, rather than playing music, playing with the entire concept of live performance. WHOA, I thought. They just moved from recorded to live in a way that SOUNDS identical. Fascinating. It’s almost like they’re commenting on how live performance in our current era of technology is really just for show. Wonder if that will continue. And oh boy, did it continue, and morphing into a near-satire of big budget pop concerts. A troupe of dancers appeared in the aisles during one track (song? piece?) dressed a bit like USC cheerleaders if USC cheerleaders wore cowboy hats decorated in caution tape and surgical masks, but proceeded to repeat a few pretty simple dance steps as they marched around the hall for what couldn’t have been more than three minutes, never to return. For the last two pieces of the evening a cellist joined the band onstage, but played first only a few extended techniques that were indistinguishable from the previously mentioned extended technique string track now backing her again, and then a pretty well worthless string of whole notes for the final number.
Let me clarify that: the notes and the performance of said notes was perfectly good, but in the context of a sample-filled electronic concert, having her appear live was more like the band saying “see? this doesn’t really add anything, but it’s pretty to look at,” in a takedown of the low-hanging fruit “live with orchestra” tokenism that so many bands use to build cultural capital for themselves. Is this the other side of the coin for classical pieces that add a four-on-the-floor drum beat to try to prove their own relevance? I believe so. Had it been in a standalone piece, the appearance of the cellist may have been merely pointless and confusing (as it often is in electroacoustic concerts). In the context of a concert using sonic and visual confusion as a narrative, her mere appearance onstage hammered home the band’s point about live performance. It almost would have been more effective to have her sit there and do nothing.
This may all be speculation on my part, of course, and the problems of the intentional fallacy in this reading of the show’s content are myriad (ha). During that cellist’s appearance at the end, however, came a projected rotating skull eating a VHS tape. Like Nathan Fielder’s glance at the camera in the season finale of Nathan For You when a mark pointed out that “this is all for a TV show,” that skull eating a VHS tape screamed “the old way of doing concerts is dead. You just watched us kill it. And wasn’t it fun?”
This summer I heard composer Martin Bresnick give a talk on the idea that modern composers will really, really have to reckon with the loudspeaker in their work. It’s an idea I’ve been thinking about a lot, and I’m pleased to hear bands like Oneohotrix Point Never who are reckoning with it in their own creative ways. After seeing MYRIAD I dare say this band is on the forefront of a musical future we should all be excited about. If they are touring anywhere near you, get tickets immediately.
The Isaura String Quartet on Machines and Strings
On October 24, the Isaura String Quartet performs Machines and Strings at REDCAT. Billed as “an immersive concert experience,” the program features works by artists including Chrysanthe Tan, Stephanie Smith, Ajay Kapur, Sarah Belle Reid, April Gerloff, and Jules Gimbrone performed in collaboration with interactive lighting and projection by alumni artists from the 2018 CalArts Expo creative team. The evening also includes the world premiere of Ulrich Krieger’s completely revised quartet Up-Tight II and a new work by Amy Knoles featuring the KarmetiK Machine Orchestra, directed by Ajay Kapur, who also created the custom-built robotic musical instrument Lydia.
I caught the original version of Ulrich’s piece when Isaura played it back in February at Human Resources and was really taken with the piece and their approach to it. Here’s a video from that performance:
Needless to say, I’m excited to hear the revised version and hear and see everything that the quartet is promising us for the 24th, so asked if the members would be down for an interview. Violinists Madeline Falcone and Emily Call and cellist Betsy Rettig kindly answered my call. Here’s our conversation:
You just performed at CalArts and are now bringing Machines and Strings, Part II to REDCAT. The show has been billed as an “immersive concert experience.” I know you’ve got a deep interest in production. Could you talk a bit about what, beyond performing music, this program is all about?
Madeline: These concerts are about community, musical language, and elevating voices that we believe are important. Many artists are struggling with the current state of art and struggling to contextualize their art within the current social and political climate, and it is wonderful to find these ways in which we can support each other. We feel very proud of our team of amazing artists including performers, composers, lighting designers, video artists, and technological innovators. We have learned from each of these artists over the course of this production and the quartet has expanded our musical language through the process of working on each of these pieces.
We have developed an interest in production because we are used to self-producing, which is how most of these shows featuring experimental sounds/weird ideas/emerging artists tend to happen, but also because production relates directly to the music. The audience experiences sounds, lights, energy—all of those are essential to bringing the thing to life. For both of these concerts we have been working with Lauren Pratt as a producer and mentor, and she has been wonderfully supportive.
What attracts you to the work of the composers you’ve programmed?
Emily: When we started thinking about putting together a program featuring strings and music tech, the theme of order and disorder kept coming up: strings as disorder—going out of tune, breaking a bow hair, the natural human nature of playing an instrument where error is a factor—and machines as order, completing tasks, following functions, the precision with which a machine can act. At the same time, you can think of strings as orderly and machines as disorderly. Disorderly machines have actually come up quite often during our preparation for this concert! We kept this idea in mind when we were looking for composers and pieces to perform, and that idea has really shaped the program. We’re excited to showcase so many composers who are using technology and strings, sometimes together and sometimes not, in really innovative ways.
I know Isaura has a heavy focus on working with local composers, and that you’ve also taken quite a few gigs in the rock and popular music world, such as your residency at Emo Nite LA. How do those performance practices inform each other in your work? Do you approach them very differently as players?
Betsy: In many ways all of these different musical worlds need each other, and musically, we use the same tools for approaching every genre. As an ensemble we work together the same way to communicate time, expression, musicality, intonation, etc. Most of the pop and rock projects we have been part of have involved the artist specifically wanting players who were well-versed in a variety of playing styles and extended techniques.
Our crossover experience has been particularly helpful in our work with Ulrich Krieger, developing his quartet Up-Tight II. When he approached us about playing this piece, it was because of a prior collaboration with opera singer Timur called Love, Honor, Obey. Ulrich arranged an Elvis song for that project and really wanted us to go crazy with it. Up-Tight II is dedicated to Lou Reed and inspired by the Velvet Underground. We’ve been working a lot in rehearsals developing the physicality of the piece, which is so often present in rock music.
What are your favorite concerts you’ve attended in LA in the past year?
This is an almost impossible question to answer because there is so much exciting music happening in this city all of the time… but a few stand-outs include:
Emily: James Tenney’s Changes: Sixty-Four Studies for Six Harps presented by SASSAS at The Box last November and Dog Star 14’s concert of pieces by Eric Heep, Corey Fogel, and Erika Bell. (Side note: Eric Heep is actually one of the co-creators of Lydia, the robotic piano featured on our concert!).
Madeline: Matmos at The Broad’s Summer Happenings; Dolores: Our Lady of the 7 Sorrows with Ron Athey and Nacho Nava; and Quartetto Fantastico with visuals by Jesse Gilbert for the Mars Festival earlier this month.
Betsy: Michael Webster and the Breath Control Orchestra, Nice Day for the Races from a radio play by Samuel Beckett at the Box, and Southland Ensemble: Ruth Crawford / Ruth Crawford Seeger at Automata
Can you tell us more about Lydia?
Madeline: Lydia is a modified mechatronic instrument built on an upright piano created by CalArts students and faculty in 2013 under mentorship of artist and MacArthur fellow Trimpin. The instrument uses motors rather than hammers to create sound on the piano strings, and also includes other tools such as a saw that scrapes against the bottom of the instrument to introduce new piano sound worlds. We have enjoyed getting to know her as our chamber music partner over the last couple months.
What’s next for the quartet?
Emily: We will be ending 2018 with a few recording projects, and we have some exciting collaborative projects for 2019 in LA and New York, which we look forward to announcing soon!
Anything else you’d like to add?
Betsy: Thanks for chatting with us!
Tickets for Machines and Strings are available at redcat.org/event/machines-and-strings.
WasteLAnd’s Biomes paints a portrait of Katherine Young
WasteLAnd marked the opening of their sixth season with a packed venue for a concert titled Biomes, featuring three pieces by Chicago-based composer Katherine Young. Katherine Young’s pieces are multimedia electroacoustic works. She incorporates not only sounds, but lights, movement, interactive performance, and anything in between. The first piece of the night, Earhart & the Queen of Spades performed by LA-based guitarist Nicholas Deyoe, uses a variety of sounds on the electric guitar. Hearing an electric guitar make unusual noises isn’t anything new, but the way Deyoe created the sounds is. Instead of a guitar pick, Deyoe used an array of hand-held objects such as small battery-powered fans, strings of pearls, keys, and bobby pins. These objects, Young explained in the program notes, reference lost objects and myths and femininity. When the fans hover above the amplified strings, the guitar creates an eerie hum; when the fan blades strike the strings, it makes a sizzling effect. The pearls, as you might guess, sound somewhere between raindrops and hail. Each sound emanation was intriguing in its own right. Young pulled out all the stops to create a twenty-minute piece of interwoven sounds, pitches, and rhythmic motifs.
The second piece of the night displayed a completely different approach to music. The Wurlitzer part (performed brilliantly by Wells Leng) used relatively typical twentieth-century techniques like whole tone scales and cluster chords. Combined with Matt Barbier whispering and crooning microtones into the euphonium, Underworld (Dancing) reminded me of an eerie yet meditative take on an old-timey calliope dance. Basically, it’s how I imagine music in the Upside-Down à la Stranger Things. And it was rad.
The final piece of the night was the world premiere of Biomes 1.0. This piece combines acoustic instruments (two trombones+ and a bassoon, played by RAGE THORMBONES Weston Olencki & Matt Barbier, and Katherine Young herself, respectively) with electronics and lights. The lights change over time, sometimes slowly and sometimes in the span of a heartbeat, and represent the smaller ecosystems present in the encompassing biome. The instrumentalists improvise within the ecosystem, building the scene with notes, whispers, whistles, and metallic clacks and clangs, further developed by the electronics reacting to the instruments’ paths. Some segments sounded like the soundscape you almost expect: the dark green light briefly feels and sounds like a sleepy rainforest with croaking frogs and rustling vines, and then transforms into something unrecognizable but no less beautiful and comprehensive. The stark white light evokes the sharp chill of the Arctic, but instead of polar bears we find gasping tubas and huffing bassoons. Throughout the piece, the light segregated the biome into ecosystems, but the steady undercurrent of electronic noise and human breath united the parts into the whole. Biomes clocked in at over half an hour long, but I was so enchanted that time nearly stopped.
Katherine Young took LA under her spell with these three incredible pieces, especially Biomes 1.0. She is WasteLAnd’s featured composer this season, so be sure to attend the rest of the concerts to hear more of her and the incredible musicians of the contemporary music scene of LA.
Track premiere: Alexander Elliott Miller’s “Zanja Madre” from To….Oblivion
Composer/guitarist Alexander Elliott Miller‘s debut solo album, To….Oblivion comes out everywhere on October 20. The record and historical photography project deals with lost spaces in Los Angeles, and to celebrate the release Alex is playing three sets at the Bendix Building that day as part of the LA Conservancy‘s architecture walking tours. A few standing room tickets are still available.
I first heard To….Oblivion in its nascent stages at a What’s Next? Ensemble show a few years ago, and then caught the full piece at Oh My Ears! in Phoenix back in January. My favorite track/movement was the “Zanja Madre,” which is the original aqueduct that brought water to El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles del Rio Porciuncula (L.A. is a useful abbreviation, isn’t it?). I asked Alex if we could premiere the track when the album was ready, and he said yes. So, feast your ears!
Alex also had time for some interview questions about the project. Here’s our conversation:
Okay, so talk to me about To….Oblivion
To….Oblivion is an album all about historic landmarks in Los Angeles. It’s for solo electric guitar, which I play myself, with electronics and a video slideshow. The electronics include both live processing of the guitar as well as recorded sounds which aim to capture an impression of the acoustic environment of each site. The album will be released along with videos of the recording with the slideshow both projected behind me and intercut directly.
There are six historic sites: the Belmont Tunnel, Dunbar Hotel, Zanja Madre, Tower Records, Long Beach’s Pike Amusement Park and Anaheim’s Center Street.
When you were writing the pieces for the record, were there any direct or obvious connections between the places and your composing (for instance, tracing the curve of the LA river in a melody), or was each location more of a loose inspiration for your work?
There’s nothing as literal as tracing the curve of the river and interpreting it as a melody. With each movement, I found myself wanting to make the slideshow and soundtrack first, finding the right order for the photographs to convey the story of each site, then matching up the sounds to those images where appropriate. Usually the guitar part was the last thing to be written, almost like a film score, though I usually had pretty strong ideas of what I wanted beforehand.
Some of the movements suggested particular types of guitar playing or sound worlds. Certainly the movement about the Dunbar Hotel, at the hub of LA’s mid-20th Century jazz scene gave me a chance to try my own take on jazz as a composer, and the Tower Records movement let me return some classic rock guitar playing that I grew up with.
The Belmont Tunnel, about an abandoned subway tunnel from the early 20th Century suggested certain sound effects: there’s an effect I create with an eBow and some pitch shifting that is a heavy, loud, roaring sound that reminds me a train, there’s a ton of reverb, almost like the echoes I imagine down in that abandoned tunnel.
Was there anything in particular that acted as a deciding factor in whether or not to use a location? Did any places not make the cut?
I was interested in locations that either seemed like symbols of larger issues in the city, or perhaps had interesting sonic or even musical implications.
The Belmont Tunnel, for me, is a symbol of public transportation’s role in shaping the city, and presents a great “what if:” what if LA’s original subway had been allowed to grow, in place of or in addition to expansion of the freeways, how would the city have been different?
The Zanja Madre movement was written at the heart of the drought, and deals with LA’s complicated relationship with water. I also liked that the original Zanja Madre was a project that dated from 1781, constructed within weeks of the original establishment of the city. It was right there at the beginning of Los Angeles, and dealt with our major problem: water.
Two movements venture further outside downtown LA, to Orange County and Long Beach, but these are also two of the sites to which I have a more personal connection. “Anaheim’s Center Street” looks at urban blight and redevelopment, and has a scene were the heart of the old downtown is demolished with bulldozers. I loved the idea of including bulldozers in the soundtrack, and felt that scene, perhaps more than anything else in the piece, captured the sadness of the title “To….Oblivion.” I live on Anaheim’s Center Street and got to know my own neighborhood much better by doing this piece. The Long Beach movement tells a similar story of urban decay, but I left out the violence of the bulldozers in this movement, and focused more on the happy memories of the old amusement park. I’ve worked in Long Beach for six years, and I think this movement is probably the most hopeful in the set, being a sort of expression of my gratitude to the city.
Alexander Elliott Miller performing To….Oblivion!
Then there are two sites in which music itself is an important part of the historic site’s identity. The Dunbar Hotel was at the heart of LA’s Central Avenue jazz scene. This location also has a complicated history representing the status of race relations in LA, as the Dunbar was one of the few hotels were African American celebrities were welcomed. One has mixed feelings about it: on one hand, it’s an exciting cultural focal point where numerous jazz heroes were present (Duke Ellington, Louie Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Ray Charles, countless others all stayed there), and yet, a regrettable place, existing primarily because of segregation laws. Secondly, the Sunset Strip’s Tower Records obviously represents a kind of celebration of music in its day, but also may have become, since its closing, a kind symbol of all of the changes the music industry has experienced in the last two decades.
When I first started the project, I think there were some other historic sites that I considered very briefly, but the shape of the piece with the six now part of the final version emerged quickly. Still, other locations that I may have considered at the beginning which didn’t make the cut included the Nestor Film Studio (the very first ever movie studio in LA), the Pan Pacific Auditorium (which burned to the ground and is now the site of Pan Pacific Park), and, of course, the Ambassador Hotel. I discovered Gabriel Kahane’s album “The Ambassador,” after this (it’s an album I love and one which shares an “LA location” concept with my project), so honestly, I’m glad I didn’t include it. I already had a hotel in the project anyway, in the Dunbar Hotel.
You once told me that when you visit places you like to enter via different modes of transportation to give yourself a different perspective or idea of “home base” for a city. For instance, coming into LA on the 10 from the desert is a very different experience than taking the train down from Nor Cal to start at Union Station or arriving by boat in San Pedro. Could you talk a bit about your perspective on LA now that you’re often coming up from Anaheim, or your take on the city as a person raised in the midwest and northeast?
Well, I was born in Boston and raised in Kansas City. I still have family in both places, and I’m fortunate to have lived in other places as a student or for temporary jobs in my twenties, but most of my life as an adult has been here in the greater LA area. I’ve never taken a boat into San Pedro or Marina del Ray, but obviously driven, flown and taken trains into LA many times; I think I see all the same problems that everyone else does, first the strangeness of its location coming out of the desert when you drive here from the east, and then once you’re here, the high rents, homelessness, gentrification, traffic and access to water.
On the positive side, LA has always seemed like a place that is what you make of it (or how much you’re able/willing to drive through it). Maybe what I mean, more specifically, is that LA is a place where I feel I’ve met many people who share my interests – like you if I may say so – a place where I feel I’ve been welcomed into a communities both with musicians in the city and the schools where I work. I haven’t had the opportunity to live as an adult, work, pay rent, and be a working musician or teacher in Boston or Kansas City so couldn’t compare those experiences.
Composer and guitarist Alexander Elliott Miller
Lastly, part of the joy of writing this piece really had to do with exploring LA itself. Much of the time when I’m composing, I’m isolated at home with a computer, piano or guitar. This piece presented an opportunity to get out into the city, partly because I wanted to hang out at each site a little bit, but also because I needed to record so many sounds of the city for the soundtrack and wanted to do everything authentically. So for the Belmont Tunnel, for example, I found a Saturday to take a handheld mic and record subway sounds while circling the system all day, exploring new neighborhoods all the while. For the Dunbar Hotel, I took that mic to a jazz club and recorded ambient crowd noise during a set change between bands. The water sounds in Zanja Madre are actually the LA River in Los Feliz, and the sounds of the Sunset Strip were actually recorded on Sunset near Tower Records’ site, with some of the sounds of CDs clicking against each other recorded at Amoeba Records. For Anaheim’s Center Street, I went to a mall at 1:00am where an old Macy’s was being demolished and recorded bulldozers; the amusement park sounds for Long Beach were a mixture sounds of the Santa Monica Pier, Knott’s Berry Farm rollercoasters and the Griffith Park Merry Go Round. The whole thing took years, but experiencing LA in so many places and different ways was one of the things that made the experience of writing this piece so much fun.
Who are you working with to present this project live?
On the day of the album release, Oct. 20th, I’ll be performing the work as part of an event co-presented by two organizations: Synchromy and the LA Conservancy.
The LA Conservancy organizes frequent walking tours of various neighborhoods in the city, exploring historic architecture. This October, their Walking Tour will go through the Fashion District downtown, and include the Bendix Building. My performance, which will be on the penthouse floor of the Bendix, will essentially be a stop along that tour, so I’ll be playing selections from the album all day long for various groups coming and going. The tours themselves are sold out but a limited number of concert-only tickets will be sold. It was the idea of Synchromy’s director, our friend Jason Barabba, to get in touch with them about this project.
Two weeks later I’ll be playing selections from the album in San Francisco at the Center for New Music. I’m splitting the program with a wonderful guitarist in the Bay Area, Giacomo Fiore.
What’s next for you? Although the album is finished and coming out this month, are you continuing to add tracks to the project?
I think I’m happy with where the project is now. I like the six movements I have, I’m not opposed to adding more but am not ready yet. Also, once, the idea occurred to me that I could, instead writing new movements about new locations, perhaps revisit these same locations in ten years or so to see how they’ve continued to change. Just a thought….
I will say this is the first work I’ve done that had a video component, and even though it is a simple video consisting of a slideshow, I did greatly enjoy having that element to further the storytelling potential of each work. I don’t have plans for new video works, nor plans to collaborate with a video artist, but that’s something I’m interested in. And the electric guitar, that will remain an important part of my voice as composer. That ain’t going anywhere.
Anything else you’d like to add?
I got a lot of help on this project! Rychard Cooper, my colleague at CSULB, recorded the project and edited the final video, and there are also a number of other musicians who play on the soundtrack in the background of the movements about the two “musical” locations. On the Dunbar Hotel, underneath my guitar playing, you’ll hear recordings of jazz musicians: that’s Jamond McCoy on piano and Zaq Kenefick on saxophone. And in the Tower Records movement, you’ll hear Tom Kendall Hughes on drums as well as some singing from Mikey Ferrari. I recorded all of them, giving them minimal instruction, and they definitely all gave me a ton of inspiration, steering me in particular directions for my own guitar playing.
Lastly, thank you, Nick, for the interview and everything you do for our new music community on this site and around town!
Keep up with the release over at Alex’s website, alexanderemiller.com.
LA Fest at the Phil: A Los Angeles Story of Modernism and Postmodernism
With this week’s kickoff of LA Fest and the LA Phil’s centennial season, the country’s most ambitious orchestra offered a program reflective of the past, as well as an ambitious glance into the future.
Sandwiched between two modern works, a casual and tight-knit performance of Beethoven’s triple concerto (Op. 56) featured Martin Chalifour on violin, Robert deMaine on Cello, and Joanne Pearce Martin on piano. The soloists conversed easily with a Dudamel-led orchestra, and what the performance may have lacked in theatrical sparkle it gained in a focus that highlighted its more intimate chamber elements. It was a fitting pairing with Esa-Pekka Salonen’s LA Variations, which itself constituted a study of clever orchestrations navigated as only a conductor could, but which was particularly notable for the chamber groupings that evolved within the sizable aggregate forces of his instrumentation. Salonen’s work betrays a deep love for romantic orchestral music, but with a modernist vision that sometimes growls, sometimes shimmers in stunning, delicate, intimacy.
The second half was dedicated to the premiere of Andrew Norman’s Sustain, a monumental work of fresh, forward-looking ritual in the deconstruction of sound. While the sound world of Sustain gives a nod to the mid-century orchestra, the form throughout feels daringly original—not necessarily singular in its approach, but in Norman’s ability to immerse in the hypothetical and, more importantly, to trust in his own musical instincts once there. The result is a music that is nostalgic for a time unknown; a remembering from the future where some fiber of our concert experience remains, becomes sacrosanct, while others dissolve away in the solvent of time and relevance. What remains is something primal in its force and refined in its treatment, a reimagining of how our relationship to communal listening might evolve. I, for one, hope I am around to see that day; to reminisce of Sustain and what came after in a newly-antiquated, corrugated steel shipwreck on the corner of 1st and Grand.
WasteLAnd’s Featured Composer Katherine Young Interviewed by Artistic Director Nicholas Deyoe
Katherine Young, WasteLAnd’s season six featured composer. Photo by Deidre Huckabay.
WasteLAnd‘s sixth season kicks off tonight at ArtShare tonight with a concert focused on this year’s featured composer, Katherine Young. Katherine makes electroacoustic music using expressive noises, curious timbres, and kinetic structures to explore the dramatic physicality of sound, shifting interpersonal dynamics, and tensions between the familiar and the strange. As an improviser, Katherine amplifies her bassoon and employs a flexible electronics set up for solo and collaborative performances. The LAPhil’s Green Umbrella series, Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s MusicNOW, Ensemble Dal Niente, Third Coast Percussion, Spektral Quartet, Weston Olencki, Nico Couck / Internationales Musikinstitut Darmstadt, Fonema Consort, others have commissioned her music. She’s excited about coming-soon projects with Lucy Dehgrae for Resonant Bodies Festival, WasteLAnd and RAGE, Distractfold Ensemble’s Linda Jankowska, Callithumpian Ensemble, and Yarn/Wire. She’s releasing new music this year with Michael Foster & Michael Zerang, Wet Ink, and Amy Cimini (as Architeuthis Walks on Land).
Ahead of the show, we got WasteLAnd artistic director Nicholas Deyoe, who has a lot of experience with Katherine’s work, to interview the composer. Here are Nick and Katherine:
Nick: Some of the following questions relate to your monodrama When stranger things happen and the three pieces that it draws from: Earhart and the Queen of Spades, where the moss grows, and just water, no lemon. Would you share a little bit of the background on this project?
Katie: Sure! All of four of the pieces – the three concert pieces and the monodrama – are inspired by a short story called “The Girl Detective” by Kelly Link, which is a noir meditation on loss and a creative coming-of-age-story that follows a girl detective on various cases / adventures. The story takes a very fragmented, nonlinear form, and contains lots of lists of lost objects, references to myths of femininity (Nancy Drew, fairytale princesses, Demeter and Persephone, etc.), and a noir atmosphere. Each of the pieces in my cycle formally explore experiences of loss and modes of detection and creative reassembling.
For Earhart & the Queen of Spades, all of the guitar preparations – fans, bobby pins, keys, jewelry, etc. – are drawn from a list I compiled of lost items the girl detective comes across, plus things that the performers involved in the premieres had lost. So, for example, the fans are a reference to Amelia Earhart (mentioned in the story), and several of the performers told me about losing pieces of jewelry that had lots of personal significance.
It’s funny – I actually borrowed the title for Underworld (Dancing) from “The Girl Detective,” too. So I’d been thinking about that story for a long time!
Nick: While learning the Earhart, I developed my own emotional attachment to all of these objects and how they interact with my guitar.
On Friday night, we’re presenting a world premiere (BIOMES 1.0), something relatively new (Earhart & the Queen of Spades, 2016) and something “old” (Underworld (Dancing), 2008). You mentioned the other day that you feel a certain connection between these three pieces. Would you tell us a bit more about the connections that you feel between these pieces?
Katie: Listening to the rehearsal of Underworld (Dancing) it occurred to me that each of these pieces to different degrees and in different ways blur out of a linear “musical” forms and into sonic meditations through the use of drone, saturating textures, and/or spatialization.
Nick: You are an active improviser, and you also produce meticulously notated scores full of nuanced details. Looking at Friday’s program, BIOMES 1.0 is driven by improvisation between you, Matt, and Weston; Underworld (Dancing) is fully notated, but filled with freedom between the euphonium and the Wurlitzer, and Earhart is very clear in its instructions, but often feels like you’re inside of a structured improvisation including recurring fragments. All of the styles feel very much like “Katie Young,” despite the range of approach. What are the differences in your own mindset when you work in these different realms?
Katie: I think I’m always looking for ways to infuse a little bit more surprise into my notated scores – to give them the energy of real-time exploration that is one of the things I love about improvised music. As you point out, that can be achieved in a lot of different ways and to different degrees. Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about the function or need the piece is serving for the people I am making it for / with, and then I use whatever notation is best for making that happen. There are things you can achieve with open forms that are really difficult to get from hyper specified notation, but there are things that that notation can make happen that more open forms can’t. But in all cases I start with the people and the sounds and go from there.
Details for tonight (October 5, 2018) are available at wastelandmusic.org/biomes, and the series is currently running a fundraiser with stretch goals of making every concert this season free. You can support their work at wasteland.wedid.it/campaigns/5108.