Women in (New) Music: Breaking Down Systems with Sound of Late

Posted on October 18, 2017 by maestrobeats

With death and destruction come opportunities for growth and change. This fall, that’s the theme behind Sound of Late’s season opener on Oct. 21 and 28 in Portland and Seattle. The program features music inspired by decay, deterioration, and new growth—both literally and metaphorically.

Sound of Late flutist Sarah Pyle is the curator behind the concert program, which musically depicts how breaking down old systems can create positive change. Combine that with the ensemble’s ongoing focus on music by women composers and it serves as a striking metaphor for historical issues of representation in classical music.

The centerpiece of the program is Anna Clyne’s Steelworks, scored for flute, bass clarinet, percussion, and prerecorded tape. Inspired by the last steelworks factory in Brooklyn, the piece weaves together metallic, pulsing live performances with recordings of industrial machinery and interviews with employees from the factory. The composer’s equally restless and ruminative tape piece Beauty is also on the program.

Clyne’s two industrialized works are contrasted against the softness of Somei Satoh’s whimsical Birds in Warped Time II for violin and piano and Sarah Kirkland Snider’s lyrical Thread and Fray for clarinet, viola, and marimba. Rounding out the program are Giacinto Scelsi’s dizzying flute and clarinet duo Ko Lho and the world premiere of Noel Kennon’s lilac, my fire field.

We sat down with Sarah Pyle to learn more about the program and inspiration behind Sound of Late’s season opener:

Second Inversion: What makes Sound of Late’s concerts different from your average classical music performances?

Sarah Pyle: In all of our concerts, we aim for a more approachable, casual experience, and we love featuring Northwest composers and artists! Several members of the group have contributed to our past programming, so each concert really is a unique experience, as they tend to reflect the identities of the musicians in the group. In a typical concert experience, our audience is seated fairly close to us, and we hope that coming out to a show feels like having a really good conversation with a friend.

SI: Can you tell us a bit about your ensemble’s ongoing focus on music by women composers?

SP: We keep data on all of our past programming. Looking over the numbers today, I’ve found that in our regular concert series 58% of the music we have performed since our first concert in 2015 has been written by women composers. We don’t choose our programming based on gender metrics; it has just worked out that way. We program works the way I imagine many other artistic directors do—by asking, “Whose works impart meaning to me? Whose voice is resonating with me now?”

SI: What are some of the overarching themes of this particular program?

SP: This concert is really perfect for October. It’s all about decay and systems that change by breaking down. For instance, Anna Clyne’s Steelworks for flute, clarinet, two percussionists, and electronics features a tape part that incorporates interviews with workers in the last steel factory operating in Brooklyn. The recurring text is, “If something is working fine and you can keep up with demand, then there’s really no reason for you to change unless the machine breaks down by itself.” I’m sure this quote could inspire a hundred spin-off articles on “The State of Classical Music.” To me, though, the decomposition of cyclical mechanisms that this bit of text implies creates exciting spaces for opportunity. With this programming, we wanted to really showcase the aesthetics of systems in breakdown.

SI: In what ways (if any) do you feel that being a woman has shaped your experiences as a performer and concert curator? What advice do you have for other female-identifying artists who are aspiring to creative leadership roles?

SP: Representation really does matter. The first time I played a work by a woman composer in the classical sphere, I was 12 or 13 years old, working on the Concertino for Flute and Piano by Cécile Chaminade. My flute teacher at the time said, “You know she was a woman, right?” And of course I didn’t know. I remember feeling stunned that I had never even noticed I had only played works by male composers up to that point.

As a concert curator, I go to shows and notice an extreme lack of representation. Personally, I find the music being written by women composers today resonates with me in a powerful way. In all the programming work I have done for Sound of Late, I strive for representation without tokenism, and I know others in the group do the same.

As far as advice goes, the biggest piece of advice I’m living right now is to make sure you’ve got a proper support network. As a newcomer to Seattle (going on two years!), this is something I’m still building in my new city. What I love about Sound of Late is that the support network grows with each concert series, including new friends, guest musicians, and curious audience members.

The work, though, whether it’s writing, curating, or performing, is still hard to do, and it is easy to get discouraged. Some inspiring words that I think about almost daily are from an article published last summer by the composer Ashley Fure about her experience organizing a panel on gender in new music at Darmstadt: “Some of us now have access to the resources we need to make the work we believe in. What a gift that is. And with that gift, to my mind, comes an obligation to build our boldest aesthetic visions. I can say without pretense and in purely demographic terms: the canon needs us. Our most radical action is in making work.”

SI: What are you most looking forward to with this concert, and what do you hope audiences will gain from it?

SP: This is probably my favorite set of pieces we’ve ever performed as a group. Most of the works are by living composers, including pieces by Somei Satoh, Anna Clyne, Sarah Kirkland Snider, and Seattle composer Noel Kennon.

I’m looking forward to sharing the program with our friends in Seattle and Portland, and I hope our audiences leave with a desire to examine and unravel, to ask “What if?” and to find meaning and beauty in change.

Sound of Late’s Steelworks performances are Saturday, Oct. 21 in Portland at N.E.W. Expressive Works and Saturday, Oct. 28 in Seattle at Flutter Studios. For tickets and additional information, please click here.

ALBUM REVIEW: Bang on a Can All-Stars’ “Field Recordings”

Posted on May 18, 2015 by maestrobeats

by Maggie Molloy

You’ve probably heard countless buskers playing bucket drums and other found objects on city streets—but you’ve never heard anyone bang on a can like this before.

The Bang on a Can All-Stars are a six-member amplified ensemble known for exploring the furthest reaches of the classical music world, with an affinity for imagination, experimentation, multimedia music performances, and all things avant-garde.

The one of a kind ensemble is comprised of cellist Ashley Bathgate, bassist Robert Black, pianist Vicky Chow, percussionist David Cossin, guitarist Mark Stewart, and clarinetist Ken Thomson, and their wide-ranging repertoire spans from the minimalist musings of Philip Glass and Steve Reich to the computer music compositions of Paul Lansky and Tristan Perich.

But the All-Stars’ latest project combines an even more colorful palette of creative influences. Toeing the line between music and sound art, “Field Recordings” is a new multimedia project which combines music, film, found sound, and obscure audio-visual archives to create a dialogue between past and present art traditions.

(Purchase links and more information from Cantaloupe Music)

“It’s a kind of ghost story,” composer David Lang said of the album. “We asked composers from different parts of the music world to find a recording of something that already exists—a voice, a sound, a faded scrap of melody—and then write a new piece around it.”

Lang is one of the co-founders of Bang on a Can, along with Julia Wolfe and Michael Gordon. The three appear as featured composers on the new 12-track album, along with Florent Ghys, Christian Marclay, Tyondai Braxton, Jóhann Jóhannsson, Todd Reynolds, Steve Reich, Bryce Dessner, Mira Calix, and Anna Clyne.

The album begins with a performance of Julia Wolfe’s “Reeling,” a lively piece based around a sound clip of a French Canadian vocalist. He sings in a twirling, sing-song style with no lyrics, his melody taking on the role of a fiddle or banjo soloing in a folk reel. Little by little Wolfe adds more instruments to the mix, creating an increasingly chaotic and computerized sound, like a record being rewound and replayed over and over, speaking to the album’s overarching theme of manipulating recorded sound.

The next piece on the album is nothing short of an absolute treasure. Florent Ghys’s “An Open Cage” uses as its basis excerpts from John Cage’s “Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse),” a poetic five-hour diary recorded by Cage himself a year before his death. In Ghys’s piece, a solo pizzicato bass line dances within the rhythms of Cage’s calm and serene narration, painting his deadpan delivery with a funky groove and a distinctly contemporary color. The lively bass line creates an undeniably catchy duet with Cage’s witty and obscure observations, and the piece grows in musical force, gradually adding more instruments until finally a small chorus of voices appears, echoing Cage’s words.

Christian Marclay’s “Fade to Slide” is equally experimental. The multimedia piece is a dramatic exploration into the rich sounds and distinctive timbres of the world around us, featuring everything from water splashing to record playing, bike riding to gong ringing, glass breaking to soup eating, perfume spraying to bagpiping. Yes, even bagpiping.

Marclay specializes in creating sonic collages from found footage, as evidenced by the imaginative—and at times humorous—combinations of recorded sounds in both the audio and video versions of the piece. (The video version is included in “Field Recordings” on a DVD along with five other multimedia pieces.)

The All-Stars also pay tribute to one of the biggest names in contemporary classical: Steve Reich. The album features the ensemble’s own arrangement of “The Cave of Machpelah,” an excerpt from Reich’s multimedia opera, “The Cave.” The slow-moving and ambient piece features an interesting mixture of musical timbres, with wispy, high-pitched cello strings skidding above a deep, droning bass, muffled recorded sound, and a bowed xylophone.

The album ends with a performance of Anna Clyne’s “A Wonderful Day,” the first in a series of short electroacoustic works combining recordings of Chicago street musicians with live instrumental ensembles. This particular piece features the raw, slow voice of an elderly man singing a sweet and poignant tune, surrounded by the muted sounds of the city and the All-Stars’ gentle accompaniment.

Each piece on the album uses recorded sound in a different and distinct way, but they all have one thing in common: they combine music of the past with music of the present, thereby crafting a new vision for music of the future. And in doing so, “Field Recordings” opens up a colorful new can of worms in contemporary classical music.

ALBUM OF THE WEEK: Orchestra Underground: Tech & Techno

Posted on September 2, 2014 by maestrobeats

by Maggie Stapleton

Founded back in 1977, the NYC-based American Composers Orchestra is dedicated to the creation, performance, preservation, and promulgation of music by American composers by way of concerts, commissions, recordings, educational programs, and new music reading sessions. With an esteemed leadership of Derek Bermel, Artistic Director; George Manahan, Music Director; Dennis Russell Davies, Conductor Laureate; and Robert Beaser, Artistic Advisor Laureate this organization is in amazing hands.

Orchestra Underground: Tech & Techno is the fifth digital album from ACO. Each piece was commissioned or premiered by ACO for Orchestra Underground, “a series stretching the definition of, and possibilities for the orchestra. The series challenges conventional notions about symphonic music, embracing multidisciplinary and collaborative work, novel instrumental and spatial orientations of musicians, new technologies and multimedia.” Orchestra Underground just celebrated its 10^th anniversary season in 2013-14 and what better way to celebrate than with this collection of live recordings by Mason Bates, Edmund Campion, Anna Clyne, Justin Messina, and Neil Rolnick.

This release busts out of the gate with Edmund Campion’s Practice, a full-blasted introduction of orchestral forces, cresting and blending seamlessly into an electronic, computer generated outro in Campion’s cheeky musical response to the age-old question, “How Do You Get to Carnegie Hall?” Appropriate, seeing as most of the music on this album was recorded in Carnegie Hall’s Zankel Hall which seeks to host the latest contemporary sounds from classical, pop, jazz, and world music artists.

Like all of the music on this CD, the fusion of traditional orchestral instruments with electronic forces is brilliantly executed in Justin Messina’s Abandon. This work is played to an electronic soundtrack Detroit techno from the early ‘90s during which they experienced a musical rebirth in the underground clubs.

Tender Hooks, by Anna Clyne features a pair of laptops operated by Jeremy Flower and Joshue Ott, which transmit and receive live data from the orchestra. Each element of this recording combines standard notation, written instructions and graphic representation. It also pays homage to one of the earliest electronic instruments, the Theremin!

Neil Rolnick collaborates with violinist Todd Reynolds, to present their instrument creation, the iFiddle. As Rolnick puts it this is “not just a concerto for violin, but a concerto for a cyborg violin that has been intimately joined to a computer.” This union definitely displays both elements of a traditional violin, and yes, I think cyborg describes it best. This piece is strikingly accessible, with catchy violin melodies throughout.

The opening of Omnivorous Furniture by Mason Bates has the feel of “do your best robot dance,” inspired by down-tempo electronic music which soon leads way to full on dance party/funkadelic triptastic. Mason Bates uses computer and drum pad with the orchestra in this work heavily influenced with British hip-hop.

If you’re looking for a gateway into electronically inspired orchestral music, this is a great disc! If you’d like to purchase the collection, you can visit iTunes, Amazon, or the American Composers Orchestra.