Skip to content

Posts Tagged ‘wild Up’

Claire Chenette shares her WORK

Oboist Claire Chenette will be sharing her WORK with Tuesdays at Monk Space — specifically, a passion for cultivation, both in the worlds of new music and the fermentation of food. The program explores the often mysterious concepts of invisible processes over time, experimentation, and the complexity of crafting. The upcoming concert on April 17 will feature works by composers Helen Grime, Nicholas Deyoe, Ruth Crawford-SeegerToshio Hosokawa, and Marin Marais, along with a selection of her own handcrafted fermented foods. I had the opportunity to ask Claire some questions about the program and the inspiration behind it. Here’s what she had to say: 

Claire Chenette

The concept behind your upcoming concert is fascinating. What interesting relationships do you find between the fermentation of food and creating music? 

I’d like to answer this question with the help of fermentation expert Sandor Katz–“we use the same word —culture—to describe the community of bacteria that transform milk into yogurt, as well as the practice of subsistence itself, language, music, art, literature, science, spiritual practices, belief systems, and all that human beings seek to perpetuate”.

For me, fermentation and music are adjacent in the patterns of my daily life. I’ll be bringing an alpine-style cheese that I made last fall when I was brainstorming ideas and ordering music for this show. I’ll also be bringing a batch of sauerkraut that I made last Monday, the same day that I tied the reeds I’ll use on Tuesday. This show is part of Wild Up’s WORK series, and I can’t imagine a better or more real way to share not just my oboe playing, but my work and ways of working.

How did you get started fermenting your own foods, and do you have any favorites? What do you find most interesting about the process?  

Some people approach fermentation for its health benefits. Traditionally, it was mostly about preserving the harvest pre-refrigeration. I was drawn to fermentation by my taste buds. The flavors of home ferments are often much more complex and interesting than anything I can find in the grocery store (which is why they go well with the music in this show, which is more complex and interesting than anything I can find on the radio). One of the most unexpectedly simple and delicious ferments I’m bringing is a carrot-ginger relish that I made using way-too-big, overwintered carrots that I found when I was digging up the garden this spring.

The most interesting thing about the fermentation process is that you can’t really control it, which means that what you create is bound to be unexpected. You set up a controlled environment, and then you tend to it while it does its thing. Microbial communities and time are transformative.

A sample of Claire’s handcrafted cheeses.

The concert at Monk Space features works by composers Helen Grime, Nicholas Deyoe, Ruth Crawford-Seeger, Toshio Hosokawa, and Marin Marais. Can you tell us a bit more about the works on the program? For example, do they relate to each other in any ways you’d like to point out? 

Nick Deyoe wrote NCTRN 2 for me in 2015 and this will be my first performance. Virginia Woolf writes “The living poets express a feeling that is actually being made and torn out of us at the moment,” and that is the best phrase I can think of to describe NCTRN 2. I can’t imagine that it will be something anyone is expecting. With the traditions of fermentation on display, I wanted to bring in history and an older sense of innovation with the French Baroque composer Marais. Ruth Crawford’s “Diaphonic Suite” is playful and modernist. Hosokawa’s “Spell Song” is heart-wrenchingly lyrical and expressive. And Helen Grime’s “Arachne” is a perfectly crafted little story about what might befall you if you think you’re the best at weaving. A good reminder to take it easy on the crafting.

Anything else you’d like to share? 

All of the ferments I’m bringing will be displayed on ceramic art by Saul Alpert-Abrams. Potter Shannon Garson writes “The privilege of using handmade pots is that they contain the idea of human endeavor, a link with other people, not with factories or corporations.” It is truly a privilege to bring Saul’s pottery to this event. His work will highlight the radical idea that a simple object can be a place where people can meet and share a life-affirming experience of beauty.

For more information about the upcoming concert and to purchase tickets, visit Tuesdays at Monk Space.

The LA Phil’s Second Noon to Midnight transformed Disney Hall

On November 18th Walt Disney Concert Hall transformed into a showcase of the community, talent and swagger of Los Angeles new music. The second annual Noon to Midnight event was as much an exhibition as a festival: An overlapping schedule of pop-up performances populated the building’s many nestled spaces, encouraging attendees to wander and casually sample the day’s various offerings. The music-making spilled over Gehry’s grand titanium shipwreck onto the sidewalk and plaza, but the main stage served as a central hub for major performances, punctuating the day with moments of communion between curious ears scattering outwards toward the bustling amphitheater, beer garden, and cozy nooks and crannies of the hall.

In truth, this collar-loosening was the first successful performance of the day. Among younger audiences, the glitzy, glass-enclosed posters of Dudamel might seem out of touch with the Phil’s superimposed tagline “our city, our sound” as his immaculate white bow tie and baton are a far cry from the flimsy band posters that litter telephone poles around Echo Park. But something about licking food truck drippings off of your fingers while listening to electric guitars compete with traffic noise really tempers the imposing austerity of the concert hall. And so, from the very onset, Noon to Midnight transformed the space from a venue for witnessing art into a home-base for engaging with it.

And engaging it was. Yuval Sharon and Annie Gosfield’s new performance piece, War of the Worlds was a fitting centerpiece for the event, occupying both the hall and remote sites in a sprawling, tech-savvy production that cleverly balanced national and local relevance (see Nick Norton’s review here). Wild Up performed two separate sets. The first was a showcase of the collaborative works born of the LA Phil’s National Composers Intensive, featuring new pieces by six young composers. As one might expect, the music reflected an excited exploration of the ensemble’s open-mindedness, navigated by some promising compositional voices. The second set utilized the ensemble’s larger forces to premiere several new works that best demonstrated the ensemble’s agile, performative charm—sometimes dance-y, sometimes delicate, sometimes asking “how did I end up waist deep in this swamp” and “are trombone multiphonics the only way out.” But whether shimmering or sloshing, Christopher Rountree and wild Up were always committed, always convincing, and always a hell of a lot of fun to watch.

The smaller ensembles offered a more intimate experience, including a noisy, forward-looking set by gnarwhallaby, installation performances by HOCKET and Southland Ensemble, jazzy moments with the LA Signal Lab, and a tight, driving performance by Jacaranda. Outdoor spaces hosted less traditional instrumentations like RAGE THORMBONES and Los Angeles Electric 8. The performance that perhaps best encapsulated Noon to Midnight as a whole was Grisey’s Le Noir de l’Etoile: red fish blue fish, spread among the serene beer garden atop Disney Hall, animated the crisp evening air and city views with a radically virtuosic performance in which audience members strolled between and around the performers to create a consuming, fluid and completely individual experience of the colossal work. Here the performance and experience of the music were inseparably entangled, defined by the audience’s direct engagement with the production. The same could be said of Chris Kallmyer‘s Soft Structures, almost a festival in itself.

In total, the day included more than twenty separate programs, and it would be impossible to speak to each set individually. But parsing the experience into discrete parts would betray the atmosphere the LA Phil took such care to create in the first place; Noon to Midnight is a monument of local music that generates all the electricity and none of the pomp of the traditional concert. The music, performers, spaces, drinks and food all embodied an LA personality that manifested in every detail. Having spent most of my life in Silicon Valley, what strikes me most since moving to Los Angeles is the physicality of the city: people don’t just philosophize about things, they make them. There is a reverence for the man-made and the hand-made: What the east side lacks in blooming nature it replaces with colorful graffiti, what towering buildings of Hollywood obscure from your view they replace with blinding LEDs and enormous marquis. In a field of new music that can all too easily slip into intellectualism, this combining of upstart and established groups alike was a heartening account of the range of artists getting their hands seriously dirty making art. It is clear that music here is being made not only in pristine halls, but also in aged, mixed-use buildings with shoddy plumbing. And so, rather than hanging the the local art on a white wall, standing back and rubbing its beard to pontificate, Noon to Midnight was instead an invitation to come together, wash hands, and admire the buildup of dirt in the sink. A glorious, silver sink in the middle of downtown.

Lukas Ligeti, the Gőz-Kurtág-Lukács Trio, and the Vision of Moholy-Nagy

Sitting in Bing Theater in the heart of Los Angeles, I found myself experiencing a unique insight into Hungarian culture at The Vision of Moholy-Nagy and Contemporary Music. The performance was timed to coincide with the Moholy-Nagy exhibition Future Present at LACMA. In all fairness, there was a dose of German culture mixed in too, since the ideals of the Bauhaus school (of which the Hungarian painter and photographer Moholy-Nagy was a prominent figure) were a resonating theme throughout the evening. The performers came from all over: Hungary, yes, but also Los Angeles and New York. True to the Bauhaus movement, different approaches to music, technology, and art were combined, necessitating the concert to be a multi-disciplinary event – even the walk to the theater involved passing some pretty spectacular sculptures and architecture.

The Gőz-Kurtág-Lukács Trio at LACMA's Bing Theater

The Gőz-Kurtág-Lukács Trio at LACMA’s Bing Theater

The concert began with the fearless GőzKurtágLukács Trio, who performed various selections of electro-acoustic works on cimbalom, trombone/bass trumpet/seashells, and synthesizer/computer, with mesmerizing visualizations by Szabolcs Kerestes. Partly through-composed and partly improvised, these works were a collective microcosm of the Hungarian classical electronic music scene, a creatively vital genre during the repressive decades of state socialism. Their performance transported me to a meditative, almost spiritual state, yet somehow simultaneously rooted me with technical, detailed focus. I was entranced by the immaculate, reverberant textures, ranging from pointillist and chaotic to celestial and broadly gestural. The accompanying visualizations featured rapidly moving lines, shapes, and colors, and were directly responsive to live sound. The exception to this rule was György Ligeti’s graphic score to Artikulation, which was comically incredible to watch on a big screen with surround sound.

Lukas Ligeti, who recently moved to Southern California for a new teaching position at UCI, was the featured composer after intermission. The art of the Bauhaus movement, and of Moholy-Nagy, seems to have a marked influence on Ligeti’s music, which showed impressive breadth, experimentation, and proportional symmetry. He presented three works with varying instrumentation and compositional approaches. The first, Language: PROUN: music (2016), had its west coast premiere by soprano Ariadne Grief and wild Up members Matthew Barbier (trombone), Matthew Cook (vibraphone), Derek Stein (cello), and Andrew Tholl (violin). The piece itself is a reaction to Moholy-Nagy’s exhibition Future Present, and follows the Bauhaus tradition in its unconventional exploration of balance and symmetry (however, this is done on Ligeti’s own terms). While in many cases text is made to fit the cadences of music, Ligeti turns the usual plot on its head by allowing the natural rhythm of freely-flowing speech to entirely dictate the music. Continuing on with the natural progression of this idea, the instrumentalists follow the cadences led by the soprano, which Ariadne Grief accomplished with radiant, playful sincerity.

Members of wild Up perform Lukas Ligeti's piece, Language: PROUN: music

Members of wild Up perform Lukas Ligeti’s piece, Language: PROUN: music

Next was Thinking Songs (2015), a fiercely virtuosic five-movement work for solo marimba. Few marimbists could have pulled it off like Ji Hye Jung – she not only played it perfectly, but also somehow made it look easy (in fact, she danced through the hardest parts). The technical expertise required for movements such as Four-Part Invention and Dance was matched by a musical expressivity that was stunning to behold. The composition itself took us an incredible musical journey: exploiting timbral possibilities with different mallets in Dance, slow-moving lines in Lamento, technical impossibilities manifested into reality in Four-Part Invention, playful exploration of prepared marimba in Scherzo, and quasi-minimalist shifting accents in Two-Part Invention. 

Closing the show were three works for Notebook, an ensemble founded by Ligeti to explore the intersection between composition and improvisation. These pieces featured not one but two electric guitars (Eyal Maoz and Tom McNalley), trombone (Rick Parker), violin (Amma Savery), saxophone (Daniel Blake), synthesizer (Ricardo Gallo), and the composer on drums. The performance was pure fun, with an exploratory energy that reconfirmed the experimental and playful side to Ligeti’s musical personality.

wild Up presents Richard Valitutto’s WORK in Pasadena

On April 8, 2017 the Pasadena Conservatory of Music was host to Richard Valitutto along with gnarwhallaby, Arpeture Duo and a subset of wild Up – all in a concert from wild Up’s WORK series, which focuses on single members of the group. Several new pieces and arrangements by Valitutto were heard, as well as reference works by Messiaen, Feldman and Wolfe. Soprano Justine Aronson made a special appearance and the elegant Barrett Hall was filled almost to capacity on a quiet Saturday evening.

Pianist Richard Valitutto

The program opened with Papier Mâché, an original piano work by Valitutto. This began with a slow, mysterious feel and just a hint of tension in the chords that increased as the piece progressed. The density and complexity slowly built up, adding to a sense of uncertainty, just as the dynamic crested and fell back, fading at the finish. Papier Mâché has a sophisticated sheen and a solid, well-crafted construction that made for a fine opening to the concert.

Polichromia, by Zygmunt Krauze, followed, and this was performed by gnarwhallaby, the Los Angeles-based new music group who have made a mission of performing works by Polish avant-garde composers active in the mid-20th century. Polichromia begins with sustained tones in the cello, muted trombone and clarinet while the piano counters with rapid one and two note figures separated by silence. The highly chromatic tones in the instruments make for some intriguing harmonies and the sharper piano licks offered a fine contrast. After a few minutes this sequence finishes and there is an extended silence by all. This process restarts twice more, with the tones in the instruments becoming more active in each new sequence. Polichromia creates an environment filled with many varied tone colors, vividly portrayed by gnarwhallaby.

Next was an arrangement by Valitutto of two piano works: From the Cradle to Abysses by the Romanian-French composer Horațiu Rădulescu and Hungarian Passacaglia by György Ligeti. As Valitutto explained, these pieces felt like piano reductions of some larger instrumental work and the purpose of his arrangement was to fill out the parts that seemed to be embedded in the original scores. Two Arrangements for gnarwhallaby was the result, and this was played continuously as a single piece of music. The brass, woodwind and string components present in the gnarwhallaby ensemble was ideal for this sort of exploration.

Two Arrangements for gnarwhallaby began with solitary piano notes followed by a sharp sforzando from the trombone and quietly sustained tones in the cello and clarinet. Something like a melody materialized from the piano and cello while the trombone continued to emit loud sforzandos at various intervals. The dynamics of the piano chords increased rapidly and soon joined the trombone in making unsettling statements as the cello and clarinet continued with their smoothly understated response. The contrasts here were very effective – the more so because of the difference in instrumentation.

The program for wild Up and Richard Valitutto’s WORK concert

A soft cello solo appeared and seemed to tiptoe around the dramatic piano crashes. This melody was soon passed around to the clarinet and trombone. The piano calmed down to a series of steady two-note chords as the clarinet took up the melody in a higher register. Eventually all three instruments joined in together and some lovely harmonies emerged. The passages in the instruments gradually increased to a rapid tempo just as the piece concluded.

Two Arrangements for gnarwhallaby is an inspired expansion of the works of two 20th century masters, and confirmed Valitutto’s sharp instincts for orchestration. This arrangement creates a seamless connection between the two source pieces and the vivid colors brought out by the expanded instrumentation were matched by the coordination and precision of gnarwhallably’s playing.

Shadow (2013) by Rebecca Saunders followed. This is a solo piano piece that explores the sympathetic vibrations of the piano strings that occur after a loud chord is played. An acoustic ‘shadow’ is heard, and with the sustain pedal depressed, the soft tones are allowed to ring out and decay in the subsequent silence. Accordingly, Valitutto struck a series of crashes, tone clusters and sharp chords – often with maximum force – so that the resulting acoustic shadow was clearly heard, even up in the top row of Barrett Hall. These effects were amazingly varied – from lightly hovering and insubstantial to menacingly ominous to warm and welcoming. After a few minutes of listening you begin to ignore the initial impulse and focus instead on the quiet shadows that follow. The process is something like hearing a loud crash of thunder and then listening to the rolling echo as it dissipates into the distance.

The playing became more complex, loud crashes alternating with softer ones, multiplying the contrasting character of the various shadows. The interactions between the shadow tones themselves, although very understated, were also intriguing to the ear. Shadow is an instructive piece that points to the importance of listening for nuance, even when confronted by repeated dynamic outbursts. Valitutto’s sense of timing and the application of energy was perfect, allowing this piece to unfold with all of its subtlety intact.

Another solo piano piece was next, The Black Wheatear, by Oliver Messiaen, from Catalogue d’oiseaux (1958). This began with strong, crashing chords reminiscent of a booming surf; the breeding grounds of the black wheatear include the rocky sea cliffs of the Iberian peninsula. A series of short and rapid runs in the upper registers portray the brief but rich warble of the species. These skittering phrases regularly recur, nicely suggesting the chattering of birds wheeling high above a coastal meadow. The quick and spiky passages were accurately played by Valitutto, fully realizing Messiaen’s unconventional vision.

Voice, Violin and Piano by Morton Feldman followed, and for this Valitutto was joined by Adrianne Pope on violin and – naturally – soprano Justine Aronson. All the familiar Feldman virtues were present – the soft, airy voice of Ms. Aronson hovering lightly over a quiet violin and gentle piano chords. Each sound seemed independent of the others, but the sequences often produced memorable moments despite the spare texture. The intonation, especially in the voice, was impressive as there are almost no landmarks for pitch; even so, there was no hesitation or tentativeness in the many entrances. Voice, Violin and Piano is counted as a miniature in the Feldman canon, but this performance contained everything that makes his music so distinctive.

Valitutto’s Another Spring was next, based on poetry by Denise Leverton and with violist Linnea Powell joining the other players on stage. The opening piano chords of this were bright and sunny while the strings played very high, thin pitches that brought to mind wisps of wind. With the entrance of the soprano voice, Another Spring gained its focus and produced some lovely passages; the strong vocal part giving Ms. Aronson some room to stretch after the restrained Feldman piece. The seemingly disparate piano chords, airy strings and lovely legato vocal parts came together in a fine balance that nicely captured  the optimism of a radiant spring day.

In his final remarks Richard Valitutto explained that the composers of his generation have spent their artistic lives working in the shadow of 9/11, and this burden has only increased since the November election. Accordingly, the last piece selected for this program was Compassion (2001), by Julia Wolfe. This begins softly, with an ominous slow trill that steadily builds tension, followed by a series of strong chords that become progressively more chaotic. The roiling chords roll in like a booming surf, freighted with powerful emotions. The rumbling continues to build in intensity, especially in the lower registers, until there is an explosive silence – and the roar slowly dies away. After a short silence, a new trill is heard, now filled with a quiet sorrow. Compassion is destined to be a landmark of our era and was played to perfection by Valitutto, whose efforts were received with extended applause.

The impeccable playing by all the performers made Work an engaging evening of contemporary music that ranged from  forceful and complex to the soft and subtle. This concert was a good benchmark reading of Valitutto’s varied musical influences as well as pointing to his continued artistic growth.

 

Second Take: Bonnie and Clyde

Los Angeles-based experimental opera company The Industry workshopped the much-anticipated contemporary opera Bonnie and Clyde for their Second Take program on February 26, 2017. Written by Andrew McIntosh – with libretto by Melinda Rice – the performance was given at the spacious Wilshire Ebell Theatre with a large crowd in attendance. More than three years in development, the full musical score of Bonnie and Clyde was realized by a cast of soloists, a small chorus and wild Up, a 17-piece instrumental ensemble, all under the direction of Christopher Rountree.

Yuval Sharon, Artistic Director for The Industry, explained in his welcoming remarks that the Second Take preview was designed to give a complete performance of all the music in the opera. There is no acting, costumes or scenery, but the full musical forces are all present. The program notes explained that “[Second Take] showcases the new piece in a nascent and pure state; production concerns and directorial interpretation have not yet put this composition to the test.”

The six vocalists comprising the cast stood on one side of the stage, four choristers were placed on the opposite side, with wild Up in the center. A large screen above and at the back of the stage helpfully displayed the libretto as it was sung. As all the singers were stationary and dressed in formal black, the performance feeling a bit more like an oratorio than an opera. The presence of wild Up at center stage tended to emphasize the accompaniment over the singers at times, but the instrumental texture throughout was generally transparent enough that there was no compromise to any of the vocal elements.

As librettist Melinda Rice observed, “When a story is familiar, there is hardly any question of how it will end.” This perspective informs almost everything about Bonnie and Clyde, and from the opening moments the feeling is one of a somber sadness. The libretto is always on a personal and emotional plane, with much of it taken from the reminiscences of the surviving players in the real-life drama. The libretto draws material from the published autobiography of Ted Hinton to form the narrative thread. Hinton worked as a delivery man and personally knew both Bonnie and Clyde. He later became a police officer and was a member of the posse that finally caught up with the fugitive pair.

Bonnie and Clyde unfolds in 24 scenes over two acts. Act I serves to introduce the many characters: Ted Hinton (James Onstad), Clyde’s mother Cumie (Sarah Beaty), brother Buck Barrow and his wife Blanche (David Castillo and Lauren Davis), as well as the titular Bonnie and Clyde (Justine Aronson and Jon Keenan). Given the static nature of the staging, it took a few scenes to get the sense of these relationships – the acting and costuming in the final production will be helpful here – but the music and the singing were both sensitive and precise, clearly sketching out the emotional terrain. Early in Act I Cumie, portrayed by Sarah Beaty, sings a beautiful aria in the form of a letter asking the governor to parole Clyde as he “is needed here on the farm.” There is a palpable sense of pathos in the music; the hard-scrabble life of an East Texas farming family is distinctly heard and felt. When Clyde returns home from prison he arrives in a new Ford V8. Rather than return to his family and the difficult life of a farmer, Clyde is completely bewitched by the power of the automobile and the freedom this represents; you can hear this tension in the music and it marks a decisive point in the story.

The final scene in Act I is masterfully done – Bonnie and Clyde are on the run and crash their car near a washed out bridge in the country. Bonnie is severely burned and they seek shelter at a nearby farmhouse. The family there offers to call for help, but Clyde refuses and announces that he will steal their car to continue the flight. The frightened family begins to sing a hymn – as heard in the chorus – and this immediately connects with the audience on a spiritual level, much like a chorale in a Bach Passion. Act I thus concludes with Bonnie and Clyde renouncing everything that is good in their past for an uncertain freedom in the future.

Act II opens with a spoken soliloquy by Ted Hinton, and this helpfully brings the narrative forward, putting the audience squarely in the middle of the most familiar part of the story. Bonnie and Clyde are now public enemies with brother Buck Barrow and Blanche also members of the gang. In a dramatic duet, Buck is asked to renounce Clyde and return to the quiet life. The music poignantly captures the heart-rendering choice that turns on a brother’s loyalty. When Buck is killed in a police ambush, Ted interrogates the captured Blanche in a tense scene accompanied by a steady tone in the woodwinds that heightens the emotional impact. “Your husband is dead” announces Ted – and the story gains its full dramatic traction.

After a brief orchestral interlude, Bonnie and Clyde return to the stage for a duet – having been absent since the end of Act I – and the story gathers momentum toward the inevitable finish. Another soliloquy by Hinton tells of how Bonnie and Clyde ran a roadblock on Easter Sunday, killing a rookie policeman in the process. The young man was just two weeks from his wedding and there is a very touching aria sung by Marie, his intended bride, lamenting her loss. Hinton now sings of how he has ‘gotten into their future’ and believes he can predict the couple’s next move. Hinton devises a trap for the pair and at this point the music turns very dark, the solemn toll of piano chords ringing out like church bells. A final epilogue scene is unexpectedly quiet with none of the violent histrionics of the more popular accounts. Clyde is simply heard repeating: “Freedom is driving and driving and driving…” as the opera fades to its finish. After a respectful silence, the audience responded with an extended and enthusiastic applause.

Bows after the concert premiere of Andrew McIntosh and Melinda Rice's <em>Bonnie and Clyde</em>.

Bows after the concert premiere of Andrew McIntosh and Melinda Rice’s Bonnie and Clyde.

This performance of Bonnie and Clyde, although limited to just the musical elements, was nevertheless a powerful experience. The singing and playing was of a very high caliber throughout and the conducting by Christopher Rountree was flawless. The music and libretto were well-matched and artfully performed by all. The eventual staging, scenery and costuming will be an important element in portraying the relationships and motivations of the characters, especially in Act I. The singing was hauntingly beautiful, with the arias and duets more or less evenly distributed throughout the cast. The premiere of the finished production of Bonnie and Clyde is sure to be an extraordinary event.

 

Second Take: Andrew McIntosh and Melinda Rice on Bonnie and Clyde

Two years ago we interviewed composer Andrew McIntosh about his opera-in-progress, Bonnie and Clyde, before the first reading of a few excerpts at The Industry and Wild Up’s 2015 First Take program. Tonight in inaugurates the first ever Second Take, with a complete performance of the work. Andrew and his librettist and partner Melinda Rice somehow had time to answer questions in this week leading up to the premiere, which is at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre tonight at 7.

Bonnie and Clyde made an appearance in the first edition of First Take back in 2015. The Industry is now inaugurating Second Take with a full concert performance of the piece. Obviously there are more scenes and more music, but could you tell us what’s changed about the opera since First Take 2015? Did that reading alter your original conception of the piece? How did it influence writing the rest of it?

Melinda Rice, Andrew McIntosh, and the rest of their family. Photo by Kat Nockels.

Melinda Rice, Andrew McIntosh, and the rest of their family. Photo by Kat Nockels.

Melinda: Andrew and I have discussed this a lot.

In the excerpt of this opera performed at First Take in 2015, Bonnie and Clyde are on the edges of the story, both literally (singing from behind the audience) and in the narrative.

I felt their absence in First Take. I believed that we had created space for seeing other characters. But as I continued to work on the libretto, selecting the stories that I wanted to tell out of all of the stories that have been written down concerning them and their affects on others, Bonnie and Clyde crept back into the libretto, and back onto the stage.

In a vocal workshop of what was meant to be the full opera in mid 2016, I still felt that Clyde, and to some degree Bonnie, were missing, so I apologized to Andrew, who had thought his work in creating new material for this opera was coming to a close, and said that I wanted to write more for them. Scene 11, among other things, came out of that conversation.

Andrew, I heard you once say that you didn’t mind if audiences didn’t like your music, but that you cared a lot about what the people playing it felt. Is that sentiment the same with opera, in which there is – at least in many cases – a plot and staging that needs to communicate with a viewer?

Andrew: I’m hesitant to engage with this question, since I don’t remember the original context and I’m not sure it’s a statement I would necessarily stand behind. Also, I do have a tendency to frame ideas provocatively in conversation in ways that I often wouldn’t write down.

What I can say is that I do care quite a lot about the way performers feel while playing my music. I take extreme care to make the notation as clear as possible, solve issues like page turns, making sure the musicians have all the information they need during long rests, enough time for instrument changes, etc. Also, it is my goal to write with a kind of radical clarity, so that even if there’s only one note then it’s a note that requires love and affection from the performer and that it has some particular quality to it that they can engage with. There aren’t any throw-away notes in my music – every single one of them counts for something and asks the performers to engage critically in some way. Thus, it’s important to me to create something the performers will care about and invest in, since their parts are often exposed and transparent, even in a setting like Bonnie and Clyde where there are 27 people on stage.

1. Consider Bach’s Musical Offering or Art of the Fugue. They were completely theoretical exercises. He wrote the music because he was interested in exploring certain ideas in an almost absurdly focused, deep, and abstract way, to the point that he didn’t even specify what instruments were to play – it’s just abstract harmonies, counterpoint, and rhythms. He certainly wasn’t imaging what audiences might think or care about, yet that music continues to be performed and loved and evolve centuries later. If he had written only for a particular audience in some town in 18th-century Germany then perhaps the music wouldn’t have ended up as radical, iconic, and powerful as it did. I suppose the Musical Offering was written partly as a challenge from Frederick the Great, but I don’t know whether Bach expected the work to actually be played or not.

2. I have many small pieces that I’ve written for friends. One of those is the Symmetry Etudes, a set of eight pieces composed between 2009 and 2012 for Jim Sullivan and Brian Walsh (both of whom are playing in Bonnie and Clyde, incidentally). I wrote them simply as little experiments for us to play together in Jim’s living room for fun, not even for an audience at all. Yet, one of those pieces was the first work of mine to be played in Disney Hall, since John Adams happened to come across it and decided to include it on a concert. If I had been composing for Disney Hall I certainly would have written a different piece, and chances are that it wouldn’t have had whatever quality the Symmetry Etude had that made John select the piece for the concert. I don’t know.

3. The longer I live the less I trust my own judgment about other people’s music or art. I am fully aware that I can hear something and have a strong negative reaction the first time, yet completely embrace it the next time I hear it. In the past I’ve written off whole genres of music thinking that I didn’t value them, and then later realized that it is some of my absolute favorite music to listen to (eg. opera). If my own tastes fluctuate that much, how could I expect a whole audience to react or engage in any kind of predictable way? All I can do is write sounds that I love, try to write for the instruments or singers to the best of my ability, write in a way that asks them to engage intensely, and attempt to do so with the clearest voice I can find. If that resonates with people who listen then I will be overjoyed and grateful, but I also understand that I am never going to please everyone in a room, nor am I going to attempt to. Much of the music I love to listen to myself would probably have a somewhat polarizing effect on many audiences. If it speaks with intensity and clarity then it’s probably going to rub someone the wrong way at some point.

Melinda, I know you as a musician, but before this project didn’t know your work as a writer. Did you study formally? Or is Bonnie and Clyde a sort of first creative foray into writing?

Melinda: First, thank you for mentioning my work as a musician. I appreciate that.

This is my first libretto. I did release an album in 2016 with some of my original lyrics on it, words that I had been working on in 2013-14. I also studied fiction and non-fiction writing at Sarah Lawrence College, as well as writing in the context of film. And at the Philadelphia High School for Creative and Performing Arts, I was a writing minor (you could do that there, which was a pleasure).

I often worry that my desire for the accoutrements of writing (the reflection, the imagining, the words, the reading of words, the editing of words, and the physical feeling of a paperback in my hands) is stronger than the concepts I have to communicate. But on the topic of Bonnie and Clyde I have made myself comfortable through reading the words of many people affected by the couple, and the ideas in this opera that have come through that process have felt necessary to share.

Andrew, in our first interview before First Take two years ago, you said you “feel that working with words and voices has unlocked something in my writing that I have been trying to find for a long time…I don’t know where it will lead, but I have a feeling that all the work I’ve been doing with singers over the past year will have a significant impact on the future of my writing.” Now that you’ve been at it a while, can you discuss a bit about where that has led?

Andrew: Ha! I still don’t know where it will lead. I’m not in the right space yet to answer this question. I don’t usually understand what I’ve done in a composition until a year or two after it’s finished. Working extensively with singers definitely changed my musical language quite substantially, but I don’t think I could articulate the nature of the change right now. So, ask me again in 2018…

As a wife and husband creative team, how has work on this project made its way into other parts of your lives, or has your relationship made its way into working? Has there been a separation between work and life, so to speak?

Melinda: I don’t know how other people’s relationships work, how much they talk about work, how much they talk about hobbies, how much they talk about ideas. For Andrew and I and this project, we would make dates to work on the opera, and we would sometimes even leave our home and walk somewhere for the meeting, so that we were really clear in our focus. But once an idea became interesting to us and was developing, our conversations about the opera would become a big part of our lives together. It felt important, so we discussed it a lot. I don’t think either of us ever felt like we didn’t want to talk about it when the other one brought it up.

What about tonight’s performance has you most excited?

Melinda: It is an honor to get to share this opera with these musicians with an audience tonight. I am terrified and excited to feel how it is received with an audience. And I am excited that my parents are here.

Andrew: Hearing the incredible talents of the musicians on stage, hearing the whole thing in one fell swoop, listening while knowing that my family has traveled from far-away corners of the country to be here and see what the little brother is up to.

We here at New Classic LA cannot wait to hear Bonnie and Clyde tonight at Second Take. Full details on the concert are up at theindustryla.org/projects/bonnie-and-clyde. Thanks to all of the composers who did interviews this week for First Take as well – you can read all of them at newclassic.la/firsttake.

First Take: John Hastings on The Former World

The 2017 edition of The Industry and wild Up’s First Take is right around the corner. On February 24, the world’s most audacious opera company presents scenes from works-in-progress by six composers. Full details on that are up at theindustryla.org/projects/first-take-2017. Over here at New Classic LA, we’ll repeat our tradition of one composer interview per day in the week leading up to it. You can read all of the interviews – including the 2015 interviews – at newclassic.la/firsttake.

Today we’ve got composer John P. Hastings discussing his work The Former World.

Describe the work you’ll be presenting at First Take.

Composer John Hastings

Composer John Hastings

The Former World is a multi-media essay on ‘deep time’, geologic history, the environment, humanity, and the artist. The work uses two focal points: the life and writings of the artist Robert Smithson (famous for his land art work, Spiral Jetty) and the writer John McPhee’s tome on American geologic history, Annals of the Former World. For me, the piece began as a process to tie together the vast expanses of time used in geology with the life of the artist. How can humans comprehend these large spans of time? Coupled with the idea of human involved degradation of the environment, the work endeavors to focus on what we leave behind, what Robert Smithson called “ruins in reverse.”

The project has several components:

      1. An acoustic guitarist performing fractured, faux-Americana styled improvisations
      2. A violin duo performing highly ordered microtonal pitches.
      3. Sub-bass frequencies articulating slow movement.
      4. 4 performers delivering a multitude of text (including parts of an essay by Robert Smithson and selections from Augustine’s Confessions) using a variety of operations.
      5. Mobile boomboxes that play back field recordings made from different locations throughout the United States.
      6. A two-channel video, detailing geologic history and the human intervention on the landscape along Interstate 80, from New York City to San Francisco.

What’s your background in writing opera, or for voice?

Writing for voice, or opera for that matter, was not something that I was initially keen. However, as I have developed in my compositional life, I have come to the realization that text can explicate certain ideas that instrumental music can only approximate. The ability to further the musical work through words obviously makes complete sense. Starting with Sonic Baptism (2014), written for my newborn son, I wanted to include text that had special significance. The idea of layering text on a musical setting is something that I have included in my last several pieces.

Does your composition process change at all when writing in this medium?

I would not necessarily say that my process changes when writing for opera; whenever I am putting together a work I always try to leave open the door to whatever ideas and thoughts might come in. However, when working a piece this large, with so many parts, there does appear to be more opportunities for different tangents and threads to come into play. Because of that, the process has been longer, included more research, and has incorporated many more concepts than I originally started with. This has definitely been to the benefit of the piece and as I continue to work on The Former World I am sure that there will be even more to include.

What else are you working on that you’d like people to know about?

Along with The Former World, which will probably take some time to complete and go into production, I am beginning the process of a long-form work that features solo trombone. This will also be another multi media project and will focus on the city of Los Angeles through its different built ecologies, as the architectural critic Reyner Banham described them. I am really looking forward to digging into the piece and taking the time to investigate Los Angeles and the different peoples that live in such a dynamic urban environment.

That’s it for First Take interviews this year, but check back tomorrow for an interview with Andrew McIntosh, whose Bonnie and Clyde, with librettist Melinda Rice, is slated for the first ever SECOND TAKE the very next day. Get your First Take tickets at https://www.eventbrite.com/e/first-take-2017-and-second-take-bonnie-clyde-tickets-27916364598. See you tonight.

First Take: William Gardiner on All Is For The Best

The 2017 edition of The Industry and wild Up’s First Take is right around the corner. On February 24, the world’s most audacious opera company presents scenes from works-in-progress by six composers. Full details on that are up at theindustryla.org/projects/first-take-2017. Over here at New Classic LA, we’ll repeat our tradition of one composer interview per day in the week leading up to it. You can read all of the interviews – including the 2015 interviews – at newclassic.la/firsttake.

Today we’ve got composer William Gardiner discussing his work with Thomas Rawle, All Is For The Best.

Composer William Gardiner

Composer William Gardiner

Describe the work you’ll be presenting at First Take.

Our piece is an animated video opera called ALL IS FOR THE BEST. It consists of an animated film with music in close sync. We wrote the music and conceptualized it together, while I took care of the orchestration and Thomas did the animation. However it was a close collaboration and we talked about every element together. In this piece we wanted to give primacy to the directness and emotiveness of music and moving images. Both music and images have a special ability to be abstract and vague yet expressively dense and specific, and we were interested in trying to make a piece in which this quality of music and image is the life-force of the piece. Thematically, the piece is politically engaged–in some ways it could be thought of as a modern descendant of Voltaire’s Candide–but its modus operandi is not particularly verbal or literal, and we hope that causes the audience to have take an active role in interpreting it.

What’s your background in writing opera, or for voice?

This is my first opera project, though I have written a piece for soprano and early music ensemble before. In terms of my relationship to opera, it’s probably worth mentioning that I grew up listening to baroque opera/Bach’s passions, and later became interested in songcraft in rock music. Thomas has more experience in writing for voice in that he has spent the majority of his career as a singer and songwriter. He performs and records under the moniker DRELLER and has released music through Terrible Records (US) and Goodbye Records (UK).

Did your composition process change at all when writing in this medium?

Hopefully it did not change very much. We tried to bring image, music, and singing together in a way that retains or even amplifies what we love about those things, rather than having them make compromises in order to fit together. However, working in a very fluid, multi-artform collaboration was really challenging (in a good way) and we’ve pushed each other further than we thought we could go.

What else are you working on that you’d like people to know about?

Next up for me is a cello concerto. Thomas is about to make the next DRELLER release, which is going to be four tracks with accompanying video art.

Check back tomorrow for our next interview, and get your First Take tickets at https://www.eventbrite.com/e/first-take-2017-and-second-take-bonnie-clyde-tickets-27916364598.

First Take: Marc Lowenstein on The Little Bear

The 2017 edition of The Industry and wild Up’s First Take is right around the corner. On February 24, the world’s most audacious opera company presents scenes from works-in-progress by six composers. Full details on that are up at theindustryla.org/projects/first-take-2017. Over here at New Classic LA, we’ll repeat our tradition of one composer interview per day in the week leading up to it. You can read all of the interviews – including the 2015 interviews – at newclassic.la/firsttake.

Today we’ve got composer, conductor, and Industry music director Marc Lowenstein.

Describe the work you’ll be presenting at First Take.

The work I’m presenting at First Take is an excerpt from a new opera called The Little Bear. It’s an opera about the power of children’s stories and what those fairy tales can reveal about the psychology of time, change, loss, and love. So it’s a family opera: not really a children’s opera, though hopefully understandable by older children. In this wonderfully re-invigorated era of new operas, I’ve noticed that there are not many works being written about or for families and I am very drawn to the subject and the challenge it presents in bringing those themes to the operatic musical stage.

What’s your background in writing opera, or for voice?

Marc Lowenstein. Photo by Eron Rauch.

Marc Lowenstein. Photo by Eron Rauch.

I grew up as a singer and later became a conductor and a composer and finally a teacher as well. So, I’ve always lived in and around the operatic world. I wrote an opera about ten years ago based on the movie The Fisher King, and it was a good learning experience. Someone somewhere once said something like “everyone should be forgiven their first opera” and I still feel fondly about that one, and think of it as a learning experience. And I’ve always been interested in new operas, and feel very fortunate to work as Music Director of The Industry with Yuval. At The Industry, I’ve worked with a wonderful array of composers with different approaches to opera and I love seeing wildly differing effective ideas of how to bring music and drama to life in our present day. I particularly enjoy seeing other composers frame their individual voices in this world of amazingly diverse musical styles, and I’m enjoying the process of finding the right compositional voice for The Little Bear.

Does your composition process change at all when writing in this medium?

Not really. A lot of my non-operatic music is in fact a bit operatic. One thing, though, about writing opera is a slight uncertainty as to how all the pieces really do fit together in real life: in an actual, staged opera there seems to be a need for some accommodation for how dramatic storytelling contributes to and shapes the perception of musical time. That is a fun conversation to find oneself in the middle of, and one great thing about First Take is that it can show you relatively early in the process what in that dialog is merely theoretical and what might actually work.

What else are you working on that you’d like people to know about?

I’m already expanding the Little Bear a little bit for a concert at REDCAT on April 6th that will also include a solo cantata for Jodie Landau and the premiere of a cello concerto for Derek Stein. And then there is the rest of The Industry’s exciting 2017 season that will include Lou Harrison’s Young Caesar with the LA Phil Green Umbrella series and the premiere of Andy Akiho’s and Yuval Sharon’s Galileo in September, two projects that I feel particularly passionate about!

Check back tomorrow for our next interview, and get your First Take tickets at https://www.eventbrite.com/e/first-take-2017-and-second-take-bonnie-clyde-tickets-27916364598.

First Take: Dylan Mattingly on Stranger Love

The 2017 edition of The Industry and wild Up’s First Take is right around the corner. On February 24, the world’s most audacious opera company presents scenes from works-in-progress by six composers. Full details on that are up at theindustryla.org/projects/first-take-2017. Over here at New Classic LA, we’ll repeat our tradition of one composer interview per day in the week leading up to it. You can read all of the interviews – including the 2015 interviews – at newclassic.la/firsttake.

Today we’ve got Dylan Mattingly.

Describe the work you’ll be presenting at First Take.

Stranger Love is an opera in three acts. At roughly five hours long, with 8 singers, 6 dancers, and an orchestra built on the engine of three microtonal pianos, the music of Stranger Love is like an elemental force, offering world-sized visions of the disparate ecstasies of a human life on earth, from the gentle falling of snow to a gospel revival, and the vertigo of looking into the stars.

Drawing inspiration from Plato’s Symposium, Stranger Love presents both a love story, and the story of love, in various dimensions. Act I is the tale of Tasha and André, lovers who—like Orpheus & Eurydice, Heloise & Abelard, Rick & Elsa—are brought together by chance, and whose brief, intense joy is soon threatened. Their story unfolds to the rhythm of the seasons: Spring is the encounter; Summer, the unfolding; Autumn, the threat from without; Winter, the threat from within. Act II re-frames the story: no longer individual, it is now, in the spirit of the comic poet Aristophanes, archetypical, and the action belongs to six dancers arranged in three pairs. The final act compresses seasonal time into a single instant: it is the vision of divine love—a love supreme—that Socrates attributes to the priestess Diotima.

Composer Dylan Mattingly

Composer Dylan Mattingly

Stranger Love is deliberately counter-cultural in scale. Given the persistent fragmentation of contemporary life into ever shorter temporal intervals, hectic distraction has become a default mode of our daily experience. Large-scale art forms provide a rare opportunity to encounter and dwell within a different temporality, a kind of “slow time” (Keats) in which attention is both dilated and focused. Through the collage and sequencing of music, lyric, dance, and scenography, Stranger Love endeavors to make this kind of uncommon experience possible.

The excerpt performed at First Take begins with a small introduction to the opening of the second act, and is followed by scenes 5 and 6 from the first act. These two scenes present vignettes from the end of Summer, as the light begins to wane. Scene 5 is set against the backdrop of a midsummer night’s stillness. Here, for the first time, André begins to recognize the transience of togetherness, the eventuality of loss. Tasha responds that “Delphinium, my darling, will bloom in late summer” — now is not yet the time for tears. As Scene 6 opens, the lovers share fragments of memory from the time before they knew one another. Through these recollected moments, they try to draw one another into the sacred narratives of their lives and to imagine a future together. Against a fading light, they celebrate together “the continuous life of you and me.”

Stranger Love is being written for the New York-based new music ensemble, Contemporaneous, which I co-founded in 2010 and of I am currently the executive and co-artistic director. Contemporaneous, called “ferocious and focused” by The New York Times, is an ensemble of 21 musicians who are dedicated to the commissioning and performance of the most exciting music of now.

What’s your background in writing opera, or for voice?

So much of the music that I love is sung. I think that’s likely true for a lot of people, and I’m attracted to the visceral power of the human voice. Something about being sung to signals to us that there is a connection taking place, that something is being felt simultaneously in you and me across the impermeable negative space that will ever distinguish us from each other.

While we often imagine Greek tragedy in an almost sterile environment, intoned in lugubrious waves of ethos, truly the experience of Oedipus, of The Oresteia, was a fundamentally musical event, a tremendously immersive show of music, dance, and poetry. In 2013, both my musical work and academic life (I have a B.A. in Classics, specializing in Ancient Greek from Bard College) aligned around the intricate and ecstatic musical tradition of Greek tragedy in the 5th century B.C. And while we imagine 70 attendees in a black box theater, the performance of tragedy in Athens was more like the Superbowl. Both the strange and beautiful patterns of the rhythm in Euripides’s words and the inherent unknowability of its true sound I find to be endlessly fascinating, and offered to me a wonderful vantage point from which I might imagine the role of the human voice in drama. Using this study as a point of departure, I wrote a large-scale work entitled The Bakkhai, which sets the seven choruses of Euripides’ terrifying and beautiful play to create my own entirely new personal and imaginary folk music. Work on Stranger Love has felt in some ways to be an extension of this communal and effervescent vocal tradition, and is as well inspired by my study of the polyphonic vocal music traditions of the Bayaka tribes in Central Africa and the choir of Rapa Iti, a small island in the South Pacific.

Does your composition process change at all when writing in this medium?

I wouldn’t say my compositional process has changed in working on Stranger Love so much as my thrust as a composer and the process of writing has led me singularly on this path towards this piece. And indeed, I don’t think Stranger Love could exist otherwise. After all, few things could be further removed from the aesthetic expectations of the modern public sphere than a five hour long piece of music and theater that presupposes the power of abstraction, the value of perspective, and the importance of total joy. I’ve chosen to write this massive opera, more dream than waking life — and closer to the nightmusic of that non-linguistic visceral space wherein we fall in love than the house of language in which we move by day — not for any monetary gain (there is none) or compelled by any external factor, but because I know it to be the best thing that I can do. I want to write music not because it adheres to the world we accept, but because it offers an experience of the world as we might hope to live it. Once we’ve imagined something, it already exists.

What else are you working on that you’d like people to know about?

As a composer, Stranger Love is an all-encompassing experience. For an opera that seeks to be totally immersive, about an almost violently undiscerning joy in the spectrum of being alive on this planet, it would feel like a divestment of responsibility were I to ever let this piece out of my mind.

While I am not working on any other compositional projects, I am working as the executive director and co-artistic director of Contemporaneous, the NY-based new-music ensemble of 21 musicians, which I co-founded in 2010. Contemporaneous has performed over 100 concerts and presented the world premiere of more than 75 new works since its start seven years ago, and we have a big show coming up in April in NY (April 11th at Roulette in Brooklyn and April 15th in Tivoli, NY) consisting of four world premieres and incredible new large-scale microtonal music for the ensemble. I couldn’t be more proud of what Contemporaneous is doing and can’t wait to be a part of bringing these wonderful and daring new works to life (by composers Katherine Balch, Kyle Gann, Shawn Jaeger, and Kristofer Svensson).

Check back tomorrow for our next interview, and get your First Take tickets at https://www.eventbrite.com/e/first-take-2017-and-second-take-bonnie-clyde-tickets-27916364598.