PMP NEW YORK
PMP TANGLEWOOD
Group Visits Tanglewood Music Center’s Festival of Contemporary Music PMP sponsors professional development trips in order to foster ties within the Philadelphia music community, as well as to expose trip participants to external programming philosophies.
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The trip participants attended a concert presented by Mr. Browning’s World Music Institute that evening. The concert, called Fiesta Mexicana: Masters of Mexican Music, took place at Town Hall and featured four different styles of Mexican music and dance. José Gutiérrez Y Los Hermanos Ochoa performed in the Veracruz Trio Jarocho style, and the entertainment continued with Domingo “Mingo” Saldivar, nicknamed “The Dancing Cowboy,” who lived up to his name while singing and playing the accordion with his Conjunto Tejano band. The Marimba Chiapas performed third, concentrating on traditional sones, both waltzes and up-tempo pieces, spiced with Spanish sesquilatera syncopation. The program culminated with the Mariachi Los Camperos de Nati Cano, who displayed their mastery of the breadth of the mariachi repertoire, from classic sones, rancheras, and regional folk rhythms, to pieces marked by the harmonically and rhythmically rich contemporary sound. Saturday, March 13th, the final day of the trip, the morning panel discussion centered on Creating, Programming, and Presenting Interdisciplinary Work, and was moderated by Frank Oteri, Composer and Editor of the American Music Center’s web magazine, NewMusicBox. Speaking on the panel were Harold Meltzer, Composer and Artistic Director of Sequitur, Paola Balsamo Prestini, Composer and Co-founder/Director of VisionIntoArt, and Steven Vitiello, Composer and Archivist at The Kitchen. Both Sequitur and VisionIntoArt create multidisciplinary programs that fuse new music with theater, opera, dance, and spoken word poetry. The Kitchen is a presenting organization committed to supporting the performance of vital and pioneering artists. Beyond his “day job,” as he joked, Vitiello also works as a sound artist and has collaborated extensively on interdisciplinary installations with visual artists, both in the United States and in Europe. This group spoke on the challenges inherent to interdisciplinary programming, from clarifying priorities of theme and content, to overcoming technical restrictions in traditional venues, to coaxing musicians beyond their disciplinary comfort zones. Much of the discussion focused on intersections of artistic and curatorial work. They spoke positively on the reception of experimental programming, and the excitement of convening diverse audiences, which members of PMP’s group affirmed with anecdotes from their own performing and presenting experience. Before returning to Philadelphia that afternoon, the group attended a matinee performance of Steven Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd at the New York City Opera. Sweeney Todd tells the story of “the demon barber of Fleet Street,” who survives imprisonment, exile and shipwreck and returns to his native London, evoked as sordid and corrupt, to avenge the death of his wife. The City Opera presented Hal Prince’s seamless production of the famously macabre musical, with Timothy Nolan in the title role stalking woodenly around the 19th century city and shifting to a trembling rage as he took his razor in hand. PMP sponsors professional development trips in order to foster ties within the Philadelphia music community, as well as to expose trip participants to external programming philosophies. This is the fourth year PMP coordinated such a field trip. Attendees of last year’s professional development trip enjoyed performances by the Kitchen House Blend, with guest artists/composers Tiyé Giraud, Evan Ziporyn, and Roy Campbell; the Geri Allen Trio, featuring Buster Williams and Billy Hart; and the Metropolitan Opera’s production of William Bolcom’s A View From The Bridge.
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he intention of the Philadelphia Music Project, to foster adventurous programming among music organizations in the Philadelphia area, has frequently led it to explore ways of encouraging the work of living composers. In August, PMP’s search for new music took it and a small group of representatives of new music organizations to the Tanglewood Music Center in rural Massachusetts for five days of concerts, meetings with artists, and discussion on the position of contemporary music in Philadelphia. The summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Tanglewood Music Center hosts an astounding array of programming on its extensive, wooded grounds. PMP joined its 2004 Festival of Contemporary Music, under the direction of Robert Spano, music director of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, and attended concerts by the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Meridian Arts Ensemble, New Fromm Players and Tanglewood Music Center Fellows with guest artists Dawn Upshaw, Lucy Shelton and André Watts. As Allan Kozzinn noted in the New York Times, the wide-ranging festival “touched on virtually every stylistic current in modern composition.” Composers represented in the festival included Samuel Barber, Luciano Berio, Elliott Carter, Michael Gandolfi, Elliott Gyger, Jonathan Harvey, Magnus Lindberg, Bernard Rands, Kaija Saariaho, Esa-Pekka Salonen, David Sanford, Elliott Sharp, Alvin Singleton, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Amy Williams, and Frank Zappa, many of whom were in attendance. Programs included a Composition Film Project that paired Tanglewood student composers with filmmakers to co-create works that balanced their visual and aural elements. PMP held four roundtable discussions in which the group was joined by composers Elliot Sharp, Elliott Gyger, Michael Gandolfi; performing artists Daniel Grabois of the Meridian Arts Ensemble, soprano Lucy Shelton; and administrators Ellen Highstein, Director of Tanglewood Music Center and Anthony Fogg, Artistic Administrator of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. The discussions addressed topics from new compositional modes to the challenges faced by modern chamber music groups in touring to Tanglewood’s history and aspirations. During downtime at the festival, the group attended Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard at the Williamstown Theatre Festival and visited Mass Moca (Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art), where it was given special tours by the Laura Heon, head curator, and Jonathan Secor, Director of Performing Arts. The excursion to Tanglewood provided its participants with an invigorating community of contemporary musicians and music lovers, and, perhaps more importantly, a forum for exploring questions about new music’s rise in the consciousness of local, national, and international audiences. Professional development opportunities such as this trip enable members of Philadelphia’s music scene to renew their imaginations and rededicate their efforts toward further invigorating the artistic offerings in the region and beyond.
Above: (From left) Bob Capanna, Executive of Settlement Music School, Katy Clark, Philadelphia Chapter Director of the American Composers Forum; Linda Reichert, Artistic Director of Network for New Music; Thaddeus Squire, Artistic and Producing Director of Peregrine Arts; Chris McGlumphy, Managing Director of Relâche; Daniel Grabois, French hornist of the Meridian Arts Ensemble; and Elliott Sharp, composer. Left: Michael Gandolfi, composer, and Lucy Shelton, soprano.
ELLIOTT SHARP ON TECHNOLOGY AND COMPOSING
The audience watching someone just doing a computer, just hearing a tape music concert or someone playing a laptop is a completely different vibe, you know? I mean it’s more, for me, in the realm of installation, which is completely valid, but if you’re going to be live, you might as well be live. You want someone up there sweating, you know? Because the audience can smell it, and the performer can smell the audience…that’s just an important part of the concert experience. I’d say my main writing work now is with these algorithmic pieces that are instruction sets and sets of composed materials… they’re mostly based on kinds of biological metaphors and network systems, like cellular automata or computer games that create artificial life. It’s about creating an organism that has some purpose. And that purpose is usually to groove, you know, and to mutate itself and to create little structures that are always related somehow to the core material…and you always recognize the life form from its source but at the same time, every manifestation of it is completely different. It’s different than improvisation, but it uses improvisatory tools.
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