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CONCERT REVIEW: Advance notice can’t compete with live performance of Toby Twining Music By Gayle Williams, Herald-Tribune / Sunday, April 21, 2013 It didn’t matter that I had heard the buzz, read previous reviews and listened to YouTube videos, I was not ready for the emotional impact of hearing Toby Twining Music in a live performance. Thanks to New College New Music everyone in Sainer Pavilion experienced the extraordinary range of vocal capabilities that the innovative composer Toby Twining employs in his music.

The focal point of the program was the incidental music Twining created for the 2008 production of Sarah Ruhl’s critically acclaimed play, “Eurydice” at Philadelphia’s Wilma Theater. This is a fantastical take on the Greek myth of Orpheus told from Eurydice’s perspective. Twining’s score painted the aural set and scenery using sounds, vocal techniques, harmonies, but only a rare intelligible word.

It’s a real challenge to describe what Twining created here. An analytic approach reveals play with vocalized consonants, digraphs, diphthongs, as well as throat-singing and whistle-humming. But a dissection like that sucks the life out of the music, don’t you think? I found that by closing my eyes and letting the sounds envelope me, the experience was much more meaningful. I could feel the waves on the beach, Eurydice’s fatal fall, the demonic wall Orpheus faced at the gates of Hades.

Twining introduced his musicians with equal inventiveness providing samples of their prowess and the vocal techniques he relies on. Soprano Eileen Clark’s range took her from jazz scat to lyric heights. Eric Brenner served as a male soprano/alto, while cellist Mailina Rauschenfels sang the same range and showed off her throat-singing as well. Tenor Christopher Preston Thompson and bass Steven Hyrcelak had and amazing vocal and rhythmic command that helped created some of the most other-worldly and percussive effects. Twining himself sang throughout the program revealing many more talents.

Much more satisfying to these ears was his most recent work, “Two Songs from Wandering,” set to poems by Hermann Hesse, the German poet immersed in eastern mysticism. The two poems, “Magic of Colors” and “Walk at Night,” were delightfully illuminated by Twining’s sound imagination. There was a sense of alchemy in the way he combined the colors of his sound and harmonies. It was an amazing journey to one of the most densely delicious final chords I’ve ever heard at the end the first song.

Ending with an explosion of sound in celebration, the Finale from “Eurydice,” “Yes, Yes, Yes!” employed yodeling and lots of vocal percussion infused with jubilance. Quickly on its heels was an encore of “Shaman,” the title track from his first CD from 1994. These musicians are remarkable and Twining is a visionary, perhaps even a Shaman himself.

CONCERT REVIEW

TOBY TWINING MUSIC. New Music New College. Reviewed April 20 at Sainer Pavilion.

Saturday March 9, 2013
Vancouver New Music at the Orpheum Annex

[EAR HEART MUSIC] Mantra Percussion – TimberRemixed
Tuesday, April 30, 2013 @ 8:00 pm
Roulette

Louth Contemporary Music Society
Mantra Percussion at St. Peter’s Church of Ireland,
Drogheda Arts Festival 2013
May 4, 2013

Press Highlights

The New Yorker
Most Memorable Classical Performances of 2012 “…aural hypnosis” Read here

Timber is featured in Alex Ross’s most recent New Yorker Article. Read here

TimeOut New York
Top Ten Classical Performances of 2012 “…superhuman” Read here

New York Times
“…overtones hover and fuse, conjuring eerie moans and radiant coronas.”

New York Magazine: The Carpenter’s Greatest Hits Read here

21. March 2013:

Recital at the Bosniak Institute, Sarajevo Winter Festival, Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina

19. March 2013:

Performance at the Radulescu Festival, Cologne, Germany Radulescu Festival

To see his other dates:

Mak Grgic Schedule

“Mathew Rosenblum (b. 1954) is based in Pittsburgh, and is obviously a composer with a rich imagination and ferocious intellectual curiosity. The most immediately distinguishing aspect of his work is its use of alternative tunings (i.e., other than standard equal temperament). Yonah’s Dream (2008) uses Harry Partch’s just intonation scale (43 tones to the octave), as it is written for Newband, an ensemble composed entirely of Partch instruments. But Rosenblum does not write a Partch knockoff (and he uses different tuning systems in his other pieces). He has many more references to contemporary pop music than Partch (for example, the second movement of the 1989 Circadian Rhythms, Stargazing, has a loose, cool-jazz feel), while the latter was searching more for a revival of primitive and archaic musical aesthetics. 2003’s Under the Rainbow for flute and fixed media is the height of this engagement with popular culture, a fever-dream of cartoon music and The Wizard of Oz through which the flute(s) wander wide-eyed, a little like Dorothy. Rosenblum is also quite willing to let the music settle into a sort of hypnotic stasis, as occurs in the Two Harmonies of 2011. And the 2009 The Big Rip (A Science Fiction Cantata) is a meditation on dark energy, both as it is manifested in cosmology, and in the nefarious acts of unseen financial “masters of the universe,” who devastate lives from a distance, lethal yet invisible. It has quite ravishing vocal writing for the German Calmus vocal ensemble (who also play percussion) and the Raschèr Saxophone Quartet (who produce sounds and textures which at times sound almost electronic). In this piece the harmony sounds much more overtly overtone-based.

All the music is fresh and groovy, but it never has the discomfiting feel of a lot of music that’s trying too hard to be hip. Rosenblum is a quester, he’s after answers to big questions through his art, even when the scale is intimate. I applaud this quality. The performances and recordings are excellent. Circadian Rhythms, Two Harmonies, and Under the Rainbow feature some stars of the Pittsburgh new-music scene. The insightful notes are by Rosenblum’s friend and colleague Eric Moe, another Pittsburgh composer whose work I admire. For credit due, Deoro is Dae Eggar, cello; Chuck Palmer, percussion; and Rob Frankenberry, keyboards. ” Robert Carl, Fanfare

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” To say that Mathew Rosenblum takes an interest in unorthodox tuning systems is true as far as it goes, but it doesn’t really do justice to either the depth and beauty of the music on t his disc, or to Rosenblum’s range as a composer. The 20-minute score that gives the disc its title does include two differently tuned pianos, along with cello and percussion, and much of the music’s distinctive sound comes from the interplay of the various scales. But what makes the piece so rich and inviting are the wit and dexterity with which Rosenblum deploys those sounds, incorporating them first into sparse, evocative dreamscapes, then into bursts of punk rock or piano jazz that maintain a connection to the whole. Other pieces here display different sides of a multi-faceted creative voice, from the spangly beauty of “Yonah’s Dream” (which incorporates the tuning system of the visionary composer and instrument builder Harry Partch) to “The Big Rip,” a densely wrought choral work that Rosenblum bills as a science-fiction cantata. Perhaps most beguiling of all is “Under the Rainbow,” which combines a live flute with a madcap recorded melange of electronic sounds and clips from Warner Brothers cartoons and “The Wizard of Oz.” It’s the kind of jape that should be merely brash, but Rosenblum makes it at once funny and moving”

Joshua Kosman

MATHEW ROSENBLUM, CIRCADIAN RHYTHMS, New World Records

NPR’s Top 10 Classical Albums of 2012

“Just Ancient Loops, with its evocative drone and pizzicato opening, unfolds like a journey. The music, with its blend of East and West, soars in interlocking swirls of color, rests in a central chorale and builds steam to an ecstatic conclusion, sounding as if it had always been here.”

- Tom Huizenga, National Public Radio

Michael Harrison
Maya Beiser

NEW YORK TIMES REVIEW OF JACK QUARTET’S PREMIERE OF “CHANT” AT METROPOLITAN MUSEUM

“Chant, by Michael Harrison, was written in 2011 but this was its premiere. Here, too, harmonies were blocked out in unhurried chords while individual players broke out, here and there, with flurries of embellishments.

There were dissonances that went beyond those encountered in medieval music, but they always sounded like a natural outgrowth of the ancient modes. Through subtle alterations of timbre and volume, the members of the quartet achieved different degrees of density and buoyancy. In the course of the evening Christopher Otto and Ari Streisfeld took turns playing the first violin parts, and in “Chant” it was Mr. Streisfeld who was given the more soloistic phrases, which he shaped with a natural rubato and a smidgen of sweet vibrato.”
- Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim, The New York Times

Click here for video streaming at METMEDIA
To view Chant forward to 8:25 (music begins at 9:30)

Click here for audio streaming at WQXR
To hear Chant forward to 8 minutes (music begins at 9:05)

Chant will receive its West Coast premiere at The Da Camera Society of Mount St. Mary’s College in L.A. on February 10, 2013

FILM FESTIVALS AND PERFORMING ARTS CENTERS PRESENT

Just Ancient Loops
(click on link to hear samples)

Film by Bill Morrison
Music by Michael Harrison
Cellos performed by Maya Beiser
Produced by Bill Morrison, Hypnotic Pictures
Steve Acunto and Capolavori Productions

Sundance Film Festival
Cellist Maya Beiser performs Just Ancient Loops with the film, presented by the
Sundance Institute Film Music Program at the Sundance Film Festival Music Café

Film Festival Showings

International Film Festival Rotterdam
Clermont-Ferrand Short Film Festival
The Walker Arts Center

About Bill Morrison

“One of the most adventurous American filmmakers”
- Variety

Over the past twenty years Bill Morrison has built a filmography of more than thirty projects that have been presented in theaters, museums, galleries and concert halls worldwide. His work often makes use of rare archival footage in which forgotten film imagery is reframed as part of our collective mythology.

Morrison’s films are in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, The Nederlands Filmmuseum, and The Library of Congress. He is a Guggenheim fellow and has received the Alpert Award for the Arts, an NEA Creativity Grant, a Creative Capital grant, and a fellowship from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. His work with Ridge Theater has been recognized with two Bessie awards and an Obie Award.

Using archival footage, chemical processes and animation, Bill Morrison presents a unique view of the heavens inspired by the traditional notion of ‘music of the spheres.’ The cello becomes an ‘Über-instrument,’ laying down drones, building rhythmical grooves on top of each other, singing melismatic melodies, and reaching up to the stratosphere as the music evolves and builds into a massive, exhilarating climax.

ON MICHAEL HARRISON AND MAYA BEISER’S NEW CD TIME LOOPS INCLUDING, JUST ANCIENT LOOPS

“The cello is an ideal instrument for extensive multi-layering in performance-whether via pre-recorded tracks or live ensemble of multiple instruments-and arguably one of the performers who most expertly utilizes pre-recorded layers of sound is Maya Beiser. For the recording Time Loops she teams up with composer and pianist Michael Harrison to perform a number of Harrison’s works inspired by “music from ancient Greece and the Renaissance, Indian ragas and Minimalism.” All of his music is performed in just intonation, and the result is an ear-openingly clear, bright sound that fits the instrument beautifully and highlights the ecstatic, spiritual nature of the compositions.

The album begins with the three-movement Just Ancient Loops, which is by far the strongest and most engaging work on the disc. The first movement, titled “Genesis,” opens with bubbling, virtuosic pizzicato lines over a steady drone. This is soon joined by soaring melodic lines juxtaposed with hunks of chordal material that take a loose chorus-verse song format. The layers gradually pile up on one another and are then stripped away to reveal more minimal textures with opening lines peeking out from the melodic forest, only to snowball again and again.”
- Alexandra Gardner, New Music Box

“Michael Harrison’s Just Ancient Loops, an appealing mix of live and recorded cello lines, raga-inspired drones and Minimalist rhythms performed by Maya Beiser, was enhanced by Bill Morrison’s film, recorded on archival and decaying celluloid, and repurposed for Georges Méliès-style fantasy and sublimity.”
- Steve Smith, The New York Times

“The Bang on a Can Marathon is always good for a spectacle or two. The day’s glitziest work was Michael Harrison’s Just Ancient Loops, which cellist Maya Beiser performed along with some 20 electronic versions of herself.”
- Richard Gehr, The Village Voice

“…a masterpiece composed of multi-layered cello tracks… absolutely stunning.”
- Sam Reising, I Care if You Listen

‘Catching Net’ is a huge dirty bomb of a double album that’s going to detonate right under everyone’s cosy assumptions of what it is to be a ‘new music’ composer. Brooklyn­ based  Eli Keszler, 29, describes himself as a Conservatory, where he studied composition with  composer/improvisers Ran  Blake  and Anthony Coleman, while  developing ideas about visual art.If Keszler’s story sounds familiar- you’re right, hardly a week goes by without some street-cred-starved composer talking up their punk ‘past’ to promo their latest mainstream marvel in  The Guardian- he’s  the  real  deal. His music is pathologically determined notto please and you  just know he has spent some pretty sordid nights in CBGB and other New York palaces of punk.Cold Pin is a sound-art installation around which musicians are asked  to respond spontaneously. Strung-up piano wires  are pummelled by a choir of automated beaters, unpredictable patterns reeling out from Keszler’s carefully composed engineering. Improvisation is usually, by definition, a profoundly social  activity; Keszler, though, carves  up the  musical space differently.

He drags living and  breathing musicians – including his own  detail-obsessed, busier­ than-you-think-is-possible drumming- into the  realm of machine music,  a combination that finds  vulnerable beauty within the surface ugliness by highlighting the  age-old fear  of queried boundaries between man  and  machine.The music is most characterful when faceless;  as trumpeter Greg Kelley, an exemplary presence otherwise, snugs slightly too  closely to jazz phraseology in the  live version of Cold Pin, the focus  is noticeably diminished. Catching Net pairs  the  Cold Pin installation with  a composed score for string quartet and  piano but  those ecstatic levels of energy and  the  basic sound world change not a jot. Which means Keszler has found ways of communicating the fantastical sounds inside his head  with  notation and  with  no notation. He’s on to something special.

Philip Clark, Gramophone Magazine

Dusted Magazine

“According to Eli Keszler, the way he makes his music is the least interesting aspect of his work. His audience might disagree; seeing what unleashes his complex sonance patterns sounds pretty interesting to me. When Keszler constructs sound, it’s an architectural work, including not just instruments and performers, but the way intonation fills and co-opts a vertical space. Everything is part of the sound, except, ironically, Keszler himself. The sonority is part of a continuum, a previously existing entity he merely brings to our notice. As if to underline this point, criticism doesn’t affect him. He claims it is like reading the critique of a mathematical formula.

In removing himself from the work (his words), he opens up a spatial enormity that presents itself as a listening opportunity on a grand scale. It may seem ambiguous to say a sound is “huge,” until you hear the recordings of Keszler’s latest offering. Catching Net is a collection of selected installations and compositions Keszler has created during the last two years, a giant double disc of various modifications of a single idea. For example, the “Cold Pin” tracks derived from an installation with piano wires interfused at one point into the dome of the Cyclorama at the Boston Center for the Arts that rose over 25 feet, sometimes performing with an ensemble, sometimes without. The “Collecting Basin” is a giant of an installation set up at the McNeil Street Pumping Station during the MSPS new music festival in 2011. All the works are visual, too, and this disc pays homage to the images through beautiful photographs and images taken from each exhibition. However, Catching Net allows for the opening up of the sound as its own experience, building on the visual only in its influence upon the performance. In this way, Keszler here expands, or stretches, the work, bringing the listening experience to the fore and sublimating the observed.

The order of the works replaces some of the removed structure of the imposing visuals. By starting with the energetic drumming and frenzied compositional pieces from the “Cold Pin,” Keszler offers up some solid ground on which to start the journey. By the time we reach the third recording, the Boston ensemble has drifted up in the mix, and Keszler’s drums and enormous strings take on an almost muted underplaying effect, though you can hear the latter as he thumbs out his own unrelenting forward march”  To Read the complete review at Dusted Magazine go to http://www.dustedmagazine.com/reviews/7494

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Tiny Mix Tapes Review of Catching Net

Past reviews include:

“L-Carrier ,” demonstrates another facet of Mr. Keszler’s work: the construction of large-scale, interactive installation pieces, which can function alone or in tandem with live performers. (“Catching Net,” a two-CD set newly issued on the German label Pan, includes contrasting versions of a similarly conceived piece.) In essence “L-Carrier” is an installation of piano wires from 3 to 70 feet long, amplified and struck with mechanical beaters triggered by input from a remote Web page hosted by Turbulence, a Web-art initiative.

“At Eyebeam, Mr. Keszler’s spindly lattice stretches across a gallery wall and extends to the ceiling beams, filling the reverberant space with the steely pangs and groans of a ghost ship rocking on a river’s currents. For Thursday’s opening-night event, presented by Eyebeam and Turbulence in conjunction with the Issue Project Room’s Darmstadt Institute, Mr. Keszler led an octet in a live version of the work.

Anthony Coleman, playing Farfisa organ, and Geoff Mullen, who applied metal bolts and a glass slide to a partly unstrung electric guitar, worked mostly in tandem with Mr. Keszler’s busy flux. Ashley Paul, on clarinet and alto saxophone, and Reuben Son, a bassoonist, provided long, slightly funereal tones; the violinists C. Spencer Yeh and Catherine Lamb and the cellist Alex Waterman countered with warm sustained chords and flitting squeals.

For just over an hour Mr. Keszler’s music waxed and waned, the installation clanging and groaning along with the performers. At times you’d swear that the mechanical beaters were assessing what the ensemble’s sounds needed: a rude jolt here, a complementary hush there. Artful, perplexing and endlessly fascinating, it could just as well have been magic.”

- Steve Smith, The New York Times

“Keszler’s latest release, Catching Net, certainly pushes past typical record-length boundaries. A double CD surrounded by selected sketches, schematics and scores for the pieces included, Catching Net is an attempt to take a few very basic thoughts and build teeming, interactive worlds of sound with them. A 10-minute version of “Collecting Basin” suggests an impossibly low-strung and large upright bass being bowed the cliffs of the Grand Canyon. The remaining five pieces, though, are all variations on “Cold Pin”, a seemingly infinite premise that Keszler explored last year on a two-track LP of the same name.

The first disc opens with three distinct versions of “Cold Pin”, an idea that uses more than a dozen motors to beat and brush multiple piano wires stretched through a large space; oftentimes, as Keszler controls the tiny machines, a loosely instructed group of upper echelon improvisers plays around and in between the sounds of the strings.

On these three takes, the foundation remains constant, but the result varies wildly. “Cold Pin 3″ is ecstatic and shrieking, with Geoff Mullen’s guitar passing long, snarling notes through a melee of percussion and horn sighs; the much-shorter “Cold Pin 2″, however, suggests a thorough deconstruction of Oval’s electronica glitches, with a thousand tiny sounds flashing and snapping above a powerful subdural rumble. At set’s end, the machines play by themselves, showing the firmament to the other atmosphere. And though it goes by the name “Catching Net”, the title track and this collection’s highlight is “Cold Pin” reworked for string quartet and piano, with the musicians playing from scores rather than suggestions this time. Dynamic to the point of volatility, the 16-minute slinks and surges, grows quiet and blasts back in at triple volume– all very surprising for a piece that, by this point in the collection, has already been presented three times…The complicated relationships between composition and improvisation, between installations and recordings of the same are just two of the binaries Catching Net tests. There’s also the idea of the human responding to the machine and the machine responding to the human controller. Keszler avoids laptops in his work, making the sounds more prone to chance and error and unexpected achievement. That seems appropriate for a composer who first rose through the ranks of punk rock and still plays in Red Horse, a clattering act described by NPR’s Lars Gotrich as an “almost industrial-punk duo.”

- Pitchfork Magazine

Eli Keszler: The Violent New Worlds of Catching Net; “L-Carrier”

What does it mean to be a multimedia artist today? For 28 year-old American composer/percussionist Eli Keszler (www.elikeszler.com), the answer might not be what you would expect.
Keszler–whose new art installation L-Carrierrecently opened on June 7 at Eyebeam Art & Technology Center in New York City (video premiere below)–frequently combines elements of sound, visual art, and mechanical engineering to create highly immersive sonic environments rooted in the tactile world.

With his double album Catching Net, released on June 5 by the German record label PAN, Keszler continues to do what few artists are able to do — effectively translate his installations into engaging audio recordings. The installation documented prominently here, with both previously released and new iterations, is Cold Pin. The artist’s press release explains the process most succinctly: “Keszler’s installations employ piano wires of varying lengths; these are struck, scraped, and vibrated by microprocessor-controlled motorized arms…” The artist has in essence created a mechanical percussionist that can either produce its own “solo performance” or be accompanied by Keszler and other more “organic” musicians.

A musical abstract expressionist, Keszler excises anything that suggests a melody in favor of myriad textures with drones that blare, sear, and scrape their way across the soundscape. His creations are unapologetically violent, and none of the double album’s six tracks last less than ten minutes. It seems as if Keszler is attempting to break us from the preconceived notion that percussion’s primary role is to establish the rhythmic foundation of the music. ThroughoutCatching Net, the percussionist elicits seemingly countless colors from his drums, crotales, and other percussion instruments. In this way, Keszler gives the percussion family equal footing alongside the other instruments, rather than relegating it to less-than-musical status. His approach to the other instruments’ timbral possibilities is similarly inventive.

The Disc One opener, entitled “Cold Pin 1,” features a relentless barrage of sound — various drum rolls, clatters, clinks, screeches, tapping, and ear-ringing frequencies. This visceral onslaught gives way to “Cold Pin 2″: whirring sounds reminiscent of baseball cards stuck in bicycle spokes and pattering akin to rainfall provide a quieter, if no less daunting aural environment. As the composition progresses, signs of enigmatic and unspecified life suddenly appear — frog-like croaking, primal squealing that sounds like electric guitars, bird-like chirping, low growls and gongs. With his double album Catching Net, released on June 5 by the German record label PAN, Keszler continues to do what few artists are able to do — effectively translate his installations into engaging audio recordings. The installation documented prominently here, with both previously released and new iterations, is Cold Pin…A musical abstract expressionist, Keszler excises anything that suggests a melody in favor of myriad textures with drones that blare, sear, and scrape their way across the soundscape. His creations are unapologetically violent, and none of the double album’s six tracks last less than ten minutes. It seems as if Keszler is attempting to break us from the preconceived notion that percussion’s primary role is to establish the rhythmic foundation of the music. ThroughoutCatching Net, the percussionist elicits seemingly countless colors from his drums, crotales, and other percussion instruments. In this way, Keszler gives the percussion family equal footing alongside the other instruments, rather than relegating it to less-than-musical status. His approach to the other instruments’ timbral possibilities is similarly inventive.

The double album Catching Net confirms Eli Keszler as an artist whose distinctive blend of soundscape and architectural engineering transcends the perceived limitations of percussion, and in the process, forges new sound worlds.

- Daniel J. Kushner, Huffington Post

“American opera’s newest star.”

- The New Yorker

“Soldier Songs Rocks.  … David T. Little brilliantly expounds upon the life of the soldier through three archetypal phases of life…His music is both complex and simple…using percussion liberally to utilising the simple sounds of a flute or clarinet to convey the enormous range of emotions the Soldier experiences.”

- The Houston Chronicle

“one of the most promising stars on the 21st century opera scene”

- Olivia Giovetti, WQXR/Q2

“perhaps the most prominent member of a group of young composers who are reviving the unabashedly political music-theatre tradition of Marc Blitzstein.”

- The New Yorker: featured in Goings on About Town

“among the brightest lights to emerge in recent seasons.” Steve Smith,

- Time Out New York

Steve Smith, New York Times Review

“Shock and awe’ entered the mainstream vocabulary in 2003, when the term denoted the military doctrine of an overwhelming display of force that would be used in the invasion of Iraq. That the designation can have a markedly different meaning to the men and women who serve in the armed forces is a central point of “Soldier Songs,” a musical theater piece by the composer David T. Little. When the work had its New York premiere on Friday night at Pace University’s Schimmel Center for the Arts, shock and awe took on a new meaning: that of staging aesthetic.

Mr. Little completed “Soldier Songs” in 2006, basing its libretto on interviews he conducted with family members and schoolmates who served in World War II, Vietnam, the gulf wars and Afghanistan. In just under an hour the work depicts episodes from a nameless protagonist’s lifetime involvement with military conflict, from boyhood sandbox skirmishes and first-person-shooter video games to the terror of actual battle and the anguished loss that comes in its wake.

Mr. Little also alludes to mass-media saturation; a virtual-reality distancing between a soldier’s actions and their results; and jingoistic longing for military dominance. At several points he uses the actual recorded voices of veterans: notably, both female and male.

Nursed through several earlier incarnations by a loyal producer, Beth Morrison, “Soldier Songs” had its formal premiere in a staging directed by Yuval Sharon, introduced in 2011 at the International Festival of Arts and Ideas in New Haven and jointly mounted in New York by Pace Presents and Prototype, the ambitious new festival Ms. Morrison helped to found.

Mr. Little’s gifts for setting text comfortably and effectively, and for writing music informed by Minimalism and rock but slavishly indebted to neither, are evident throughout the briskly paced work. But the concerns he conveys in “Soldier Songs” are seldom comfortable or pleasant, and Mr. Sharon’s production detonates them in vivid, sometimes harrowing ways.

Nearly all the action is concentrated in a patch of center stage, a sandbox with a seesaw, hidden at times by fabric walls that rise and fall. Monitors strewed around the set flash video-game images and patriotic slogans. An overhead screen and bare lighting rigs frame the stage, at one point producing blinding flashes and deafening outbursts that convey precisely shock and awe.

As the Soldier, the sole vocalist apart from isolated shouts from the instrumentalists, Christopher Burchett marched, paced and caromed around the set, producing a robust baritone, a childish falsetto and a power-mad bark by turns. As a stage presence he was fearless; stripped to his underwear for a scene of rabid battle preparation, he evoked superheroic posturing and vulnerability simultaneously.

Zac Ballard, a child actor, was a haunting foil as the Boy, serving as the Soldier’s playmate and mirror. Upstage in plain view, Todd Reynolds conducted Newspeak, Mr. Little’s instrumental ensemble, in a performance that aptly balanced precision, nuance and impact.

In program notes distributed on Friday, Mr. Little — who wrote about mixing politics and art for The New York Times — claimed that “Soldier Songs” was not meant to convey a specific point or message. Maybe so, but Mr. Sharon’s confrontational staging emphatically underscored implicit antiwar sentiments. At once seductive and repulsive, the presentation provided further evidence of Mr. Little’s fast-rising stock as a vital theatrical creator.”

PROTOTYPE is a joint endeavor of HERE and Beth Morrison Projects.
Music and Libretto by David T. Little
Directed by Yuval Sharon
Conducted by Todd Reynolds
Starring Christopher Burchett and Zac Ballard
Featuring the ensemble Newspeak
Scenic and Costume Design by Chisato Uno
Animation Design by Corey Michael Smithson
Lighting Design by Christopher Kuhl
Associate Production Design by Brian Ireland

Eliot and Bill Frisell will appear at Da Camera of Houston
on January 26 and in Italy on February 1-5, 2013

Review of BACH/PAGANINI Recital,
Bad Aibling, Germany
A “Teufelsgitarrist” (Devil’s Guitarist)
Eliot Fisk at the “Saitenspreungen” Festival in Bad AIbling
by Rainer W. Janka

The American born, citizen of the world (“Weltbuerger”) , Eliot Fisk, who looks a bit like Woody Allen when he plays the part of the elegant Professor, teaches in 5 languages at the Mozarteum in Salzburg. At his concert in Bad Aibling as part of the “Saitenspreungen” series he spoke in excellent German about his program that included “only” works of Bach and Paganini. Fisk compared the two composers with film directors Federico Fellini and Ingmar Bergman: like them Bach and Paganini are operalike, colorful, surprising to Fisk: Paganini as Fellini; and Bach, profound, the absolute master, as Bergman.

When Fisk plays, with his head very near to the guitar, he seems to melt into the instrument. He plays the guitar not just with his fingers but with his entire body, which he often practically raises off the chair and at times almost violently, at times rocking quietly.

When he plays the Capricci op. 1, of the devil’s violinist Paganini, Fisk himself turns into a “devilʼs guitarist” to whom neck breaking leaps, insanely difficult arpeggios, lightening runs, and quick position changes apparently present no difficulties. During all these difficulties he can still create clearly recognizable melodic and harmonic structures which certainly dance along the outer edges of what is possible on the guitar. On the other hand, in the Sarabande of the Bach lute Suite BWV 995 he conjures a sudden meditative stillness: a single melodic line that leaves us breathless. Rather than the breath of the devil here one felt that of God. Surging fullness, mathematical concision in the fugues, delicate trills in with a single finger, artistic virtuosity and the breathtaking dance of the fingers was also at hand in Bachʼs Cello Suite BWV 1009, like everything else in the program also transcribed by Fisk. This devilʼs violinist contrasted with the breath of God was always lucid able to articulate walking bass lines, dramatize the conclusions of fugal movements and differentiate between leading melody and accompanying figuration.

The audience experienced as described by presenter Thomas Jahn a literally once in a lifetime concert, because Eliot Fisk played this program only on this evening. The delighted audience applauded for 3 encores before the Guitar professor laughing lightly departed from the stage and the still amazed public

Eliot Fisk is hailed by critics at 2012 Córdoba Guitar Festival

“The beautiful fusion in his music of Domenico Scarlatti makes Italian and Spanish his experience was perfectly reflected in the interpretation of Eliot Fisk made six of his sonatas, presented in a very successful tonal order, culminating in an extraordinary transcription of the K.178 in which all his virtuosity displayed in the exhibition of contrast measures it contains. He completed the first half with a superb version of the Suite BWV 1009 for cello by JS Bach, culminating in a masterful way in the jig that closes after a sarabande courante and prodigiously recreated.”

“His interpretation of Seville and Cordoba can be considered an absolute reference, the light that he gave his ring in the first and poetic serenity that was evident in the second. The emergence of music Paganini was impossible to contrast accused the program repertoire. Fisk offered the wide range of its technical resources holding tight harmonic diversity that fail to occur on the violin, an instrument of the original version, thus promoting the passion and vehemence of these singular works. The merger of Fisk with his guitar as an organic whole had the highest expression in the Capriccio no. 24 where he boasts unimaginable variations, closing a big recital of not less awaited reunion.” Antonio Jose Canton

“…the second half with Spanish music was played masterfully. I have not seen a more classical flamenco guitarist play with such feeling. The music of Granados, Ernesto Haffter (Habanera wonder why!) And Albeniz on guitar was sublime Fisk .

“Eliot Fisk is a guitarist with great personality, he brings any music to their land and makes it his own. He is both a communicative and an affable man, with a unique staging…he was thanked with a standing ovation.” Saenz Javier Lopez, Diario Córdoba.

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Derek Bermel: Canzonas Americanas
Notes

“There is another possibility,” John Schaefer mused. We had just discussed all of the repertoire I could think of that might fit the 2003 New Sounds Live concert on which he had invited Alarm Will Sound to perform. I always brace myself when a presenter moves obliquely like that, keeping my fingers crossed that the piece being foisted on us won’t be dreadful. John explained that New Sounds Live had commissioned a Derek Bermel work a few years before called Three Rivers that had never really been “nailed,” and would we be interested in tackling it: I’d known Derek from my undergraduate years at MIT, where I’d premiered his youthfully raucous orchestra piece Lukwanda Sings with the MIT Premiere Orchestra in 1993 (I recently presented Derek with the original tape of that performance as a birthday gift). John brought Derek’s piece up cautiously, not wanting to even send us the score unless we thought we might be up to it – “it’s a tricky piece and calls for some improvising too,” John said. “If you have any doubts, better just to pass.”

We didn’t pass. And that New Sounds Live concert began what has been one of Alarm Will Sound’s longest running and most fruitful composer collaborations. Derek has turned out to be an ideal match for Alarm Will Sound. He shares our wide-ranging and eclectic musical interests: Derek has studied Thracian folk music with Nikola Iliev, Brazilian caxixi with Julio G?es, and Ghanaian gyil with Ngmen Baaru and Bernard Woma; and he’s collaborated with artists as diverse as Wynton Marsalis, Paquito D’Rivera, and Mos Def. Derek relishes Alarm Will Sound’s love of complexity: he arranged Conlon Nancarrow’s ferociously complex Study 3A for Alarm Will Sound’s a/rhythmia project in 2007, and many of the works on this album show Derek’s fascination with Nancarrow-esque rhythmic layering. And Derek also shares Alarm Will Sound’s joy in stylistic eclecticism. As great American composers like Copland, Gershwin, and Ellington have done before him, Derek synthesizes the diverse musical languages of his time into a unique, thoroughly individual American voice.

This album draws together all of Derek’s works for Alarm Will Sound’s sinfonietta instrumentation, the one-on-a-part chamber orchestra that Derek calls “the orchestra of the 20th century, which developed with the particular needs and preoccupations of composers of our era.” This sort of instrumentation has served Derek particularly well, marrying the wild range of instrumental colors that he expertly harnesses with the tight rhythmic ensemble that his music demands.

Three Rivers (2001) is the work that John Schaefer brought to Alarm Will Sound’s attention in 2002, and is the piece that introduced us to Derek’s music. It remains the piece of his that we’ve played most. Although Three Rivers was written originally for the Kitchen House Blend band, Derek reworked it significantly for Alarm Will Sound in 2002. The rivers of the title are three different musical streams which are introduced separately but eventually layered on top of one another. The piece’s mix of challenges and characters – the laid-back “lugubrious funk” of the opening, the caffeinated high-speed unison passagework, and the two full-ensemble improvisatory passages – made it a great fit for our interests, and set the stage for our long-running collaboration with Derek.

This juxtaposition of vernacular musical ideas with complex rhythmic layering is inspired by Nancarrow’s music and is a recurring interest of Derek’s. In no piece is his exploration of these ideas as intense or focused as in the oldest work on this album, Continental Divide (1996), which was written when Derek was studying with Louis Andriessen in Amsterdam. Derek writes that the way in which the piece kicks musical ideas abruptly from one tempo to another was inspired by Stephen Hawking and Alan Guth’s writings about bursts of expansion in the growth of the universe. There’s a methodical single-mindedness about the piece that is distinct from his recent works, though the ground pioneered here is territory that Derek has moved through more fluidly in later works. The mix of extreme rhythmic layering and grooves that need to “feel” right no matter how complex the context makes Continental Divide one of the most challenging pieces in Alarm Will Sound’s repertoire (topped only, perhaps, by Derek’s own arrangement of Nancarrow’s Study 3A).

Derek studied West African music in Ghana in 1992, where he learned to play the gyil, a 14-to-18-key instrument resembling a Western marimba. Ghanian musical ideas have stuck with Derek: he played gyil in his own band, TONK; he brought one of his gyil teachers, Bernard Woma, and Alarm Will Sound together for a unique performance at Carnegie Hall; and he is returning to Ghana yet again in the coming year. Hot Zone (1999) draws on rhythms and melodies Derek learned during his studies in Africa, treating them in ways that emerge from his own highly-skilled approach to harmony and his fascination with
juxtaposing layers of differently flowing and apparently unrelated music in ingenious ways. Clashing dissonances (which appear in many of the works on this album) here are used to conjure up the subtle pitch inflections of the gyil. Derek even honors the local tradition of honoring one’s teachers in song: in the slower sections of the piece, Alarm Will Sound’s violin players (Caleb Burhans and Courtney Orlando) sing Derek’s homage to his gyil teachers Ngmen Baaru, Richard Na-Ile, and Bernard Woma in the Dagaba language.

While many of Derek’s works for chamber orchestra have included vocalization in some form, Natural Selection (2000) is the one in which that use is most involved, with the texts (by Derek’s long-time collaborator Wendy S. Walters and Naomi Shihab Nye) summoning up the myriad moods and characters that guide and shape the instrumental writing. The menagerie of song titles – One Fly, Spider Love, Got My Bag of Brown Shoes, and Dog – belie the very human stories they tell: of frustrated and predatory love in the first two songs, of urban blight in the third (Poet Wendy Walters is from Detroit, and the song could refer to the decay of her home town). The result is one of Derek’s richest and most humorous scores, which summons and draws from a kaleidoscope of styles: cabaret and singspiel in the first two songs; spoken word, recitative, gospel, and scat in the third; and Native American song in the beautiful and simple final lyric. Natural Selection was drawn together from separate songs originally written for smaller ensembles, and three of the four were composed for baritone Timothy Jones, who sings them on this recording.

At the End of the World (2002) is the most straightforward and compact piece of the group. It sets an early, short poem by novelist Nicole Krauss which imagines a genesis that tries to improve on the world as we know it, but arrives at the conclusion that everything could only be as it is.

“I generally like to begin a piece from a place of simplicity,” Derek writes, and all of the works on the album begin simply, though maybe none more than the most recent work on the disc, Canzonas Americanas (2010), which was commissioned for the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Green Umbrella series. The first movement starts with a plain, pentatonic tune that seems to have been dug up from an old American folk song or maybe a forgotten Aaron Copland Ballet. But Dudamel had asked Derek to examine connections between North and South American musical traditions, and this fragment of apparent Americana becomes a virtual exhibit of such connections, as it becomes transformed through encounters with myriad styles: Latin rhythms, blues, jazz, rock, and funk. (Copland,like Derek, spent much time in Latin America and incorporated Latin influences into his music.) To prepare for writing the piece, Derek returned to Brazil for a month. “I spent days re-familiarizing my fingers with ch?ros, bossa nova, and samba standards,” Derek recalled, “and nights jamming with friends
in clubs.” Dudamel’s assignment was perfect for a composer with Derek’s musical roots, and the piece moves fluidly between diverse styles in a way only possible for a composer with Derek’s fluency in so many musical languages. Derek continues to explore many interests from his earliest works – the first and third movements involve the same sort of Nancarrow-inspired rhythmic layering as Derek’s early Continental Divide – the single-minded focus of those younger works is replaced by an assured and mature openness and subtlety. Like Natural Selection, Canzonas Americanas ends in a fourth movement which is a
contemplative song, in this case one inspired by the “gentle seductiveness” of the island of Itaparica in Bahia. The song was written for Luciana Souza, who sings it on this recording, and the four movements of Canzonas Americanas are dedicated to some of the many friends and colleagues Derek has cultivated in his wide-ranging musical career: the first to John Adams, the second to the late architect Silvio Robatto’s family, the third to Gustavo Dudamel, and the fourth to John Corigliano for his 70th birthday. Canzonas Americanas establishes Derek as a composer firmly in an American tradition; like Copland,
Ives, Gershwin, and Ellington before him, Derek draws together numerous contemporary influences and stylistic roots into a unique voice that is tuneful andrich, engaging and sophisticated. – by Alan Pierson
—
Canzonas Americanas marries two postmodern forces – American composer/clarinetist Derek Bermel and the contemporary chamber band Alarm Will Sound. Sharing a joy for stylistic eclecticism and complexity, they form a remarkable recording that combines Bermel’s wide range of instrumental colors with the virtuosic rhythmic ensemble that his music demands. This marks Bermel?s follow-up CD to the Grammy-nominated Derek Bermel: Voices (BMOP/sound) album of large orchestral works.

“Derek Bermel synthesizes the diverse musical languages of his time into a unique, thoroughly individual American voice that is tuneful and rich, engaging and sophisticated,” says Alan Pierson, Artistic Director/Conductor of Alarm Will Sound and the Brooklyn Philharmonic. “Canzonas Americanas establishes Derek as a composer firmly in an American tradition like Copland, Ives, Gershwin, and Ellington before him.”

The versatile Bermel has been widely hailed for his creativity and theatricality. He re-imagines the sounds of indigenous world music, jazz, and rock in his uniquely virtuosic and dynamic compositions. Canzonas Americanas takes listeners on a rhythmic and sonic journey – from the yearning, pulsating choros at a club in Rio di Janeiro to the intricate, colorful xylophone music of a West African village. “Music is a prism through which I see and reflect the world,” says Bermel.

The title track “Canzonas Americanas” (2010) was commissioned and premiered by the Los Angeles Philharmonic led by Gustavo Dudamel. Through a wide array of American popular music idioms and Latin rhythms, “Canzonas Americanas” evokes the spirit of Gershwin, Ellington, Villa-Lobos, Bernstein, and other trailblazing composers who have been indelibly influenced by both North and South American musical traditions.
Based on Lobi xylophone music of Ghana, “Hot Zone” (1995) draws from Bermel’s study of the West African gyil in 1992 with Ngmen Baaru. Bermel is scheduled to return to Ghana next year. “Hot Zone” has been described as elegantly contrasting “the heavily syncopated tutti rhythms with the melismatic solo writing for English horn and cello” (New Music Box).

Bermel’s fanciful energy is on full display in “Continental Divide” (1996), written during a period when Bermel was traveling back and forth between New York and Amsterdam (where he studied with Louis Andriessen). The piece is inspired by both the Continental Divide, the dividing line in the U.S. where water flows to different oceans, and by the chapter “The Origin and Fate of the Universe” in Stephen Hawking’s Brief History of Time. The quick leaps and complex relations (known as metric modulations) from one tempo to the next mirror Hawking’s and Alan Guth’s “bursts of expansion” in the early universe. According to Pierson, “Continental Divide” remains one of the most challenging pieces in Alarm Will Sound’s repertoire.

From frenetic to funky to flowing, the three rhythmic currents of Three Rivers (2001) are manipulated by Bermel to create a work whose character is ever-changing. It toys with radically contrasting musical elements – controlled v. uncontrolled, fused v. pulled apart, mixed v. collided, earthy v. angular – and calls for abrupt shifts of temperament from the ensemble. Alarm Will Sound has made Three Rivers a specialty. According to the Chicago Tribune, “this is one sonic knockout I’d love to hear again.”

Bermel’s skill in characterization comes to the fore in the two vocal settings on this disc. Natural Selection (2000), a four-song cycle for baritone and ensemble, is an edgy and amusing series based on animal portraits written by poets Wendy S. Walters and Naomi Shihab Nye. The songs’ titles – “One Fly”, “Spider Love”, “Bag of Brown Shoes”, and “Dog” – disguise the true humanistic stories they tell. “At the End of the World” (2000) for soprano and large ensemble was commissioned and premiered by the Albany Symphony’s avant-garde unit The Dogs of Desire to celebrate the 350th anniversary of the founding of Albany, New York. It?s a compelling setting of an early existentialist poem by Nicole Krauss.