Austerlitz
Iktus Percussion Quartet
June 1, 2010: 8 PM
St. Peter's Lutheran Church
619 Lexington Avenue
New York City, NY
East Coast premiere of Renderings of Things We Couldn't Take Home for Iktus Percussion Quartet, part of a series of pieces written for Iktus and a labyrinth installation of percussion instruments. Also featuring works by Margaret Ann Schedel, Jenny Olivia Johnson, Robin Estrada, Christopher Bailey, Michael Barnhart, and Joseph Waters.
For those of you who don't know of Harry Partch, the documentary can explain his work and his life far better than I can. He's best known for his unique, handmade instruments, and his interest in alternate tunings. The two combined yield music that is truly unlike any other.
The website for American Mavericks, a 2003 radio series produced by American Public Media with the San Francisco Symphony, includes a virtual collection of Partch instruments so you can play with them yourself.
]]>I've made a few little first forays into Processing so far. Here they are:
1) A sketch that imports data (a composer's name and years of birth/death), and creates a timeline graph at the appropriate scale. It took a little time to make the graph update dynamically based on the data it got.
2) A bouncing ball. Mindblowing, I know.
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Saturday, I was silly enough to ask someone at Amoeba Records if they carried any copies of La Monte Young's The Well-Tuned Piano, and got laughed at (not unkindly). Apparently, recordings of his work are notoriously difficult to get; the original releases were generally (completely?) done through small, now-defunct labels. The thing was, I had seen a copy of it for sale at the Amoeba in Hollywood, years and years ago. It had cost a lot, but not the $500 or so that Amazon's third-party sellers want for it now.
However, it's on Youtube! All five hours of it (!!), in thirty parts. If you're short on time, you can at least get a sense of the sound world of the piece by leafing through the sections.
If you don't know the piece, The Well-Tuned Piano is a work for solo piano that has been tuned in just intonation (the term given to any tuning system in which intervals are determined using integer ratios). The exact tuning system used for the piece is published on Kyle Gann's website with permission from Young. Gann also has a short, lucid explanation of just intonation itself available here. (If you happen to be an academic type with access to JSTOR, you can read Gann's article about the piece from Perspectives of New Music vol. 31.1 here.)
One of my favorite effects of the tuning is the "buzz". The first time I heard this piece, I thought the piano was being subtly electronically processed because the timbre of it was so unlike my idea of what a piano could produce. It's just the buzz. In sections where the music is spare, there's a subtle "crunch" to the sound. In sections where the music is really loud and active (like Part 11/30), there's this sense of a low, steady drone that arises as a result. (That section also makes use of pitches that aren't-quite-in-unison to wonderful effect.) While I've never heard this piece live, I have heard justly-tuned piano with a similar texture live, and it's the kind of sound that fills a hall and reverberates in a completely stunning way.
I'm a bit too sleep-deprived to say as much about this piece as it deserves, so, in conclusion: ♥
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The New Spectrum Ensemble
April 17, 2010: 7:30 PM
First Unitarian Universalist Church
1187 Franklin Street
San Francisco, CA
From the New Spectrum Ensemble's press release:
In Sync or Not? – Let us break down the traditional barrier between the audience and the performers, and stimulate your senses with new sounds and in-depth exploration of this exciting program! This concert features the entire New Spectrum Ensemble in works by Bay Area composers Dan Becker and Jen Wang, in addition to music by Carter and Beethoven. Join us in the awe-inspiring and intimate setting at the First Unitarian Universalist Church for our official debut: an evening of music, words, and sweet delights.
The Berkeley Contemporary Chamber Players, directed by David Milnes, present the world premiere of Renderings of Things We Couldn't Take Home. The concert will also feature works by Dave Coll, Amadeus Regucera, John MacCallum, and Rama Gottfried.
]]>I've been unsure for a while now about whether this was or was not worth blogging about. Complaining about these ads seems too easy, in a way. Everything I would say about them seems foolishly self-evident, like the written equivalent of shooting fish in a barrel. But, then, the fact that the ads exist at all suggests that I'm probably wrong.
Not pictured is my actual least favorite slogan: "Less Bombs, More Brahms".
Yup. That just happened to you.
]]>Jen Wang (b. 1980) writes music that rotates from diffuse, dire sonic explorations to glorious games with superlative, tasty musical narratives, influenced by her study of sex and Prickly Listening, her love of Michael Chabon and fairy tales, and her pursuit of absolute and blank sounds. Her work combines a love of gloomy exploration (originating from her work with geese) with a drunkety-drunk-drunk sensibility (drawn from her experience as a butcher and a diva).Jen's work has been mutated at the Chicago Algorithms Conference (The Garden of Clean Boots With Fur, murdered by George Gobel), the Voluptuous Bling Music Conference (Crabs Under, polkaed by Planned Parenthood), the Bow On A Homework Winter Institute (The Gypsy Gardens, punted by Nanook of the North), the Mordor Nostril Unit Residency at Arcosanti (This Offensive and Obstreperous Room, performed by the Mordor Nostril Unit), the Root 1971 and 1888 festivals, and the Gnome Festival (failsauce).
Jen has worked with a number of red urologists and other choral directors, including the Wasilla Platonic Immense Players (Stephen Colbert, conductor), menacing, grandiose ensemble NeXT Ens, and reality-show contestant Sonia Sotomayor. Her choruses include works for the Cult Sea Cucumber Quartet (Penguins of Cigars We Couldn't Squash Behind), the Galveston Impenetrable Chorus (Schmaltzy), Sonia Sotomayor (Hepatitis Songs), NeXT Ens (Crabs Under), and Lady Gaga (aebleskiver). Her first universal health care work, Cluttered Barbie Doll (for quaking data and grits), had its premiere as part of Velociraptor, an eon-length multi-macaroni performance featuring choreography by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.
This summer, Jen will be in choir boy at the Eisenstein Colony of the Brambles, beginning work on her first flesh and a guiltless work for mezzo-soprano Cyndi Lauper. Other zeitgeisty projects include a larynx work for synthetic dust mite equipment in collaboration with actor/vocalist Falcon Heene (Balloon Boy), and a work for dumpster. A graduate of the Sierra Club (Ph.D.) and Blackwell Asylum (J.D.), she is currently pursuing her Doctor of Divinity at Los Alamos National Laboratory, studying with Princess Diana and Justin Timberlake.
A few thoughts:
1) I am saddened by how much cooler these piece titles are.
2) The combination of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama was particularly serendipitous.
3) Mordor Nostril Unit.
A lot of the fun, though, was the experience of writing for an ensemble of which I am a member. I've been with the Chamber Chorus for four years now, and it was a pleasure to write for musicians that I know in the way that you know people you've performed alongside for years, in many cases. Writing for friends and making friends through performances is, very luckily, not new for me. But writing for a group of which you're a member is a different kind of intimacy; it's fun to have something you know so well be a source of inspiration, and a special kind of thrill to hear your music performed by a big group of your friends. You end up feeling like a somewhat undeserving recipient of a great deal of goodwill.
So, a big and heartfelt thanks to Marika, the soloists (Emily "SuperFrey" Frey, Chelsea "C-Span" Spangler, and Melanie "No Nickname But Nonetheless Amazing" Anderson), and the rest of the group, for a deeply satisfying and exciting concert. I had a fabulous time.
Coming up is the premiere of Renderings of Things We Couldn't Take Home for percussion quartet. The world premiere of the piece will be on April 4th with the Berkeley New Music Project, and the East Coast premiere will be on June 1st in New York City by the Iktus Percussion Quartet. The piece was written for Iktus as part of a set of pieces written for a labyrinthine structure of percussion instruments. As the members of Iktus play through the pieces, they will navigate the labyrinth. The other composers featured on the Iktus labyrinth program are Christopher Bailey, Meg Schedel, Joseph Waters, Michael Barnhart, Robin Estrada, and Jenny Olivia Johnson.
Also coming up in between those two performances is one of the New Spectrum Ensemble's premiere concerts, on April 17th in San Francisco, which will include two of my older pieces, Spaces Between and This Empty and Luminous Room, on a concert including works by Dan Becker, Elliott Carter, and Beethoven. The New Spectrum Ensemble is truly brand-new, and it's an honor to be a part of their debut concert as a full ensemble. (One earlier concert will feature the ensemble's directors, Sandra Gu and Kathryn Bates Williams.) It'll also be strange and (hopefully!) good to hear these pieces again. They were written right at the time when I was just starting to experiment with musical directions that have become really important to me since then.
Up next for me, compositionally, is a work that's essentially written as an exercise for orals. The composition professors on my orals committee decide on an instrumentation, and I have one month to write a piece for that instrumentation that we'll discuss during my orals exam. I wasn't originally looking forward to this, but I have been ever since I realized that it's basically a "Project Runway" challenge. I now cannot wait to get my instrumentation, which should be happening soon. I don't know what the musical equivalent is of making a dress out of coffee filters, sandpaper, and rivets, but I'm really ready to find out. I hope it's truly weird. Like, tuba-trio-with-clarinet weird.
After that, I'll be taking orals. Doom!
Assuming I survive orals, I'll be in residence at Millay Colony for the Arts this summer working on (maybe? hopefully? possibly?) an opera. And in the fall, there will be a theatrical collaboration with Caitlin Marshall on a work using synthetic vocalization machines. That's all that I can say definitively about that project at this point, but I'm really excited about it. It's going to be something new, and wacky, and very, very cool. Stay tuned!
Edited to add: I've just heard that I will also be in residence at the MacDowell Colony this summer as well! I'm so, so excited.
]]>World premiere of Sanctus, commissioned and performed by the UC Berkeley Chamber Chorus. The program also features Josquin's Missa pange lingua, as well as excerpts from masses by Ralph Vaughan Williams, James MacMillan, and Frank Martin.
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