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Discovering Early Music by Heidi Waleson
Music Without Borders by Shaun Brady
Looking at Inspiration by Alyssa Timin
Penderecki’s Journey by Dan Webster
Jazz Horizons by David R. Adler
The Annual Magazine of the Philadelphia Music Project 2008 | 09 A Program of the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage
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Contents 2008 | 09
01
FEATURES
02 16 18 22 26
Jazz Horizons: A Diverse Lineage in Context by David Adler Penderecki’s Journey by Dan Webster From Archive to Stage: Discovering Early Music by Heidi Waleson Looking at Inspiration: Visual Art and Historic Sites Spark Composers’ Imaginations by Alyssa Timin Music Without Borders: On Defying Definition by Shaun Brady
06 12 30 31 32 33 34
PMP Announces Project Support to 19 Philadelphia Music Organizations 2008–2009 Calendar of Funded Events PMP and Presser Foundation Premiere Recording Grants PCAH Interdisciplinary Professional Development Grants PMP Professional Development Grants PMP’s Annual Holiday Party News Corner: In the Community
BUILDING CAPACITY
36
Straight Talk: Q&A with David Bury of David Bury & Associates
38 40 42 44 48 50 53 54
spotlight
58
Matthew levy
Message from the Director
ANNOUNCING
EXPANDING HORIZONS
Director’s Note
New Frontiers in Music: New Books Lecture Series by David Adler PMP’s Symposium on Contemporary Opera and Musical Theater by Peter Burwasser Immersed in the Music: A Composer Symposium by Peter Burwasser One on One with Maria Schneider One on One with Jacob TV One on One with Steven Stucky Field Trips: Runouts: Elliott Carter, Pocket Concertos, Soloist Champions, Rzewski Die Soldaten, Artists’ Roundtable, and the New Museum: PMP’s trip to the Lincoln Center Festival 2008
Philadelphia Chamber Music Society by Willa Rohrer
Each year, these pages provide a forum for leading music journalists to illuminate creative work undertaken by grantees of the Philadelphia Music Project. In 2008, PMP awarded nearly $1 million in support to Philadelphia-based nonprofit organizations with the goal of broadening their curatorial visions and artistic capacities. The result: an expansive range of projects that challenge the bounds of traditional programming and musical practice. PMP’s encouragement of artistic risk-taking manifests itself in profoundly different ways within different genres of music. Heidi Waleson’s “Discovering Early Music” reveals the curatorial challenges and depth of musicological scholarship peculiar to three Philadelphia ensembles: Tempesta di Mare, Philomel Baroque, and Piffaro, The Renaissance Band. Waleson reports on the methodology by which each researches and constructs programs, in some cases resurrecting compositions that lay dormant for centuries. Alyssa Timin’s “Looking at Inspiration” examines another facet of curatorial practice: the creation of new work inspired by specific objects and places, including paintings, quilts, and historic sites, all “dense with suggestion.” Citing projects mounted by the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Network for New Music, and Chamber Music Now, Timin explores how artistic meaning can be renewed when “the spark of creativity passes directly from one artist to the next,” across discipline, time, and space. Many projects supported by PMP forsake traditional labeling altogether, forging new paths at the intersection of classical, jazz, world, folk, rock music, and more. Shaun Brady’s “Music Without Borders” accounts for efforts by several Philadelphia presenters, including the Kimmel and Annenberg Centers, Slought Foundation, and International House, to traverse the boundaries of genre, challenging artists and audiences alike as they foster the development of new musical aesthetics. Other funded projects commemorate the legacies of individual composers. In “Penderecki’s Journey,” Dan Webster traces the Polish composer’s career, from his emergence nearly 50 years ago when he “shocked listeners and apparatchiks” with a pioneering, emotionally charged use of sound mass, to his week-long Philadelphia Orchestra residency in October 2008, which will culminate in the U.S. mainland premiere of his Concerto grosso for three cellos and orchestra in celebration of his 75th birthday. Likewise, in “Jazz Horizons,” David Adler previews a series of jazz portrait concerts featuring the music of Clifford Brown, Andrew Hill, Julius Hemphill, Anthony Braxton, and John Hollenbeck, as presented by the University of the Arts, Ars Nova Workshop, and the Painted Bride Arts Center. Adler underlines these artists’ historical contributions and contemporary relevance as jazz innovators, from champions of ’50s hard bop to purveyors of the modern avant-garde. These articles and the enclosed compact disc honor the creativity, dedication, and artistic excellence of many of Philadelphia’s finest musicians and impresarios. Their work, diverse and rigorous, enriches the lives of Philadelphians for whom music is a fundamental means of personal expression.
front cover: Philadelphia composer George Crumb, whose Voices from the Morning of the Earth will be premiered by Orchestra 2001 in October (see p. 8) photo: Peggy Peterson www.peggypetersonphotography.com
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transcriptions. It’s just mind-boggling, letter-perfect playing.” Brown was born in Wilmington, Delaware and spent much of his creative life in Philadelphia. In addition to his enduring work with Blakey, he co-led the Clifford Brown-Max Roach Quintet (featuring a young Sonny Rollins), one of the most influential working bands of the 1950s. According to critic Martin Williams, author of The Jazz Tradition, “Brown became something of a rallying point for Eastern [coast] musicians: in the face of a fad for ‘cool jazz,’ it was as if he rose up and shouted to his contemporaries—even to his elders— that jazz should not abandon the other side of its technical and emotional heritage, that it could find a renewed life in a reiteration of some of its first principles.” Sadly, Brown’s life is also one of the most tragic stories in jazz. Golson vividly recalls standing by the stage door at the Apollo Theater and being told by a weeping friend, pianist Walter Davis, Jr., that Brown had been killed in a car crash the previous night, on June 26, 1956, en route from Philly to Chicago. Golson responded with the ballad “I Remember Clifford,” which quickly became immortalized in trumpet literature thanks to recordings by Dizzy Gillespie, Lee
FEATURE
The term “jazz” covers a vast and contentious aesthetic terrain, pushing musicians to new frontiers of technical excellence and creative depth. This season, the Philadelphia Music Project funds performances that highlight the music’s idiomatic range and expansive potential. The slate includes a tribute to the late trumpet master Clifford Brown; accounts of the experimental yet wholly distinct languages of Anthony Braxton, Julius Hemphill and Andrew Hill; and a residency involving Brooklyn composer-bandleader John Hollenbeck with 12 handpicked musicians representing the cream of today’s Philadelphia improvising circuit. While these offerings may suggest a chronological timeline, they do not propound a view of music as a linear progression. Rather, in jostling together the most “traditional” swing-oriented work with the most “avant-garde” outpourings, from the ’60s to the ever-unfolding present, these programs seem to say: We can have it all.
Jazz Horizons: A Diverse Lineage in Context by David R. Adler
The paradigmatic figure in jazz is in many ways the trumpet player, from Louis Armstrong onward. Clifford Brown (1930–1956) is one of the most thrilling players ever to take up the instrument. A child of bebop and heir to the innovative mantle of Dizzy Gillespie and Fats Navarro, “Brownie” brought a level of stunning harmonic accuracy, turn-on-a-dime phrasing, melodic flair and tonal brilliance to the field. Successive generations, from Freddie Hubbard to Wynton Marsalis to Roy Hargrove, have all had to grapple with Brown’s legacy. But thanks to his sheer musicality, and his authorship of modern standards such as “Joy Spring,” “Daahoud” and “The Blues Walk,” Brown has left his mark on all jazz musicians, not just trumpeters. This season the University of the Arts presents a concert series under the banner “Brownie Speaks.” The participants include two of Brown’s friends and contemporaries, saxophonists Benny Golson and Lou Donaldson, irrepressible performers who appear with their respective bands. Terence Blanchard, who, much like Brown, came up under the tutelage of drummer Art Blakey, plays Philadelphia with his groundbreaking ensemble as well. The Lars Halle Jazz Orchestra, with featured trumpet soloist Jon Barnes, also presents the world premiere of a newly commissioned work by the acclaimed composer and trombonist John Fedchock. “Clifford’s been very inspirational in my musical life,” says Fedchock, “and so certain melodic fragments, ideas he used in his solos, came right to the forefront when I started thinking about the piece. I tried to incorporate those ideas, and then, through further study, look for other aspects to influence the development. Over the past several months I’ve been studying Clifford and his soloing, looking at PMP 2
documenting composed and improvised works of innumerable configuration for some 40 years. His Philadelphia performances involve radically disparate concepts over the course of two nights. The first, at Settlement Music School, features his Falling River Quartet, with Braxton on reeds, Katherine Young on bassoon, Erica Dicker on violin and Sally Norris on piano. This group uses Braxton’s colorful graphic scores, painted and laminated on sheets of 11x17 paper, to fashion worlds of sound at once organized and wholly spontaneous. Braxton refers to the Falling River scores as “sources for visual extraction into an intuitive coded logic.” Young likens them to “a map of a park—you want to think about jumping around them. Your eye is encouraged to move in a nonlinear way.” The second night, at St. Mark’s Church, finds Braxton conducting two earlier through-composed works: Composition No. 103 ( for Seven Trumpets) and Composition No. 169 ( for Brass Quintet). Braxton has used parts of these pieces as material for other settings in what he calls his “tri-centric” system. But complete readings with the intended instrumentation—what Braxton calls “origin performances”—remain extremely rare. The brass quintet piece is
Anthony Braxton, photos by Emiliano Neri
Morgan and Donald Byrd. Dead at age 25, Brown had already changed the course of jazz history. Eerily enough, we have a recording of his final night alive, a Philadelphia session titled The Beginning and the End, on which he’s heard to say: “Thank you very much, you make me feel so wonderful. It’s been a pleasure being here. I really must go now, it’s so hot.” After Brown’s death, in the increasingly tumultuous decades of the ’60s and ’70s, the language of the music changed, new tributaries opened up and an edgier experimental aesthetic came onto the agenda. Anthony Braxton, Julius Hemphill and Andrew Hill epitomized these new departures, and the three are honored this season as part of the Ars Nova Workshop’s “Free/Form: Composer Portraits” series. Questions swirled around this new music. Could it be called “jazz”? Was it a break from tradition or a logical, necessary development in that tradition? One thing is certain: the stylistic syntheses and sonic innovations of these artists now form part of the cultural bedrock for a wide range of up-and-coming players. Saxophonist Anthony Braxton (b. 1945) came of age as a key member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, the Chicago-launched organization explored in depth in George Lewis’s new book A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music. One of the most prolific artists of our time, Braxton, a 1994 MacArthur Fellow, has gone about
intensely rhythmic, “almost physically impossible to play,” according to trumpeter Taylor Ho Bynum. No. 103 entails an additional twist: the musicians must perform in caped costumes and Zorrostyle masks, according to specifications in the score. “Braxton has a beautiful way of magnifying the moment,” says Bynum. “Each of us also has five different mutes strung around our necks,” he adds, “so the timbres are constantly changing. Even though there’s a certain homophonic character built into the piece, it really becomes quite an orchestral world.” Julius Hemphill (1940–1995) was born in Texas and emerged from St. Louis, Missouri as a highly original saxophonist, composer and leading light of the Black Artists Group (BAG). He worked as a Braxton sideman and went on to a highly productive tenure with Oliver Lake, David Murray and Hamiet Bluiett in the World Saxophone Quartet. Like Braxton, Hemphill dealt with a broad range of creative propositions, from swinging, blues-soaked jazz to music for string quartet, woodwind ensemble, theater and multimedia productions, big band and more. In the mid-’90s he performed with Björk. “Hemphill looked backward with great sentiment, and forward with a fearless and focused personal vision,” says veteran reedist and longtime Hemphill associate Marty Ehrlich, noting that cross-disciplinary work such as this can be both radical and traditional. The Ars Nova tribute to Hemphill falls in two parts, both involvPMP 3
Jazz Horizons: A Diverse Lineage in Context
Page 4: Terence Blanchard, photo by Jenny Bagert Page 5: John Hollenbeck, photo by Oskar Henn
The term
Among the many gifted musicians following in the footsteps of these pioneers, drummer-composer John Hollenbeck has gained particular respect and recognition. A New York native, he has received repeated nods from the Down Beat Critics Poll and the annual Jazz Journalists Association Awards, not to mention a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Grammy nomination for his 2006 Large Ensemble recording A Blessing. Hollenbeck has worked in a wide variety of settings in jazz and beyond, with
“jazz” covers a vast and contentious aesthetic terrain, pushing musicians to
ing Ehrlich. First, at Settlement, Ursula Oppens plays “Parchment” for solo piano and joins the Daedalus String Quartet for the complex, evocative “One Atmosphere.” Daedalus also ventures the remarkable “Mingus Gold,” Hemphill’s sequence of Charles Mingus compositions arranged for strings. Ehrlich, fronting two different incarnations of the Rites Quartet, rounds out the program with selections for saxophone choir and items from Hemphill’s landmark 1972 debut Dogon A.D. The following month at World Café Live, Ehrlich joins fellow alto saxophonist Bobby Zankel and his progressive big band, the Warriors of the Wonderful Sound, for readings of classic Hemphill compositions. The Philadelphia-New York summit continues with a Philly-specific incarnation of the Julius Hemphill Saxophone Sextet, a group Ehrlich has kept in business since the passing of its founder. Joining Ehrlich, Zankel and the accomplished Elliott Levin will be the promising younger horn players Dan Peterson, Bryan Rogers and Dan Scofield. Count on the program to include a showstopper titled “The Hard Blues.” In a recent performance at Miller Theatre in New York, this piece inspired the sextet to march around the hall, with Alex Harding hooting and hollering on baritone sax. It’s no coincidence, and a testament to Hemphill’s lingering impact, that a select group of Philly improvisers (including Levin, Rogers and Scofield) chose to perform “The PMP 4
Hard Blues” when they recently launched Science Fiction Sessions (now called SciFiPhilly), an avant-garde concert series sponsored by Ars Nova and held Sundays at the Ethiopian restaurant Gojjo. Exactly where pianist Andrew Hill (1937–2007) falls on the jazz spectrum has long been a matter of dispute. His language, while elusive, wound up making a huge impression on players ranging from guitarist Nels Cline to pianists Vijay Iyer and Jason Moran. Cline, in an article he penned for Jazz Times in February 2007, observed how Hill’s music “still felt rooted in harmonic tradition. Hill’s never been predictable or safe, and his music maintains a maverick, loose-limbed quality that trusts the improviser while also providing a visionary sonic structure to work within.” A West Coast avant-jazz veteran and now lead guitarist for the indie-rock band Wilco, Cline released the acclaimed New Monastery: A View into the Music of Andrew Hill in 2006. This season he comes to Philadelphia to give Hill’s work the honor it deserves, by interpreting it in his own, highly individual way. Hill recorded five classic albums (including the historic Point of Departure) for Blue Note in just eight months in 1963 and 1964, when he was 26. The music confounded distinctions between post-bebop and the avant-garde and featured greats on the order of Eric Dolphy and Bobby Hutcherson. But in the end, Hill’s unclassifiable sound
rendered him an “outlying cult figure,” as critic Gary Giddins once put it. Braxton paid homage to Hill with Nine Compositions (Hill) 2000, and wrote in the liner notes: “This is a private musical universe that is not always appreciated by the greater jazz business complex.” Thankfully, that began to change in Hill’s final years. There were new recordings for Palmetto involving Marty Ehrlich and trumpeter Ron Horton; a slew of reissues and discoveries from the Blue Note vault, including the long-lost 1969 nonet session Passing Ships; and finally, a new Blue Note quintet album called Time Lines, a ravishing farewell made shortly before cancer claimed Hill in April 2007. Horton, former music director of Hill’s large ensemble, participated in one of Hill’s final concerts, a reading of the Passing Ships repertoire at Merkin Hall in New York. Leading a formidable sextet, Horton travels to Philly this season to revisit Passing Ships and take stock of Hill’s legacy now that the artist has passed. “Andrew didn’t really enjoy looking back,” Horton says. “He was more concerned with being in the moment. When Merkin Hall proposed that concert, I knew Andrew didn’t want to play the music just like the CD. So I don’t intend to do it like the CD either.” Remarking on the place of Passing Ships in Hill’s oeuvre, Horton notes: “It was a middle period, a changing period, when Andrew’s early Blue Note days were com-
ing to a close. And he was experimenting during that time with larger ensembles, string quartets, vocal groups. I want to tap into that experimental part of what he was doing.” With his long absences from the jazz scene, Hill could have been all but lost to music history. But thanks to his valedictory efforts, and the work of Cline, Horton and others, new generations of players and listeners are discovering what Braxton has long known: “[Hill’s] compositions are sonic gold and can be mined for musical secrets forever.”
new frontiers of technical excellence and creative depth. such greats as Bob Brookmeyer, Kenny Wheeler, Fred Hersch and Meredith Monk. His own music defies easy categorization, moving from tuneful, poetic lyricism and ethereal soundscapes to intense, hard-charging grooves and open improvisation at a moment’s notice. From broad-canvas large ensemble scores to woodwind and percussion works, to the tight, punchy romps of his Claudia Quintet, Hollenbeck’s expressive palette is admirably far-reaching and continually expanding. This season PMP facilitates a novel collaboration between Hollenbeck and a diverse group of Philadelphia improvisers, who will workshop and perform together at the Painted Bride Art Center during a fall-winter residency called “Big Ears.” From a wider pool of applicants, Hollenbeck chose as his ensemble mates Bobby Zankel (alto sax), Matt Davis (guitar), Katt Hernandez (violin), Bart Miltenberger (trumpet), Venissa Santí (vocals), Brent White (trombone), Brian Howell (bass), Matthew Mitchell (piano/electronics), Bryan Rogers (tenor sax), Aino Söderhielm (soprano sax, clarinet) and Patricia Franceschy and Gabe Globus-Hoenich (marimba, vibes, percussion). The group meets for two separate weeklong sessions. “My goal for the first week is to get a sound as a band, to find each other musically,” Hollenbeck says. “After the first session I’m hoping to write some music specifically for them. It’s important for everyone to get to know each other’s timing and hear our sound together. Some of the players are composers themselves, and would maybe want to write for the group. So during the first week, everyone can listen to each instrument and explore what the possibilities are.” “Big Ears” culminates in Painted Bride performances by the Philadelphia ensemble and Hollenbeck’s New York-based Large Ensemble as well. The project represents a coming-together of musical communities, not to mention a rare opportunity for brilliant but overlooked Philly players to gain wider exposure. Moreover, “Big Ears” is another welcome instance of Hollenbeck and his peers breaking boundaries and looking ahead to tomorrow’s artistic pursuits. “I feel that all the best stuff is in that unnamable category, at least when it’s still new,” Hollenbeck muses. “It’s great to listen to something I did and I can’t even put an ownership on it. I have no idea where it came from, no idea what it is. That’s a happy moment for me.” David R. Adler writes regularly for The Philadelphia Inquirer, Philadelphia Weekly, Jazz Times and Down Beat. His work on music, politics and culture has also appeared in The New York Times, The New Republic Online, Slate, Democratiya and many other publications. He blogs at lerterland.blogspot.com.
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Page 6, left to right: Sound/video artist Kasumi Bassoon virtuoso Pascal Gallois, photo © Philippe Gontier Page 7, top to bottom: Pharoah Sanders, photo by Quentin LeBoucher Composer Maurice Wright, photo by Ryan S. Brandenberg
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The Academy of Vocal Arts (AVA) was awarded $65,000 to produce the Philadelphia premiere of Ottorino Respighi’s rarely performed 1934 opera La fiamma, a tale of forbidden love and witchcraft set in Byzantine Ravenna. Two concert performances will feature AVA resident artists Jan Cornelius (soprano), Christopher Bolduc (baritone), Michael Fabiano (tenor), Ben Wager (bass-baritone), and Taylor Stayton (tenor), with the AVA Opera Orchestra conducted by Maestro Christofer Macatsoris. American Composers Forum, Philadelphia Chapter received $21,000 in support of a residency with French new music bassoon virtuoso Pascal Gallois at Temple University. Mr. Gallois will perform a recital of music for solo bassoon and bassoon with piano (accompanied by pianist Charles Abramovic), including Luciano Berio’s Sequenza XII and U.S. premieres of works by Olga Neuwirth, György Kurtág, and Bruno Mantovani. The Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts was awarded $85,000 in support of the American Composers Orchestra’s (ACO) fourth year in residence at the Center. The ACO’s groundbreaking “Orchestra Underground” will offer two concerts featuring new works by American composers Fred Ho, Kamran Ince, Clint Needham, Greg Spears, Keeril Makan, David Schiff, Fang Man, Margaret Brouwer, Kati Agocs, and Rand Steiger, as well as a reading of works by emerging Philadelphia composers.
Ars Nova Workshop received $40,000 to present “Free/Form,” a six-concert series seeking to illuminate the compositional breadth of composer/musicians Andrew Hill (1937–2007), Julius Hemphill (1940–1995) and Anthony Braxton (1945–). Featuring new interpretations and rare appearances from past collaborators, the project includes performances by the Nels Cline Ensemble, trumpeter Ron Horton and ensemble, pianist Ursula Oppens, the Daedalus String Quartet, the Rites Quartet, the Julius Hemphill Saxophone Choir, and Bobby Zankel and the Warriors of the Wonderful Sound. MacArthur Fellow Anthony Braxton will conduct his new ensemble in two compositions performed only once to date: Composition 103, which includes choreography for seven costumed trumpet players, and Composition 169 for brass quintet. Chamber Music Now! received $20,000 to commission Philadelphia-based composers Philip Maneval, David Laganella, Richard Brodhead, and Richard Belcastro to create works inspired by the history of the Eastern State Penitentiary (ESP). Ensemble CMN! (clarinetist Josh Kovach, violinist Hanna Khoury, cellist Miguel Rojas, percussionist Gabe Globus-Hoenich, and soprano Rachael Garcia) will premiere the works inside the cellblock walls of the ESP. In 2007, the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia was awarded $120,000 over two years to commission and premiere new works by Terry Riley and Sir John Tavener in partnership with San Francisco’s New Cen-
numbers
In 2008, 19 local music nonprofits received project support from PMP, with awards ranging from $20,000 to $85,000. That adds up to 141 events and $981,064 of support for adventurous music in greater Philadelphia. From traditional to contemporary forms of classical, jazz, and world music, here’s what PMP grantees will bring to the region in the coming year:
by the
PMP announces project support for 19 Philadelphia music organizations
141 public events. 25 world premieres, 18 of which were commissioned with PMP support. 31 regional premieres. 74 public performances: 45 New, 30 Chamber, 3 Choral, 5 Early, 3 Electronic/electroacoustic, 3 Multimedia, 5 Opera, 14 Orchestral, 3 World, 18 Jazz. 67 residency/educational activities. 24 collaborating cultural/educational organizations. 32 visiting ensembles. 348 guest artists. 317 resident artists. 26,405 live audience members. 9,120 residency attendees. 362,000 radio broadcast audiences on WRTI-FM and WHYY-FM.
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PMP ANNOUNCEs 2008 GRANTS
tury Chamber Orchestra. The second year of the project features Tavener’s new work, Tu ne sais pas, inspired by the poetry of Jean Biès, which will be scored for voice, timpani, and string orchestra, and feature mezzo-soprano Sarah Castle. International House Philadelphia received $40,000 to present “Tête-à-tête” in collaboration with Ars Nova Workshop. The fiveconcert series features duo performances by Tony Conrad and Keiji Haino; Pharoah Sanders and Hamid Drake; Mats Gustaffson and Thurston Moore; The Paul Bley Duo; and Kieran Hebden and Steve Reid, showcasing a cross-section of experimental, improvisational, and exploratory music from the past 40 years. The Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts received $70,000 in support of the sixth season of “Fresh Ink,” which will feature Grammy-nominated Imani Winds performing the world premiere of Cane, a work by Blue Note jazz pianist Jason Moran; the Bang on a Can All-Stars with guest artist Glen Kotche of the indie band Wilco; and the Philadelphia debut of Alarm Will Sound. Network for New Music was awarded $40,000 to commission six new works for the Network Ensemble. Seeking to illuminate connections between music and visual art, the project will pair composers Richard Brodhead and David Laganella with artists from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts; composers Kyle Bartlett and Gene Coleman with artists from NEXUS/foundation for today’s art; composer Andrea Clearfield with visual artist Maureen Drdak at the University of the Arts; and composer Todd Reynolds with visual designer Laurie Olinder and filmmaker Bill Morrison as part of Peregrine Arts’ Hidden City Festival.
Page 8: Maestro Charles Dutoit, photo by Chris Lee Page 9, clockwise from top: Theo Bleckmann Bang on a Can All-Stars Clifford Brown, Newport Jazz Festival, 1955, © Herman Leonard Photography, LLC
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In its 20th anniversary season, Orchestra 2001 received $40,000 to commission and present three perspectives of orchestral vocal composition: A Scandal in Bohemia, a chamber opera by Thomas Whitman based on a story by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle; Tides, an operetta by Ronald G. Vigue; and American Songbook VI: Voices from the Morning of the Earth by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer George Crumb. These will be premiered with guest artists Ann Crumb (soprano), Randall Scarlata (baritone), Markus Beam (baritone), Laura Heimes (soprano), Julian Rodescu (bass), and Ben Wager (bass-baritone). The Painted Bride Art Center received $50,000 to commission composer, bandleader, and jazz drummer John Hollenbeck to create and perform new works, both with his Large Ensemble and in collaboration with selected Philadelphia musicians during a two-week residency program. The Philadelphia Chamber Music Society was awarded $65,000 to present ten concerts featuring eight Philadelphia and two world premieres by Thomas Adès, Lukas Foss, David Horne, Lee Hyla, Aaron Kernis, Lowell Lieberman, Melinda Wagner, Robert Capanna, Richard Wernick, and David Maslanka performed by the Emerson, Orion, Muir, Brentano, Juilliard and Daedalus String Quartets; the Philharmonic Quintet of New York; violinist James Ehnes; Elizabeth Hainen (principal harpist of the Philadelphia Orchestra); pianist Lydia Artymiw; and flutist Carol Wincenc. The Philadelphia Classical Symphony was award-
PMP Project Grant Panelists, 2008: Rand Steiger (panel chair), composer/conductor, Professor, University of California, San Diego Harolyn Blackwell, soprano Bill Bragin, Director of Public Programming, Lincoln Center Zhou Long, composer, Visiting Professor, University of Missouri at Kansas City Greg Osby, composer and jazz saxophonist, Blue Note recording artist Ethel Raim, Artistic Director, Center for Traditional Music and Dance Stanley Ritchie, violinist, early music specialist, Professor, Indiana University Robert Shafer, Artistic Director, City Choir of Washington
ed $80,000 over two years to commission composers Curt Cacioppo and Maurice Wright to write works for “Reawakenings of American Indian Music,” a project that explores the culture of the Lenape Indians. The Philadelphia Museum of Art was awarded $40,000 to commission an original composition by jazz pianist Jason Moran inspired by the Museum’s fall 2008 exhibition “Gee’s Bend: The Architecture of the Quilt.” The new composition will be performed by Jason Moran and The Bandwagon (Nasheet Waits, drums, and Tarus Mateen, bass) with special guest Bill Frisell, guitar, and Alicia Hall Moran, soprano, as part of the Museum’s “Art After 5” programming. The Philadelphia Orchestra received $85,000 in support of Krzysztof Penderecki Week in October 2008, honoring the Polish composer’s 75th birthday year. Mr. Penderecki will join the Philadelphia Orchestra for the mainland-U.S. premiere of his Concerto Grosso for three cellos and orchestra with soloists Arto Noras, Daniel Muller-Schott, and Han-Na Chang; a performance of his chamber work by members of The Philadelphia Orchestra and Arto Noras; pre-concert lectures; and a Composer-to-Composer discussion. Piffaro, The Renaissance Band received $40,000 to present “Nouvelle, Nouvelle,” a midnight mass featuring Claudin de Sermisy’s Missa voulant Honneur interspersed by French noel tunes and settings, as well as a nativity play based on the noel texts—both traditions harkening back to medieval Christmas. The performance will incorporate images and text from a 1520s noel manuscript housed in the Rare Books Collection of the Free Library of Philadelphia. Piffaro will be joined by soprano Laura Heimes, tenor Philip Anderson, and PMP 9
PMP ANNOUNCEs 2008 GRANTS
Page 10 clockwise from top: George Crumb, photo by Peggy Peterson; Jason Moran; Marcus Belgrave, photo by Clyde Stringer; Taylor Stayton, Ben Wager and Christopher Bolduc, photo by Paul Sirochman; Composer David Laganella
First Time in Philly by Shaun Brady
Page 11, from top: Vocal duo Ranjani and Gayatri; Composer Kati Agócs photo by Herman Leonard
actors Mark Jaster and Sabrina Mandell. The Slought Foundation received $20,000 to present five concerts in collaboration with Soundfield, including Austrian sound artist and composer Werner Moebius in a program of multimedia works; German composer Michael Maierhof with Philadelphia’s Ensemble Noamnesia; American composer and vocal artist Theo Bleckmann; Ensemble OnLine Vienna; and Taiwan’s Chai Found Music Workshop. SRUTI, the India Music & Dance Society was awarded $18,000 to present a series of three concerts of Carnatic music (classical music of Southern India), featuring vocalist Sanjay Subramaniam, violinists Dr. Mysore Manjunath and Mysore Nagaraj, and vocal duo Ranjani and Gayatri. Philadelphia Baroque Orchestra Tempesta di Mare received $40,000 to present “From Wealth of Tears to Cheerful Hearts: Odes by Bach and Blow” in collaboration with The Philadelphia Singers. The program features J.S. Bach’s rarely performed Trauer-Ode along with the modern world premiere of John Blow’s With Cheerful Hearts, an
ode for New Year’s Day transcribed from the sole surviving manuscript at the Royal College of Music. The University of the Arts was awarded $63,785 to present “Brownie Speaks,” a symposium celebrating the music and life of jazz trumpeter and composer Clifford Brown. The symposium will feature former Clifford Brown band members Benny Golson and Lou Donaldson with their bands, as well as Terence Blanchard performing contemporary selections that showcase Brown’s continuing legacy. Marcus Belgrave and the Lars Halle Jazz Orchestra will perform pieces from Brown’s historic repertoire, as well as the world premiere of a newly-commissioned work by John Fedchock.
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Over the course of the 2008–2009 season, PMP grants will bring a vast array of new music to Philadelphia audiences. But in several cases, not only will the music be new to Philadelphians, but Philly will be new to the artists. Below are several artists and ensembles making their Philadelphia debuts during the coming year with support from PMP: Canadian-born concert violinist James Ehnes will appear under the auspices of the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, performing a program including Bach, Mozart, Strauss, and the local premiere of Philly native Aaron Jay Kernis’ Two Movements (with Bells). The Philadelphia chapter of the American Composers Forum will bring bassoonist Pascal Gallois for a residency including a concert, master class, and recital. One of the premiere voices in new music, Gallois is a former professor at the Paris conservatory and soloist with Pierre Boulez’ Ensemble Intercontemporain, and has premiered an impressive number of landmark modern compositions. The young ensemble Alarm Will Sound, appearing as part of the Kimmel Center’s “Fresh Ink” series, takes a fresh look at the classical repertoire. The 20-member group performs works by the masters of contemporary music alongside arrangements of music by electronica artist Aphex Twin and The Beatles. Nearly all of the artists in Slought Foundation’s “Soundfield@ Slought” series will be new to local ears: Austrian sound artist Werner Moebius, German composer/improviser Michael Maierhof, the new-music chamber group Ensemble On-Line Vienna, and the Taiwanese traditional Chinese instrument ensemble Chai Found Music Workshop. Though he has played Philly many times with the Claudia Quintet, drummer/composer John Hollenbeck’s Large Ensemble will debut as part of his residency at the Painted Bride Art Center. Also, Hollenbeck will assemble a group that will make its international debut while simultaneously seeming very familiar to local audiences, since it will be comprised of a dozen hand-picked Philadelphia musicians. Composer Keeril Makan hails guitarist Seth Josel, for whom he’s writing a new piece for guitar and orchestra to be premiered by the American Composers Orchestra, as “someone who has all of the training of the classical and acoustic guitarist,” but also understands electronic sound processing. Born in New York, Josel is based in Berlin where he has worked in close conjunction with a number of master composers, from Gavin Bryars to Helmut Lachenmann. In addition to soloists and large ensembles making their debuts, a number of duos will converge in Philadelphia for the first time. Given the importance of interpersonal chemistry in jazz, that almost amounts to the same thing. They include most of the pairings in International House’s “Tête-à-Tête” series—saxophonist Mats Gustafsson and guitarist Thurston Moore; saxophonist Pharoah Sanders and drummer Hamid Drake; drummer Richard Poole and pianist Paul Bley (who, given that he has been absent from Philly since the 1950s, will be making a virtual debut, at least as far as most of the audience is concerned). PMP 11
Calendar of Funded Events
September 2008 9.6.2008 Carnatic Vocal Concert by Sanjay Subramaniam SRUTI, the India Music and Dance Society; www.sruti.org Calvary Vision Center, Blue Bell, PA 9.20.2008 Carnatic Violin Concert by Mysore Nagaraj & Manjunath SRUTI, the India Music and Dance Society; www.sruti.org Calvary Vision Center, Blue Bell, PA
2008–2009
10.14.2008 The Philadelphia Orchestra: Happy Birthday Penderecki Cellists Han-Na Chang, Daniel Muller-Schott, and Arto Noras perform Penderecki’s Concerto grosso No. 1, for three cellos and orchestra The Philadelphia Orchestra; www.philorch.org Verizon Hall, Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts 10.18.2008 Soundfield@Slought: Michael Maierhof with Ensemble Noamnesia Slought Foundation; www.slought.org Irvine Auditorium, University of Pennsylvania
October 2008 10.3.2008 Soundfield@Slought: Polwechsel Slought Foundation; www.slought.org Slought Foundation 10.3 + 10.5.2008 Orchestra 2001 performs Vigue, Schwantner, and Crumb World premieres: George Crumb’s Voices from the Morning of the Earth and Ronald Vigue’s Tides Orchestra 2001; www.orchestra2001.org 10.3: Perelman Theater, Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts 10.5: Lang Concert Hall, Swarthmore College 10.4.2008 Carnatic Vocal Concert by Ranjani & Gayatri SRUTI, the India Music and Dance Society; www.sruti.org Calvary Vision Center, Blue Bell, PA 10.10 + 10.11.2008 The Philadelphia Orchestra: Three Cellos U.S. Premiere of Penderecki’s Concerto grosso No. 1, for three cellos and orchestra, featuring cellists Han-Na Chang, Daniel Müller-Schott, and Arto Noras (Philadelphia Orchestra debut) The Philadelphia Orchestra; www.philorch.org Verizon Hall, Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts 10.10.2008 Composer Portrait: Anthony Braxton Falling River Quartet Ars Nova Workshop; www.arsnovaworkshop.com Settlement Music School, Mary Louise Curtis Branch 10.11.2008 Composer Portrait: Anthony Braxton’s Composition 103 + Composition 169 Ars Nova Workshop; www.arsnovaworkshop.com St. Mark’s Church 10.12.2008 The Philadelphia Orchestra Chamber Concert: A Celebration of Penderecki’s 75th Birthday All-Penderecki program featuring Arto Noras, cello and Chantal Juillet, violin The Philadelphia Orchestra; www.philorch.org Verizon Hall, Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts
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10.23.2008 First Soundings: James Ehnes, violin and Andrew Armstrong, piano Philadelphia premiere of Aaron Jay Kernis’ Two Movements (with Bells) Philadelphia Chamber Music Society; www.pcmsconcerts.org Perelman Theater, Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts 10.24.2008 Fresh Ink: Imani Winds World premiere of Jason Moran’s Cane Kimmel Center Presents; www.kimmelcenter.org Perelman Theater, Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts 10.25.2008 Soundfield@Slought: Werner Moebius with Ensemble Noamnesia Slought Foundation; www.slought.org Slought Foundation 10.25.2008 Tête-à-tête: Paul Bley + Richard Poole International House Philadelphia; www.ihousephilly.org International House Philadelphia
November 2008 11.1.2008 Brownie Speaks: Benny Golson Quartet and Lou Donaldson Quartet University of the Arts; www.uarts.edu Merriam Theater 11.16.2008 American Composers Orchestra: Orchestra Underground Season Opener with Fred Ho, baritone saxophone and Seth Josel, electric guitar Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts; www.pennpresents.org International House Philadelphia 11.18.2008 First Soundings: Orion String Quartet with Kim Kashkashian, viola and Marcy Rosen, cello Philadelphia premiere of Lowell Liebermann’s Quartet No. 4, Op. 103 Philadelphia Chamber Music Society; www.pcmsconcerts.org Independence Seaport Museum 11.21 + 11.23.2008 Explorations in New Music and Art: Sound/Art/Space World premieres: works by Gene Coleman and Kyle Bartlett, inspired by the art of Jennie Thwing and Sherif Habashi Network for New Music; www.networkfornewmusic.org NEXUS/ foundation for today’s art 11.25.2008 First Soundings: Juilliard String Quartet World premiere of Richard Wernick’s String Quartet No. 7 Philadelphia Chamber Music Society; www.pcmsconcerts.org Independence Seaport Museum
December 2008 10.30.2008 Pascal Gallois Comes to Philadelphia U.S. premieres: works for bassoon by Olga Neuwirth, György Kurtág, and Bruno Mantovani American Composers Forum, Philadelphia Chapter; www.composersforum.org/philadelphia Temple University, Rock Hall Auditorium 10.30.2008 Brownie Speaks: Marcus Belgrave, Lars Halle Jazz Orchestra, and John Fedchock premiere of a newly commissioned work by John Fedchock University of the Arts; www.uarts.edu Levitt Auditorium, The University of the Arts 10.31.2008 Brownie Speaks: Terence Blanchard Band University of the Arts; www.uarts.edu Levitt Auditorium, The University of the Arts
12.7.2008 First Soundings: Philharmonic Wind Quintet of New York Philadelphia premiere of David Maslanka’s Wind Quintet Philadelphia Chamber Music Society; www.pcmsconcerts.org Independence Seaport Museum 12.12.2008 Composer Portrait: Ron Horton Sextet Performs Andrew Hill’s Passing Ships Ars Nova Workshop; www.arsnovaworkshop.com Settlement Music School, Mary Louise Curtis Branch 12.12.2008 Art After 5 Presents Jason Moran & the Bandwagon World premiere of Moran’s new commission inspired by the Gee’s Bend quilt exhibition Philadelphia Museum of Art; www.philamuseum.org/artafter5 Philadelphia Museum of Art
12.19–12.22.2008 Nouvelle, Nouvelle! Christmas in Renaissance France Piffaro, The Renaissance Band; www.piffaro.com 12.19: Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill 12.20: St. Mark’s Church 12.21: Sts. Andrew & Matthew Church 12.22: All Saints Church
January 2009 1.9.2009 Composer Portrait: Julius Hemphill (Part I) Featuring Ursula Oppens, The Daedalus String Quartet, Marty Ehrlich and the Rites Quartet I & Rites Quartet II Ars Nova Workshop; www.arsnovaworkshop.com Settlement Music School, Mary Louise Curtis Branch 1.11.2009 First Soundings: Carol Wincenc, flute; Hiroko Yajima, viola; Marcy Rosen, cello; Lydia Artymiw, piano World premiere of Robert Capanna’s Sonata for Flute and Piano Philadelphia Chamber Music Society; www.pcmsconcerts.org American Philosophical Society 1.16.2009 First Soundings: Daedalus String Quartet with Michael Tree, viola and Peter Wiley, cello Philadelphia premiere of David Horne’s Flight from the Labyrinth Philadelphia Chamber Music Society; www.pcmsconcerts.org American Philosophical Society 1.23 + 1.24 + 1.27.2009 Philadelphia premiere of Respighi’s La fiamma Academy of Vocal Arts; www.avaopera.org 1.23, 1.24: Perelman Theater, Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts 1.27: Centennial Hall, Haverford, PA 1.25.2009 First Soundings: Muir String Quartet with Menahem Pressler, piano Philadelphia premiere of Lukas Foss’ Quartet No. 4 Philadelphia Chamber Music Society; www.pcmsconcerts.org Independence Seaport Museum 1.31.2009 Tête-à-tête: Mats Gustafsson + Thurston Moore International House Philadelphia; www.ihousephilly.org International House Philadelphia 1.31.2009 With Cheerful Hearts: odes by Bach, Vivaldi and Blow Modern world premiere of John Blow’s With Cheerful Hearts, featuring the Philadelphia Singers Tempesta di Mare; www.tempestadimare.org Old St. Joseph’s Church
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Calendar of Funded Events
2008–2009
February 2009
March 2009
2.1.2009 With Cheerful Hearts: odes by Bach, Vivaldi and Blow Featuring the Philadelphia Singers Tempesta di Mare; www.tempestadimare.org Old St. Joseph’s Church
3.1.2009 First Soundings: Brentano String Quartet with Hsin-Yun Huang, viola Philadelphia Premiere of Lee Hyla’s Howl Philadelphia Chamber Music Society; www.pcmsconcerts.org Independence Seaport Museum
2.6 + 2.8.2009 Whitman/Anderson: A Scandal in Bohemia World premiere of Thomas Whitman’s A Scandal in Bohemia Orchestra 2001; www.orchestra2001.org 2.6: Perelman Theater, Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts 2.8: Lang Concert Hall, Swarthmore College 2.22.2009 American Composers Orchestra: Collaborations, New & Green Philadelphia premieres: ACO-commissioned works by Fang Man,Margaret Brouwer & Kasumi, Kati Agòcs, and Rand Steiger Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts; www.pennpresents.org International House Philadelphia 2.26.2009 Composer Portrait: Julius Hemphill (Part II) Bobby Zankel and the Warriors of the Wonderful Sound + Marty Ehrlich Ars Nova Workshop; www.arsnovaworkshop.com World Café Live
3.6.2009 Explorations in New Music and Art: Windhorse World premiere collaboration by composer Andrea Clearfield and artist Maureen Drdak Network for New Music; www.networkfornewmusic.org Great Hall, University of the Arts 3.6.2009 Big Ears: John Hollenbeck Residency Project Featuring Hollenbeck and 12 Philadelphia Musicians Painted Bride Art Center; www.paintedbride.org Painted Bride Art Center 3.20 + 3.22.2009 Sir John Tavener Meets Bach World premiere of Tavener’s Tu ne sais pas Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia; www.chamberorchestra.org Perelman Theater, Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts
April 2009
2.28.2009 Fresh Ink: Bang On A Can All-Stars with special guest Glenn Kotche from Wilco Kimmel Center Presents; www.kimmelcenter.org Perelman Theater, Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts
4.1.2009 First Soundings: Emerson String Quartet Philadelphia premiere of Thomas Adès’ Quartet No. 2 Philadelphia Chamber Music Society; www.pcmsconcerts.org Independence Seaport Museum
2.28.2009 Big Ears: John Hollenbeck Residency Project Featuring Hollenbeck’s Large Ensemble Painted Bride Art Center; www.paintedbride.org Painted Bride Art Center
4.3.2009 Explorations in New Music and Art: Visions of America World premieres by composers Richard Brodhead and David Laganella Network for New Music; www.networkfornewmusic.org Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts Historic Landmark Building
4.25.2009 Fresh Ink: Alarm Will Sound Kimmel Center Presents; www.kimmelcenter.org Perelman Theater, Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts 4.26.2009 First Soundings: Juilliard String Quartet with Elizabeth Hainen, harp World premiere of Melinda Wagner’s Quintet for Harp and Strings Philadelphia Chamber Music Society; www.pcmsconcerts.org Perelman Theater, Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts
May 2009 5.8.2009 American Mosaics II: Colorful Stories of a Great Nation World premiere of Curt Cacioppo’s Lenape Refrains Philadelphia Classical Symphony; www.classicalsymphony.org Church of St. Luke & the Epiphany
June 2009 6.10 + 6.11.2009 Explorations in New Music and Art: Re-Sounding/Hidden City World premiere collaboration by Todd Reynolds, composer and violinist; Laurie Olinder, visual designer; and Bill Morrison, filmmaker Network for New Music; www.networkfornewmusic.org The Royal Theater
TBD Composer Portrait: Andrew Hill Featuring the Nels Cline Ensemble Ars Nova Workshop; www.arsnovaworkshop.com Soundfield@Slought: Theo Bleckmann + Ensemble Noamnesia Slought Foundation; www.slought.org Slought Foundation Soundfield@Slought: Ensemble On-Line Vienna Slought Foundation; www.slought.org Slought Foundation Soundfield@Slought: Chai Found Music Workshop Slought Foundation; www.slought.org Slought Foundation Tête-à-tête: Tony Conrad + Keiji Haino International House Philadelphia; www.ihousephilly.org International House Philadelphia Tête-à-tête: Pharoah Sanders + Hamid Drake International House Philadelphia; www.ihousephilly.org International House Philadelphia Tête-à-tête: Kieran Hebden + Steve Reid International House Philadelphia; www.ihousephilly.org International House Philadelphia
Coming in 2009–2010 RAIM: Re-Awakenings of American Indian Music New music by Maurice Wright exploring the culture of the Lenape Indians Philadelphia Classical Symphony; www.classicalsymphony.org
4.16 + 4.17.2009 American Composers Orchestra / Penn Presents: New Music Readings & Lab Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts; www.pennpresents.org International House Philadelphia 4.24 + 4.25.2009 Cell Block: Stories of the Eastern State Penitentiary Chamber Music Now!; www.chambermusicnow.org Eastern State Penitentiary
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PMP 15
FEATURE
Page 16: Krzysztof Penderecki, photo by Donald Lee Page 17: Krzysztof Penderecki, photo by Werner Neumeister
Penderecki’s Journey by Dan Webster
Birthday honors may range from a pat on the back to the touch of a jeweled sword on the shoulders of the kneeling hero. But how to classify the near-Olympic celebration preceding the 75th birthday of Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki? Has any composer—ever—been swept into such a tidal flow of honors, performances, tributes and world travel on the occasion of a 75th birthday?
Verdi? Strauss? Stravinsky? Puccini? Doubtful, but for many reasons. Mass communications, ubiquitous sound reproduction and speedy travel were not theirs. But for Penderecki, the times and the planets have aligned themselves so that his every work, boosted by political coincidence, by historical events and by the theatricality of his writing, has sounded—and touched—listeners in Jakarta, Rabat, Melbourne, Tokyo, Warsaw, Philadelphia and… and… When Philadelphia hosts the composer in October, it will be one city among dozens devoting performances and honors to the peripatetic Pole as he continues a world-circling journey which began a year ago and will return him to Warsaw for his actual birthday on November 23. His has been a remarkable journey. Born in a Poland under the heel of first Nazi and then Soviet occupiers, he found music the path to spiritual freedom. He espoused no compositional style and accepted few dicta from the PMP 16
past. He had found a new musical world, and from the earliest pieces shocked listeners and apparatchiks with his ideas. His music seemed based in political storms. His first international hit—that word is apt—was his Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima (1960). His score looks like flights of airplanes across the page, and the grinding agony of the writing—string players played below the bridge to produce that anguished outcry—gripped audiences everywhere. Was it the emotional power of the subject or the uncanny skill of the writing which made it an instant concert entry? At any rate, the work became part of everyday language around the world. The Philadelphia Orchestra played it (in January 1969). It was its first brush with the composer. Yet Penderecki’s music had been heard here first in 1968. John Butler created Ceremonies for the Pennsylvania Ballet using three early works, Fluoresences, Cello Sonata and Anaklasis, all of which were iconoclastic, but harbingers of his core thinking through his entire long life of invention. Those three works treated instruments in new ways, asked listeners to forget traditions of harmonic progress and to savor clouds of new sounds.
That this music could come from a nation muffled by Soviet rule made it sound all the more exciting. How could the closed Red Fist allow Penderecki— and his predecessor Witold Lutoslawski—to imagine such stuff and to send it out into the world? The answer is that it had no choice, for music—like ideas—has a way of slipping under doors, and into the air where other musicians hear it. Penderecki levered open closed doors, too, by writing music for the Church. His catalog has included big works from the ancient traditions of the Church, from the beginning to this minute. Aus den Psalmen Davids, written 50 years ago, swept like wind through Poland. His early St. Luke Passion is a standard for chorus and orchestra; his Polish Requiem, written at the height of Poland’s move to democracy, remains one of his most performed works, and has been programmed during his birthday progress. The Philadelphia Orchestra, programming his monumental Utrenja, brought the composer here for the first time in 1970. That work, about the entombment of Christ, filled the Academy of Music with mystical sounds, like that of voices heard within ancient stone cloisters, the Temple Chorus singing antiphonally in Old Slavonic, the orchestra challenged by complex rhythms. Baffled, Eugene Ormandy had to have the composer mark the score so he could conduct in four. The composer looked around Philadelphia with an air of amused detachment rather like that The Beatles wore on their first American visit in 1965. Philadelphia was not a hotbed of musical innovation when Penderecki came. Walking past Curtis Institute, he asked who taught composition. When told that Gian Carlo Menotti and Rosario Scalero shared teaching, Penderecki said “Ah, Salieri.” Nothing in his scores seemed ordinary or traditional. He wrote Dimensionen der Zeit und der Stille for choir—and big percussion group. He rejected the word “experimental” because he was not seeking the unusual for its own sake. He knew what he wanted and was searching for ways and instruments to fulfill his vision. When available performers or instruments could not, he invented instruments—like the tubaphones in his Seven Gates of Jerusalem—to place the exact sound in the precise moment in the music. No area of music has been out of his reach. He has written for electronic instruments and written works on tape, including Ekechejria for the ill-fated Munich Olympics in 1972. He took notice of jazz in 1971 with Actions. Film buffs treasure his music in The Exorcist, The Shining and the mountain climbing epic Fearless. His massive operas—The Devils of Loudon and Paradise Lost, in particular, have demanded their place in the repertoire. What of iconoclasm? Listeners who admired his daring, his ear for innovation, his utter independence, also have charted what appeared to be a steady retreat from adventure. He heard the rumblings and said that in his youth he had had to invent, to explore, to question. But, he noted, everything in music has been discovered, he didn’t need to seek something new. When 14 composers were invited in 1995 to write sections of the Requiem of Reconciliation for the victims of World War II, the audience in Stuttgart heard wildly disparate musical styles. Luciano Berio, Judith Weir, Marc-André Dalbavie, Alfred Schnittke and György Kurtág were among them. After hearing Penderecki’s Agnus Dei they came away believing Penderecki was reconciling himself to music in A minor. The composer would agree, for he consciously has searched music’s history for styles and approaches that appeal to him. Critics identified a period when he was heavily influenced by Bruckner. Bruckner of all people. But he has also reconstructed Bachian counterpoint, classical gestures and post-romantic manners. Nothing musical is foreign to him! That seems borne out by the repertoire for his world tour. In Philadelphia, the Orchestra is playing his Concerto grosso for three cellos and orchestra, a recent instrumental work reshaping the musical styles of Vivaldi and other early clas-
Dan Webster was music critic for The Philadelphia Inquirer from 1964 to 1999.
sical writers. Orchestra musicians will play his Clarinet Quartet (Hello, Brahms), his Sextet, the Violin Sonata No. 1 and solo works for tuba, cello and viola. The titles are from historic tradition; the music from radical restructuring. On the World Tour, he conducts orchestra works with chorus, his new Horn Concerto, The Polish Requiem, Stabat Mater and even his hit, Threnody. This 75th birthday recognition is more than deserved, for Penderecki has written from his heart to the hearts of people around the world. That isn’t learned in the conservatory, nor is it a commercial trick. Musicians value his innovations at the same time they marvel at his grip on tradition, even convention. Music for an occasion? His music makes the occasion. Music for a sacred text? It rings with conviction and spirituality. Instrumental work? The Horn Concerto and the Concerto grosso reassure that there are far horizons in music. The birthday progress—something Victoria might have envied—touches Philadelphia and moves on. Penderecki is the focus of wonder and admiration for having created a repertoire that speaks directly to listeners on every continent, every land, in every ensemble. No wonder so many listeners want to see him this year. PMP 17
feature
From Archive
to Stage:
Orchestras, opera companies and ensembles that play music written in the 18th century or later can usually look to commercial sources for their performance materials—scores, parts, and the like. But historical performance groups, many of which specialize in seeking out music that has not been heard for centuries, have a tougher job.
Page 18: Richard Stone, Emlyn Ngai and Gwyn Roberts of Tempesta di Mare, photo by Bill Cramer Page 20, from left: Page from manuscript of John Blow’s With Cheerful Hearts Philomel in concert with Julianne Baird Page 21, from left: Tempesta di Mare, photo by Mark Garvin Piffaro, the Renaissance Band, photo by Andrew Pinkham
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Their sources are not publishers or music libraries, but microfilm, rare book collections, and scholars, and their finds often require considerable work before the parts can be placed on the music stands. The Philadelphia Music Project has been a regular partner to Philadelphia-based ensembles in helping to finance the research that makes such programs unique. And three such ensembles—Tempesta di Mare, Piffaro, and Philomel—have found that the wonders of modern technology, specifically the Internet and music notation computer software, can now make the research piece of the historical performance equation a lot easier to tackle. For their 2008–09 season, Tempesta di Mare, a Baroque orchestra, and the Philadelphia Singers, a choral ensemble, decided to explore a collaborative program. Gwyn Roberts, co-director of Tempesta, recalls, “We got together to talk repertoire with the Singers’ music director David Hayes, and we agreed that it would be neat to do Bach’s Trauer-Ode because it’s off the beaten track, and it showcases instrumentalists and pulls the vocal soloists from the choir. But what to pair with that? We wanted something unusual.” Tempesta had enjoyed performing Great Choir of Heaven, an ode by John Blow, in an earlier season. “So with David’s permission, I went off to research Blow odes that used an instrumental ensemble that would be compatible with the Bach.”
Discovering Early Music
by Heidi Waleson
Naturally, there is no complete edition of Blow odes, so Roberts started “poking around” in journal articles. She soon hit pay dirt: a 1965 article in the journal Music and Letters that was a chronology of court odes by Blow, along with their instrumentation and the location of their manuscript sources. She also found an essay by Bruce Wood, chairman of the Purcell Society and one of the foremost authorities on Blow and Purcell, which looked at musical influences on Blow from Italy and France. “It included a couple of hand-transcribed excerpts from one particular ode, With Cheerful Hearts, that showed him doing interesting things with rhythms and using vocal soloists with instruments, in a little one-upmanship with Purcell,” Roberts says. The piece, a New Year’s ode for 1690, had the right instrumentation—Roberts checked that with Wood’s Blow article in Grove and the 1965 chronology article. The next task was to find the music, and to see if the ode had ever had a modern performance—if not, Tempesta could take credit for the modern premiere. The catalogue in Music and Letters placed the manuscript at the Royal College of Music in London. This would have meant a transatlantic loan, but Richard Griscom, music librarian at the University of Pennsylvania (and a recorder player in the Penn ensemble that Roberts directs), told her that the Penn library has the entire RCM collection on microfilm—159 reels of it. Roberts also contacted Bruce Wood at Bangor University in Wales, and his graduate student, Susan Pollock, who is in the process of transcribing and editing Blow’s odes. Neither knew of any modern transcription or performance of the work. Once the particular microfilm containing the manuscript was found at Penn, lutenist Richard Stone, Tempesta’s co-director, took over. He scanned the microfilm into a data stick, brought it back to his home computer as a series of JPEG files, and then transcribed it into his music notation software. “It was unusually easy to read, and pretty complete—I only had to make up five or ten bars of missing counterpoint,” Stone says. Then, voilà—Roberts and Stone listened to it in a computer-generated rendition—probably the first “performance” in about 300 years. Roberts and Stone are delighted to be performing Blow, whose output has been much overshadowed by that of his more famous contemporary and friend, Purcell. Roberts explains the historical reason for the disparity: money, and the Protestant asceticism of William and Mary. William was spending the treasury on war with the Catholics in France, so most of the musicians at court weren’t being paid. That included Purcell, who found work elsewhere, including the theater. But the court needed Blow, who was the organist and choir director of the Chapel Royal. “He was one of the few with reliable employment,” Roberts says. The sinecure was a double-edged sword, however: William disliked musical excess of any kind, so Blow’s compositions were mostly simple verse anthems with organ accompaniment. “For big occasions, like this New Year’s ode, he was allowed to stretch himself to do something special.” Purcell’s more elaborate and varied oeuvre produced more enduring fame, even though he died much younger than Blow did. But Blow will have his moment: on January 31 and February 1, 2009, Tempesta and the Philadelphia Singers will perform the 20-minute work, With Cheerful Hearts. Piffaro, the Renaissance Band, also specializes in finding unusual music to perform. However, one of its programs, scheduled for the weekend of December 19–22, 2008, will be built around a find that does not include any music notation. The roots of the project go back several years, explains co-director Robert Weimken. “I live next door to a fellow who used to curate rare books in the Free Library of Philadelphia, and he told me that the Library had a 16th-century manuscript of French noels (Christmas carols). I thought it would be fun to build a project around it, and get the library involved.” The resulting concert is to be a multimedia event, in which Claudin de Sermisy’s Missa voulant Honneur will be performed interspersed with sung French noels drawn from the manuscript and dramatic vignettes that reflect the scenes depicted in it. Piffaro, a wind ensemble, will be joined by four singers and two mimes for the project. The concept, which is based on liturgical practice of the period, brings a rustic, peasant element into the sacred aura of the mass, and into PMP 19
From Archive to Stage: Discovering Early Music
the sacred space. The manuscript, a small (7x10 inch), plain-bound volume dating from about 1520, has only texts and pictures. There are a few suggestions about the tunes to which the various noels might be sung, but there is no music in the book. Joan Kimball, Piffaro’s co-artistic director, who has been working with the document, says, “It’s definitely a rather rustic manuscript. The illustrations are done in water color, a rather light wash, and the hand is in script. Towards the end of the book, the writing deteriorates considerably—it looks like it must have been a different hand—and is hardly legible.” The texts are rustic too. A modern translation from the old French of one of them, Or vous tremoussez, (“Stir yourselves now, shepherds of Judea”) reads, in part:
Donald and Jester and Puddinhead have jumped up to run to the place Where the Messiah is born. The child is as sweet as a bird on the branch, So with the milk from my nanny-goat Garoche I made him a cheese. Hurtaoult gave him a mound of butter, Tienvrine gave him a bale of straw, Floquet gave him his cheesecake. The illustrations reflect those simple sentiments. Kimball says, “What I find so wonderful about the illustrations are their naturalness and charm. There are scenes depicting everyday life—a sheep shearing, a pig slaughter for a feast, dogs, cats, goats. There are a number of depictions of musical instruments, including some of the ones that we play in Piffaro—shawm, bagpipe, recorder, pipe & tabor, hurdy-gurdy. There is a delightful picture of a bagpipe-playing pig! There is only one religious illustration in the whole book—a nativity scene on the opening page.” Piffaro plans to use about half a dozen of the noels in the performance, choosing appropriate music for the texts. “The texts are fun and upbeat, and the popular tunes to which they were set were probPMP 20
ably very familiar to the audience, in contrast with the ordinaries of the mass,” Weimkin says. “We conceive of it as a midnight mass taking place in a little parish church somewhere, not a grand place like Notre Dame de Paris. The forces that would perform a mass like this would depend on the size and wealth of the cathedral or monastery—there could be many more singers than the four we are using. This one strikes us as being intimate, and we’re setting a stage where the two elements—the intimate mass and the little vignettes—don’t contrast so much.” The wind band itself is a given in these church settings. “Large, acoustically live spaces lend themselves to the immediacy of attack of wind instruments,” Weimkin says. “Bowed strings depend on the developing of the sound, and that is not characteristic of Renaissance polyphony, but of a later Baroque style. Cathedrals used wind bands well into the 17th century.” Kimball and Weimkin have pursued various kinds of scholarly work for the program, some involving the manuscript itself, and some exploring the practical traditions of the period. Figuring out the tunes is another task. Since only a handful of the noels specify
Harpsichordist and musicologist Bruce Bekker, co-founder of the chamber ensemble/chamber orchestra Philomel, likes to devise programs with context, and the 300th anniversary of the birth of Benjamin Franklin in 2006 provided a perfect opportunity. “I wanted to share Franklin’s deep commitment to music,” says Bekker, who is especially interested in colonial Philadelphia in general and in Franklin in particular. “He has an amazing roster of identities, and very few know of him as a music lover. In the year that we celebrated him, all the others were being trotted out. I wanted to acknowledge his interest in music, his personal theories about it, his likes and dislikes.” Philomel’s 2005–06 concert series, a collaboration with soprano Julianne Baird, thus featured three concerts built around music that Franklin would likely have heard at home in Philadelphia and abroad in London and Paris. The music was interspersed with readings and talk, exploring Franklin’s experience and understanding of music. In addition, Philomel offered several salon concerts in historical spaces like the Physick House, where Franklin and his friends might have gathered, in an effort to replicate the intimate experience that such
today, so that lead involved conferring with a colleague who collects 18th-century printed material that would have been given to audiences at that time.” Bekker feels that his research provides the audience an unusual level of context. “There’s a letter by a young American visitor describing entering a small room in Paris where Franklin is present,” he says. “If you connect that with descriptions of salons of the period, it gives listeners a special kind of engagement—you hear music that Franklin heard in salons; then you hear this American’s shock and awe at the vibrancy of life in high society Paris. It adds a dimension that you can’t get from straight program notes.” Finding the music itself can be tricky, however. The “Franklin in Philadelphia” concert, which featured works by unfamiliar composers, was a puzzle that took some sleuthing to put together. “One of the frustrating things about researching the music of colonial Philadelphia is that we don’t have printed programs,” Bekker says. “There were advertisements of concerts, but if there were printed programs, they don’t exist anymore. There probably weren’t any—it was a convivial environment, so things were probably introduced
the music to which they are to be sung, the artistic directors have had to search out appropriate music. “Some is monophonic; some is polyphonic, with three and four-voice textures,” Weimkin says. “We’ve been delving into this larger repertoire, trying to align text and music. I’m also researching liturgical practice, using collections of cathedral archives—Penn has a pretty good collection of them, or we can get them on library loan. You can find out who the performers were from records that give accountings of personnel and how much they were paid. Sometimes there are even written records of the event, some with pictures and brief descriptions. Sometimes we know where the vignettes were placed in the mass.” The mimes, a man and a woman, will devise their parts based on the noels that are chosen. “We’ll probably build some scenes that draw on the influx of peasants into this otherwise educated, sophisticated environment,” Weimkin says. They plan to have “generic” costumes that reflect the period but are not actual reproductions. Piffaro is also planning to put together a booklet with translations that includes images from the noel manuscript—possibly even creating large cutouts of some of the images with which the mimes could interact. “We thought about projecting them, but that becomes a three-ring circus,” Weimkin says. “We decided to keep it to two rings, and focus more on the music. We’ll put the music in context, and use the manuscript as basis and springboard for presenting the program.”
concerts might have been. Philomel also produced Benjamin Franklin’s Musical World, a CD featuring highlights from the series. A lively compendium of music that Franklin knew and loved, and works that were played during his time, ranging from Scottish tunes and popular cantatas by James Oswald, to works by such composers as Thomas Arne and Luigi Boccherini, the CD is an important permanent documentation of Franklin’s era, a historical look at an aspect of the period and the man that has otherwise been largely overlooked. To research the Franklin program, Bekker went hunting for Franklin musical references in letters, diary entries, and the like. “A good deal of what I did might be called sifting, looking for needles in haystacks,” he says. “It was fascinating, because often there were things in plain sight that had not been pursued because biographers who were Franklin scholars didn’t have an awareness or interest in what things meant musically.” Bekker found a lot of material at the American Philosophical Society and online. Biographical information about Franklin is easily accessible, and once Bekker had a lead he would pursue it. For example, he says, “Franklin wrote a letter making fun of a particular piece by Handel. That was fairly straightforward—I just had to find the piece, and find it in the edition Franklin was referring to. Music by Handel is pretty readily available, but Franklin would have had access to less than complete scores than we have
verbally. The advertisements give names, but you don’t know if it’s the performer or the composer. Or it might say a sonata by Haydn, but which Haydn, and which sonata? You have to connect different pieces of the puzzle so that you can make strong conjectures about precise pieces.” Philomel’s themed concerts—which usually have Bekker doing research two or three years in advance—have included a look at music and manners at the court of Louis XIV (the music was refined, the manners, less so), and another about Rembrandt’s Holland. One recent program, a look at the genesis of public concerts, which occurred in London at the end of the 17th century, was, Bekker says, a kind “upstairs/downstairs program” called “An Armchair Pub Crawl.” The music was played in a performance space above a tavern, so Philomel interspersed the music with sometimes raunchy tales of tavern life written by Ned Ward, a tavern owner and writer. “The music was not as refined as that of the French court, but it was certainly more refined than Ned Ward’s stuff,” Bekker says. “Giving the audience a sense that public concerts were actually invented was intriguing to us. When things go way back in time, they start to have a kind of magical aura. We really like to bring things back to life in a way that is true to history and more engaging.” Heidi Waleson covers opera for The Wall Street Journal and frequently contributes to music publications such as Early Music America.
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FEATURE
Page 22: Eastern State Penitentiary interior, photo © Mark Perrott 1992 Jason Moran and the Bandwagon
Among the many projects that PMP will support this season, three invite composers to base new works on specific objects and places, including paintings, quilts, and the historic Eastern State Penitentiary. The Philadelphia Museum of Art has commissioned pianist Jason Moran to create a work inspired by the upcoming exhibition, “Gee’s Bend: The Architecture of the Quilt,” and Chamber Music Now will produce a concert of thematic commissions inside the penitentiary’s dramatic Cellblock Seven. Network for New Music will present a full season of concerts with commissions responding both to visual artwork and historic locations, from 19th-century oil paintings in the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts to a remote kingdom in northern Nepal.
Looking at Inspiration: Visual Art and Historic Sites Spark Composers’ Imaginations by Alyssa Timin
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Jason Moran ranks high among the most inventive pianists of his generation. Recently named in Smithsonian magazine’s “37 Under 36: America’s Young Innovators in the Arts and Sciences,” he has repeatedly set his creative sights beyond the traditional boundaries of jazz. Early in his career, Moran embraced one of hip-hop’s signature elements by incorporating recorded samples into his works. These days, he and The Bandwagon (bassist Tarus Mateen, guitarist Marvin Sewell, and drummer Nasheet Waits) enter the stage accompanied by a tightly edited mix of influences from all over the musical map. Visual art history plays an increasing role in Moran’s large-scale projects. For 14 months in 2004 and 2005, he served as the Walker Art Center’s artist in residence (a title he transferred to his most recent album). Moran had the privilege of sifting through the Center’s permanent collection, eventually choosing the work of conceptual artist Adrian Piper to guide the composition of “Milestone.” Specifically, he focused on “The Mythic Being; I/You (Her),” a series of photographs from 1974 in which the subject’s racial and gender markers slowly transform while her/ his running monologue describes the disintegration of trust in an undefined relationship where “You instinctively perceive me as the enemy.” Moran assembled the text for “Milestone” from conversations with Piper, his wife, and with his quartet, exploring questions of race and identity from an autobiographical standpoint. For “IN MY MIND: Monk at Town Hall 1959,” one of Moran’s most recent commissions, the composer enlisted help from Glenn Ligon, a contemporary artist who has inherited the tradition of text-based work from Piper and others (Ligon’s soft-white neon sign, negro sunshine, graced the cover of Artforum in May 2006). The artist created a black-and-white painting, repeating “IN MY MIND” in roughly stenciled lettering that smudges illegibly toward the bottom of the canvas. Always resistant to being pigeonholed, Moran denies that he is particularly interested in text-based visual art. Instead, he emphasizes, “I’m into what people do really well,” adding that he takes opportunities to make connections among artists of all disciplines. He feels a special commitment to fostering community among African-American artists but hardly does so at the exclusion of other artists who interest him.
Moran seeks to outdo himself with each project, and he increasingly turns to “outside forces” to help take his compositions to the next level. He is “constantly talking to artists,” he says. For his current commission from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Moran sought advice from performance and video art pioneer Joan Jonas, with whom he worked in 2005, on performing in the cavernous Great Stair Hall. A professor at MIT who holds dual appointments in visual art and architecture, Jonas has long been recognized for her sensitivity to the aesthetic properties of space. Although his ideas for the PMA performance are still gestating, Moran says their correspondence has led him to consider building a wood room inside the Hall as its set. “I was not going to turn down a challenge like that,” the pianist remarks of the PMA’s invitation to write a work inspired by the quilts of Gee’s Bend. Produced within a tight-knit and secluded AfricanAmerican community in rural Alabama, the quilts are renowned for their masterful construction and bold, improvisational style. While they are beautiful in themselves, the quilts also testify to a remarkable community tradition. Women in Gee’s Bend have quilted for generations—almost certainly since before the end of slavery, when their home was still a plantation. Pieced together from available scraps of fabric, including worn out work clothes, the quilts serve very practical purposes, keeping homes comfortable and warm, while also providing a special means of individual expression, social distinction, and continuity between generations. Though secluded, Gee’s Bend attracted attention throughout the 20th century. As early as the Great Depression, the cohesion and creative spirit of its residents earned it the nickname “An Alabama Africa.” During the 1960s, “Benders” played a significant role in the civil rights movement, particularly under the ministry of Martin Luther King, Jr., who visited the rural community and spoke at their church. However, the quilts’ reputation as fine art only solidified as recently as 2002, when an Atlanta-based art dealer collected 70 quilts for a traveling museum exhibition. “The Quilts of Gee’s Bend” began at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and caused a sensation at its second stop, the Whitney Museum of American Art. “Gee’s Bend: The Architecture of the Quilt” follows up on the initial tour with stops in Denver, Louisville, and Philadelphia. In the past six years, the quilters have formed a collective, a foundation, and gained gallery representation in New York. Unfortunately, the massive exposure provided by the exhibitions has also spawned a lawsuit and subsequent rifts among the quilters. Moran is well aware of these recent chapters in the history of Gee’s Bend, and he wants his composition to address the problems associated with the quilts’ commercialization: what happens when they are hung behind glass in a museum, and objects that once functioned inside homes become decoration? Moran observes that he has not yet gone to meet the artists, and he is prepared for the visit to “change everything.” Still, some details are clear. He has invited jazz guitarist Bill Frisell, who has a strong affinity for American folk art forms and already took his own trip to Gee’s Bend, to augment the Bandwagon. The ensemble will also include Moran’s wife, the soprano Alicia Hall Moran, and children from North Philadelphia’s AKWD (“Any Kid Will Do”) Preschool.
On top of the history of Gee’s Bend, the visual power of the quilts, and questions regarding their status as decorative art, the pianist also wants his composition to acknowledge contemporary experiences of race in Philadelphia. One gets the sense that he is not willing to permit the impression that struggle and solidarity among African-Americans only happened in the past, or only happens in the South. A composer of conscience and ambition, Moran is driven to fold more and more of the world into his art. Those who go to his concert on December 12th will hear his latest synthesis. The local presenting organization Chamber Music Now will probe the shadows of Philadelphia’s past in a concert of new works held inside and inspired by the notorious Eastern State Penitentiary (ESP). Situated less than half a mile from the PMA, the Penitentiary is one of the city’s most impressive historic sites. It attracts the most visitors around Halloween, when the decommissioned prison is transformed into “Terror behind the Walls,” perhaps the most elaborate (and expensive) haunted house in the region. However, the place manages to be delightfully creepy year-round. From 1829 until 1970, ESP operated as one of Philadelphia’s main penal institutions. Designed by architect John Haviland, the Penitentiary kept convicts in complete solitude, on the theory that the protracted isolation would by itself bring about their reform. This utopian fallacy is made eerily visible in ESP’s architecture: cellblocks extend from a central rotunda in radial symmetry; they exude the pristine, unconscious cruelty of overly ambitious social engineering. The surrounding wall is so tall and deep, and built with such stony conviction, that it looks almost new. Inside the old cellblocks, however, plaster has been sloughing off the walls for decades, burying abandoned mattresses with white dust and flakes of paint. The atmosphere is thick with loneliness and lost time. Richard Belcastro and David Laganella, the directors of Chamber Music Now, turned to ESP for their major production for the season. They have made an annual tradition of commissioning new works around a unified theme. Having been on the hunt for a new performance space, Belcastro and Laganella hit on the idea of the Penitentiary as a way to solve two problems at once, albeit temporarily. They take pride in keeping their productions “a local affair,” working almost exclusively with local composers and musicians and often making an aspect of Philadelphia their theme. Still, their upcoming concert at the Penitentiary marks their first concert to take place “in the source of the inspiration.” After receiving approval from the ESP’s Board of Directors, Belcastro and Laganella agreed that the commissions would be “too fun to give away.” Each season, the two directors—also both composers—choose a PMP 23
Looking at Inspiration: Visual Art and Historic Sites Spark Composers’ Imaginations
concert on which to program their work. Neither could resist the Penitentiary’s sinister allure, so they took on half of the program themselves and commissioned two other area composers, Richard Brodhead and Philip Maneval, to complete the bill. The recently established Ensemble CMN, a resident group including soprano Rachael Garcia, cellist Miguel Rojas, violinist Hanna Khoury, clarinetist Joshua Kovach, and percussionist Gabe Globus-Hoenich, will perform. In the quest for an angle on the storied site, the account of one of ESP’s first female inmates captured Belcastro’s attention. Ann Hinson was among the first four women sentenced to the Penitentiary and was central to a highly publicized investigation into the integrity of the institution a mere five years after it opened. Under the watch of an underkeeper’s wife, records indicate that Hinson received certain privileges, including special housing and a job as a cook in the penitentiary’s public quarters. Both she and Mrs. Blundin, the underkeeper’s wife, as well as other members of the administration, were accused of “licentious and immoral practices,” as well as late night dancing and “carousing.” As historian Leslie Patrick coolly notes, the warden received a reprimand, “though he would be allowed to keep his position,” Mrs. Blundin was “required to leave the premises of the prison,” and “Hinson was never heard from again.” The threadbare life story of this female convict makes her feel just out of reach, a frustratingly inaccessible phantom. Caught with too many privileges and too few rights in an apparently lawless penal institution, she seems to have been swallowed up by circumstances beyond her control. Intrigued by Hinson but deprived of her perspective, Belcastro has set out to write a work—including the text—imagining the life of his tragic muse. Maneval similarly plans to dig into the Penitentiary’s archives for stories of inmates’ experiences. Before he dives into the details, however, he reports that he is absorbed in the “broader themes of incarceration, isolation and redemption.” In contrast to Belcastro and Maneval’s somber meditations, Laganella has been thinking about reality television. Specifically, he has been thinking about an episode of “Ghost Hunters” filmed inside ESP. His work, he remarks, is taking shape in response to the theatricality of ghost stories. He plans to cast his soprano in the role of “apparitions,” animating her part with all the imaginary magnetism of the undead. Brodhead, the fourth composer on the program, plans a different approach. Rather than focusing on the history of the Penitentiary, his attention has fallen on the acoustical properties of the space itself. He is considering placing the performers at differPMP 24
ent ends of the cellblock, or even in separate blocks altogether. Network for New Music (NNM), one of the region’s longest-standing experimental ensembles, has dedicated its entire 2008–2009 season to “Explorations in New Music and Art,” although audiences can also expect historic and site-specific references among their remarkably varied programs. Coincidentally, NNM has commissioned works from Laganella and Brodhead for a performance in the rotunda of the Historic Landmark Building of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (PAFA). Both composers will write in response to works in the Academy’s permanent collection. In keeping with his contemporary sensibility, Laganella chose a 2006/2007 work in ink and graphite by the emerging artist Ben Peterson. The composer saw California Ten, a six-foot-by-ten-foot, minutely detailed drawing, before it went under glass in one of PAFA’s galleries of new works. “As soon as I saw it,” he affirms, he knew it was the image he wanted. Peterson’s drawing depicts an absurd, gently humorous vision of the havoc wreaked by a major earthquake. A wedge of coastal real estate has heaved and curled like a wave. Astroturf hangs over an abyss, and a house has left its innards— mostly appliances—on a weirdly blank plane beneath the surface of the earth. Laganella has been gazing at a “tiny black-and-white version [of the drawing] taped to my wall next to where I work.” Only three weeks into writing and already working on the second movement, he is “kind of shocked” at how quickly the composition is coming together. Simultaneously, Brodhead is composing one of his largest chamber works to date. Drawn to paintings in PAFA’s collection from the 19th and early 20th centuries, he settled on four images, each of which informs one movement. The first movement responds to Thomas Eakins’s Arcadian Scene. Brodhead interpreted the painting’s “sense of blended colors and something more discrete emerging” as a melodic idea developing from initial “atmospheric material.” Willard Metcalf’s The Twin Birches, Morris Hall Pancoast’s The Pennsy Train Shed, and James Whistler’s The Thames will guide the latter movements. NNM’s November concert at NEXUS/foundation for today’s art follows a similar format but embraces a very different aesthetic. Gene Coleman and Kyle Bartlett, both experimental composers who make use of extended techniques, take on the postmodern visual vocabularies of Sherif Habashi and Jennie Thwing. Bartlett, who describes her approach to composition as “microscopic,” seized on a sense of fragmentation in Habashi’s paintings. Scored for two flutes and two basses, the vast range of her piece aims to evoke “the
open, blank field.” Coleman, known for cultivating new sonic ground between disparate instruments, has also studied painting and filmmaking. His interest in deconstructing musical boundaries should mix well with Thwing’s complex installations. Summer 2009 brings the Hidden City Festival to Philadelphia, a celebration of some of the best-kept secrets and longest forgotten buildings in town. NNM will collaborate with producer Peregrine Arts on a concert in the abandoned Royal Theater. Built on south Broad Street in 1919, the Royal formed an important center for Philadelphia’s African-American population. “During an earlier time,” writes Inquirer reporter Linda K. Harris, “performers such as Fats Waller, Pearl Bailey, Billy Paul and Bessie Smith took the stage, singing and dancing for an adult crowd dressed to the nines.” In June, Network’s ensemble will perform a new site-specific production created by members of the Ridge Theater—composer and violinist Todd Reynolds, filmmaker Bill Morrison, and theatrical designer Laurie Olinder. Although Reynolds acknowledges that his partners’ creations often evoke nostalgia, he contrasts himself as “not a very literal composer,” and confirms that he does not plan to “pull spirits out of the walls.” Instead, having long loved the popular music that made the Royal famous, he looks forward to rekindling its energy in his composition. Likewise, he strongly supports Hidden City’s marriage of archaeology, cultural history, and contemporary performance. Reynolds enthuses, “I thrill to the idea that people are willing to dig down into a city, into history, to reopen the conversation about the history of Philadelphia.” However, Philadelphia is not the only place to have captured the imagination of local artists. Tibetan Buddhism comes to the foreground in a daring collaboration between composer Andrea Clearfield and painter Maureen Drdak, who will trek together to Lo Monthang, a semi-independent kingdom in the Upper Mustang region of northern Nepal. Clearfield is an omnivorous composer, constantly embracing new material, and she has always wanted to go to Nepal. In the kingdom whose name means “Plains of Prayer (or Aspiration)”, she plans to make digital recordings of both folk and ceremonial music. In particular, she hopes to capture a fraction of the thousands of songs written and performed by Tashi Tsering, royal singer to the Mustangi Raja. Clearfield’s compositional ideas center on the metaphor of ascent to higher and higher planes. The image is essential both to the mountainous terrain of Central Asia, as well as—perhaps not coincidentally—to the Tibetan Buddhist vision of spiritual attainment. In naming their project “Lung-Ta,” the collaborators establish a guiding concept that helps illuminate connections that Tibetan Buddhism makes between the physical and metaphysical universe. The term translates most literally to “Wind-Horse” and refers to the colorful prayer flags often associated with Tibet. Riding on the wind, these flags traditionally depict the horse that, according to
local mythology, carries the “Jewels of Buddhism,” the benefits of religious practice, up to the heavens. Lung-ta are vehicles for prayer. At the same time, explains Drdak, the word also applies to “a quality of the individual.” Just as the flags carry and transmit the dedicated merit of practitioners, so too the practitioner bears his merit within himself. In this sense, lung-ta signifies a kind of conflation of health and spiritual attainment based on a spiritualized idea of the wind or breath. A person whose lung-ta is up easily overcomes obstacles; when a person is “muddling, or can’t get it together,” Drdak adds, her lung-ta is said to be down. The painter has already made one trip to Lo Monthang and connects deeply with the spiritual worldview of the isolated kingdom. Although she treasures the culture’s purity, she also celebrates the inevitable commingling of historically and socially disparate elements. To that end, she and Clearfield view the project as an attempt to bridge distinctions between East and West. Drdak’s paintings will depict the lung-ta in stylized “biomorphic” form. The mythical horse is largely abstract, a muscularly curving shape intersected by rays of gold leaf “signifying the flaming energy of the Buddhist Dharma.” To more fully invest the images with motion, Drdak plans to take her canvases off their stretchers and hang them loose above the stage at the University of the Arts where Group Motion Dance Company will join Network’s musicians. Composers are wonderfully free when it comes to subject matter. A source can guide every note of a work or a single element of its structure. This season of PMP-funded projects suggests that, regardless of discipline, artists can interpret one another endlessly. Moments of inspiration and gestures of creativity forge links across time and space. The individuality of artists and their objects blend into a kaleidoscopic conversation among forms. Like artworks, historic sites are dense with suggestion. You walk into them and perceive an abundance that surpasses whatever you yourself are likely to comprehend. When the spark of creativity passes directly from one artist to the next, it is perhaps easiest to appreciate how meaning can be refreshed and renewed by change, or by falling into a stranger’s hands. Alyssa Timin’s writing on music and visual art has appeared in New Music Box, Visual Arts Journal, Finnish Music Quarterly, and Sequenza 21.
Page 24: Lung-ta detail, painting by Maureen Drdak Page 25: Network for New Music Ensemble, photo by JJ Tiziou
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FEATURE
Nearly three centuries ago, Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus devised a system for neatly classifying living organisms, a well-defined, hierarchical system based on shared physical characteristics. A mere two decades after his death, European scientists were confronted with the platypus, a creature whose bizarre mixture of mammalian and birdlike features challenged the Linnaean system. Over the ensuing generations, Linnaeus’ scientific progeny have refined, revamped, and at times been forced to completely renew their approach to cataloging the natural world. Debate rages today between those who draw lineages based on the evidence of evolutionary change versus those who draw their conclusions chiefly from subtle discrepancies in the genetic code. Music, too, has its labels and its hierarchical family trees. And like the planet’s flora and fauna, music has undergone an often gradual, sometimes seismic process of change over time to arrive at the mind-boggling variety that exists today. But while the sections in your local record store suggest a few broad, mutually exclusive categories—rock, jazz, classical, country—these genres are more interrelated, more prone to interbreeding, and therefore far more malleable, than one would be led to believe. With support from PMP, many of Philadelphia’s music groups are doing work that freely and sometimes brazenly traverses these generic boundaries, whether
Music Without Borders:
Composer Keeril Makan, photo by Scott Irvine
PMP 26
purposely striving to forge new paths or simply following personal muses wherever they may lead. The Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts’ “Fresh Ink” series showcases contemporary composers and performing artists, many of whom steer what appear to be traditional classical music ensembles in very untraditional directions. In this, its sixth season, “Fresh Ink” will present three such groups: the “amplified chamber group” Bang on a Can All-Stars, presenting two Philadelphia premieres with percussionist Glen Kotche, drummer for indie rockers Wilco; the Grammy-nominated quintet Imani Winds, world premiering a new work by jazz pianist Jason Moran; and, making their Philly debut, the young 20-piece ensemble Alarm Will Sound, whose repertoire extends from contemporary classical to arrangements of electronica and classic rock. The process by which some musical genres have come to exist is remarkably similar to the intermingling and natural selection that has given rise to new species over the planet’s history. Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley didn’t arise fully-formed from some Memphis laboratory with a new idea called rock n’ roll. Instead, living poor in the 1950s South where blues-singing blacks and country-swinging whites came into close (if uneasy) contact, a new form arose which fused elements of both. In urban America, such commingling is imbued with a rich multi-cultural flavor, as evidenced by the Imani Winds, a classical woodwind quintet that often collaborates with musicians from other traditions, especially jazz. Their Kimmel Center performance will include the premiere of Jason Moran’s Cane, a piece inspired by the pianist’s slave ancestors in Louisiana, and a piece written for the group by legendary saxophonist Wayne Shorter. Asked to categorize the ensemble, Imani clarinetist Mariam Adam offers, “It’s mu-
sic that is absorbing its environment. For us, growing up as an ensemble in New York City, that means jazz, world, Latino, salsa, tango, Chinese Urhu in the subway, Middle Eastern music through your favorite falafel place. We’re conservatory-trained and we still play sonatas, but the faces of chamber music are evolving.” Adam expresses reservations about the urge to label that inevitably accompanies the marketing of any artist, a trend that only accelerates as new avenues open up. “One of my biggest gripes with the age of information that we’re in right now—with title bars on web sites or sections in record stores—is putting titles on everything,” she says. But the drive to describe is nothing new, nor is it quite so unnecessary as the artist-publicist dichotomy might suggest. As with animals who occupy new habitats and eventually change so drastically that they can no longer procreate with the species from whence they came, so eventually will musical genres become so developed that they hardly resemble their own parents. Certainly the traces of a blues holler or a hillbilly twang were readily evidenced in Elvis’ “revolutionary” new sound, but ten years later, good luck finding the fingerprints of Robert Johnson or Roy Acuff on Rubber Soul.
similar kinds of musical thinking going on, and vice versa.” The goal of finding an audience is of primary importance in assigning genre designations. For some, the type of music one listens to has less to do with personal taste than it does with defining an identity: the chosen genre comes with its own look, values, social clique. Those who subscribe to these ideas can be easily marketed to; less definable choices mean less definable consumers. That leaves some artists, whose work is not so easily slotted into preexisting niches, hard-pressed to find their spot in the marketplace. Composer Keeril Makan, who will have his new piece for electric guitar and orchestra premiered by the American Composers Orchestra at the Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, laughs when recounting the struggle to classify his latest CD, In Sound, released on saxophonist/composer John Zorn’s Tzadik label. “Zorn’s been dealing with this issue for
On Defying Definition
by Shaun Brady
Not all such evolutions happen quite so naturally—there are those experimenters who purposefully combine seemingly disparate elements, test tube in hand, to try and force a chemical reaction. Miles Davis continually had his finger on the pulse of new music, successfully integrating aspects of rock and funk into his 1970s electric experiments, and even dabbling in hip-hop with lesser success in his later years. Many of his sidemen from that era went on to pioneer a genre so intent on cross-over that its very name reflected that idea: fusion. Alarm Will Sound, a group of musicians in their mid-20s to mid-30s, has very consciously expanded its repertoire in unexpected directions. They’re best known for the 2005 CD Acoustica, an album of virtuosic arrangements of songs by electronic musician Aphex Twin. For the group, being able to draw upon two different genres helps to expand their audience and possibly even cultivate new listeners for those separate branches. “I think that’s where we feel like we’re doing something really cool,” claims AWS managing director Gavin Chuck. “Somebody who’s coming to hear some hardcore modernist classical stuff will hear us play an arrangement of electronica and realize that there are actually
some time,” Makan says, “whether he’s jazz or experimental, improvisation or new music. I think they classified my CD as avant-garde/experimental, but I noticed that a lot of CD distributors are putting it under jazz. It has nothing to do with jazz, but because they know Zorn and the types of things that Tzadik promotes and produces, they think it will appeal to a jazz audience—which in itself is varied between listeners of more traditional Wynton Marsalis music or things that are more avant-garde. So in other words, I have no idea what you would call it.” The coining of terms is a special challenge in the “classical” realm. Where other genres, rock and jazz in particular, can boast a plethora of fairly coherent subgenres, classical music is more frequently defined by historical periods than stylistic tags, and recent innovations in particular have failed to generate sufficient new terminology. Terms like “new music” or “20th/21st-century classical” are non-specific and/or have
Music Without Borders: On Defying Definition
limited shelf-lives, while tags like “experimental” or “avant-garde” describe approaches, not styles, and may be applied across genres. Which leaves an organization like the American Composers Orchestra attempting to redefine “the orchestra” as a sonic tool for modern composers, whatever their background, rather than an ensemble for the performance of standard repertoire. It’s an approach akin to erasing classifications in response to the platypus, not redefining them, and then throwing a few species into a room together to see which can fruitfully reproduce. The Annenberg Center will present two concerts in the fourth year of the ACO’s “Orchestra Underground” series. ACO Executive Director Michael Geller refers to “Orchestra Underground” as the organization’s “entrepreneurial, slightly ‘subversive’ take on what an orchestra is or what an orchestra could be. In part, ‘Orchestra Underground’ is an attempt to redefine the symphonic ensemble in a flexible format that’s friendly to new technologies, multimedia, new visions and new collaborations. A large part of that is encouraging composers and artists who haven’t traditionally thought of writing for orchestra to do so. So there have been a number of artists who come out of jazz and improvisatory musics, varied world music traditions, the computer music studio, and/or the theater and dance world. I think if we’re doing our job right, we’re not advocating for any one musical aesthetic, but rather advocating for the opportunity for creative composers and musicians to engage in writing for the orchestra.” Certain composers and artists, not content to wait for others to define their work, coin their own terminology. Baritone saxophonist Fred Ho offers the mouthful “Afro-Asian New American Multicultural Music” to describe his work, adding, “I don’t agree with classifications, but self identity and recognition of influences and inspirations are important.” Ho’s brand of jazz brashly ventures across generic and cultural boundaries. Born in California, he regularly integrates elements from his Chinese ancestry into his multimedia works—elements both real and perceived, from traditional Chinese folk music to martial arts film tropes. Ho’s first orchestral commission came from the ACO in the midst of his battle with colorectal cancer, and resulted in When the Real Dragons Fly! The piece’s title comes from a Ho Chi Minh quote: “When the prison doors open, then the real dragons will fly out.” “I wrote the piece with the intention to eliminate all forms of stratification,” Ho offers, “the tearing down of all walls and ‘prisons,’ which I believe will allow ‘true’ dragons to fly—meaning the most original, fiercest and transformative persons, ideas and works [will] be liberated and have the chance to contend and impact upon society.” Given the strong political bent of his ideas, it’s no surprise that Ho’s genre hybridization is rife with social commentary, the multiple hyphenates of his musical identity reflecting his socio-cultural one. “Everyone is a hyphenated-American unless one accepts the racist grand narrative that European settler-colonialism and white supremacy are the primary characteristics of the American identity,” Ho insists. “I choose the opposite, that what is truly American is multi-lingual, multi-cultural… In my personal journey growing up in American society, the expressions and explosions of the oppressed have had their greatest impact upon how I see myself and my role in society and the world.” While not as anarchic in spirit as Ho, Chinese-born composer Fang Man uses the orchestra to parallel her own cross-cultural experiences by fusing musical traditions. Fang’s clarinet concerto Resurrection combines western techniques with Chinese opera and electronics, and was inspired by a PMP 28
from top: Alarm Will Sound, photo by Justin Bernhaut Saxophonist Mats Gustafsson Imani Winds
non-musical source—Wassily Kandinsky’s painting Composition V—Resurrection of the Dead. While living in New York, Fang has become interested in jazz music, which she initially hoped to add as yet another element in her compositional mix, but ultimately shied away from in the case of Resurrection. “I like jazz a lot,” she says. “It’s very rich. But I don’t come from a culture that has jazz in its blood. I don’t want jazz musicians or people who know it well to hear my music and think, ‘You used it in a cheap way.’” Naturally, these stylistic absorptions don’t only work one way, with myriad genres and traditions being gathered under the classical umbrella. Jazz and experimental music presenting organization Ars Nova Workshop will present two series that showcase the outer limits of what could be considered jazz: “Free/Form: Composer Portraits,” a six-concert series spotlighting the compositional work of pianist Andrew Hill and saxophonists Julius Hemphill and Anthony Braxton; and, in collaboration with International House Philadelphia, “Tête-à-Tête,” a series of five duo performances with participants ranging from legendary pianist Paul Bley to Sonic Youth guitarist Thurston Moore. While Ars Nova does categorize itself as “jazz and experimental music,” Director Mark Christman says, “We’re always interested in artists who aggressively defy category, are defined by multiple categories, or are enigmatic.” The series being undertaken by Ars Nova could be seen as two extremes of that continuum. “Free/ Form” explores the compositional side of a music traditionally associated with improvisation, while “Tête-à-Tête” promises the more immediate, almost chemical reaction of artists pairing off and conversing with one another, sometimes across generations and stylistic approaches. Both feature artists and combinations which challenge the limits of “jazz.” “If there’s anything I can do with regards to genre,” Christman says, “it’s to facilitate an event that contradicts it, or allows the audience to question it. Where the event falls categorically is of no value; what is important is elevating artists with overlooked or undervalued bodies of work, supporting and rewarding ambition, drawing connections, articulating relevance, and challenging ourselves.” Then there are those whose work seems to defy categorization altogether. Slought Foundation’s “Soundfield@Slought” series, curated by bass clarinetist/composer Gene Coleman, will present five concerts by largely indefinable artists. Taiwan’s Chai Found Music Workshop utilizes traditional Chinese instruments in startling contexts, from Western
classical music to experimental sound art to rock concerts; German composer Michael Maierhof composes by means of improvising, creating works for prepared piano and amplified plastic cups; singer Theo Bleckmann’s expansive vocal range covers territory from the Great American Songbook to ethereal drones and electronic looping. Austrian composer Werner Moebius, who combines digital sound sources with acoustic instruments, sometimes in the context of art installations, defines himself as “an artist who works with sound rather than a composer. When I begin to work on a new piece I never know exactly which form or genre it will take. I think it is worth striving for a position that can exist outside rigid or pre-determined categorizations. As an artist it’s valuable to produce works of integrity.” While discussing the concept of genre, many of these artists seemed to echo jazz pianist—or is it African-American classical composer—Duke Ellington’s famed axiom that there are only two kinds of music—good and bad. Alarm Will Sound’s Gavin Chuck, for instance, said, “Hopefully what we’re doing is good music from the genres that interest us. Because that’s the fun part of being a musician—you get to play what you listen to.” Shaun Brady is a Philadelphia-based writer and filmmaker. His writing appears regularly in the Philadelphia Daily News, Metro Philadelphia, and the Philadelphia City Paper.
PMP 29
ANNOUNCING
PMP and Presser Foundation announce first round of Premiere Recording Grants
PCAH’s Interdisciplinary Professional Development Grants Take Artists “Across the Divide”
Jan Yager’s Tiara of Useful Knowledge detail
In the summer of 2008, four Philadelphia music organizations were awarded grants ranging from $18,420 to $25,000, totaling $93,420 in support of an eclectic range of recording projects. These represent the first round of adjudicated grants made by the Premiere Recording Grant Program, a joint initiative of PMP and the Presser Foundation.
this page, from top: Sanford Sylvan Min Xiao-Fen, photo by Helmut Lackinger
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The Program seeks to support projects that document the work of living composers and disseminate recordings of previously unreleased contemporary music, enhancing the public profiles of its grantees in the process. Members of the distinguished panel that adjudicated proposals included: Steven Stucky (panel chair), composer, conductor, and Cornell University Professor; Peter Burwasser, Presser Foundation representative and journalist; Gerald Cleaver, jazz composer and drummer; Gil Rose, Artistic Director, Boston Modern Orchestra Project and Music Director, Opera Boston; and Augusta Read Thomas, composer. Here is a preview of the sounds that 2008 Premiere Recording grantees will capture for posterity—listen for recordings soon! Ars Nova Workshop received $25,000 to produce five recordings on High Two: ·S panish Fly (Steven Bernstein, slide/valve trumpets; Marcus Rojas, tuba; and Dave Tronzo, electric guitar) performing music by Steven Bernstein ·M in Xiao-Fen Asian Trio (Min Xiao-Fen, pipa; Okkyung Lee, cello; and Satoshi Takeishi, percussion) performing Return of the Dragon Suite by Min Xiao-Fen · Marshall Allen (alto saxophone and electronic valve instrument) and Louis Moholo (drums and percussion) performing their own works · John Tchicai (alto saxophone), Mary Halvorson (guitar), and Ches Smith (drums) performing their own works · Scorch Trio (R. Björkenheim, electric guitar; I. Håker Flaten, doublebass; and P. Nilssen-Love, drums) performing their own works The Mendelssohn Club of Philadelphia was awarded $25,000 to produce a recording for innova featuring The Golem Psalms by Andrea Clearfield and Fire-memory/River-memory by James Primosch, with guest artists the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia and Sanford Sylvan, baritone. Network for New Music received $18,420 to produce a recording for Albany Records featuring chamber music by Bernard Rands, including Scherzi; Walcott Songs; Sans Voix Parmi les Voix/Prelude; and now again—fragments from Sappho with guest artist Janice Felty, mezzo soprano. Piffaro, the Renaissance Band was awarded $25,000 to produce an album for Parma Recordings (a subsidiary of MMC) featuring a Vespers program by Kile Smith, with guest artists The Crossing, a chamber choir conducted by Donald Nally.
The Interdisciplinary Professional Development Grant (ipdg) program at The Pew Center for Arts and Heritage supported three new projects in 2008. Now in its third year, the IPDG program is co-directed by Philadelphia Music Project Director Matthew Levy and Pew Fellowships in the Arts Director Melissa Franklin, who took over for Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative Director Paula Marincola in July 2008, when Paula became the Center’s Executive Director. The funds enable grantees to cross-pollinate with specialists from other disciplines, artistic and otherwise, conducting research and developing new working relationships outside their principal areas of practice. This year, Leah Stein Dance Company received support to begin research with composer Pauline Oliveros and an ensemble of dancers and vocalists, exploring ways that movement can be meaningfully interrelated with sounds generated by the human body and voice. Philadelphia Live Arts/Philly Fringe used IPDG funds to bring teaching artists Marina Kptijn and Tamara Beudeker to conduct a five-day workshop with Philadelphia dancers, exploring Belgian choreographer Jan Fabré’s “four elements of the body.” And Pig Iron Theatre Company traveled to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil for a week of exchange across cultures and disciplines with two dance-theatre groups based there, Cia dos Atores and Lia Rodrigues & Companhia de Danças. But what of the 12 IPDG grantees who received funds in 2006 and 2007? When asked for an update, a number of artists confirmed that the seeds of their interdisciplinary excursions did indeed bear fruit. Here’s a selection. In fall of 2006, Group Motion received funds to collaborate with composer Phil Kline, ultimately developing Sonic Dances, a piece featuring iPods and speakers attached to dancers’ bodies, which premiered at the 2007 Live Arts festival and was reprised in 2008. This experimentation also led to Refug(u)e, presented in June 2008, in which J.S. Bach’s last fugue is performed by dancers wearing individual instrumental voices on their iPod-speaker apparatuses. And the collaboration will continue when Group Motion takes Kline’s “traveling music” to the Old Met on North Broad Street as part of the Hidden City Festival in June 2009. In January 2007, metal sculptor Jan Yager was awarded an IPDG to study botany in multiple American cities, in the process initiating
a correspondence with biologist Dr. Maura Flannery. The two developed a presentation about Yager’s experiences studying science as an artist, which they presented to an audience of trained biologists at the Botany 2007 conference in Chicago. Dr. Flannery has since contributed an article to Metalsmith magazine on “biophilia and contemporary jewelry” (her first article published outside academia), which included analysis of Yager’s work. “… [A]rtists and scientists not only talk to each other but have a common language—the natural world—through which they communicate,” noted Dr. Flannery in one of her letters. The collaborators continue to correspond regularly, and Yager now refers with confidence to “phyto-remediation, bio-plans, and bio-renewables” in her sculptures, having gained a scientist fact-checker. In June 2007, Eastern State Penitentiary (ESP), under the curatorial direction of Julie Courtney, used IPDG funds to invite composer Vijay Iyer and filmmaker Bill Morrison to examine the possibility of an on-site collaboration. The idea that emerged involves re-creating an out of body experience in a solitary confinement cell at ESP using virtual reality technology. In February 2008, Morrison, Iyer, and neuroscientist Dr. Partha Mitra discussed and demonstrated their proposed collaboration as part of “Brain Wave,” a New York Citywide festival exploring how art, music, and meditation affect the brain. At the time of this writing, the collaborators are developing resources to fully realize the project. In summer 2007, theater artist Geoff Sobelle received funding to explore techniques for incorporating stop-motion animation into live theater with theater and film company Forkbeard Fantasy in the United Kingdom and animator Steven Dufala in Philadelphia. This experimentation contributed to Sobelle’s 2008 Live Arts project, Flesh and Blood and Fish and Fowl, which relied heavily on projection-work in its developmental phases. He also added animation to a drastic reworking of an older piece, Amnesia Curiosa, for an engagement at the Studio Theatre in Washington DC in spring of 2008. Amnesia uses a 19th-century “cabinet of wonders” aesthetic in a museum setting. “I created a cabinet filled with animated specimens that seemed to float, spin, appear and disappear as the audience peered into the cabinet,” explains Sobelle. “This was all done with stop-motion animation.” –E.S. PMP 31
ANNOUNCING
The View from Here: PMP Professional Development Grants
Where did PMP Professional Development grants take the artistic leadership of Philadelphia’s music nonprofits in 2008?
1 I nternational Society of Contemporary Music’s World Music Days and 18th annual Gaida Festival of Contemporary Music in the Lithuanian capital Vilnius
2 Jazz à la Villette, Paris, France 3 Jazz Improv LIVE Convention and Festival, New York City 4 Bard Music Festival, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York 5 Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music, Lenox, Massachusetts 6 T heater productions of The Violet Hour, Private Lives, Waiting for Godot, In Two Keys, Othello and All’s Well That Ends Well by the Barrington Stage Company, Berkshire Theatre Festival, and Shakespeare & Company in Western Massachusetts rooklyn, Hudson River, Vassar College, Berkshire, and Norman Rockwell Museums, 7 B as well as the Museum of Smith College, New Britain Museum of American Art, and the Hartford Athenaeum 8 International Istanbul Jazz Festival, Turkey
Tim Ries warms up the crowd at PMP’s 2007 holiday party
Clockwise, from top: Jay Azzolina, Felicia, Tim Ries
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Each year at its annual holiday party, PMP invites members of Philadelphia’s music community to generate some warmth while the days are cold and the nights long. Last season, the gathering brought together 85 of PMP’s friends at the Curtis Institute of Music to eat, drink, and savor the evening’s treat: a concert by saxophonist Tim Ries and his ensemble of celebrated musicians. One of New York’s finest jazz saxophonists, Tim has recorded and performed with many jazz, pop, rock, and R&B icons, including Joe Henderson, Red Garland, Badal Roy, Maria Schneider, Danilo Perez, the Rolling Stones, Paul Simon, Sheryl Crow, Lyle Lovett, Stevie Wonder, Incognito, and David Lee Roth. Tim was joined by his daughter, vocalist and violinist Jasia Ries; guitarist Jay Azzolina; rapper Felicia; bassist Ben Williams; drummer Ben Hutchinson; and pianist and accordionist Gary Versace to play a selection of Ries’ original compositions and arrangements of traditional tunes from around the world.—E.S.
PMP 33
ANNOUNCING
News Corner: in the Community Make it New
Between January and September 2008, International House Philadelphia’s theater underwent a $475,000 makeover. Audience members can enjoy new seats, upgraded sound and ventilation systems, and a refurbished stage, floor, and walls. In 2008, Ars Nova Workshop began sponsoring SciFiPhilly, a Sunday night series at West Philadelphia’s Gojjo that provides musicians in the city’s experimental and improvisational scene— as well as guests from faraway lands such as New York, Chicago, and Norway—a new space to “throw down regularly.” SciFiPhilly is a loose collective involving members of the Spring Garden House, Shot x Shot, and High Two Recordings. In December 2008 and January 2009, NEXUS/foundation for today’s art will transform its gallery space into a low-powered radio station. NEXUSradio will broadcast a series of single-installment works by Mike McDermott (Mikronesia), Gene Coleman, and John Phillips, as well as ongoing “work-in-progress” free form radio created by the local community. During gallery hours (Wednesday through Sunday, 12 to 6 p.m.) artists, musicians, actors, performers, djs, activists, poets, scholars, local community groups, and other members of the public will be given the opportunity to use the radio broadcast in the manner for which it was originally intended: public enjoyment and information. For more information, see: www.nexusphiladelphia.org. This season, Mendelssohn Club of Philadelphia collaborates with Leah Stein Dance Company on two world premieres. At the 2008 Philadelphia Live Arts Festival, they performed Urban ECHO: Circle Told, a collaboration between composer Pauline Oliveros and choreographer Leah Stein. At Peregrine Arts’ 2009 Hidden City Festival, Leah Stein will choreograph a new commission by David Lang for Mendelssohn Club’s chorus and Leah Stein Dance Company’s eight dancers. This will be Lang’s first work for large chorus. Awards, Grants, Accolades
In 2007–2008, Philadelphia Baroque Orchestra Tempesta di Mare celebrated its sixth consecutive season with Artistic Excellence funding from the National Endowment for the Arts. Tempesta was one of only four Baroque orchestras nationwide to receive one of these coveted grants, and the only one with a budget under $1 million. Orchestra 2001 received a 2007–2008 ASCAP/American Symphony Orchestra League Award in Adventurous Programming for the second year in a row. Astral Artists (formerly Astral Artistic Services) soprano Angela Meade was recently awarded $50,000 as the first-prize winner of the José Iturbi International Music Competition. Angela was also recently named the winner of the George London Foundation and Marguerite McCammon competitions. Astral pianist Spencer Myer won first prize in the 2008 New Orleans International Piano ComPMP 34
petition. Astral saxophonist Doug O’Connor captured Second Prize in the 2nd International Jean-Marie Londeix Saxophone Competition in Bangkok. Recordings
In 2008, Porter Records released a CD of previously out-of-print recordings of the Odean Pope Trio, What Went Before Volume 1. Pope’s forthcoming album, Odean’s List, will feature James Carter, Jeff “Tain” Watts, Terell Stafford, Walter Blanding, David Weiss, Lee Smith and George Burton. In 2007–2008, Tempesta di Mare released two CDs on the prestigious British label Chandos Records, where Tempesta remains the sole represented U.S. Baroque orchestra. Both discs—Flaming Rose, featuring the Nine German Arias and Trio Sonatas by Handel with guest artist Julianne Baird, and the world premiere live recording of orchestral works by Johann Friedrich Fasch—have earned rave reviews all over the world, with the first named “CD of the Week” (Sunday Times, London), and the second receiving a 5-star rating (Goldberg Magazine). The Curtis Institute of Music and Ondine Records will collaborate in the production and distribution of a commercial recording to be released in Spring 2009. The recording will include Hindemith’s Klaviermusik mit Orchester and Dvoˇrák’s Symphony No. 9 (“From the New World”) performed by the Curtis Symphony Orchestra and Christoph Eschenbach at the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts. The collaboration marks the first commercial recording of the Hindemith work. In January 2009, Naxos American Classics will release the world premiere recording of Philadelphia-born composer Vittorio Giannini’s Piano Concerto and Symphony No. 4, works unheard since their debuts in 1937 and 1960, respectively. After much research, Philadelphia Virtuosi Chamber Orchestra Music Director Daniel Spalding discovered the Piano Concerto in a bank vault in North Carolina. The recording will feature Spalding conducting the Bournemouth Symphony and PVCO principal soloist Gabriela Imreh on piano. In November 2007, Harmonia Mundi released an album by Astral pianist Spencer Myer, Preludes & Variations. Gramophone described it as “a compelling and artful disc by a rising talent.”
On The Road
In October 2008, Carnegie Hall will present “Making Music: George Crumb,” featuring Orchestra 2001, soprano Ann Crumb, and baritone Randall Scarlata performing the New York premiere of George Crumb’s Voices from the Morning of the Earth (American Songbook VI). Academy of Vocal Arts tenors Michael Fabiano and James Valenti both made Teatro alla Scala debuts in the 2007–2008 season. Tenor Stephen Costello opened the 2007–2008 Metropolitan Opera season in Lucia di Lammermoor, which was telecast live in HD at theaters around the country and beyond. In June 2008, Odean Pope played a four-day concert tribute to the late Max Roach at the Iridium in New York (Mr. Pope was saxophonist with the Max Roach Quartet and Double Quartet for 23 years). Other touring engagements included: performances in Europe with the New Change of the Century Orchestra, filmed as part of a documentary about Sunny Murray in November 2007; and the Tel Aviv Jazz Festival in February 2008. During the 2007–2008 season, the Curtis Institute of Music launched “Curtis On Tour,” a new initiative that brings the conservatory to audiences nationwide, presenting Curtis students in chamber music performances alongside the school’s celebrated faculty and alumni. For its first season, “Curtis On Tour” presented a string sextet composed of violist Roberto Díaz (’84), Curtis president; cellist Margo Tatgenhorst Drakos (’99), a former member of the American String Quartet; and students Bella Hristova and Joel Link, violin; Vicki Powell, viola; and Yu-Wen Wang, cello. In May 2008, Dave Burrell performed a four-concert gig at the Bordeaux Jazz Festival, “The Complete Dave Burrell at Bordeaux” with Db4, Leena Conquest, and the Dave Burrell Italian Trio. Burrell’s upcoming appearances include the Strasbourg Jazz Festival, the Madrid Jazz Festival, the Marble Jazz Festival in Botticino, Italy, and the Whitney Museum of American Art Composers’ Showcase. The Beat Goes On: Anniversary Alert
2007–2008 marked the 35th anniversary season of the Bucks County Choral Society and the 20th anniversary season for Kennett Symphony of Chester County’s Music Director and Conductor, Mary Woodmansee Green. The Philadelphia Classical Guitar Society celebrated its 40th anniversary in 2008 by presenting a professional members concert and a concert and master class by David Russell. The Society also sponsored a competition for high school and college classical guitarists. On September 26th, 2008, Orchestra 2001
Musical Chairs
The most anticipated moment in International House’s theater renovation may have been when their notoriously uncomfortable seats were extracted like so many shabby teeth. But the saga of the chairs does not end there. Some have begun a second life at NEXUS/foundation for today’s art, which reclaimed a set of I-House’s folding seats to replace the rickety wooden chairs in its performance space. As it turns out, the wooden chairs have their own place in Philadelphia history: they were donated to Nexus by the Painted Bride in 1981, when the Bride moved from its original South Street location to 230 Vine Street. Happy to keep the chairs’ legacy alive, Nexus has passed them on to Little Berlin and the Philadelphia Institute for Advanced Study.—W.R.
hosted “O2001 Toast to 20 Years!” at the Free Library of Philadelphia. Mayor Nutter’s office presented 02001 Artistic Director James Freeman with a key to the city in recognition of his ongoing efforts to enrich Philadelphia’s cultural life. On September 14th, 2008, the Academy of Vocal Arts celebrated the combined 50 years of leadership of Music Director Christofer Macatsoris (his 30th anniversary) and Executive Director K. James McDowell (his 20th anniversary). For its 135th anniversary season in 2008–2009, the Mendelssohn Club of Philadelphia will perform a celebratory concert pairing a world premiere by Jennifer Higdon with Verdi’s Requiem.
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BUILDING CAPACITY
David Bury is a fundraising and development expert and the founder of David Bury & Associates, a New York City-based consulting firm. In July 2008, David traveled to Philadelphia to conduct private meetings with local nonprofit music organizations, under the auspices of the Philadelphia Music Project. After his meetings concluded, PMP Director Matt Levy sat down with David to reflect on his consultancy.
Straight Talk: Q&A with David Bury
Matt Levy: David, would you provide an profit music sector? overview of your work as an arts consultant? I was hired over 30 years ago to run What’s the big picture? the Brattleboro Music Center in Vermont. David Bury: Right. Well, it’s primarily It was my first arts job. The Center was a in development and fundraising, helping really wonderful organization, founded by organizations and individual artists find a fantastic woman named Blanche Moyse, more resources, especially contributions who had been a co-founder of the Marlboro and grants. They, in turn, use those reMusic Festival and was a violinist. I was sources to lift their organizations to the hired to be her administrator. The music next level or to carry out a project of some center had community and children’s chomajor proportion. For example, an artist ruses orchestras, a chamber music Eachoryear at its and annual holidayand party, PMP invites arts organization might engage us to help series and in-school programs. It produced members of Philadelphia’s music community to prepare a single proposal, let’s say agenerate major some a Bach festival thatthe toured around warmth while days are coldNew and proposal to the Wallace Foundation, beEngland and into New York City performing the nights long. Last season, the gathering brought cause they haven’t applied for something of 85Bach choralfriends (particularly cantatas) and together of PMP’s at thethe Curtis Institute that magnitude before. Or, on the other exinstrumental repertoire. We performed the of Music to eat, drink, and savor the evening’s treat: treme, an organization might contract us to B Minor Mass and the Passions frequently. a concert by saxophonist Tim Ries and his ensemble manage all its development and fundraising It was just mind-blowing to me to have the of celebrated musicians. One of New York’s finest activities. In the case of Meet the Composer, opportunity to learn so much about the jazz saxophonists, Tim has recorded and performed we’ve been doing that for the past seven musicpop, while simultaneously learning how to with or many jazz, rock, and R&B icons, including eight years. Actually, we do that forJoe quiteHenderson, a makeRed an arts organization work. Of course, Garland, Badal Roy, Maria Schfew other organizations ranging in size and Danilo a big part ofthe that was finding more andSimon, more neider, Perez, Rolling Stones, Paul nature, from community based arts schools resources. So, I quickly began to learn about Sheryl Crow, Lyle Lovett, Stevie Wonder, Incognito, and after-school programs, to ensembles development and David Lee Roth. Timand wasfundraising. joined by his daughter, and orchestras, to presenters and festivals. And from there you went onJay to Azzowork vocalist and violinist Jasia Ries; guitarist It’s really quite wide-ranging, practically with some major service organizations and lina; rapper Felicia; bassist Ben Williams; drummer any kind of arts endeavor you can think of! funders? Ben Hutchinson; and pianist and accordionist Gary How did you get into the field, and how to play From there I took a joboriginal as Assistant DiVersace a selection of Ries’ compodid your work come to focus on the nonrector of the Vermont Council on the Arts, sitions and arrangements of traditional tunes from PMP 36
which I held for a couple of years. That position helped me to see things on a state-wide level, instead of an organization-specific level. At one point, because I had gotten something of a reputation for fundraising when I was at the Music Center, three organizations approached me and asked, “Would you ever consider helping us with development and fundraising?” All of a sudden it dawned on me that if I said yes to all three, I would have a full time job. At just about the same time, Chamber Music America approached me and asked if I would do all its institutional fundraising. I had been a board member from early on in CMA’s history, so I said yes, because I really loved the organization. And it just kept growing from there. It was all word of mouth. Someone would call and say “There’s a project you might be interested in.” Over the past 15 years it’s grown from just my longtime colleague Steve Procter and me to eight of us who do this work. Generally, we work with about 30 organizations over the course of a year, and I suppose over the past 30 years, we’ve worked with nearly 200 different organizations. That’s wonderful. I know that your work varies greatly from one organization to another, but is there a general methodology that you use to help groups find and expand resources and build capacity? Well, it goes back to what we call “good development practice,” which is essentially understanding that to be viable in the long term an artist or an arts organization needs to build a network of people who share its core values, identify with its work, and, importantly, have the means to help. This, broadly defined, means: money, networks, and resources—such as professional expertise or access to in-kind contributions. For example, rehearsal space is a common in-kind contribution. So building that network is fundamental to how we think about increasing an organization’s capacity. Almost always we talk about the degree to which an artist or organization has an existing network, is aware of it, and is thinking in an ongoing strategic way about strengthening its relationship to each of the people and organizations that constitute that network. That’s the large context. The small context is case by case. What can this particular foundation do for us now, and are we in a position to approach it? To what degree are we connected to that foundation, either on the staff or on the trustee level? Do we have a history with it? What does the foundation need from us in order to consider us a prospective grantee? By addressing these questions and others, we come up with a short-term plan that positions the organization to be successful with that particular foundation. Working through that conceptually and then helping an organization carry out the plan strategically—essentially, that’s the work we do. So, with clients with whom you’ve worked for long stretches of time, how has your approach manifested itself? Maybe give an example of an organization that has grown in terms of profile and capacity. We’ve been working with the Orchestra of St. Luke’s for almost 15 years. It’s grown from a $1 million to almost $6 million organization. It’s gone from an operating deficit to the point where it’s debt free and has a $10 million endowment. It’s currently in the midst of a $35 million capital campaign for an orchestra rehearsal facility that we have helped conceive, organize, and coordinate. Also, I think it’s fair to say that we helped redefine how the Orchestra thinks about generating earned income, particularly in regard to its primary constituency, which it now conceives of as the “presenter/producer marketplace” rather than individual ticket buyers. It’s really a highly entrepreneurial and collaborative organization in that regard. We’ve played a part in shaping its contributed income strategies, and those strategies have really paid off.
So, that’s an example of a client relationship that’s been productive. I should also say that there are some situations where we’re not effective, where things don’t work out as well as we had imagined they would. For example, when a client doesn’t have the ability to supply the information we need in order to be effective. That makes it nearly impossible to prepare good materials simply because the information isn’t there. That’s bad, so we’ve learned to avoid those situations. Could you talk about your work in Philadelphia in particular? What are some of the most common problems that local arts organizations seem to be grappling with? I know that you came across the full gamut of challenges, but I wonder if there are any trends. I think the first thing that struck me—and this isn’t characteristic of only Philadelphia, I find it in a lot of places—is just the degree to which there are some remarkably talented people out there working in challenging circumstances, but doing really good work because fundamentally they believe in it, and that’s what their life is about. I find that phenomenally inspiring, that there is this population of people that is committed to making culture live in communities all around the country, and particularly here in Philadelphia. That resonated throughout all of my meetings with your constituents. I would say that the kinds of problems and issues they’re facing are similar to those in other communities. In some ways, I look at Philadelphia and am a little bit jealous that there are places like Pew, and PMP, and the William Penn Foundation. The level of sophistication within the funding community in Philadelphia is just sensational. I don’t know of another community that has those kinds of resources available to it. I don’t even think New York does. The way it’s organized and used, and the way funders think in Philadelphia is just, frankly, more sophisticated about, and more concerned with, the local arts ecology. A third thing that comes to mind is the degree to which, although people intuitively understand the need to build donor networks, they’re not really informed about how to do it in the most practical and efficient ways. Everyone I met with, as far as I could tell, found the idea of good development practice, particularly of how you implement it and how it works, really appealing. Good development practice provides a maximally efficient way to build a donor network; by systematically building the network and cultivating its members, an organization’s fundraising inevitably becomes more and more successful. In other words, focus on development (buildaround the world. —E.S. ing the network) and your fundraising will do well; in the absence of good development practice, it will do less well. The more people you have in your network—people who are involved in your organization and educated about what it does—the greater the likelihood of their providing financial support, and the more generous that support will be. It’s not that people are unaware of good development practice; it’s that they’re unaware of how it can be practiced in a systematic and efficient way that leads to good results in fundraising. That’s the message I preach. If artists and arts organizations are disposed to implement good development practice and have the personal and organizational skills to carry it out, the results can be absolutely transformative.
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descend from the same guy, I found very interesting.
New Books on Music Lecture Series: Ben Ratliff & Alex Ross by David R. Adler
Books are immersive, self-contained worlds, but their stories can radiate outward, in ways the authors didn’t necessarily foresee. Two recent volumes, Ben Ratliff’s Coltrane: The Story of a Sound and Alex Ross’ The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (both Farrar, Straus & Giroux), seem at first glance to address different subjects. However, each succeeds in showing how modernism—in jazz and classical music, respectively—has impacted a wider cultural sphere, changing the way we listen to this day. In late 2007, the Philadelphia Music Project hosted readings by both of these influential music critics, as part of the PMP New Books Lecture Series. Although Ratliff and Ross appeared in Philadelphia two months apart, they touched on matters of creativity and artistic production that are inescapably related. Ratliff, a critic for The New York Times, began by emphasizing what his book is not: a biography of the late saxophonist John Coltrane. Rather, he explained, it is “a book about music”—specifically, the evolution and reception of Coltrane’s sound, what it reveals about Coltrane’s time period and the way we appreciate jazz artistry in the present. Similarly, Ross, a staff writer for The New Yorker, described his book as “very much a story of classical music’s place in culture right now,” an inquiry into “the challenge of modernism and how audiences have struggled to come to terms with it.” Put another way: If Ratliff tells the story of a sound, Ross tells the story of many sounds. If Ratliff focuses laser-like on the output of one artist so as to generate PMP 38
larger questions, Ross casts an imposingly wide net so as to narrow the questions down. And while both narratives interact on an implicit meta level, sometimes they literally converge on a specific point—for instance, when they explicate the influence of Coltrane on Steve Reich. In these pages, connoisseur viewpoints are argued over in new ways; daunting bodies of work are placed in an incisive, welcoming context for the general reader. The big-picture message is that jazz and concert music aren’t niche categories after all. History buffs, rockers, ravers: All can learn from Ratliff’s and Ross’s accounts of musical innovation in the 20th century, and draw their own conclusions about the trajectory of the 21st. Ratliff’s book idea began gestating on the job in the mid ’90s, when he noticed a pervasive Coltrane influence on the players he was reviewing for the Times. “You start to think: We know Coltrane was important. We know some feel he was the last major figure in jazz. But why? How did this happen? Why is it that this one man had such a blanketing influence?” Coltrane’s sound, moreover, galvanized players on just about every point of jazz’s aesthetic spectrum: Coltrane became an ideal of the practiced musician, the perfectionist, the solitary student.… On the other hand, he’s also an ideal as a cathartic improviser… [whose playing] doesn’t reduce to bar lines and traditional structure.… These are two different ways of looking at music and the fact that both of them
Leading off with a passage from his Introduction (pp. xviii–xx), Ratliff spoke of Coltrane as an artist whose transitions, however radical, still had a compelling internal logic. “One of the general listener’s major misperceptions of jazz is that when improvisers work at their best, they pluck ideas out of the sky, channeling heaven. No.” Ratliff also challenged the notion of Coltrane as an otherworldly saint, while insisting this needn’t diminish his stature in jazz history. This is the focus of the second section of the book: not Coltrane but the rhetoric about Coltrane. Ratliff read from a chapter called “you must die”—words that Charles Moore actually wrote to fellow trumpeter Don Ellis in 1965, in response to Ellis’s negative criticism of Coltrane. Choosing a passage from pp. 171–174, Ratliff summarized a de rigueur view that took hold around Coltrane’s late-period work, as “music [that] requires new inventions of selfhood,” that “cannot be separated from the path toward racial tolerance and absolute worldwide human equality.” Without being cavalier about this view—he takes pains to contextualize and explore its genesis— Ratliff concludes: “No art can hold up under the weight of these hopes.” During the Q&A session, a mild tension surfaced between Ratliff, eager to demystify Coltrane, and audience members keen to hold onto the artist as a spiritual symbol. But common ground was easy to establish. Referring back to the “titanic claims of importance” that some lavished on Coltrane in the mid-’60s, Ratliff said: “I think if I had heard that band playing [live], I probably would’ve written something like that too.” His larger point, however, was that by evaluating Coltrane on the plane of mortals, not gods, we do him even greater justice. Ross prefaced his talk with autobiography, recalling a youthful immersion in classical music that “began with Mozart and stopped with Brahms.” By college he listened “almost exclusively to music of the postwar avant-garde era,” writing off popular music entirely. Then he made the leap to radical jazz artists such as Cecil Taylor and Ornette Coleman, followed by experimental rock along the lines of Sonic Youth and Pere Ubu. Finally, around age 25, he came to accept the Beatles and other universally admired fare. Such was the journey that inspired The Rest Is Noise. Ross explained: “If I could discover popular music in this roundabout way, perhaps there are those who could move in the opposite direction, who have grown up with popular music, and are listening to the more adventurous, progressive end of it, who might become curious about classical music and perhaps enter through the gateway of the avant-garde or minimalism or Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring and work backward from there…. I’m engaging in a project that a lot
of music and performing arts organizations are facing now, which is to find new audiences.” The Rest Is Noise falls into three chronological sections, the first addressing the sonic revolutions of 1900–1935; the second the New Deal period, World War II and the rise of totalitarianism; and the third the postwar avant-garde and the contemporary age. Ross read from each of these, beginning with a passage on Schoenberg (pp. 49–51), continuing with a look at government support of the arts under FDR (pp. 277–280) and ending with thoughts on the “purely American art” of minimalism (pp. 473–475). “I called the book The Rest Is Noise to allude to the perception of 20th-century classical music as a period of continuous dissonance … the general sense that classical music was going along wonderfully and suddenly all hell breaks loose and the music ceases to be of broad interest. I obviously don’t agree.” The Q&A session began on an apt note: What’s next? What is Ross excited about in the new century? “As a critic I have an obligation not to have any ideas about the future,” he responded. “It might cut me off from hearing the music that doesn’t fit into my expectations. I really try to let the music tell me where things might be going.” Ratliff, in his text, makes a similar case against “future-mongering” and criticizes the “hippie myth in which jazz is ‘tomorrow’s music’ forever and ever…” This is not to say that innovation is nothing. It’s to acknowledge music’s tendency to “advance by slow degrees,” as Ratliff puts it. Many jazz critics, itching to hear “the next Coltrane” and ready to fault young musicians for insufficient boldness, would do well to check their impatience. As fun as it is to imagine a dialogue between Ratliff and Ross, it’s unnecessary, for such a dialogue already exists. In early November 2007, the two participated in an open exchange at the widely read news and culture site Slate.com. The goal, in Ross’s words, was “to converse for a day or two across the walls of specialized taste.” In an eight-part epistolary format, they mused on the formation of taste among the young; the role of the critic amid the upheavals of digital media; ways of talking about music that “move past ideological dispute,” and other areas of shared concern. The discussion kept cycling back to the differences, and commonalities, between jazz and classical performance, and the problem of attracting and even defining the audience—issues that both Coltrane and The Rest Is Noise contend with in various intersecting ways. “You and I have both been talking about ritual,” wrote Ratliff, concluding philosophically. “[A]nd the thing about ritual is that by definition it goes on and on, whatever it is. That’s what we hope from our favorite music—we never want it to stop in our lives, whether it’s free improvisation or composed top to bottom.”
David R. Adler writes regularly for The Philadelphia Inquirer, Philadelphia Weekly, Jazz Times and Down Beat. His work on music, politics and culture has also appeared in The New York Times, The New Republic Online, Slate, Democratiya and many other publications. He blogs at lerterland.blogspot.com.
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“Enduring the Risk”: PMP’s Symposium on Contemporary Opera and Musical Theater by Peter Burwasser
Peter Burwasser is the classical music critic for the Philadelphia City Paper and a regular contributor to Fanfare magazine and Philadelphia Music Makers. As a freelance writer, he has also contributed articles and reviews to The Philadelphia Inquirer, WRTI Program Guide, and Carnegie Hall Playbill.
Producing opera is one of the most expensive and risky endeavors in all of the performing arts. It is a logical extension, then, that producing new opera is even riskier, perhaps bordering on madness. This was the concept lurking behind the shadows at a PMP symposium on contemporary opera and musical theater. Marc Scorca, the president of OPERA America, moderated a discussion with three arts managers from the trenches: Steven Osgood, artistic director of American Opera Projects; Diane Wondisford, producing director of the Music-Theatre Group; and Yuval Sharon, Vox Project director of New York City Opera. The audience represented a microcosm of the Philadelphia scene, including the directors of the Opera Company of Philadelphia and Center City Opera Theater—the two professional
companies—as well as educators and students from Settlement Music School, Curtis Institute of Music, Temple University, and University of the Arts. There were also small dance companies expressing interest in collaborative musical ventures. A number of attendees identified themselves simply as composers, including Jennifer Higdon, Dave Burrell, Tina Davidson, Richard Belcastro, and Jennifer Barker. As one audience member put it, producing new opera is “absolutely vital for the future of
the art form.” Scorca echoed the sentiment in his opening comments; he wants to make sure that programs include more work by living composers. The key has to be a careful balance of risk, artistry and management, or, perhaps to put it more realistically, “not managing the risk as much as enduring the risk.” Public financing has been crucial. The National Endowment for the Arts invested over $2 million in a program called Opera for the Eighties, and by the mid 1990s there were 15 to 20 new works a year appearing at companies across the country. That funding does not merely prime the pump for new productions, it sustains them; as soon as the dollar amounts decreased, so did the number of new productions. Public perception is an issue here. Scorca calls the distinction between commercial and non-commercial musical theater “a false dichotomy,” but sees hope in the maturing of the scene. That hope has been stoked by the patient, hard work of Diane Wondisford and the Music-Theatre Group, where she has toiled for 26 of the group’s 38 years. This is, as is typical, an artist-led institution. Their mission is encouraging new composers, writers, directors and designers to come together to make new work. It could be a musical, but most likely would be operatic. There has been a tone poem song cycle, and puppetry became an important element of the productions. “This is not just a place for one-offs. We look for repeated performances. We’ve been a launching pad for directors and composers.” Music-Theatre Group’s resume backs up this claim—past participants have included Tan Dun, Tommy Tune, Bill Irwin, and Julie Taymor. Music-Theatre Group is always active in shaping the piece. They are never given a work that is ready to go, and the whole process can take anywhere from a year and a half to seven years. Wondisford’s work ethic is rooted in her love for the medium, and her high aesthetic standards. “I can’t imagine producing something I didn’t have a strong personal attachment to.” American Opera Projects has a slightly different operating model. Steven Osgood views it more as a workshop and development company, with an emphasis on everyday nuts and bolts. “Sixty to seventy-five percent of our time is in the workshop phase, including public performances, but generally with no staging and with piano
accompaniment only.” Training has been a crucial element, such as master classes by soprano Laura Flanigan for young singers, or a series of workshops on how to write for the operatic voice. But there is also that remaining third of their energies that go to producing. They have ushered in 15 world premieres. Funding is also something that is mentored; it is “a continual challenge—the bulk of our funding is project oriented.” That funding also supports general operating expenses. Vox Project does not produce fully staged operas, but, as an outgrowth of the New York City Opera, presents new American works in concert versions. “This May will be the ninth year. We have featured 82 works, 35 of which have gone on to future life,” says Sharon. The vision of Vox is to be as inclusive and democratic as possible. “We actively try to get as many of our colleagues to come to these workshop readings and hear the works in three dimensions.” Sharon seems to echo the sentiments of his colleagues when he speaks of his desire to create “cultural diversity, but also a place that highlights aesthetic diversity. There is no one definition of what opera can be. We want to promote opera as an open art form that has no definitions anymore.” But nobody said that it would be easy.
Left to right: American Opera Projects’ Darkling, photo by Gerry Goodstein The Summer King, photo by Matthew Gray THIS IS THE RILL SPEAKING, photo by Matthew Gray
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expanding horizons new frontiers in music
From top: Terry Riley, photo by C. Felver Martin Bresnick, photo by Marc Ostow Shulamit Ran, photo by Edward Chick
Immersed in the Music: A Composer Symposium with Terry Riley, Martin Bresnick & Shulamit Ran
“I like jazz a lot, I like Indian classical music, I like western classical music, I like contemporary music— all of those elements seem to mix together and come out.”
by Peter Burwasser
If there is a thread that connects the work of the three composers featured in the PMP Composer Symposium last March, it is a quality of meshing tradition with innovation—in each case, in such a way as to have survived the musical style wars of the previous generation. It was probably not, for any of them, a conscious aesthetic decision, but simply a fortuitous outcome of a natural path towards finding a personal expressive language. This seems even to be the case for Terry Riley, a path-breaking minimalist, who gleefully absorbed musical idioms from around the world as he smashed conventions along the way. Shulamit Ran, while never really rejecting atonality, found a way to make it uniquely communicative, and in doing so, became one of the finest composers of symphonic music of our time. Martin Bresnick moved beyond his early work with computer music after encountering the intoxicating imagination of his teacher, the great György Ligeti. His joyously inclusive music has inspired a group of his own students who now form a leading edge of the new music world, including Evan Ziporyn, David Lang, Michael Torke, Mark Mellits and Julia Wolfe. Moderator Steven Smith, a music journalist whose work has appeared in The New York Times, among other publications, added another layer to the discussion by exploring transformative times and places in the lives of his subjects. Riley, an American West Coast minimalist pioneer, ended up having a seminal influence on both the new music and rock scene of London in the 1960s. Israeli born and raised Ran is fiercely proud of her Middle Eastern roots, but has since become a fixture of the American symphonic music scene; one might even say one with an American Midwestern voice. And Bresnick, who grew up in a socialist commune in the Bronx and has never shed the vocal patterns that identify that origin, had established his career at Stanford, and is even regarded as a West Coast musician by many of the colleagues of his youth. Smith drew out of all three composers an intuitive sense for their art that they all trace back to childhood (and perhaps beyond), which includes a complete lack of interest in stylistic categorization. Ran (b. 1949) can recall having stories read to her by her mother, and making songs out of PMP 42
the words. When her mother asked her where the songs came from, she answered, “They are right there, on the page.” Shortly after, she composed her first music: songs set to Hebrew poetry. When they were performed and broadcast over the radio, she was still in summer camp, and sat around a big radio to listen to them with the other kids. Even as Ran made something of a sensation as a child prodigy, the issue of gender never really came up. “It was never very much in the forefront of my thinking. In Israel, it just wasn’t an issue. Being a girl, doing this, did not seem to particularly upset anybody. I grew up in a country with a woman Prime Minister, and women are in the army.” As an ironic side note, her mentor in Chicago, composer Ralph Shapey, once told her that his parents wanted him to do something more manly than composing. Influences such as the famously independent Shapey, not to mention that radical from another time, Beethoven, have left Ran with a great sense of possibility in her creative process and language. “We do what we want to do at certain points in our life. I was very interested in the emancipation of the dissonance, an important trend in the 2oth century. But the emancipation of the consonance is equally interesting to me.” This statement, made only somewhat in jest, was an appropriate lead in to a segment from her 1997 Soliloquy for piano trio, a work that adroitly and elegantly moves back and forth between harmonic languages. You might almost say that, like the composer, the music is bi-lingual. Ran’s experience as the composer in residence of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra from 1990 to 1997, amidst the Daniel Barenboim era, was critically formative. “I was immersed in the music. I thought it was especially important to be with all these people who have to compose and all these people who have to perform. That for me is the guarantee that music will somehow continue. People need to do it.” That sentiment was fully on display in the excerpt heard from the urgently expressive second movement from her Violin
“I’m not worried that my music is trivial or banal. I know how complicated it is.”
“I always try in my writing to find, to seek, the soul of the instrument.”
Concerto. “I write for performers. I seek the soul of the instrument.” Terry Riley (b. 1935), who seems to travel through life with a perennial twinkle in his eye, may not set out to confound expectations and stereotypes, but it often happens nevertheless. He began his career as an academically trained adherent of the music of Stockhausen, but quickly became a lover of jazz, which he performed, before he entered the most celebrated part of his career, as a pioneer of minimalism. Such current luminaries as Steve Reich name Riley as the father of the trend (he has said that “everything began” with the landmark work In C). But Riley confers the title of originator to his jazz partner La Monte Young. Smith began his talk with Riley on the subject of In C. The original inspiration is a surprising one. “I had the good luck to meet Chet Baker in Paris at the time [in the early 1960s]. We asked him to join our group. It was working with him and looping [on tape] some of his trumpet solos, that I got an idea of some of these melodic little cycles.” Riley continued to pile up influences of jazz, and most notably, Indian music (“I fell in love with Indian classical music”). In London, his work with tape looping was picked up by John Cale and the Velvet Underground, Peter Townsend and the Who, and other pop notables. When Smith suggested that at this point in his life he had become a sort of rock star, he deadpanned, “A poor one. In the ’60s in London there was a connection between different musicians. It was like a small town.” A new work by Riley was auditioned, the last movement of Banana Umberto, written for the Paul Dresher Ensemble. Riley described it as a “kind of a piano concerto for electric/acoustic ensemble.” It is a sweet, jazzy piece with a Brazilian rhythmic lilt and enough quirky corners that it sounds as if it could be a sound track for a post-Fellini filmmaker. Banana Umberto is, like most of Riley’s current work, and unlike his early music, mainly notated. It almost makes him seem like an entirely different composer, since improvisation and performance flexibility were so central to his work from the 1960s. “Sometimes it’s fun to actually have something come out of your work that you didn’t expect. Sometimes I’ve built on that.” Yet Riley seems unperturbed by his evolution as an artist, and seems to accept it as a natural process. “Your life experience goes into your music. It’s sort of irrepressible.” Martin Bresnick (b. 1946) was raised in a musically aware family that did not have any concept of making music as a living. He can recall his parents being amazed at the rapt attention, even trance-like state he entered into as he listened to music. But growing up in a cooperative working class community in the Bronx, in the Amalgamated Clothing Workers housing projects, there was a practical decision as to whether to buy a musical instrument or a refrigerator. Fortunately, there was a supportive community in the city in those days. “In the public school system, if they found a kid who could play an instrument they tried to help you.” Bresnick went to California in the late 1960s to complete his graduate schoolwork. At Stanford, he reports, “John Chowning took me under his wing.” This is not a household name, but in fact Chowning’s work is critical in the evolution of late 20th-century music. He discovered the frequency modulation synthesis, the basis for commercial proliferation of computer music, via technology that Chowning licensed to Yamaha. “Computer music reconnected me with the thing that got me going with music in the first place, which was the sheer love of sound and how sounds exist in the world.” While still at Stanford, Bresnick had another revelation, perhaps the pivotal one of his musical life, when he encountered the music of Hungarian composer György Ligeti. It occurred as he looked at the score of the landmark work Atmosphères. “This guy [Ligeti] is doing something with the orchestra that we had been struggling to achieve on the computer with much less success.” Bresnick became instrumental in convincing Stanford to bring Ligeti onto the faculty. Ligeti immediately became a central figure in Bresnick’s life, and he said that he has still not gotten over the death of Ligeti two years ago. The depth of his affection for Ligeti was palpable and moving as he spoke. Most of all, Bresnick seemed still inspired by the breadth of Ligeti’s interests and imagination. “He had a positive view of American music. He admired Nancarrow, Partch, and Riley, and wanted to meet them.” A similar breadth of style has been noted in Bresnick’s own work, as demonstrated by several excerpts. Gates of Paradise is an unusual sort of multi-media piece that includes reproductions of William Blake drawings and requires the solo pianist to recite Blake poetry while playing. Everything Must Go—In Memorium, György Ligeti is a jaunty, affectionate homage for saxophone quartet, written for, and here played by PRISM. He is unfazed by the differences in his music, and may well speak for his fellow symposium participants when he declares, “I don’t want to be bound by predictive notions. I want to tell you what I see now.” PMP PMP43 43
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Maria Schneider’s music has been described as evocative, majestic, magical, heart-stoppingly gorgeous, and beyond categorization. Born in Windom, Minnesota, Schneider arrived in New York City in 1985 after studies at the University of Minnesota, the University of Miami and the Eastman School of Music. She immediately sought out Bob Brookmeyer to study composition, and at the same time became an assistant to Gil Evans, working on various projects with him. The Maria Schneider Jazz Orchestra came into being in 1993, appearing at Visiones in Greenwich Village every Monday night for a stretch of five years. Subsequently, her orchestra performed at festivals and concert halls across Europe as well as in Brazil and Macau. The CD Concert in the Garden won the 2005 Grammy Award for Best Large Ensemble Album and became the first Grammy-winning recording with Internet-only sales. It also received Jazz Album of the Year from the Jazz Journalists Association and the Down Beat Critics Poll. Both also named Schneider Composer of the Year and Arranger of the Year. “Cerulean Skies,” from her newest fan-funded ArtistShare® recording, Sky Blue, won a 2008 Grammy Award for Best Instrumental Composition.
One on One with Maria Schneider
On January 11, 2008, PMP brought Maria Schneider and music writer and radio producer Eugene Holley together for an intimate discussion about her work. The talk coincided with the Maria Schneider Jazz Orchestra’s regional debut at the Philadelphia Museum of Art that evening, presented by the PMA’s “Art After 5” series with support from PMP. Eugene Holley: When do you as an artist realize that you’re sounding like yourself? Maria Schneider: Well, I could start out by saying that when I finished college in 1985, my biggest frustration was I felt like my music could be just about anybody’s, you know. I was writing a piece here and there that was influenced by Thad Jones, and a piece influenced by Gil Evans, and I didn’t really know who I was. We had had many guests come through the Eastman School of Music and one of them was George Russell. When George was in front of the band playing “All About Rosie,” it was like he was just rising out of this music. Keith Jarrett came. He’s got a personality, but his music, no doubt, it’s Keith Jarrett, you know? And I remember Dave Holland came and when he played, I realized all the music that I loved, it was infused with personality. When I started studying with Bob Brookmeyer, I would bring music in, it might be a tune with a solo, and he’d look at it and say, “Why is there a solo there?” And I’d say, “Well, you know, PMP 44
this is something from Mel Lewis’ band, and there’s a tune, and then there’s this little sendoff and now comes the solo.” And then he’d say, “A solo should only happen when the only thing that can happen is the solo.” And I’d kind of say, “Okay. Yeah, yeah I know what you mean.” I really didn’t quite understand what he meant. And then it would be, “Well, why are there chord changes here?” “Well, you’ve got a solo over the chord changes.” The more I looked into every aspect of the music, I realized kind of subliminally, we’ve developed this template from the history of jazz: you have a tune structure; everybody solos on that tune; there are chord changes; the bass line has its functions—so it almost becomes, for a lot of people… A script? A script—a template—almost like a prefab house: these are the walls you have to choose from, and then okay, some people can do some really creative things by putting it together in a different way. But if all of a sudden you really break down every aspect and you say, “Well, I can do anything. Why does someone have to solo using chord changes as the context? What if it’s a motive, or what if it’s something else?” And so the more that I asked myself, “Why did I do that? What else could I do?”—without even realizing it, my music, I think, became my own, because suddenly you’re not accepting somebody else’s dictum for what you should do. Then over time, more and more influences… I went to Brazil. Of course you cannot go to Brazil without having every aspect of your life changed. That’s true. And it changes you molecularly, you know? And the shift, the biggest shift that came to my music in Brazil—these are things you don’t even realize when you’re going through it—you realize it two records later. All of a sudden I realized joy came into my music after I went to Brazil. Before Brazil my music was dark, intense, dance
heavy, minor, Phrygian, with small intervals towards the bottom. Brazil happened to me and all of a sudden everything started to lift and be light and… The Carnival effect. Yeah, absolutely. What really blows me away about what you do; you have this natural counterpoint that goes on. In “Hang Gliding,” from your Allegresse CD, the way you voice your horns in certain… There ain’t nothing natural about it! It is hard work!! I remember I really suffered. I mean, so many things are going through my head, and then I was looking at myself and going, “You’re insane! Who are you?” All the shifting of the keys and keeping it constantly moving, I remember, “Okay, should I go up a half step there, or should I go up two steps? I need to clean the sock drawer. Now I gotta eat. Oh man, a manicure, then I’ll feel good.” You know, it’s so crazy how much avoidance I go through, and those decisions, it’s like, “Okay, if I go up a whole step and a half step instead of a half step for that last key, what if I regret it?” You know, so I can spend three days worrying about if I regret it. It’s insane. How did the training that you got from studying classical music help you to at least make the contrapuntal stuff sound easy? Okay, when I was back at the University of Minnesota, first of all they didn’t have a jazz program. They had a big band there, and I wrote for their big band, but I had no jazz training whatsoever, except I studied with Manfredo Fest, who’s a Brazilian pianist, a blind man. Those lessons were amazing, but I learned the jazz thing just by listening and studying on my own. How? I studied out of this Inside the Score book that Ray Wright had written, who eventually I studied with, but basically was analyzing
scores by Thad Jones, Bob Brookmeyer, and Sammy Nestico. And then I studied the Lydian Chromatic Concept by George Russell. I remember just getting into that book. And then I just listened like crazy. Listened to Mingus try things, listened to just everybody I could. My classes at the University of Minnesota were fantastic; I had such great teachers. My orchestration teacher was phenomenal, Dominick Argento. He was such a great teacher: classy man, funny, intellectual. And then I had this fantastic counterpoint teacher, Paul Fetler, who had studied with Hindemith. I was kind of shunning my classical because I just got so into jazz. I just wanted to do jazz and he was teaching my comp lessons, and he said, “You know, you’re listening to so much jazz, why don’t you go write for the big band and watch them rehearse? But in the meantime, you know, take my advanced counterpoint class.” His class was amazing. It was a whole year of going through Bach’s Art of the Fugue. All those fugues are all made with the same subject. They all have the same motive. But they all use a different technique. One stretches it out longer, and it’s like putting it through different mathematic formulas. Finally, by the end, it’s a mirror fugue, you can turn it upside down and play it backwards and forwards and I forget how many ways. And every technique we studied, we’d have that week to then write a fugue. It was difficult, but I
Maria Schneider, photo by Takehiko Tokiwa
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One on One with Maria Schneider
learned so much, and I loved it. I feel like jazz really suffers from “voicing-itis.” I remember this guy I was taking lessons with once, and I wrote some kind of structure. He said, “Oh, why don’t you throw in one of these boys?” One of those boys? I mean, I can’t relate to that. You know, because to me, a voicing isn’t just a voicing. The beauty of Gil Evans… everybody thinks Gil Evans is about voicings and woodwinds and mutes. Well, he is about woodwinds and mutes, but he’s not about voicings. It’s all about lines. Lines on the bottom—the tuba’s always playing the melody. And it’s how those lines converge, and everything’s always moving. There’s never anything that’s not part of almost a stepwise line coming in contrary motion and sometimes parallel motion, and then it goes like this, and that, and because of the logic of how every single part is moving, something that might be startling if you just took a slice, just like if you took a picture from a film of some beautiful actress, but you caught her in a weird moment, she might look odd. A voicing can be like that too. If in music, all you are concerned with is every voicing sounding strong or powerful, then you get this sort of milk toast effect. Right, exactly. And everything becomes “ba doop ba ba ba ba doop ba.” I call it testosterone big band. I like nuance and beauty and lightness. That does come from classical music, and more and more jazz musicians are getting hip to doing that, and yet maintaining whatever we perceive as being “jazz.” I want to add something to this because, one thing about your music, you adhere to dynamics. I can’t tell you how many times as a reviewer that I listen to big bands and somehow there’s a green light just to be loud all the time, and I guess this is what you’ve gotten from studying with Gil. Well, my whole reason for doing music—it’s expression. It’s not to make cool sounding music or hip tunes—it’s storytelling. It’s sharing something through music. The problem with big band music is so few writers are writing with that serious intent that the music really means something beyond just being a really cool sounding chart, so the players are going to play like that because there’s not that other level to play from. But it’s also come through years. My first music was much more bombastic. You know, it’s become softer and part of it is I’m just so tired of that sound in my ears. Audience member: Could you talk about your creative process? Do you use pencil and manuscript, or a computer? I have a board on my piano and a huge piece of score paper, with clips so I can expand the paper, and I use score paper that has lots of little staves with no bar lines because I don’t want anything to pin me down. I think if you see bar lines you tend to start thinking in a set meter. I want my ideas to just flow freely and then figure out where the bar lines need to be in order to make the music sound like what I’m hearing. And then I just usually throw down an idea, fool around playing what I’m hearing, writing it down. When I find an idea I really like, I try to go off of it spontaneously. Audience member: Are the ideas melodic? They might be melodic, or could be a rhythmic thing, or could be a PMP 46
Page 46: Maria Schneider and Eugene Holley Page 47: Maria Schneider, photo by David Korchan
The more I asked myself, “Why did I do that? What else could I do?”—without even realizing it, my music, I think, became my own, because suddenly you’re not accepting somebody else’s dictum for what you should do.
vamp, harmonic, a chord texture… and I just try to go spontaneously off of it. And when I get stuck I try to analyze it and say, “What’s inside this?” Because I believe if you love something or it resonates with you, it has math inside of it. We live in this mathematical universe. Everything has order. I believe our intuition does too. I always tell students, you don’t have to sit and write from math from the beginning. In the end, analyze. If you analyze your ideas, you will find out that you’re a mathematical genius. And then once you understand that, you can pop your intuition to another level. So I go back and forth between this intuitive—pushing it, writing myself into a corner, go back, analyze it, and develop it. Audience member: Is it in sections, or do you see and hear the piece in its entirety? I wish. It’s like a puzzle, so I’ve got this little chunk, and I’m like, “Shit, how do I break out of this?” It’s like you have a puzzle and no one told you what the picture is going to be, and you have five billion pieces and most of them are shades of yellow, brown and black, and then there’s a few red pieces, and you’re like, “Okay, find all the red pieces,” because otherwise what are you going to do? So you find the red and put them together and you see it’s a scarlet tanager—okay, it’s a bird, so maybe it’s trees and grass. Sometimes you have these miraculous days where everything fits perfectly together, and you’re like, “Oh my God, the key just miraculously modulates to this, and look, this is a motive of this upside down.” And then you’re like, “I’m a genius.” Then you become cocky as all hell, and like, “I’m going to get a pedicure!”
My whole reason for doing music—it’s expression. It’s not to make cool sounding music or hip tunes— it’s storytelling.
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expanding horizons new frontiers in music
One on One with Jacob TV
Dutch “avant-pop” composer Jacob TV (aka Jacob Ter Veldhuis, b. 1951) started as a rock musician and studied composition and electronic music at the Groningen Conservatoire, where he was awarded the Dutch Composition Prize in 1980. During the ’80s he made a name for himself with melodious compositions. “I pepper my music with sugar,” he says. Long queues at the box office for the four-day Jacob TV Festival in Rotterdam in 2001 already attested to the growing popularity of this composer, both in the Netherlands and abroad. His Goldrush Concerto, the Third String Quartet and several of his so-called boombox pieces like Grab It! became hits, inspiring the work of various choreographers. Early in his career, TV stood up to what he called the “washed-out avant-garde,” which made him a controversial figure in certain circles. He strives to liberate new music from its isolation by employing a direct—at times provocative—idiom that spurns “the dissonant,” which in TV’s view reflects a devalued means of musical expression. His “coming-out” as a composer of ultra-tonal, mellifluous music reached its climax with the video oratorio Paradiso. In May 2007, the Whitney Museum of American Art organized a three-day festival celebrating his music in New York City. On April 29, 2008, PMP hosted an interview with Jacob TV and NewMusicBox.org editor Frank J. Oteri. What follows is a selection of Jacob’s statements about his music and career.
PITCH BLACK: The Music of Jacob ter Veldhuis, an evening-length multimedia production combining video installation by Tobin Rothlein and choreography by Amanda Miller, performed at the Whitney Museum of Art. Photo by Cylla von Tiedemann.
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I grew up in the ’50s. Europe was a grey place—postwar—and everything that was colorful at that time came from this country: Walt Disney, chewing gum, big cars, Elvis Presley… So I grew up with that. This was the Promised Land, so to speak—it was so inspiring. It took a long time for me to find my way as a composer. I think it took me until I was about 40 years old to find a style of my own. At that time I saw a documentary about Chet Baker, the late jazz troubadour who lived his last years in Amsterdam. One of the reasons he lived there was because it was easy to get drugs (and it still is quite easy), so he lived a very tragic life, and he died very young by falling out of a hotel room window. Shortly before he died he was interviewed. This interview was almost impossible because he couldn’t talk, he was so drugged out. But still, I used voice samples from his interview, and it became a trio for boom box with voice samples of Chet Baker, cello, and piano. So for me this was a discovery because suddenly I realized something which is not completely new, because 20 years earlier an American composer, Scott Johnson, used speech in music as a source of inspiration. And of course Steve Reich did that in pieces like City Life or Different Trains, in his own way. But for me, I was looking for authentic emotion; I was looking for people in very emotional situations to use in my work. I felt like a photographer, making pictures of this world around us, and I realized, “Okay, I can focus on any kind of subject”—political, religious, or whatever. American television is a very fascinating source of inspiration to me. To give an example, an episode of the Jerry Springer Show became the source of a jazz suite I wrote ten years ago called Heartbreakers. I was so taken by the way people let themselves go in front of an audience of millions, shamelessly. That is impossible in Europe, because people are more reserved, in a way. TV commercials are also so different in this country than they are in Europe. I was fascinated when I saw a TV ad about an “Electronic Pro”—a kind of belt that produces 3,000 contractions in just ten minutes—and you get a perfect body from that. You don’t have to do anything; you can wash dishes while you wear this. And it was amazing the way this product was advertised, even in Europe. I really love this commercial, so I tried to exaggerate the excitement even to a higher point in a piece called, The Body of Your Dreams. It’s been performed by an American pianist, Andrew Russell, a bodybuilder himself. I compose by intuition. I have the source material; I pick out all the samples that I like; I put all the samples under the keys. All 88 keys of my electronic keyboard have one sample—can be a word, can be a syllable, or even a complete sentence—then I start playing around with this. I just press these keys, and I get a groove, and the groove is so beautiful… I push on the record button and record the groove. That’s how I start working—it’s a trial and error. Although I’m a classically trained composer, I don’t want to see music at all; I don’t want to see any notes. I compose whole pieces, and then decide, “Okay, how should we do the instrumentation of the brass? What will the horns do? The trumpets…?” And so on. I have to work like that because I’m not a rational person. No, I couldn’t live like that. No, I was bad at mathematics, but good at language, so I’m interested in this approach. If I was a painter, I’d use a lot of different colors of paint and experiment with colors on the canvas.
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Gil Rose: So much of your music is “aware” of so many other musics. Would you give a perspective of where you see yourself in the scheme of American music, or just music in general—in the historical timeline of compositional trades, styles, schools, agendas? If you had to write your own Wikipedia entry, who would you say Steve Stucky is? Steven Stucky: The shortest answer would be “I don’t know,” but it’s complicated trying to think of oneself from the outside. I’ve thought about this question a lot because of the necessity of talking in the composing business. What you say about yourself becomes a much bigger part of your persona than it ever was, at least for most kinds of composers. And because I have one foot, or up to one knee in academia (where what we do is talk, essentially, about what we do), you become a sort of self-musicologist if you’re not careful, with a combination of self-awareness and maybe self-consciousness. Your question is on point because I’ve thought almost my whole life about myself in relation to my heroes. I won’t say too much about my heroes. But of the two poles—anxiety of influence and ritual ancestral slaughter, or ancestor worship—I’m the sort of composer who has these sorts of gods and who acknowledges them somehow every day in my work and in my love affair with the history of music. Some of the pieces have overt historicism, as you know. But I think that always, I’m aware of what I’m doing as a kind of footnote to what thousands of others—to what my colleagues have done. I’m not so interested in inventing the wheel; I’m interested in painting it in beautiful shades, or somehow improving it slightly. I find it interesting that your interest in other music is very catholic, in the sense that you seem to be looking for inspiration and problem-solving and gesture externally. What about on a micro level? If we break down into your harmonic writing, any axes to grind on those fronts? Well, my principal axe to grind on harmony is that I’m for it, which is not as simple a statement as it sounds. Because, growing up when we grew up, it wasn’t a thing you could be for. There wasn’t a good way to think about harmony for part of the 20th century, for most composers, and I think I worked out only gradually my thinking about how this might tie to the traditions I loved most. In fact, I can now see, after so many years and with some help from others, that not only did I never give up the idea of harmony as a kind of governing force in almost all my music, but that the kinds of harmonies [I’ve employed] are related to specific traditions in music history, and especially to the tradition that you might say embraces Debussy and Bartok and Lutoslawski, and eventually Berio—this sort of chromatic harmony that has not been liberated
expanding horizons new frontiers in music
One on One with Steven Stucky
On June 26, 2008, under PMP’s auspices, Steven Stucky was joined by renowned conductor Gil Rose for a conversation about his music and career.
Steven Stucky portraits by Hoebermann Studio Photography
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Steven Stucky (b. 1949) is widely recognized as one of the leading American composers of his generation. His music is acclaimed for its formal clarity and imaginative use of color—as well as for its ability to communicate powerfully with a broad concert-going public without sacrificing complexity, artistic integrity, or technical finesse. In 2005 Mr. Stucky won the Pulitzer Prize for his Second Concerto for Orchestra, which The New York Times described as an “electrifying display of orchestral fireworks.” In addition to composing, Mr. Stucky is active as a conductor, writer, lecturer, and teacher. Music Director of Opera Boston and winner of Columbia University’s prestigious Ditson Award, Gil Rose is also the founder of the Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP), a chamber orchestra dedicated exclusively to performing and recording music of the 20th and 21st centuries.
“The goal of art is to make the hair stand up on the back of your neck, and that’s all I’m after, actually, and everything else is ways to make it happen.”
from some kind of ideal of euphony, of beauty. I’m not one of those people who want to ignore big chunks of 20th-century music or repertoire. I probably learned less from Schoenberg than from Debussy. I would not give up early Ligeti. I would not give up Elliott Carter for anything. And I encourage my students, many of whom live in this ahistorical now, in which a whole chunk of our heritage is just missing from their consciousness and I think it’s a terrible shame. I try to rectify that whenever I can. However, I do think that the emancipation of dissonance didn’t work, or didn’t work very well, because giving up the contrast between consonance and dissonance, however one makes that work—those are very general terms—was just giving up too good a tool, and most of us have gotten it back in some way. What about your relationship to early music? I know a lot of composers of your generation at this time have leaped back, stopping at Debussy and then taking a big jump to Josquin and from Josquin to Byrd. How did that happen for you, and do you remember when it happened? It happened in sophomore counterpoint class, I think. Well, it probably happened in high school choir, where you run into this music. But, one of the positive influences of academic life is that I get to teach counterpoint often, and it turns out to be really something quite important in my way of working, which I might not have had had I not been forced into this academic situation. I’m actually mainly influenced by the late 16th century, not so much Josquin and certainly not Machaut, but essentially the age of Palestrina, which is also the age of Byrd. What about how that primarily contrapuntal writing manifests itself in your orchestral writing? Do you find that that way of thinking contrapuntally—in longer lines and less obvious to the listener—is at the root of your music’s construction? Maybe not the root of the construction, but it’s a fundamental way of making the surface. Very often my music has quite dense textures, but these textures are constructed in rather simple ways. You know, canonic and so on. In a way that’s very much like, say, the micro polyphony of Ligeti—in a different style, but the same principle. If you look at them side by side, you can see that we’re interested in the same thing. Audience member: Do you enjoy going back to the shorter forms, like Album Leaves, after working with the larger forms, trying to say so much in a small amount of time? That’s one reason for doing these things, and some of those short pieces are those that you just write for someone’s birthday, you fax or PDF them. But those short pieces—I really just gave myself one or two pages to try to do something PMP 51
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PMP RUN-OUTS!
Making Music: Frederic Rzewski Carnegie (Zankel) Hall
Elliott Carter’s What Next? Miller Theatre at Columbia University New York stage premiere of Carter’s only opera, conducted by Jeffrey Milarsky and directed by Christopher Alden Amanda Squitieri, soprano Susan Narucki, soprano Katherine Rohrer, mezzo-soprano Matthew Garrett, tenor Morgan Smith, baritone Jonathan Makepeace, boy alto
Frederic Rzewski, Pianist Stephen Drury, Pianist Steve ben Israel, Narrator Opus 21 Ara Guzelimian, Series Moderator
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March
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March
Presented by Meet the Composer, New Music for Soloist Champions is the culmination of a year-long project in which eight soloists— all major figures in the new music world—collaborated with eight diverse contemporary composers to create a wide-ranging body of new solo works.
Featuring Frederic Rzewski’s Attica, Spots, War Songs, Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues (two-piano version), and the New York premiere of Natural Things (co-commissioned by The Carnegie Hall Corporation, the Irving S. Gilmore International Keyboard Festival and Opus 21)
May
New Music for Soloist Champions Symphony Space, Peter Sharp Theater
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Ever hungry for live music, PMP hosted four “run-out” trips to New York City to attend a variety of performances during the 2007–2008 season. Here is what they heard:
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that’s very immediate. This is one of the things about music that seemed so important to me, and it’s not so easy to do. That is, never to waste any time warming up during a piece, whether it’s a small piece or a big piece, but to start saying something right away rather than saying “um.” And in a small piece, you don’t have time to say “um.” You can only say one thing, and you have to have something worth saying. They’re very good for your technique, sort of liberating your imagination. Part of the liberation is, essentially that they don’t really have formal problems, so you can concentrate on other things. I do them sometimes as calisthenics or as gifts, or whatever. Audience member: If I understood you correctly, you said earlier that your approach has technical problem-solving as a means to an end of expression, and I think your music really demonstrates that. Well, thank you. The means to the end thing is a shortcut way of saying something that’s a little more complicated because there are cases in which I don’t understand the emotion that I’m going for in a piece until afterwards. It’s not that I say, “I have some emotional content and I need some tools in which to encode it.” Sometimes all I have are the tools and the intellectual thrust of making the piece work and then I don’t get to experience the feelings of the piece, really, until afterwards. This is rewarding when it works out—I suppose when it doesn’t, then it’s not. There are some emotional surprises for me. Not complete surprises, but you can’t get the whole picture… I imagine that if you’re making a film, that until you’re sitting in a theater with an audience, you can’t experience it the way that the audience does, even though you’ve seen it for a thousand hours in the editing room. It’s a little bit like that for me. The goal of art is to make the hair stand up on the back of your neck, and that’s all I’m after, actually, and everything else is ways to make it happen. Audience member: What’s your approach to teaching composition? That’s a great mystery that in 30 years of teaching I haven’t completely solved. When I was studying composition, I had a tremendous amount of affection for, and even reverence for the people I studied with. But I’d be unable to tell you what I learned from them. And that’s not a condemnation of their teaching; it is a statement about the reality that you end up teaching yourself to compose with moral support from your senior colleagues. There’s not a whole lot of technical evidence that what we give to students turns them into composers. You can turn them into theorists or fugue writers, or something, but that’s not the same. I do try to be a good colleague to them, and I try to ask a lot of questions of composers that they have forgotten to ask of themselves in a particular situation—about what they’re doing in a piece, and why they’re doing it. So that if they can go home and keep asking themselves the same question, they are their best teachers, and that’s the sort of service that you can give them. But, I don’t have a system. I have
different approaches with different people because they all need different things or are able to accept different things. There are certain general areas of music which, if they’ve never thought about them, I will at least try to get them to think about. One of the ideas is making harmony work somehow—a composer who has just not had a chance to think about it, I will make him or her think about it. There are composers for whom harmony is not a subject—Lou Harrison, for example. Well, that’s a special case. Someone could have messed him up by making him think about harmony, but he was too strong of a personality to have fallen for that. If they have no way of thinking about form, then I try to find some way to make them think about form, which is, I hope, not a received method, but a way they can go about thinking about it for themselves. I don’t have a real system, though. There are teachers like that, who have systems, who have been successful, but I don’t have that. And no one used it on me; maybe that’s why I don’t have that. Audience member: What is your take on popular [idioms] that are kind of entering the composer’s technique? Is this a good direction that people are going into? GR: Why don’t I say something and then you can finish it off. I don’t know if it’s a good or bad direction. I think in the world of the Pandora’s Box that was opened and anything became possible, you don’t put anything back in that box. We’re never going to go back to a controlled modernist agenda. I think that that’s happened, and part of what’s happened is that those things have become eligible source material. And once they become source material, they will either be used to good effect, bad effect, with skill, without skill, with integrity, or without integrity. The elements themselves—the popular music element, or the rock element—they themselves are not good or bad for our using. And we might as well get comfortable with it, because it ain’t going back in the box. I agree with all that: materials are neither good nor bad; achievement is good or bad. A material is neutral. Secondly, the influence of popular music on so-called classical music is several centuries old. It’s not a very new subject. It seems like it now because everything is kind of more open than it was before, but there is a Neapolitan Tarantella in many a symphony and there are Croatian folk songs in a Haydn symphony, and so on. What’s great about the current situation is having dropped the barriers about what’s permissible material, what’s a means of expression, and so on, is inherently a positive thing. It makes possible results that we couldn’t have gotten before. What’s difficult about overtly popular references is that the real thing is so vibrant that there’s some steep competition when you do it over. So, not all of it succeeds, personally, but I’m completely in favor of the attempt.
december
One on One with Steven Stucky
Pocket Concerto Project Miller Theatre at Columbia University Laura Elise Schwendinger, Chiaroscuro Azzurro (for violin and chamber orchestra) Ichizo Okashiro, The Starry Night (for piano and chamber orchestra) John Zorn, The Prophetic Mysteries of Angels, Witches, and Demons Performed by: Jennifer Koh, violin; Christopher Taylor, piano; Tara Helen O’Connor, flute; International Contemporary Ensemble (Jayce Ogren, conductor; Alex Lipowski, percussion; William Winant, percussion; Ikue Mori, electronics)
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expanding horizons new frontiers in music
On July 9th and 10th, 27 members of Philadelphia’s arts community joined PMP, PCAH, and Pew Trusts staff for a one-night trip to New York City to attend a performance of Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s iconic opera Die Soldaten, presented as part of the 2008 Lincoln Center Festival. Steven Sloane conducted the 110-piece Bochumer Symphoniker and its extensive percussion section, along with a jazz combo and 40 singers, actors and dancers. This spectacular production, directed by David Pountney, sent the audience literally traveling on train-like tracks along the length of a narrow, 220-foot long stage, achieving a sense of intimacy and immersion inside the cavernous Park Avenue Armory.
Die Soldaten, Artists’ Roundtable, and the New Museum: PMP’s trip to the 2008 Lincoln Center Festival
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The next morning, trip participants gathered to share their thoughts in a discussion moderated by Marc Scorca, president and CEO of OPERA America. The conversation touched on many topics, and, as might be expected, PMP attendees voiced a broad range of responses to Die Soldaten, which recounts the ruination of a young woman at the hands of several soldiers during World War II. “For me there was this dialectic between the large and the very peninsular,” mused composer Andrea Clearfield. “But, I wonder if the music loses anything by being in that big space? I wanted to understand more of the subtleties of the music, what the subtexts are in those rare tender moments—when you have a mother’s love, and you have it for a split second… It went for the archetypal, but I lost that intimacy.” Blanka Zizka, the Wilma Theatre’s co-artistic director, observed that, “You cannot ask for an emotional dose out of it, because that was not the intention.” “I loved the music. I’m disturbed by it at the same time because I felt there was this block of sound that was continuous, that ended just as it began,” recalled Karl Middleman, artistic director of the Philadelphia Classical Symphony. “But just as soon as I might begin to tire of it, something fascinating would change the texture.” Everyone seemed in agreement that the piece was challenging, and that this particular production gave the viewer lots to digest. “I left [Christopher Keane’s 1991 City Opera] production much more satisfied. But I left last night fascinated, and it was the same kind of fascination as when I was 18 and saw Aida,” remarked Robert Driver, general and artistic director of the Opera Company of Philadelphia. Steering the conversation toward the difficulties inherent in mounting an opera of this scale, and particularly in Philadelphia, Scorca wondered, “Is it a fair reference point to come to the premiere event of the premiere summer festival in the largest city in the Western hemisphere and say, ‘Oh, what can we learn from that?’” Warren Oree, music producer of the West Oak Lane Jazz & Arts Festival, responded optimistically, saying, “I think it’s valid, because if you are going to present any type of arts program, I think you need courage. So, why not come to the place where they are taking chances, where they are on top of the heap, so to speak, where they are trying some things? You might realize that you’re closer than you think.” Gene Coleman, artistic director of Soundfield, an organization that presents experimental music, pointed out that the Lincoln Center Festival needed to pool its resources in order to mount this production to scale, partnering with the Ruhr Festival in Germany—a strategy that perhaps Philadelphia organizations could adapt. “[T]his program actually was made possible by a very robust collaboration between different arts institutions. That’s certainly an idea that Philadelphia could take as a model, because you could scale that down. It’s not just a question of doing it on a massive scale…” After a quick break, participants were treated to a roundtable with three New York-based artists, moderated by John Schaefer, Host of New Sounds™, Soundcheck, and New Sounds Live™ on WNYC Public Radio. Schaefer was joined by David Krakauer, a clarinetist who performs a variety of
Left: A scene from Die Soldaten, photo by Stephanie Berger, www.stephaniebergerphoto.com This page, from top: David Krakauer, photo by Jean Marc Lubrano; T.S. Monk
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Die Soldaten, Artists’ Roundtable, and the New Museum: PMP’s trip to the 2008 Lincoln Center Festival
genres, from classical to klezmer; T.S. Monk, drummer, bandleader, composer, and vocalist; and Susan Botti, composer and soprano. Schaefer introduced his guests as artists who share “the idea of breaking expectations, both within the music industry, and out there in the real world audiences.” As the three discussed their lives and influences, it became apparent that they are constantly establishing, reestablishing, and breaking down their expectations of themselves and their relationships with various musical lineages, in the process creating new works. “I think we’re kind of like snakes, and we shed everything...” Susan Botti mused. “Part of your craft is to embrace the tradition, and then kind of move through it, not around it… these traditions, you can’t deny them, you have to find a way to coexist.” T.S. Monk, an artist who has always had to think about how his work relates to his father’s, suggested that this tension between the individual artist and the musical tradition in which he exists was as real for his father as it is for him. “The ‘you’ of it, the individual component, is really a driving force. My father did not start out to change music in the 20th century, that wasn’t his goal. I don’t think that was his goal the day he died. The goal was ‘Let me do my thing.’ And then you turn around and say ‘That’s what happened? Whoa!’” This focus on individual artistry has become T.S.’s philosophy: “What I think about is how I can be more myself today…if you garner the courage to be yourself, you’re very likely to do something different.” All three shared doubts they encountered along their journeys, fueled by others’ ideas of how (or whether) they “should” be performing certain genres of music. “I began to have this sort of crisis of confidence myself about playing jazz, again about individuality,” remembers David Krakauer. “At a certain point, some thread started bringing me toward klezmer music. It was music that, when I would hear it, I would say, ‘Oh, it sounds like how my jazz would speak with a very heavy Yiddish accent.’ And it felt like roots music for me; it felt like something that was a part of me.” But just because an artist finds personal meaning and connection with a tradition doesn’t mean that the tradition greets the artist with open arms—far from it. “I have a drawer full of hate mail saying ‘What are you doing? This is not klezmer!’” David laughed. Every tradition has its stakeholders (T.S. called the most rigid of these the “Jazz Police,” or “all these people who don’t know and they don’t know it, but they got a lot to say about it.”). But it’s the artist’s purpose to internalize and manipulate seemingly unyielding genres, revealing their porousness and malleability. Of course, there are those who would set rigid boundaries, but this has never made sense to T.S., who remembers that, “My dad’s crew, him, and Dizzy, and Miles, and Coltrane, those guys were not into locking onto anything. Actually, most of them died in the process.… It’s our obligation to those artisans who inspired us to keep pushing the ball, because the only reason they stopped was that they died.” The panelists again echoed this idea that innovation is sparked by meaningful engagement with tradition, as new forms emerge through conversations within and across musical lineages. “This, to me, is the world’s gift, to be able to have collaborations like this. It’s a state of mind, and it’s an openness, and it’s a beautiful thing,” said David. And yet, for these artists, personal engagement is challenged in the age of corporate-driven pop fabrication. “I think often PMP 56
Unacabine by Robert Kusmirowski, part of the New Museum’s “After Nature” exhibition. Photo by Benoit Pailley
pop culture removes the human element, and the human element is what is so critical to the communicative elements of music. …If you can define who you are the way Hendrix could bend one note… just move it and do your thing with it, it brings the human thing into it. The human element is just the bottom line in all of our music.” To put a finer point on it, each individual human’s element is the bottom line, with life’s experiences miraculously bleeding into the music, as noted by David: “When you hear a composition of yours, nobody else could have written that music. It’s your music. And that’s a very important thing. Whereas I have heard some younger musicians, and the technique of their instrument is so advanced, but they sound generic. I can’t tell one saxophonist from another. If I were their teacher, I would say ‘Get back to a thing where you create a sound that is absolutely your own.’” As T.S. put it, “You have all these kids with all these degrees behind their names, in composition and orchestration, and this, that, and the other, and I’m listening to it, and it just sounds like the answers to tests.” This panel of musicians gave an affecting call to look within for the courage to create, to trust that one’s individual experience has value in inspiring art. That afternoon before returning to Philadelphia, the group made one last stop at the New Museum in its new location at 235 Bowery in the Lower East Side. Designed by Tokyo-based architects Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa (their collaboration is called SANAA) with Gensler, New York, serving as Executive Architect, the white seven-story building looks to be made of paper or plastic, lending it an otherworldly quality amidst storefronts and houses half its height. The group visited an exhibition called “After Nature,” which featured works by 27 artists, depicting “a universe in which humankind is being eclipsed and new ecological systems struggle to find a precarious balance.” The works touched upon “truth liberated from fact,” as described by artist and filmmaker Werner Herzog. One had a sense of examining relics from a world parallel to our own—but an extinct one.—E.S.
“My father did not start out to change music in the 20th century, that wasn’t his goal. I don’t think that was his goal the day he died. The goal was ‘Let me do my thing.’ And then you turn around and say ‘That’s what happened? Whoa!’”—T.S. Monk “My dad’s crew, him, and Dizzy, and Miles, and Coltrane, those guys were not into locking onto anything. Actually, most of them died in the process. …It’s our obligation to those artisans who inspired us to keep pushing the ball, because the only reason they stopped was that they died.” —T.S. Monk
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sp0tlight
Although the story of the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society officially begins in 1986, when Artistic Director Anthony Checchia founded the organization, we can trace PCMS’ origins to a more distant time and place: Marlboro, Vermont, in the 1960s. It was there, at the famed Marlboro School and Festival—a summer program pairing the best and brightest young musicians with master artists—that Checchia became interested in presenting. Though he first came to Marlboro to play the bassoon, in 1958 Checchia was offered an administrative position by founder Rudolph Serkin, which marked the beginning of Checchia’s four-decade-long relationship with Marlboro (today he remains the school’s General Manager).
For nearly a quarter of a century, the Society has flourished by remaining loyal to the needs of its public, even as that public has expanded and diversified.
Spotlight on PCMS: Your Friendly Neighborhood World Class Chamber Music Presenter A conversation with Anthony Checchia, Artistic Director by Willa Rohrer
As it turned out, this marked another kind of beginning as well: during the mid-’60s, Checchia began presenting a three-concert series called Music from Marlboro in East Coast cities. “We’d arrived at a point where it seemed like the next logical step would be to take those works and things that happened here at Marlboro that everyone felt were exceptional and tour with them,” he explains. In Philadelphia, Checchia’s hometown, the series caught on— and so PCMS’ predecessor was born. Marlboro is not a school or a festival in the conventional sense. It’s perhaps better described as a “happening”—a dynamic space in which young and experienced professional musicians meet and collaborate. The curriculum and performance programs are not planned in advance; instead, participants name pieces that they would like to study, the scheduling department performs its special magic (taking care to group musicians of different experience levels together), and whichever pieces turn out the best become part of the festival’s performance repertoire. During the ’60s and ’70s, the Music from Marlboro series continued to develop. In the hopes of attracting a bigger audience to hear its lesser-known performers, Checchia—with the support of patron (and PCMS Founding President) Elizabeth Starr Cummin—added performances by a hot young ensemble of Curtis graduates called the Guarneri Quartet. Audience members began asking for more concerts. Checchia understood that further expanding the series made little sense for Marlboro, but wanted to do something to address the needs of Philadelphia’s burgeoning audience. In 1986, with the help of Starr Cummin and Executive Director Philip Maneval, Checchia founded the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society. PCMS presented seven sold-out concerts that first year—and had to turn 250 people away. Checchia realized that he and his colleagues were facing their first crucial decision: what was the best way to accommodate PCMS’ growing audience? “I felt that we should add concerts rather than repeat concerts,” explains Checchia. “Because to me, the feeling that you can get in a cosmopolitan city is that you have access to more things and different things, and that it would be better to have ten different groups than six groups repeated twice.” The need for more concerts was certainly there. Aside from a few chamber music series, there were almost no consistent opportunities for Philadelphians to hear this kind of music. PMP 58
PCMS’ 2008–2009 season includes the Daedalus Quartet (top, photo by Steven J. Sherman) and the Orion Quartet (bottom, photo by Lois Greenfield)
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Spotlight on PCMS: Your Friendly Neighborhood World Class Chamber Music Presenter A conversation with Anthony Checchia, Artistic Director
As Checchia explains, when he began PCMS, the basic premise was “not to compete with other organizations, but to present things that were not being presented.” Another key part of the organization’s mission was—and is—to keep ticket prices as low as possible in order to make the world’s best artists accessible to the public. Checchia explains, “We’ve had people say ‘Why don’t you just raise ticket prices?’ That’s not what we’re about. If we raise ticket prices, maybe we’d have to raise less in contributions—but then we would have less people at the concerts!” Low attendance hasn’t been a problem yet. After its first sold-out season, PCMS continued to flourish: the more concerts it added, the more it sold out. Today, the Society presents over 60 concerts a year: world-renowned chamber ensembles as well as jazz, woodwind, string, piano, and vocal recitals. The Society also commissions and premieres new music, solidifying its reputation as one of the leading chamber music presenters in the United States. But to describe PCMS’ success this way—that is, solely in terms of its remarkable growth—suggests that it was a mythic ascent to glory rather than a series of careful steps. As Checchia makes clear, this is far from the case. Rather, the impact PCMS has made on its field is the result of hard work, prudent planning, thoughtful as well as passionate leadership. The Society has seized opportunities to diversify its programming, but has worked equally hard to resist over-extending itself. This has meant carefully considering the needs of “specialty” audiences that weren’t being addressed; PCMS’ vocal concert series, for instance, might attract a smaller crowd than the Julliard Quartet, but it is also a loyal crowd. As one would expect, PCMS’ financial planning has been as crucial to the organization’s success as its artistic decisions. Checchia explains that, “any subsidy is what we call a reasonable subsidy— [so] that one concert doesn’t cost $20,000 and another one $2,000 or $4,000.” He adds, “We’re not in business to pay a particular artist $25,000 so they can come and play in Philadelphia. Either they have
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to be interested in playing for a very high-quality audience or we can’t present them.” In addition, PCMS’ core staff divides time with the Marlboro School and Festival, lessening salary costs for both organizations. Local collaborations—with organizations such as the Kimmel Center (where PCMS is a resident company), the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Curtis, Temple, Settlement, the Musical Fund Society, and Fleisher Art Memorial—have also been a key to PCMS’ stability. The Society cultivates future audience members through its extensive, ten-year-old educational program, which presents master classes and seminars, pre-concert lectures, and free children’s concerts. Checchia reflects, “I guess the challenge that we have is like the challenge that everyone has: how do you get more people to subscribe? All over the country subscriptions are down, single ticket sales are more frequent than they used to be…” But despite this challenge, PCMS has not lost sight of its core values. For nearly a quarter of a century, the Society has flourished by remaining loyal to the needs of its public, even as that public has expanded and diversified. “We try to think of ourselves—and I think we’re faithful to this—as a community organization,” says Checchia. “I think in terms of ‘What can we do artistically and musically that serves the community?’”
Editor Matthew Levy, PMP Director Managing Editor Emily Sweeney, PMP Senior Program Associate Assistant Editor Willa Rohrer, PMP Program Assistant Design fluxism.com
The Philadelphia Music Project (PMP) was initiated by The Pew Charitable Trusts in 1989 to foster artistic excellence and innovation in the region’s nonprofit music community. PMP meets this objective by supporting commissions and productions of new works, presentations of large-scale or long-neglected works, interdisciplinary collaborations, and similar programmatic enhancements. PMP maintains a comprehensive professional development program, producing seminars, symposia, and field trips; providing consulting services in strategic planning, public relations, and audience development; and offering modest grants for professional development to the leadership of local music organizations. PMP is a program of The Pew Center for Arts and Heritage. www.philadelphiamusicproject.org
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A Program of The Pew Center for Arts and Heritage PMP is administered by The University of the Arts
About The Pew Center for Arts and Heritage
The Pew Center for Arts and Heritage (Center), formerly the Philadelphia Center for Arts and Heritage, is dedicated to stimulating a vibrant cultural community within the region. Established in November 2005, the Center houses seven Initiatives of The Pew Charitable Trusts: Dance Advance, Heritage Philadelphia Program, Pew Fellowships in the Arts, Philadelphia Cultural Management Initiative, Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative, Philadelphia Music Project and Philadelphia Theatre Initiative. The Initiatives support artists and arts and heritage organizations in the five-county, Southeastern Pennsylvania region whose work is distinguished by excellence, imagination and creative courage. The Pew Center for Arts and Heritage is funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts and administered by The University of the Arts. For more information, visit www.pcah.us. About The Pew Charitable Trusts
The Pew Charitable Trusts is driven by the power of knowledge to solve today’s most challenging problems. Pew applies a rigorous, analytical approach to improve public policy, inform the public and stimulate civic life. We partner with a diverse range of donors, public and private organizations and concerned citizens who share our commitment to fact-based solutions and goal-driven investments to improve society. www. pewtrusts.org About The University of the Arts
The University of the Arts is the nation’s first and only university dedicated to the visual, performing and communication arts. Its 2,300 students are enrolled in undergraduate and graduate programs on its campus in the heart of Philadelphia’s Avenue of the Arts. Its history as a leader in educating creative individuals spans more than 130 years. www.uarts.edu
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