Lee Hyla In Memoriam

Miranda Cuckson (vln), Ning Yu (pf), and
Mariel Roberts (cello) performing 'Amnesia Redux'

I am on my way home from the Lee Hyla Memorial Concert at St. Mark's in the Bowery this afternoon.  It was a moving event that filled me with joy at the delicate rage and furious beauty of Lee's music, and also brought great tragedy for all the music that will remain unwritten.

c)i (Miranda Cuckson, Ning Yu, and guest Mariel Roberts) performed Lee's Amnesia Redux along side so many of Lee's friends and collaborators: Jim Pugliese; Christine Bard; Rhonda Rider; Marty Ehrlich; Stephen Drury; Tim Smith; and Vicky Chow, Trevor Dunn, Kenny Wollensen.

Before c)i played, I said a few words, which I hadn't been expecting to do; I think that they went something like this:

Early in c)i's existence, we took on a large project with him, his Miller Theater portrait concert.  This was a big deal from him and a very big deal for us, but what mattered most to me, and to c)i, I think, was his trust in our ability to pull that event off.  That is what Lee taught me, to trust in me, in my abilities and capacities and notions of what might be possible in music and in life.  Like Mathew (Rosenblum) said,  Lee's honesty and directness were at the very core of how he lived, and he taught me that it is through authentic commitment to one's own vision (not to the vicissitudes of what one should do, or what would gain one advantage) that one genuinely connects with people in the way that one must to create the musice of surpassing excellence that he did with every work.

Our sorrow is great, but also great is the beauty he gave us.

Revisiting

Sadly, you don't often play pieces more than once or twice in the new music world.  Most of the time, we pour ourselves into learning an intricate web of rhythms and timbres for a piece that evaporates from our muscle memory only a few weeks afterwards.

My first experience with Mario Davidovsky was 10 years ago, when I learned Festino with my talented colleague and guitarist Dan Lippel for the Look and Listen Festival.   It was a first on many levels: my first piece of contemporary repertoire with guitar, the first where the violist was the highest voice, and the first time I played with double bass in a quartet setting.

We spent hours and hours of slow, fast, and every-notch-in-between practice just to get everything lined up.  When Mario came to visit a rehearsal (which always happens when logistically possible) it was just starting to hang together....just.  The performance itself was a bracing roller coaster ride as we strained to hear each gesture as it flew by, further complicated by that bathroom-like acoustic particular to NYC art galleries below 34th Street.

Miranda Cuckson on Mario Davidovsky

Miranda Cuckson wrote this beautiful essay about her experience with Mario Davidovsky and his music. 

My group counter)induction is presenting a concert of Mario Davidovsky’s music on June 7 at Subculture. I wrote this essay below, which will appear on c)i’s blog and in abbreviated form in the program booklet. (Also my organization Nunc will be performing his music at the Teatro Colon on August 15-17.)

counter)induction is thrilled to close this season with a concert tribute to the great Argentine-American composer Mario Davidovsky. Mario, who turned 80 this year, has been a central figure in contemporary music since his pioneering compositions with electronics in the 1960s. Through his subsequent work at such institutions as Harvard University, the Composers Conference, and the Koussevitsky and Fromm Foundations, and his attendance at innumerable concerts and events over the years, he has been a key participant in the discussion and support of the music of our time. Even as technology evolved far beyond the methods he originally used, he has stayed true to his core musical impulses and values, steadily creating an oeuvre much beloved by a cadre of remarkable performers and listeners. This August, he will revisit Buenos Aires, where the distinguished Teatro Colón will honor him with several concerts.

Bird-like thoughts...

The band is getting ready for dress rehearsal of my piece 'Bird-Like Things...' and I thought that I would share the program notes, in advance of tonight's performance.  This is a piece that has grown on me and grown with its performances, becoming more refined and compact, but also more open and varied in the options available to performers; I'm very excited about this performance of this group of performers:

'Bird-like Things in Things like Trees' was conceived along with painter Rob Tarbell during a stay in the medieval village of Auvillar in south-western France at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. As we shifted into the slower pace of Auvillarian life, focused on natural, agrarian cycles of the day, season, and the harvest, we each were struck by a heightened presence of birds in our lives— birds were not to beings to be observed, but part of the every day, circling and singing on the way to the market, hovering and pilfering during our meal time, and entering our studios sometimes in an explosive flutter, and sometimes as a surprise guest on our tables, canvases, and scores.  Neither of us had pursued mimetics or have much interest in strongly representational practices, but we felt obligated by our situation to trace our encounters with these birds into our art in some way.  This is a rather different situation than 'mimesis' – we drew and sang things that were like birds, but that bird-ness is revealed most clearly in the gesture of their tracing. This is ekphrasis far more than it is mimesis; what is figured is that act of figuring, rather than the figured.  These are processes in which source material is only occasionally clearly visible or audible; the originary image or sound is 'worked' so thoroughly that connection to the source is replaced by connections to the subsequent iteration of 'working.'  Thus the audience is hearing traces of sense memories of birds: the obstinate pica pica, and the ortolan, that royal feast so delicious that its enjoyment must by hidden from God by a napkin placed over the head.  But also represented is the milieu in which these birds fly and nest and sing and eat.  This piece is less about verisimilar representation than it is about the gap between experience, memory, and communication: the composition and the improvisation of the performers is the folding and refolding of memory and experiential trace, the transition from event to memory, memory to speculation, and speculation back into being is that bird-like behavior called musicking.  The composition of this work has been supported by a grant from the The George Washington University.

Heidegger's Hammer

Hammer patent, H. H. Frey (1915)

I've always loved this passage from Heidegger's 'Sein und Zeit' :

 "The less we just stare at the hammer-thing, and the more we seize hold of it and use it, the more primordial does our relationship to it become, and the more unveiledly is it encountered as that which it is—as equipment. The hammering itself uncovers the specific ‘manipulability’ of the hammer. The kind of Being which equipment possesses—in which it manifests itself in its own right—we call ‘readiness-to-hand’." (Being and Time 15: 98)

I am having some of my students wrestling with the passage right now, and it has struck me (in the run up to this concert) as full of insight into the whole notion of 'etude' that we are engaging with here, and with the technical aspects of performance in general.

It is the action of hammering that reveals the potential of the hammer, not the contemplation of the hammer; the action of performing reveals the potential of the instrument, not the contemplation of the instrument. (Sounds a lot like counter)induction, to me at least...)

Out of the Shadows...

My favorite moments of being a member of counter)induction are when I am working alongside a composer to premiere their piece.  Over the years, I have known Ryan Streber more as an amazing audio engineer than a composer - but it has been such a joy having him coach us on his new work.

What happens between getting the music in your mind onto the page and the actual performance is an interesting process.  Some things get cut, ideas are added, passages are rethought after trying them out in different ways.

His "Shadow Etudes" is in three movements.  The first is called "Wheel Variations", where the viola and clarinet cyclically move through passages of alternating textures and rhythms as they shadow each other.  The middle movement utilizes a haunting array of colors that only our specific instruments can make, while the final movement is full of rollicking hocketed rhythms.  

Hope to see you tomorrow at 6pm!

Looking forward to c)i's next concert this Thursday at the NY Public Library for the Performing Arts' Bruno Walter Auditorium! I love the library there, I've done much reading and looking for pieces in both the circulating and research collections, and did a recital of Ross Lee Finney's music there when I was doing my dissertation (the NYPL has his papers).

Our program is called "Etudes and Studies" and features works by a diverse assortment of composers, from Debussy and Rachmaninoff to new works by c)i composers Ryan Streber and Douglas Boyce. It seems to me that, rather than focusing on etudes as means of exploring or showcasing instrumental virtuosity, this program looks at "studies" more from a compositional standpoint: the composer's work piece, in which he/she examines a question of craft or expression using a certain medium (say, string quartet, or viola and clarinet duo). So we have the quietly flowing counterpoint and displaced rhythms of Dallapiccola's Two Studies for violin and piano, the concise working-out of ideas in Berio's Study for String Quartet, and George Benjamin's remarkable exploration of the sound of two violas, layering them in waves, each climbing to high singing notes, tossing pizzicatos back and forth, and together keeping a propulsive triplet motion going though the piece. Brilliant piece for the performers but a fascinating study in sound and construction too! I'm looking forward to hear the whole program- hope to see you!

Composers Talking: Wyner, Boyce, Bartlett, Karchin

Yehudi showing us all how it is done!

One of the things that I love about working with counter)induction is opportunity for conversations and interactions with other composers.  Our composer members (Kyle Bartlett, Ryan Streber, and myself) are good talkers, but I love to be surprised and engaged with new things that I haven't thought about.  This certainly happened during the conversation embedded below, a conversation among Yehudi Wyner, Kyle Bartlett, Lou Karchin and myself at counter)induction's last concert.

I think it's great the way we all dance around the issue of variety, and particularly American responses to that diversity.  I've written a bit about this issue before, and here I was particularly struck with the ways that the four of us wrestle with and admit to the fact that we don't really know what it is to be an 'American composer:'  even the general idea of 'openness' doesn't capture the back and forth between faction and community that seems to constantly and eternally renegotiated.

Not surprisingly, the best part is when Yehudi stands up and explains it all...

Bartlett's 'Spell' :: a recording

With our next concert coming up in two scant weeks, I thought that it would be nice to repost a performance from our last concert, a joint program with the Washington Square Contemporary Music Society.

I'll post one or two other excerpts from that concert in the next week or so, but I thought I'd start with Kyle's delicately ferocious string trio Spell.  I wrote about this just before the premiere, and listening it two it a few months later I continue to be struck by the work's aggressive vacillations between feeling like the only piece of music you've ever heard and being a piece that has both just begun and just ended.

Unsurprisingly, tremendous performances from Miranda Cuckson (violin)

Max Mendel (viola), and Christopher Gross (cello).




Come here some more tremendous music and performances on 31 January at the Bruno Walter Auditorium in the Library of Performing Arts at Lincoln Center.

'American Explorers' at Tenri

As zero hour approaches for c)i's concert tonight at the Tenri Cultural Institute, I've been gathering my excitement, and gathering my thoughts about the concert. It's terribly varied program, measured aesthetically both from piece to piece, and within a composers output; Yehudi Wyner just said of the piece of his being rehearsed right now that "I'd never try the things I was trying in this piece again; I didn't have so much as a change of heart as a heart transplant!"

I'm also looking forward for the brief conversation with the composers that we have planned just after intermission. The program present several aporia that beg for further discussion. Two that leap out at me are the question of the American in music, and the tension between vocality and instrumentality in this concert of instrumental chamber music.  The concert bears the title 'American Explorations,' per the design of the Washington Square Contemporary Music Society's Lou Karchin. To me American culture seems to have a particular interest in rewriting either history, or it's particular position within that history. This tendency has been observable for some time, appearing in discussions of the American identity from de Tocqueville's 'Democracy in America' to Cornel West's 'The American Evasion of Philosophy'; More recently, and more specifically musical is Ross's 'The Rest is Noise,' which resituates the bulk of American concert music as a specific matrix of interaction between a tradition of European Art Music and American Popular Music. This seems to resonate strongly with Ricouer's notion of history, in which memory, imagination and forgetting interact to bring forth expressive acts and works that are both contingent upon historical frames while also reinforcing or creating particular historical framings. Any notion of the American would seem to me to have to account for both the diversity of these practices and stances, and in the persistent practice of starting over, for every composer and often for every piece.
<p dir=ltr>The question of vocality and instrumentality presented itself to me when reconnecting with Yehudi Wyner's 'Romances' for piano quartet being performed tonight. Yehudi speaks so elequently about the connection between songfulness and writing for instruments in his work. (A brief interview where it comes up can be read here: http://www.bruceduffie.com/wyner.html). Lou has just finished a multi-year opera project, and Kyle has been studying voice now for several years, performing with c)i last year on her own work 'mothers. And yet all the works are strongly rooted in the physicality of instrumental performance. 'Spell' in particular highlights the the body in performance at the moment when the instrumentality of performance dissolves into noise and gesture. Many thanks to all the composers and performers and WSCMS for contributing so such a dynamic program, and for contributing to conversations like this, in words and in music. You all still have an hour to get over to 6th Ave and 13th; hope to see you there!

Some notes on Kyle Bartlett's 'Spell'

Eminent theorist Christopher Hasty once, in conversation, said something that I still find quite perceptive and relevant to Bartlett's music.  He said (paraphrased as required by memory & time) that her music 'seems as if it shouldn't work, but does.  It is almost not there.'  Throughout her output, increasingly in recent works, and clearly in 'Spell,' witness is borne to moments of origination and moments of dissolution; In the compositional process, in performance , and in the experiencing of the audience there are again and again transitions from chaos to control and back again, between a sculpted world of maximal density and complexity and a smooth space of quietudinal repose.  The severity and occasional violence of such rapid transitions is not (as a colorful wag once put it) a bold statement of anti-music, but rather an unveiling of the ontic character of music, esp. music in performance.  Music-in-performance is always about to not be, and is also new to being; each sound is a new action and, in the case of Bartlett's pure distillations of sound, gesture, and action, it is new to the aspiration of being music.  These are not vacillations but oscillations, as the domain of music (and in 'Spell,' the domain of music-for-strings) is orbited and approached and transected, but never inhabited for very long.

'Spell' operates on dual precipices of not-being: a divide between the striking and bowing, and between action and stasis.  Each divide bring different elements to the fore, showing these domains to be orthogonal and entwined in equal measure.  To provide a modicum of the diachronicism notes like this are expected to manifest, consider the progression of the work; an opening shadow-world of harmonics and whispers is interrupted by explosively percussive rhythmic unisons ending abruptly in a return to the opening stillness, but a stillness now threatened with a recapitulation of the interrupting violence.  And yet it would be a mistake to say that the interruption of that first material is simply 'surprising.'  By the delicacy of character and presentation, the opening is from its first moments in danger of dissolving into nothing, much as the base ferocity of the percussive material risks monomaniacal reduction to machinic 'bruit.'  Such oppositions persist through out the piece, each blossoming in repetition, as do fragile bridges between the domains.

Such a hermeneusis places us adjacent to Lyotard's formulation of the Sublime, situated in art as the anticipation of not-being; this threat of extinction and the need for new action to bring art into the Now makes, for Lyotard, the Sublime the very core of the Modern.

'Hidden in the cynicism of innovation there is surely a despair that nothing further will happen.  But to innovate is to behave as if any numbers of things could happen, and it means taking action to make them happen.  In affirming itself, will affirms its hegemony over time.' (Lyotard, 'The Sublime and the Avant-garde')

Lyotard's move to situate his sublimity in time is right and proper, but he interrogates the Sublime in the domain of the visual arts, and so finds himself focusing on the Sublime as an isolated event, often the perception or representation of physical or spatial momumentality (either of nature, of the infinities of color fields, or stark projections of negative space).  This vantage can result, if we are not careful, in teleological narratives in which the Sublime is a moment to be achieved.  Such a misstep loses the great insight of Bartlett's music -- the ontic character of the Sublime in art is not occasional and momentary, but pervasive and continual.  It can be discovered through delicacy or savagery, and peers out at us from corners at right-angles to the Real, enfolded in habit and history, and unfolding in each moment of music's obstinate, persistent capacity to be.

I am really looking forward to working with the band on my new string trio, SPELL, for c)i's 10/20 show. First of all it uses some new playing techniques I've been developing. I've had some fun Skype sessions with Miranda and Jess working these out! I appreciate even more the virtuosity, commitment, and, well, baddassness of our musicians that I enjoy as a composer. Hot and cold running sonic mojo,anytime I want it. I hope that you'll join us (wait for it!) for a long tall draught of superb music making on the 20th. World premieres by Fennelly, Karchin, and Bartlett, plus music by Yehudi Wyner, Carson Cooman, and Jesse Jones.

http://counterinduction.com/season/concert/275

Partita by Ryan Streber

Tomorrow at the counter)induction's concert, I am going to play Ryan Streber's "Partita" for solo cello.
He wrote me this piece in 2007. I have performed it at c)i anniversary concert at Merkin hall, as well as at my recitals in Japan. So I would say I know this piece quite well.... but every time I play this piece, I am inspired to play it differently each time. This piece is like walking along side of a collage. Every time I play this piece, I see different characters, colors that I didn't notice before, hear different voices. So, please come to the concert tomorrow and let's discover this piece together.

What to do with all the boxes of CDs...

For the past few weeks, we have been living with boxes of CDs and posters in anticipation of our big CD release show tomorrow on 4/29.


Since we are indeed apartment dwellers, we thought we would put them to good use!

But we really hope they all wind up played on the stereo/computer in YOUR home

Hope to see you tomorrow! 

The groove has been established

I think it's safe to say that we're now in a comfortable performance-ready groove.  This particular set of rehearsals was NOT easy to put together.  In fact, our last major rehearsal was yesterday - a whole week before the concert.  And the one prior to that was also a week removed.  Of course there are a couple of odd little ones scheduled here and there in the interim, but the performance season approaches critical mass in late April - and even with almost three months' lead time on the scheduling, we just managed to get the requisite hours booked- whew!

One advantage I've noticed about having major rehearsals spaced so far apart is the 'percolation' factor: for me at least, both technical passages and musical ideas seem to develop in a less hurried way, and age nicely with more periodic contact.  Certainly better than cramming everything frantically into the few days before the show.

Thank goodness for Skype, bringing Doug to the vantage point of Steve's piano lid for tweaks and suggestions.  Kyle managed to make it up for rehearsals on her piece, and even though I'm not in that one, all feedback so far suggests that she BRINGS IT!  Can't wait to finish up the season in both a dramatic and celebratory way.



 

A Brief History of A Brief History

Next week, c)i will premiere the chamber version of my work 'A Brief History of Acceleration' on our CD release concert.  This is an interesting work for me to have composed at this point and in this place;– it draws on improvisational practices that have not been a significant part of my musical activities since I was an undergraduate.  The 'big band' version of the piece was commissioned by the Williams Jazz Ensemble, an ensemble that served as one of my best and favorite compositional laboratories in which to explore musical possibilities. My time with the ensemble also helped me to develop an approach to music which focused on the experience of music rather than traces of music, on the performance and the performer rather than a score or a recording.  Inevitably my engagement with the WJE and the apparatuses of musicking moved my practice on– any technical system contains within it an inescapable tendency for change. Though the aesthetic distance between my work and the aesthetics of the WJE seemed to grow, my work increasingly evidenced efforts to reproduce the character of partnership and communitarianism that my experience with WJE embodied. The aleatory and tychism of all music of the last decade is an echo of those jazz based but not bounded experiments.

This chamber version of the work has been created specifically for c)i's upcoming concert; we were looking for repertoire that would capture c)i's energy and dynamism while at the same time being a bit of a party piece.  It also struck me as a fun chance to let the c)i performers step out as improvisors in a way that doesn't happen that often in our concerts.  

The acceleration of the title evokes multiple changes in speed – the expressive accelerando and ritardando of performance, the mechanical acceleration we associate with the power of internal combustion engines, or perhaps the increase of speed that Deleuze, Guattari and Lyotard associate with the economic and technological rationalization of the world. But at root, I intend to evoke the

acceleration described in the philosophical work of Steigler and Gille – the personal experience of a technical milieu changing at an ever increasing rate, an experience in which one, as a participant, contributes to and is caught up in that increasing change.  This slippage between a controlled fall and a mad rush is to some extent heard in the changes in tempo through out the piece, but mostly through increasing density, activity, and general ferocity.

A Brief History of Acceleration is dedicated to Andy Jaffe, from whom I learned more than can be easily listed or expressed in words.

Coming up soon!

Ten days until our CD release concert! Looking forward to rehearse this weekend and get back to Kyle Bartlett's squawks and quirky rhythmic figures (and to put the instrumental parts together with her own theatrical vocalizations) and to Douglas Boyce's groovy take on big-band swing, combined with his idiosyncratic experiments with "open pulse" and aleatoric writing.

I think it's great that we are presenting these two world premieres by Kyle and Doug and a premiere by Erich Stem at the April 29 concert, while the CD itself offers previous works by these three composers. Cool to highlight the ongoingness of c)i creativity. Our composer-member Ryan Streber's Partita for cello is featured on both the CD and the release concert, at which we will also give live and lively renditions of "Dead Cat Bounce", written expressly for c)i by Eric Moe, and "Ciao Manhattan", by Lee Hyla, who has had a close association with c)i for some years. Sciarrino's "Centauro Marino" - the only work by a non-American on the CD - represents just the sort of breathtakingly vivid conjuring of a soundworld that c)i is crazy about.

Come and join us to celebrate and have a great time on the 29th!

On Tuesday the c)i players had the first rehearsal for our April 29 CD release show, which features a new piece for piano quartet and narrator by Kyle Bartlett, as well as a new arrangement of a big band piece by Douglas Boyce. It was a thrill to rehearse these two works with the ink still drying on the page, so to speak (we received the scores days before the rehearsal).
Kyle's piece will be our second with narrator in as many months; the text, written I believe by the composer, is most striking! Serial killers, obscenity! Thrilling; I can't wait to see this come together. And Doug has given us the chance to test our jazz abilities by taking solos, comping and so on. This program is all American, but with such excellent variety. I look forward to it.
Steve

adventures in marketing

So, last week I reached the double bar line on my latest piece for the band. It's called MOTHERS and it's about Grendel's mother and an Italian female serial killer. The idea came to me last November in a hotel in New York. I was in the city for a conference on new opera, and I was thinking a lot about the way composers talk about their work to others.

Fast-forward to 12:30 am. One thing I love to do when I'm staying in a hotel is watch the gristly, spooky true-crime shows on late at night. I don't watch TV much as a rule, and the coincidence of being able to stay up late and watch whatever I want on tv feels like a luxury.

Perhaps I was subconsciously on the market for an easy-to-explain subject for a dramatic work. Once it came to me, it seemed obvious - female killers! I had been wanting to do something with the character of Grendel's mother for some time. When I read about Leonarda Cianciulli, the "Soap-Maker of Correggio" who killed three women in a deluded plan to protect her son on the battlefield in WWII, I realized that both of these women killed on behalf of their beloved sons - Grendel's mother in retribution for Grendel's death, and Cianciulli as a protective sacrifice for her son's safety. (also to make what she called some "acceptable creamy soap.") Mother-love gone very, very wrong.

I hope you will come hear MOTHERS at our next concert - 4/29, Tenri Cultural Institute. I'll be doing the sprechstimme role. It's a big party for our CD release, so you'll hear some choice cuts from that as well as this world premiere and Douglas Boyce's A BRIEF HISTORY OF ACCELERATION in a brand new arrangement. Hot.

Coming together

Every musician has at the back of his or her mind the musical equivalent of the "bucket list" (I detest that term)-- pieces one would love to perform or to compose, but hasn't yet found the right collaborators, or venue, or concert for them. I prefer the more attractive term "desiderata." With the extraordinary program this evening we are all checking multiple works off our lists of desiderata. I feel so fortunate that the program, the venue, and the collaborators have come together to perform these monumental works. And while we'll draw big, beautiful, bold checks next to three items on out list, working with Paula and Yuki and being buoyed up by the passion of their music making has only inspired us to add more items to our desiderata. I look forward to making more and more check marks with them.