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This Wednesday at 5pm I’ll be presenting a talk on my music at the Camargo Foundation. Unlike the artist colonies I’ve had the privilege of attending (Yaddo, VCCA, Kimmel Harding Nelson), Camargo Fellows come from both the arts and the humanities. Despite–or perhaps because of–our seemingly disparate research and creative pursuits, the presentations by my fellow fellows have been among the highlights of this fellowship so far. Fascinating questions and discussions by very informed and deeply thoughtful colleagues make this time together very special.

A fellow composer once told me that at their first meeting Milton Babbitt said, “Tell me everything about yourself–from the moment you were born. Musically speaking.”

That is rather what I intend to do this week, starting from my first musical experiences and working my way forward to my current project for the JACK Quartet. Here are some of the questions and topics I plan to discuss:

Big Questions
1. Why do I write music?

2. What does music do?

3. What is the experience of composing like?

Recent Works
1. In Search of Planet X: the stories behind music, my need for syncopation, expecting the unexpected

2. Noticing: the influence of traditional Asian music on my works, doing a lot with a little, going in and out of focus

3. Clarinet Sonata: different musics coming together, atmosphere and texture, our endless need for beauty

Current Camargo Fellowship Project
Witness, a new string quartet for the JACK Quartet

I think most of us are aware of our hometown heroes, and as a kid growing up in Pittsburgh Lorin Maazel’s presence was huge.  Starting in fifth grade I attended a free Saturday music school for public school students called “Centers for the Musically Talented” that took me every week to Peabody High School in East Liberty, from which Maazel had graduated decades earlier.  His mother, Marie Maazel, helped to reorganize the Pittsburgh Youth Symphony Orchestra in the 1950s.  I played in PYSO during high school at Heinz Hall (where I also ushered three to six days a week for three years).  Following his child prodigy conducting years (We’re talking conducting the NBC Symphony while still in the single digits.), Maazel attended Pitt, a place I called home from 1998-1999.  Many critics have noted that Maazel played second violin in the Pittsburgh Symphony while he attended Pitt, but none of the recent obits I’ve come across have mentioned that the conductor of Pittsburgh in the 1940s was none other than Fritz Reiner.  And we wonder where some of Maazel’s immaculate technique came from!  Maazel returned to his Pittsburgh roots, leading the Pittsburgh Symphony (with various titles) from 1984 to 1996, culminating in its centennial world tour.  And just in case the hometown connection was not clear enough, the block of Sixth Street in front of Heinz Hall is also named Lorin Maazel Square.

It seems every discussion of Lorin Maazel must include examples of his “distant” or “mercurial” demeanor and his “perfectionistic” and “demanding” style.  In Pittsburgh we were certainly aware of his hiring of 37 new PSO musicians, and there was lore about his personal Maazel-only elevator backstage.  But as young musicians some of these stories took on lives of their own.  Did he really shout out “Silence!” from the stage when one of his grandchildren made noise during a rehearsal of the Mother Goose Suite?  Certainly he didn’t really have a red telephone in his sixth floor suite with a direct line to Moscow….  (Or did he?)

Maazel has left us with an incredible discography (including his own compositions) from the world’s greatest orchestras and opera companies spanning a lifetime of music making around the globe.  For my part I will recommend his cycle of Sibelius symphonies with the PSO.  Maazel was all about instrumental balance and building drama through the large-scale architecture of the piece, and these are qualities that work especially well for Sibelius’s unique forms and characteristic orchestrations.  In these recordings you will hear not just Sibelius, but Lorin Maazel’s Sibelius.  And you will hear everything very, very clearly.  Bravo, Maestro!

Here he is conducing the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra in Mahler 5.

 

I had a great time last night listening (and dancing) to the soulful sounds of Dwight Wilson & The Classic City Soul Band at The Melting Point in Athens, GA. This was the first concert in their Motown Downtown series, and it didn’t disappoint. Great music, rich voices with a lifetime of experience, and a relaxed and diverse crowd. Who can resist this positive and expressive music? We need more of that today! I’m looking forward to more good times at this venue.

www.meltingpointathens.com

While visiting Pittsburgh I was delighted to learn that the Pittsburgh Festival of New Music was taking place during my stay. I had the chance to hear Frederic Rzewski play his recently premiered Dreams, Part I (2012-2013) and his 1977 work, Four Pieces, plus an encore memorial piece for Milton Babbitt. This was my second time hearing Rzewski perform his own work, having met him in 2009 at the MusicX Festival at the Hindemith Foundation in beautiful Blonay, Switzerland. Continue reading “Rzewski in Pittsburgh”

On the good news front: I am honored to have received a fellowship to the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France!
I’ve had the pleasure of attending a number of artist colonies (Yaddo, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center) in the last couple years and have always been impressed with the people I’ve met and the level of concentration I’ve achieved while in residence. There’s something about going to a beautiful and isolated new place, surrounded by talented and creative people, that seems to get the compositional juices flowing. It may also have something to do with the excellent food these colonies tend to have! In any case, I am certainly looking forward to my time in France. Time for a crash course in French language…or at least French cuisine….

www.camargofoundation.org

It is with both “emotion and meaning” that I spread the good news of the Leonard B. Meyer papers at Penn. This fascinating collection, housed at Penn’s Special Collections Center, is now complete and ready for all manner of researchers and thinkers. Between 2008 and 2010 I read, identified, and organized a vast trove (about a dozen boxes of correspondence, writings, teaching materials, original compositions, and memorabilia) of Meyer’s materials. My efforts have now been summarized in a concise finding aid by Ben Rosen.

Meyer, who taught at Chicago and Penn, is best known for his seminal 1961 book, Emotion and Meaning in Music. His work, which combines music theory, aesthetics, philosophy, history, and science–among other fields–stands as an example of what interdisciplinary discourse can achieve when the thinker can weave together diverse methodologies in a meaningful way.

It was very special for me to be enveloped by Meyer’s words in such a direct and personal way, particularly through his beautiful letters to colleagues. I got the feeling that I had taken a course with him or joined him for lunch after spending so much time with his words and ideas. One of the things that most impressed me was seeing multiple drafts for articles and book chapters side by side; this allowed for a clear understanding of the development of his thinking in a highly nuanced way. It was also great to see some of his original compositions (Meyer studied with Wolpe and Copland, among others.). I suspect these works may turn out to be some of the most fruitful materials in this collection.

pennrare.wordpress.com/2014/05/06/leonard-b-meyer-papers-1935-2008/#more-1799

I’ve had a great time exploring Athens, OH and taking in some of the 2014 Athens International Film and Video Festival. In Bloom, the 2013 film by Nana Ekvtimishvili and Simon Groß, was a highlight. The film takes place in Tbilisi in 1992 and explores two young women coming of age amid unsettled political change. This was a film that gave me the distinct sense of being in its setting as opposed to on a set. The gray buildings, pale blue tile interiors, narrow winding streets, and stonework all contributed to the underlying seriousness and realism that made this film so affecting.

Athens Film Fest website

The performers of NOBROW.collective, led by Aaron Butler, gave a thrilling premiere performance of my percussion quartet, Kinetic Attractions, last night as part of the Athens International Film and Video Festival. They played with energy and clearly enjoyed making the most of the work’s playful and more aggressive sections. The work began without pause following a screening of Melissa Haviland and David Colagiovanni’s Dinner Music. It was especially enjoyable to see their work on a larger screen, and the back-to-back pairing of film screening and musical performance highlighted connections between the works that would otherwise have gone unnoticed: timbral links between the quiet gongs in my music and the slowed image of small cups bouncing from a hard surface; textural links between the sparse quiet rhythm of cymbals, wood blocks, and buzzing shaker recalling the slow motion shards of ceramic pulsing on the screen.

The concert concluded with the premiere of Matthew Burtner’s Deep Earth. A large-scale multi-media work lasting 40 minutes, it combined a grand assortment of acoustic and electronic instruments–including unusual sound sources like gravel and dragged concrete slabs–with video. Burtner favored large scale shapes that grew through an accumulation of instruments to large masses of sound. The most striking movement (pun irresistibly intended) was the finale, in which tuned stones offered a memorable rhythmic dance against historic documentary footage. Its straight-forward melodic approach was a welcome contrast to the earlier swell/release-based structures.

There was a real feeling of involvement and attention from the large-turn-out audience at this concert, and I felt everything was paced well with the right amount of sound versus visuals and a good contrast among the selections. There is much exploration of multi-media in new music concerts of late, and this performance showed what is possible with smart programming.

NObrow Collective

Athens Film Festival

Melissa Haviland

David Colagiovanni

Matthew Burtner

For the second weekend in a row I’ve had the great fortune of hearing my solo violin work, immaus, performed at a regional conference of the College Music Society. Last week it was Lina Bahn in Denver, and this week I heard Kia-Hui Tan in Fargo at the Great Lakes Regional Chapter Conference of the College Music Society. I first met Kia-Hui, a member of the faculty at Ohio State University, at the CMS International Conference in Seoul in 2011, and we have run into each other a few times recently. In October she gave a fantastic solo recital at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, where I teach; later that month we were both at the CMS National Conference in Cambridge, MA. So I was thrilled to finally hear put her bow to the strings (plus some left hand pizz) in the service of my work.

Kia-Hui’s performance was excellent. Her interpretation was relatively more rhythmically strict than Lina’s intensely frenzied approach last week but equally exciting and dramatic. Kia-Hui’s adherence to evenness of rhythm and tempo allowed the work’s final section to stand out even more because of it’s long, slow build (slow burn?) to the work’s explosive climax. immaus remains my most performed work, and it is a joy to have so many wonderful violinists discover this work and for me to rediscover it through their unique performances.

Kia-Hui Tan

Today I had the pleasure of hearing Lina Bahn perform my solo violin work, immaus, as part of the Rocky Mountain Regional Conference of the College Music Society in Denver. Lina is a member of the faculty at the University of Colorado at Boulder and Executive Director of the VERGE ensemble in Washington, D.C. I first met her when she gave a spellbinding performance of immaus at June in Buffalo in 2009. With that performance still fresh in my ear and memory, I was again reminded of what a thrill it is to hear one’s work come alive in the hands of an amazing performer.

From the opening three-note motive Lina grabbed the listener’s attention. There was an appropriate edge to her playing that worked well during the music’s frenzied runs and tense silences and emphasized the “scurrying” nature of the opening tempo indication, making the soaring lyric lines of the central slow section even more searing. Hers was a compelling and personal interpretation of the work that left everyone blown away. What more could a composer want?

After spending just half a day in Denver I elected to take a long, winding, peaceful, and productive trip on Amtrak back to Philadelphia. I’ve been hooked on trains for some time, and this trip gave me the chance to experience the California Zephyr eastbound (My only other travel on the CZ was westbound to the Aspen Music Festival last summer.) as well as riding the entire length of the Capitol Limited from Chicago to Washington, D.C. Train travel in the US is certainly not the fastest route, but with a private room it does offer some key ingredients to a composer’s success: a distraction-free environment, regular meals, and…no escape! Here’s hoping the smooth clickety-clack of the rails inspires me to “work the rhythms” in my percussion quartet, Kinetic Attractions.

Lina Bahn
June in Buffalo
Aspen Music Festival