A home for new and unusual music from all corners of the classical genre, brought to you by the power of public media. Second Inversion is a service of Classical KING FM 98.1.
“We dedicate this music to mother figures who work selflessly to build families and communities, to artists and creators who love passionately and live fearlessly, and to the marginalized and oppressed groups of people who sing of stars,” reads the dedication statement for Brooklyn-based chamber group Karavika’s sophomore album, Of Earth and Sky.
Indeed, Karavika’s significance to their community comes through in this album, which was funded by friends and fans on Indiegogo following their 2012 debut. They have given back by hosting children’s workshops at the Brooklyn Children’s Museum, performing regularly on Carnatic Sundays at Cornelia Street Café, as well as in the Brooklyn Raga Massive – a leading organization in the Raga, or Indian classical, renaissance.
With lively, inventive arrangements, Karavika provides space for new ways to think about fusion music. Sri Lankan, Indian, and folk music of the Americas are all in evidence from the outset.
The opening track, entitled Your Passing Touch, presents a walk-down chord progression over which Trina Basu’s violin and Amali Premawardhana’s cello lead the ensemble in a sweeping melodic line, dovetailing dramatically over an energetic tabla performance by guest musician Advait Shah. A short breather, and Perry Wortman’s mandolin takes the lead with a prominent mandolin that alternates between blues and Raga styles.
Trina Basu and Amali Premawardhana. PC Gary Winter.
They continue into an arrangement of the lullaby, All the Pretty Horses, in which Basu and Premawardhana’s voices join in raw, unprocessed harmony, lending an intimate feel to the track. Sameer Gupta imparts his expertise on tabla while violin and cello pizzicati build a dark, American folk-inspired atmosphere.
Basu and Premawardhana’s chemistry in most notable on Raga Behag, as they complement each other like sisters forming a single musical expression from their two instruments. It is a refreshing and reaffirming arrangement with a strong sense of purpose.
Karavika. PC Dipyaman Ganguly.
As the album goes on, many guest musicians add new sonic layers to the experience – Carnatic vocals, a bamboo flute called the bansuri, another violin, and an Indian drum called a mridangam. The group excels at creating a sense of perpetual motion and communal harmony, with each instrument boldly featured and lending support as each piece unfolds. For Karavika, Of Earth and Sky has truly been a labor of love.
On May 24, 2016, Town Hall Seattle concert-goers and Second Inversion listeners were fortunate to hear the world premiere of Movement for String Quartet and Piano by Andrius Žlabys. If you missed it, we’re pleased to present this video production on the Town Hall stage!
Joshua Roman sat down to chat with Andrius about the piece and his composition background.
Joshua Roman: When was the first time you thought about writing your own music?
Andrius Žlabys: Well, actually from childhood. I started by improvising, before I began formal piano studies, to the horror of my piano teacher, because my whole setup was fairly developed in an amateur way. So I had learned, on my own, the Bach Toccata and Fugue for organ, but my fingers were all over the place, so it was a kind of promising disaster.
JR: What style did you improvise in?
AŽ: I started to come to the keyboard (we have a grand piano where I grew up) – and I would begin just tinkering with the piano, finding any sonorities I could. I don’t know what style that was. Kid style. But I think I might have made some sense, because my parents thought “it’s not just regular banging on the piano”, and I would spend a lot of time on it. So they decided maybe it’s a good idea to try lessons. And so I kept improvising, and the style was kind of baroque for a while, and then some contemporary elements were added as I was exposed to more contemporary music. And at some point I did try to write it down, fragments, but I didn’t have any formal composition studies until I came to the U.S. to Interlochen, where I studied composition.
JR: Did you ever write anything that was performed at Interlochen?
AŽ: Yeah! I wrote a piano sonata, a piece for violin and piano, and actually a suite for cello and piano. When I auditioned for schools, I got into Peabody as a double major; composition and piano, but I chose to go to Curtis as a piano major. So for a while, I didn’t compose, and then started up again later. But I kept improvising.
JR: Who are some of your influences as a composer?
AŽ: I have composers that I love and play all the time like Bach, and obviously Mozart. Looking at more current composers, I love Messiaen, and I love Shostakovich, Schnittke, and Arvo Pärt. But I was also influenced by many of my close friends who are composers. For example, Dmitri Levkovich, and Yevgeniy Sharlat, who was a tremendous influence. He wrote a piano quartet for me; through that and other pieces that I observed him writing I got to see the process, the struggle, and moments of joy when it comes through.
Somehow I was so in a piano mode that I never developed the ability to write lengthy things. Because the actual technique of writing is to be able to capture the ideas before they float away. So once I became able to capture longer ideas, there was more possibility. The ideas were always there, I just never had the capacity to capture them until I took up composing in a more focused way.
JR: Do think that composing affects your piano playing at all?
AŽ: Absolutely. Yes, they’re so interconnected. In interesting and sometimes strange ways. For example, when I compose – as a piano teacher, I change a lot. Because I start to see all kinds of motivic connections that I would never see otherwise. I remember once I was teaching Mozart Fantasia in C minor, and at the time I was actively writing a piece, and I saw all kinds of things in the Mozart that were totally out of my vision when I was practicing the piece myself. So yes, it affects my interpretation. First of all, you get to see how the thought is developed. So I get to see what is the core idea, which influences the piece mostly on a subconscious level. I get to see how everything revolves around that idea, which is usually just a couple of notes. And to see the whole, not just the parts – that musical cognitive process, a kind of inner logic.
Since I started composing more, Beethoven has become a total mystery. In his case, there are so many rather simple harmonic progressions; we have tonic-dominant, dominant-tonic; fairly straightforward. And then you get ornamentation in the form of the melody, which is also often just very simple arpeggios. And the real genius is somewhere in between those two things. Because by themselves, harmonic progressions are just harmonic progressions, right? And without them, those ornamentations would not make sense. So something happens in this very thin area, a kind of boundary layer. So I began to see more of those things when I started really composing.
As a performer of my own music, I always hear “how it should really sound”. It makes me much more demanding of what my sound should be. On the other hand, I realize that how the piece should sound is not defined by, you know, precise dynamics. When I analyze the great works I now see how masterfully the composers placed those dynamics. They are precise enough, but leave just enough room for freedom, and every composer does it differently. It’s such an important element, and when I compose myself, I can imagine the music being interpreted in different ways, as long as the underlying thought is somehow expressed.
JR: How do you feel playing the piano affects your composition? This is kind of the opposite question.
AŽ: Playing the piano of course gives me access to polyphony. For me, voice leading in composition is probably the most important thing. The lines follow a certain kind of logic – almost like physical laws. And then, when they try to break the boundaries of those laws, those have to be intentional moments, not accidental. Voice leading, polyphony, the importance of independent yet strongly interacting lines, are the most important values for me, no matter what style. I think that if you look at any music that we consider great music, the voice leading is almost always impeccable, unless intentionally not so. Then, of course, it’s breaking those rules quite purposefully.
Writing for piano, it helps to know how to write for my own hands. Sometimes it makes me write kind of demanding stuff for the piano, and then of course I have to deal with it.
JR: Aside from knowing the idiom of the piano, do you think being someone who interprets other people’s music and performs it for audiences affects your compositions at all?
Photo Credit: D. Matvejavas
AŽ: Oh yes, absolutely. It’s been kind of a tradition throughout classical music; every composer was a performer and every performer a composer, up to a certain historical period when they began to separate. Ideally you should be able to play every instrument that you’re writing for. I can only play piano, but I try to strongly envision how it would be on the other instruments, so I can write in a way that would be comfortable. Or if uncomfortable, there would be a good reason for that.
For me, I want to write as few notes as possible to convey the feeling. I try to avoid unnecessary complexity. It’s like words; I like to be laconic if possible. Get to the point.
JR: Let’s talk about your piece, A Movement for Piano Quintet.
AŽ: Movement for String Quartet and Piano. Actually, somehow I prefer — “quintet” for me is not as noble sounding as “quartet”, because for me it implies a kind of mesh. I think the string quartet is such a complete sonority. The piano is like a guest, that gets to join for a little while.
JR: Fair point. What was the inspiration for your piece, Movement for String Quartet and Piano?
AŽ: The initial sketches for the piece, and the original motive – a rising three note line – came from a feeling I had during the events in Ukraine in 2014. In fact, the piece is dedicated to the memory of the victims of the war in Ukraine. So the whole piece comes from that feeling or thought. It’s definitely not a very happy piece. There’s a sense of things going wrong, and kind of a protest against that.
This was very close to home – Lithuania. I felt solidarity with Ukraine, and we felt that this could happen to Lithuania as well. To this day, there’s a lot of uncertainty about that.
JR: How does the feeling affect your compositional process?
AŽ: Well, there’s nothing explicit on purpose. There’s an intention, and I think that intention directs the whole process. The obsessive rhythm, and the images that might be seen, come from that intention. It’s not a peaceful piece, even though it has peaceful moments, maybe. There’s kind of an underlying feeling of foreboding.
AŽ: Yes, the ostinato, with its obsessive quality.
There’s another place with strong images – after the big climax there’s a solo quartet section, which is kind of like a Sarabande. And then the piano eventually comes on top, and that feeling was of disjointed, parallel realities, that kind of coexist, but not necessarily coincide. That creates a hallucinatory feeling; it’s not quite a cadenza, but elaborate passagework that comes on top of quite a nice harmony and destroys it.
Then there’s a pizzicato canon, which feels like a person who’s locked into a room of a certain number of dimensions, and cannot get out of it. It’s just perpetually repeating. And again, the piano comes in with little scales which are really a rearticulation of the theme from the beginning.
One of the reasons I couldn’t write for a while when I was – back at Curtis was that I felt I wasn’t allowed to write tonal music. So when I would write, the stuff that would come out would be tonal, and I would dismiss it because it’s just not contemporary. And at some point I said “OK, if that’s what’s coming out then that’s what I have”. That’s my natural language. So, of course, everybody looks for their own style, but my idea is that if I have something that sounds a certain way in my head, and it sounds enough that I want to write it down, then that takes precedence over style. For me, if I can express a certain idea to the best of my ability, or state of mind, then the style will take care of itself.
As we near another anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks, we’re reminded of just how terrifyingly destructive and divisive those events were, both within our country and beyond it. Nearly 3,000 innocent civilians died that day—along with another 6,000 who were injured—and that was only the beginning of what was to come.
The attacks led our nation’s troops into what has become the longest-running war in U.S. history. Since 9/11, nearly 2 million U.S. soldiers have been deployed to Afghanistan or Iraq. Over 6,000 American troops have been killed, another 44,000 wounded, and the rest of our nation’s lives forever changed in the legislation that has followed.
Nineteen hijackers changed our nation, our world, and the entire course of history.
It begs the question: Why?
Why are the nations of the world so divided? Why do we keep terrorizing one another? Why do we keep fighting these wars? Are we really all that different?
These are some of the questions composer David Lang asks with his composition “the national anthems,” a choral work released earlier this summer onCantaloupe Music. Performed by the Los Angeles Master Chorale (under the baton of Grant Gershon) with the Calder String Quartet, the album takes a critical look at the way we as individual nations define ourselves.
Los Angeles Master Chorale under the baton of Grant Gershon. Photo credit: David Johnston
“I had the idea that if I looked carefully at every national anthem I might be able to identify something that everyone in the world could agree on,” Lang said. “If I could take just one hopeful sentence from the national anthem of every nation in the world I might be able to make a kind of meta-anthem of the things that we all share. “
He combed through the anthems of all 193 countries in the United Nations, pulling one line from each to use in his libretto.
David Lang. Photo Credit: Peter Serling
“What I found, to my shock and surprise,” Lang said, “Was that within almost every anthem is a bloody, war-like, tragic core, in which we cover up our deep fears of losing our freedoms with waves of aggression and bravado.”
That underlying sense of fear haunts the entire work, with the choir’s prayerful voices rising above a stained glass string accompaniment. The piece is organized into five movements exploring themes of peace, courage, glory, freedom, and community, ever so slowly sprawling outward from the first movement’s unified, tight-knit harmonies toward contrapuntal chaos.
The piece builds in quiet urgency through the war-stained patriotic glory of the middle movements, the once-unified voices separating as the wounded strings weep softly in the distance. And yet, the final movement returns to a churchlike hymn, the voices once again finding unity in their hopes, their prayers, and their music.
Calder Quartet. Photo Credit: Autumn de Wilde
The anthem is paired with another largescale choral work: Lang’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “the little match girl passion,” based on the children’s story of The Little Match Girl by Hans Christian Andersen. It’s a classic parable given new depth through Lang’s masterful part-writing: a poor young girl, beaten by her father, fails to sell matches on the street and freezes from the bitter cold of the cruel world around her. Yet in wake of “the national anthems,” her story serves a dual purpose, reminding us of the personal wars and private tragedies we all face—and how truly delicate and cherished is our freedom.
“Hiding in every national anthem is the recognition that we are insecure about our freedoms, that freedom is fragile, and delicate, and easy to lose,” Lang said. “Maybe an anthem is a memory informing a kind of prayer, a heartfelt plea: There was a time when we were forced to live in chains. Please don’t make us live in chains again.”
Imagine yourself in the midst of an entire orchestra of fog horns.
That’s kind of what the beginning of Travis Laplante’s Blade of Love sounds like. It is, in a word, jarring.
The opening of the 40-minute opus stridently jolts you out of your everyday surroundings and promptly thrusts you into a kaleidoscopic realm of bold colors and even bolder sounds—an entire world of tangled noises you didn’t even know existed.
Blade of Love is the sophomore album of Battle Trance, a tenor saxophone quartet led by the aforementioned Travis Laplante. Along with his coconspirators Patrick Breiner, Matt Nelson, and Jeremy Viner, Laplante explores the saxophone as a vessel for the human spirit—in all its beautiful and discordant complexity.
This complexity is expressed, in part, through a colorful palette of extended techniques both virtuosic and primal: the piece features multiphonics, overblowing, nontraditional mouth articulations, singing, grunting, growling, scowling, and a whole slew of other sounds we don’t even have names for yet.
“There were certain specific sounds that I imagined being in Blade of Love, but I couldn’t get close enough to them using traditional saxophone tone,” Laplante said. “Sounds like arrows flying through the air, birds singing or flying overhead, bombs, water running, the wind, fires, singing in church, making love, killing, waves crashing, fighting for your life, thunder, the sound of rage, howling, crying, laughing, the sound of my last breath. So I began working on different ways for the saxophone to get closer to these sounds, and the resulting techniques became part of the fabric of Blade of Love.”
Suffice it to say, the fabric of Blade of Love is not so clear-cut. In fact, the album is more of a quilt than a piece of fabric, really. It’s the kind of quilt that is worn and well-loved—wrinkled, ripped, speckled, shared, tattered, torn, and sewn back together with tender, loving care. The three distinctive movements bleed in and out of one another, each one borrowing small patches here and there from the moods, motives, and melodic landscape of the others.
The initial foghorns of the first movement evaporate into airy, overlapping waves of sound before gradually transforming into a soulful sax groove atop circling minimalist melodies. Yet just as the musical texture begins to slow down and thin out, a drawn-out crescendo yanks you back into an anxious soundscape of fluttering melodies, overlapping and interacting like four frantically beating lifelines intertwined.
A series of (by comparison) barely audible whistling blends softly into the second movement, eventually giving way to another dramatic sonic contrast: this time, a variation of the earlier sax solo layered over a medley of visceral squeaking, squawking, pitch slides, and what I can only describe as saxophonic neighing. Breathy stretches of silence punctuate the warped, wavering harmonies, and the movement comes to a close with a warbling chant of foggy multiphonics and primordial sputtering.
A cross between a solemn hymn and a whale song quartet begins the shorter final movement, with sighing sax melodies overlapping and evaporating into damp waves of tranquility. But of course, Blade of Love does not end so mildly: the sax quartet flickers anxiously back into another variation of the original sax solo and the piece gradually comes to a close with the sound of breathless, fluttering saxophone keys.
And by the end of the album, that breathless flutter starts to sound pretty familiar. It sounds like wings flapping, mouths breathing, hearts beating, and life living. Because sometimes, life does sound like fluttering keys—or spiritual hymns or whale songs. Sometimes life really does sound like an orchestra of fog horns—and that, too, can be beautiful.
Music in the American Wild at Hurricane Ridge Visitors Center. Photo Credit: Geoff Sheil
Following the completion of the Music in the American Wild tour in celebration of the centennial of the National Park Service, I took some time to consider the state of the interaction between music, the parks, and wild places in general. Inspiringly, there are many projects happening now that explore this terrain. The interaction of wild spaces and music is a topic which many people both in the United States and around the world are eager to explore.
In addition to Music in the American Wild, another group recently completed an entirely separate tour that brought new music to the national parks in celebration of the centennial. TheGrand Valley State University New Music Ensemble‘s tour visited Badlands, Wind Cave, Grand Teton, and Yellowstone National Parks. This tour concluded on July 9, 2016. They also commissioned new music for the centennial, presenting eight new works alongside three previously commissioned works from a 2014 tour of national parks of the Southwest.
Also like Music in the American Wild, the GVSU tour was supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. The fact that there were at least two separate new music ensembles touring the national parks and celebrating the centennial with newly commissioned works is outstanding! However, beyond recognizing projects like these, we must address the deeper meaning of what they are trying to accomplish. The effect of music in wild places is defined by two axes: the interaction of music and venue, and the content of the music itself.
When we consider music in the context of wild places, there is a spectrum of ways in which music and location interact. At the most basic, some projects are little more than outdoor concerts, with music (usually) written for indoor spaces presented outdoors. Moving further along the spectrum, some outdoor concerts include music that was written with the outdoors in mind, inspired by the outdoors, or even specifically written to be performed outdoors. Some projects go a bit further and curate music for the specific space in which it will be performed, whether written with outdoor performance in mind or not. Further along are projects that include music written specifically for the outdoors, sometimes combined with aforementioned curation of music for specific venues. Finally, there are other projects written for exactly the specific outdoor venue (and sometimes, time) at which they are performed.
Heart o’ the Hills Campground. Photo Credit: Geoff Sheil
Music in the American Wild falls squarely in the middle of this spectrum, with a robust, if not completely essential, connection to their specific performance locations. The music that they presented was certainly written with the outdoors in mind and was designed to be performed outdoors (indoors, too, I suspect). However, not all of their pieces were designed for or inspired by specific places, and not all of their pieces took an apparent interest in interacting with the location in which they were to be performed. The group did, however, take the care to specially curate the programs of each of their performances so that the music they offered complemented each different performance space. The project was successful, to be sure, but the interaction of music with wild spaces shouldn’t be limited to the form it took in Music in the American Wild.
Music in the American Wild in the Hoh Rain Forest. Photo Credit: Geoff Sheil
Consider a piece like John Luther Adams’Inuksuit, in which the music intentionally acts like an assistive device, helping the audience experience the performance location in a new way. The music is not written for any specific outdoor space, but is intended to be performed outdoors and to deepen the experience of the space. This overtly intentional interaction between music and outdoor performance spaces illustrates one way concepts from Music in the American Wild and similar projects could be extended.
Inuksuit was performed in Seattle in September, 2015. Photo Credit: Melanie Voytovich
Another piece that illustrates how music and location can be even more deeply connected is Michael Gordon’s collaborative pieceNatural History, which was premiered on July 29, 2016 at Crater Lake in Oregon and commissioned by the Britt Music and Arts Festival. This piece was written specifically to be performed at Crater Lake, making both location and music essential to the project. Further, Natural History’s collaborative nature extends its connection to the performance location; the piece involved local musicians, especially focusing on performers from the Klamath Tribes, for whom Crater Lake has always been a special spiritual place.
Crater Lake. Photo Credit: Britt Festivals
The totality of connections to place in Natural History invites consideration of the role of content in projects that include the interaction of music and wild spaces. Natural History was conceived with a keen awareness of Native American issues and culture. Other pieces, like many of John Luther Adams’ works, are centered on the issues of climate change and ecology. Pieces like these, which openly confront and explore the serious issues facing our wild spaces, are leading the way as musicians become more interested in and adept at exploring the intersection of music and nature.
On this front, one piece from Music in the American Wild’s set list deserves special recognition. Aaron Travers’ piece Sanctuary, inspired by the armed occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge earlier this year, takes a clear-eyed look at a difficult issue that is relevant to modern audiences.
Perhaps, as time moves on, more projects like Music in the American Wild will delve even deeper in search of connections to place. Maybe they will attempt to explore some of the modern challenges surrounding our national parks and wild spaces. The issues of conservation, Native American history, and land use are as relevant now as they have ever been. Exploring these sometimes-unpleasant facets of our National Parks and wild places is good for everyone involved; musicians get to participate in relevant modern conversation on topics that truly matter, and the public gets a new set of tools with which to connect with wilderness and consider the issues.
American Camp at San Juan National Historical Park. Photo Credit: Geoff Sheil
I have immensely enjoyed covering the Music in the American Wild ensemble this year. I would like to thank them for all of their hard work and their openness in presenting these enjoyable concerts, and for visiting the beautiful (and sometimes overlooked) National Parks of Washington. They deserve praise for contributing to the movement to connect music with our national parks and wild places. Projects like this not only bring music to new and exciting places, they deepen the public’s awareness of wild places and can foster much-needed conversations on the issues surrounding them. I sincerely hope that the project continues into the future and grows even broader in scope. Until next time, I suggest we all go “take a hike!”
And by the end of the album, that breathless flutter starts to sound pretty familiar. It sounds like wings flapping, mouths breathing, hearts beating, and life living. Because sometimes, life does sound like fluttering keys—or spiritual hymns or whale songs. Sometimes life really does sound like an orchestra of fog horns—and that, too, can be beautiful.
