NOW Ensemble visited Seattle earlier this month for the TownMusic at Town Hall series and Second Inversion spent some quality time with them here in our studios!
For more in-studio sessions, including videos of Joshua Roman & Friends and ETHEL, visit our Video page.
To hear the archive of NOW Ensemble’s performance at Town Hall, visit our Live Concert Recordings page.
by Jill Kimball
A Far Cry.
When really, really good musicians get together to play music, something magical happens. Some of the best performances in history have been called divine or heavenly. No matter their faith (or lack thereof), those who appreciate music can agree there’s something otherworldly about an amazing performance or recording.
“We’re kind of scrubbing on our instruments, and what somehow comes out of that physical act is something spiritual or transcendent, ” says Miki-Sophia Cloud, a violinist with the self-conducted chamber orchestra A Far Cry. “The history of spiritual mysticism [is] about connecting the physical and the spiritual, which is such a theme in music as well.”
In observing the connection between mysticism and music, the members of A Far Cry had a great idea. They decided to make an album called Dreams & Prayers, a unique collection of music that explores the relationship of spirituality and sound. It begins with Hildegard of Bingen, fast-forwards to the present day, backtracks to 1994, and then concludes at the bedside of a newly-healed Ludwig van Beethoven. Four works, three faith traditions, and 1,000 years comprise this stunning, exhilarating, and (dare I say it?) transcendent album.
The disc gets is name from its focal work, Osvaldo Golijov‘s The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind. Golijov originally composed the piece for klezmer clarinet and string quartet–more specifically, for the Kronos Quartet–and has now written an arrangement specifically for A Far Cry to premiere. What’s especially exciting about this recording is that the klezmer clarinetist is David Krakauer, the very same musician who played the premiere with Kronos.
The whole piece is inspired by the writings and teachings of Isaac the Blind, a Jewish mystic who lived in 12th and 13th century Provence. Its three movements are inspired by the three historical Jewish languages: Aramaic, Yiddish and Hebrew. The kind of transcendence explored here is more ecstatic and lively than it is dreamy or serene: you get the sense that Krakauer and the Criers just let go and played with abandon, reveling in the piece’s driving dance rhythms, lush orchestration and utter chaos.
With this 33-minute tornado at the center of Dreams & Prayers, it’s easy to forget there’s another world premiere on the CD: Mehmet Ali Sanlikol‘s Vecd, commissioned by the ensemble. Vecd, in Arabic, “refers to a state of rapture or ecstasy,” according to the composer; the piece is a musical evocation of the kind of spiritual ecstasy Sufi whirling dervishes try to achieve in formal religious ceremonies. Almost everyone will find this piece aesthetically appealing, even if they don’t make the religious connection. It begins with just a few musicians playing soft, meditative sustained notes. Then, a dramatic melody swoops in. Over the course of a few minutes, it gains in speed and volume until the piece reaches its whirling climax. The sound gradually slows and fades until, as in the beginning, only a few musicians remain.
My absolute favorite part about Dreams & Prayers is its opening track, an original arrangement of the chant O ignis spiritus paracliti by the incomparable Hildegard of Bingen. Hildegard isn’t famous just because she was one of history’s first female composers. She’s famous because she was a composer, writer, philosopher, theologian, scientist, mystic, and Benedictine abbess…simultaneously. And her music was like nothing anyone had heard before: her chants were more expressive, complex and artistic than any of those composed before and even during her lifetime. It’s such a pleasure to hear her haunting chant arranged so simply on this disc: no extraneous notes or harmonies, just one pure melodic line played in perfectly-imperfect unison by the violinists of A Far Cry. Despite its simplicity, it’s not background music: this track deserves your undivided attention.
A close second favorite is the album’s heart-wrenching conclusion, the third movement from Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 15. At first it seemed strange for A Far Cry to include something so comparatively conventional, but then I read T.S. Eliot’s thoughts on the piece:
“I find it quite inexhaustible to study. There is a sort of heavenly or at least more than human gaiety about some of his later things which one imagines might come to oneself as the fruit of reconciliation and relief after immense suffering; I should like to get something of that into verse before I die.”
History tells us T.S. Eliot was on the nose about this piece: Beethoven likely wrote it following his recovery from an abdominal illness. In the original manuscript, he describes the third movement as a “Holy song of Thanksgiving to a convalescent of the Deity.” It’s an ode to the emotional healing power of music, further proof that we turn to music for a respite from all forms of pain. One last time, A Far Cry connects the physical with the spiritual in their impeccable yet sensitive performance of this movement.
Thanks to a successful Kickstarter campaign, Dreams & Prayers is available to buy through the ensemble’s own label, Crier Records, here.
This week’s multihued, multidisciplinary music events blur the line between music and other artistic mediums.
The Frank Agency and Nonsequitur Present “People. Make. Awesome.”
[Paris Hurley]
Music and movement are mixing this Thursday at a multidisciplinary performance experience. The Frank Agency and Nonsequitur have teamed up to present a new interdisciplinary art project titled “People. Make. Awesome.”—a three-part series of artistic pairings exploring different aspects of sound.
This week’s event explores the space between sound and movement, pairing local composers with local dancers and performance artists. The featured artists are multidisciplinary dance artist Ezra Dickinson, multi-instrumentalist and composer Chris Credit, dance artist Karin Stevens, composer and pianist Michael Owcharuk, performance artist Paris Hurley, and composer and vocalist Hanna Benn.
With so many different types of artists and artistic mediums, the performance possibilities are endless—but one thing’s for certain: it will be awesome.
“People. Make. Awesome.” will take place this Thursday, Nov. 13 at 8 p.m. in the Chapel Performance Space at the Good Shepherd Center in Wallingford.
Anthony de Mare Presents “Liaisons: Re-Imagining Sondheim from the Piano”
For decades Stephen Sondheim has dominated the theatre stage with his music and lyrics in classics like “Sweeney Todd,” “Into the Woods,” and “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.” However, his works have never graced the concert hall—until now.
“Liaisons: Re-Imagining Sondheim from the Piano” is a commissioning and concert project which celebrates and reimagines Sondheim’s music through unique contemporary music performances of his works. Conceived by renowned concert pianist Anthony de Mare, the project features Sondheim’s music reimagined by influential contemporary composers Steve Reich, Nico Muhly, Daniel Bernard Roumain, Adam Guettel, Mason Bates, Ethan Iverson, and countless others.
De Mare, who specializes in contemporary music, has performed these works throughout the U.S. This week, he is bringing the best of Sondheim to Seattle.
The performance will take place at the Cornish Playhouse at Seattle Center this Thursday, Nov. 13 at 8 p.m.
Seattle Modern Orchestra Presents “Electro-Colors”
Seattle Modern Orchestra is putting pigment into pitches this weekend at their 2014-2015 season opener titled “Electro-Colors.” The performance features a colorful program with a broad spectrum of compositions.
The concert is the U.S. premiere of American composer Huck Hodge’s “Alêtheia” for large ensemble, a vibrant and dramatic composition which won the International Society for Contemporary Music’s League of Composers Competition earlier this year. The event will also feature Hodge’s “Zeremonie.”
The multihued program also features a composition by Pierre Boulez, one of the most influential avant-garde composers of the 20th century. Boulez’s “Dérive 1” radiates with rich colors and melodies, creating a vivid rainbow of textures and timbres.
Seattle Modern Orchestra musicians will also perform a work by French spectralist composer Tristan Murail. The piece, titled “Treize couleurs du soleil couchant” (“Thirteen Colors of Sundown”), transports its listeners into a fascinating exploration of sound and color.
The performance will take place this Saturday, Nov. 15 in the Chapel Performance Space at the Good Shepherd Center in Wallingford. There will be a pre-concert presentation at 7:30 p.m. and the concert begins at 8 p.m.
ETHEL is not your ordinary string quartet – don’t expect them to perform Mozart or Haydn, though I’m sure it would be brilliant if they did! In short… ETHEL rocks. They focus primarily on the works of modern composers and have worked closely with Julia Wolfe, Osvaldo Golijov, Jacob TV, Phil Kline and collaborated with artists from Kaki King to David Byrne to Gutbucket to Robert Mirabal to Bang on a Can.
ETHEL was recently in the Northwest and graciously stopped by our studios for a fun video session! Here’s one of our favorites.
Check out the other four offerings on our video page and listen below to the full audio session!
Here at Second Inversion we aim to “Rethink Classical,” but the array of sounds on Huck Hodge’s new album, “Life is Endless Like Our Field of Vision,” steps beyond that mantra. “Rethink Sound,” perhaps? The four pieces offer a varied textural output and alternation of pieces without and with electronics – chamber ensemble (Talea Ensemble under Jim Baker), piano with computer-realized sound, chamber ensemble (ditto Talea/Baker), string quartet (JACK Quartet) with live processed melodica, performed by Hodge.
Alêtheia (roughly translated as “truth”), composed in 2011, opens the disc. Alêtheia is based on Hodge’s reconciliation of two opposing philosophies of truth, particularly as noted by Parmenides, who sees truth as a fixed and unchanging reality, and Heraclitus, offering the notion that reality is in constant flux. The music reflects this juxtaposition of truth in the musical form of time – many sections of the piece have simultaneously still, static, fixed ideas (e.g. a single harmony lasting 30 seconds) but with rapidly changing timbres. Melody also portrays this opposing force of truth; the piece is strongly rooted in melody, represented as a fixed element. Fragmented and textural moments with a style marking of “Disjunctly lyrical” counteract the fixed nature of the melody. The US Premiere of this piece is this Saturday, November 15 at 8pm, performed by the Seattle Modern Orchestra!
Moving along, Pools of shadow from an older sky is in five movements for live-processed bent piano, computer-realized sound and video projection. While we don’t get the visual stimulation in this recording, there is no lack of richness for the sense of sound, performed here entirely by Huck Hodge. The piece was commissioned by the American Academy in Rome in 2011 (while Hodge was in Rome celebrating his receipt of the Rome Prize) in commemoration of Galileo’s first telescope demonstration. The premiere was on April 11, 2014, exactly four hundred years afterward. While Alêtheia dealt with juxtaposition of truth interpretations, Pools of shadow from an older sky displays a past vs. present negotiation. Hodge weaves church bells and hymns of Roman cathedrals with present sounds from Rome (sirens and street noise), all the while with a clear homage to Galileo. Piano twinkling stars and intergalactic radio wave sounds create a soundscape that is truly otherworldly. Close your eyes as you listen – I hope you’ll feel as transported as I do!
Continuing with the theme of “this or that,” re[(f)use] can be interpreted in many ways. First, there’s the world “refuse”:
ref·use /rəˈfyo͞oz/ v. indicate or show that one is not willing to do something
ref·use /refˌyo͞os/ n. matter thrown away or rejected as worthless; trash
…but also within the word there are many other words: fuse (noun & verb), use, reuse. Each shade of meaning has something to do with the piece. re[(f)use] uses a lot of “junk” sounds – cell phone noise, speaker hums, cell phone ringtones. The aesthetic here is an attempt to reverse the hierarchy of “beauty” to which many composers and musicians often strive. Rather than taking something that’s already beautiful, like a violin melody, and transforming it into something less beautiful (perhaps in attempt to question its beauty), re[(f)use] takes sounds which are inherently ugly and transform them into something beautiful. Hodge performs on live processed melodica along with the (amplified) JACK Quartet.
It’s always a pleasure to feature Seattle-based artists here on Second Inversion. Huck Hodge has received more accolades before the age of 40 than many of the world’s greatest composers have achieved in their entire life, including the Rome Prize, Guggenheim Fellowship, Gaudeamus Prize, and the Aaron Copland Award.. Alêtheia and another one of Hodge’s works, Zeremonie, will be featured on the upcoming Saturday, November 15 Seattle Modern Orchestra concert. PS, Tune in to The Takeover on Wednesday, November 12 at 3pm to hear SMO Co-Artistic Director Jeremy Jolley share some of the music from the upcoming season.
You can purchase the disc from New World Records here. Enjoy!