LIVE PERFORMANCE FEATURE: Seattle Pro Musica sings David Lang

Posted on July 25, 2014 by maestrobeats

David Lang‘s the little match girl passion won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for music, and was recently performed by Seattle Pro Musica under the direction of Karen P. Thomas:

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A little bit of background on the piece, by David Lang:

“My piece is called The Little Match Girl Passion and it sets Hans Christian Andersen’s story The Little Match Girl in the format of Bach’s Saint Matthew Passion, interspersing Andersen’s narrative with my versions of the crowd and character responses from Bach’s Passion. The text is by me, after texts by Han Christian Andersen, H. P. Paulli (the first translator of the story into English, in 1872), Picander (the nom de plume of Christian Friedrich Henrici, the librettist of Bach’s Saint Matthew Passion), and the Gospel according to Saint Matthew. The word ”passion” comes from the Latin word for suffering. There is no Bach in my piece and there is no Jesus—rather the suffering of the Little Match Girl has been substituted for Jesus’s, elevating (I hope) her sorrow to a higher plane.”

A few of Seattle Pro Musica’s concert-goers offered up their reactions to this moving piece:

“What has stayed with me most from LMGP is the last line, “Rest soft, rest soft”. Boom. “Rest soft, rest soft”. The weight of that single drum beat. The weight in the silent lift of Karen’s hands following that drum beat. The weight and beauty of such a ‘simple’ phrase. “Rest soft, rest soft”.

Boom.

Silence.” –Miriam Gnagy

“the little match girl passion is one of those pieces that’s very difficult for performers. Besides being technically demanding, the story is so moving that you could easily get carried away by your emotions and become lost. It’s a delicate balancing act – being in the moment enough to make it powerful for the audience without losing control of the performance. It was an unforgettable experience.” –Wes Kim

“Evocative. Poignant. Difficult. Heartbreaking. David Lang’s the little match girl passion causes the singer—and the listener—to experience viscerally the shivering of a little girl on the last evening of the year, and mourn her passing in a forgotten corner of the village. The Hans Christian Anderson fairytale brought to musical life—a 21st century artistic masterpiece.” –Marilyn Colyar

“The music was mesmerizing. It made me FEEL cold. The blend and balance of the voices was perfection, the halting rhythms dropped me into a focused suspended listening state, so that the sudden shift to the intense soprano solo swept me up and broke me open. What a piece! The stamina of the performers and their complete engagement was extraordinary. The use of instruments (that low drumbeat, the tubular bells, the chain on the hub) was powerful and haunting.” –Elly Hale

“The LMGP performances were haunting. The austere walls of St. James’ made the repetitions in the music even more relentless, providing a suitably cold and eerie atmosphere for the piece to grab the listener by the throat. And so it ended: the candle died with our last breath.” –Isabelle Phan

Many thanks to Karen P. Thomas and David Lang for the allowance of this streaming on-demand!

ALBUM OF THE WEEK: Christopher Bono’s BARDO

Posted on July 21, 2014 by maestrobeats

by Rachele Hales

stock-4 Christopher Bono spent his early life devoted to baseball and was even drafted by the Seattle Mariners before an injury prevented him from playing, but it’s this music that he really knocks out of the park. This is an artist just totally hitting his stride. I feel like I haven’t even experienced enough in life to fully appreciate an album like this; music that is powerful and humble and confronts the spiritual and the unknowable beginning from a place of absolute desperation.

Bono’s narrative for Bardo draws heavily from Tarot (specifically “The Fool”) as well as the Tibetan Book of the Dead to share the surreal journey of The Fool as he moves through a cycle of loss — from intense sorrow toward the afterlife and eventually rebirth. (“Bardo” translates from Tibetan as “the transition.”)

The story is told in four movements, with preludes before each meant to suggest “ambient portals” acting as passages to the next chapter of The Fool’s journey. “Bardo I: Enter the Mystic” invites you in with a drone and then quickly jumps to a stormy, chaotic yearning before, as the liner notes indicate, our protagonist is driven to “face the churning storm of dark destiny emanating from his own mind.”

The listener soon finds herself in “Bardo II: The End of the Oligarchs,” a musically jagged, violent, thumping battle that ends abruptly before everything, including the life of The Fool, is destroyed and gives way to the calm sounds of water. “It is The Fool passing from his earthly end into what the Tibetans call the Chönyid Bardo, or the state between lives… He begins a spiraling journey through the hallucinations and obstacles inside this labyrinth of karmic repercussions.” In “Bardo III: Enter the Void,” his offenses and virtues are weighed by the deities and the music takes on a militant tone before swelling, swelling, swelling, and then bursting into silence as The Fool learns to trust his own inner wisdom and thus is liberated. Here the music carries him rhythmically to a place above and beyond the darkness of doubt and we hear the euphonious expression of prayers for our Fool from those who remain in the physical plane.

At this point we have listened to The Fool’s odyssey from despair to destruction, destruction to death, and death to liberation. Before entering Bardo IV, we are treated to “Endless Doors to Endless Wombs,” which is this reviewer’s favorite of all the preludes. The beautiful, meditative piece lasts for a blissful seven minutes and, if you close your eyes and turn up the volume, it might feel like you’re floating.

The Fool finally enters “Bardo IV: Clouds Blooming at the Thought of Union,” which tells of his rebirth by way of gentle, pulsing sounds that cycle, crescendo, and decrescendo until there is only silence and our protagonist begins his story anew.

When I had this album playing at home, several friends commented on how “epic” it felt. And that’s true. If you didn’t read the liner notes or have any frame of reference for Bono’s inspiration, it could totally sound like the soundtrack for an amazing RPG or fantasy film. Played straight through it is like a saga told in sound and the fact that you may not know the details doesn’t stop you from connecting to, understanding, and enjoying it. That’s really saying something. The fact that this is sixty minutes of extremely dense material yet it remains approachable from start to finish (or should I say rebirth?) is quite a feat. Listening with headphones and the volume cranked up was like ! in my heart and I didn’t just appreciate the experience, but also the experience of the experience if that makes any sense.

To purchase the entire album, please visit iTunes or the Our Silent Canvas store for Vinyl or CD.

WORLD PREMIERE: DEREK BERMEL’S “DEATH WITH INTERRUPTIONS”

Posted on July 15, 2014 by maestrobeats

by Jill Kimball

Composer and clarinetist Derek Bermel.

About 22 years ago, the composer Derek Bermel was in Ghana, practicing the xylophone.

(It’s a long story. Just go with it.)

“I see this woman walking along, carrying a jug of water on her head, and she’s moving her hips, dancing to the music,” he said. “But then I notice that she’s dancing in a different rhythm than I was playing.”

Bermel kept playing, confused but smiling. “I thought…why is she doing this dance to another rhythm? And then I realized: My whole way of feeling the rhythm was wrong in that song.”

To Derek Bermel, an award-winning composer and clarinetist who has traveled the world to perform and write music, context is everything. If he hadn’t been in Ghana that day to see a local woman dancing along to his music, he’d never have been able to see beyond his Western view of rhythm.

Similarly, if we hadn’t caught up with Bermel in the studios for some context before the world premiere of his latest piece, “Death with Interruptions,” we might not be quite as choked up listening to it now.

On Monday night, at the Seattle Chamber Music Society‘s Summer Festival, “Death with Interruptions” had its premiere. You can be the first to hear it on demand below.

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“Death with Interruptions” was commissioned by the Seattle Chamber Music Society and is a piano trio, an established classical form that in Bermel’s hands sounds anything but established. It begins with a simple, plaintive melody and moves through a series of transformations in movement, speed, and texture. Every variation continually returns to the piece’s core, which sounds like a kind of musical heartbeat.

“Death with Interruptions” is inspired by Jose Saramago’s novel of the same title, in which death is a living character. “It was an intriguing thought,” he said. “Yes, death is often very dispassionate, but also quite ridiculous and impulsive,” like a human might be.

He began writing the piece just a month after the passing of his father, playwright and theatre critic Albert Bermel. Much like Johannes Brahms in his German Requiem, he was interested in exploring the ways we, the living, cope with death as it strikes us again and again over the years.

“We experience death in many, many ways–the deaths of parents, friends, pets, lovers–but life keeps going as death hits,” he said. “So the way we experience death, I realized, is not so much as this one calamity but as a series of pangs we experience. The experience is continually interrupted, and we return to it when we’re in a quieter moment. There’s something about that that’s present in the form of the piece.”

Bermel was never shy about exploring feelings of loss. One of his first compositions was “A Pig,” which he dedicated to the family’s pet guinea pig when it passed away.

Between early childhood and adulthood, Bermel pursued music–he played in his high school jazz band and in a rock group simply called The Generic Band–but he also loved science, and his focus shifted between the two for a number of years.

“I was interested in a bunch of different things, and I’m grateful for that time I had to figure out who I was as a human being,” he said. “That hopefully comes through in my music.”

ALBUM OF THE WEEK: Portraits of Contemporary Polish Composers: EWA TRĘBACZ

Posted on July 7, 2014 by maestrobeats

by Maggie Stapleton

Outdoor locations in Washington (and all over the Pacific Coast, for some, like Nat Evans) have proven to be inspiring recording venues for new music. Ancient Lakes and the Dan Harpole Cistern are two such locations that inspired Seattle-based Ewa Trebacz (originally from Kraków, Poland).

Second Inversion’s Album of the Week is a collection of some of Ewa’s finished products which include field recordings from these locations. What makes this album so fascinating is that while much of it was recorded and produced in Poland, there’s a very special part of Washington state incorporated into some of these pieces (things lost things invisible, Errai and ANC’L’SUNR).

Furthermore, this album is part of a special annual project from The Polish Music Information Centre and Polish Composers’ Union to preserve new works and performances by living composers. Each year they publish 10 CDs, featuring a different composer In 2013, Ewa Trebacz one of the chosen composers.

Second Inversion was thrilled to talk to Ewa and Josiah Boothby (French horn collaborator on much of this disc) about each work:

The two have a longstanding friendship, which surely made the collaboration fun, but Ewa says, “Horn is AWESOME for processing or editing. You can almost make any instrument out of the horn sound… you can process it so many ways, create so many timbres, you will never be able to tell it came from the horn.”

On the method of composition, recording, and production, Ewa told us, “our method of work is somewhat like film production. We basically travel from one place to another and then later I create some basic shape of the piece that’s kind like a labyrinth of spaces. Later, in the concert performance the electronic part is reproduced by a surround speaker system at the same time the live performers bring the element of ‘here and now.’ Josiah ends up playing with himself from the past and at the same time creating the very direct
interaction of where the performance takes place.”

The Dan Harpole Cistern at Ford Worden is a large underground space with a 45-second reverberation time. Ewa recorded several musicians in this space to be used later in live performance. What’s it like to play an instrument in the Cistern? Josiah says, “It’s other worldly down there!… so often when we’re performing this difficult music by living composers, it’s hard. As a performer for me in that piece (things lost things invisible), I got to go into a resonant space, make big noises, and I got told, you know, do something a little less this way or a little more this way.. it was a lot of fun!”

Errai was another piece with samples (Josiah on horn and Anna Niedzwiedz, voice) recorded in the Cistern. Josiah goes on to say, “in a space that’s resonant enough to still sound while I’m playing another note, all of a sudden I can play chords with myself. Anna and I were not only playing with each other, we were playing with ourselves and there were several of us, simultaneously, and this is before Ewa starts doing anything with the electronics.”

Recordings from ANC’L’SUNR came from multiple locations, including the Cistern and also another Washington location, Ancient Lakes. What’s with the title? Ewa explains, “Funny thing, everyone keeps asking me what the language is, or what it means… but really, it’s an abbreviation for places where I made recordings. So, the word itself doesn’t really mean anything, but I think it’s inspiring.” This piece was produced with ATK, a software package developed by Juan Pampin, Joshua Parmenter, and Joseph Anderson at the UW DXARTS which preserves as much spatial relation in sounds as possible.

Ewa holds Masters Degrees in Composition, Computer Science and Econometrics and a PhD from the University of Washington’s Center for Digital Arts and Experimental Media (DXARTS) , where she currently works as a Research Scientist.

ALBUM OF THE WEEK: ZOFORBIT

Posted on June 30, 2014 by maestrobeats

by Maggie Stapleton

ZOFO (shorthand for 20-finger orchestra… ZO=20 and FO=finger orchestra), is a fresh chamber ensemble with a vision to embrace exciting classics like Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring for piano four-hands and expand the repertoire by commissioning works by new composers including Pulitzer Prize winner William Bolcom, Gabriela Lena Frank, and Terry Riley. Pianists Eva-Maria Zimmermann and Keisuke Nakagoshi take the freshness a step further, aiming to commission works by composers who have never written for piano four hands, stretching composers to step into a new compositional realm.

ZOFORBIT is the duo’s most recent release on Sono Luminus (available also on iTunes or Amazon), with all pieces themed around outer space. The difficult part for ZOFO wasn’t finding piano four-hands music that fit into this category, it was choosing from a multitude of options! ZOFO’s own arrangement of Gustav Holst’s The Planets is the anchor of the album, as 2014 marks the centenary of this iconic composition. Urmas Sisask’s The Milky Way, George Crumb’s Celestial Mechanics, and David Lang’s Gravity round out the collection.

Gravity is full of descending, falling lines with a very distinct sense of gravity, almost as if there’s no escape. Composer David Lang says, “With ‘gravity’ I had the image in my head of how to make a kind of music that would always be falling. The material is in a state of slow perpetual motion, moving inexorably downwards and yet never really resting or landing.” Keisuke further describes Gravity as one of the saddest, yet most beautiful pieces he’s ever played.

Estonian composer Urmas Sisask makes great use of the inside of the piano in The Milky Way, calling for plucked and dampened strings and glissandi. The first movement is ethereal, atmospheric, and engaging. The opening motive of the piece gradually expands in dynamic and intensity, layering in more texture throughout. The plucked strings (both dampened and not) inside the piano add a great celestial, other-worldly effect. The second movement beings gently, with continuous ascending lines (a nice contrast to Gravity’s descending lines) giving way to a repeated single pitch with strummed strings, cresting to a simple, solo melody. ZOFO’s recording of George Crumb’s Alpha Centauri and Beta Cygni (from Celestial Mechanics) is a great aural experience, but the video below really showcases the effects in this piece. Both pianists must stand throughout most of the piece to achieve all of the inside piano effects. Eva-Maria explained that they have to actually HIT the strings, standing side-by-side, so much so that they must be careful not to hit each other. Alpha Centauri is very exciting and fiery, contrasted well by Beta Cygni which is much more introverted with hints of gamelan music. Many times in Beta Cygni, the strings are dampened right in the middle, producing a pitch which is an octave higher producing a gong-like effect.

This entire album is a great showcase of what two pianists can do not just at the keyboard, but also inside the keyboard. Huge applause for ZOFO’s effort to successfully pull off yet another cleverly themed album. To hear more conversation about the album, as well as the duo’s background and beginnings, listen below!