Remembering Bern Herbolsheimer

Posted on January 14, 2016 by maestrobeats

Photo Credit: Rosetta Greek Photography http://rosettagreekphotography.com

We are deeply saddened to hear of Bern Herbolsheimer’s passing. Bern was an incomparable composer in the Northwest music community and has left a rich, warm, and inspiring impression on us all. He served on the faculties of Cornish College of the Arts & the University of Washington and had works premiered by Seattle Symphony, Pacific Northwest Ballet, and choirs all throughout the region.

Bern visited our studios just a few months ago and shared some beautiful insights about his piece, “Botanas,” written for and recorded by the Saint Helens String Quartet on American Dreams, recently released on PARMA Recordings (Navona). We will play this piece today in remembrance at 1pm on Second Inversion.

From Maggie Molloy‘s album review of American Dreams by the Saint Helens String Quartet:

Bern Herbolsheimer’s five-movement “Botanas” explores a very different perspective: the piece is based on the rich melodies, flavorful food, and exquisite culture of the Yucatán region of Mexico.

“I always have been interested in the similarities between food, cooking, eating, creating music, and consuming it with our ears,” Herbolsheimer said of his inspiration for the piece. “So I thought I would combine each movement with a traditional Mayan melody and the name of a traditional Mayan botana or appetizer.”

From spicy salsa to roasted squash seed humus to traditional tamales eaten on the Day of the Dead, each piece has its own lively and distinct flavor. And while each one may be just a little tidbit of flavorful timbres and textures, together the piece is an entire feast of dynamic colors and characters.

We are so thankful to have this piece, and many others by Bern, in our library to remember him for days, months, and years to come. Rest in Peace.

ALBUM REVIEW: Feral Icons

Posted on September 8, 2015 by maestrobeats

by Maggie Molloy

When you hear the word “feral” used to describe a musical instrument, the first thing that comes to mind is probably something wild and ferocious like an electric guitar, a saxophone, maybe even a double bass—but probably not a viola.

Unless, of course, you are composer Peter Vukmirovic Stevens. In his latest album, titled “Feral Icons,” he explores the tempestuous and untamed territory of solo, unaccompanied viola. The performer on the album is violist Mara Gearman, a Seattle native and a member of the Seattle Symphony.

Stevens is a Seattle-based composer, pianist, and multimedia artist whose music is deeply influenced by visual media, literature, and travel—and “Feral Icons” is no exception. The music was inspired, in part, by his travels and his interest in art history.

“I’ve been surrounded by icons my whole life, growing up,” said Stevens, whose first musical influences came from the Serbian Orthodox church where he sang during church services as a child. His new album was especially inspired by the rich history of icon paintings in places like Cyprus and Bulgaria, where he recently visited.

“I was doing my research on that art form, which I think is unique in the Western world in that it’s very symbolic,” he said. “The work is done anonymously by the artist, and the amount of symbolism that is present in icons was a great vehicle for adding live musical ideas as musical representations of icons and people that I admire…Each piece is sort of an icon, a painting in itself of a particular attribute.”

The album is a suite of six pieces for solo, unaccompanied (and very assertive) viola which combine the instrument’s rich tone with an exotic harmonic language and a thematically rich musical arc. For Stevens, the pieces on the album collectively represent a single entity, though each is varied in its symbolism and character, as is brought out through Gearman’s commanding performance.

“Watching her play is like a display of power,” Stevens said. “She is a tremendous player. In order for solo instrument pieces to be communicated, having somebody of her caliber is really important to bring the music to life.”

The opening title track, “Feral Icons,” begins with broad, full-bodied bow strokes that highlight the viola’s rich, raw tone. The expressive melodies are perfectly balanced against double-stop harmonies and unrelenting rhythms, creating a gorgeous contrast of musical textures.

It is followed by the melancholy reveries of “Sovereign, I,” a pensive and heartfelt musical meditation. The musing melodic lines ring across the viola’s entire pitch range above rich harmonies. In fact, Stevens considers the spacing of harmonies to be one of the most important aspects of his harmonic thinking.

“The benefit of working with a string instrument is that you can play the same note sometimes on three or four different strings, and it allows you to create different tonal effects and different timbral effects,” he said. “And it’s nice that it’s not a piano, because you have all these different strings available to think about the color of the sound you want and where it is on the fingerboard.”

The third work on the album, “Sanctuary,” is an opulent exploration of color, with textural interest created through dreamy, sweetly ringing melodies contrasted with lush chords, percussive flourishes, and the occasional, deliberate silence.

The next piece, “Ex Nihilo,” takes its title from the Latin phrase meaning “creation out of nothing.” Expressive melodies, aggressive rhythms, forceful double-stops, and shifting tempos create a richly varied tapestry of musical textures.

“Bloodlines” follows with its haunting, romantic melodies dancing above a low drone, and the album comes to a close with the breathtaking lyricism and visceral energy of “Black and Gold.”

And balanced against the power and intensity of 45 minutes of solo viola, Stevens manages to maintain the sincerity, the vulnerability, and above all, the beauty of a single, unaccompanied instrument.

“It’s a wonderful challenge to write for a single instrument,” he said. “That a single instrument can carry the entire musical vehicle that is needed for a good piece of music to be realized. And that challenge is so exposed. It’s a wonderful metaphor for the individual, for a single person just trying to process the world around them. The solo instrument is a wonderful means of expressing that individuality and that complexity within each of us.”

A “Feral Icons” CD release party and performance featuring Gearman will take place at Seattle’s Steve Jensen Gallery on Capitol Hill this Saturday, Sept. 12. Doors open at 7:30 p.m. and the performance begins at 8 p.m.

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ALBUM REVIEW: “American Dreams”

Posted on August 31, 2015 by maestrobeats

by Maggie Molloy

“I got piano lessons when I was 5 years old from the widow of the town doctor in a little farm town in Iowa,” said composer Ken Benshoof. “I would go there after school, she would give me bread with brown sugar and butter, and we would have a music lesson.”

And it was there, in America’s heartland, that Benshoof got his very early start to a career in music composition.

“It wasn’t very long before I felt that the pieces she was asking me to play were not very good, and that I probably could write better pieces,” he laughed. “So, I found a piece of paper and drew some lines on it and started putting notes. I’m sure whatever I wrote wasn’t any better than what I was playing, but the impulse to make the world better by writing a better piece stayed with me for my whole life.”

In many ways, that’s the dream—finding one’s passion, pursuing it with unbridled determination and dedication, creating a life for oneself, and maybe even making the world a better place along the way. In fact, some would even consider that to be the American Dream.

Benshoof is just one of four American composers featured on the Seattle-based Saint Helens String Quartet’s debut album, “American Dreams.” Comprised of violinists Stephen Bryant and Adrianna Hulscher, violist Michael Lieberman, and cellist Paige Stockley, the quartet is committed to exploring adventurous and uncharted musical territory.

The modern-day musical pioneers’ latest creative endeavor explores the beautiful and bold diversity of American music, mixing contemporary classical with elements of folk tunes, blues and jazz grooves, American spirituals, and more. The album was recorded and produced at Jack Straw Cultural Center, the Northwest’s only nonprofit multidisciplinary audio arts center.

“What we found attractive about [these composers] is that their music is warm, it’s approachable, it doesn’t turn you off,” cellist Paige Stockley said of the album. “It’s not hard to grasp. It helps audiences just immediately connect to the music because it’s heartfelt and it’s beautiful. One of the rules that I use when I’m choosing repertoire is ‘Is this music that I love? Is this music that I want to hear? Is this music that feeds my soul?’”

The album’s title track is Grammy Award-winning composer Peter Schickele’s five-movement String Quartet No. 1, “American Dreams.” The piece evokes images of rural America through an adventurous combination of jazz and Appalachian folk elements over waltzing basslines, rustic melodies, sustained harmonics, and energetic syncopations.

“This piece is so beautiful because it has birds at dawn, it has barn dances, it has Indian chants played by the viola,” Stockley said of the piece. “If you can picture American Midwest and the wheat fields at 4 o’clock in the morning and birds chirping and the distant, fading sound of a barn dance—that’s ‘American Dreams’ quartet.”

Ken Benshoof’s “Swing Low” is similarly nostalgic. Based on the historic spiritual, “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” the work is comprised of eight very short pieces, each about one minute in length. The work makes use of folk-like pentatonic melodies in both major and minor harmonic contexts, with the original melody peeking through in ever-changing shapes and structures. Benshoof uses a colorful palette of textures and timbral details to explore the deceptively buoyant tune’s dismal subject matter.

The work is followed by Janice Giteck’s somber and lyrical one-movement quartet, “Where Can One Live Safely, Then? In Surrender.” Based on a cantus firmus by Johannes Fux, the piece portrays a sense of calm yearning, making use of the Dorian mode in a meditation on the unraveling of Western culture.

The work is followed by Giteck’s “Ricercare (Dream Upon Arrival),” a slow and dreamy piece with lines of poetic counterpoint softly weaving in and out of each other.

Benshoof follows with his “Diversions” for violin and piano, performed by violinist Stephen Bryant and pianist Lisa Bergman. The six short movements include a variety of folk and blues elements which give each a warm, whimsical, and often playful character.

The final piece on the album is Benshoof’s “Remember,” a short, sweet, and hopelessly heartfelt piece inspired by the classic American folk song “Get along Home, Cindy.” (You know the one: “I wish I was an apple / Hangin’ on a tree / And every time my Cindy’d pass / She’d take a bite of me.”)

“The piece has a rich, romantic feel about it,” Benshoof said. “There’s a warmth in it and there is a little bit of ‘biting the apple’ and there’s a little bit of some third thing in there which I’m not going to try to describe.”

Perhaps that third thing might be wishing or wistfulness, melancholy longing or maybe even unrequited love—but whatever it is, it’s certainly nostalgic.

“‘American Dreams’ captures that early pioneer spirit,” Stockley said of the album, “The America that we wish we still had, or maybe we never even had it at all, but that feeling of hope and nostalgia, memory and warmth—and looking to a bright future.”