A home for new and unusual music from all corners of the classical genre, brought to you by the power of public media. Second Inversion is a service of Classical KING FM 98.1.
Join us for a special LIVE broadcast this Friday, March 18 at 7:30pm (PT) of pianist Jeremy Denk presented by the UW World Series at Meany Hall on the University of Washington campus. Denk is the winner of a 2013 MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, the 2014 Avery Fisher Prize and Musical America’s 2014 Instrumentalist of the Year award. This Friday’s program features a huge variety of music, some newer, some older, all worth tuning in for or better yet, coming to see live if you’re in Seattle! The New York Times called Denk a musician “you want to hear no matter what he performs.”
Program: Bach: English Suite No. 3 in G Minor, BWV 808 Byrd: Ninth Pavan and Galliard in D Minor from Lady Nevell’s Book Bolcom: Graceful Ghost Rag Hayden/Joplin: Sunflower Slow Drag Tatum: Tea for Two Hindemith: Ragtime from 1922 Stravinsky: Piano-Rag-Music Ives: Ragtime Dances No. 3 & 4 from Four Ragtime Dances Nancarrow: Canon Lambert: Pilgrim’s Chorus from Tannhauser Bach: Goldberg Variations, BWV 988
SI host Geoffrey Larson will keep you company on the stream for the broadcast on Friday night and if you come to the show, say hello to Maggie Molloy in the lobby, enter to win a fabulous prize, and grab some SI swag!
David Stock did not hold back. That one thing about the late composer is for sure; his music was unfettered by any sort of self-consciousness or reticence. His works are an unabashed good time, and the bluntness of his titles reflect a musical personality full of good humor: Plenty of Horn, Blast!, Sax Appeal, Knockout. David was an up-front kind of guy, and was profoundly focused on creating, promoting, and nurturing the finest musical art. He left an indelible mark on the American musical landscape in long associations with some of the country’s finest orchestras. Through his creation of the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble and his work with other Pittsburgh institutions, he brought amazing culture and musical vitality to the Rust Belt.
Who better than Gil Rose and the Boston Modern Orchestra Project to do justice to his work? Rose shares Stock’s ties to Pittsburgh (both were educated at Carnegie Mellon), and his no-nonsense, quality-above-all-else attitude. In response to the often modest size of BMOP’s concert audience, Rose told the New York Times, “I don’t like to put a lot of money into marketing because I’d rather put it on the stage.” He has focused on building an orchestra of the Boston area’s finest freelancers and focusing their collective musical might into the most consummate performances of contemporary music, with a special emphasis on preserving the music of living composers in high-quality recordings with his own BMOP/Sound label.
Rose and BMOP explore Stock’s concertos in this latest release, teaming up with soloists who were close with the composer. The Cuban-born violinist Andrés Cárdenes premiered Stock’s earlier 1995 Violin Concerto with Pittsburgh Symphony during his time as that orchestra’s concertmaster, and aside from his usual spectacular virtuosity brings a special affinity to this music. He seemingly devours every note and rhythm in the Concierto Cubano (2000), particularly in the tango-like third movement “Dancing, with fire.” That third movement is not far from the textures and harmonies of the final movement of Copland’s Clarinet Concerto (both works are scored for soloist and string orchestra), revealing some of the underpinnings of the Americana in Stock’s orchestral sound. Though BMOP’s intonation begins to fray slightly in the course of some rapid and challenging passagework, the orchestra executes this music with resolute confidence and poise under Rose.
Stock’s music is not all pyrotechnics: the lyricism that rounds out the works on this release actually makes the collection quite accessible for newcomers to his music. The second piece on the disc is especially demanding of a special seriousness in addition to the trademark Stock joviality, and oboist Alex Klein is fully committed, giving an almost operatic performance. In Oborama, Stock presents a series of five character pieces that each feature a different instrument, touring us through the oboe family from English horn to musette (piccolo oboe), oboe d’amore, and bass oboe before giving the final word to the standard oboe itself. Klein is an especially adept practitioner of the instrument to excel on all five, giving life to each instrument’s character as portrayed in the five-movement drama. If you know of another work that features five instruments of the oboe family, please tell us. It must have been a rare treat to see this work in live performance – we are super jealous.
There’s more live performance FOMO in Lisa Pegher’s recording of Stock’s Percussion Concerto, which is whoa!-inducing from the start. Stock strikes up an unbalanced dialogue between soloist and orchestra at the outset, with the soloist interjecting thunderously among soft string chords à la Ives’ The Unanswered Question (or the second movement of Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto, with roles reversed). Pegher masterfully captures the underlying tension of the inward-looking second movement (marked “Introspective”), and the soft tones of the marimba never seem to wander aimlessly. She’s right at home as the fully battery is unleashed in the jubilantly syncopated finale, and BMOP is up for the mad scramble of notes as well. Stock has written another fearsome part for the orchestral timpanist in this concerto, and BMOP’s Craig McNutt trades blows with the soloist with aplomb.
I first met David Stock at a Seattle Symphony rehearsal in 2007, when the orchestra was preparing for a performance of his work Blast! under Gerard Schwarz. One of my favorite memories of David comes from one of the many conversations we had at performances of the Pittsburgh Symphony (did he miss a single one?), when I reminded him of that occasion in Seattle. He exclaimed at me from behind his suspenders and massive glasses, “It’s not just Blast, you know, it’s Blast! With an EXCLAMATION POINT!” Speaking of Stock with Jerry Schwarz in Pittsburgh in 2014, Schwarz said to me: “We chose to feature David’s music ina program of the All-Star Orchestra. He always said, ‘It’s not just Blast, you know, it’s Blast! With an EXCLAMATION POINT!’”
David was an unforgettable person, and the infectious character of his music is felt both by those familiar with his work and experiencing it for the first time. Though this latest BMOP release was recorded before his passing in November 2015 and was never meant as a eulogy for the composer, it serves as a fitting tribute, wrapped in the blinding virtuosity, good humor, and friendship that these musicians do best.
Geoffrey Larson is a host on Second Inversion, and is the Music Director of Seattle Metropolitan Chamber Orchestra.
Second Inversion hosts Rachele, Geoffrey, and Maggie S. each share a favorite selection from their Friday playlist!Tune inat the indicated times below to hear these pieces. In the meantime, you’ll hear other great new and unusual music from all corners of the classical genre 24/7!
Andrew Skeet: “Setting Out” from Finding Time (on Sony Records)
The textures of Andrew Skeet’s “Setting Out” seem to glow and shimmer and are so evocative of evening images that it’s no wonder that this music gave birth to an amazing visual creation as well.The videofor this track is a must-see if you enjoy contemporary dance, or minimalist-influenced chamber music, or both. The lighting effects appear to flicker in the same manner as the piano and Skeet’s twinges of electronic effect, visually mirroring the twilight colors of the music. – Geoffrey Larson
Tune in toSecond Inversion in the 1am and 1pm hours to hear this recording.
Glenn Kotche: “The Haunted Suite” from Adventureland (on Cantaloupe Music)
“The Haunted Suite” is a 5 movement work interwoven throughout the album Adventureland by Glenn Kotche. Each vignette depicts an eerie place (Dance, Hive, Furnace, Viaduct, and Treehouse), in a “piano vs. percussion” duel between Lisa Kaplan, Doug Perkins, Matthew Duvall and Yvonne Lam. My favorite movement of the lot is “The Haunted Dance,” which sounds a bit like a music box possessed by dark, mysterious forces with a ghoulish figure instead of a graceful ballerina spinning. Twisted, eerie, and captivating. – Maggie Stapleton
Tune in toSecond Inversionin the 7am and 7pm hours to hear this recording.
Christopher Tin: “Come Tomorrow” from The Drop that Contained the Sea (on Tinwoks Music). Performed by Soweto Gospel Choir, Angel City Chorale & Royal Philharmonic Orchestra.
Do your soul some good and explore the vocal traditions of the Xhosa with an uplifting, spirited choral piece. The Soweto Gospel Choir is an international treasure exuding joy that cannot be faked. Here they sing from Christopher Tin’s beautiful choral album The Drop That Contained The Sea, a collection of 10 vocal works, each sung in a different language and all exploring water in a different form. Climbing through the mist toward the steepest summit is a cinch with “Come Tomorrow” as your exuberant musical companion. – Rachele Hales
Tune in toSecond Inversion in the 8am and 8pm hours to hear this recording.
Whether it’s Seattle Symphony commissioning and recording new works, Wayward Music Series programming adventurous and avant-garde music concerts, or your good friends at Second Inversion providing a multimedia platform for all of it—Seattle prides itself on being one of America’s strongest cultural centers for new and unusual music.
(Photo credit: Kimberly Chin)
But here are two of the newest Seattle new music groups you may not know about: the Universal Language Project and Scrape. You can catch both of them this weekend when they team up to present an innovative concert of new works by Seattle composers Brian Chin and Jim Knapp.
But first things first—who are these guys?
Brian Chin is the artistic director of the Universal Language Project: an innovative concert series rooted in the commissioning and performance of 21st century music and interdisciplinary collaboration. Jim Knapp is the artistic director and resident composer of Scrape: an original music string orchestra with harp and guitar.
The Universal Language Project recently commissioned Knapp and Chin to create a new sound for Scrape featuring soprano soloist Chérie Hughes—the results of which will be performed in two concerts this weekend: one at Soma Towers in Bellevue and the other at Velocity Dance Center on Capitol Hill.
So what’s on the program? Well, let’s just say it’s a new music mashup featuring an imaginary letter, an Eckhart aphorism, an Obama song cycle, and a meditation on Ives. We sat down with Brian Chin to get all the details.
Second Inversion: In many ways contemporary music transcends specific timeframes and concrete qualifiers; the definition tends to be abstract and often subjective. What does “new music” mean to you?
Brian Chin: I actually don’t like the phrase classical because it is confusing. The classical era was over 200 years ago, yet most people think of anything with strings as classical. I think that this is very confusing now, as instruments and genre lines are almost meaningless. I like the phrase “music” better—yet, I see the problems here too. Perhaps we get more general with our use of “orchestral,” “acoustic string,” or “mixed chamber ensemble;” and we all know what “indie band” means. But “contemporary classical” is, by definition, an oxymoron!
SI: Seattle is one of few major U.S. cities that is really blossoming in the contemporary classical music sphere—what do you think makes our music scene here so unique, and in what areas do you think there is potential to improve?
BC: Seattle is a geographic island. This makes for great music to grow, evolve, and emerge in relative isolation. This is great so long as we hit the tipping point of boiling over to the ‘mainland’—as grunge did. The reality is that this is a double-edged sword: I think this is both why we have such great stuff here, but it is hard to find—gone once you do—and difficult to build a following, as you can’t just keep playing the same repertoire over and over. The growing community of practitioners and the “We’re all in this together” spirit is our key to growing Seattle New Music!
SI: What are you most looking forward to with this concert collaboration between Universal Language Project and Scrape?
BC: Scrape is a very diverse ensemble that walks the line between several genres. The music of Jim Knapp is mature, smart, and flippin’ beautiful. As you know, the key aspect of the ULP series is that we strive to bring together diverse musicians and artists in order to create something generative and new. For this show, we added a soprano to Scrape, which brings in a whole new element of text and color. Both Jim and I have contributed pieces for this.
SI: Can you tell me a bit about your piece “The Obamatorio” being performed at this concert?
BC: “The Obamatorio: A Song Cycle for Soprano and Scrape” sets four quotes from Barak Obama to music. Rather than select text that are overtly political, I have chosen Obama words that speak to the universal truths of the human condition. I have brought in a multitude of tools to tell the story.
For example: one movement is set in Central Park and I merge the grinding obstinate of mechanical city music with the nature motives of birds. I used “Messiah’s” bird calls for this. In the moment “Strangers” referencing immigration, I use a smash up of world music styles form Irish jigs to African ostinatos and Middle Eastern vocal techniques to paint Obama’s words.
SI: What composers, artists, or styles of music most influence your work?
BC: Bach, Miles Davis, Stravinsky, John Hollenbeck, Bartók, and Charles Mingus.
SI: What do you hope audiences will take away from this concert?
BC: I hope they have a ton of fun are inspired to do great work!
Performances of this ULP and Scrape collaboration are this Friday, March 11 at 8 p.m. at Soma Towers in Bellevue and Saturday, March 12 at 8 p.m. at Velocity Dance Center on Capitol Hill. For additional information and tickets, click here.
These are just some of the things that ran through my head as I tried to push through the internal noise and jot down a few melodic ideas to match the words in front of me. The negative voice in my head can be quite derisive. I’ll avoid, for your sake, typing the more profane things it comes up with to keep me from making progress.
While that voice was not helpful at all, it was not entirely without ground to stand on. I’d never taken someone else’s words and set them as music before. I’d never written for an ensemble of such size, or a piece of such scope. It was yet another creative stretch past my previous efforts and it was, at times, very painful. There were times when I really did feel like I was faking it until I could make it.
But that’s the thing about doing something for the first time, isn’t it? You don’t know what will happen. Not that you can ever truly know, and be 100% sure, of any future. But at least you can have an experience-based sense of what to expect.
So how did I end up in this stress position, reaching for something new? I tend to say “yes” a lot. It’s one of the things that has been a blessing and a curse. Sometimes, both. In this particular case, I’m super glad that I did say “yes”, because those intense, stressful periods were short, and interspersed with real glimpses of inspiration. Were it not for the deadline, I might have had nothing but joy and a synergetic experience. Truth be told, though, without a deadline I might have never finished. And, once the piece was complete, I had the thoroughly moving experience of performing it with committed and powerful musicians. And there’s more to come!
This project, my setting of Tracy K. Smith‘s poem “Life on Mars”, from her Pulitzer prize winning book Life on Mars was an outgrowth of an earlier collaborative seed. Scott Reed, at the Music Academy of the West, had approached me about working with Tracy at some point, and as an intro to her work, had given me a copy of Life on Mars as well as another one of her books, Duende. I’d read them multiple times when there suddenly was the need for another composer on one of Town Hall Seattle’s concerts full of premieres. We wanted four new works with our available forces – Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire was the big work on the program, scored for Soprano, Violin, Cello, Flute, Clarinet, Piano, and a few doublings – and had run out of contacts with time on their hands. I was convinced to set two of the nine pieces from “Life on Mars” for that concert, and when Music Academy of the West found out I was already in that project, they commissioned me to finish the 9 song cycle.
I chose “Life on Mars” because to me it represented a colorful, modern voice using creative analogies to probe some of the deeper questions about complicity and empathy. Up to that point, the little music I’d written down on paper had been more fanciful in nature; playing with the idea of light traveling through different atmospheres, or exploring the naïve quality of young love. I wanted, this time at least, to look something straight in the face and tell it I was not afraid.
Tracy’s work does this. In “Life on Mars,” we circle around the darkness, toying with theories about what binds us together or pulls us apart. We also take the time to more directly confront episodes of moral error, looking at the horrifying story of a man who kept his daughter in a cage in his basement for years, a girl recounting the rape and destruction wrought on her village, and the actions at Abu Ghraib.
Finding a musical way to embrace the variety of tones, even among those darker passages, was a unique challenge. The nine poems had a few through lines – a character named Tina (a real-life friend and colleague of Tracy’s) muses about scientific connections to emotion and language while the author’s voice responds in the text – and a rhythm of wild fantasy in contrast with the depths of depravity emerges – but my initial and pervading instinct was to follow the many colors within the poems to their most natural musical styles. Thus, I began to search out the most obvious clues and go from there.
One of the first things that jumped out at me was the sarcasm in the poem about Abu Ghraib (“Strung Up”). As I heard a voice in my head speaking the text, enunciation became stronger and a blues rhythm began to emerge. There was no going back from this, and it became a hardcore blues riff with bass clarinet taking center stage along with the soprano. In “They”, where the girl has been dragged from her village, the italicized text and hauntingly stark descriptions of the event made me feel an incredibly discordant juxtaposition of stillness with bubbling energy underneath. More whispered than spoken, with moments of beautiful reverie that become disturbing for their context.
At other times, it was not a voice that captured my imagination so much as connections to the structure or the words themselves. The first movement references “dark matter” (which I chose as the title of the song), and the rhythm of those words began popping up as a unifying music gesture. In “Back and Forth”, violin and cello exchange false harmonics in an easy dancing rhythm, and the singer alternates between two notes as she sings the line. I used a simple inversion technique in “In Error” as the words “and told in reverse” are sung, and amplified the effect with a sudden stop on the word “hacked.”
As for structure, one of the happy things about writing based on an existing piece of art (or anything, really) is that I am able to come up with a musical structure based on what I perceive as the existing narrative. Rather than coming up with a new abstract form, or imposing my own, I was able to just spend a lot of time with the text and watch as the shape began to emerge, seemingly on its own. Obviously this is my interpretation, and is based on my musical associations with the text, as well as my understanding of the text on its own merit. Other artists might not have gone off so playfully with passages like the one in “A Pair of Them” where words like “spaces”, “nothing”, and “equation” are repeated in the text, and so repeated as flourishing musical gestures in the song. Also, someone else might not have bothered to count that there were 12 statements about “The earth” and decided that a “Passacaglia” was in order, with each phrase starting on a different chromatic tone over the same ground (earth).
I could geek out all day over this, hehe. That’s the fun part. Once you get an idea, it can be absolutely exhilarating. My parents, who hosted me at their farm in Oklahoma for much of the writing of this piece, probably thought I was nuts as I would shout and repeat just-discovered harmonies over and over again on the piano. Especially as I’m not really a trained pianist or vocalist, but have no shyness at home.
But even that might not compare to hearing this sung and played live. I’m very grateful to all the musicians who have performed notes I’ve written – each time it has been a humbling and invigorating experience. And, as someone fairly new to composition, mind-bending as well. With this piece, with my short chamber work “take me all the way,” and again with my cello concerto “Awakening.”
The latest performance of my own work, which you can hear in its entirety, was with Jessica Rivera singing “we do it to one another” at Town Hall Seattle, and all of the musicians brought their best in a performance that left me feeling amazing gratitude. Jessica and the others really got into the characters, and left me with goosebumps from intensity as well as beauty (yes, there are moments of great beauty in this poetry as well). Jessica Rivera is someone who takes the roles she inhabits very seriously. She is not only a singer with a beautiful voice, but one that uses it with a great sense of responsibility and deep preparation.
I was especially grateful for their dedication as a fever had me horizontal for much of the week, and shaky on my feet even during the performance, which I conducted. So, a brief but heartfelt thank you is necessary to:
(February 25, 2016 performance at Town Hall Seattle. Photo Credit:Libby Lewis)
As part of this very special event, Tracy was able to join us and read some of her poetry, including “Life on Mars.” You can hear this, as well as our panel discussion with Rebecca Hoogs, below. Tracy shares some of her insight into the writing process, as well as her feelings about having her work turned into a musical piece after the fact. Spoiler: we feel the same about that – it is a unique situation when compared to either setting poems from an author of the past, or working with a librettist in a real-time collaboration.
Thank you for supporting my artistic journey by reading this blog. Please feel free to comment, and even suggest topics for future posts. There are plenty on the docket, but it’s always nice to know what you are most interested in hearing about, as well. In a process that is not too dissimilar from my composing, that negative voice pops up during the writing of blog posts as well. One thing I’m slowly learning: sometimes that voice just means you’re breaking new ground, and it’s important to keep going as you expand your artistry, and ultimately, your concept of self.
I hope you have a chance to listen to the concert in its entirety. Back to my initial impulse to write this particular piece; I am a fan of music that helps us escape, celebrate, etc. I know I am in part, an entertainer. But sometimes, I think it’s important to explore a little deeper, within the safe place that art can offer. Then we have the opportunity to challenge ourselves to look within, with fearless scrutiny, and face every aspect of our collective nature together.
