Posts Tagged ‘Tom Johnson’
Dog Star 12: Math is Nature
On Tuesday, June 14, 2016 the Dog Star volume 12 concert series convened at Art Share LA to present Math is Nature, an evening of experimental pieces by Tom Johnson, John Eagle and James Tenney. The Koan Quartet, from the Southland Ensemble, and the Isaura String Quartet were on hand to play and a good sized audience turned out to fill the space. Curated by John Eagle and Cassia Streb, all of the music in this concert involved mathematics in the composition and performance realization.
Art Share LA
The first work was Formulas (1994), by Tom Johnson. The Koan Quartet took the stage and the piece began with a moving melody line, repeated in different permutations by each of the instruments. Just as the active and optimistic feel of this seemed to be established, all fell quiet. After a few moments of silence, two tones in the violins were heard, followed by the viola. The sequential sounding of each instrument gave some movement to the otherwise slow and deliberate feel. The sense of mystery and suspense built up – and then there was another period of silence.
Formulas continued in this fashion – short sections with various combinations and permutations of instrument entrances, rhythms, dynamics and pitch directions. A nice minimalist groove broke out in one sequence while others featured lush harmonies or florid counterpoint. The parts were all cleanly played by the Koan Quartet with good ensemble throughout. Although originally conceived as a more strictly algorithmic piece, Tom Johnson confessed in the program notes: “I too have to rely on taste and instincts, and I can never prove that this version is better than the others, and finally this piece is not so much Formulas as simply music.” Formulas is an engaging and varied work that is an elegant balance of pure mathematics and inspired music.
A short intermission allowed the Koan Quartet to withdraw and the Isaura String Quartet took the stage for rhythm color #3 (2014), by John Eagle. The program notes sketched an overview of the methods employed in this composition: “The piece is made up of 24 individual pages (arranged in any order) which present three players with a sequence of notes and their numerical doubles (to be counted). These numbers are determined by the ratio of the given note to a fundamental which is either played or implied by a fourth part which drones throughout. While the score is presented like a grid, individual cells are left out in performance (not to be played) or are optional (left to the player to decide to play or not).” rhythm color #3 has an indeterminate structure and can be realized in many different ways depending on the decisions made by the performers at the time.
The Isaura Quartet at Dog Star 12
An extended period of silence began the piece followed by a low sustained tone from the cello, soon answered by the violins and viola. As each player entered, a verbal counting or a recitation of numbers was heard. The tones, all long and continuous, formed some interesting harmonies. As there was no perceived beat in the playing, the verbalization of the numbers added a kind of structural skeleton to the texture of tones as they sounded in various combinations and sequences. Various emotions emerged as the piece unfolded: tension, anxiety or fright – especially when the violins were at extremely high pitches – or a more spiritual feeling as when the cello played warm, reassuring tones. With all the players had to do to navigate the score, the ensemble and intonation were exemplary and there was never any sense of confusion or uncertainty over the many entrances.
rhythm color #3 operates at the cutting edge of an important experimental idea in music – that a piece can be performed in many different possible ways, and that the process of realization can include self-direction by the performers. The success of this performance demonstrates the far-reaching possibilities of this idea.
After a short break the Koan Quartet returned to perform Arbor Vitae (2006) by James Tenney, the final work of the composer. The program notes stated that Arbor Vitae is “… a series of related tonalities modulating through a richly populated, extended just intonation pitch space.” All of this began with a low, almost inaudible tone from the cello that was soon joined by the other strings at a similarly quiet dynamic. The combined sound seemed barely above a whisper and had some competition from a cooling fan. The long, subtle tones continued, only gradually increasing in volume and pitch. The intonation was exceptionally well-controlled by the Koan Quartet who were also equipped with tuner pickups on their instruments to realize the extended JI pitches called for in the score.
The quiet sounds invited careful listening and the interplay of the higher pitches was particularly interesting. Long, sustained tones came from each instrument but the entrances were offset and this gave the surface a sense of graceful and deliberate movement. The tones moved lower into the middle registers, creating some lovely harmonies. True to its title, a biotic feel predominated and the piece seemed to uncoil like a living organism. Arbor Vitae is a subtle, yet expressive depiction of the organic as realized through alternate tuning and precise playing.
The annual Dog Star concerts continue to provide a unique and generous contribution to the experimental music scene in Los Angeles, and beyond.
The Koan Quartet is Eric KM Clark and Orin Hildestad, violins, Cassia Streb, viola, and Jennifer Bewerse, cello. The Isaura String Quartet is Emily Call and Madeline Falcone, violins, Melinda Rice, viola, and Betsy Rettig, cello.
Interview: Violinist and composer Andrew McIntosh on, well, everything
Andrew McIntosh has a lot going on. His new recording of Tom Johnson’s music came out last week (and is great, and is available by clicking here), he’s a full time member of both wild Up and The Formalist Quartet, he runs Populist Records, and, tomorrow afternoon, he’s giving a free performance of Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber’s Mystery Sonatas at the Hammer Museum. He also, based on his photo, takes good care of his cats. They look pretty happy. I’m amazed that he found time to answer a few questions.
Between the cd, the wild Up residency, and performing Biber’s complete Mystery Sonatas this weekend, it’s been a huge couple of weeks for you. How’s it all going?
To be honest, it’s been quite intense. I’ve been up until 1 am or later working pretty much every night lately, because in addition to everything you just listed I also have to finish two compositions in the next week or so, prepare for a violin and piano recital with Dante Boon in Amsterdam in early September, and prepare for a recording session in Berlin of Marc Sabat’s music! The Biber concert is something I’ve been looking forward to for a long time, though, and I feel pretty well-prepared for it since I started learning the music over 2 years ago. However, it is around 120 minutes of music, so that much material is always going to feel pretty overwhelming no matter how well prepared you are – especially when you are playing in a total of 14 radically different tunings throughout the piece!
As a matter of fact, the whole year has been a bit insane, although very rewarding. For the past several years I have been juggling five different large-scale multi-year projects and 2012 is seeing the completion of all five of them, Biber being the last: the Tom Johnson CD, Wolfgang von Schweinitz’s 80-minute violin/bass duo (performed several times earlier this year), a 45 minute composition for two clarinets and violin (premiered at the Hammer in July), a 50 minute composition for two microtonal pianos (being premiered at the Gaudeamus Festival in Holland this September), and this Biber cycle. It’s an exciting time and I feel very grateful to be able to do all of this work, collaborate with great musicians, and have it all presented!
Tell me a bit more about your interest in Biber. When I hear your name and think about the projects I’ve seen you involved in, music from 1675 definitely isn’t the first thing that comes to mind, and the smattering of Bach and Vivaldi on your performance calender is pretty minimal. Is baroque music a passion of yours you’ve been looking to engage with more, or is it this work by Biber in particular that’s got a hold on you?
Well, baroque (and earlier) music is actually something of a focus for me. If that’s not reflected in the calendar on my website than that’s my fault for not keeping it up to date and comprehensive (I’m not as good at that as I probably should be, but a new and more representative website is in the works…). Early music is in fact such a strong focus for me that I actually went back to school at USC recently to do an additional part-time graduate degree in early music performance, which finished this past May. Also, I’ve played a couple of solo baroque concerts in the past year or so (mostly with French and early Italian repertoire), as well as performing with Musica Angelica, the Corona del Mar Baroque Festival, and a variety of other random engagements. A large portion of my CD collection is filled with the likes of Dowland, Ciconia, Couperin, etc.
Biber has been by far my favorite baroque composer since I was first introduced to his music about 10 years ago by my older sister. You may know that I already have an inclination towards music that uses tuning in unusual ways, which Biber does brilliantly. That’s just a starting point, though. Besides that, his music is wonderfully imaginative and playful, using the violin in ways that were not only unique and unheard-of at the time, but which are still very unique and fresh even when compared with the 300 years of violin repertoire that’s been written since. I can’t think of very much music that feels more joyful to me to play, even when the pieces are quite dark or somber. I tend to think of Biber as the 17th century counterpart to Messiaen, another of my favorite composers.
It has been a dream of mine to play these pieces for quite a long time, and going back to school for an early music degree, restoring an 18th century German violin, playing concerts of lots of baroque and renaissance repertoire has all been in a way leading up to this goal. I’ve invested an absurd amount of time and energy in the project so I hope to keep playing the pieces in the future as well.
With a lot of Tom Johnson’s music, as well as music by other minimalist composers, it seems like the challenge in performing it may be more mental than technical (though of course whatever you’re thinking is expressed via technique). How do you go about preparing pieces like these? Is there anything different in your approach to learning and practicing them?
Good question! I’d say that ultimately the challenge of pretty much all music is more mental than technical. I always tell my students to develop their imagination as much as possible, since you can only play as well as you can imagine.
That being said, these pieces are actually excruciatingly difficult from a technical perspective – which is part of why I am attracted to them in a strange way. The simplest music is often the hardest to play, like Mozart, for instance. I imagine that most of the music on the correct music CD would be fairly easy on piano, but on the violin or viola it feels full of risk at every moment. The tiniest little bow squeak or finger movement that you wouldn’t usually even notice sticks out like a sore thumb in Tom’s music. To give you an example, we had to record one of the movements of Tilework for Violin several times simply because it was early in the morning and I’d had a lot of coffee. My stomach kept growling at exactly the same point in the piece and each time it ruined the take – that’s how exposed the music is!
The preparation was a long and multi-faceted process – like the Biber actually. It started with working with Tom in San Francisco at the Other Minds Festival performing a string quartet of his in 2010. I was very struck by the beauty and strictness of the music, and also his charming personality. Naturally, I asked him for some solo pieces and he delivered a great big pile of them. I started incorporating them into concerts and eventually I had enough for an entire solo program of his music. It wasn’t until I was already performing the music quite a lot that I seriously started thinking of recording the pieces. Everything sort of came together very naturally at just the right time (by “naturally” I actually mean “with a whole lot of work”) and Tom was very enthusiastic about the whole thing, so now we have a CD!
The notation in Tom’s music is generally pretty open, so interpretively there are some interesting parallels to early music there: flexible instrumentation, flexible tempos and even register, no indications written for phrasing or articulation. One has to make a lot of decisions when playing Tom’s music, but I always try to approach it from the perspective of figuring out how each piece wants to be played – as if they have their own unique characters and opinions that are just waiting to be discovered.
What, as a composer, initially attracted you to working with just intonation and alternate tunings?
I don’t think I can provide a simple answer to this question. I remember experimenting with tuning quite a lot as a kid. I grew up in a rural area of the Nevada desert and I had a lot of time on my hands to practice, but I almost never practiced what I was supposed to (to the eternal frustration of my poor teachers!). Instead I would spend hours improvising and “composing”, although I rarely wrote down my compositions at that age, and many of those improvisations involved retuning the violin and bending notes and who knows what else. Sometimes I tried to notate these improvisations or play them on piano, but I often couldn’t figure them out once I tried to analyze them – and in retrospect I am pretty sure that it was because I was using microtones but didn’t have the vocabulary to actually understand what I was doing. When I shared some of this kind of playing once with my violin teacher she didn’t know what to do, so she gave me a CD of Alban Berg and said I should see if I liked it, which I didn’t at the time. To her credit, she was actually a very good teacher and I was probably a very stubborn and difficult student to teach. I wish I had some kind of documentation of these improvisations to go back and listen to, but unfortunately no such thing exists.
When I was exposed to the music of Gerard Grisey and Harry Partch in grad school at CalArts I finally felt like here was the harmonic language that I had been looking for all along. My music generally sounds nothing like either of those two, but nonetheless they are the ones who first inspired me to move in this direction. I was also studying microtonal theory and some composition at the time with Marc Sabat (who, together with Wolfgang von Schweinitz, developed the Hemholtz JI notation that I use), and so my path became more clear once I had a way to notate and articulate the musical thoughts that had been percolating since childhood.
Just intonation is more or less just a representation of the way that sound works naturally, and that’s always been a fascination of mine. I don’t exclusively write in just intonation, though, because I believe that imperfection and compromise are also very important ideas for music.
It seems like we’re seeing a resurgence of the composer/performer persona in concert music in recent years, and while I have a feeling it’s got something to do with those of us who are establishing themselves today having grown up steeped in popular music, where that’s the norm, I’m interested in your take on the subject. Are performing and composing, for you, two sides of the same coin of being a musician?
I don’t really have much to contribute to the composer/performer resurgence discussion, other than that it seems to me a very logical and stimulating way for music to be made. As a matter of fact, and this has been said by many people recently, composing and performing went hand in hand for most of musical history. Perhaps the middle of the 20th century will be read about in history books as the time when musicians were uptight and judgmental and thought it necessary to limit ones activities in order to be taken seriously. I tend to see the more recent trend as a logical return to a very healthy way of making music.
For me, they are two strongly related pursuits, but definitely not two sides of the same coin. For instance, anyone who knows me well knows that I hate performing my own music (although I often end up doing it anyway). Composing is something done in solitude and it doesn’t develop linearly, whereas performing is done in a community and happens in real-time. Composing is meditative and freeing, while performing is thrilling but stressful. I guess they are both acts of artistic creation, but they fill very different roles in my own life and it’s an ever-increasing challenge to reach a balance between them.
Also, I often seek out music to perform that will nurture and develop particular ideas in my writing. A few years ago I was performing a lot of Grisey, Nono, and Feldman for this reason. There was something in the music that I could only truly learn and understand by performing it, and now that’s a very valuable experience to have had. More recently I’ve been playing Tom Johnson, Schubert, Biber, and Wolfgang’s music for that reason.
What are your thoughts on the LA scene? What’s good about it, and what would you like to see change?
It’s a little hard to define even what the “LA scene” is, since it’s a constantly-shifting and not-geographically-centered entity, but I can say that there is an exciting community of musicians here who are dedicated to their work, very talented, and great people. My wife and I were confronted with the opportunity to move to Montreal a few years ago and thinking about that made us realize how much we like it here and appreciate the people around us. Obviously, we’re still here!
It would be nice if LA could develop a little bit more of a support system for its modern classical music (and early music!) – in terms of venues, funding, education, infrastructure, and things like that, but these things seem to be gradually developing anyway. I’m excited to see what the music scene will be like here in a decade or two.
Same here. Thank you, and good luck this weekend!
Thanks to you too!
For details on tomorrow’s show, visit wildup.la/events/chamber-music-andrew-mcintosh-plays-biber. More about Andrew McIntosh can be found at plainsound.org.