The final concert of the 16th Annual Other Minds Music Festival devoted the first half of the evening to the music of the 70-year-old Dutch composer Louis Andriessen (above). Alex Ross at The New Yorker wrote an interesting essay about the composer last year, starting off with a description of a 1969 protest where "a group of radical young Dutch musicians ran amok at the Concertgebouw, the fabled Amsterdam concert hall. At the start of a performance by the Concertgebouw Orchestra, the troublemakers, who included the composers Louis Andriessen and Reinbert de Leeuw, began making noise with nutcrackers, rattles, bicycle horns, and other devices. They also distributed leaflets denouncing the orchestra as a “status symbol of the ruling élite."
Ross continues:
"Carnegie’s recent survey of Andriessen’s work and that of his colleagues and protégés, de Leeuw among them, has revealed an undiminished capacity for making mischief. The composer still resists Romantic trappings, favoring what he has called a “terrifying twenty-first-century orchestra” of electric guitar, keyboards and Hammond organ, saxophones, bongos, and other non-Wagnerian instruments. He likes amplified, pop-style voices better than pure-toned, vibrato-heavy ones. His pantheon of idols has Bach and Stravinsky at the center, but also makes room for Count Basie, Charlie Parker, and the Motown greats. At the age of seventy, he remains a bit of a badass."
The first two pieces were the 2005 solo violin Xenia, where Monica Germino (above center) gave another wonderful performance that included her singing in the final movement, and then she was joined by the vocalist Cristina Zavalloni (above right) in the 1998 Passeggiata in Tram in America e ritorno from surrealist poetry by the mad Italian poet Dino Campana.
A larger ensemble appeared for the 2003 Letter from Cathy, which is a short, witty setting of a postcard sent to Andriessen by the legendary new music vocalist Cathy Berberian, who was once married to Luciano Berio, one of Andriessen's teachers.
The Andriessen set ended with an improvisation by the composer at piano and his muse Cristina Zavalloni vocalising in what sounded like a high-wire act. Joshua Kosman at the San Francisco Chronicle describes it:
"Andriessen began his session with angular repeated chords that sounded like the start of one of his aggressive instrumental scores. But by the time Zavalloni made her entrance, babbling in tongues and emitting vocal glissandos, the accompaniment had broadened into a sort of unsteady chorale. The music that followed ranged hyperactively from fractured torch songs in French and Italian to machine-gun bursts of vocal effects and stuttered phrases. Turning on a dime from one strain to the next, the performers followed one other's lead with uncanny fluidity."
Kyle Gann (above) is as known for his music writing as his actual music. He was a brilliant, entertaining "downtown music vs. uptown music" polemicist for decades at the New York Village Voice, and currently writes the PostClassic blog when he's not writing books about John Cage or teaching students at Bard College. The second half of the concert started with his 2000 piano solo Time Does Not Exist, another gentle reverie that almost got lost between the intense theatrics of Andriessen and the driving jazz of Jason Moran who followed him.
Time Does Not Exist was played by pianist Sarah Cahill above, and in a note to me after I asked her about the music, she wrote:
"At the opening panel, Kyle described the piece as being about the experience of psychotherapy-- how ideas and memories cycle back and repeat over and over, but slightly altered-- and confessed that he actually felt uncomfortable now with people listening to it, so he wanted me to play it as quietly as possible. I've performed it in recitals, and also recorded it, but there was something magical about performing in this context on Saturday, partly because it was sandwiched between louder, more dramatic pieces. Charles Amirkhanian deserves credit for having the foresight to know in advance how the very different pieces on the program that night would offset each other so well in juxtaposition. Kyle puts very few dynamic or expressive markings in the score, so there's a lot of interpretive leeway. A lot of the challenge is deciding how to balance chords, whether to bring out the tenor or the alto voice in a chord progression, if you pull away from the climax or move towards it. Kyle writes beautifully for the piano, and it's always tremendously rewarding to play his music."
Jason Moran (above with orange cap) premiered a half-hour piece called Slang with Moran on piano, Tarus Mateen on bass, Nasheet Waits on drums, Mary Halvorson on guitar, and Alicia Hall Moran as the vocalist.
2010 was an outrageously successful year for Moran. He received the MacArthur Fellowship "genius" grant, while his recording with The Bandwagon, Ten, won just about every Best Jazz Album of the Year award.
Slang featured prerecorded recitations of jazz-related slang words by what sounded like clueless sociologists and eager children which would segue into musical responses by the ensemble, and exquisite, deadpan vocalising by Alicia Hall Moran (above center). It was a wonderful performance and a great finale for the festival.
The second evening of the 16th Annual Other Minds Music Festival started with a "spatial music" world premiere commission from the festival called The Space Between by David Jaffe with special instruments created by Trimpin (second and third from left above). The composer Kyle Gann relates the following anecdote about the installation at PostClassic, his Arts Journal blog:
"Trimpin, whose mischievously adolescent sense of humor is one of his most endearing qualities, had the best joke of the week. David A. Jaffe had inherited a bunch of percussion from his teacher Henry Brant, and he used those instruments in his piece The Space Between Us. Included were about 25 chimes, and Trimpin had the idea of suspending the chimes from the ceiling and having them played via MIDI. So David’s piece had two string quartets, one on each side of the audience, plus a Disklavier onstage, a couple of MIDI-played xylophones, and the chimes hung from the ceiling. On the preceding panel, as the audience sat underneath those chimes, David explained that Trimpin had suggested suspending the chimes, but that he, David, was afraid that they would fall down and strike audience members. Charles asked, “So Trimpin, how are the chimes suspended from the ceiling?”, and Trimpin answered, “Oh, with very thin twine….”
Gann continues: "The Space Between Us was perhaps the festival highlight, with the string quartets playing ethereal melodies with the disembodied chimes in rhythmic unison."
The spread-out string players were from the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble and the Del Sol String Quartet, with percussionist Andrew Schloss (above, talking to pianist Sarah Cahill) standing on stage like the Wizard of Oz, waving his wands to conjure up magical effects.
Next up was a sensational set by the Balinese guitarist I Wayan Balawan (center), with I Nyoman Suarsana and I Nyoman Suwida playing gamelan, and Dylan Johnson and Scott Amendola playing pickup bass and drums respectively. This was world fusion music at its most entertaining, an amazingly fresh mixture of traditional gamelan, rock guitar, and jazz. I Wayan Balawan, according to the Other Minds website, "plays a special guitar with two necks made by Julius Salaka. There are six strings on the guitar's upper neck and seven strings on the lower neck, which utilizes MIDI pickups to trigger synths and samplers."
I Wayan Balawan not only played his two-necked guitar/MIDI sampler with the virtuosic speed and skill of a Jimi Hendrix, but he sang and led the entire ensemble, which included some lightning-fast gamelan work by his colleagues above. This was his first appearance in the United States, but he's returning June 30th for a Thursday evening MATCHA event at the Asian Art Museum in conjunction with its Bali exhibition. Do not, I repeat, DO NOT miss this if at all possible.
I wasn't able to stay for the second half of the concert, which featured a short piece by Agata Zubel and a long percussion improvisation by the the legendary Dutch jazz drummer and artist Han Bennink (above right, talking to Trimpin). A few trusted concertgoers told me that the performance by both was a triumph. Matthew Cmiel at San Francisco Classical Voice has an entertaining description of the "riot of activity."
The 16th Annual Other Minds Music Festival kindly hired me to do some freelance photography for them this year, which allowed me to watch and hear all four evenings of music-making by contemporary composers (above, flanked by Artistic Director Charles Amirkhanian on the right) and a host of performers from around the world. It was an extraordinary festival, with a higher success ratio than usual for this kind of event. Keep in mind, though, that I am not objective after four straight days around these musical artists. Consider this a report of what you missed rather than a review.
Each of the three concerts started off with an interview by Amirkhanian (above right) with the featured composers for that evening. Thursday's opening concert featured (left to right) the Dutch composer of the moment, Louis Andriessen, the American Kyle Gann, the Polish vocalist and composer Agata Zubel, and the Seattle-via-BayArea Janice Giteck.
After a funny, pre-recorded deconstruction of the "Star Spangled Banner" by Anthony Gnazzo, the concert started with Triskaidekaphonia, a short piece for alternately tuned piano by Kyle Gann (above left) that cleared everyone's hearing with its gentle exploration of the many tones between notes, played by Aron Kallay.
This was followed by a violin and piano duet from the late 1960s by Andriessen called Le voile du bonheur, played brilliantly by one of the composer's muses, violinist Monica Germino (above left with David Jaffe) who put down her instrument for the third movement and sang a "teenage tune" about flirting with Bertie.
The main performers of the evening, the Seattle Chamber Players, then played Gann's Kierkegaard, Walking, a charming ramble through an imagined Copenhagen. They were later joined by Loren Mach and Joel Davel on percussion with Eric Zivian on piano for Andriessen's Zilver, a wildly contrasting piece of music where the quartet plays "a long melody in slow musical motion" and the percussion plays "increasingly fast staccato chords." It was bracing trying to figure out which strand to listen to, the lyrical or the strident, or both.
After intermission, Agata Zubel (above center, flanked by Janice Giteck and Richard Friedman) joined the Seattle Chamber Players for Cascando. Georgia Rowe wrote about the performance in the subscriber-only Musical America:
"The festival’s other great discovery was Zubel. The Polish composer-vocalist introduced her brilliant Cascando, a 2007 song cycle for strings, woodwinds and voice that incorporates texts by Samuel Beckett. The score employs an astonishing range of vocal sounds: cries, whispers, pure tone and Sprechgesang, and Zubel delivered them all in a riveting performance. Her voice – a vibrant, voluptuous, precise soprano – is a marvel, and with the Seattle Chamber Players, for whom the work was written, her voicing of the Beckett texts shone against the odd effects and abrupt rhythmic shifts of the instrumental parts."
The final work was Janice Gitek's Ishi (Yahi for 'man'), a six movement piece for the Seattle Chamber Players that sounded terribly conservative after everything that preceded it, but as the music went on, the sincerity and sheer beauty of the musical writing swept away all objections. Ishi, (above right) the last Stone Age Indian living on the continent, spent his final years with the Anthropology Department at UCSF in what is now called Sutro Forest. The music was a poignant reminder of his unspeakably sad story.
