This past week was a kind of waking dream for the four of us in So Percussion. We were invited by the Los Angeles Philharmonic to open their 14/15 subscription season at Disney Concert Hall by snapping twigs...
The Phil co-commissioned David Lang to write a new concerto for percussion quartet and orchestra. Titled "man made," the pieces uses our skills and curiosity as instrument builders and foragers to place homemade instruments in a very classical context.
Below is some footage of each part of the piece during the dress rehearsal for the premiere:
footage of Disney Hall and the LA Phil used by kind permission
of the LA Phil
"man made" is in four parts. The soloists perform mostly on found and homemade instruments: twigs, wine bottles, steel pipes, and trash cans. The orchestra engages in a dialogue with the found instruments, sometimes complementing and sometimes overwhelming them.
The four performances to the packed hall were a success, and to us it all seemed unreal. That the experiments in found sounds and amplified plants that John Cage pioneered had come to this point was hard to believe.
Every single person we met at the LA Phil was warm, encouraging, and ultra-professional, from Maestro Dudamel himself to every member of the stage crew. Players from the orchestra approached us backstage during the breaks, asking about the sounds we were making and the compositional processes involved.
The LA Times' chief classical critic Mark Swed seemed to really get what we were after. Find his insightful review here.
After the weekend orchestra concerts, we switched gears to prepare for our own concert on the Green Umbrella series, the LA Phil's signature new music programming. We performed David Lang's quartet "the so-called laws of nature," as well as Michael Gordon's massive "Timber." Again, Mark Swed attended, and his review was very apt.
This is just a quick digest. I've only started to absorb what made this particular gig so special. There was something wonderful and surprising about being included in the orchestra's core series, not shunted off into the "new music" corridor of orchestral programming. That may be another post of its own.
In the fall, So Percussion will be releasing Bobby Previte's Terminals, a sprawling series of concerti for percussion quartet plus improvising soloists. I wrote this short essay for the LP liner notes.
Terminals Liner Notes for LP
Bobby
Previte’s Terminals proposes a simple
idea: that the percussion ensemble is actually an ideal vehicle for the 21st
century concerto. Writing for percussion allows the composer free reign to grab
the flotsam of sounds and ideas that have floated through his life. He’s a drummer, and so the choice of percussion
seems natural. But anybody
who knows Bobby’s music knows that drums are just a part of the equation, the
instrument that spoke to him earliest and strongest.
Terminals is a compendium of ideas
that – though the percussion ensemble itself is young in the context of western
music history – also have sentimental resonance. The sheer magnitude of orchestration recalls the huge
mid-century novelty percussion orchestras, or the clashing and wailing of
Edgard Varese’s Ionisation. Bobby knows these references well, and
he celebrates the spirit of joy and chaos that they conjure. Some of his compositional choices – a
swing-era drum battle, an abrupt break into slow blues, VERY long rhythmic
vamps – would feel awkward or contrived in the hands of other contemporary
composers. But Bobby has lived
these musical moments deeply: in Terminals,
they form a coherent viewpoint.
We half-joke
with him that he is our favorite marimbist of all time because of his inspired
contribution to Tom Waits’ song “Clap Hands” on the album Rain Dogs. His career
spans an incredible breadth, including collaborations with the soloists on this
record. But Terminals alsointersects
with an earlier phase of his life, as a student of the influential percussion teacher
Jan Williams at the University of Buffalo. Jan opened the door for Bobby to a whole world of
avant-garde concert music: the percussion experiments of John Cage and Lou
Harrison from the 1930’s, the hard-edged modernism of Pierre Boulez, the
uniquely serene assemblages of Morton Feldman.
This
early exposure seems to have had an impact on him: Terminals is an ambitious statement in the vein of those bold
composers. This big statement is
made using percussion, but not in the way Cage and Varese used it for their
youthful radical gestures. Bobby’s
percussion statement feels more like a summation than a revolution, a
repository of decades of thinking about these instruments.
“How
much of that did you make up, and how much was written down?”
This
is the question we are asked at almost every So Percussion concert, one we’re
happy to answer. That ambiguity means we’re doing our job. It comes at the threshold where predetermined
and spontaneous ideas blend together.
A good classical performer, though he or she is often playing prescribed
notes, is striving for that balance with every performance.
In
Mozart and Beethoven’s time, the concerto soloist was partially an improvising
soloist. The cadenza was a bravura display not only of technical ability, but
also of imagination and spontaneity.
The way that Bobby weaves masters of contemporary improvisation into the
fabric of Terminals may at first seem
like another cross-genre experiment. But actually, his combination of sturdy,
crafted ensemble writing with careful curation of the soloists’ talents is one
of the oldest formulas we have.
And
what soloists! The first time we
performed Terminal 3 with Nels Cline, I actually forgot to play for a few bars
because I was so enraptured by what he could do. In live shows, John Medeski’s climactic entrance on the
organ always electrifies the room.
It is a credit to
Bobby’s composition and the soloists’ artistry that I’m always listening to
this record wondering “what is improvised, and what is fixed?” The happy truth is that it hardly
matters, because in this universe good ideas are simply good ideas, no matter
whether they jump off the page or directly out of the fertile minds of the
musicians.
Working
with Bobby on Terminals was
exhilarating and revelatory. Traipse
out in front of the audience to perform a clichéd, deadpan stick-clicking
routine? Not on your life, but for
you Bobby ok, because somehow it will work. Learn to crack a bullwhip, because that’s what the
Buddy-Rich-Gene-Krupa drum battle section requires? You’re insane, but yes, we trust you. Interrupt the fourth movement with a
duet between washboard and spoons, or spend ten minutes performing no other
action than setting up a whole drum kit on stage? Why the hell not, at this point?
Bobby
pushed us beyond our boundaries. In preliminary meetings about Terminals we told him we’re a touring
group, so really he should stay away from instruments like chimes, timpani,
huge drum setups, and a thousand pesky accessory instruments. This is of course exactly what he ended
up using.
His
winning combination of dogged conviction and convivial humor always helped us
jump over the next hurdle. Very
few composers can ask so much while also making you feel so invested.
In May, So Percussion is featured on Cenk Ergun's latest release Nana performing Proximity, a ravishingly beautiful piece made of metal sounds that he wrote for us in 2009.
We've known Cenk for years - he and Jason attended Eastman together - and this project gestated very slowly. It represents a unique vision that could only be Cenk's music.
On Wednesday, May 14, Cenk releases Nana on Carrier Records. We also have a release party at the So Percussion Studio. So Percussion, Cenk, Grey Mcmurray, and Jeff Snyder will perform.
Wednesday, May 14 - 8pm
20 Grand Ave #205
Brooklyn, NY 11205
In this post, I have included some excerpts from Proximity, as well as a couple of questions that I asked him about his work.
I've always liked Cenk's music, and I trust him, so I enjoyed working on the project. But sometimes I had a hard time wrapping my ears around what this piece was about. Undoubtedly, this stemmed in part from having a click track in my ear and being consumed with my local tasks during the piece. When I heard the final mix of the recording, I had my "eureka" moment.
I've come to believe it's one of the most stunning pieces of music anybody has written for us.
I asked Cenk a bit about his music:
Me: I wouldn't normally interrogate you about how your Turkish background influences your music, but you specifically mentioned to me that Proximity features that influence. Can you tell me more about that?
Cenk: "Traditional Turkish music is monophonic. Melodies are played by a large variety of instruments in unison or at octaves, and always in rhythmic unison. Instruments like the saz, ud, ney, kanun are impossible to tune perfectly together and thus create a unique sonority when playing in unison. This sonority is the impetus for Proximity and is clearly audible especially in the opening minutes. Another influence present on the opening was Japanese Taiko drumming. I remember when I finally felt ready to puts notes down on paper after months of preparation - I was at a Kodo concert. It was their concentration and the focus on the music - the intensity of the moment - I decided I wanted to begin the piece that way."
Me: How would you describe your aesthetic briefly to somebody who is just getting to know your music?
Cenk: "Always experimental in spirit. All sounds in any combination. No sounds in one combination. A dedication to simple, clear, unified shapes in time. A focus on individual sounds rather than the relationship among them. Interest in time, memory, perception. Interest in instruments and instrumentalists. Listening.
I love the highly amplified sounds of quietly played instruments. These sounds do not have the harsh quality of loud playing, and yet because they are amplified they are loud enough to reveal all their detail to the ear. This is why Proximity is scored for amplified percussion quartet. It's a relatively loud piece produced by amplified quiet playing. The pitch content in my works is usually extremely limited. I like to focus on a specific, limited set of pitches for long spans of time - as my goal is always to establish a single sound texture and maintain it for as long as possible with minimum variation. Regardless of the tuning method I'm using, or the length of the piece, I often find that by the end of a piece I've used only about 7-8 different pitches as well as their siblings at different octaves. The first 8 minutes of Proximity is only 3 pitches, played at several different octaves on several different instruments."
The last part of Proximity consists of the elemental sound of tam-tams, the ultimate vibrating metal. In a way, Proximity is Cenk's "Construction in Metal," although his voice is wholly his own: indebted to Cage, Feldman, and many others, but totally unique. I find that the frenetic activity found through Proximity - and especially at the end - steers the sounds away from ritual or cultural assignment. The steady hum of the tam-tams grows and accumulates mass, but the molecules continue to vibrate.
Proximity may be one of the most successful realizations of something we've long cherished: percussion as the vast world of things that vibrate, piercing an inner emotional core with sound.
“An intellectual or bodily habit is therefore a structured discipline that generates knowledge. It is a discipline that requires a special kind of training, specific to each organum, and habitually idiosyncratic to an instrument.” - J.F. Gauvin (333)
These words zoomed out at me as I was reading a paper my wife prepared for her graduate course on the interdisciplinary practices and ideas of 17th century Italy. It seemed to perfectly describe the way I was thinking about an old and frustrating question in teaching music: technique or musicianship?
Of course, excellent musicians know that this is a false dichotomy. In reality, the two are holistically connected as part of a continuum. I asked to see the article in order to investigate the context of this extraordinary statement. Actually, the article was not about music at all: it was about the role that scientific instruments played during the early modern era in moving knowledge from the purely speculative and rational to the empirical through experimentation.
The author is an academic named Jean Francois Gauvin, curator of the collection of historical scientific instruments at Harvard. As I read further, I noticed that the purpose of his work was not only to highlight the role of instruments in advancing scientific discovery, but also to argue that the practice upon the instruments themselves yielded knowledge, and that part of that practice was beyond the realm of words and rational discourse:
“Instrument practices, whether to survey a field, observe the moons of Jupiter, perform logarithmic calculations, or generate new experiments under a controlled vacuum, all have something in common; they require coordinated movements, precise gestures that are difficult to characterize and ascertain. Such a bodily knowledge, impossible to articulate in plain spoken words or in writing, is often understood nowadays as tacit knowledge.” (328)
“Tacit knowledge!” It was this word “knowledge” that captured my attention in the first quote. I struggle sometimes to articulate the role that fundamental skills play in musical training. The word “technique” has a sterile, wooden feel to it: to many musicians it conjures the unthinking automaton, the skilled but uninteresting performer who has no imagination or heart. But “knowledge” is a powerful, sinewy word.
The concept of “tacit knowledge” seized me, because it provided a label for a concept that usually passes wordlessly between teacher and student. Both of my main percussion teachers - Michael Rosen at Oberlin and Robert van Sice at Yale – used to say to me “don’t tell me, show me!” The rational comprehension of what I was supposed to do, and the tacit knowledge that my hands and brain had to acquire to actually do it, were NOT the same in their eyes.
In Gauvin’s historical account, the practice or habit of acquiring tacit knowledge was called habitus. The concept of habitus was important enough to warrant a definition by the great English philosopher Thomas Hobbes:
“Habit…is a generation of motion, not of motion simply, but an easy conducting of the moved body in a certain and designed way. And seeing it is attained by the weakening of such endeavours as divert its motion, therefore such endeavours are to be weakened by little and little. But this cannot be done but by the long continuance of action, or by actions often repeated; and therefore custom begets that facility, which is commonly and rightly called habit; and it may be defined thus: HABIT is motion made more easy and ready by custom; that is to say, by perpetual endeavour, or by iterated endeavours in a way differing from that in which the motion proceeded from the beginning, and opposing such endeavours as resist." (331)
Habitus is essential to any discipline: art, craft, science, or sport. But the purpose of habitus is not mindless repetition for its own sake…it is to acquire a special kind of knowledge, without which the goals of those activities are not attainable. It can be a habit of the body (in corpore), and/or of the mind (in anima) (329). As a practicing musician in a physically demanding field, I'm fascinated by the implications of the habitus in corpore, the effect that the training of physical movements has on the knowledge we acquire.
One of the problems with the question of technique in music is that the discussion rarely centers on the broad, encompassing vision of habitus. It is usually local to the practice that the speaker values or is familiar with. In the world of percussion playing, it might refer to a seamless snare drum roll. One might argue that acquiring the tacit knowledge of how to do this roll is essential to achieving mastery, but they are only talking about mastery of the specific types of music for which a roll is necessary.
As a teacher at a conservatory of western classical music, I prescribe many required habits that fulfill the demands of the music we study. That snare drum roll is among them, and so I put our students through the ringer of applying the habit of being able to play a roll. When they are called upon in orchestra to do it, they must already have a “motion made more easy and ready by custom,” and they must have spent much time “opposing such endeavours as resist.” Otherwise additional demands will overwhelm their capacity to perform well.
Too often, we are limited by the confines of the genre we operate within. "Technique" then only applies to whether you can swing like Philly Joe, play a perfect snare drum roll, or lay down Gershwin's "Porgy and Bess" on the xylophone without missing a note (all excellent things to be able to do). Habitus asks the question: what do you seek? The answer may very well be "I don't know."
Gauvin’s orbiting concept to complement habitus is organum, the instrument.
An organum is "'that which is used by an agent in or for the performance of an action.’ It is a 'thing with or through which something is done or effected.' An instrument, at its core, is thus 'anything that serves or contributes to the accomplishment of a purpose or end.’” (319)
Human-produced sound requires an instrument. Gauvin makes clear that the ancient definition includes more than material inventions, such as "a person...an organ or body part...a religious or sacred text..." (319) An instrument is the means to the end, and understanding the instrument is as important as any of the purely abstract knowledge we could hope to deduce or acquire about the structures of sound.
The nature of the habitus we develop is directly affected by the peculiar nature of its corresponding organum. I’m struck by how well this corresponds to a musician’s practice, and Gauvin even spends a page detailing the misfortune of a plucky organ inventor of the 1600’s who was sure that his 27 key octave was going to catch on with musicians because it contained “a greater number of consonances and other intervals in their justness,” and which would “be played as easily as the others when the hands become accustomed to them, because they follow the infallible rule of reason."(332)
Habitus does not only serve to achieve mastery over something that already exists. Gauvin illuminates that the main purpose of applying the scientific method to the use of instruments was to harness the practice upon the instruments as a technique towards discovering something new, the essence of the “experimental.”
“…Galileo’s telescope was meant to observe something that was never seen before, though precisely what it was remained undetermined. Hence, a seventeenth-century organum was not an instrument restricted to a terminus ad quem (final limiting point), in the strictest scholastic interpretation (the hammer in the blacksmith’s hand was the most common example used). Instead, an organum, in the hands of an increasing number of natural philosophers, grew into an instrument guaranteeing a terminus a quo – a starting point, if used properly.” (316)
John Coltrane’s relentless and obsessive saxophone practice comes to mind: not just the mastery of an existing craft, but a push beyond, a searching into the void. In a recital I just attended, the pianist Richard Goode displayed a completely mastery of his instrument, transcending it and achieving a kind of pure ephemeral poetry. Only habitus achieves this, and only daily negotiations with the mechanisms of a cumbersome piece of 19th-century furniture produced the knowledge necessary for that moment to exist.
The problem – and opportunity – of percussion
As I speculated on this historical wisdom, I thought of my own practice, which is complicated and diverse. Richard Goode's performance only increased my astonishment that something so exquisite could be wrangled from a big cabinet full of strings. A percussionist’s life consists of the tension between the demands of craft and the imaginative possibilities of many different instruments.
We see ourselves not just as practitioners, but also as curators. Our studios are like museums of sound, junk, and technology. In addition to the habitus of playing our instruments with taste and proficiency, we must cultivate a flexible approach to each new circumstance. We cultivate the meta-skill of knowing how to start a new habitus almost from scratch when a novel new instrument combination or setup comes our way.
Last year David Lang wrote a concerto for my quartet So Percussion to play with orchestra. The second movement requires us to play tuned wine bottles. Characteristically for David, the material is quite complex, and even more characteristically, we have to play it in unison throughout. The wine bottles are set up in a straight line moving outwards from the performer, so that all of our motions between them are a matter of bringing our sticks closer or moving them further from the center of our bodies:
Further complications arise from the nature of the scale that is used: G, A, Bb, C, C#, D, G. As the diagram shows, the 7 bottles are spaced out evenly in front of the performer’s body. If you take a look at the music, it seems to consist of straightforward notation: they are the same notes and rhythms that we’ve been using for years. But in this case, the physical relationship to the spacing of the notes is completely out of whack. Whole steps and half steps are meaningful aurally, but meaningless physically. The closest intervallic relationships between physically adjacent bottlesare the half steps of A-Bb, C-C#, and C#-D, but the largest is the fourth from D-G! On any standard piano keyboard – which is identical to the way most tuned percussion instruments are grouped – these intervals would correspond to a physical space on the keyboard that corresponds to the aural space of the intervals and the visual space on the notation.
Not so in David’s piece. When I was first confronted with this setup, I was no more of a virtuoso with the instrument than would be anybody off the street. I had to develop a brand new habitus from the ground up, and a huge chunk of the learning curve would consist of training my hands and my brain to reconcile the cognitive dissonances of these new relationships.
It’s a bit disingenuous to suggest that I didn’t have any advantages in learning the bottle instrument. In a sense that’s true: my first attempts at playing this material were agonizingly slow and rudimentary. But there are other aspects of the percussionist’s habitus that compressed the learning curve for me.
To start, any time we play music with two sticks, we articulate in some binary combination of right and left -- you’ll notice the R’s and L’s in my Lang score. This drumming habit is one of the oldest and most important skills we practice. It is the very first thing I cover with undergraduate percussionists, in the form of George Stone’s primer Stick Control.
The students must learn how to execute these permutations of stick combinations with perfect fluidity, at different tempi and dynamic levels. I use the snare drum as the basic instrument for these exercises, but you could whack on almost anything to practice them. When I learned the bottle music from Lang’s piece, the facility in executing these combinations was already ingrained. One major element is already crossed off the list of skills that must be incorporated into the new habitus.
At the Bard Conservatory, each of the four members of So Percussion teaches a semester of fundamental skills to the first and second year students. Although we’ve all acquired the basic knowledge to teach these skills, we’ve gravitated toward particular areas. I teach the snare drum semester. Josh works on basic timpani, which involves perfecting extremely simple exercises while placing the focus on producing a good sound. Eric teaches the elements of playing keyboard instruments such as marimba, which consists of focusing on the shifting mechanics of moving around the instrument. Jason’s semester fascinates me, because it’s like nothing I ever had: he works on the drumset, but rarely teaches anybody how to play a particular style of music. Instead, he applies a creative and permutational approach to 4-limb coordination, where the student may have to learn how to play Steve Reich’s “Music for Pieces of Wood” split up among their limbs, or read through many patterns in exercise books while shifting between hands and feet on the kit.
The purpose of this unified approach may seem esoteric to a student who is in the thick of the curriculum. After all, they are not yet really learning any music that will help them win an audition or impress their parents. But the ever-shifting and complex demands of percussion playing require that there be a baseline habitus in place in the future, that any new situation can be met with a confident set of skills that will provide a jumpstart in adapting to the specific needs of the situation.
Another established habitus that helped me work my bottle music up to speed is simply how often I’ve put myself through this process with different organum. Gauvin’s definition is sufficiently broad for me to think of each unique, curated setup of instruments as a whole. As such, although I have probably played each individual instrument within the setup before, the organum that is specific to each piece is its own new entity.
Constantly throwing yourself into new situations like this is a habit. I know how long it will take my hands and brain to begin to adapt, and how much extra time is needed to build basic fluidity as compared with marimba or another familiar instrument. I know that it’s going to be slow and painful for awhile, then get better. I know that I won’t be able to read the music with fluidity at first, but that I must keep plowing ahead.
Outside of the case of Lang’s piece, my group has our own collective habits that help us adapt together to new situations. Two of the most crucial are cueing and singing. Student percussionists are sometimes surprised at how much we insist on these tools, but they are actually lifelines that help us deal with the diversity of a repertoire where almost every single piece of music requires different physical movements. A string quartet, for all of its unique challenges, never even has to think about this. For us, singing has provided a way for us to utilize the same instrument in the preparation of almost every piece. We are able to check ourselves on where the greatest challenges of the music lie by having this baseline.
Cueing is another habit that glues us together. When I've looked over at Jason while performing together over the last twelve years, he’s been behind a different combination of instruments practically every time, but his body language and our unspoken communication have evolved a consistent familiarity. I can’t depend on him to always be in the same place on stage, nor to be making the same sounds. But I always know how he’ll show where the time is, or indicate that it’s time to move on from a looping pattern, or end a phrase.
Habitus in composition
Below is the video for the epic work that the composer Dan Trueman wrote for So Percussion called “neither Anvil nor Pulley.” You can chill out and watch the entire thing, or skip around to get a sense of what’s going on. The piece combines two of Dan’s primary areas of activity: fiddle playing (especially the Norwegian Hardangar fiddle), and building new instruments that involved computers.
Since the piece is a percussion quartet, there is no actual live fiddle playing. But movements 1, 3, and 5 are all fiddle tunes, orchestrated and composed out for our strange little percussion band. Movements 2 and 4 incorporate new instruments that rely on computers to manipulate and transform their sounds.
It struck me that in both cases, the practice of the specific instruments was essential in generating the musical material. The laptops respond dynamically to what the performers are doing, and their feedback suggests new ideas. The fiddle tunes have the contour and character of Dan’s fiddle playing…it’s unlikely that abstract structural planning would have created the same melodies.
When I say “abstract structural planning,” that is of course its own habitus in anima and it is usually developed through an intellectual organum such as serialism or sonata form. For the purposes of this article, however, I’m most interested in how the quirks of physical practice reveal knowledge.
I asked Dan - who is now a colleague at Princeton in addition to being a collaborator - to comment upon this way of thinking and working:
“This past year I’ve been giving a talk in various contexts (integrated humanities PhD program at Princeton, the national academy of engineering, others) called “Scordatura: on Re-mapping the Body to Sound (and vice-versa).” I begin by looking at scordatura on the violin, and how it subverts a deeply embodied hard-earned system that links ear, eye, and body. When highly trained, we hear a G, and our 2nd finger goes down on the E-string, or when we see a G on the page, our 2nd finger goes down on the E-string, etc. We have all sorts of patterns built into our fingers, and again expectations for how those patterns correspond to sound, or how they can respond to what we hear or see on a page. Once you re-tune the instrument, all of that gets subverted. For some like me (I learned to read music when I was 4, before I learned to read English) and many others, this might seem like a bad thing, but it is a fantastic tactic for opening up creative spaces.
That very system can be a bit of a prison: we just know it too well, and there is no room for surprise: re-tune, and BAM, all of sudden these familiar embodied patterns yield unexpected sounds, and we can explore. I do this *all* the time, and when I do I try to be sensitive to what I discover while exploring. I rarely come in with much of a preconceived idea about what I’m after (I might know i’m wanting something fast, something slow, something dark, something melodic, but maybe not even that), and rather just let my fingers roam and see what emerges. It really is part of a creative practice, in that I’m always playing, always listening, always trying to be on the top of my game (and often not succeeding), so that when I’m exploring a creative space like this I’m in the best possible position to find things that are inspiring to me.
The next thing I talk about is the prepared piano, and how Cage’s approach achieves a similar thing for the piano, subverting a well understood feedback loop and making new creative space where we can leverage our hard earned physical knowledge (and even our music reading skills, whether or not the notes on the page correspond to pitches we hear; this is similar to scordatura notation that Bach, Biber, and others - including me - use). My own prepared digital piano (well-prepared digiklavier?) is similar, except that instead of bolts and rubber, I’ve dropped simple algorithms between the strings that respond to our playing in different ways. It’s a different preparation but a similar subversion, though in this case the preparations have consequences in time as well as in the immediacy of the sound we get back when we press a key; we play something, and then the instrument continues to respond over time, providing further resistance for us to wrestle with. Again, with this I build preparations, sometimes with an ear for a rough idea of what I’m after musically, or what I’m interested in exploring musically (dynamic tuning, asymmetrical grooves, etc…), and then I explore. I’m not a very good pianist, so I don’t have the same kind of embodied abilities as I do with the violin, but it is still an incredibly rich creative space to explore, one that led to some new etudes for digital prepared piano called "Nostalgic Synchronic," and one that I’m continuing to use for pieces I’m working on now and will in the future.
You (Adam) asked if it was a leap in my compositional evolution to this bodily way of thinking. I think it was way back when i was getting started, and it came through the Hardanger fiddle primarily, since that tradition is full of scordatura. I think it was absolutely crucial to my development as a composer; whatever good work I have done is undoubtedly due in large part to having started working that way. Those ideas have extended to everything that I do as a musician, whether it be writing a string quartet, building a digital instrument for a group of percussion virtuosi, or working on a fiddle tune.
Steve Mackey has this great quote where he parodies Groucho Marx: "I refuse to accept any idea I can think of." I’ve always thought this is great, and resonates with how I’ve felt for a long time. Basically, we want to engage everything we can in the creative process, and our bodies are at the center of that. I’m usually most successful when I don’t quite know what I’m doing. I may figure it out later, but if I’ve got it all worked out while doing it, I’m usually bored with what I come up with!”
When I emailed Dan to ask him to contribute some thoughts, I knew he'd have something interesting to say, but I couldn't have imagined how well it would correspond to the topic of this essay. Dan imposes an unfamiliar habitus on himself practically every time he composes, a sort of creative kick in the butt to make sure new ideas are available to him.
Final Thoughts
I believe we as musicians could benefit from seeing the world of our practice in a larger context. We are not only cogs in an industrialized wheel of music production.
We are creators ourselves, seekers of knowledge. Rather than only practicing towards a known goal – concrete goals are important, don’t mistake me - what if we saw ourselves as striking out into the unknown? Like Galileo, what if the main purpose of practice upon our instruments was to doggedly apply a useful habitus to an open-ended process? This process may entail composition and improvisation, or it may be the crucial element in collaborating with a composer. It may even be the process of constantly revisiting great old music to see what new knowledge accumulates from the generations of performers who are dedicated to it. I enjoy reading about the weird contraptions, hare-brained ideas, and creative gall of the early 17th century. I feel that we are, or could be, in a similar era for music-making.
But their example implies that we as artists must not only live inside the confined space of "practicing." We must have a practice, a habitus that is intellectually and creatively engaged, mining our bodily insights towards new knowledge.
Gauvin, Jean-Francois. 2011. "Instruments of Knowledge." In The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy in Early Modern Europe. Edited by Desmond M. Clarke and Catherine Wilson. 315-37. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
About a week ago, I got the idea to check in with some of the students who have attended the So Percussion Summer Institute, which is about to enter its sixth year.
I have been receiving updates from alumni about fresh new ideas they've had since attending our festival. Many have started their own groups, commissioned new pieces from their peers, and/or engaged with their local communities through music.
This article is a compilation featuring their responses in alphabetical order. You'll find links galore to explore their music, and perhaps to find a new favorite band!
In 2012, the So Percussion Summer Institute introduced me to Xenakis' "Pleiades" - the inventive percussion sextet written in '78. Since being fully initiated into the world of Xenakis, I've found his music beyond captivating, and difficult to narrow down to any handful of descriptive words. During my second summer at Princeton with the So dudes, Adam Sliwinski was kind enough to hear about an all-Xenakis program I was trying to do in the fall of 2013. After showing Adam a few sketches I'd done for the show, he encouraged me to go forward with it. The following, for me, acts as somewhat of a retrospective, or in other words, a tour of what it meant to do an event in honor of Xenakis and his work.
http://zacbrunell.wordpress.com/
Victor Caccese
Sandbox Percussion was founded in 2011 and for the past three years has been
wildly ambitious and motivated while building their career as a contemporary
percussion quartet. Brought together by their love of chamber music, and simple joy
of playing together, members Jonathan Allen, Victor Caccese, Ian Rosenbaum, and
Terry Sweeney are committed to bringing percussion chamber music to a wider
audience. While possessing a deep love and respect for traditional percussion
masterworks by composers such as Steve Reich and John Cage, Sandbox is also
excited about the discovery of new works through collaboration with young
composers and other performers. Most recently they appeared on a Ted Talk in
Brooklyn, NY collaborating with Blind Ear Music, a collection of composers melding
technology and performance to create real-time composition. To find out more
about Sandbox and upcoming events please visit www.sandboxpercussion.com.
David Degge
In addition to becoming a founding member of the Mobius Percussion Quartet in 2011, SoSI alum David Degge recently received a Fulbright grant to pursue further chamber music study after completing his Master’s degree in 2013. He is the first American percussionist to study at the Liszt Academy of Music with Zoltán Rácz in Budapest, Hungary, and he has also had the opportunity to work closely with members of the widely acclaimed Amadinda Percussion Group. Now in the group's 30th year, Amadinda’s impact on the world of percussion music cannot be overstated, and David is a proud beneficiary of their recent efforts to increase collaboration with young musicians. A highlight of his time in Hungary has included participation in the first Liszt Academy student performance of Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians under the direction of Rácz and fellow Amadinda member Aurél Holló, who also performed as members of the ensemble.
Chris Demetriou
SoSi had a pretty massive impact on me in a lot of ways. Perhaps the most direct connection was that, after the institute, I had a huge arsenal of tools to bring back to the quartet I play with, all of which helped propel us forward towards our goals. Especially experiencing “Where (we) Live,” and talking to members of So about various processes of composition, I found myself approaching writing music with more comfort and excitement. These things in combination led to a lot of progress for my group, The Kraken Quartet, including some fun performances of Jason’s music as well as a few recordings of our own pieces (I’ll attach links separately bellow). Extending from this, I have recently found myself very interested in writing and performing my own music as a soloist, again highly influenced in concept and aesthetic by my time at SoSi (unfortunately no nice recordings for now, but I will hopefully have some in the next few weeks if you are interested). In addition to these tools and ideas, I am continually grateful for the community that SoSi nurtured. Even a few years after the program, I constantly find myself in contact with people I met that summer, always with exciting opportunities. Elliot Cole was kind enough to write a new piece for Kraken, and helped us immensely when we performed his postludes (again, something new to me at SoSi). Next month I’ll be traveling a bit and performing my music, and many of the stops will be to play concerts with friends I made at SoSi (including Evan Chapman and his group Square Peg Round Hole, Chris Sies and Dylan Greene with their group Willo, and Mika and Yumi with Mobius). I am truly grateful for all of these individual things I gained from my SoSi experience. But mostly, I know that the program impacted me as a musician in a lot of intangible ways, and for that I feel very fortunate. playing Jason’s music:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0SDdqbstNohttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fd5uOs8tGW4 playing Evan Chapman’s music (after meeting him at SoSi):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T7rYwCpt0ks collaboration (definitely influenced by seeing you perform with Grey McMurray):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_O5L8C77uv4 original music:
http://thekrakenquartet.bandcamp.com recording of a piece Tim Feeney wrote for us:
http://thekrakenquartet.bandcamp.com/album/still-life
Abby Fisher
Last year, I co-led a percussion commissioning consortium with fellow percussionist and Lawrence University graduate Alexv Rolfe. We commissioned a solo work for vibraphone and speaking voice from Lawton Hall (also a Lawrence grad), and invited others to join. Hall’s piece, titled ‘all your thens for now’ with text by Tim Davis from his essay The Ladies’ Tee and music drawn from Self Portrait in Three Colors by Charles Mingus, was completed in October 2013. We were successful in raising all the necessary funds and even a few consortium members are SoSI alums! During the fundraising process, we made a website for the consortium; the site included a blog written by Hall about his compositional process, a place to make contributions, and a list of the members. ‘all your thens for now’ will be available for purchase from Hall’s website Fall 2014 (http://www.lawtonhall.com).
Ethan Geller
I've written a whole bunch of software inspired by some of the Cage chance music I learned about at SOSI, like a program called Soundwrite for OS X that converts text to harmonic progressions. All my software and music can be found at ethangeller.com.
Also, I just found out yesterday that I got into the CCRMA masters program at Stanford! Very exciting times.
Dylan Greene
In 2011, Chris Sies collaborated with Elliot Cole at the Sō Percussion Summer Institute and helped to première a recent work of his, Postludes. Elliot, smart man that he is, gave out free copies to all the SoSi participants that year. We brought it back to Ann Arbor and performed it all over town - quite literally. Later that spring, Dylan offhandedly sent Elliot an email mentioning how well the Michigan community received his piece and expressing just how much we loved the work. The two of them kept in touch. This was around that same time, the four of us started publicly improvising on vibraphone - inspired by Elliot's intuitive writing and adding our own textural commentary. In the summer of 2013, we performed some of our improvisations at SoSi's pop-up concert. Elliot was in the crowd - full circle. Since, with community and and collaboration in mind, we've performed Hanuman's Leap with Elliot Cole, we've collaborated and continue to collaborate with Andrea Mazzariello, we're about work with Chris Demetriou, and down the road, we're collaborating with Kazimier Music aka Bill Delelles. In terms of medium, we approach dancers and visual artists with the same ideology and methodology that we bring to chamber music. And we work to be able to speak one language to both educated and common audiences. Art is art and sound is sound.
The Willo Collective is a Midwestern family of creator-performers. Members - percussionists, bass players, electronic artists, vocalists, producers, visual artists, and dancers - collaborate in small groups as individuals as well as collectively, under the masthead. As a tight-knit group of artists, Willoseeks to make the universal personal via collaboratively inclusive work - Art From and For Community. Us willocollective.com/willocollective.bandcamp.com/ A few of Dylan's other projects: The TUSKS Band
We began as a "we want to performed Steve Stavropoulos' electronic music live" kind of outfit. We quickly evolved into a collaborative, pink and teal, electro-acoustic, tune-writing, we-only-rehearse-in-the-dark, type of band. The best kind of description I can offer about our music is that it comes from all of the caves in which bats roost and silverfish colonize. We're currently recording an EP and plan to drop an album soon after. TUSKS is Isaac Levine, Steve Stavropoulos, Rebecca Rosen, and Dylan Greene. YUKON
Comprised of two percussionists, a trombonist, and a pianist, the YUKON project is goal oriented towards the ritual and scholarly practice of Chamber music - old and new. Poised to compete in the first University of Michigan Brigg's Chamber Music competition, the project is preparing for their first full recital at the Kerrytown Concert House in April and plans to record over summer. Currently, they are collaborating with Dominic Coles, a young composer studying at Yale, who they met at the 2013 So Percussion Summer Institute.
Katelyn King
Basically SoSI has really empowered me to connect with others in our community. I am working on a new solo vibe and speaking piece through a consortium I was a part of with Abby Fischer, another alum. And here at McGill I am working with two composers on new pieces for percussion and electronics. I am also working with a sound recording student at McGill to compile an album of rarely performed and recorded percussion works, as well as the new pieces I mentioned. SoSI really pushed me to create my website, katelynkingpercussion.com, and to put my recordings up online and post about the things I’m doing.
Will Keith
"A group of friends and I have recently started a new music group called "Percussionisms." Our main focus is to take great music for percussion and bring it out of the concert hall. We play a mix of established composers (Reich, Cage, etc.), new commissions from our friends, and original work from our members. We are stuck on playing pots and pans at the moment, but we will hopefully be acquiring more instruments soon to expand our range. We are still VERY new (we just played our second gig last night!), but we have received a lot of great feedback so far, and are extremely optimistic about the future. Our only online presence at the moment is our facebook page (www.facebook.com/percussionisms), but we will hopefully be registering a website very soon."
Daniel Kozlowski
After SoSI 2013, I was homeless and jobless, living on my friend's couch just south of Nashville. Fortunately, two of the three guys who lived in that house are percussionists, in addition to being some of my best friends. During that time on the couch, some of my first moves into the Nashville music scene were emails the the Musical Director of Portara Ensemble, a choir in town that tends to program some really wonderful contemporary music, and they do it pretty darn well. I had drawn up some programs in the spring and pitched them to their MD, and the resulting conversations eventually landed a concert on Feb. 22nd (tomorrow as a write this). The program required a percussion quartet, so while I was at dinner with Bryan and Sebastian (who were putting me up) and our good friend Jesse, Prost was born out of necessity. The show with Portara was the first step of many. We're working with a local artist/pianist Madeleine May to put together a show that involves live painting/sketching as part of a showcase for her artwork; SoSI alum Amy Garapic also reached out to us to help organize a Make Music Nashville day this June, which will possibly include a full performance of Drumming; and, since Nashville has so many incredibly talented songwriters and commercial musicians, our long-term vision is to produce a collaborative album with a local songwriter, giving Nashville's rock scene a post-classical(?) twist. Or perhaps the other way around. Either way, we're really looking forward to developing and promoting music of a different kind in this crazy, talented, artistic city.
Here's the link to our FB: https://www.facebook.com/prostpercussion -- We're on twitter @prostperc
James McKenzie
Ensemble playing was a big part of my decision to come to Madison; lucky for me, the grad percussion group I'd been excited to play with was transitioning into its own professional ensemble: Clocks in Motion. Now, beyond playing the music we love to play, we all contribute in managing the group ourselves; I got to build our new website and am in charge of many of our technological tools. So far this year we've finished recording our first album and premiered the piece that won our first call for scores, and we are now heading off for a week-long residency and our third midwestern tour! http://www.clocksinmotionpercussion.com
Eric Shuster
Eric Shuster (SoSI ’12) is directing the Salisbury University percussion ensemble for the premiere and recording of Jerry Tabor’s percussion quartet 40-Grit (2013) this spring. Tabor, who studied with Thomas DeLio and is professor of composition at Salisbury University, explores a performer’s limits and challenges the function of time in his music. 40-Grit, which is dedicated to Shuster and the ensemble, will appear in a collection of Tabor’s recent works on Neuma Records, to be available later in 2014. For more information please visit www.neuma-music.com. Additionally, Shuster has started a music series called LORD C presents that is devoted to sharing innovative or unfamiliar work by emerging and established artists of various perspectives. For more information please visit www.lordc.tumblr.com.
Yumi Tamashiro
The Mobius Percussion Quartet, founded in 2011, has been giving masterclasses at major universities such as Rutgers University, Curtis Institute of Music, and Juilliard School of Music. We have just finished commissioning a new piece by Ross Karre and have been performing with Radical 2, Elliot Cole, and many others. After our video release of 'What Hath II' by Australian composer Kate Neal, Mobius will be touring both 'What Hath II' and 'paper melodies (my music box music)' in the midwest and California in the 2014-15 concert season. Kate Neal's "What Hath II" http://vimeo.com/68811925
Jessica Tsang and Chris Salvito
Chris and I wanted to share our most recent project with you - we started a chamber group with a colleague of ours in early 2013, and we feel that SoSI really impacted how we present our music (not just because Josh wrote us an amazing piece!). So’s entrepreneurship and artistic thoughtfulness set a high standard for our ambitions, and we’re really grateful to have gotten to work with you guys. Here’s a link to our website: http://www.verharren.com/
Nate Tucker
I am the new core percussionist for new music group Juventas in boston and I am going on tour with American Repertory Theater in Las Vegas (starting in 2 weeks!) - which my final part of the audition process was in y'all studio in december when we rented it out! woot woot!
Besides that I thought it'd be fun to let you know that I did lecture at Roxbury Community College for their dance department on John Cage which a lot of that material was inspired by YOUR John Cage class in SOSI numero uno. Im hoping to take more advantage of that knowledge with the dance community in years to come.
Clara Warnaar
I've been getting a lot more in touch with writing and have written a couple of percussion solos, as well as current chamber and electronic pieces in the making. Anyway, here's a bit about my most recent and concrete projects:
Excelsis, a percussion quartet comprised of four women from four different countries, had its' debut performance at the New York Weekend of Percussion over a week ago with a fun interpretation of Bobby Previte's Terminal 4. Upcoming projects include a full performance in the spring and a composer's contest which will result in the publication and premiere concert of the winners' pieces in the fall. More information to come!
Website: http://excelsispercussion.wix.com/excelsis Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/excelsispercussion
It was with dismay and sadness this week that I learned in Slate
of the demise of classical music.A
genre I’ve loved for years, which was so loosely branded as to encompass one
thousand years of history across dozens of countries and cultures, is gone.
In my grief, I groped for an explanation.How had this happened?Just two weeks ago, I was watching
Pierre Boulez conduct Mahler 10 on public television in Cleveland, yesterday my
wife was practicing Scarlatti in the living room while I cooked in the
kitchen…but it’s too much to bear.
Despite the creeping despair, I searched the rest of the internet
for clues.How could such a
durable and yet nonsensical category of music finally have met its untimely
demise?Was it a total
loss?Could Monteverdi still be
revived, or at least some medieval sacred music?
What proof did we have that it was truly dead?But, my friends, the answer came in the
dark of the night, with the comforting glow of Facebook illuminating my pale
visage:classical music is UNDEAD.
It had been right in front of my face. The signs had been showing up for years: time and timeagain, I’d endured
the panic…suffering the familiar shock, racing downstairs to check that my
record collection was still there.Yet, it always seemed to reemerge, not with a majestic roar but with its
steady refusal to be completely extinguished.
Was I a fool to ignore what was hiding in plain sight?Could these constant reincarnations
have ever been anything else?
My refuge, as always, lay in Wikipedia.I combed the annals in search of a clue.With dread climbing up my spine as a
serpent stalks its unsuspecting prey, I keyed the search:
"Anundeadis a being in mythology, legend or
fiction that is deceased yet behaves as if alive. A common example is a corpse
re-animated by supernatural forces by the application of the deceased's own life forceor that of another being (such as a demon)."
Oh, joy and horror, that it could be naught else!
How to reconcile that my lover was this mangled beast?Those sounds that had suckled me, the
staggeringly diverse repertoire that only barely formed a coherent musical genre
was a ghastly multi-headed hydra.Reeling, I confronted my present quandary with cool detachment and a clarity
reserved only for madness.
I had to think,All
of these years, I knew that “classical music” was a clumsy, blunt instrument
used to lump together centuries of human creativity.Yet this thought had never troubled me before.It seemed as if the apparitions hiding
within (for I now know them to be nothing less, dear reader) could survive the
steady onslaught of lazy journalism…but how?I didn’t question that, I dared not.It was enough for me only that it
survived, for I could not bear the truth.
My unsteady thoughts turned to the “other beings” to whom the
Wikipedia tome referred.That
classical music had usurped its own hidden life force to reanimate was obvious,
but it must have had help.Who?The dizzying array of
possibilities threatened to overtake my already enfeebled mind, as I now could
trust nobody.My friends, my
classmates, even my own family could be in league with the abomination, feeding
its grotesque ambition.
Suddenly, the truth:the graying audiences, the conspiracy of silence in the concert hall,
the lack of demographic savvy…these were the white hunters, holy warriors
laboring in secret to save me from the evil that I dared not face.Oh, if only I knew...if only my naïve and careless love for many extremely different kinds of music
had not blinded me!
I sensed that the grip classical music had on me from
childhood was suddenly severed, as if by naming the creature I could defeat its
unholy spell.Perhaps there was
still time to arrange my escape, to hide from its gaze, if only for ---
