♬ Genre, I'm Only Dancing ♬

wildUp: American Composers Forum Concert REDCAT, Los Angeles, 11 September 2015

 

'Conducting' is when you draw 'designs' in the nowhere -- with a stick, or with your hands -- which are interpreted as 'instructional messages' by guys wearing bow ties who wish they were fishing.

Frank Zappa

 

Neither bow ties nor a desire to be elsewhere were much in evidence on Friday evening as a 10-member contingent of wildUp, plus conductor Christopher Rountree, took to the stage at REDCAT to premiere pieces commissioned from the three winners of the 2015 edition of the American Composers Forum National Composition Contest.

For most contemporary composers, the challenge lies not so much in getting a new work a first performance as it does in ever getting it a second. These three ACF composers—Nina C. Young, Alex Temple, and William Gardiner—can now settle in to worrying about their works' third performances, as wildUp performed each of them twice in the course of the evening. The initial rotation was Young/Temple/Gardiner. A discussion with the composers followed. Young, currently in Rome as a recipient of the aptly-named Rome Prize, appeared via a taped Skype conversation. After the interval, the pieces were performed reordered: Gardiner/Young/Temple.

For a listener, hearing any piece of music for the first time poses the challenge of "finding the way in" on the fly. Popular music is popular, in part, precisely because its structures, rhythms, hooks and other devices offer immediate ease of entry. Much the same is true of pre-20th Century Classical/Romantic repertoire: familiarity with the modes and methods typical of that repertoire allows listeners to orient themselves as those tools are used in expected or unexpected ways in a previously unheard example. On first approaching a 20th Century or contemporary "new music" work, a listener's efforts to hear it in a meaningful way may be thwarted by the fact that its makers have a grant of essentially unlimited discretion to adopt or reject the conventions and techniques of their forebears. Even a recondite, abstruse piece becomes more fathomable when heard with the benefit of the memory of having heard it at least once before. A good recording of a piece can allow for the sort of recurring exploration that eventually allows a listener "to know it for the first time." In the case of Friday's premieres, a second hearing in live performance provided much the same service.

Of the three works on offer, Nina C. Young's "When Eyes Meet" likely gained the most by being played twice, simply because its methods call so little attention to themselves and are accordingly difficult to grasp at as they waft past for the first time. It especially gained by the addition of the composer's comments on her conception of the piece, which draws on the simultaneous potency and discomfort that grows from direct contact, particularly eye contact, with another human. On second hearing, it began to share its secrets, as a Dutch still life might do. A third hearing would be a welcome opportunity.

William Gardiner's "Chiaroscuro" possesses subtleties of its own, but they work around the periphery of a feature that cannot be ignored: a chthonic, viscerally resonant MIDI-controlled bass tone that looms and withdraws, attacks and releases, the deep dark ground against which the other players flash out in contrast. It made an immediate impression on first encounter, and rewarded a second descent to hang suspended in its cavernous center.

REDCAT was a nearly full house, and each performance was enthusiastically applauded. The most boisterous response was reserved for Alex Temple's "The Man Who Hated Everything," a tribute to and critique of the late Frank Zappa, chock full of sly humor, frenetic improvisation, and guilty pleasure. In a piece that ended with a sung litany of the things, innumerable, that Zappa hated, the first two thirds exemplified much that he undeniably loved: doo-wop harmonies, rapid fire wildly melodic tuned percussion, post-Coltrane free jazz, the rigorous modernism of Varèse, all thrown together as if without care or without caring, yet with precision and a desire that each bit be heard, through and through. Zappa hated stupidity and ignorance, as he saw them. more than anything, and this piece is anything but stupid or ignorant. It is also a total blazing hoot. Two times through was, in this instance, just enough to whet the aural palate for many more.

It is in the nature of wildUp that the group rarely plays music that does not, in some way, genuinely excite its members. That excitement and the commitment to giving the best possible account in the moment poured through in each performance of each piece. The composers in the room were likely well pleased. A proper fine night for new music, this was.

~~~

Photo by the blogger; taken in summer 2014 on Ventura Boulevard, directly across the street from the Sherman Oaks Galleria, a shopping mall hated but nevertheless immortalized by FZ (and daughter Moon) in "Valley Girl".

The blogger citizen music journalist attended this performance via a complimentary press ticket, but would definitely have attended as a paying customer had that opportunity not come his way.

A Boy's Own Gothic Sarah Kirkland Snider's Unremembered

It needs a name, this creative space Sarah Kirkland Snider and others have been defining for themselves as composers over much of the past decade. "Alt-Classical" seemed to serve the purpose briefly, but no one is satisfied with that one anymore, and its claimed reach was too broad in any case. "Contemporary Classical" casts the net even wider, capturing even less. For purposes of this post, and with a very particular focus on SKS, her close collaborators, and other creators whose sensibilities hew relatively close to hers, let us propose

Magical Classicism.

An imagined musical equivalent to literary Magic Realism, Magical Classicism (if it existed) would describe music that deploys the forces of orchestral/symphonic or traditional chamber music, but is not limited to them. Electric guitars, synthesizers, jazz or rock or hip-hop derived percussion assemblages, would all be fair game if they are applied to the purpose of producing music of thoughtful inquiry and humane emotion, willing to embrace a modicum (or more) of overt beauty but suspicious toward too-easy sentiment or the merely pretty and ornamental. Magical Classicism would draw as well on the three rules Wallace Stevens articulated for poetry in his "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction": that it must be abstract, that it must change, and that while being and doing so, perhaps most of all, it must give pleasure.

Magical Classicism provides a fair description of the long-form song oriented work Sarah Kirkland Snider has produced in 2010's momentous Penelope and in her newest, Unremembered, releasing today via New Amsterdam. This blogger's deep-dyed and abiding fondness for Penelope—one of the best musical things since the turn of this still-young century—is no secret. Today, however, the subject is Unremembered.

Unremembered grew from a commission to write for the vocalists of Roomful of Teeth, for whom Snider originally composed five pieces setting verses written for the project by the poet Nathaniel Bellows. One of those, "The Orchard", appeared on the group's Grammy-winning self-titled debut in 2012. Bellows kept writing, and illustrating, more poems, and Snider kept setting them, and the whole evolved into what now presents itself as Unremembered, a cycle of 13 songs all drawn from or inspired by some version of Bellows' childhood and early youth in rural Massachusetts.

Together, the poems revisit a haunted boyhood, as recalled or reshaped some years later. While they are shared by three quite different singers, the poems' point of view is unified, all speaking in the voice of "the poet" (not literally Bellows, one assumes, but a persona resembling him) excavating that past.

There is a town, but it is only glimpsed once, when a sleepwalking girl passes through to the other side of it to meet the uncertain end to her dream ("The Guest"). Apart from the poet, individualized people are rare in these poems, which spend more time with animals and, particularly, with the places of the past. Those places comprise an aged New England of woodlands, hills, forest, farmsteads and old estates (many abandoned), creek sides: zones in which human and natural and possibly supernatural worlds mingle or rub uneasily together, where the past is never quite past. These sorts of landscapes are somewhat familiar, in their strangeness, from Hawthorne (another Nathaniel), from the small-town Midwest of Ray Bradbury, from the nostalgic-pastoral side of Stephen King [e.g., "The Body"/Stand By Me], and others.

There are ghosts, there is at least one witch out in the woods, there are glades rumored to have been the site of suicides. A drowned man lies on the riverbank. Human or animal, past or present, death is rarely far beneath a sylvan afternoon or a seemingly untroubled field. The most harrowingly specific description in Unremembered is of "The Swan," randomly destroyed, crushed in an extended instant as a truck backs over the place where she had been nesting. Indeed, Unremembered begins and ends with the poet sensing "the vapor of the dead" in the porches of his ear, sparking the rueful reflection that he has "never learned to love someone/The way I did that place."

As a title, "Unremembered" contains its own mysteries: the poet is seemingly engaged in remembering and in sharing his memories with the listener, so what is it that is unremembered? Are these narratives true memories at all? Are they known only to the poet, thus unrecollected by anyone else? Is the poet unburdening himself, unwinding the strands of his own memory, sharing these vignettes for the sake of consigning them hereafter to the realm of the forgotten?

In its current, album version Unremembered is performed by "the Unremembered Orchestra," drawn from numerous contemporary music ensembles such as ACME, ICE, Victoire, and Alarm Will Sound, and including several composer-performers (Timo Andres and Caleb Burhans among them). Edwin Outwater, of Ontario's Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony and the San Francisco Symphony, conducts. The recording is co-produced by the composer with Lawson White, and the multitracking and processing tools of the studio serve as another player.

Sarah Kirkland Snider's score builds on, without repeating, the musical language of Penelope, and shares with its predecessor a heady blend of thoughtful intricacy with forthright emotional appeal. Nearly all of the poems set for Unremembered are constructed using short-lined rhyming quatrains, but they do not succumb to sameness: the setting composed for each is rhythmically and tonally distinct, a sequence of craftily detailed tableaux, rich with surprise and nuance.

The singers are Padma Newsome (on "The Estate," to which he brings a Yeatsian bardic quality), DM Stith and, continuing seamless collaboration with Snider that began with Penelope, Shara Worden. DM Stith's scrubby tenor, which he recently compared in a note on Twitter to that of Robert Wyatt, is an apt match for the wondering boy that was. Shara Worden fills that role as well, while also standing in for the larger natural and unnatural forces of the world. Her wordless voice is an element of the air these pieces breathe, suspended as dust motes, adrift as seeds from a milkweed pod. Engaging the texts, she deploys a seemingly faultless dramatic sense of tone and inflection. Her progression in "The Swan", arching and aching through the middle verses only to land upon "a splayed and shattered/Thing", is lethally sad. Her way with a single word (such as "fixedly" in "The Witch") can be a song in itself.

With no continuous plot as such, Unremembered works by an accumulation of incidents and effect across its duration. It provides the listener a sojourn in the poet's recollection or reconstruction, or perhaps reinvention, of a past that may have been a prelude to the backward-glancing present, or may have been a refuge out of which we have been cast, with the poet, into a colder and less welcoming world. Unremembered's abstractions and changes linger, as do the pleasures of its remembered company.

~~~

Incidentally: Some of the musical material from Unremembered has also found its way into "Pale as Centuries", a short piece written for NOW Ensemble and included on that group's latest release, Dreamfall. 

~~~

[The blogger has had the benefit of an advance review copy of Unremembered, on which this post was based. He also preordered Unremembered the moment it went on sale and is looking forward to receiving that second copy. Procuring a physical copy is definitely recommended, for the sake of the attractive album booklet containing the texts as well as illustrations by Nathaniel Bellows for each of the poems.]