The Bleeding Edge: 5/18/2026

This will be another busy week on the Bleeding Edge. The only event that has already been announced is the one that will take place one week from today. This will be Is That Your Final Answer?, which will conclude Earplay’s 41st season. Hopefully, by now, most readers will recall that the title of the season was Answering The Unanswered Question, inspired by Charles Ives’ enigmatic orchestral composition, “The Unanswered Question.” Prior to that performance, there will be a generous number of other events as follows:

Tuesday, May 19, 7 p.m., Make-Out Room: This month’s Jazz at the Make-Our Room program will be divided equally between two sets. The opening set will be The Holly Martins with instrumentalists Kasey Knudsen on saxophone and Eric Vogler on guitar providing backup for vocalist Lorin Benedict. The second set will be led by percussionist Graham Viegut, and the other members of his ensemble have not yet been announced. As usual, there will be no cover charge, meaning that donations will be accepted (not to mention welcome). For those unfamiliar with the venue, it is located in the Mission at 3225 22nd Street.

Wednesday, May 20, 6 p.m., Yerba Buena Center for the Arts: This will be the latest installment in Free Wednesdays programming at the venue. The performance will take place in the current exhibition: Diedrick Brackens: gather tender night. Composer, singer, and songwriter Willie Alexander III will perform in this space. He works with music that is layered, intimate, and resonant, conceived with the goal of enhancing the visual impact of the exhibit. This will probably be another familiar venue for most readers, located at 701 Mission Street.

Thursday, May 21, 7:30 p.m., Center for New Music (C4NM): Composer Neil Rolnick will perform selections that he recorded for his upcoming album, Messages. His music is based on phone messages from his late wife. It also reflects on his loss of hearing in his left ear. General admission will be $15 with a $10 rate for C4NM members and students. This will be yet another familiar venue, located at 55 Taylor Street, just north of Market Street.

Friday, May 22, 7 p.m., Medicine for Nightmares: For this week’s Other Dimensions in Sound program, reed player David Boyce will lead a trio, enhancing his performance with electronic effects. Rhythm will be provided by Bryan Dean on electric bass and drummer Brian Rodvien. As always, the venue is located in the Mission at 3036 24th Street, between Treat Avenue and Harrison Street. There is no charge for admission, presumably to encourage visitors to consider buying a book.

Saturday, May 23, noon, Center for New Music: This will be the monthly G|O|D|W|A|F|F|L|E|N|O|I|S|E|P|A|N|C|A|K|E|S event with the usual opportunity to enjoy vegan pancakes while listening to “bleeding edge” music. It appears that this month there will be five sets with “bleeding edge” eccentricities in the names as follows:

1. Mephitick Ooze (visiting from Massachusetts)
2. Fowl Figures
3. Madame Varga
4. Mission Hypnotic
5. Shuttered

Admission will be $10 with a $6 rate for members and students. For those that do not yet know, the venue is located at 55 Taylor Street, just north of Market Street.

Saturday, May 23, 6 p.m. and 7:30 p.m., Mr Tipple’s: It appears that this site has not accounted for saxophonist Steven Lugerner since November of 2023, when he presented his Boundary Pushers series of four programs. He now leads the SLUGish (note the capital letter from his name) Ensemble, which explores the synthesis of jazz, chamber music, and experimental sounds. Lugerner leads on both bass clarinet and baritone saxophone, performing with a diverse rhythm section consisting of Justin Rock on guitar, pianist Rumi Abe, Michael Potter on synthesizer, bassist Isaac Coyle, and Michael Mitchell on drums. This is another familiar venue, located in the Civic Center at 39 Fell Street.

Saturday, May 23, 8 p.m., Gray Area Art and Technology: Errorgrid will present the second installment of its DATA/LOSS showcase series, which will bring Portland and Bay Area artists together for “a night filled with curated raw audiovisual oblations.” The series is a “dark electronica showcase exploring the erosion of data and the loss of form.” The performance will take place in the Grand theatre, located in the Mission at 2665 Mission Street.

Sunday, May 24, 2 p.m., San Francisco Public Library, Main Library: Composer Terry Riley was born on June 24, 1935, meaning that last year he celebrated his 90th birthday. Before his next birthday comes along, pianist Sarah Cahill will present a recital organized around his compositions. The program will include the first set of Keyboard Studies, composed in 1964, “Fandango on the Heaven Ladder,” and “Be Kind to One Another.” Cahill’s program will also include the Shade Studies composed by Samuel Adams and Danny Clay’s Circle Songs. The performance will take place in the Latino Room on the lower level; and (of course) there will be no charge for admission.

Donald Robinson preparing his drums for this Sunday’s performance in North Beach (from the BayImproviser Web page for this event)

Sunday, May 24, 2 p.m., Jack Kerouac Alley: At exactly the same time, there will be a “Music and Poetry Celebration” on the other side of town (so to speak). Those unfamiliar with the venue will have no trouble finding it after visiting the City Lights Bookstore in North Beach at 261–271 Columbus Avenue. The music will be provided by the trio of Bruce Ackley on soprano saxophone, drummer Donald Robinson, and Eric Hunt on bass.

Terry Riley’s 90th Birthday Celebration Delayed

Photographs of Sarah Cahill and Terry Riley (courtesy of Jensen Artists)

Composer and pianist Terry Riley was born on June 24, 1935, meaning that he had reached the age of ninety almost a year ago. Pianist Sarah Cahill had planned to celebrate the occasion this past December with a program entitled Terry Riley at 90: A Piano Celebration. However, the event, which had been scheduled for performance at the Main Library building of the San Francisco Public Library in the Civic Center, had to be rescheduled due to a power outage. Now, as Riley nears his 91st birthday, Cahill will finally give her performance towards the end of this month.

When this event was first announced on this site, Cahill had not yet finalized her program. I now know that the Riley compositions she will play will include “Keyboard Studies,” “Be Kind to One Another,” “The Walrus in Memoriam,” “Fandango on the Heaven Ladder,” and “The Great Beauty.” As was originally planned, Cahill will also play works by contemporary composers Danny Clay (“Circle Songs”) and Samuel Carl Adams (“Shade Studies”).

Also as was originally announced, the performance will take place at the Main Branch of the San Francisco Public Library. It will be held in the Latino Room, which is on the lower level of the building. It will begin at 2 p.m. on Sunday, May 24; and it will be free and open to the public. For those that do not already know, the venue is located in the Civic Center at 100 Larkin Street; and, because this is a “public” library, there will be no charge for admission!

Spoleto Festival USA: the April Release

Cover of the album being discussed (from its Amazon.com Web page)

Some readers may recall that, a little over two weeks ago, I wrote my first article about the release of a series of recordings of performances that took place last year at the annual Spoleto Festival USA in Charleston, South Carolina. The full title of that album was Live from Spoleto 2025: Orchestra. This coming Friday will see the release of the second album: Live from Spoleto 2025: Chamber Music, Vol. 1. As of this writing, Amazon.com has created a Web page, which is processing pre-orders for MP3 downloads.

Each of the eight tracks on this album involves at least one composer and/or arranger. The oldest of those composers is Alexander Borodin, represented by the “Nocturne” movement from his second string quartet in D major, best known for having been transformed into a song (“And This Is My Beloved”) for the Broadway musical Kismet. “Ricercar” was composed jointly by Trollstilt, the partnership of Dan Trueman and Monica Mugan); and the vocal line for Caroline Shaw’s “Other Song” was arranged by Steven Banks for performance on saxophone. The penultimate track is an improvisation (spontaneous?) by Mahsa Vahdat. Sadly, my impression of this new release was no better than my account of the Orchestra album. My only real satisfaction came from the string quartet account of Terry Riley’s “G Song,” performed by Alexi Kenney, Geneva Lewis, Ayane Kozasa, and Paul Wiancko.

Terry Riley: Another Ten Trips Around the Sun

Photographs of Sarah Cahill and Terry Riley (courtesy of Jensen Artists)

American composer Terry Riley was born on June 24, 1935. Some readers may recall that pianist Sarah Cahill celebrated his 80th birthday by producing a four-CD album entitled Eighty Trips Around the Sun: Music by and for Terry Riley. The first two discs were devoted entirely to Riley compositions, while the other two documented reflections of composers influenced by him. In “order of appearance,” those composers were: Danny Clay, Gyan Riley (Riley’s son), Samuel Carl Adams, Christine Southworth, Keeril Makan, Elena Ruehr, Dylan Mattingly, and Pauline Oliveros (who was about three years older than Riley).

In a little over two weeks, Cahill will celebrate Riley’s 90th birthday. Riley is still alive, but the advance material I received said nothing about whether he will be present for the occasion. To the best of my knowledge, Cahill will give a solo performance which will probably incorporate Riley selections from Eighty Trips Around the Sun with the works that Adams and Clay composed for that album. The former will be represented by “Shade Studies” and the latter by the three-movement “Circle Songs.”

The performance will take place at the Main Branch of the San Francisco Public Library. It will be held in the Latino Room, which is on the lower level of the building. It will begin at 2 p.m. on Sunday, December 21, and it will be free and open to the public. For those that do not already know, the venue is located in the Civic Center at 100 Larkin Street; and, because this is a “public” library, there will be no charge for admission!

Sarah Cahill Launches 2024 at Old First Concerts

This afternoon I live-streamed the first performance of the new year to be presented by Old First Concerts. This was a solo piano recital by Sarah Cahill, whom I had not heard since her Flower Piano performance this past September. I can always count on Cahill to expand the boundaries of my listening experiences, and this afternoon was no exception.

Her entire program was framed by two compositions by Ann Southam, whose music she had previously performed at the Chapel of the Chimes in June of 2022. The program began with the first piece in Southam’s first Rivers Series collection, composed in 1979, and concluded with another “river-oriented” work, “Commotion Creek,” composed in 2007. As might be expected, both of these compositions evoked their subject matter through rhythmic textures, which Cahill realized with eyebrow-raising precision.

The most recent work on the program began the second half. This was Evan Ziporyn’s “You Are Getting Sleepy.” This was another richly textured composition, and I must confess that trying to follow the flow of those textures was probably the most challenging undertaking of the afternoon. Ziporyn’s offering complemented the conclusion of the first half of the program, which was Terry Riley’s “The Walrus in Memoriam.” This was a tongue-in-cheek homage to one of the weirder Beatles tunes (“I Am the Walrus”); but any quotations were deftly camouflaged by Riley’s rich counterpoint.

Excerpt from Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s thickly textured Forest Scenes (from IMSLP, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 License)

The remainder of the program reflected on the early twentieth century, presenting three composers whose works had gone unrecognized for the better part of my life. The earliest of these was a five-movement suite by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor entitled Forest Scenes. Through thickly-textured keyboard writing, the music unfolds a narrative of passion between a “lone forest maiden” and a “phantom lover,” who, in the final scene, proudly “journey towards the great city.” This was followed by Amy Beach’s “A Hermit Thrush at Eve,” the first of her two Opus 92 compositions. (The title of the second is “A Hermit Thrush at Morn.”) Beach knew how to set the mood for this work without trying to emphasize any bird calls.

The last of the offerings from this period in music history consisted of three of Ruth Crawford’s piano preludes, which she composed between 1925 and 1928. Even before she met and married Charles Seeger, Crawford had established qualities as a composer; and I realized, with more than a little regret, that I have not had an opportunity to write about her since I listened to Cahill and violinist Kate Stenberg perform the duo sonata she had composed in 1926. The preludes that Cahill selected left me hoping that, on some occasion in the not-too-distant future, I shall have the opportunities to listen to all nine of the preludes played as a cycle.

Meanwhile, as always, I shall find myself waiting to see what Cahill will select for her next recital.

Old First Concerts: January, 2024

As of this writing, Old First Concerts has prepared only two programs for the month of January. Both of them will be on Sunday afternoons but at different times.  These offerings will continue to be “hybrid,” allowing both live streaming and seating in the Old First Church at 1751 Sacramento Street on the southeast corner of Van Ness Avenue. All tickets will still be sold for $25 (no reduced rate for seniors or students). Hyperlinks to the event pages (which include hyperlinks for streaming) will be attached to the date and time of the performances as follows:

Sunday, January 7, 2 p.m.: The 2024 season will begin with a solo piano recital by Sarah Cahill. The program does not have a title; but, if it did, it would be something like “Something Old, Something (relatively) Recent!” The first three selections will all date from the first quarter of the twentieth century. The composers will be Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (his Opus 66 Forest Scenes), Amy Beach (the first of her Opus 92 “Hermit Thrush” compositions), and Ruth Crawford Seeger (four of the nine preludes she composed between 1924 and 1928). The more recent selections will be two works by Ann Southam (the opening selection in her Rivers Series and “Commotion Creek”), along with compositions by Terry Riley (“The Walrus in Memoriam”) and Evan Ziporyn (“You Are Getting Sleepy”). Ziporyn is expected to attend this recital.

Sunday, January 28, 4 p.m.: This will be the first visit by the Ives Collective since this past September. They are a quartet whose members are Kay Stern (violin), Susan Freier (violin and viola), Stephen Harrison (cello), and Elizabeth Schumann (piano). The program will begin and end with compositions by Mélanie Bonis, who just missed studying at the Paris Conservatoire under Gabriel Fauré. The opening selection will be the piano trio that she entitled “Matin et Soir” (morning and evening); and the program will conclude with her Opus 69, her first piano quartet composed in the key of B-flat major. Between these “bookends” Stern, Freier, and Harrison will play the string trio that Ethel Smyth composed in 1887.

New SoundBox Program Explores Patterns

This morning the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) and Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen launched the third SoundBox concert in the current season of performances streamed through the SFSymphony+ on-demand service. The title of the program is Patterns. While the preview article I wrote for this program frequently cited minimalist techniques, Salonen never once referred to “minimalism” (unless I am mistaken) or, for that matter, Philip Glass’ preferred phrase, “repetitive structures.” Instead, the program explored how four different composers (one of whom happened to be Salonen himself) chose to work with patterns as the building blocks of a composition.

This was most evident in the “grand finale” of the program, Terry Riley’s “In C.” This is based on a score that simply enumerates 53 short phrases, ordered by assigning each a number from 1 to 53. The shortest of these phrases consists of a single note (which is, of course, C). One of them is significantly longer than the other 52. The piece is scored for any number of performers playing any variety of instruments. The only “leadership” of the performance involves one musician playing “The Pulse,” the note C hammered out consistently in repeated eighth notes. This tends to be played on the high register of a piano; but Salonen himself provided “The Pulse” by playing it on a toy piano.

The 53 phrases, in turn, were played by 27 SFS musicians. Their instruments were violins, violas, cellos, flute, piccolo, oboe, cor anglais, clarinet, bassoons, contrabassoon, horn, trumpet, trombones, tuba, percussion, and ukulele. The “ground rules” are that each performer must play all 53 phrases in numerical order. However, each phrase may be repeated as many times as the performer wishes; and each performer can pause for as long as (s)he wishes before advancing to the next phrase.

This performance was captured on video by Frank Zamacona, working with multiple cameras. By way of “subtitles,” he superimposed the individual notated fragments at the bottom of the screen. Obviously, he could not account for all the fragments being played at any given time; but, for those who could read music notation, those projected fragments allowed the attentive ear to home in on which instruments were playing a particular fragment at a particular moment in time.

If that were not enough by way of visual stimuli, Zamacona then surrounded the musicians with animated projections designed by Adam Larsen, most of which seemed to involve silhouettes of people walking forwards or backwards with occasional intrusions of both domestic and wild animals. In other words he embellished a musical structure based on repetitions of a catalog of musical phrases with projections of repetitions of familiar shapes in motion. Thus, not only were there “patterns” in Riley’s 53 repeated phrases; there were also patterns in Larsen’s repeated shapes. As a result, the entire video amounted to a grand design of patterns reflecting patterns.

Reflection figured just as significantly in the selection that preceded “In C,” Arvo Pärt’s “Spiegel im Spiegel” (mirror in the mirror). This music was far more austere in its resources, since the piece was composed for violin (Chen Zhao) and piano (Elizabeth Dorman). However, the performance was augmented by complementing the two musicians with two members of the Alonzo King LINES Ballet, Adji Cissoko and Shuaib Elhassan, performing choreography by King. In this case the music had less to do with patterning and more do to with exploring different ways to permute and combine a limited number of pitches. However, for this performance, the projected video again drew on approaches to reflection, often suggesting that the dancers was taking place in a space defined by a highly elaborate multi-mirror kaleidoscope:

screen shot from the video being discussed

The program began with “Clapping Music,” composed by Steve Reich, one of Riley’s colleagues at the San Francisco Tape Music Center, who was one of the participants in the first performance of “In C.” Indeed, Riley got the idea of composing around a rhythmic pulse from Reich! However, “Clapping Music” is all rhythm without any role for pitch. As the title suggests, rhythmic patterns are defined simply by clapping hands; and Reich composed the piece for only two performers. However, Salonen presented the piece as “chamber music” on a slightly larger scale in which he performed along with Steven Dibner, Bryce Leafman, Stan Muncy, Catherine Payne, Nick Platoff, and Jessica Valeri. This “clapping ensemble” performed with such precision that one could still appreciate the interplay of rhythms across the two notated parts; but the increase in the number of performers added to the impact of the rhythmic patterns from which the score was composed.

Salonen also used this concert as an opportunity to premiere his own music. “Saltat sobrius” (dancing sober) was composed as a fantasy on one of the earliest documented compositions of polyphony, the four-part organum “Sederunt principes” (the princes sat), composed by Pérotin to be sung in Notre-Dame de Paris. Prior to the emergence of polyphony, sung texts were chanted in unison in rhythms that tended to reflect the rhythms of speech. Pérotin’s predecessor at Notre-Dame, Léonin, is often seen as the “father of polyphony,” although his earliest efforts tended to involve one voice singing elaborate patterns while another sang sustained pitches of a familiar chant. Pérotin extended Léonin’s technique by providing additional voices singing against the intoned chant pitches. These eventually involved elaborate rhythmic patterns, which marked the beginning of music notation as we now know it. “Sederunt principes” is important in music history because it involves three independent melodic lines sung above the cantus firmus, the tones of the chant which is being accompanied.

Those familiar with the music of Notre-Dame from this early period of music history would have no trouble recognizing the phrases of “Sederunt principes.” Salonen basically dispenses with the cantus firmus and focuses on the patterns that unfold in the upper three voices. He then subjects those patters to different processes of recombination through which new patterns emerge. This is realized by an imaginative “three-by-three” approach to instrumentation. The instruments involved are viola, cellos, and bass, each of which has three parts for three individual performers. There is then a “continuo” of sorts provided by a harp. As a result, the perception of how those new patterns evolve out of older ones is enhanced through the composer’s approach to instrumentation. As in the performance of “In C,” this is very much music of patterns reflecting patterns; and those reflections are clearly evident in the transparency of Salonen’s score.

The duration of this Patterns concert was slightly less than 50 minutes, but the overall content was so rich that one could hardly wish that there had been any more of it.

Salonen to Curate Minimalist SoundBox Program

This Thursday at 10 a.m., the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) and Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen will launch the third SoundBox program in the current season of performances streamed through the SFSymphony+ on-demand service. Salonen will curate and conduct a program entitled Patterns. The program will feature works by three of the composers associated with minimalist techniques, which became a major focus of attention after they emerged during the Sixties and the decades that followed. Two of those composers will frame the entire program, which will begin with Steve Reich’s “Clapping Music” and conclude with Terry Riley’s “In C.”

For those unfamiliar with these selections, “Clapping Music” was a composition based entirely on rhythm, requiring only two performers doing nothing more that establishing those rhythms through clapping their hands. As can be seen from this photograph, Salonen will join other SFS musicians (six of them) for a “group performance” in which two “clapping choruses” will account for the two parts of the score:

photograph by Kristen Loken, courtesy of SFS

“In C,” on the other hand, was composed for any number of musicians playing any number of instruments and all reading from the same score.

According to the Wikipedia page for this composition, Riley himself suggested that “a group of about 35 is desired;” but he then qualified this recommendation by saying “smaller or larger groups will work.” The score itself consists of a collection of short phrases, all oriented around the note C, numbered from 1 to 53. The tempo for these phrases is established by “The Pulse,” which is nothing more than the note C played in repeated eighth notes, usually on the high register of a piano. Each musician (other than any of them providing “The Pulse”) is required to play all 53 of the phrases in their numerical order. However, each phrase may be repeated as many times as the performer wishes, and the performer can pause as long as (s)he wishes before advancing to the next phrase.

The music was first performed in 1964 by members of the San Francisco Tape Music Center; and, since I have been writing, I have had occasion to listen to performances in both Herbst Theatre and the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. For the Soundbox performance Salonen will provide the pulse playing on a toy piano. There will be 27 SFS musicians playing the 53 fragments. Instrumentation will include violins, violas, cellos, flute, piccolo, oboe, cor anglais, clarinet, bassoons, contrabassoon, horn, trumpet, trombones, tuba, percussion, and ukulele.

The other “pioneering minimalist” in the program will be the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt. He developed his own compositional style in the Seventies, giving it the name “tintinnabuli.” This basically involves a return to the major triad, thus swinging the pendulum away from the explorations in atonality that emerged during the first half of the twentieth century. Pärt himself justified the name because he felt that the three pitches of a major triad “are like bells” (presumably because they can reverberate against each other). On the Soundbox program his music will be represented by “Spiegel im Spiegel” (mirror in the mirror), which was composed as a duo for violin (Chen Zhao) and piano (Elizabeth Dorman). They will be joined by Adji Cissoko and Shuaib Elhassan, members of the Alonzo King LINES Ballet performing choreography by King.

In addition to providing these three reflections on music from about half a century ago, the program will also present the world premiere of “Saltat sobrius” (dancing sober) composed by Salonen. The music is a fantasy on one of the earliest documented compositions of polyphony, the four-part organum “Sederunt principes” (the princes sat), composed by Pérotin to be sung in Notre-Dame de Paris. Salonen’s score is instrumental, written for a chamber ensemble of violas, cellos, basses, and harp.

This program will be made available for viewing at 10 a.m. this coming Thursday, April 15. As with previous SoundBox events, the admission fee for viewing this SoundBox episode will be $15. Donors that have contributed $250 or more will be entitled to receive complimentary subscriptions to both the SoundBox and CURRENTS series of concerts. Payment for a single admission will be processed through the Patterns Web page, while subscriptions may be purchased through the home page for the entire Digital Season.

Another “Just” Album from MicroFest

At the beginning of last month, MicroFest Records released its latest album of music by composers interested in the use of just intonation. My own interest in this approach to tuning dates back to my time in graduate school, when I could spend hours pouring over a chart in the second edition of Willi Apel’s Harvard Dictionary of Music, which compared the frequency differences between equal-tempered tuning and earlier systems based on the integer ratios of the perfect fifth (3:2) and the major third (5:4). That interest was revived as a result of reading Lou Harrison: American Musical Maverick by Bill Alves and Brett Campbell, which so absorbed me that I found myself already writing before I had finished the book. That “intermediate” exercise was an article on this site entitled “On Listening to Integer Ratios,” which was when I documented my first thoughts about the Just National Steel Guitar designed for playing just intonation.

Less than two weeks after writing that piece, I found myself taking on an adventurous recording devoted to compositions written around the just intonation system. This was the MicroFest album playfully entitled Just Strings, whose title was also the name of the trio consisting of guitarist John Schneider (who produces the MicroFest recordings), harpist Alison Bjorkedal, and percussionist T.J. Troy. In that context the title of the new MicroFest album, Just National Guitar, suggests that it serves as a “sequel” to Just Strings, exploring the use of just intonation on a different instrument. Currently, this album is available from Amazon.com only for MP3 download; but the download includes a highly informative digital booklet.

Lou Harrison playing a Just National Steel Guitar (from the Just Strings booklet, courtesy of John Schneider)

The entire album consists of solo performances by Schneider on a Just National Steel Guitar. It is organized around the works of two strikingly different composers. It begins with Harrison’s three-movement suite, Scenes from Nek Chand, inspired by the work of an Indian artist of the same name. Harrison chose to compose the piece using a modal scale based on the sixth through twelfth overtones of the harmonic series. Since the “tonic pitches” of the series are those overtones that are powers of two, the result was a gamut that provided the tonic with its “dominant” partner from both below (sixth harmonic) and above (twelfth harmonic).

The Just National guitar was created to provide an instrument with both strong sonorities (metal strings naturally amplified by the body structure of a National Reso-Phonic Steel Tricone guitar) and a fret system that would accommodate the intervals of Harrison’s scale. Scenes from Nek Chand turned out to be Harrison’s final composition, and it was first recorded on a Mode album collecting Harrison’s five suites for guitar. Towards the end of the album, Schneider presents a “new” Harrison suite, this one consisting of six Harrison pieces that predate the Just National instrument arranged for Just National performance by Schneider.

Throughout the album, compositions by Schneider himself, Terry Riley, Tom Johnson, and Carter Scholz are interleaved with the five short movements of a suite by Peter Yates entitled Quips. True to the title, each movement presents a brief quip by a different source. In order of appearance, those sources are Oscar Levant, Groucho Marx, Mark Twain, George Orwell, and Franz Kafka. This requires that Schneider sing in counterpoint with the melodic line he as playing. Schneider rose to this challenge admirably; but I have to confess that, for the most part, I was able to follow the words because I already knew what they were.

Two of the composers on the album, Johnson and Scholz, seemed to be as interested in the mathematical properties of sequences of “overtone integers” as they were in the music that resulted. Both Johnson’s “Rational Melodies” (Schneider performed only seven of the 21 melodies in the collection) and Scholz’ “Almost Square” reminded me of my own student days of playing with sequences of whole numbers that had interesting properties involving different forms of symmetry. (There was a side of me that wanted to do one better than the twelve-by-twelve “grid” representation of the valid forms of a single-twelve tone row.) Both Johnson and Scholz came up with material far more conducive to attentive listening than anything I had managed to conceive.

Riley’s contribution to the album consists of two pieces intended to be part of a longer suite for the Just National instrument. Both involved reflecting on a protest against the outbreak of the war with Iraq initiated by President George W. Bush on March 19, 2003. A protest march down Broad Street in Nevada City, California, prompted the composition of “National Broad Street March;” and that piece was subsequently complemented by “Quando Cosas Malas Caen del Cielo” (when bad things fall from heaven). It is worth noting that some of Riley’s earliest works were created at a time when there were frequent protests against United States involvement in the Vietnam War; but there is a sense in which these 2003 pieces are more explicit in their motives of protest.

Schneider’s own contribution to the album is his Tombo por Lou. This may be approached as a “response” to the “call” of Scenes from Nek Chand; but, as the title suggests, it also serves as a memorial for Harrison himself. That said, when one listens to the two pieces side-by-side (as they are arranged on the album), there is a sense that Schneider chose to pursue overtone-based intervals that were rather more adventurous than those that Harrison preferred. It would be fair to say that Schneider has nodded gracefully as several of the structural forms that one encounters in Harrison’s music. However, those forms are then populated with new approaches to the creation of melodic lines and their accompaniment.

Schneider has arranged the album in such a way that the attentive listener will be guided through a wide variety of different approaches to using a tuning system with origins in Harrison’s desire to work directly with natural overtones. There is so much individuality across the selections that are offered that one is unlikely to dismiss any of them as “more of the same.” More importantly, the album prepares its listeners for the prospect of encountering a Just National instrument played in recital. I have been fortunate to have that experience several times, and I am always looking forward to the next opportunity.

Terry Riley Opens Other Minds’ 25th Season

Last night in the YBCA (Yerba Buena Center for the Arts) Forum space, Other Minds presented the opening concert of its 25th anniversary season. Executive & Artistic Director Charles Amirkhanian observed that this was the same space that was used for Other Minds’ first concert, making last night somewhat of a homecoming event. The program was devoted entirely to the music of Terry Riley, who served on the first Other Minds Board of Directors and has figured significantly in those qualities of “otherness” that have distinguished Other Minds concerts over the following quarter century.

Gloria Cheng and Terry Riley at the keyboard (from the Facebook Event page for last night’s concert)

The first half of the program consisted entirely of solo compositions played by Gloria Cheng. She began with Riley’s two earliest works, dating from 1958 and 1959, and devoted most of the time to the five pieces in the seventh book of works that Riley has entitled The Heaven Ladder. Riley himself player three solo pieces after the intermission, and he was then joined by Cheng to give a four-hand performance of “Cheng Tiger Growl Roar,” which he composed for her. Both Cheng and Riley provided the notes for the program book, making this a thoroughly personal recital in just about every way.

Riley’s earliest pieces were written when most of his time at the piano was devoted to playing the music of Arnold Schoenberg. This marked a move away from his previous interest in “rebellious” composers like Francis Poulenc and Darius Milhaud. Schoenberg’s music made for an entirely new experience for Riley, not only for its lack of a tonal center but also for its approach to prosody that often made the very concept of phrase structure as ambiguous as its “emancipated” dissonances. It is not difficult to recognize the presence of Schoenberg in Riley’s own phrase structures, but one is just as aware of how Riley engaged those structures with a different (and unique) underlying logic. It is particularly worth noting Riley’s own observation that the music grew out of listening for the right sounds without taking into account the grammatical constraints that guided Schoenberg’s own approach to atonality.

The program then leapt from the Fifties to the Nineties with “The Walrus in Memoriam.” Riley’s rhetoric has shifted to another one of his past influences, that of ragtime. The music was intended as a memorial for John Lennon with “I Am the Walrus” underlying (usually subtly, rather than explicitly) the thematic material. This was then followed by the five Heaven Ladder pieces.

Riley noted that these were the first piano pieces written out in their entirety since his two Schoenberg-inspired compositions. During the intervening 35 years, his music-making at the keyboard drew heavily on memory and improvisation, very much in the spirit of past jazz piano masters. While she was playing from the pages of Riley’s notations, Cheng’s performance still reverberated with gestures of spontaneity. Riley’s program notes suggest that each of the pieces has its own unique inspiration and resulting personality; and there is something touching in the way the set is framed by music for his twin grandchildren, opening with the “Bear Dance” of grandson Misha and concluding with a lullaby for granddaughter Simone.

Following the intermission, Riley preceded the two pieces listed on the program with what seemed to be an improvisation. On the basis of what he said (not very clearly), the music may have been based on an earlier organ piece entitled “The Bull.” The two pieces listed in the program, “Simply M…” and “Requiem for Wally,” were both memorial pieces. The “Wally” of the second piece was ragtime pianist Wally Rose; and the music was particularly notable for how Riley could work polyrhythmic grammar into traditional ragtime rhetoric.

Finally, “Chang Tiger Growl Roar” took its title from the initials of its two performers. It consisted of four movements, one for each word in the title but not in the same order. Rather, the “Cheng titles,” “Growl” and “Cheng” began the set; and Riley’s words, “Tiger” and Roar,” concluded it. Each of these pieces amounted to an engagingly playful gesture, suggesting that the acts of two friends making music together always transcends any of the marks set down in paper to document that music.

Other Minds Launches 25th Anniversary Season

The 25th anniversary season of Other Minds (OM), whose dedication to shining a light on contemporary and experimental music continues to thrive as vigorously as it did when Artistic Director Charles Amirkhanian launched this endeavor, gets under way at the beginning of next month. The program will be the first of two duo piano recitals that will precede the beginning of OM Festival 24 in March. The pianists for this recital will be Gloria Cheng and Terry Riley.

Terry Riley at a performance in Tokyo on November 8, 2017 (photograph by Takahiro Kyono, from Wikimedia Commons, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license)

All of the compositions on the program will be by Riley. The one duo performance will be the Bay Area premiere of “Cheng Tiger Growl Roar,” which Riley completed earlier this year explicitly for performance with Cheng. Cheng will give solo performances of some of Riley’s earliest work, two pieces composed between 1958 and 1959, both of which reflect his early interest in atonality and the rhetoric of the Second Viennese School. The remainder of the program will then reflect music more familiar to those acquainted with recordings of Riley’s music. Cheng will play “The Walrus in Memoriam,” composed in 1991 and revised in 1993, and the seventh book in Riley’s The Heaven Ladder series, consisting of five compositions. Following the intermission Riley will give performances of two of his other solo works, “Simply M…” and “Requiem for Wally;” and the program will then conclude with “Cheng Tiger Growl Roar.”

This recital will begin at 7:30 p.m. on Wednesday, December 5. The venue will be the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA). Specifically, the performance will be held in the YBCA Forum, which is on the west side of Third Street between Howard Street and Mission Street (directly across from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art). All tickets are being sold for $45. Tickets may be purchased in advance through an event page on the YBCA Web site.

Cahill Recognized as “Champion of New Music”

John Nuechterlein announcing Sarah Cahill’s recognition as 2018 Champion of Music (photograph by Michael Strickland)

Yesterday afternoon in Old First Presbyterian Church, pianist Sarah Cahill was honored by the American Composers Forum (ACF), which named her a 2018 Champion of New Music. The award was presented by John Nuechterlein, ACF President and Chief Executive Officer. ACF was first organized in 1973 by students at the University of Minnesota and was incorporated as the Minnesota Composers Forum in 1975. The ACF name was adopted by the Board of Directors in 1996. Since Minnesota is also the home of General Mills, home of Wheaties, Nuechterlein announced that Cahill would be further honored with her photograph on a box of Wheaties, whose motto is “The Breakfast of Champions” and which has honored many leading sports figures on past boxes. My guess is that the box he presented to Cahill was a one-off; but, if I see her on the shelf at Safeway, I shall not be surprised!

The Champion of New Music Award was established by the ACF Board of Directors in 2005 as a national mark of recognition to honor individuals or ensembles that have made a significant contribution to the work and livelihoods of contemporary composers. In Cahill’s case one might almost call it a lifetime achievement award. Cahill has been performing new music at least since the age of seventeen, when a young John Adams wrote “China Gates” for her. Throughout her adult life she has been presenting programs consisting primarily, if not entirely, of compositions that she commissioned. As was observed at the beginning of this month, when she gave a two-hour recital for Flower Piano, many significant works in her repertoire are also available through solo recordings she has made.

Yesterday’s award presentation took place after Cahill presented a recital for Old First Concerts. The program was shorter than usual (and played without an intermission) to allow time for the award ceremony and the reception that followed. Regardless of brevity, the program provided an informative scope of pieces written for Cahill, going all the way back to “China Gates.” Commissioned pieces by Meredith Monk, Phil Kline, and Terry Riley that would then be recorded on her A Sweeter Music album were also included, as well as works by Pauline Oliveros and Annea Lockwood, which were written for an anniversary program Cahill prepared honoring the 100th birthday of Ruth Crawford Seeger on July 3, 2001. The newest work on the program was Samuel Adams’ “Shade Studies,” based on one of Riley’s improvisations and written for that composer’s 80th birthday on June 24, 2015. (Adams’ piece was also included as part of the “appendix” for Cahill’s album of Riley’s piano music, Eighty Trips Around the Sun.) Cahill’s encore came from another one of her albums, Patterns of Plants, consisting of music by Mamoru Fujieda, who had a technique for transcribing the geometrical pattern of a plant into a melodic pattern. Her encore selection was one of the “Pattern” movements from Fujieda’s nineteenth collection of pieces, which he entitled The Olive Branch Speaks.

The result was an afternoon event where one could not only appreciate the recognition Cahill was receiving but also a rich body of evidence making it clear how well deserved that recognition was.

Sarah Cahill’s Flower Piano Recital

 Sarah Cahill playing the Flower Piano Wissner instrument (photograph by Linda Dembo)

This afternoon in the Exhibition Garden of the San Francisco Botanical Garden, pianist Sarah Cahill presented a two-hour solo recital. This was one of twelve piano performances, all taking place simultaneously and each on an instrument placed in a different region of the Botanical Garden as part of the twelve-day Flower Piano event being co-hosted by Sunset Piano. While the Flower Power Performance Schedule said that Cahill would be playing music by Terry Riley and Meredith Monk, her program was far more diverse, demonstrating the rich scope of her repertoire.

Nevertheless, there were three Riley compositions on the program. The first of these was “Be Kind to One Another,” conceived as a reflection on 9/11 and first recorded by Cahill on her A Sweeter Music album released on Other Minds Records. Riley called this piece a rag; and, while he definitely brought his own voice to the music, it was a voice that seemed to reflect some of the more reflective or melancholy rags that Scott Joplin had composed, rather than usual lively examples taken from ragtime tradition. Since the tracks for A Sweeter Music were recorded in 2013, Cahill has built up a long history with this piece; and it was easy to grasp and appreciate the affection she brought to her interpretation.

On the more abstract side she had planned to play music from Riley’s Keyboard Studies, but the sostenuto pedal of the Wissner instrument she was playing was not up to realizing this music in a matter that reflected either Riley’s intentions or Cahill’s interpretation. More interesting was “The Philosopher’s Hand,” which Riley originally performed as a solo piano improvisation for the Kronos Quartet album Requiem for Adam. The piece was subsequently transcribed as solo piano music by Toon Vandevorst. Riley had conceived the improvisation in memory of Adam Harrington, son of the Kronos first violinist David Harrington. Pandit Pran Nath had attended the funeral and had silently taken Harrington’s hand. Harrington would later tell Riley that Nath’s was “the softest hand he ever held;” and Riley responded to that observation with his improvisation, which was then added to the Kronos recording. Cahill explained this backstory before performing Vandevorst’s transcription, and one could appreciate the sensitivity of touch that she brought to her keyboard work.

Monk was represented by another selection from Cahill’s A Sweeter Music album, “Steppe Music." Her other contributions to the program were her “St. Petersburg Waltz” and “Railroad (Travel Song).” I must confess that my own knowledge Monk’s work has been restricted almost entirely to her vocal compositions. In all three cases one could appreciate the affection that Cahill had for these pieces. This was also true of her performance of “Embers,” the second movement of Phil Kline’s mini-suite The Long Winter, also included on A Sweeter Music. One might not have been able to grasp the implications of warmth in the midst of cold, but this was again music of affectionate reflection.

from Amazon.com

The other Cahill album that was generously represented in this afternoon’s recital was Patterns of Plants, the music of Japanese composer Mamoru Fujieda. The album consists of selections from a very large repertoire of works created by Fujieda, each of which involves transcribing a geometrical pattern identified on a specific plant into a melodic pattern. Two of the pieces that Cahill played were taken from “collections” (which is how Fujieda describes his groups of individual compositions) with titles that cite specific plants, Begonia in My Life (the twentieth collection) and The Olive Branch Speaks (the nineteenth collection). In the absence of images of the plant patterns, it is not easy to think about how Fujieda’s music is associated with those patterns; but there is definitely an elegance to Fujieda’s style that one could not fail to notice in Cahill’s interpretations of his pieces.

Other composers on the program included John Adams (“China Gates,” which he wrote for Cahill), Pauline Oliveros (“Quintuplets Playpen,” a rare example of her working with conventional notation), Ingram Marshall (“Authentic Presence”), and Gabriela Lena Frank ( a movement from “Sueños de Chambi”). However, most interesting was Cahill’s decision to begin and end with the same selection, Kyle Gann’s “Going to Bed.” This was his transcription of the music that Philip Glass composed for “Bed,” the penultimate scene of his opera project with Robert Wilson Einstein on the Beach. This seemed to set the tone for the modernist stance of the selections that would follow, meaning that its repetition allowed for reflection on what one had experienced.

Sarah Cahill to give Three Flower Piano Concerts

Pianist Sarah Cahill (photograph by Marianne Larochelle, courtesy of Jensen Artists)

Flower Piano is an interactive music festival organized by Sunset Piano in partnership with the San Francisco Botanical Garden. Over a dozen grand pianos will be distributed across the 55 acres of the Botanical Garden, all available for anyone to play. This will be the fourth annual incarnation of the festival; and, to date, over 40,000 people have enjoyed music over the course of the past three festivals.

In addition to these “public access” settings, there will be specific dates and times for performances by local musicians. This year one of those local musicians will be pianist Sarah Cahill, who has prepared a program that will be given three performances. That program will feature compositions by Terry Riley and Meredith Monk. The Riley pieces will all be taken from Cahill’s 2017 four-CD album, Eighty Trips Around the Sun: Music by and for Terry Riley. She will play “Be Kind to One Another,” “Fandango on the Heaven Ladder,” and “Keyboard Studies.” These will be complemented by performances of Monk’s “St. Petersburg Waltz” and excerpts from Steppe Music.

Two of these performances will be free to San Francisco residents and will take place in two of the different areas of the Botanical Garden. The first will take place at noon on Saturday, July 7, in the Exhibition Garden; and the second will begin at 11 a.m. on Sunday, July 15, in the Zellerbach Garden. Non-residents will be admitted for $9. The remaining performance will be given as part of NightGarden, a ticketed event that will offer three evenings of performances (July 12–14) along with adult refreshments, snacks, and outrageous lighting. Cahill will present her Riley-Monk offerings at the first of these concerts (on Thursday, July 12), which will begin at 8 p.m. Tickets for each concert are $45 for general admission, and tickets for all three evenings are available through an Eventbrite event page. This event page also includes a list of all the pieces that will be played at each of the three concerts.

Volti Concludes Season with Two World Premieres

Last night at the Noe Valley Ministry, the Volti a cappella choir, whose motto “Singing without a net” can still be found in the program book, concluded its 39th season with a program entitled Bay and Beyond. The title may have referred to the fact that the two world premieres on the program, both products of Volti commissions, were composed, respectively by Bay Area composer Danny Clay and Lithuanian-born composer Žibuoklė Martinaitytė, whose “beyond” now extends only as far as New York. This year Clay was selected for Volti’s Choral Arts Laboratory, a commissioning and residency program for American composers under the age of 35. The residency side of the program means that the composer can develop his/her work through active engagement with the performers, rather than just submitting a score that is subsequently performed.

Clay took advantage of this active engagement to create, for the first time, a new work based on guided improvisation, rather than a score. He created three pieces collected under the title Playbook Choruses. Most likely the title reflected the sports connotation of the noun “playbook,” referring more to strategic guidelines than to explicit instructions. There was also a distinctively ludic quality to each of the pieces.

The first suggested that the conductor was “playing” the vocalists, as if the collective were some sort of instrument. That suggestion was reinforced by distributing the singers among the audience, allowing listeners a “full frontal” view of conductor (and Artistic Director) Robert Geary. The second was a variant of musical chairs with each of the players (standing) contributing to making the music. The process of elimination was a bit more obscure but was reinforced with theatrical gestures. The last involved a more meditative gathering of three groups (again on audience side), each around a music box advancing through its notes at a deliberately slow pace.

The free-form nature of these pieces, along with the different levels of wit that emerged through performance, could not have provided a better instantiation of that “singing without a net” motto. Each piece depended on an acute capacity for in-the-moment commitment; and, in the first of those pieces, that commitment was required of both conductor and vocalists. At the same time, Clay had chosen a title that referred not only to strategic approaches to play but also to the connotation of “playing for the fun of it.” This was music that obliged the performers to dispense with any suggestions of formality, an obligation shared by the audience accepting that these were not the usual “concert pieces.” Fortunately, both performers and audience had no trouble buying into this obligation, making for a listening experience that was as fun as it was memorable.

From that contextual point of view, Martinaitytė’s new piece, “Chant des Voyelles” (incantation of vowels), could not have been more different. As she explained to the audience, the work emerged from her realizing that she did not want to set a text in her native Lithuanian that would require listeners to bury their heads in a text sheet, nor did she want to wrestle with shaping her music around English words whose sonorities were still somewhat foreign. She recalled a sculpture by Jacques Lipchitz called “Chant des Voyelles,” which was inspired by an Egyptian prayer consisting only of vowels; and this inspired her to approach her composition from the same point of view.

The result turned out to be a fascinating investigation of the nature of sound itself, rather in the spirit of how several painters from a variety of different periods have tried to use their work to understand the foundational nature of color. Those on the technical side of speech understanding systems appreciate the extent to which vowels are recognized through different patterns in the frequency spectrum. By having different voices sounding different vowels based on different pitches, Martinaitytė could synthesize her own individual frequency spectra, which would result in new sonorities not representative of any recognizable vowel. In other words the piece emerged from the composer’s ability to create new sounds almost as if she had been working with electronic synthesis equipment.

One result was that, every now and then, timbres would emerge that could not be attributed to any individual source but, instead, reflected synthesis through the superposition of multiple sources. Some might have thought that this amounted to replacing electronic oscillators with human singers. However, the performance of the piece transcended its “scientific roots.” Instead, execution took on an almost ritualistic quality (reflecting back on the Egyptian rite that inspired Lipchitz); and Volti’s performance was so focused and compelling that there was no doubting that this was an act of music-making that easily held the attentive listening in its thrall.

The program began with “Caeli enarrant,” composed by Robin Estrada on a Volti commission in 2016. At the beginning of the program, Geary stressed the importance of Volti revisiting the results of past commissions, rather than just focusing on moving on to “the next new thing.” In my own case, however, this was a “first contact” experience. It did not take long to realize that the composer had taken Latin Biblical texts and decomposed them into phrases, words, and possibly even syllables, which could then be reconstructed in different combinations.

This suggested the connotation that “Divine Word” was not simply a text one could read from the pages of the family Bible. Instead, it was an onslaught of linguistic “primitives,” which mind had to tinker with and ultimately assemble into one or more meaningful sentences. In many respects, Estrada was even more daring in his efforts to reduce text to such “primitives” than Martinaitytė had been in her decision to work only with vowels. In both cases the listener was obliged to be actively committed to a process of sense-making; and the coupling of these two pieces on the first half of the program made for a mental workout that turned out to be as refreshing as it was engaging for those willing to buy into participation.

The remainder of the program was devoted to “new music from earlier times.” Volti revisited two Cowell compositions, which they had performed almost exactly a month ago for the first of the three Bard Music West concerts entitled The World of Henry Cowell. They also concluded the program with Terry Riley’s setting of the 193rd chorus from Jack Kerouac’s 242-stanza poem “Mexico City Blues.” Each of these three pieces came from a different decade of the twentieth century. The Cowell choruses were composed in 1937 and 1953, and Riley’s Kerouac setting was written in 1993. Nevertheless, each had its own way of representing a “new voice of its time,” providing an enlightening perspective for the commissioned compositions that were last night’s “main attraction.”

Sarah Cahill Honors Terry Riley’s 80th Birthday

courtesy of Jensen Artists

Composer Terry Riley celebrated his 80th birthday on June 24, 2015; and pianist Sarah Cahill has been hard at work to honor the occasion. The result only became available for download from Amazon.com his past September 29, but it was definitely worth the wait. It is a four-CD album entitled Eighty Trips Around the Sun: Music by and for Terry Riley; and its very title serves to knowledge the “cosmic” significance of having lived for 80 years. The collection is arranged in such a way that the first two CDs survey Riley’s own music and the other two present eight new works composed to honor Riley’s landmark birthday, each by a different composer.

[sentences updated to reflect input provided by Cahill, 11/20: 9:15 a.m.: All of the selections on the first CD were taken from the Piano Works collection of Riley's music published by Chester Music in April of 2015. Two short pieces composed between 1958 and 1959, a time when Riley’s primary influence was Arnold Schoenberg, are the first two tracks on the first CD.] However, Riley would shortly thereafter abandon the rigorous approach to notation that he took in those pieces; and he would not return to that approach for 35 years. During that intervening period he focused almost entirely on improvisation, and anything he committed to paper served more for guidance than for specification. This would explain why the List of Works Web page on his Web site includes “Book 5,” “Book 6,” and “Book 7” of The Heaven Ladder but not any of the earlier “books.” If these existed at all, they probably only served as guides for improvisation. (Even “Book 6” consists only of “minimal sketches.”)

“Book 5” is the one collection represented in its entirety by Cahill. It is a set of five works for four hands on a single piano keyboard [added 11/20, 9:30 a.m.: written on a commission from Cahill], and Cahill recorded all of them with pianist Regina Myers. She also recorded two of the solo pieces from “Book 7,” “Misha’s Bear Dance,” which was played by Myers, and “Fandango on the Heaven Ladder,” which Cahill played herself. Myers also plays “Simone’s Lullaby;” and Cahill plays “Be Kind to One Another,” which Riley wrote for her A Sweeter Music project.

The track from these first two CDs with the most interesting backstory, however, is the one entitled “Keyboard Studies,” which is 25 minutes in duration. When John Cage was working on his Notations project, for which he collected a single score page from each of 269 composers, Riley gave him a sheet of staff paper that had “Keyboard Studies” at the upper left and “Page 2” at the upper right. Below that header were eight lines, each with a fragment of notation giving only pitch class information (with no rhythm).

Cahill obtained a copy of the full score and then asked Riley how to play it. He suggested combining the figures on the first page with those on the second. Cahill interpreted this by playing one set of figures with one hand and another set with the other. Only later did she realize that there were two “Keyboard Study” pieces, one on the first page and the other on the two remaining pages. This does not explain why the plural form “Studies” appears in Cage’s book. However, it does explain why the CD track is labeled with the plural form, “Keyboard Studies,” because Cahill’s performance superimposed the two studies.

The result makes for absorbing listening, very much in the spirit of what Philip Glass calls “music with repetitive structures.” Those familiar with Glass should have no trouble differentiating Riley’s approach to this concept from Glass’. As long as one embraces the concept, it is easy to buy into the intricacies that emerge from Cahill’s approach to playing the fragments that Riley had notated.

The contributing composers for the remaining two CDs are Riley’s son Gyan, Danny Clay, Samuel Adams, Christine Southworth, Keeril Makan, Elena Ruehr, Dylan Mattingly, and Pauline Oliveros. The Oliveros piece is the longest and fills the fourth CD. It is based on an indeterminate score for one or more players. The performers are tasked with exploring the different ways in which two or more sounds can rapidly alternate. Adams joined Cahill for the performance that was recorded for this album.

As might be guessed, Riley’s piece involves the son recalling the life of his father and the latter’s diverse activities. The title “Poppy Infinite” refers to the improvised piece “Poppy Nogood and the Phantom Band,” which involved the father capturing samples of music he was playing on saxophone and then playing in counterpoint against those samples in a way that builds up the number of voices sounding simultaneously. Two of the contributing composers offered reflections on what may be Riley’s best known composition, “In C,” Makan’s “Before C” and Ruehr’s “In C Too,” both of which amount to reflections of the underlying pulse that drives the progress of “In C.”

Taken as a whole, the album makes for many absorbing listening experiences. Nevertheless, as one who has listened to Riley performances in a variety of settings, I have to say that I have a personal preference for his approaches to improvisation. I have experienced those approaches both in concert and on recordings, and I am consistently struck by how they always seem to go beyond any preconceived notions of genre that may be kicking around my cerebral cortex before the music starts. [updated 11/20, 9:25 a.m.:  Still, Cahill has made it her life's work to interpret those scores that Riley has committed to notation. Those who have followed this site regularly know that there is no such thing as a definitive interpretation of notation. One might almost say that, once one interpretation has been mastered, it is time to seek out another one. (I like to say that I learned this precept from Pablo Casals, but actually I learned it from reading Bernard Greenhouse’s account of his studies with Casals!) The tracks of Riley’s own music on Cahill’s collection provide a vivid sense of the diversity of material that Riley could engage as a point of departure, but the performances are just as vivid for the immediacy that Cahill brings to their interpretations. These are performances that are likely to sustain my own attentive listening for some time to come.]

Del Sol Quartet to Present Whole Sol Festival

This month the Del Sol Quartet (violinists Benjamin Kreith and Rick Shinozaki, violist Charlton Lee, and cellist Katheryn Bates) will be celebrating its 25th anniversary season. The celebration will consist of a series of three concerts of consecutive evenings, which is being called the Whole Sol Festival. The ensemble will be joined by special guests including Terry Riley, Gyan Riley, Gabriela Lena Frank, and Daniel Wohl, all performing their own compositions. Those works will include a world premiere performance of Frank’s music and another of Gyan Riley’s work. Other world premieres will be by Theresa Wong and Erberk Eryilmaz. The program for each evening will have its own title around which the program will be organized as follows:

Thursday, November 16, Dark Queen Mantra: Readers may recall that this is the title of the album that Del Sol released this past August. It is also the title of the three-movement composition by Terry Riley that begins the album. That piece is scored for guitar and string quartet, and the guitar part is played by Terry’s son Gyan. At this concert the players will present an expanded version of the work has it had been recorded. The album concludes with “The Wheel & Mythic Birds Waltz,” which will also be performed at this concert. The remaining work on the program will be Terry Riley’s “G Song.”

Friday, November 17, It’s Our Party: This program will include the world premieres of pieces by Eryilmaz, Wong, and Riley. Riley’s piece, “Vernal,” has been scored for string quartet and audience-participation ukulele choir. For those interested in participating, Del Sol has created a Google Forms signup page. Those who visit this page will see that criteria for participation will be very flexible. Experience with the ukulele may not be necessary, nor will it be necessary to have an instrument in the first place. The evening will also include electronic soundscapes and visuals created by Wohl.

Saturday, November 18, Kanto Kechua: The final program will focus on Frank’s music. “Kanto Kechua” is the title of the piece that will be given its world premiere. The program will also include her piano quintet, “Tres Homenajes – Compradazgo;” and Frank will join Del Sol to perform the piano part for this piece.

All three concerts will begin at 8 p.m. The venue will be the Atrium Theater, which is part of the Diane B. Wilsey Center for Opera, located on the fourth floor of the Veterans Building. The street address is 401 Van Ness Avenue, and the building is on the southwest corner of McAllister. For those taking public transportation, this is an intersection for both north-south and east-west Muni lines. Ticket prices for a single concert range from $25 to $75, and Festival passes for all concerts and the Saturday evening post-concert party are available for $120 and $150. Separate Brown Paper Tickets event pages have been created for both Festival passes and the individual concerts on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday.

“Beyond Terry Riley” Jamming from Brooklyn Raga Massive

This afternoon the Yerba Buena Gardens Festival presented one of its more unconventional (if not the most unconventional) of its outdoor offerings for this summer season. The performers were the members of Brooklyn Raga Massive, which has lined up a series of performances in the Bay Area (including one at the Red Poppy Art House, which happens to be tonight, and another at the Center for New Music) over the course of the coming week. Today’s offering was announced to be Terry Riley’s “In C,” whose score consists of 53 short numbered music phrases, which may be played by any number of performers on instruments of their choosing. The rules are relatively simple. Beginning with the first phrase, each phrase may be repeated any number of times, after which one may pause before moving on to the next phrase in the ordering. The piece is over when all players have gotten through the 53rd phrase. The tempo is set by the pitch C being played at a steady pulse, usually on the highest octaves of a piano keyboard.

Brooklyn Raga Massive is a relatively large ensemble that brings traditional Indian instruments together with more familiar Western instruments. On this occasion, however, the group was even larger. Members of Classical Revolution were invited to participate, making for a total of twenty performers.

On their “home turf” Brooklyn Raga Massive offers a weekly Raga Music Jam Session. This amounts to an exploration of the similarities and differences that arise in the improvisational practices of the raga in Indian Music and jazz in the Western world. From this point of view, “In C” is a somewhat unlikely selection for performance. The timing of the individual phrases is left to each performer, but improvisation is not part of the framework. This afternoon Brooklyn Raga Massive chose to respond to Riley’s constraint by bending his rules, so to speak, to allow improvisation to enter the process.

To understand how this worked involves a bit of explanation of what makes the rules behind “In C” tick. As might be expected, all 53 phrases are rooted in the tonality of C major. As the piece proceeds, those phrases tend to accumulate in piles of superpositions, giving rise to an overall sense of a rich texture that is always gradually changing. As might be expected, the texture itself is consistently oriented around a C major triad (C-E-G). However, the first non-triadic diatonic pitch (an F) shows up in the second fragment; and the first chromatic pitch (F-sharp) appears in the eighteenth. Thus, while the triad may dominate, the changes in texture often convey a sense of a modest harmonic progression.

As a result, the changing texture itself serves somewhat as a sort of “chart” against which individual performers can improvise. Because of the varying backgrounds of the performers, those improvisations reflected both raga and Western jazz practices. Furthermore, following the usual jazz conventions, it appeared as if there had been some a priori agreement over which musicians would take improvisational “departures” from Riley’s score and in what order they would do so.

It is not hard to imagine that such a practice would rub purists the wrong way. “In C” has achieved iconic status for its role in pushing back against the complex abstractions that had obsessed composers of serial music. It chose to confront the demons that only saw beauty in the mathematics behind the permutations of twelve-tone rows by bursting forth with a barbaric yawp worthy of the poetic excesses of Walt Whitman. However, if the “message” behind that yawp was “It’s time for a new set of rules,” then why should we push back when an ensemble comes forward to apply that same declaration to Riley’s own rules?

Remember, Riley himself had a thoroughly engaging capacity for improvisation. I have been fortunate enough to listen to him exercise it in concert several times. I even had a chance to chat with him a bit. My guess is that, had he been in this afternoon’s audience, he would have had no trouble buying into how Brooklyn Raga Massive had worked out their own approach to his score. (I also think he would have been delighted to observe that his pulse was being provided by pitched Indian drums.) Judging from the way in which this performance attracted a large number of listeners and held their attention for over an hour, I suspect that Riley would also have felt that both he and his music were in good company.

Innovative “In C” Coming to Yerba Buena Gardens

As a rule I am not particularly big on outdoor concerts. The acoustics are rarely up for seriously attentive listening, meaning that the experience tends to be more on the social side than the musical one. Nevertheless, there are exceptions; and this summer presented us with one of the best of them in last month’s offering by SFJAZZ, in conjunction with the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy, of John Luther Adams’ “Inuksuit.” This was, after all, a score for 9 to 99 percussionists, who begin in a central location and then are supposed to disperse themselves across a vast outdoor space. At last month’s performance that space was Lands End, and Adams’ conception of an open-ended score realized in an extended outdoor setting could not have been better served.

Regular readers also know that I try to set aside the time to sample some of the outdoor offerings in the annual Yerba Buena Gardens Festival (YBGF). One is surrounded by imposing masses of man-made architecture; and, during this particular summer, that visual factor is being reinforced by the ongoing ambient sounds of the latest construction projects. This is not the best of settings for encountering a promising young soprano or even an innovatively eclectic jazz combo; but, as the hyperlinks reveal, I was there to experience both and take them in as musical, rather than merely social, events.

However, next month, as YBGF runs towards the conclusion of this season’s schedule, it will host an offering that is closer in spirit to Adams than to Jenny Lind or that “border region” between jazz and soul. That offering will be a performance of “In C,” another open-ended score, this time composed by Terry Riley. It would not be unfair to say that “In C” was one of the most revolutionary contributions to the aesthetic shift that began to take place in the early Sixties. The score consists simply of 53 short numbered musical phrases, and it may be played by any number of performers on instruments of their choosing. Among the pieces that have come to be called “minimalist” (for better or worse), “In C” may be the one that has received the most performances by the largest number of different ensembles.

With all that as context, next month’s YBGF offering is likely to be a significantly unique approach to playing the piece. That is because the performers will be Brooklyn Raga Massive, which was co-founded by Sameer Gupta, who used to be based here in San Francisco. This is a group that is inspired by Indian Classical Music and the instruments involved in performing that music; but it takes that foundation as a point of departure for new approaches to music-making, which includes a weekly Raga Music Jam Session and a recent “Coltrane Raga Tribute” concert. Over the past three years this group has been performing “In C” with traditional Indian instruments; and, when they come to visit San Francisco next month, they will bring “In C” to YBGF in a performance that will also include members of San Francisco’s own Classical Revolution. The result should be engagingly consistent with Riley’s personal aesthetic, which has frequently involved approaches to synthesize Western and Eastern perspectives.

from the Facebook Events Web page

This performance will begin at 1 p.m. on Saturday, September 16. Yerba Buena Gardens has a street address of 760 Howard Street. This is the northwest corner of Third Street, and the grounds of the Gardens extend to the north and to the west. The stage for most YBGF concerts is situated roughly to the west of the entrance to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which is on the other side of Third Street. All YBGF events are free, but donations are collected at the conclusion of every performance.

Del Sol Records Riley and Scodanibbio

As was observed yesterday, the Del Sol String Quartet (violinists Benjamin Kreith and Rick Shinozaki, violist Charlton Lee, and cellist Kathryn Bates) will be holding a release event this coming Saturday for their latest album on Sono Luminus, Dark Queen Mantra, which will be available on Friday:

courtesy of Jensen Artists

For those who are impatient, Amazon.com is, as usual, processing pre-orders. The album features one of Terry Riley’s earliest compositions for string quartet, a coupling of two short movements entitled, respectively, “The Wheel” and “Mythic Birds Waltz.” (I have heard Del Sol play the “Mythic Birds Waltz” on its own.) This early work is coupled with the Riley composition for which the album is named, which he wrote in 2015. Dark Queen Mantra is a three-movement suite for string quartet and guitar; and, on this album, the guitar part is taken by Riley’s son Gyan. Between these two Riley compositions, Del Sol plays Mas Lugares, a five-movement suite involving transformations of madrigals by Claudio Monteverdi composed by Stefano Scodanibbio. Del Sol had played all three of these selections in a recital they gave at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music in December of 2015, and the recording sessions for this album were held about two months later.

Taken as a whole, the “program” for this album is a decidedly lyrical one. In that respect it is highly appropriate that the “core” of that program should be based on the texts of the Italian poems that Monteverdi had chosen to set as madrigals. Furthermore, Scodanibbio’s approach to “transformation” involved a significant departure from “transcription.” He was clearly aware of Monteverdi’s skills as a contrapuntist; but he chose to explore those skills in terms of note-against-note relationships based on natural harmonics. Those explorations led Scodanibbio to new approaches to dissonance. Thus, while the words that Monteverdi set are not part of Scodanibbio’s composition, the emotional intensity behind those words comes through with greater strength than we tend to encounter in “straightforward” performances of Monteverdi’s scores.

One encounters similar effects in “Dark Queen Mantra,” the title of the final movement in the suite of the same name. This movement is, indeed, the mantra of the suite, dwelling on the repetition of a simple phrase through which the listener can transcend the complexity of the here-and-now. Nevertheless, here, too, the impact of intonation arises, again through bowing techniques involving frequencies based on nodal points, rather than the pitches of an equal-tempered chromatic scale. In addition the use of sul ponticello bowing imposes even harsher overtones that emerge as the darkness suggested by the movement’s title. As a result, this final movement contrasts sharply with the almost nostalgic qualities suggested by the suite’s first two movements.

Contrast is similarly at heart of the final selection. “The Wheel” amounts to a slow jazz ballad, perhaps reflecting the early days of Riley’s career, when he supported himself by playing in piano bars. The “Mythic Birds Waltz,” on the other hand, is a splendid exercise in rhythmic complexity that pretty much defies anyone to try to waltz to it. Indeed, if there is any trace of Vienna at all in this piece, it is decidedly obscured by other influences, the most significant of which probably involve Riley’s interest in the rhythmic patterns of classical Indian music, which he studied with Pandit Pran Nath.

As a result there is much to be gained from beginning-to-end listening where this album is concerned; and the combination of the keen ears of the Del Sol players and the engineering skills in the recording studio make that listening experience a highly satisfying one.