Saturday, January 12, 2013

Creative Collaboration: The Making of Steve Mackey's "It Is Time," part III


Creative Collaboration:  The Making of Steve Mackey’s It Is Time

Part III

Time sits
Time stands
Time is time…

from Isaac Maliya’s, Time is Time 


Several years ago So Percussion had the honor of commissioning Steven Mackey for a new percussion quartet.  Steve – Professor of Composition and Chair of the Music Department at Princeton University – is one of the most omnivorous and brilliant composers in America today. 
            During the course of a year and a half, we worked closely with Steve to craft a new piece that highlights each of us as performers and interpreters.  We found the end result to be astonishing in its innovation and conceptual power. 
            Over this series of four articles, we’ll dissect each movement through the eyes of the individual members of the group: Eric, Josh, Adam, and Jason.  We’ll also talk about working with Steve to unlock the potential in each of these instruments.
            This article focuses on Adam Sliwinski and the marimba in the third movement.  It appears in the third issue of Avue Magazine, a publication of Adams Instruments.  The movement runs from 16:30 to 27:00 in the video below.

 Il Penseroso
“Adam, I hate to tell you this, but you’ve got the slow movement.  I was hoping to show you all off, but I need to do something else.” 
When the time arrived for Steve Mackey to write the third movement of It Is Time, we had already decided that he’d write marimba music for me.  In the previous two installments of this series of articles, Josh and Eric related how simultaneously generous and demanding Steve is as a composer.   He invites you in to the process, asks for input, even what instrument(s) you’d like to play…then writes fiendishly difficult music so well that you have no choice but to commit to it. 
            In So Percussion, everything is equal.  We make artistic decisions by consensus, everybody has the same vote, and we do our best not to present the group as having hierarchy.  A lot of our repertoire features this same dynamic, even to the point where each of us plays identical instruments in layers of complexity (Reich, Lang, Xenakis). 
            It Is Time is designed to break the pattern of anonymity within our music, while still setting us all on equal footing.  I think initially in Steve’s mind, it meant that each of us would also get to rock out on our instrument, displaying the kind of virtuosity that makes percussion music so exciting and fun.    
            By the time Eric’s and Josh’s movement were sketched out, Steve realized that the piece was taking on epic proportions, and its story was turning darker.  The first time he told me where the marimba movement was going, it was by way of apology.  His meditation on the concept of time had lead him to a more melancholic place, where exhilaration at the thought of controlling and harnessing time also revealed its indifference and inevitability. 
            I was thrilled that Steve would throw this kind of challenge at himself in a percussion piece.  To be honest, my favorite moments in So’s work happen when a composer finds these spaces for introspection:  sometimes elegiac, often conflicted.  Each one seems to take the creator by surprise.  I’m thinking especially of the flower pots and teacups in David Lang’s the so-called laws of nature, the final Chorale Prelude in Paul Lansky’s Threads, and the second movement of Steve Reich’s Mallet Quartet.  Some of Jason’s music from amid the noise is unbearably melancholic to me, precisely because it isn’t meant to be. 
            Perhaps pensive music breaks the mold of expectation of how percussion usually functions:  it seems better suited to a song with acoustic guitar, or an adagio from a great string quartet.  I have always craved this pensive, reflective mood, believing since I was in high school that percussion could achieve it.  In the best cases, it inspires what Wordsworth called “thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.”  It is not the same thing as being really sad, which can be tiresome and self-centered. 

The third movement of Is It Time begins with the simplest gesture:  a bouncing ball, releasing its potential energy with a burst of optimism, but always returning to rest.  Steve wanted “time” - such as it is here - to come to a screeching halt at the beginning of this section.  What had built up into a huge menagerie of instruments and colors is now reduced to the solo marimba:  a quiet roll on one note that barely erupts into the first bouncing ball. 
For awhile, this single gesture repeats: winding down, restarting, over and over again.  While Steve and I were working together, this was straightforward enough, as learning to control the natural bounce of a stick is one of the first things that a percussionist has to do.  But he wanted to take it further.  How could we create polyphony, the perception of overlapping wind up and release?  He wondered if notating gestures with general overlap indications would be effective.  Not trusting my own ability to be convincing with that, I told him how much I admire the way composers like Xenakis use precise notation to achieve chaotic results.  In the end, he decided upon a way of notating the gesture as an accelerating rhythm, so that an overlapping gesture could be placed anywhere, worked out for performance as a complex polyrhythm.  Paradoxically, this kind of detailed execution frees the performer from his own tendencies and limitations.  Often as an artist you want to celebrate those personal tendencies, but in this case we needed an impersonal, inevitable force. 
My movement is somewhat unique in that Steve already had reams of experience writing for marimba.  In the other movements, he actually invented new instruments (or extended them in entirely new ways).  Our challenge was to get the sound, mood, and pacing just right for this movement, to expand the reach of the piece into another world, where time is elastic and ill-defined. 
His final touch took me completely by surprise, and was even annoying:  While I am toiling away at my fateful gestures, the other members of the group rise up from their instruments and start walking around, placing little dinosaur wind up toys all over the stage.  It’s chaotic, distracting, and frankly takes a bit of attention away from the soloist.  To my mock-dismay, it was also pitch-perfect, exactly what the movement needed. After all, the music that I’m playing is not in any sense about me.  Gravity and nature are indifferent to our need for attention, which is why we hold them in awe. 
This is ultimately the most profound rumination a pensive moment yields:  we are so small compared with the forces that operate upon our lives.  Optimism and action are a struggle against, or even a celebration of, the fact that our momentum will always eventually come back to rest. 





Thursday, January 10, 2013

Our Princeton Year


With SoSI's new focus on student composers in 2013, I wanted to highlight some of the work that came out of last year's residency at Princeton University.

For almost a decade, So Percussion has worked on and off with the Princeton composition department.  This year's Summer Institute is our fifth at Princeton, and many of the faculty have written major pieces for us.

I've written previous articles here about our projects with Paul Lansky and Steve Mackey.  Dan Trueman's huge work "neither Anvil nor Pulley" will be released this year on Cantaloupe Music.

One of our favorite attributes of the Princeton department is the stylistic diversity and openness of their culture. Students come in with many different ideas and influences, which they are encouraged to explore. Steve, Dan, and Barbara White are all serious composer/performers, who incorporate improvising and fluid collaboration into their work.

During the 2012-2013 academic year, they invited us to be in residence full-time.  We taught a fall seminar on writing for percussion, and spent the spring collaborating with each grad composer on a new work for quartet.  As we have so often realized, teaching folks how to write for percussion is actually teaching a process of exploration.  Of course, there are always helpful hints we can give about orchestration, mallets, etc.  But it seems that unlocking a composer's imagination for percussion is mostly about encouraging their willingness to conceive a new world with each piece.

In some cases, the composers surprised us by suggesting a technique or way of making sound that we hadn't thought of:  Elliot Cole wondered about bowing harmonics on vibraphone.  We said we'd never tried it, and then discovered right in front of the whole class how magical it was.

Below are a few that came out really well, and for which the composers made nice online audio and video links.  Listening to these again seven months after the premieres, I'm blown away by how different and developed each voice is.

Although we enjoy doing readings and short residencies with new work, there is simply nothing to compare to this long collaborative process, especially for percussion.  You quickly become aware that the one true thing that students often lack is the time, resources, and exposure to create mature work.

I've done many weeklong composition residencies, both with So Percussion and as a conductor with the International Contemporary Ensemble.  The goal of these residencies is usually to get a decent live recording to help the composers develop their careers, which is a great thing that they really need.  But you rarely leave one of those weeks feeling transformed by the process.  Usually, the performers are exhausted, and sometimes the composers are exasperated by having so little time to experiment and develop their ideas with living people.

Obviously, it's often the most that can be done.  Our Princeton year was a dream come true, a chance to truly see how far these composers could take their ideas when given the chance.

The composers' websites are linked below, if you're interested in learning more about their music.


Elliot Cole

Postludes for Bowed Vibraphone

These pieces were a breakout success from the residency.  We programmed them again at SoSI, and they've since been performed all over the country and even the world!  Elliot passed along a list of performances as of Jan 1, 2013, seven months after the premiere.  Below is my favorite, No. 5 in Db.

Mobius Percussion Quartet, NYC
Tennessee Tech
Indiana State
U. Indiana
Michigan State
Louisiana Tech
U. Wisconsin Oshkosh
Living Room Music, Ann Arbor MI
U. Akron
Square Peg Round Hole (band), Bloomington Indiana
Juilliard
U. Kansas
U. Tennessee
Cleveland State
Ohio State
Mahidol U. Bangkok



So Percussion - Elliot Cole - Postludes for Bowed Vibraphone (No. 5) from Elliot Cole on Vimeo.


Kate Neal

What Hath II  

We first commissioned Kate to write for SoSI students.  She had a very strong language and set of ideas  to explore.  This music is based on naval codes, semaphore, and morse code.  The visual and theatrical elements of the piece are very detailed.


What Hath II: excerpt 6min. from Kate Neal on Vimeo.


Cenk Ergun

Snares

Cenk is a friend of ours and a frequent collaborator.  He loves to write extremely quiet music.  For this piece, he took a common percussive nuisance - the snares on a snare drum rattling in resonance - and made a whole gestalt out of it.  As usual with Cenk's music, what at first may sound like ambient activity is actually very rigorously organized, exuding a Feldman-esque beauty.





Troy Herion

Earth Crust

Troy's piece speaks quite well for itself.  He was very sensitive to the excitement and intimacy of chamber music playing on percussion instruments.  I'm proud of the performance, because I think it exhibits a level of familiarity that is impossible in a reading or with one week of rehearsal.


So Percussion - Earth Crust by Troy Herion from Troy Herion on Vimeo.