Category: Uncategorized

Along with a bunch of my friends, Sam Beebe, Niloufar Nourbakhsh, Joseph Bohigian, Joseph Bohigian, Rob Cosgrove and Taylor Long, we put together a few works to put on the New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival. We had originally proposed a full length concert set, but after the festival was canceled due to COVID-19, they moved to an online format and we all were cast out into far-flung regions of the world. For the online format, though, we still had the opportunity to compose and record some new works for a Networked Music format. We also recorded a work of Sam’s:

Sam had this to say about his piece:

Pretty Saro is a tune I first heard from a Jean Ritchie recording with Doc Watson. I was immediately struck by the simplicity and power of both the performance and the tune and lyrics. Later on I heard Peggy Seeger do it on one of her albums, and it sort of lodged the song in my
36

mind ever since – I’ve always wanted to make some interpretation of it. So, with Pretty Saro Orbital, have tapped Brian Eno’s procedure of rotating tape loops from his album “Music for Airports” as a method to cope with the lack of precise synchronization of parts due to the limitations of remote performance via video conferencing and unstable home internet connections. The material, sourced from the traditional song, is presented with an open scoring, and is played to a shared (albeit erratic) metronome, which remains silent to the audience. I am pleased by the way this project has allowed me to explore and remodel these two sources and make them my own.

The festival organizer had this note:

Welcome to NYCEMF 2020.Just as we were organizing our concerts, which were supposed to take place between June 14 and 21, the United States was hit by the world-wide pandemic of the coronavirus. The entire country went into lockdown, and New York City was the epicenter of the outbreak. People were forbidden to leave their homes except to get medicine or food (and restaurants were closed, so you could only get take-out). Over 40 million people in the USA lost their jobs, and the economy went into a meltdown.

All this has had a major impact on music productions and organizations. The largest musical organizations in New York, like the Metropolitan Opera and Philharmonic Orchestra, cancelled their seasons and will not open until 2021. All local concert activity ceased, and the only performances that began to take place were virtual productions over the internet. A few musical productions have taken place with very small audiences in large spaces in order to allow for social distancing, but most events were simply cancelled.

Thus, we were forced to cancel the in-person concerts for NYCEMF 2020, but we were able to organize this virtual presentation. All composers who had works accepted were invited to submit something, and we will also allow them to have the same pieces played live next year if they wish. As you can see, we have an extraordinary group of pieces presented in this way.

We will miss some of the unique features that we have always had in previous festivals, particularly the opportunity to hear works in surround sound and with some of the special ambisonic qualities that some works use, as well as the opportunity to have sound installations and live performances. But we will return to these as soon as we are able to resume our normal activities.

The festival is organized into concerts just like they would have been if we had presented them in person. I encourage you to listen to everything on the festival, and you can do so as long as we are able to leave the festival on line. Enjoy!

Hubert Howe, https://nycemf.org/program-book/

Last Fall (I know, big delay), Lachenmann rolled up to Zürich and had a series of events that ran the course of a weekend, including several concerts at ZHdK. This all coincided with his one of performances as the narrator in his Ballopera Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern alongside a chamber concert and talk-back that the Züri Opera house had hosted. This was near the end of the run of the his show—if I remember correctly, there was only the closing show left after this weekend—and amazingly, from an American’s perspective of sales rates for contemporary classical productions, all of the shows were sold out.

Luckily, I was able to get a ticket through ZHdK, and the seats were amazing. But before I get to the Ballopera (it’s a thing now), let me rewind to earlier in the weekend, which started out with a chamber concert performed by ZHdK students and Lachenmann himself. Without getting into too much detail, there were several pieces on the program. The ones that truly stood out were Wiegenmusik, and temA. Wiegenmusik: for it’s truly lush piano writing and harmony, and temA: for the instrumental and coloristic creativity that Lachenmann is known for. Intériur I was masterfully performed, but it’s funny: I think that for an ‘instrumentarium’ that inevitably demands for creative writing, Lachenmann called for a massive battery of instruments, yet, in contrast to his reputation and the presented temA, got little out of each.

• 

• 

ZHdK’s Arc-en-Ciel (the school’s large New Music ensemble) also presented some Lachenmann alongside Morton Feldman’s Rothko Chapel. I spoke with some of the players afterwards, and they mentioned that Lachenmann really took the time to work through everything with the ensemble. The players from the chamber concert expressed the same thing to me, which leads me to believe it was a truly exceptional rehearsal experience. I know, had I been in their position, it would have meant the world to me, to have someone of Lachenmann’s stature not simply dip in for the dress and peace out after the concert (he attended all the post-concert social gatherings). In this way he served as a role-model for how to treat colleagues, students, or even just fans.

Das Mädchen was also an interesting experience. There are many political aspects to the work and the production itself, which I will get into in a second. The production was stunning, and the opulence of the orchestra on hand, alongside the fact that it was spatialized throughout the opera house, was really put to use beautifully within the musical experience. The first half of the piece was revelatory orchestral writing, after which, the music (reflecting the content of the narrative) flagged and died away . I wonder if the music would have been so captivating on recording, or whether it is intrinsically linked to how the orchestra is positioned around the audience (bound to the live experience).

Hearing a bunch of Lachenmann’s music live, back-to-back over a weekend, alongside seeing a panel discussion hosted at ZHdK (not the one at the opera house), there were a few things that struck me about Lachenmann’s music and the apparatuses (INSTRUMENTARIUM) surrounding it. Lachenmann is well known for being a Marxist, and his modernist style of music hews close to modernism as a dialectically and progressively grounded historical and aesthetic ideology. There are many contradictions in the the sequence of events I’ve covered in this post to a Marxist, or even dialectic musical-political ideal. On the one hand, I do understand that we live in a society (cue joker), and one has to navigate institutions and realities within that society in order to produce the art one wants. On the other hand, there is something quite ironic about a Ballet, whose principal character’s hope is extinguished by a cold, uncaring (capitalist) society, yet the work was most definitely produced in an iconic type-space of Bourgeoisie/high society, which is nonetheless situated in the economic center of one of the banking capitals of the world.

I have been working on this new paper that was recently published in the Journal of Network Music and Arts this fall. Check it out!

 

This information has been out of the bag for some time–that being said, what’s the point of having a website if you don’t post cool stuff that happens?

This upcoming fall I’ll be spending a year studying at the Zürcher Hochschule der Künste working on my dissertation project. This is all being made possible through the generous U.S. tax payers, the staff at the IIE, the generous Swiss tax payers, and the SFBI under the auspices of a Fulbright Open Study/Research Award and the Swiss Government Excellence Grant.

Check in here over the coming year, where I’ll be posting about my time in Switzerland and the progress of my crazy participatory computer music system!

This week my work Toy3 for Laptop Ensemble will be performed on Sonic Spring out at Stony Brook University! Come check it out!

This June, The Impossible Will Take a Little While was awarded a 2018 UMEZ Arts Engagement Grant from LMCC and the Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone. The program is described here at LMCC’s website! More details to come on a performance of this upcoming work!

UMEZ Arts Engagement is a new grant program launched in December 2017 to enhance the diversity and frequency of arts and cultural presentations in Upper Manhattan. The program provides direct support for these activities to Upper Manhattan’s artists and nonprofit arts organizations under the guiding principle that support for artists of diverse disciplines, practices, cultural backgrounds, and career stages contributes to the vibrancy and sustainability of the communities in which they live and work.