Program Content of January E4TT Concert

The E4TT trio of Margaret Halbig, Abigail Monroe, and Nanette McGuinness (from an E4TT Web page)

The Ensemble for These Times (E4TT) trio of soprano Nanette McGuinness, pianist Margaret Halbig, and cellist Abigail Monroe will present its next recital at the end of this coming January. The title of the program will be Below the Surface: Music by Women Composers, and the trio will be joined by violinist Ilana Blumberg. The scope of the program is extensive enough that it should be sufficient simply to summarize the enumeration in the press release:

The highlight of the program will be the World Premiere of a COVID-delayed commissioned song cycle titled “Below the Surface,” by Canadian-born, Scotland-based Call for Scores composer, Emily Doolittle (b. 1972, pictured top) for soprano and piano, to texts by Bay Area poets Rachel Richardson (b. 1979) and Rella Lossy (1934-1996), along with ten other works by women composers: Chinese-American composer Du Yun (b. 1977); 2014 Guggenheim Fellow Elena Ruehr (b. 1963); Gabriela Ortiz (b. 1964); exciting emerging Puerto Rican-born composer Angélica Negrón (b. 1981…); 2020 Opera America Discovery Grant for Female Composers recipients Lisa Bielawa (b. 1968) and Sarah Kirkland Snider (b. 1973), and Gabriela Lena Frank Academic of Music alumnae Akshaya Avril Tucker (b. 1992), Korean Jungyoon Wie (b. 1990), Seo Yoon (Soyoona) Kim (b. 1988), and Manjing Zhang (b. 1991).

If that were not enough, Richardson will also contribute to the program with a reading of her poetry.

Those that may feel overwhelmed by the number of composers contributing to this program (not to mention the diversity of their respective approaches to composition) may wish to know that, while the concert will be presented to a “physical” audience, there will also be a live-stream of the performance. Presumably, once that video has been live-streamed, it will be archived for later viewing. This will allow serious listeners to set their own pace, so to speak, allowing for “breaks” between the individual selections long enough to prepare for the transition from one compositional style to another.

The performance will begin at 7:30 p.m. on Saturday, January 29. There will also be a discussion with some of the contributing composers beginning at 7 p.m. However, as of this writing those participants have not yet been finalized. The performance will take place at the Center for New Music (C4NM), located at 55 Taylor Street, half a block north of the Golden Gate Theater, which is where Golden Gate Avenue meets Market Street. All tickets may be processed in advance through the C4NM Events page. General admission will be $15 with a $10 rate for C4NM members. The performance will be live-streamed to a YouTube Web page that will be linked to the C4NM YouTube Channel.

Lara Downes Celebrates the 19th Amendment

91Classical is the classical music radio station for Nashville, Tennessee, owned by Nashville Public Radio. However two of the announcers, Colleen Phelps and Rachel Iacovone, have been adding video to the mix, creating program content that can be viewed through Facebook and other platforms. Yesterday Phelps hosted a program to honor Tennessee’s ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution on August 18, 1920, thus providing the necessary 36 ratifying states to secure adoption. (As recently observed, adoption was not certified until August 26; but yesterday was significant for Tennessee’s role in the process.)

Phelps marked the occasion by hosting a half-hour recital by pianist Lara Downes, who presented a program consisting entirely of music composed by women. This included a world premiere performance of “Quiet Streets,” a short work by Elena Ruehr, which may have been conceived in preparation for a more extended piano concerto. The program also included two pieces from the Twenties, which had been composed in the wake of the ratification process. The earlier of these was Amy Beach’s “Farewell Summer,” from her Opus 102 collection, which she composed in 1924. This was followed by the first of Florence Price’s “Fantasie nègre” compositions (in the key of E minor), which she completed in 1929 and revised in 1931.

The videos of these performances were made at Downes’ home, playing on her Yamaha grand. However, one of the selections was recorded earlier at National Sawdust. This was a duo performance with Simone Dinnerstein, both playing Bösendorfer instruments. They joined forces to present Meredith Monk’s “Ellis Island.” The program then concluded back at Downes’ home with her playing Jed Distler’s solo piano arrangement of “God Bless the Child,” one of Billie Holiday’s best-known songs, which she composed with Arthur Herzog Jr. in 1939.

This made for a rich diversity of styles and rhetoric, all packed into a half-hour duration. Since I am on the “final stretch” in reading The Heart of a Woman: The Life and Music of Florence B. Price by Rae Linda Brown, I welcomed having yet another opportunity to listen to Downes playing Price’s music. Having listened to my recording of her playing the “Fantasie nègre” rather frequently, I found myself comparing Price’s “fantasy technique” to the Hungarian “rhapsodies” composed by Franz Liszt. Just as Liszt drew upon Hungarian music as sources for rich embellishment, Price had done the same with the spiritual “Sinner, please don’t let this harvest pass,” which probably emerged from the slave culture that had grown prior to the Civil War.

To a great extent, there was a thread of alienation that wove through many of Downes’ selections (whether or not she had explicitly intended that rhetorical stance). Thus, the spiritual theme behind Price’s “Fantasie” reverberated a decade later in “God Bless the Child.” Similarly, Monk’s “Ellis Island” evoked the alienation of those that had escaped oppression in the “Old World” only to confront it again in the intimidating bureaucracy on an island not far from the coasts of both Brooklyn and Manhattan.

Mind you, I do not think that Downes was deliberately trying to be depressing with her selections. Nevertheless, if Phelps’ program had been intended to honor American women overcoming a major act of discrimination, the historical context reminds us all that discrimination continued to prevail in many different aspects of American life. Indeed, we only have to follow the progress of the Black Lives Matter movement to appreciate that the capacity for discrimination is still with us.

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.]

The Bleeding Edge: 1/30/2017

This is one of those transitional weeks that crosses from one month into the next. As a result there will be two events at the Center for New Music (C4NM) that have already been announced, tonight’s percussion evening and I Sing Words on Friday. This week also mark’s the beginning of the Sunset Music | Arts 2017 Vocal Series. That leaves only three additional events, one tonight and two on Thursday, to be taken into account as follows:

Monday, January 30, 7:30 p.m., Herbst Theatre: Earplay will present the first of the three concerts in its 2017 season, marking 32 years of exceptional programming. The title of the entire season is Air, Wind, Water, with one noun for each of the three programs. The featured composer of the season will be Toru Takemitsu, and there will be five world premieres over the course of the three performances. Furthermore, each program will have a Takemitsu piece associated with the title.

Thus, this first program will present Takemitsu’s final composition, a flute solo that happens to be entitled “Air.” The other end of his career will also be represented with a performance of his “Romance” for solo piano, which he composed between 1948 and 1949. The world premiere on the program will be Laurie San Martin’s “Fray,” written on an Earplay commission and composed for string trio. There will also be the West Coast premiere of Tonia Ko’s duo for violin and piano, “Plush Earth in Four Pieces.” Other works on the program will be Elena Ruehr’s “Blackberries” for clarinet, cello, and piano, and Peter Josheff’s sextet, scored for flute (doubling on piccolo), clarinet, violin viola, cello, and piano.

Herbst is located on the ground floor of the Veterans Building, located at 401 Van Ness Avenue on the southwest corner of McAllister Street. The performance will be preceded by a preconcert talk at 6:45 p.m. General admission will be $25 with a $10 rate for students. Tickets will be available at the box office before the performance.

Thursday, February 2, 7 p.m., C4NM: The Del Sol Quartet will return for the second concert in the current Soundings series, now in its fourth year. (Hence, the title of the program is Soundings 4.2.) The idea behind the series is to present a musical performance in the context of the display of visual art. The music for this program will be Crossings, the collective title that Ben Johnston gave to his third and fourth string quartets (each only a single movement), to be performed consecutively but separated by a specified interval (around 90 seconds) of silence. The visual art will be a display of photographs by Elmore DeMott, created as an artistic response to her mother’s Alzheimer’s condition.

C4NM is located at 55 Taylor Street, about half a block north of where Golden Gave Avenue meets Market Street. General admission will be $20 with a $15 rate for C4NM members. Both levels of tickets may be purchased in advance online through a Vivendi event page.

Thursday, February 2, 7 p.m., Luggage Store Gallery: This will be another evening of electronics in the Luggage Store Creative Music series offered weekly by Outsound Presents. The opening set will be taken by Amanda Chaudhary, who works with both analog synthesis and custom-made digital software (occasionally incorporating folk and toy instruments). She will be followed after about an hour by a duo performance by Agnes Szelag and Danista Rivero. Szelag is a cellist, and Rivero is a vocalist. However, both of them extend their performance technique with electronic technology. The Luggage Store Gallery is at 1007 Market Street, directly across from the Golden Gate Theatre at the corner of Golden Gate Avenue and Taylor Street. As always admission will be on a sliding scale between $6 and $15.

A Literary Connection Overlooked (or just ignored)?

At last night's Call & Response recital by the Cypress String Quartet, there was a potentially interesting literary connection that I chose to ignore in my Examiner.com review because there were too many other points I felt were more important. Nevertheless, I believe it still deserves some "examination." It concerns the juxtaposition on Elena Ruehr's new string quartet, Bel Canto, based on a 2001 novel of the same name by Ann Patchett, with Franz Schubert's D. 810 D minor string quartet, best known as "Death and the Maiden."

The connection may be appreciated through the précis of Patchett's novel that Richard Scheinin provided in a preview piece that appeared in the Eye section of the February 25 San Jose Mercury News:

Patchett's book is about hostage-taking terrorists and their victims: business executives, powerful politicians and a fictional world-famous soprano named Roxane Coss, who have gathered for a birthday party at the home of the vice president of an unnamed Latin American country. The terrorists creep in through the heating vents and take over -- and what happens during the next few months of terrible but rich coexistence is unexpected: a web of friendships and love affairs evolves.

The connection has to do with the fact that Death and the Maiden is also the title of a film Roman Polanski made in 1994, based on a play by Ariel Dorfman that had a relatively successful run in New York. Like Patchett's novel it is set in "an unnamed Latin American country." It also involves a hostage situation, but with a different twist. It is about a woman (Sigourney Weaver) who discovers that her neighbor is a man (Ben Kingsley) who had once tortured her for her political beliefs. She captures him and holds him hostage, and the plot revolves around whether or not she will apply to him the same treatment he had applied to her. The title comes from the fact that her most vivid memory of her experience with him was that he would play that Schubert quartet while torturing her.

From a narratological point of view, these are entirely different stories; so it would not surprise me if Patchett was unaware of either Dorfman's play or Polanski's film. On the other hand in this same preview piece, Ruehr describes herself as a pretty voracious reader; but I have yet to encounter any sign that she knew about this politically charged literary connection to Schubert's quartet. In my Examiner.com piece I made reference to the red hot dramatic intensity of Schubert's music. This additional connection, which may well be accidental or coincidental, knocked that temperature up a notch for my own listening experience!