Breath & Hammer II

The Ties That Connect Us

David Krakauer and Kathleen Tagg on Breath & Hammer II

With these two performances in Berlin, we premiere a greatly expanded version of our Breath & Hammer program, designed specifically for the Pierre Boulez Saal and its unique in-the-round configuration. Using newly composed, spatialized surround-sound interludes as well as new visuals produced and performed live by Jesse Gilbert, we have tried to create an immersive evening that envelops the audience in an array of sound and images.

The starting point was the core material of our preexisting Breath & Hammer project, which is made up of our arrangements of songs given to us by composers and artists we tremendously admire, who are also friends and close associates. The program includes pieces by creators as diverse as New York–based visionary John Zorn, Syrian clarinetist Kinan Azmeh, and Cuban percussionist Roberto Juan Rodríguez, as well as our own original compositions that contain influences ranging from interlocking drumming patterns to Romantic symphonic music, to minimalism and klezmer. We find that these diverse and seemingly disparate musical influences intermingle and are transformed into something entirely new.

The project has grown steadily in increments since 2015. After initially creating the music, we decided to add video. Since much of the piano playing is done inside the instrument and the clarinet playing employs unorthodox techniques, the original idea to include video projections was formulated to help bring the process of the creation of our sound world closer to the audience by showing them exactly how the sounds are being created in real time. That led to our meeting with Jesse Gilbert in 2016, when we asked him to design a portable video system for our shows using three interactive cameras. We have travelled with this design for our performances of this project to date.

Moving forward and designing this expanded version for the Pierre Boulez Saal, we had to take all the unique features of the hall into consideration. The biggest challenges that come with a 360-degree concert hall are issues of sight lines and acoustics. In a space such as the Pierre Boulez Saal, where the question of sound has been so carefully addressed, there is not a bad seat in the house, which is a dream. But tackling the challenge of projections for an ellipse-shaped setting is another story entirely! Together with the Pierre Boulez Saal team, we brainstormed a multitude of different ideas over the past year, and Jesse eventually came up with a solution to have us enclosed within a hexagonal structure that acts as a projection surface visible from every part of the room.

“The Pierre Boulez Saal’s unique architecture presents a number of challenges for visual projections,” Jesse explains his approach, “particularly in its scale and multi-level in-theround seating. For these performances, I have designed a custom hexagonal projection structure, with each hexagon face framed with sheer fabric to create a continuous translucent screen surrounding the performers. Through the use of live cameras and my original audio-reactive visual instrument, the audience will be invited to form a more immediate and intimate relationship with the performers and their creative process as it unfolds. The immersive visual design builds on my decade of working with sound artists around the world, exploring real-time computer animation as a synesthetic meditation on music’s power to move and inspire us.” This is the first time Jesse is joining us for live performances, and with that, the scope of the project and the complexity of the visuals have greatly expanded.

Our sound palette for Breath & Hammer is a very personal one that has grown out of our lengthy collaboration. We have each brought everything of who we are and what we have worked on over many years into the mix. This includes the very strong grounding we both have as classical concert musicians, as well as David’s years as a klezmer innovator, composer, band leader, and avant-garde experimentalist, and Kathleen’s multi-faceted career creating, performing, and composing in numerous genres. The music in this program can be seen as very global in its scope, but at the same time it is completely personal to us, given that each composer is a close friend or associate of ours. We used the pieces themselves as points of departure and our arrangements and treatment of each one of them ended up being markedly different from the original. In recasting each composition, we found a way to transform the material in a way that reflected our own personal sound world without literally copying the devices of any particular genre. We are so grateful to the composers who entrusted us with their pieces and gave us their blessing to do so.

For these performances in Berlin, we have created a new set of “tape piece” interludes that act as bridges between the different pieces on the program. The interludes, with their sound “traveling” spatially within the hall, represent that influence coming to us from the outside—from traditions that are not our own but that we are fortunate to have been exposed to through our friends and their music. Some interludes begin with elements from the preceding piece that may be indistinguishable in their new context, and then invite elements of the next piece to lead into it.

The sound design utilizes two distinct layers: for each of the main pieces, the sound comes directly from the central stage. The interludes travel on a journey through a surround-sound speaker configuration that acts both as a kind of sonic representation of musical offerings from one piece to the next, as well as a nod to the ties that connect us one to the other, no matter how far apart we may seem.

Notes on the Music

November 22nd by Kinan Azmeh

Born in Syria and based in New York, Kinan Azmeh is a clarinetist and composer who performs across the globe as a bandleader, soloist with orchestra, collaborator with a wide spectrum of artists, and member of Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Ensemble. (He has also been a frequent guest at the Pierre Boulez Saal since its opening.) This beautiful piece was written for an American Thanksgiving celebration that fell on November 22 and conjures a feeling of nostalgia for his homeland alongside optimism of feeling at home in a new country.

Interlude I by Kathleen Tagg

All of the samples used in the interludes come directly from the arrangements of the main musical pieces. This first interlude begins with the serene bowed piano strings of November 22nd and gradually introduces the sounds used in the arrangement of Zorn’s Ebuhuel, acting as a bridge and evoking the arrival of a mighty angel.

Ebuhuel by John Zorn

John Zorn is an American saxophonist and composer and one of the leading voices in the New York “downtown” arts scene. Under the banner of Radical Jewish Culture, he has explored new possibilities for Jewish cultural identity within the context of the avant-garde. Both Ebuhuel and the next piece on the program, Parzial, come from Zorn’s large collection of pieces called The Book of Angels and were originally part of a group of eight compositions recorded by David Krakauer and his band Ancestral Groove. Later, Kathleen Tagg adapted Krakauer’s initial concepts of these two tunes into full arrangements for Breath & Hammer. In this first one, Zorn imagines a portrait of Ebuhuel, the Angel of Omnipotence.

Interlude II by Kathleen Tagg

Interlude II sets up the celestial sound world of Zorn’s Angel Parzial with multi-layered and sparse bowed piano samples.

Parzial by John Zorn

Also from The Book of Angels, this is a portrayal of Parzial, the Guardian of the 7th Heavenly Hall.

Interlude III by Kathleen Tagg

Acting as a bridge between Zorn’s Parzial and Rodríguez’s Shron, most of the material of this interlude comes from layered pizzicato motifs as played by Tagg on a plucked piano.

Shron by Roberto Juan Rodríguez

This piece comes from Roberto Juan Rodríguez’s album El Danzon de Moises, on which Krakauer also performed as a featured artist. The album’s concept was an imaginary Cuban-Jewish music based on Rodríguez’s experience growing up in Miami playing for both Jewish and Cuban celebrations alongside his deep association with John Zorn’s Radical Jewish Culture movement. Rodríguez reworked the traditional Cuban danzón in his imagination to create a music that could have possibly existed for the very small and fragile present-day Cuban-Jewish community.

Interlude IV - Traditional umrhubhe tune

Interlude IV is a direct transcription of an umrhubhe bow tune of the South African Xhosa people as performed by master musician Dizu Plaatjies. It is played in this instance in Tagg’s transcription for bowed piano.

Berimbau by Kathleen Tagg

This piece drew initial inspiration from the sounds of the overtone series as played on the South African bow instrument umrhubhe, cousin of the larger Brazilian berimbau. It then gives in to a driving motion and groove in seven, drawing on the energy of current New York City and Ellington-like horns.

Interlude V by Kathleen Tagg & David Krakauer

Interlude V explores the playful side of Krakauer’s extended clarinet techniques and rhythmic use of breath sounds.

Rattlin’ Down the Road by David Krakauer

The idea of this piece came from Krakauer and Tagg’s time spent at Yellow Barn in rural Vermont while workshopping Breath & Hammer. The whole rhythmic structure emerges from percussive clarinet sounds and was inspired by the rattling of old trucks down narrow, dusty country roads.

Interlude VI by Kathleen Tagg

This interlude uses fragments of Rob Curto’s Brazilian forró tune Demon Chopper layered with parts of Tagg’s bowinspired Berimbau.

Demon Chopper by Rob Curto

New York–based accordionist Rob Curto is best known as a leading voice in Brazilian forró music. In creating this version of his piece, Tagg looked to the African roots in Brazilian music and created an entire West African drum circle, with all the percussion sounds coming from the piano, as the basis for the structure. The melody on top was influenced by Jewish klezmer music coming from Curto’s tenure in Krakauer’s band, and an additional layer is created by Krakauer’s groove-based riffs. The result is a completely unique and personal confluence of stylistic ideas.

Interlude VII by Kathleen Tagg

Interlude VII sets up the sound world of Krakauer and Tagg’s version of the following Emil Kroitor piece with its rich Romantic undertones.

Moldavian Voyage by Emil Kroitor

One of the great gatekeepers of klezmer from the region now known as Moldavia was a clarinetist named German Goldenshteyn, who came to New York in 1994, bringing with him his region’s traditional Jewish music. He is believed to have carried nearly a thousand tunes in his head, one of which was this piece written by the great Moldavian accordionist and composer Emil Kroitor. Krakauer and Tagg reimagine it as an epic journey both geographic and political.

Interlude VIII: Synagogue Wail by David Krakauer

Synagogue Wail is Krakauer’s own semi-improvised composition for unaccompanied clarinet and a kind of portrait of his whole musical world in about five minutes: he takes the basic idea of a klezmer improvisation, mixes it with influences of jazz, funk, and minimalism, and pulls everything together with extended techniques. It’s a wild ride!

The Geyser by David Krakauer & Kathleen Tagg

The program’s final piece is an original composition based on the chord structure and form of one of the best-known works from the repertoire of Eastern European Jewish klezmer music, Der Heyser Bulgar (“The Hot Bulgar”). This complete transformation of one of the great klezmer standards creates an entirely different listening experience.