Out West Arts: Performance at the end of the world

Saturday wrapped up the second full season of performances from Los Angeles’ young new music collective wildUp. I'm going to miss them immensely over the summer (although word has it their plans for later this year involve some pretty spectacular soon-to-be-revealed collaborations.) Why I’ve come to admire this ensemble so much is that they offer something you can't find in too many other venues around town and Saturday’s program was fully representative of that. The group isn’t about just trotting out a few new works that they play for contrast with more familiar bait for potential ticket buyers. Nor is the ensemble simply about revisiting 20th century rarities and and under-programmed European modernists. No, wildUp is about the moment, making the music that they want to hear now and sharing their excitement about it with a community of people interested in living, breathing composers experimenting and finding their way in the musical world. Maybe not every piece comes off as a winner and not every note is great, but the energy and excitement is undeniable. The evenings that the players organize under director Chris Rountree are not about history. They are about playing music now and they are not to be missed.

Saturday’s program played off one of the group’s current venues, the Pasadena Armory Center for the Arts a former armory that has for several decades been home to a large thriving community arts and education program. Rountree and his colleagues couldn’t ignore the underlying implications of transforming such a space from a place of preparing for war to one of hopefully peaceful artistic production. The show built on these tensions with works about war and peace and the sometimes fine line between the two. Four of the woks were new compositions from members of the ensemble, which were joined by another new commission from local composer Nicholas Deyoe. The only dead guy on the program was Igor Stravinsky whose L’Histoire du Soldat rounded out the show in a 1993 version with rewritten text for the score by author and pacifist Kurt Vonnegut.

First up were the guns and ammunition. Andrew Tholl’s Still Not a Place to Build Monuments or Cathedrals kicked things off with an angry blaze of sound including electric guitar riffs that would have made Glenn Branca proud. The mood changed, but the chaotic swirl towards the inevitable didn’t. This was followed by Andrew McIntosh’s Inch and Mile, which, we were told, was written using just intonation, and slowly built from smaller units to more declarative rhythmic ones as an analogy of how small conflicts can lead, by a series of unexpected smaller events to larger ones. I was taken with the manner the work snuck up on the listener bit by bit it one of the night's highlights. Mr. Deyoe’s work, A New Anxiety, was a commission Rountree asked for to be based on the work of death metal bands like Slayer. Deyoe, no stranger to working with electric guitar sounds excitedly dove in and delivered the decibels and joyful exuberance one might expect from such a request.

The “peace” part of the show which followed the break had its most serene moment with Rountree’s own For Allen Ginsberg, which was built around specific chants used in Ginsberg’s own work and offered an opportunity for several performers to offer up flowers in remembrance of both Ginsberg and the peaceful causes he represented. Then came Chris Kallmyer’s Here We All Are Moving Forward. Kallmyer is as much a sound artist as a composer and things are never quite as straight forward as they seem. After receiving the commission to write a piece inspired by Palestrina and the music of William Byrd, Kallmyer wanted to produce a work that was alos political without being too didactic. What he created was a system to translate data about Iraqi casualties during the recent Iraq war into corresponding rhythmic elements that were then used as underpinning for something more reflective of the work's early music inspiration. The work was cleverly open-ended the incessant clicking rhythm constantly hoovering in the back of some beautiful melodic overlay that could be read either as a cause for hope or a reminder of our persistent ability to maintain such a great distance between that quality and our reality.

It was at this point the group turned to Stravinsky’s rude, jarring work about a soldier dealing with the devil. As conductor Rountree pointed out from the podium, it’s a bit of an odd work in that Stravinsky’s soldier, whose story occurs in bursts in between the music, is armed with a violin and not a gun and never sees much combat. Vonnegut saw this as an insult given his own combat experience and set out to replace the work’s original text by C. F. Ramuz with an ironic, more-pointed alternative story based on the life of Eddie Slovik, a WWII U.S. soldier executed for desertion – in fact the first to be so treated since the Civil War. There’s a bitter taste here making Stravinsky’s music sound even more sardonic than usual and a cast of four actors were stationed high above the orchestra on an overlooking balcony where a farcical version of Slovik’s desertion story and execution played out. It's highly reminiscent of Ullmann's Der Kaiser von Atlantis in its direct assault on human cruelty and was a wonderful addition to the program. Rountree did a great job is coordinating this stop-start piece between orchestra and actors even if not all the acting was what one might have hoped for.

And so the wildUp audience, which grows bigger and bigger at each performance, was once again left wanting more. And it appears at this point that wildUp has every attention of providing that into the foreseeable future. It's an experiment that has touched off excitement in a local community of young composers and musicians, and we in Los Angeles are luck to have them.

Labels: wildup

If there is anything that’s been reinforced to me lately, it’s that conflict, real or manufactured, seems to draw people’s attention. Even in the field of classical music, the whiff of a cross-country rivalry between Los Angeles and New York serves to do all kinds of things. It’s a marketing strategy for music festivals, and it’s an idea that certainly sells whatever it is big media conglomerates still sell these days the way it crops up again and again in the writing of people who should know better. I was reminded of this on Saturday when I heard a story regarding one of L.A.'s most prominent public writers on all things classical music. Allegedly after hearing a new composition from a young ex-Los Angeles based composer who now resides in Brooklyn, the writer was purported to have remarked about how the composer has “gone soft” now that he works in the apparently toxic confines of Brooklyn. You see, every time you insult New York in Los Angeles, an agent gets his wings.

But luckily, local artists of the musical variety at least are having none of this garbage as evidenced by two local programs that mostly celebrated the connection between themselves and their peers on the East Coast albeit in different ways. What’s more, Brooklyn-based composer Timothy Andres’ music featured prominently in both. Andres was the star attraction at this weekend’s Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra concert, which I saw Sunday in its Westwood incarnation. Andres was commissioned as part of the group’s Sound Investment program with donations from individual audience members to bring new work to life. Andres was this year’s choice, and the result was a remarkably interesting 13-minute piano concerto entitled Old Keys. The single movement highlighted Andres' familiarity with 20th-century American music history, but had an accessibility that brought later John Adams immediately to my mind. And while the piano part, which Andres played himself, was no virtuosic tour de force, it subtly achieved its own greatness fully integrating itself within the context of the larger orchestration. This was not the usual individual-vs-society concerto model but something far more nuanced. As Andres' himself pointed out, it's a restless piece constantly on the move, looking for something though not necessarily in an agitated way. If there was any complaint, it was that the piece ended far too quickly as if it were only the first movement of some larger, much more ambitious work.

Andres didn’t completely pass on the virtuosity, however. He followed Old Keys with his recomposition of Mozart’s Piano Concerto, No. 26. As music director and conductor Jeffrey Kahane pointed out before the performance, it is not a well-loved piece by many soloists. This is in part due to the fact that Mozart didn’t write out the music for pianist's left hand which Mozart himself likely improvised on the spot or played from his own memory in performance. Other composers have had a stab at fleshing this sizable gap out, but Andres took a radically different approach, creating a related but completely independent part not intended to conform or mimic Mozart’s style. The result is fiendish to play and nearly schizophrenic, the right hand almost unaware at times of what the left is doing. The orchestra speaks to the soloist as if through a translator or across time in something that feels contemporary in a twisted sort of way. Just to put a point on it, Andres played his piano transcription of Mahler’s “Des Antionius von Paduas Fischpredigt” from Des Knaben Wunderhorn as an encore. He left no doubt in this room that he’s a major talent with some incredible music yet to come.

All this bi-coastal good feeling served as a template for the young upstart wildUp collective that returned to Venice’s Beyond Baroque this past Friday and Saturday. The theme was a mocking nod to a N.Y. vs L.A. rivalry with the ensemble playing pieces predominantly from young composers working in either city. The intent wasn’t so much to draw a contrast as it was to point out similarities in two burgeoning music scenes. In the best ironic twist of all, music director Christopher Rountree, who contributed a piece based on Walt Whitman’s ”Brooklyn,” was absent from the show except by pre-taped message as he was in that very same borough this weekend helping out with the Brooklyn Philharmonic. See how easy that was? And nobody had to get off a high horse to do it no less.

Andres’s music featured prominently here as well with the group playing several chamber-sized pieces, many of which had previously been heard as part of the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s “Green Umbrella” new music series. The impressive pianist Richard Valittuto showed that Andres is not the only one who’s capable of making How Can I Live in Your World of Ideas? sound great. Andres’ Ives-inspired Some Connecticut Gospel was also in the first half of the program and was played with as much New England pluck as you could wish from any ensemble. Andrew Tholl revisited Missy Mazzoli’s solo violin piece via Bach, Dissolve, O My Heart, and participated in the violin octet that gave the juice to Andrew Norman’s Gran Turismo. Norman will be taking over the composer in residence spot at LACO starting next season so local audiences will hopefully to get to hear more of this kind of great music. These pieces bristled with invention, all very inviting, and, from the look of things, as fun to play as to hear.

The Los Angeles part of the program kicked off with a comical piece from Art Jarvinen, Egyptian Two-Step, that made ample use of the hissing from compressed air canisters with the players breaking out in smiles as wide as the audience's. From here things got a bit more serious with Odeya Nini's Shelter in Swarm, Andrew McIntosh’s Silver and White and Andrew Tholl’s Corpus Callosum, which all showed the markings of European modernism. I was perhaps most taken with Rountree’s Brooklyn, which provided chamber accompaniment to a pre-recorded reading of Whitman’s poem. Whitman’s language is as stunning as Ives’ music and Rountree craftily follows along matching the emotional fervency in the building vision of a city from the water. It was all very exciting stuff in large part due to the commitment and excitement of the players. Granted, sometimes that excitement cut into their ability to sell the music in a serious fashion with a rotating roster of emcees for the show who were too inclined toward a little humorous self-deprication, which can go a long way; more than that goes way too far. But better this than something boring, which wildUp never is. Again proving that, yes, we can all get along and have a good time without highlighting our divisions to do so. Who would have guessed?

Labels: Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, wildup

Los Angeles loves young fresh faces. And when they come with talent to match, sparks can fly. Which may just happen again later this month when the not-yet-30-year-old composer and pianist Timothy Andres arrives in Los Angeles for two high-profile performances with two very different local organizations. Andres is a fast-rising star in the musical world having already had his work included in programming from the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 2009, the year before he released his debut recording, Shy and Mighty, on the Nonesuch label. Press has been glowing, and new commissions are coming fast and furious making his upcoming L.A. appearances a high priority for anyone interested in the next generation of American composers. His music will be included in the latest program from wildUp, L.A.’s new music collective, who’ll consider current music scenes on the East and West Coast on the 23rd and 24th of March at Beyond Baroque in Venice. And on an even bigger note, he’ll appear with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra under Jeffrey Kahane on the 24th and 25th of March playing his completion of the Mozart Piano Concerto No. 26 as well as his new piano concerto, Old Keys, a commission of the group’s Sound Investment program. Not excited yet? You should be. Prior to all this, Out West Arts was lucky enough to get Timo to take a stab at the ever popular 10 Questions.

1. How important is contemporary technology to your creative process?
   

   
   I have trouble separating the "creative" process from the day-to-day "getting notes down" process. For me, they mostly happen at the same time; it's not very glamorous. I almost always work directly into Sibelius. I've been composing on computers since I was a kid, so it feels natural. Occasionally I'll start with an audio mockup in Logic. The only thing I'll do by hand is the very outset of writing a piece, sitting at the piano and improvising and occasionally jotting down incomprehensible little notes to myself.
   
   That's in addition to all the other things computers help to do: recording, editing, playing random keyboard instruments, doing all my design and layout, doing my website, exchanging scores and recordings with fellow musicians—I even read most music off my iPad now, so there are pitiably few hours in a day that I'm not in front of some sort of screen.



2. What’s your current obsession?
   

   
   It's not one that I would have anticipated even a couple of years ago, and that is men's clothing. Out of school I dressed like any number of Liberal Arts College Graduates—that is to say, in striped t-shirts and skinny jeans. When I moved to New York I found myself in a meeting at my record label or something, and all of a sudden it was—I feel like a child right now, and not in a good way. Also around that time a friend of mine bought me a really beautiful jacket, and I realized I had not a single thing in my wardrobe that wouldn't look ridiculous alongside such a garment, so that started me down the path. Now I spend most of my free time trawling eBay or thrift shops, searching for, I don't know, the perfect houndstooth bow tie or something equally foppish.
   
   There are a number of other things I waste time on including bicycles, cooking, and repeatedly cleaning all surfaces in the apartment.



3. You’ll be performing alongside the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra on March 24 and 25 in a program that will feature a new commission from you for them, a piano concert entitled Old Keys. What should we know about the piece before hand?
   

   
   Here are some things you should know about Old Keys: it's an uncharacteristically neurotic piece for me, full of little details and inflections. It's a piano concerto but only in outward appearance; the piano part is not flashy or even that difficult. The entire thing is basically stitched together out of transitions, or at least each section is agitating to move on to the next; it never sits still and just contents itself with one or two things.

4. That same weekend, L.A.’s young, fresh family of musicians wildUp will feature your music in a program playing off an imagined East Coast vs West Coast composer rivalry. Can’t we all just get along?
   

   
   Yes and no. West coasters, in my experience, tend to be genuinely open minded, which is so great. If there's rivalry it is solely between the East coast and its own self.
   
   Over here, critics and curators love to repeat that old saw about how today's young composers have no stylistic limitations, how we just "let it all hang out" all of the time, but in reality things are much more like that old Tom Lehrer song "National Brotherhood Week"—everyone comes out to Miller or Merkin to hear their friend's piece and puts on a friendly face for precisely as long as is needed ("be grateful that it doesn't last all year!"). At one of these things someone asked me if I was an "uptown or downtown" composer, which… just… never ask anyone that.
   
   Competition among composers is a funny thing. If you're, say, a violinist and you bomb an audition, it's easy to say "I had an off day" or "so and so practiced harder" and kind of take the brunt of the blame yourself. Composers are never like that. It's more along the lines of "Orchestra X didn't program my piece because they like that Euro crap/that post-minimalist crap/That New Complexity/That New Sincerity" etc. etc.—they think there must be some terrible extenuating circumstance or conspiracy turning things against them.
   
   My strategy is to remind myself that "a rising tide lifts all boats". If your friend gets commissioned by the LA Phil, how is that anything other than fantastic? It means the LA Phil is paying attention to your immediate sphere, your field, and bringing that music to new and bigger audiences. And you never know, your friend might drop your name at Deborah Borda or John Adams and they'll end up commissioning you next time.



5. What music made you want to be a composer?
   

   
   At first it was just pure harmony what did it for me. When I learned how to play major chords I thought they were the most beautiful sound imaginable. Somewhat later it was Beethoven, Brahms, and Ravel. Now hundreds of different things make me want to compose.



6. What’s your second favorite opera after Berg’s Lulu?
   

   
   Need you ask? Nixon in China.



7. When should I clap?
   

   
   Whenever the hell you want? As long as it's not during a super beautiful quiet part?

8. You’re equally well known as a performer in your own right, especially of contemporary music. In what way does your work as a performer of other people’s music influence your work as a composer?
   

   
   The two are linked quite inextricably. I perform my own stuff a great deal, of course, but it will never challenge me as a pianist in quite the way a score from someone else does. Ted Hearne's Parlor Diplomacy totally schooled me on how to play trills, I learned how to hocket and groove from playing Reich and Adams and Brad Mehldau, and Rzewski taught me about playing ridiculous counterpoint with one's forearms. And whatever I'm currently practicing finds its way into what I write, sooner or later—it's just unavoidable. It works the other way, too; I think I get a "leg up" on deducing a composer's intentions by being one myself.
   
   Playing the piano is also my primary means of discovering new music—I don't listen to contemporary music regularly (though I'm trying to find more time for that) so I'll often find out about a great composer by performing one of his or her works.



9. You’ve been associated with at least two different larger groups of composers: the six person collective Sleeping Giant and more broadly, a generation of young composers currently living and working in Brooklyn. How important is it for you to be surrounded by a community of other composers in making the music you do?
   

   
   The proximity to fellow composers is a nice thing, and the Sleeping Giants are close friends and we love getting drunk together, so that's great. But technically we could collaborate from anywhere in the world—one doesn't need to occupy the same space in order to share work, create work together, critique said work, talk trash, and get silly.
   
   The Brooklyn/Greater NY area really comes in handy for performing. I love playing with groups like Metropolis Ensemble or ACME, chamber ensembles, bands, bandsembles (that's French), just any random and interesting gig that comes my way. Since college, my M.O. has been to stay as busy as possible at all times, and living in the midst of such an active community has allowed me to support myself doing just that. I'm grateful for it literally every day.



10. What’s the next big thing we should be looking for from Timothy Andres?
    

    
    Some things I'm particularly excited about this Spring: playing a solo "opener" for the Brad Mehldau trio in Denver, then giving a full recital at Le Poisson Rouge here in New York, leading into my London début at Wigmore Hall in June.
    
    Also some new pieces in the works for next season that I'm thrilled about: a solo piece for the amazing young pianist Kirill Gerstein, a quintet for Jonathan Biss and the Elias Quartet, my first choral piece (!) for Present Music in Milwaukee, scoring a documentary, perhaps a song cycle, and some big new collaborative works with the Sleeping Giants.
    
    And a bit down the road, my next album—a collaboration with the wonderful young orchestra Metropolis Ensemble.

Labels: 10 Questions, Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, wildup

I forgot my coat. It’s something you don’t think you’ll need often in L.A., even in January, but it was a particularly cold Monday. Of course in L.A. you also don’t expect you’ll be watching a string quartet in the expanded picture window of an Alvarado storefront just north of Sunset Blvd open to the street with midday traffic rushing by. But we’re Angelenos, and we roll with it. Where I had rolled earlier this week was the heart of Los Angeles’ latest, greatest blossoming modern, art music scene. In the last few years, an expanding network of artists and musicians with ties not only through CalArts but through the ethereal world of Twitter and other social media have been making increasingly important music, and doing it their own way, on their own terms. And on this particularly cold January day, they were making it that way in Echo Park.


The occasion was the launch of the first release from L.A.’s newest record label, populist records. (A superbly ironic name for a contemporary art music outfit.) The label is the brain child of internet-savvy violinist Andrew Tholl and violist Andrew McIntosh who explained that they had created the label as an outlet for Southern California composers to get their work recorded by a home-grown label while providing local artists a chance to perform music they wanted to play. The first recording Nicholas Deyoe – with throbbing eyes provides a survey of Deyoe's work for small ensembles including songs written for soprano Stephanie Aston and two string quartets played by the formalist quartet - Tholl and McIntosh’s quartet alongside violinist Mark Menzies and cellist Ashley Walters. In March, populist will release McIntosh’s recording of solo works from American minimalist composer Tom Johnson. (The sample below features the formalists playing Deyoe's Images from a sleepless night from the new release.)

And while self-publishing music isn’t new, populist records represent a further step in the development of a musical and artistic community in Los Angeles that is beginning to command attention for its breadth, excitement, and sheer energy of production and performance. The launch event was held at Machine Project, a Los Angeles arts collective in Echo Park that hosts and promotes a wide variety of events. Machine Project has worked closely for several years with sound artist/composer/trumpeter Chris Kallmyer who in turn, along with McIntosh, Tholl, and others, performs as part of L.A.’s new music chamber orchestra, wild Up. Kallmyer, whose own work has been seen at the Getty Museum and other major art institutions, helped arrange the event at Machine Project where cupcakes and beer were paired with performances from the formalists as well as Deyoe’s solo pieces for cello. Deyoe himself played electric guitar augmented with an empty aluminum can, a favorite implement in recent guitar-based compositions. The crowd gathered at the front of the space and on the street looking into the store like displaced shoppers in an arctic L.A. mall.


The sense of possibility was palpable as Tholl and McIntosh spoke of future plans for recordings from wild Up and other outfits in the area while the crowd filled with other familiar faces from the local art music scene, knit more closely together through an active online community. Composer Isaac Schankler, whose People Inside Electronics will produce their latest show on Feb 11 funded in part from an indiegogo campaign, was in attendance. Schankler is curating another evening at Machine Project on Jan 29, "Bandwagon! (a combine)", with all sorts of machines, musical and otherwise. All of this, of course, took place just two days after the last wild Up performance in Pasadena last weekend where artistic director Christopher Rountree helped put the final touches on wild Up's Kickstarter project to fund and press vinyl copies of their performance of the Shostakovich Chamber Symphony. The group has already surpassed its fundraising goal and is discussing plans to make a recording of last weekend’s concert available. To boot, Rountree will make an appearance on APM's Performance Today on the 19th to talk about the project. And the performance schedule of both wild Up and the formalist quartet is filled with appearances over the next several months, which, if their track record to date is any indication, will be superlative events.

Increasingly, and egged on by an active online community that has created connections in ways that may not have existed before, there is a new and expanding community of young musicians and composers across the city making exciting music they want to hear and play. The folks I've discussed here aren't the only ones, but they are creating a music scene in a way and with technology that hadn't existed before. They are intent on producing their own sounds in collaboration with one another without waiting for someone to come and discover them. And that is a great day for new music in L.A. Even if it happens in the most unusual spaces, on the most unusually cold days in our typically sunny, warm city.

Labels: LA new music, wildup

From Freud to Foucault to Prince, the song remains the same: there’s joy (and plenty of other things) in repetition. Such was the case on Friday when L.A.’s most exciting and relevant group of young musicians, wildUp, gathered at Beyond Baroque in Venice for the latest in their increasingly frequent concert series. The exuberance of artistic director Christopher Rountree and his chamber orchestra of all trades underwent a veritable sublimation; their pure energy threatening to change physical states without notice. Friday’s broad, adventurous program had a large agenda covering everything from the mechanistic production of music à la Conlon Nancarrow and George Antheil to the sly, spirited arrangements of pop and punk rock songs that were the centerpiece of the evening. All of it played with more heart than you’re likely to see elsewhere.

The first half of the show began with an exploration of the mechanistic production of sound. Richard Valitutto (who like the entire orchestra was so impressive playing the music of Sofia Gubaidulina at REDCAT this spring) played two contemporary “piano rags" – gleefully bastardized versions of the American originals - from William Albright and William Bolcom. Building on this, he was joined by violinist Andrew Tholl for Nancarrow’s Toccata for violin and player piano with Tholl playing alongside the prerecorded and decidedly superhuman pianola. Tholl, as he did at several points in the evening, amazed with his rapid-fire playing. A movement from George Antheil’s First Sonatas for Violin and piano was next. It was introduced, fairly I think, as a musical precursor of punk rock, a point punctuated by Valitutto's ferocious attack on the score that brought out the mechanistic qualities of the music. But this was all prelude to works from composer Clarence Barlow who joined the faculty of UCSB a few years ago and was present at theperofrmance. Both works performed here by an ensemble of strings, percussion, keyboard, trumpet and clarinet started from an atonal base that soon gave way to references to popular songs. The Beatles' "Michelle" mysteriously arose from Sachets des ciseaux Insatiables with a riff from Bizet’s Habanera to wrap things up. Which was almost as deliriously amusing as the rhythmic layering used to disguise Prince’s “Sexy MF” within Septima de facto. The freewheeling excitement of both of Barlow's pieces couldn't have been better suited for the polymorphously effervescent wildUp players.


But the goal here was more than cover band idolatry, and Rountree insisted, going into the second half of the evening that these performances were meant to reflect wildUp’s own spirit and approach to music. What followed were varied, sometimes witty, and often attractive arrangements by Tholl, Chris Kallmyer, and others of seminal punk rock songs from Fear, Black Flag, The Misfits, and X-Ray Spex among others. The players remained the same with additional drums and electric guitar from sound artist Kallmyer. The sound was fierce and sizable in its own way complete with amplified bassoon riffs (courtesy of Archie Carey) that would not have sounded out of place on the original versions of any the songs of the aforementioned artists. And while things didn't quite get as loud as the available ear plugs at the door might have suggested, it was a unique version of the original punk sound. Most of the vocal lines were left intact with various players taking turns including bass player Maggie Hasspacher who lead on X-Ray Spex' "Oh Bondage! Up Yours!" and made a unique addition to The Misfits' "Where Eagles Dare". Even Rountree himself turned to face the audience at one point during a rearrangement of Dirty Projectors' arrangement of Black Flag’s “Gimmie Gimmie Gimmie” to sing-shout along. And while it may not have achieved the same decibels it was decidedly a punk rock moment all its own and true to Rountree's promise it was an arrangement and performance uniquely wildUp's own. The evening was heartfelt and organic with the kind of passionate music making and energy you don’t need a marketing campaign to convince you of. The show repeats again on Saturday, and you can check out the rest of their plans for the season on the website.

Labels: wildup