Posts Tagged ‘Los Angeles’
LA Composers Project 2013: Robin Cox
Next in our series of interviews with composers featured on What’s Next? Ensemble‘s fifth annual Los Angeles Composers Project is Robin Cox. Here we go:
The name of your piece being performed at LACP 2013 is:
Everywhere
Tell us about it.
“Everywhere” juxtaposes a lilting bass clarinet solo against the rhythmic backbone of vibraphone accompaniment as processed by digital delay. I was interested in creating an impression of delay processing as simply a natural extension of the instrument. The vibraphone’s ringing ambience also provided a nice opportunity for blending such with the unique capacities a bass clarinet has for nuancing a musical phrase, or even a single long note.
Favorite X : Y?
Favorite vice : extremely dark chocolate.
Here’s the piece:
LA Composers Project 2013: David Utzinger
Next up in our series of interviews with composers featured on What’s Next? Ensemble‘s fifth annual Los Angeles Composers Project is David Utzinger. Here we go:The name of your piece being performed at LACP 2013 is:
Quintet for Flute, Piano, and String Trio
Tell us about it.
I wrote the second movement of this piece for a class I was taking at the Berklee College of Music (where I received my bachelor’s degree). It was originally scored for Flute, Violin, Cello, and Piano. A professor of mine liked the piece and asked that it be put on an upcoming school concert. I had to get the players together (of course), and as Berklee is primarily a Jazz school, I needed to look outside of the college for “classical” players that could handle the material. I had a really good friend at Boston Conservatory that played viola, she said “I can find you all the players you need if you write in a viola part”, so now the piece had a viola part. The movement was performed, everything went off fine, and then I decided about 6 months later that the only thing about the piece that I liked was the “coda”. The coda was a three voice fugue, the subject of the fugue being a very diatonic twelve tone row (they exist). In the end, only that coda survived from the original piece (still at the end of the second movement). About five years later I wrote the first movement (which is what is being performed at the LACP concert), starting the piece with a fragment of the tone row, played pizzicato in the cello.
I see music in terms of shapes and colors; triangles, squares etc. In my mind the first movement was a combination of white, light blue and grey, and was a triangle, or rather a wedge that wedged to the right, like a door stop. The beginning is the “small” side, and as the piece progresses, it slowly ramps up in tempo, density, volume, texture etc. I think of it as a giant crescendo. The fragment of the original tone row appears here and there, usually as a melodic line, poking its head out above the accompaniment. The opening of the piece is the white/grey part, and ideally, as the wedge of the piece grows, so too should the blueish color increase, and eventually take over, perhaps hinting at a bright yellow. To this end I tried to keep the strings from playing “arco”, for as long as possible, because (for no apparent reason that I know of aside from “I just see it that way”) plucked strings are white/grey, and bowed strings have color.
In the end this movement is about growth, and not necessarily the good kind. The main motif; a four note cell first played by the flute, eventually spreads and infects the entire piece. By the end of the movement, all instruments are playing some version of the fragment simultaneously, choking the piece, and abruptly cutting it off.
Favorite X : Y
Facial hair : handlebar mustache.
Here’s the piece:
LA Composers Project 2013: Jeffrey Parola
The name of your piece being performed at LACP 2013 is:
Qualms & Misgivings
Tell us about it.
Qualms & Misgivings was written in 2011 while I was studying with Frank Ticheli at USC. It was my first year at USC, and I wanted to try something different, so I decided to change up my compositional process by composing away from the piano and using alternative notion. I had a vague dramatic narrative in mind while composing the piece, where I envisioned two groups of characters, each group suspicious of the other. But these groups are inherently similar, and their suspicions lie in the subtlety of their differences. I chose musical material that represents this tension of similarity versus difference, namely whole tone and octatonic sonorities. “Wrong notes” begin to impede on the whole tone texture, which causes a friction that ultimately leads to a quarrel that leaves the characters heaving-and-hoing in the final measures.
Favorite X : Y
Favorite musical moment in LA: watching the LA Phil play Messiaen’s Turangalîla-Symphonie live at Disney Hall.
[Editor: I went to this concert, and it completely blew my mind. One of my favorite musical moments in LA as well].
Here’s the piece:
Free Show Alert: AYS plays Schnittke, Zatin, and Shostakovitch tonight!
This is very short notice, but New Classic LA is back, and we’ll kick it off with news that AYS is playing a free show at Royce Hall tonight at 7. All of the info is here:
http://aysymphony.org/2012/05/18/2012-13-season/
In rather important news for the site, I finally figured out a good way to do concert listings. It might look the same to you, but will be a zillion times easier for me to keep up to date. So let’s do this thing, round two.
LA Sounds: Wax and Feathers by Daniel Corral
Selections from Daniel Corral‘s Zoophilic Follies, as performed by Timur and the Dime Museum, are being played as part of wild Up‘s residency at the Hammer Museum next Saturday at 3. Music by Anne LeBaron, Veronika Krausas, and Isaac Schankler is also on the program. Chris Rountree is conducting, and it’s a free show. Check out the track “Wax and Feathers” below.
Cool show tonight: SCREAM at REDCAT
The Southern California Resource for Electro-Acoustic Music is putting on a show at REDCAT tonight that sounds completely awesome. Here’s the rundown from the event page:
The venerated annual music festival—begun in 1986—signs off in style, with works by four masters of the electro-acoustic idiom. The program opens withPacific Light and Water/Wu Xing—Cycle of Destruction(2005), which features solo trumpet by creative music luminary Wadada Leo Smith “overlaid” on a fixed electro-acoustic composition by SCREAM founder Barry Schrader. Next is Anne LeBaron’s Floodsongs (2012), a choral setting of three poems by Douglas Kearney performed by the Santa Clarita Master Chorale conducted by Allan Petker, with live electronics by Phil Curtis. Played by the Formalist Quartet, David Rosenboom’s Four Lines (2001) for string quartet and electronics experiments with “attention-dependent sonic environments.” The concert—and the series—concludes with the world premiere of three electro-acoustic movements from Barry Schrader’s opus The Barnum Museum (2009–2012) inspired by Steven Millhauser’s short story which describes a fantastical museum of the imagination.
Details are available at redcat.org/event/scream-finale
LA Sounds: Tango by Ben Phelps
Ben Phelps, who has been a great help to this site, suggested that we start posting tracks by LA composers and musicians. To thank him for the idea, he gets the first one. Check it out:
Free Show Alert: Leah Paul Quintet in Santa Monica on Saturday
Leah Paul just sent me this:
Concert This Saturday!
I’m excited to perform a new woodwind quintet I’ve written, played by myself, Myka Miller, Chris Speed, Danielle Ondarza, and Christin Phelps Webb, afterwards John Kibler and Brett Hool will perform as We Are The West.
The show is at 8pm in Santa Monica, directions below. This show is in a PARKING GARAGE made super cool and fun, with romantic lighting, drinks, and a general joie de vivre party-like atmosphere. Hope to see you there!
**The show is at The Parking Garage beneath the Office building on the corner of 7th Street and Santa Monica Boulevard, the entrance is down a stairway on 7th street.
Sounds pretty awesome.
Free show alert(s): Abagail Fischer at the Hammer, Aron Kallay and Rafael Liebich at my house
Yep, you read that right. New ClassicLA is having a house party. This Friday at 8, Aron Kallay and Rafael Liebich will be premiering piano pieces by Ben Phelps, Jason Barabba, and yours truly (along with a few other locals) at my house apartment in Santa Monica. I’ll also be opening the first bottle of my homemade amber ale (fingers crossed that carbonation is going as it should), and I believe a friend is bringing up a keg of something awesome that he made too. And Jason has agreed to make some kind of cakes, which I can tell you from personal experience will be utterly delicious. But yeah, the music! It’s going to be killer, and nice and loud, and you should come. I’m not so hot on posting my address on here, so email newclassicla@gmail.com and I’ll send it to you.
Then, Saturday, at 3:00 pm (more than enough time to get the shrimp omelette at Literati on the way over from my couch), Abagail Fischer presents ABSYNTH at the Hammer as a part of wild Up‘s residency there. Here’s the info from the facebook event page:
ABSYNTH is a constantly evolving multi-media program for electronics and voice, conceived by mezzo-soprano Abigail Fischer and directed by wild Up founder Christopher Rountree. Hailed as “riveting” (New York Times) and “sumptuous” (Boston Globe), Ms. Fischer makes her premiere performance in Los Angeles here. This program will include commissioned works by Nico Muhly, Caleb Burhans, Kevin McFarland, Florent Ghys, and interspersed by other works by Missy Mazzoli, Wes Matthews, Kurt Weill, Milton Babbitt, and more. Richard Valitutto will assist on keyboards.
ABSYNTH has been performed in varying lengths since 2007, in locales from John Zorn’s Lower East Side venue- the Stone, to Brooklyn’s Galapagos Art Space, presented by American Opera Projects.
For more info http://wildup.la/events/chamber-music-abigail-fischer-absynth/
Interview: Composer Don Crockett on The Face
Seems like all the buzz in town this week is about the upcoming premiere of Don Crockett’s opera, The Face, this Saturday at the Japan America Theater. A summary, which I’m entirely lifting off of the opera’s official site, certainly promises a lot to look forward to:
Set in Venice Beach, THE FACE is a deeply compelling story about the price of fame, desire and creativity. The central character, a once famous poet named Raphael, struggles with the recent loss of his lover/muse, while juggling the demands of a movie being made about his life and his increasing notoriety. The narrative is both passionate and raw in its candor, offering an insightful view of the human condition as experienced by an artist/poet.
THE FACE is a multidisciplinary chamber opera (featuring music, film and choreography), which was conceived of and created by USC composer – Donald Crockett and USC poet David St. John. The artistic team for the production includes the innovative Parisian stage director/film maker, Paul Desveaux and renowned European choreographer, Yano Iatrides.
THE FACE features an exceptional international cast including acclaimed British tenor, Daniel Norman as Raphael, American lyric baritone, Thomas Meglioranza as the movie producer Memphis, mezzo soprano Janna Baty as the director, Infanta and the talented young Australian soprano Jane Sheldon as the actress Cybele.
As you may have guessed, I got a chance to talk to Don about what’s on tap. Here’s what he had to say:
First off, congratulations on the project. I’ve only been hearing good things about it and can’t wait to hear it for myself. Tell us about the opera.
The Face got started about seven years ago when I approached poet David St. John about a possible collaboration on an opera. I had set his poetry in 2003 in a piece for The Hilliard Ensemble, and I very much responded to his language. David suggested his novella in verse, The Face, a collection of 45 poems with several possible narrative threads. I agreed that this was a great choice, and off we went. David constructed a narrative through-line in eleven scenes. He asked me to highlight lines of text in the novella which particularly spoke to me, and he always included them in the libretto. He was also very flexible about text order, repetitions, etc., which is a composer’s dream situation with a librettist.
The opera itself concerns a central character named Raphael, a once-famous poet struggling with the death of his lover and muse, Marina, who appears only on film (Raphael’s “home movies”) in the opera. A movie director seeks to make a movie about Raphael’s life, assisted by the producer, Memphis, the devil himself. The young actress Cybele is cast to play the role of the lost Marina. Raphael agrees to the deal, a Faustian pact, and filming begins. Intense emotions swirl around as the characters become involved with each other, and Raphael’s confusions and struggles continue. He finally reaches his low point, a dark night of the soul, before he can move on with some sort of reconciliation, a sense of rest. Through it all the producer, Memphis, observes and manipulates as a devilish master of ceremonies.
The Face has four singers, a silent role on film, and an ensemble of eight instruments: flute (with doubles), horn, percussion, guitar (classical, electric, and steel string acoustic), piano, violin, cello, and bass. It is in one act of eleven scenes, lasting about 80 minutes.
You’ve got a pretty long list of collaborators for this production, including contingents in France and on the east coast. What influenced your choice of teammates? Are there any new names or long-time friends working on this with you that you’d like to share something aboout?
In addition to David St. John, I am working with a French directing/lighting design team and a Boston-based new music ensemble. I had heard about the French artists from a soprano I knew in Los Angeles who was working with them. On a whim, I decided to travel to France to see their work, and I was strongly compelled to get them on this project. Yano Iatrides, director choreographer, Laurent Schneegans, lighting designer, and Amaya Lainez, assistant director, came over from Paris for the project. They have created a wonderful and quite amazing theatrical experience, with their colleague, stage director Paul Desveaux, who created the theatrical concept.
I have worked with Firebird Ensemble and their director, Kate Vincent, on several projects in recent years, and Kate decided to take the opera on as a project for Firebird Ensemble’s 10th anniversary season. It has been great to work with them, and this all creates a certain freedom when outside of the traditional opera house. Definitely a challenge as well, as Firebird doesn’t have the infrastructure associated with an opera company. They have done wonderful work as well.
Can you discuss what it was like to work with him to turn the novella into a libretto? Was there much back and forth between the two of you in the process?
In addition to what I mentioned above, we had numerous exchanges about how the characters would be fleshed out. We were essentially mining the novella for passages that would work for the opera, and creating clear characters out of this more vague (and beautiful) poetic landscape. Our working relationship has been very cordial throughout, and I now count David among my close friends.
The instrumentation you mentioned above sounds like an enormously fun combination to write for.
From the beginning, I imagined this work as a chamber opera with a small group of instruments. I chose them to offer a great deal of color possibilities and to suggest a certain heft of sound when needed. I viewed this as singers with a new music ensemble from the beginning, so having Firebird Ensemble be the “orchestra” in the work seemed a perfect solution. We also were able to bring Gil Rose on to the project as music director, and he is a very well-known champion of new American music, particularly as the music director of Boston Modern Orchestra Project.
As a teacher and department chair in one of the most prestigious music schools in the country, I imagine you must see a huge amount of diverse work coming through from students and younger composers. I know it’s a bit of an extreme generalization, but have you noticed any trends among you students’ work over time, or in recent times in particular?
A wide range of styles continues to be a hallmark of students who come to USC, and I am aware of this in recent American music in general. Looking toward European composers for ideas as well as a strong interest in melding “classical,” “vernacular,” and “ethnic” musics continues to be a common thread.
What’s your take on the new music scene in Los Angeles?
I think it is vibrant, and that there’s lots going on. It helps that the big institution in town, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, has such a strong commitment to new and recent music, which they perform at such a high level. There’s always more going on than one (or I, at any rate) can get out to hear.
Thank you!
For complete details and tickets, visit www.thefaceopera.com.