A piece of American music seldom stays fresh, even surprising, to succeeding generations of audiences. Datedness sets in so quickly, while nostalgia takes a long time to show up.

George Crumb’s “Black Angels” is an exception.

Written almost 40 years ago during the height of the Vietnam War, “Black Angels” is scored for electric string quartet and is subtitled “Thirteen Images from the Dark Land.” The score is structured on theories of numerology and includes references to Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden” and the “Dies Irae” theme from Gregorian chant.

In 1972, Time magazine named the debut LP of “Black Angels” as “Avant Garde Record of the Year.” A CD recording by the Kronos Quartet made it a hit again in 1990. And this weekend, Bang on a Can places it as the centerpiece of a full day at MASS MoCA celebrating the music of George Crumb, who lives in West Virginia and turned 80 last fall.

Composer David Lang, a co-founder of Bang on a Can, will lead a discussion and performance of Crumb’s music in the afternoon. The evening event features performances of “Black Angels” as well as the trio, “Vox Balaenae” (voice of the whale) and a series of madrigals to poems of Federico Garcia Lorca. More than a concert, it will also include live video by Jim Findlay.

A New York City visual artist, filmmaker and performer, Findlay has worked extensively with Bang on a Can on various theatrical happenings and comes to the music of Crumb with a typical sense of wonder and excitement.

“This was music you could blow people’s heads off with,” says Findlay, recalling his first encounter with “Black Angels” during the early ’90s. “It’s classical music, with classical instrumentation and serious intent, but it wasn’t repetitive and had a level of noise and the aggressiveness that I could relate to. This was like rock with violins!”

The new project has allowed Findlay a wider exposure to Crumb’s music and its inherent theatricality. For example, Crumb’s score to “Vox Balaenae” says that the performers should wear masks and perform under blue lighting.

“We’re going take that one step further and make a full stage environment,” says Findlay. He’ll be controlling three video cameras during the performance, but adds that more specifics of the show will be worked out during the week prior to the performance, during Bang on a Can’s annual summer residency in the galleries of MASS MoCA.

Asked whether the war-resistance roots of “Black Angels” might come into play, Findlay turns to a more contemporary struggle.

“With ‘Vox Balaenae,’ I’m having trouble getting away from the BP disaster,” he says. “I’m creating this black-and-white world and think about oil and water and all the things that are dying. It’s the kind of topicality that in classic art is transferable, but it’s always better when the audience makes that connection themselves. I trust it’s in the music.”

Bang on a Can presents
George Crumb Celebration
Mass MoCA, North Adams, Mass
July 25, 2010

Bang on a Can is dedicated to the forefront of contemporary music but the organization is still respectful of its elders. Concerts have often featured music from way back in the 1980s.

Saturday night’s program at Mass MoCA was practically ancient history with five pieces dating from 1965 through 1971by George Crumb.  The American composer, who turned 80 last fall, helped create the musical avant garde and these works are full of what’s called extended instrumental techniques, like singing into the flute, bowing on the bridge of a double bass, and strumming on the inside of the piano.  Tuned wine goblets and occasional whispers and shouts from the players were also part of the mix.

Over the years such stuff has become rather cliched, especially in the hands of lesser composers.  Yet the whole program was performed with great dignity and professionalism by the 17 musicians. Most appeared to be in the early to mid-20s.

The pieces were mostly trios and quartets, yet there were no set changes nor breaks between pieces.  Jim Findlay organized the staging and from a corner of the stage he created a live video backdrop.  His grainy, black and white images were mostly close ups of various rotating objects. They lent a cool reverence to the proceedings.  The only technical flaw in the night was a persistent noise floor from the amplification system.

The most startling and varied piece was the string quartet “Black Angels.”  Apart from all that the players had to do, including play gongs and wine glasses, the piece also traversed a world of styles, including a couple of hushed but jolting references to early music.  Did Crumb foreshadow postmodernism?

The three female vocalists were especially impressive.  Mezzo Sonya Knussen and soprano Delea Shand soloed in what Crumb called his “Madrigals,” with Spanish poetry by Lorca.  Both singers maintained a dead-on surety of pitch and attractive tone. This was even while delivering some swooping and percussive vocal affects and performing with nontraditional accompaniments.

Also poised and accurate was Amanda DeBoer the soprano in “Lux Aeterna,” which was a surprisingly moving conclusion to the evening. The quintet included two percussionist who got a world of weird rattling sounds from their tympani and other apparatus.  There was also a guitarist and a bass flute player, who both sat on the floor.  The single image on the video was a candle flame.

Originally appeared in the Times Union.

ALBANY SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA
Troy Savings Bank Music Hall
March 26, 2010

Music director David Alan Miller and the Albany Symphony Orchestra have made a virtue out of performing lots of new little works by emerging composers. Eager for the opportunity, the youngsters gladly take the modest commissions and write under tight deadlines. The results are usually diverting and forgettable.

A substantial new three-year grant from the Mellon Foundation has allowed the ASO to start bringing in some heavier guns. Next year John Corigliano will be on hand twice and this past week John Harbison was in town for the first of two springtime visits.

In Friday night’s program at the Troy Savings Bank Music Hall, titled “John Harbison & Friends,” the 71-year old composer’s Symphony No. 4 stood tall alongside works of Copland and Haydn.  Cast in five moments and lasting about half an hour, it was substantial, rich and assured.

Though prone to thick and dark orchestral textures, Harbison also has a keen dramatic flair.  A heavy sound dominated the opening movement and yet its constant rhythmic pulse skipped around like a child in a meadow. A similar contrast came in the intermezzo, which alternated between gliding strings and light percussion.

The symphony elicited a fine performance especially from the expanded string choir, which was both supple and meaty.  The work is being recorded for release with Harbison’s “Great Gatsby” Suite, coming up in May.

Twenty-five year old composer Timothy Andres introduced his new piece “Look Around You” as a “double concerto but for only one player.”  Soloist Owen Dalby performed on both violin and viola, though somehow there didn’t seem to be that much difference in sound or character between the two instruments.  For long stretches Andres had the orchestra simply sustain chords. Except for a few exposed figures for violin that brought to mind a country fiddle, the solo writing was busy yet indistinct, something like treading water.

Let it not be said that young composers should be written off.  Copland was 25 when he wrote “Music for the Theatre,” the charming masterwork that opened the program.  The woodwinds and brass delivered with appropriate sass, though there were occasional smudges of the larger ensemble in the trickier rhythmic passages.

Haydn’s Symphony No. 82 “The Bear” arrived at the evening’s conclusion like a cool fresh breeze. During the gently shifting currents of the Allegretto, Harbison’s more forceful play with textures and accents came to mind.

MUSIC OF HELMUT LACHENMANN
Jack Quartet, Signal Ensemble
EMPAC, RPI, Troy
March 27, 2010

The avant garde is alive and well. Helmut Lachenmann came to town to prove it.

On Saturday night at EMPAC, a retrospective concert of music by the 74-year old German composer included a couple of solo works, a string quartet and a nearly half-hour long piece for 24 players. Yet what the evening mostly consisted of was delicate and explosive sounds produced by weird instrumental techniques.

It’s a language that most American composers retreated from about 25 years ago, something like timid Democratic politicians trying to be popular and conservative.  Yet in Europe, liberalism — with music, as well as policy — is no vice.  Interestingly, it was young American musicians who performed the entire concert, always with seriousness and passion.

Most everything the program had in store was revealed in the short opening work, “Pression” from 1969.  Cellist Lauren Radnofsky’s first sounds were of her fingers sliding up and down the strings.  Once her bow was utilized, she held it tight with two hands and dragged it upward toward the neck.

The String Quartet No. 2 (1989), played with delicacy and poise by the Jack Quartet, goes further with all manner of effects, including bowing on the edge of the instruments, tapping the strings with the butt of the bow, and strumming with guitar picks.  In this piece, Lachenmann wasn’t so hyperactive with form. Instead of rapidly jumping from one sound world to the next, he lingered long enough to allow the novelty of an effect to wear off and its acoustic properties to settle in the ear and the mind.  The few times a full-bodied chord arrived, it made one realize what a luxurious bath of sound typical concerts really are.

The composer himself performed “Ein Kinderspiel,” a set of seven character pieces for piano. Like the children’s pieces of Bartok, these were intimate distillations of a mature style, sprinkled with syncopated rhythms and playful tone painting.

After intermission Bradley Lubman led the Signal Ensemble in “…Zwei Gefuhle,” which had the composer reciting a bit of da Vinci’s journal over the rumblings and bursting sounds of a large ensemble.  By this point, things felt pretty over wrought, especially when the musicians started having verbal outbursts.

One couldn’t help but keep an eye on the grand piano. Shortly into the piece, there was one player toiling at the keyboard but another with a firm grip on the lid – suggesting it wound be slammed down at any moment.  Instead, it was rapidly swung opened and closed, causing huge waves of sound.

BROOKLYN RIDER
Sunday, March 28, 2010
Union College, Schenectady

The statistics aren’t available, but it’s probably a fair estimate that the Debussy String Quartet has been performed at least a dozen times in the 38-year history of the Union College Concert Series.  It’s also no exaggeration to say that it never sounded the way it did Sunday afternoon when it was performed by the ensemble known as Brooklyn Rider.

The young male players, who are regulars with Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Ensemble, attacked the music with an urgency and gusto, not the reverent embrace that French impressionism usually gets.  Yet it wasn’t really the performance that made Debussy’s 1893 piece seem so new and fresh. The context within the concert is what did the trick.

Instead of highlighting the novelty of a familiar work by playing it at the end of a historical progression, the Brooklyn Rider went backward in time.  Everything else on the program was written in the last decade, except a John Cage piece from 1948.

First up was “Achille’s Heel” by 31-year old Colin Jacobsen, one of the Brooklyn Rider’s violinists.  It was a young musician’s stream of consciousness, an amalgam of country, blue grass, rock and jazz with lots of flashy string licks.

“…al niente” (to nothing) by Uzbekistan composer Dmitri Yanov-Yanovsky had a bit more going on than its title implies.  Like cracks in a picture window, a pervasive haze of sound was splintered over and again by harsh jagged lines from the solo strings.

The program note for Italian composer Giovanni Sollima’s “Federico II” suggested it would evoke the medieval court of the Italian ruler.  But the music actually occupied similar ground to Jacobsen’s piece.  There was the same steady pulse, though with a bit more melody from folk-like tunes.

After intermission came Cage’s piano work “In a Landscape,” in a beautiful arrangement by Justin Messina. The players passed back and forth short melodic runs for a lush and tuneful meditation.

Each piece in this odd batch settled comfortably into its own groove. Call it “solid state” music, if you like. It would be easy to say that rock and minimalism fostered the Brooklyn Rider’s taste for such fare. But then, along came the Debussy, which worked the same way.  And Debussy got the idea from Indonesian gamelan music.

The faithful and discerning Union College audience acknowledged the music and fine players with enthusiasm. There was even a holler or two for the encore, Jacobsen’s lively arrangement of a Persian folk song called “Ascending Birds.”

Reviews originally appeared in the Times Union.

Call them the children of Kronos

Today, a healthy batch of young ensembles — string quartets and otherwise — show they are equally committed to 20th- and 21st-century music, as well as to presenting themselves with flair. Over the next week, Capital Region audiences will hear three young quartets, two in concert, one in a multimedia collaboration.

First comes the Flux Quartet, which has made the soundtrack to a 3-D presentation titled “Upending,” which runs Thursday through Saturday at EMPAC. The Jack Quartet will appear on Saturday evening, also at EMPAC, in a program dedicated to music of German composer Helmut Lachenmann. And Sunday afternoon, March 29, the Brooklyn Rider gives a recital in the Union College concert series.

“Hats off to the Kronos. They’ve shown you can do something special as a quartet and enter the public consciousness,” says violinist Colin Jacobsen, 31, of the Brooklyn Rider. Jacobsen, 31, is already a familiar presence to Capital Region audiences. He’s appeared with the Musicians of Marlboro at Union College and twice soloed with the Albany Symphony Orchestra, in the Beethoven Triple Concerto with Yo-Yo Ma and in the world premiere of Kevin Beavers’ violin concerto “Roscoe,” based on the novel by William Kennedy.

The roots of the Brooklyn Rider go deep. Its membership includes Colin’s brother Eric Jacobsen as cellist, while violist Nicholas Cords and Colin were roommates at the Curtis Institute. The group was launched about five years ago, but it was during the past 10 years as members of Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Ensemble that the members embraced their sense of adventure.

“Touring with Yo-Yo, you’re in sold-out big houses willing to go anywhere with you from the first note,” says Colin Jacobsen. “From those situations, we’ve learned how to build trust with an audience, which he does from the moment he walks on stage.”

Yet it wasn’t being around a superstar that got the Brooklyn Rider’s juices going. It was the Silk Road’s all-encompassing embrace of music from East and West, as well as the vernacular and the refined. “It informed how we view the quartet and the borderless possibilities,” says Jacobsen.

Sunday’s program will be particularly adventuresome, with music by Giovanni Sollima (a 48-year-old Italian), by Dmitri Yanov-Yanovsky (an Uzbek composer who has collaborated extensively with Silk Road), by John Cage (late grandfather of the musical avant-garde), by Jacobsen himself.

Lest that lineup seem overwhelming, the centerpiece is one of the most beloved of all chamber works, the Debussy String Quartet. According to Jacobsen, Claude Debussy was on the same search as the Brooklyn Rider is today.

“He was trained in the conservatory, but was constantly rebelling against what he thought was dusty old music,” says Jacobsen. “He wrote his quartet four years after the 1889 World’s Fair in Paris, where he was exposed to the music of the world. … In the quartet, he’s willing to stay in one key center or mode and just revel in the sensual beauty and the way the voices are piled on top of each other. It’s really his broad view of where music fits in the world.”

Finding new sounds no longer requires international travel or even a world’s fair. One just needs to turn on any variety of media. Violinist Tom Chiu, 38, founder of the Flux Quartet, says his group has a well-established niche of contemporary music, mostly “iconoclastic figures that followed their own path,” as he puts it. But Chiu still feels obliged to keep up on new trends, wherever they may be found.

“I recently saw the band Vampire Weekend on ‘Saturday Night Live,’ “ he says. “There’s a lot of hype about them, and I went into it with as much open mind as I could. But to me, they’re too youthful. Yet as musicians, we’re not playing music in a vacuum. We have to make some connection with our audience. It’s like socializing at a party and trying to find common ground.”

For the multimedia event at EMPAC, created by the OpenEnded Group, the Flux contributed a recording of the First String Quartet of Morton Feldman, the Buffalo-based composer who died in 1987. Widely embraced after his death at age 61, Feldman’s music is characteristically hushed, slow moving and restrained, but his compositions are sometimes Wagnerian in scale.

The Flux made its name as the first (and only) group to perform Feldman’s Second String Quartet, which runs six hours. It’s a feat that the Kronos never could pull off but the Flux achieved — only once — back in 1999.

Without having to apply such athletic endurance, the Jack Quartet shares a similar devotion to music of the 75-year-old German composer Helmut Lachenmann. They’ve spent an extensive amount of time under Lachenmann’s coaching and performed his works across the U.S. and Europe. Saturday’s all-Lachenmann program, which includes the Signal Ensemble, will be repeated next week at the Miller Auditorium in New York City.

“His music can be a little daunting,” says Jack violinist Ari Streisfeld, 26. “But he explores textures and sounds that can be funny and he organizes them in ways that make you listen differently. (For example) we might be bowing on the tuning pegs, but we’re really playing a waltz or a gigue or a march.”

Presenting familiar music in new contexts is another trend for young groups. Bars have become popular sites for reaching new audiences.

“Some of our first big events were actually in bars,” says Streisfeld. “We performed the complete quartets of Iannis Xenakis at Le Poisson Rouge in New York and got a great review. That really helped us and got our name out.”

The Greenwich Village lounge Le Poisson Rouge, just a couple of years old, has become the go-to venue for new music fans in New York, and Streisfeld says it’s inspired similar ventures in a few other cities.

“A lot of quartets are playing in bars because it brings you new audiences, though I do prefer to play in concert halls because the acoustics don’t work in bars,” says Streisfeld. “People talk about the classical music audience getting older, but it’s still there. And maybe the newest generation just doesn’t like going to concert halls.”

Originally appeared in the Times Union.

A simple “No, thanks” would have sufficed.

I’d actually forgotten about that, having put out of my mind some of the stormier aspects of bringing to market that title and the two volumes of “Gay American Composers” discs at CRI.  But Laura and I have remained friends for years and she herself reminded me of the letter about a year ago when we had a little reunion at Symphony Space.

The occasion was the premiere of David Del Tredici’s song cycle “My Favorite Penis Poems,” which Laura had programmed in her capacity as music curator. (The most startling aspect of that event, by the way, certainly wasn’t David’s typically eloquent music, nor the two singers performing at times in their underwear. No, it  was approaching the venue on Broadway and seeing “PENIS POEMS” on the big bright lighted ribbon of a marquee.)

A couple of months ago when the New York Times announced that Laura had been named the new artistic director of Symphony Space, succeeding the illustrious Isaiah Sheffer, I hesitated to put her on this website about (out) GLTB artists in classical music. But recently Laura contacted me, praised the site, and said she wanted to be on it.  With pleasure.

Though she doesn’t officially take the reigns of Symphony Space until July 2010, Laura already has had a broad influence in the programming decisions and she’s kindly pointed out a few of the more queer-friendly events coming up, including:

A concert (earlier this month) of Gavin Creel, star of the current Broadway revival of “Hair”

Another Del Tredici premiere, written for guitarist David Leisner on April 29, 2010.

A recital of the all-female Colorado Quartet on May 7, 2010.

“I have been trying to reach out to the gay arts community in NY to get them to pay attention,” emails Laura, adding that Symphony Space also shows lots of operas in HD.

As for Laura Kaminsky the composer, she’s at work on a string of new pieces including a quartet for the Cassatt, which will be part of an all-Kaminsky program at the Greenwich House on April 15.  How she has time to run Symphony Space, write music and teach at SUNY Purchase is a wonder, but she also makes time for a girl friend, the artist Rebecca Allan.