Thoughts from Very Good Musicians - Russell Hartenberger

I thought it would be fun to ask some musicians whom I admire to write about some aspect of their work. My first email was to Russell Hartenberger.  

Russell is one of the prominent figures in percussion history.  He is a founding member of the percussion group NEXUS, one of the most important influences on So Percussion or any other percussion group.  He is also a longtime core member of Steve Reich and Musicians, and a professor at the University of Toronto.   I asked Russell to talk about the role improvisation has played in his work.  

There are other great interviews with Russell here:  On Steve Reich's music and a lot of other stuff.

It seems natural for percussionists to improvise, at least it was for me. The first experience I can remember in improvising on a percussion instrument was during a snare drum lesson with my first teacher, Alan Abel, when I was eleven years old. Mr. Abel taught me to play the paradiddle, double paradiddle, and triple paradiddle, and then he told me to play a series of these paradiddle types in any order I wanted with no pre-planning. Up to that point in my lessons, Mr. Abel had carefully prescribed everything I was supposed to play. In fact, he played along with me in every lesson, rudiment, and exercise so I would have his stick movements and time feel to emulate. So this paradiddle improvisation he requested was quite a break from our normal lessons but one that I really enjoyed. I still play paradiddle improvisations as part of a warm-up routine, only now I vary the pulse that I feel against the patterns, or I phrase the paradiddles differently by beginning on a stroke other than the normally accented one.

Two of the other drummers in my high school band percussion section also liked to improvise, so we began jamming in the band room after school, eventually putting together a loosely-structured piece with each of us improvising on various drums and mallet instruments. Just for fun we entered a school talent assembly contest and surprised ourselves by winning first prize. My experiences with improvisation continued when I was an undergraduate at Curtis Institute. The other percussionists and I had occasional jam sessions in the percussion studio and even included a work that included improvisation on school concerts that we gave through the Young Audiences program in Philadelphia.

After graduation from Curtis, I joined the U. S. Air Force Band in Washington, D.C. where the percussionists routinely ‘played the percussion room’ at the back of the rehearsal hall at Bolling Air Force Base. We did this by improvising using the light switch, locker doors, walls, and any other part of the room that made a sound.

Shortly after my discharge from the USAF Band, I played percussion in the Puerto Rico Symphony for several weeks as part of their annual orchestra expansion in order to play larger works and to tour through the Caribbean. Some of the Puerto Rican musicians in the orchestra, including the percussionists, were great improvisers and we spent many hours playing music on tropical beaches.

However, one of my most significant improvisational experiences occurred while I was still in the USAF Band.  In 1968, during one of my summer breaks from the band, I was asked to play at the Marlboro Music Festival to perform a work by composer Fred Lerdahl (who later, along with R. A. Jackendoff, co-authored the classic music theory book A Generative Theory of Tonal Music). In addition to the Lerdahl work, the Festival programmed Stravinsky’s Les Noces that week. John Wyre, who had been the regular percussionist at Marlboro for several years played the timpani part, and the other percussionists who were brought in to Marlboro for the Stravinsky were Bob Becker, Bill Cahn, and Robin Engelman. I had met John a year or so earlier, and I knew Bill from our days together in Alan Abel’s percussion ensemble at the Settlement Music School in Philadelphia, but I had not met Bob or Robin until this week. I had to leave Marlboro before the Les Noces performance, but not before John, Bill, Bob, Robin, and I gathered in the dining hall one evening and improvised for several hours. 

In 1970 I spent the summer at Marlboro as the resident percussionist. John Wyre came back to visit one day, and we spent an evening at the farmhouse of Rudolf Serkin in nearby Guilford, VT improvising on Japanese temple bowls. Two years later, in 1972, John, Bill, Bob, and I were back at Marlboro to play Messiaen’s Oiseaux Exotiques. We continued these improvisation sessions, but this time they included pianist, Peter Serkin. 

By this time, Nexus had played concerts of improvisation beginning with the concert at Kilbourn Hall at the Eastman School of Music in May of 1971. Prior to that concert, Bill and Bob played improvised concerts in the Rochester area, and all of us had gotten together in each others’ homes to improvise for fun. A particularly memorable session was at John Wyre’s geodesic dome in Norland, Ontario. John built wooden racks with lots of bells and gongs hanging from them and had other instruments spread around the dome. We spent a weekend improvising with occasional breaks to eat or to play touch football. During one of the improv sessions, Bill spotted a walking stick insect crawling near his instruments.  Bill immediately broke into a song that began, “I am a walking stick…I walk…and I look like a stick.” The song went on for quite a long time as we accompanied Bill with all kinds of percussion sounds.

Bill has an uncanny ability to combine words with sounds. Nexus was invited to play at the Dayspring Festival in the Metropolitan United Church in Toronto in the early 1970s. We improvised a concert on Saturday night, after which the pastor of the church, a very open-minded gentleman, invited us to accompany the Sunday worship service the next morning. We all willingly obliged, and the next morning we returned to our instrument set-ups and began adding various sounds to the hymns and scripture readings. In one of the readings, the pastor read the words, “and the Virgin Mary held the baby Jesus to her breast,” at which point Bill accompanied the sentence with an incredibly loud, screeching sound on a gong by rubbing the rattan end of a marimba mallet across the surface. We all laughed so hard we were unable to continue for several minutes.

Nexus has never planned any of our improvisations in concerts – except for one attempt. We had a two-week residency at York University in Toronto in the summer of 1973. Bill had been writing pieces around this time in which the performer mimed the motions of playing without striking the instruments. Just before we went on stage to play an improvisation at one of these York concerts, Bill suggested that we all go out and pretend to play but that we don’t actually strike anything. We all agreed and Bill led the way on stage. The first motion Bill made accidentally struck a cymbal and so the spell was broken and the performance became a regular improvisation with all of us actually playing on the instruments.

One of the most memorable Nexus improvisation concerts was in a church in Amsterdam in 1984. The presenter asked if we would play a concert all night long beginning about 10 pm. We agreed to do it and the result was a fantastic evening of drawn out improvisational ideas. Knowing that we had several hours to explore ideas, we developed everything very gradually with episodes lasting for extended periods.

As composed pieces began appearing in Nexus concerts: ragtime pieces; music of John Cage and Steve Reich; arrangements of African music; and original compositions by members of the group, improvisations gradually occupied less of our concerts. But the sense of ensemble that was created by the early years of improvisation permeated our interpretations of the other pieces and gave them the sense that they were being improvised, too.

I remember conversations about improvisation with Toru Takemitsu, who had very specific ideas about the kind of improvisation that he preferred. Toru spoke of the Japanese concept of ma, or playing a sound without regard to what came before or what came after, but sound for the sake of sound. An example of this kind of improvisation, and, for me, the most difficult improvisations I have played, are the crotale ‘rain drops’ in Rain Tree and the crotale sounds in the opening procession of From me flows what you call Time. Toru describes his concept of sound this way:

To give a simple example, when one strikes a temple bell, there is a long, relaxed period of time before the sound dies out and the bell can be struck again. From a Western perspective, this is a space [ma] that has no beat. It is an unascertainable, unquantifiable space. In the past, a haiku poet would have listened to the bell—perhaps thought about eating a persimmon first—and felt its beauty. Today we Japanese are immersed in a completely Westernized lifestyle, yet we hear the sound of a wind chime from time to time and appreciate the beauty of a single sound—as we possess that kind of sensitivity to sound. 

As one sound is a complete entity that resembles noise, to perform one sound means to desire unity with various sounds in nature. When traditional Japanese music is performed by a master, there is that kind of feeling or receptivity to sound. In short, one denies one’s own ego in the process, and one proceeds, instead, toward nature—a point of anonymity.
(Takemitsu, Toru. “Toru Takemitsu, on Sawari.” Trans. and annotated Hugh de Ferranti and Yayoi Uno Everett. Locating East Asia in Western Art Music. Yayoi Uno Everett and Frederick Lau, eds.  Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2004, p. 202)

All the guys in Nexus are master improvisers and approach the art of improvisation from various ways. John sometimes referred to Bill as Dr. Imagination (although Bill’s nickname in the group was once The Big Mac of Thought). Bill is indeed an imaginative player both when he is improvising and when he is playing written music. But he has also analyzed improvisation thoroughly, and his book, Creative Music Making, guides musicians who have not improvised very much to a freer way of playing music.

Michael Craden brought an audacious style of improvising to the group. His formal training was as a visual artist, not a musician, although he learned a great deal about music from his days in Los Angeles improvising with Emil Richards. Michael did not read music, so everything he played was essentially improvised. He became famous, or maybe infamous is a better word, for the sounds he made from a small collection of instruments he played as an accompaniment to the Nexus ragtime arrangements. Michael taped the instruments to a padded table and found a way to make sounds in the most unexpected places in the music. One of the instruments on his table was a small 6” tambourine with a head that had been broken so many times there was more duct tape on it than there was head. On an early tour, we were setting up for a concert and one of the young student percussionists who was helping us, and who had obviously heard our direct-to-disc recording of the ragtime tunes, ran over to Michael and said, “The sound you get on the tambourine was amazing!  How do you get that sound?” Of course, the rest of us cracked up at this remark.

And speaking of the ragtime tunes, I can’t imagine any more spectacular improvising than Bob continues to do on the rags. He finds new ways to amaze us all, not only with his Mach 2 mallet speed, but with the inventive ways he finds to redefine musicality on the xylophone. Recently, at the marathon concert at Le Poisson Rouge organized by Sō Percussion, Bob’s transition on the xylophone from the last section of Piano Phase that Garry and I played on slap tubes, to the beginning of a ragtime tune was a stroke (or strokes) of genius – the kind of genius we in Nexus too often take for granted when listening to Bob play.

Garry’s creative mind has brought a new dimension to the improvisations of Nexus. Even before he was an official member of Nexus, Garry was contributing to the group. When we received the music to Toru Takemitsu’s concerto, From me flow what you call Time, and realized we needed some kind of bells for the end of the piece, we contacted Garry to see if he could help. Garry met with Takemitsu in Japan and discussed the kind of sounds Toru imagined for these bell clusters. This meeting resulted in Garry creating two racks of wind chimes of various sizes tuned in just intonation to the main pitches in the piece. After John Wyre retired from Nexus, Garry joined the group and brought with him some beautiful Baschet sound sculptures that he uses regularly in our improvisations. When Robin Engelman left the group, Garry took over Robin’s part in the Takemitsu and redesigned the set-up to include log drums he built and tuned to the pitches of the boo-bams that were indicated in the score.

Robin and John always played an integral part in Nexus improvisations. Robin’s choices of instruments were often not percussion instruments. One of his favorite instruments was a Chinese zither-like instrument that he called the chang and played with a bow. Another instrument Robin often played was a bass harmonica. But one of my favorite instruments of his was a Scandinavian open-ended flute with no finger holes that he played in an extended improvised solo in an African-based piece we called Fra-Fra.

John Wyre, however, was the soul of our improvisations. It was John who first began collecting unusual instruments back in the days when Japanese temple bowls, Balinese gongs, and water buffalo bells were not commonly available. We all caught the collecting bug and spent most of our free time on the road scouring antique stores and import shops looking for percussion instruments. Each new discovery was quickly added to our improvisations and expanded the scope of our soundscape. John built racks to hang bells and gongs, created sound mobiles from elephant bells and glockenspiel bars, and made bell trees out of dozens of Tibetan finger cymbals.

The World Drums Festival that John organized for Vancouver Expo in 1986 was a showcase of improvisation. At the first rehearsal of this group of over 100 drummers, John told everyone that, for the beginning of each concert, he wanted us all to tap a pulse on the sides of our drums. When we tried to do that, we quickly discovered that the world’s greatest drummers couldn’t keep together with a steady beat. John decided it was prudent to designate one drummer as the leader and everyone followed that beat.  John told us all that at the end of each of the four World Drums concerts we played, there was to be no encore and no improvising. However, at the end of the fourth concert there was no holding back and the natural tendency of drummers to improvise took over. The most glorious explosion of improvisation filled the stage, with drummers and dancers reveling in the sound and feel of playing music together. As John might have said in summing up his life of improvisation,

“Beautiful, man, beautiful!”

_________________________________________________________________________________

Russell Hartenberger has been a member of Nexus and of the Steve Reich ensemble since 1971. With these two groups, Professor Hartenberger has performed throughout the world including appearances with the New York Philharmonic, Boston Symphony, Cleveland Orchestra, London Symphony, Israel Philharmonic, Cologne Radio Orchestra, Toronto Symphony, BBC Orchestra, New Japan Philharmonic, and with other leading orchestras in Europe, Asia and North America. His Western music studies were with Alan Abel and Fred D. Hinger. He has also studied tabla with Sharda Sahai, mrdangam with Ramnad Raghavan, Javanese gamelan with Prawotosaputro and West African drumming with Abraham Adzinyah. Prof. Hartenberger has appeared on over 70 recordings for various labels including Nonesuch, ECM, DGG, Sony, Philips and Nexus. He has also performed with the Oklahoma City Symphony, the New Haven Symphony, the U.S. Air Force Band, the Paul Winter Consort, the Canadian Opera Company, and at the Malboro Music Festival under Pablo Casals.

Read - Memorize - Cheat!

With Richard Goode’s performance of the last three Beethoven piano sonatas at Carnegie Hall still ringing in my ears, I wanted to share some thoughts about how we can get music off of the page and into time and space.

The concert was a revelation to me.  I heard Beethoven as the unlimited musician, able to realize any invention or idea in the most imaginative way.  But the singularity of the experience lay in the fact that Goode – or rather his assistant - cheerfully plopped his old copy of the Beethoven piano sonatas up on the desk and flipped pages through the entire 90 minutes of music, subverting a common convention of top level solo piano performances. 

I’ve been oscillating back and forth for years about the relative merits of memorization vs. “reading” in performance.  Actually, I’ve recently reached equilibrium in thinking about it:  if it sounds good, it sounds good. 

But I remember that in the past I was obsessed with this issue, and I imagine some players continue to struggle with or be ambivalent about it. I have spent some years gleaning perspective from mentors and friends, and also teaching younger musicians who are working their way through what it means to participate in a literature of music. 

In my group So Percussion, we most often consider memorization a virtue.  It happens that with percussion instruments, there is frequently choreography involved in performance, so that constantly checking back in with the score can be more trouble than memorizing.  And there is something breathtaking about watching somebody exhale a complex piece of music as if they are improvising. 

In chamber music, it’s both helpful and fun to be constantly in touch with the other performers to confirm cues, read body language, and communicate intention.  Pushing the score aside is a huge step in cultivating these habits.     

But for me there is another side...I have a lot of anxiety about memory slips.  I sometimes feel that my brain is spending more energy trying to not mess up than on the musical intention and nuance. 

This anxiety exists when performing music with only one prescribed path.  Stray off the path and you’re floundering, desperately groping your way back.  Miles Davis did not have memory slips, because each new note was an opportunity for invention.  I imagine Beethoven and Mozart experienced the same kind of freedom when performing their own music.  

What I have always loved the most about classical music is the idea of a literature – and yes, a canon – that inspires a multi-generational conversation, as well as the peculiar benefits that the use of a score lends to its creator. 

What I have admired and envied about some other musical styles and traditions is the sense of immediacy, the agency that a performer has at any one moment when he shares creative responsibility with the composer and/or the collected other performers. 

We can have both, but it helps to question ourselves about what the score is, and how we want to use it.  

READ

The first step is to stop thinking of the score as music.  As I briefly examined in a past blog post, the musical score has a wonderfully rich and varied history.  As a way of recording and passing on musical information, it was unique until the invention of sound recordings.  It also allowed a body of individual authorship to flourish, so that we now speak of Beethoven, Chopin, and Stravinsky as having an intact and recognizable body of work.  

Without pretending to define music it in its totality, I feel comfortable saying that music happens in both time and space, and that it requires the presence of aural perception, though not always of intentional sound.  I’m a firm believer in John Cage’s philosophy that sound and silence create musical space together, and also that in any event it is impossible to create perfect silence within any medium that is not a vacuum (where it doesn’t exist). 

The musical score is a visual medium, which can be perceived without reference to time.  Actually, one of the most important skills a musician learns in western practice is to move our eyes and brains patiently across the page while transmitting the information into music. 

In order to be precise, we could refer to the score as an instruction page, or a guide.  I often do this with my students to knock them out of the habit of thinking of the score as if it is actually the music.     

Part of the genius of a score by George Crumb lies in the way in which he invests completely in the visual medium, creating stunningly beautiful patterns and images.  He entrusts the performer with the task of translating this into interesting music, but with the understanding that the score is its own canvas.

- Page from Crumb, Makrokosmos - 

This playful visual realization of normally pragmatic notation goes back a very long way.

-Baude Cordier, Belle, Bonne, Sage, 14th century

If the score isn’t the music, then why not just do away with it in every case?  Answering this question is personal:  to me, it’s because the history of composition took a series of fascinating turns once writing scores became commonplace, which created a wonderful tradition.  To examine these insights in depth, I’ll happily refer you to Taruskin’s Oxford History of Western Music, which brilliantly outlines the evolution.    

This is what I love most about written music:  it creates the possibility of extending musical memory and radically personalizing a composer’s individual style, sometimes challenging the listener’s own ability to keep things straight.  In some types of experimental music like John Cage’s Music of Changes, you really aren’t expected to keep up in any case.  The composer can work with non-linear ideas on the page, exploiting many fascinating structural and narrative possibilities. 

Working with notation also allows us all to tap into centuries of tradition, to exploit and marvel at the riches of other musical tinkerers.  

I continue to believe in written music:  I really like what it can do. The truth is, we don't need it at all anymore.  Every kind of musical information can now be preserved and transmitted - with greater accuracy- by means of audio, video, and digital recording.  

When my group plays Iannis Xenakis’ music, especially the monstrous Pleiades, I’m struck by how well his visual and aural thinking line up together.  Many times, the six musicians play adjacently sequenced polyrhythms (2:3, 3:4, 4:5, 5:6, etc) simultaneously, which quickly snap back into unison after a very long period of chaos.  It’s not impossible to imagine somebody composing this non-visually, but I know for a fact that this architect loved transmuting the visual structures of architectural design into aural phenomena.  It strikes me as a kind of music with such complex layers of simultaneity and large-scale structure that it would likely not have been improvised.

So the score as a means of transmitting information and preserving compositions is a good idea.  What, then, of its use and presence in live performance? 

Those of us who play(ed) a lot of contemporary music in music school are familiar with the giant poster board parts we’ve all made to perform complex pieces.  I still use a few today, so I’m not going to dismiss them.  Sometimes, though, these boards are so large and cumbersome that they dominate the visual space the performer occupies.  It even feels as though they exist to send a cultural signal:  this music is really hard. 

In 2002, So Percussion premiered David Lang’s “the so-called laws of nature” at the Miller Theatre in New York.  This was our first major show in New York (I was 23).  We practiced for months to perfect what is still probably the most difficult piece we’ve played.  Getting the entire 36-minute piece onstage was a huge accomplishment.  We were absorbed in the minutiae of each pattern, fascinated by the symmetry and dynamism of the piece. 

David and Michael Gordon sat in the hall while we ran through it in the dress rehearsal.  We admired them so much that we couldn’t wait to see the reaction this performance would provoke. 

After we performed, David asked Michael what he thought.  “It’s great,” Michael said, “but can I make a superficial comment?  I can’t see your sticks because of those boards, and that’s my favorite part of watching a percussionist play.  Can you get the music stands out of the way?” (I'm definitely mis-remembering what he said)

As a grad student at the time, I couldn’t believe that was his first comment.  What about the subtly thwarted expectations of the patterns?  What about the hi-wire act of performing canons with our backs to each other? 

That moment had a huge impact on each of us:  if somebody’s aunt had made the comment, we might have dismissed it as cute or naïve.  But this was Micheal freakin’ Gordon, and that couldn't be so easily done.  To this day, “superficial comment” has entered our lexicon in masterclasses as a way of talking about the crucial issue of visual presentation. 

MEMORIZE

When So Percussion first started, we were on fire to memorize ensemble music.  Eighth Blackbird had taken the contemporary music world by storm with their virtuosic memorized performances, and founding members Jason Treuting and Tim Feeney had studied in Bali, where extremely complex music is taught by rote and memorized.  Jason and Tim in particular seemed to have sponge-brains for memorization. 

The initial goal was to have all of our repertoire memorized.  In early bios, we even highlighted this as part of our mission.  During our “ten thousand hours” we set very intensive collective goals for memorization:  three rehearsal letters (six pages) of John Cage’s Third Construction per day, which we’d test each other on the next morning.  When competing in the Luxembourg International Competition in 2005, we memorized almost the entire list.  When a young student watches us improvise with dried leaves or play drones for half an hour, I like to remind them of these years spent focusing on virtuosity and achievement. 

The benefits of memorization are enormous:  the discipline it requires forces you to constantly test your knowledge of the score; you spend more time interacting with yourself and others in performance; there is a special confidence in music-making that comes from internalizing its structures. 

In fact, I would be comfortable saying that music should ALWAYS be memorized as part of the learning process.  You simply do not know a piece well enough if you aren't sure what’s coming next.  The effort and process of memorization always help you to know the music better.  During the Richard Goode recital that inspired this article, I noticed that he looked down at the keyboard many times to play particularly involved passages.  He obviously had memorized each piece thoroughly. 

Here are two videos of memorized performances, first our version of Third Construction, then Tim Feeney, professor at the University of Alabama, performing Xenakis’ Rebonds A:

Our video highlights the fun and virtuosity that memorization brings to a group performance.  We find that it allows us to interact with each other more like musicians in a jazz or folk setting:  ideas seem to bounce spontaneously back and forth, surprises in the score feel like real surprises, and the anticipation of an exciting moment accumulates in the group’s energy. 

Tim’s video illuminates how an incredibly complex score can be transformed from a formidable mathematical monument into a breathing, malleable flow of information.  Rather than over-earnest and effortful, his performance actually seems spontaneous.  One of my most memorable lessons with Robert van Sice at Yale was on this very piece, where he breathlessly explained the joy of hearing such a complex musical structure delivered with dynamism, as if the performer possessed some kind of cyborg brain that could dream up Rebonds A on the spot. 

In the percussion world, Steven Schick is the pioneer of this charismatic virtuosity.  Here’s his version of Xenakis’ Psappha.

I – and we – find this kind of performance dynamic very attractive.  We strive for it almost every time.  Knowing what it looks, sounds and feels like to completely inhabit a piece of music provides a goal, an ideal to measure yourself against.  But as I mentioned above, I have a love/hate relationship with memory, which is clearly not as much of an issue for a performer like Tim (I watched him saunter through Roger Reynolds half-hour Watershed IV in grad school like it was nothing).  

My job demands that I be in command of a very high volume of hard music.  Added to this is the fact that the increasing visibility and pressure of an evolving performing career make the stakes feel higher and higher with each passing year.

There was a moment when So thought we might memorize all of the so-called laws of nature, but it is prohibitively difficult.  The laws that the piece refers to manifest themselves as unexpected variations in sequential patterns that are maddening to keep track of.  On top of that, the entire piece consists of about 2000 bars of constant notes. 

Jason memorized the 3^rd movement years ago, and now is able to pick it back up on one rehearsal with little trouble.  I also memorized it years ago,  leading to the most uncomfortable 12 minutes on stage of my life, and have since resolved to make myself more comfortable and effective.    

CHEAT! 

When I wrote above that music should always be memorized, I really should have said “internalized.”  Memory is one of the many tools that are used in preparing a performance (plus there are different kinds of memory – kinesthetic, visual, aural). 

In our group, we have come up with a number of novel solutions for “cheating.”   Cheating involves getting just the necessary information down some place where it helps you feel confident about your performance.  We call them “cheat sheets,” which is a little tongue-in-cheek, because it’s not a test.  But they do offer a way to direct the audience’s attention towards your performance, and away from the presence of the instruction page.  

Perhaps more importantly, cheating is itself a process, a kind of very personal analysis, where you decide for yourself what must stay on the page and what can go.  It might be a harmonic road map, a bunch of important rhythmic sequences, or just a reminder of what instruments to pick up. It doesn't mean that the other elements are unimportant, perhaps only that they are easier to remember.

Here’s my cheat sheet for the last movement of Steve Reich’s “Mallet Quartet:”

When written out fully on the score – this is a particular issue with minimal music – there are many many notes, so many in fact that I could never perform this movement without somebody else turning pages since there are no breaks. 

I’ve memorized the piece, but sometimes we perform Mallet Quartet on very little rehearsal to demonstrate it to students. 

The cheat sheet only has the information that I need to instantly be able to pick the part back up:  in this case, it’s the sequence of constantly shifting meters.  As with much of Reich’s music, the harmony changes are relatively slow and easy to remember.  But the meter changes have subtle pattern variations, and if my motor-rhythm part goes off the rails, there’s a train wreck (i.e., if I play a 7 when there’s supposed to be a 5).

This sense of responsibility to the group makes me want to have the security of the cheat.  I’m not trying to score points by showing I’m hardcore, I have to be rock solid: the vibraphone players are performing razor’s edge melodic canons on top of my patterns.

In solo music, there is the possibility that a memory slip might lead only to a temporary blip, with a recovery somewhere else in the music.  The audience may not even notice.  In ensemble music, it can create a chain reaction.  Learning to recover as a group is one of the vital skills we teach other ensembles, but I like having the option to minimize that risk. 

Here is my recently created cheat sheet and published part for the 3rd movement of David Lang’s man made, our first major concerto with orchestra.  We had just over a month to learn this piece before the premiere in London with the BBC Symphony.  

The instrument for this movement is ten tuned pipes, five lower and five higher.  David did the right thing by notating it in a conventional way, but I needed to be able to play these difficult patterns in a very short amount of time.  I devised my own notation for this setup, where a single ledger line indicated the break between these two sets of five pipes.   In my “keyboard,”  E and A were right next to each other, while in the traditional notation, they were a fourth apart. 

This was messing with my sense of physical space as I learned the new instrument.  I needed some way to visually reflect the feel of the pipe instrument.  Also, the pipes were lined up in a single row, without the 2’s and 3’s of a traditional keyboard to help orientation.  I immediately wrote the letter names on the pipes themselves, and also inside the noteheads of my new notation.  

Added to the complexity of the pipe melody are two trash sounds that oscillate back and forth in an unpredictable sequence which is totally unrelated to the pipes. On David’s original part these trash metals are notated as G and A, which are the pitches the rest of the orchestra performs in unison with us.  My eyes could barely distinguish between the two notes while I labored to keep track of the pipe melody.  I needed something splashier, so I used differently shaped noteheads to contrast them. 

I showed my sheet to Josh, and his first reaction was “what the hell is this?”  It made no sense to him, because it reflected entirely my own journey of problem solving, and my own personal needs as a performer. 

There is no prize for having the fanciest reading or memorizing skills.  The only thing that matters is sounding great and feeling confident. 

The good news is that a cheat sheet most often convinces the audience that you ARE playing from memory.  They are conditioned to either seeing a score or not, and even when you show them you’ve cheated, their strongest impression is usually that you’ve performed from memory. 

Finally, the journey of building a cheat is an effective step towards memorization.  You've taken the time to reduce the musical information into packets and patterns, rather than the common brute force method of cramming notes.  When I've fully memorized pieces for which I've also built cheats, I find myself preferring to go one way or another in performance, options that were anticipated from the very beginning of the learning process.  

Creative Collaboration: The Making of Steven Mackey's "It Is Time," part IV

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 Jason Treuting and the use of drumset in the fourth movement. It appears in the fourth issue of Avue Magazine, a publication of Adams Instruments. The movement runs from 27:00 to the end in the video below.

“I don't think any arranger should ever write a drum part for a drummer because if a drummer can't create his own interpretation of the chart and he plays everything that's written, he becomes mechanical; he has no freedom.” 

- Buddy Rich

I first heard Steve Mackey play electric guitar on a concert of his music as an undergraduate student at the Eastman School of Music. I was a double major at the time, studying classical percussion and “jazz” drum set. My improvisation teacher Ralph Alessi suggested I check it out. Ralph was a very important mentor for me: though a trumpet player, he opened me up to many new ideas about music and styles of playing. When he made a suggestion to see something I took it seriously. I checked out Steve’s show and didn’t quite know what to make of it. It was mostly composed music, but had a feel of discovery and freedom in the moment. So when I met Steve five or so years later at the Yellowbarn Chamber Music Festival, I begged him to improvise with me in the evenings when the long rehearsal days were over. During those sessions, I really got to know him as an electric guitarist and improviser before knowing him as a composer. Looking back on our years of collaboration since then - as a duo that gets together periodically to improvise, as a drummer in his band Big Farm, and most recently through So’s intense collaboration with him on It is Time - I am realizing more and more how important that first connection between drummer and electric guitarist was.

Flash forward … when So hung out on Steve’s deck eating BBQ chicken and grilled asparagus in 2009, he knew I was interested in exploring drum set in his new piece and he already had a great idea of how to write for the instrument and for me specifically. I had been anxious about getting drum set involved in So’s chamber music commissioning because it rarely succeeded for me in other contemporary chamber music settings I had heard. The drum set is essentially a folk instrument where each player is expected to have a unique approach. Attempts to codify it through standard notation tend to squash that uniqueness. And when the drum set is used to obliquely reference the popular styles that it has come to define (jazz, blues, R&B, funk, rock, latin jazz styles, etc), it can go drastically wrong. This is for many reasons, but perhaps most obviously because the drum set is often best played loud while chamber music, even percussion chamber music, is usually much quieter. That is a generalization, but it rings true much of the time.

 I didn’t have these fears with Steve. It didn’t cross my mind to shy away from drum set: we knew each other very well as players and he knows the instrument(s) very well as a composer. In this sense, much of the work was already done. The time needed for a composer and performer to feel each other out and discover what is possible had happened over and over again each time we played together. So, now was the time to feel out which direction to choose from the many we knew were possible. I knew the direction would be challenging. I knew it would involve adding new sounds to the drum set, finding ways to be melodic as well as rhythmic. But I wasn’t quite prepared for the new rhythmic language he would innovate and how fascinating it would be to learn to translate that to the drum set.

As Eric, Josh and Adam have all mentioned in previous articles, each of the four movements in It is Time explores a different way to look at time. In the fourth, steady time is bent and warped. In the many improvisations and little pieces Steve and I made together, we often explored the limits of how malleable groove can be, especially in duo situations. But in the case of a quartet, where a larger group is tasked with bending and warping together, a common reference is needed. Steve chose two angles to explore.

The first looks back to the analog metronome that was so central to the first movement. In this last movement, the steadiness of the metronome is warped by physically tilting it on a block. Steve and Eric discovered that if you set the metronome at just the perfect angle, you can take 2 steady beats and turn them into a longer and shorter beat and thus warp the groove. What groove?

For the second, Steve references common latin patterns from cowbell and clave playing to serve as warp-worthy grooves. In the drum set music that I play, he composes these patterns and their variations in all four limbs - my left foot alternates between a pedal cowbell and hi hat - which shift back and forth between warped and “straight” settings.

I think the end result is incredibly successful for many reasons. From a personal perspective, it just sounds great to my ears. Drum set playing often comes to life because of the player and their unique approach. Many great drummers warp groove and play around with time as an expressive tool in their improvisations. Steve embraces this sensibility, but he mixes it with the craft of a composer who methodically develops musical ideas throughout a piece. When the drum set is incorporated into contemporary chamber and orchestra music, it is usually a more static element for other things to develop against, but in this movement, he gives the drum set the ability to take themes, both rhythmic and melodic, and develop them as the driving force. That is not common and not so easy.

- Jason Treuting

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. 

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.

Where (we) Live - Brooklyn (Vermont, PA, Minneapolis, Montana)

Jason performing with blacksmith Dave Berger at Juniata College
Photo (c) Chad Herzog 2012

Strangers All Along  

When So Percussion conceives big projects of our own work -  especially those that make it to theatrically-oriented venues like BAM - we always start with a source of inspiration outside of purely musical ideas.  We look for a kind of libretto; but being rather non-linear guys, we quickly abandon the source and allow its discourse to inform our process.

For Where (we) Live, that source was Jane Jacobs' manifesto of urban planning, The Death and Life of Great American Cities.  We found in it an analogue to something that we had been thinking about for awhile:  what about attempting a unified creation with multiple and sometimes chaotic inputs?  In Jacobs' book, she rails against the well-meaning but (in her mind) hopelessly short-sighted urban planning of the 50's and 60's by the likes of Robert Moses, where whole communities and use-areas were conceived together as one design.  She claims that a truly vibrant city must have stages of growth, unplanned diversity, and mixed uses on every block.

My knowledge of effective urban planning goes only about as far as I've read that book and a few other commentaries, so I'll leave that issue here.  Also, many of the compositions we perform were created via top-down planning, and we're perfectly happy with it in music.   As I said, we abandon the source pretty quickly.

But it sparked in us the thought that our art forms are often planned and segmented in exactly the same way, so that our conservatory degrees in "Percussion Performance" designate us for a specific function in the art world.  While we eagerly embrace that function, we also feel that it requires only a simple act of outreach to experiment outside of its boundaries.

But that function is also what we've trained for, and what we're best at.  Just as with Jacobs' mixed-use block, what if we practice our craft, but ask other folks to share the stage and practice theirs?

Would it just be a big happy mess, or could we hammer out an aesthetic shape and purpose?  

Along with the many other moving parts that we attached to Where (we) Live, we decided to ask specific artists and artisans to join us on the stage and make things.  While our collaborations with Emily Johnson, Ain Gordon, Martin Schmidt, and Grey Mcmurray would be long and consistent, our work with these other artists would be very short, perhaps only a day or two before each show.

We visit each in their own studio before the performance, learning about their process by observing the idiosyncrasies and rituals of their work.  They then bring tools to one rehearsal, where we hash out the parameters of our brief collaboration.   To us, the juxtaposition is not enough.  We strive for the uncanny sense that our simultaneous and disparate activities are part of the same ecosystem, a created community on stage.

The results so far have delighted us:  Steve Procter fired his giant ceramic pots with a blowtorch; Michelle Holzapfel gathered fabric to the gently whirring amplified hum of her sewing machine; Dave Berger's mighty anvil pounded out its own rhythms while a cloud of amber-burnt dust rose to the ceiling, wafting an ancient aroma through the hall.   In Helena and Billings, Montana, Joseph Firecrow whittled a new flute, joining us in playing "Strangers All Along."


The Dignity of Craft

The concept of "craft" came up over and over again.  Why, when we have the ability to fabricate massive quantities of perfectly symmetrical and consistent objects, would somebody still labor over creating them?  The question applies just as well to music:  At this point, I can barely tell the difference between a programmed marimba in Ableton Live and the real thing.

For me, the question was answered vividly when we visited Dave Berger's forge.  I had never actually been close to a skilled blacksmith (or I guess any at all).  Something deeply human in me thrilled at the physical gesture, the smell of burned ash, the proximity to melted steel.

It brought to mind my favorite quote by the composer Iannis Xenakis, which may surprise those who think of him as a mechanical composer:

The hand, itself, stands between randomness and calculation. It is both an instrument of the mind – so close to the head – and an imperfect tool. ... Industrialization is a forced purification. But you can always recognize what has been made industrially and what has been made by hand. Industrial means are clean, functional, poor. The hand adds inner richness and charm.  

Steve Reich, another of my favorite composers, talks about the joy of discovering how much he liked hearing imperfect humans attempt phasing in his music.   Mathematical perfection pales aesthetically in comparison with our experience of identification with the performers who exert themselves in achieving it.

Our increasingly digital lives, while conferring many benefits, detach us from this thrill.  Live performance, and craft by hand, jolt us back into a basic humanity.


Our Artists

The four performances at BAM (December 19-22) feature a different Brooklyn-based artist each night.  Their creations, and the aesthetic experience of watching them make things alongside us, change the musical and theatrical environment.  We encourage anybody who comes out to check out more than one night and see how the show changes.



Brooklyn:


Paula Greif, ceramics (December 19) trained as a graphic designer and has always had an interest in rock. Her first job was in the art department at Rolling Stone; she was art director at Mademoiselle, Condé Nast, Barneys New York, and Richard Avedon’s studio and designed album covers as well. At MTV in the 1980s, she made her first Super 8 rock video for The Smiths, “How Soon is Now,” and directed many rock videos and TV commercials. After marrying and becoming a parent, she began making pottery and glassware, taking inspiration from 20th-century artisans such as Lucie Rie, Beatrice Wood, and Rosanjin Kitaoji. She has a shared studio in Red Hook and in the summer is potter in residence at old Field Farm in Cornwallville, NY. Her wares are available at Beautiful Dreamers in Williamsburg and Iko Iko in Los Angeles.

Marsha Trattner, blacksmith (December 20) is the owner of She-Weld, which specializes in welding, black- smithing, custom metal design and fabrication. She gives workshops and private instruction, and runs a “Girls Night at the Forge.” Trattner also creates sculpture, drawings, prints, and designs lighting, jewelry, theatrical sets, and artifacts for the home and garden. 

Marsha's studio in Red Hook was ravaged by Sandy, so we'll be donating a portion of our proceeds from merchandise sales at BAM to the The Red Hook Initiative, as well as to Marsha's personal restoration efforts.  

Riccardo Vecchio, painter (December 21) was born in 1970 near Milan, Italy. From 1990 to 1993 he studied design at the university of Trier, Germany, and continued studies at the European Institute of Design in Milan. In 1994 he was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to enroll in the masters program at the School of Visual Arts in New York, from which he graduated in 1996, receiving the Paula Rhodes Memorial Award for his thesis project. Since then, Vecchio has been a faculty member in the School of Visual Arts’ illustration department. He has won awards from American Illustration, Communication Arts and other publications. His work has been published in a wide variety of magazines and books, including The New Yorker, The New York Times, Vanity Fair, and Penguin Books. His work has also been published by the Verve Music Group, Adobe, American Express, and other media and commercial outlets in the US and Europe. His work was exhibited in a major solo exhibition at the Visual Arts gallery in Manhattan in 2006 and at project spaces in Brooklyn, including Astor Row unlimited in 2009 and 2010. He lives and works in New York City. 

Victoria Valencia, woodworker/furniture-maker (December 22) hails from California and upholds a respect for materials in their natural state while introducing urban clean metal to contrast and complement. The resulting work retains the imperfections of the varied source materials but demonstrates a finished elegance borne from the mastery Valencia has cultivated. Largely self-taught, she worked in house remodeling and then as a head designer in set design. She then began to design and fabricate custom furniture. Working closely with clients, she creates unique pieces that fuse function and an elegant, unconventional aesthetic. Her passion for solving spacial conundrums often results in enlightened ideas for forgotten spaces. She views her work as a collaboration between the client, the space, the materials, and the external environment. 

Montana

Joseph Firecrow , Cheyenne flute maker and player.


Minneapolis

Zak Sally , Comic book author and illustrator

Kate Farstad, Visual artist


Juniata College - PA

Dave Berger, Blacksmith


Vermont

Veranda Porche , Poet

Steve Procter , Ceramicist

Michelle Holzapfel, Wood artist and seamstress