Concert Reviews: Zone 5

Our season finale in Herbst Theatre on Monday, entitled Zone 5: in which discussing a plan leads to some confusion, received several reviews. We welcome feedback to any of them on our Facebook page.

Joshua Kosman, SF Chronicle:
"The San Francisco Contemporary Music Players have now completed their first season under Artistic Director Steven Schick, and it's been a lively and rewarding one, full of inventive programming and musical excellence. Monday night's season-ending concert in Herbst Theatre put a persuasive cap on the year..." (read more)

Matthew Cmiel, SF Classical Voice:
"Steve Schick and the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players have hit another home run of a concert. Sure, some of its music Monday at Herbst Theatre may not have been to everyone’s taste (particularly the new music), but that doesn’t matter in the least. Every piece was sharing a different worldview, and every piece engaged with the audience in its own way..." (read more)

Stephen Smoliar, examiner.com:
"Last night in Herbst Theatre, [SFCMP] concluded Artistic Director Steven Schick’s inaugural season with his fifth Zone of Intensity...Four of the composers on the program had prepared works in which electronic sound production was part of the performance, and perhaps some of that confusion involved the seamless integration of electronic and acoustic sounds..." (read more)

You can also read the program notes from the concert (pdf), as well as listen to the pre-concert talk hosted by Steven Schick and featuring four guest composers in a discussion of their work: Aaron Gervais, Mark Applebaum, Nathan Davis, and Edmund Campion.

From the Artistic Director

By Steven Schick

The creation of a new piece of music implicates us all in what often seems to be an unhealthy amount of wishful thinking.

A composer wishes that her efforts might be rewarded by a decent performance and maybe a certain contribution to musical posterity. A performer wishes that a new piece might bring a fresh and invigorating set of musical problems, ones that will force him to flex some technical muscles without straining anything too severely.  A listener enjoys a broad spectrum of wishful thinking from simply hoping that the new piece will not be a waste of time to, perhaps, the thought that this first performance might be an important event, maybe even a landmark occasion.  And what about the poor new piece – what hopes are buoyed by its amniotic dreams? Perhaps simply surviving a rehearsal process where composer, conductor, and players comprise an awkward tag-team of midwives is hope enough!

Friedrich Hommel, the long-time director of the Darmstadt Summer course once told me that the premiere of a new piece is very much like the neighbors coming by to visit a newborn baby. Everyone crowds over the bassinet gazing down at a red, squalling infant while cooing, “Oh, how beautiful!” I am as smitten by the comeliness of little babies as anyone, but I think that Herr Hommel has a point. The beautiful thing is the promise of human life and not necessarily the baby itself. It’s also what’s special about the premiere of a piece of music. Even if a first performance is green or misunderstood by the critics, the great promise it holds for the continuation of our art is beautiful.

Indeed one of the most optimistic things a culture can do is to commission new music since a new piece pre-supposes an intelligent and reflective audience that seeks to understand its world through art.  Any society that can imagine an interesting and interested future generation is a culture of optimism. Yet as noble as that sounds the real miracle is that any new music is created at all. After all money is tight. Why play a piece that no one knows – one that might fail, one that might lose money – when there are so many sure-fire hits to choose from?

The answer to that question lies in the rewards of an interesting conversation. With every new piece comes a new plan, and with every new plan comes the possibility for confusion. But what a grand kind of confusion it is!  The only way to deal with that confusion, to create from it a fertile ground for creation, is to talk. Our commissioned work tonight is by the extraordinary composer Edmund Campion.  I talked with Ed about instrumentation, special techniques, tempo, the distribution of players on the stage, the use of electronics, the utility of a click-track for the conductor, and the need for the players to have monitor speakers.  And that was just in the first hour!  This week we talked about the effect of bow speed on a certain kind of reverb setting.  We batted around ideas for marimba mallets and clarinet articulations. Come to a rehearsal and behold homo loquens!

The desirability of commissioning a new piece is directly tied to your interest in those kinds of conversations. If you like them there’s nothing more rewarding than working on new music. And the wonderful thing about an experience like the one we are having with Ed is that it reminds us of the many ways we can talk to composers even if they can’t talk back.

When you hear the way David Tanenbaum and William Winant engage Lou Harrison’s score for guitar and percussion it will certainly seem like a fantastic discussion among the three of them. Both performers knew Harrison well and worked with him often during his lifetime, and that certainly gives them a privileged perspective. But once you have the habit of talking to composers you can engage them in absentia whether you knew them or not. Nanci Severance may not have known Brett Dean before she learned his piece, but having worked with many living composers she undoubtedly knew how to “speak” to him through the medium of his score. (Plus there’s the additional advantage of being able to skype him in Australia!)

We are fortunate to have two extremely talented young composers with us tonight, Aaron Gervais, a visible and active member of our community, and Nathan Davis from New York.  Both have written fascinating pieces using music technology – another kind of conversation here – and both took part in rehearsals and discussions leading to tonight’s performance. We also look ahead to next season and a major commission to Mark Applebaum. Given that we are already deep in conversation with Mark about his new piece, we couldn’t resist programming his Pre-Composition, a piece about making a piece. It makes me look forward with enthusiasm to our ongoing conversations.  You’ll see.

Imagine all of the conversations, the ones that went into making the music on tonight’s program. Real live human contact: not 140-character tweets or the annoying monologue of political invective, but human beings talking to each other about something they are building together. As I said, commissioning a new work is one of the most optimistic things a culture can do.

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Zone 5: discussing a plan
Monday, April 30 · 8:00 pm · Herbst Theatre
Pre-concert talk with Steven Schick at 7:15 p.m.
More information

Contemporary Insights: Music and Conversation
Sunday, April 29 · 4:30 pm · ODC Studio B · Hosted by Steven Schick
Edmund Campion's Small Wonder (The Butterfly Effect)
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From the Composer: Edmund Campion on "Small Wonder (The Butterfly Effect)"

By Edmund Campion

I decided on the exact instrumentation for Small Wonder (The Butterfly Effect), then I left the piece, allowing it to gestate, a hidden process inside a chrysalis. Two disparate worlds cohabit: one driven by informed intuition, the other by calculation and data. Take a block of wood, then record audio samples of one hundred and one different ways of making the object speak. As in a David Hockney photo collage, the identity of the woodblock becomes revealed -- a chaotic granularity of all possible audible views of the object. I created such a repository (a corpus) of sampled percussion sounds with over 1800 samples. I devised a set of descriptors that categorized the corpus and with considerable support from the folks at the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (David Wessel, Adrian Freed, John MacCallum, Jeff Lubow), I helped write new computer software that could mine the data and generate variable gestures of orderly but unpredictable percussive material.

All the parts of Small Wonder were set into motion toward a goal that was unknowable. It is a small wonder that crafting the pieces of a puzzle that has no picture might produce something of worth. Ilya Prigogine, in his book "The End of Certainty" states, "matter at equilibrium, with no arrow of time, is 'blind,' but with the arrow of time, it begins to 'see'...Classical science emphasized order and stability; now, in contrast, we see fluctuations, instability, multiple choices, and limited predictability at all levels of observation." In the language of the ancient West, the word chaos is to be feared. I was headed for chaos, but recent scientific understanding offered me some relief from the anxiety. I reveled in diving into the rabbit hole formed when future events in a musical unfolding are accepted as non-decreeable, yet dependent on sensitive attention to initial conditions (an instrumentation, a tempo, an electronic medium, etc.). Changes on the micro event level will reverberate and cause change on the macro form level. In strictly musical terms, the biggest effect on a musical state happens when most things stay relatively stable while other things change by small amounts, as when an acoustic instrument changes frequency by a western half-step.

At the final moment of finishing the piece, I was happy to discover the order of things. Completely by surprise, I realized that the instruments formed the image of a butterfly on the stage; the bass is the thorax, the violin/clarinets are the wings. I heard the incessant noise and fluttering chaos of the electronics integrate themselves into a heterogenous space of sources and temporal levels. The music is a mirror of my world, mundane and predictable with micro edges of unpredictability and the infinite. No contradictions here, no angst. Small Wonder is a picture that is sometimes silly, sometimes tragic, sometimes both at the same time. The observer is invited to board any number of trains, at last to arrive at a destination personal to that particular observer.

Chaos used to be something to be avoided, but Prigogine demonstrates that it is the source and progenitor of the ordering principle, something to be learned from, something to celebrate. Joseph Campbell noted at the end of his life that ancient Religion/Myth supplied the human need for a Mysterium (space of the numen, place of beauty). Current knowledge rightly calls these practices into question. Just as we need to be sure that striking a particular block of wood will produce a sound that says "I am this block of wood," humans need to continually renew the numinous quality of existence, to find and attempt to understand beauty. The process of exploring, creating and understanding beauty does not require that scientific facts be discarded.

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Edmund Campion will participate in a one-hour performance and discussion of Small Wonder (The Butterfly Effect) on Sunday, April 29 at ODC Dance Commons. Click here for more information or to RSVP on Facebook.

SFCMP will perform the world premiere of Small Wonder (The Butterfly Effect) on Monday, April 30 at Herbst Theatre as part of Zone 5: discussing a plan. A pre-concert talk begins at 7:15 p.m. Click here to buy tickets or to RSVP on Facebook.

Conversation with the Composer: Nathan Davis

NYC-based composer Nathan Davis discusses his 2008 work The Bright and Hollow Sky: 

How did the instrumentation of the piece come about?

The piece was commissioned by the International Contemporary Ensemble, and they requested that I write for the instrumentation of a mixed quartet (for flute, clarinet, guitar, and percussion) by Magnus Lindberg they were often touring at the time. Trumpet player Peter Evans had also just joined the group, so we agreed it would be nice to add him as well.

At first it was a challenging instrumentation. Its relative lack of low instruments forced me to find interesting ways of expanding the instrumental registers downward. The trumpet plays subtones deep in the trombone range, aided by judicious mic technique on the part of the player. The guitar is prepared and well-amplified, yielding low gong tones.

How did you develop the structure of the piece out of its initial concept?

The piece is built in cycles with a rhythmic structure that is articulated on the structural, phrase, and surface levels. Some aspects of the cycles are influenced by Balinese gamelan music. Superimposed upon that structure is more directional and through-composed music which breaks through and at times destroys the previous structure.

What role does electronic processing (in the form of ring modulation) play in the piece?

The ring modulation creates larger chords from the live instruments. Ring modulation produces both sum and difference frequencies of any notes produced by a pair of instruments. So two instruments with separate microphones can modulate each other and produce two additional pitches, and with two pairs of instruments, I am building eight-note chords. The notes produced by ring modulation are rarely tempered pitches, and for the long microtonal chorale, I chose pitches for the instruments to play that would produce inversions of pure and just intervals through the electronics.

How might the upcoming performance of the piece be influenced by working with Steven Schick and the musicians of SFCMP, and by performing it for our audience here in the Bay Area?

I am incredibly excited for this performance. I am always amazed at Steven Schick's gift for sounding the depths of a score and by his uncanny ability to get inside a composer's head. And I am looking forward to working with the other musicians of the SFCMP, whom I know by their great reputation.

As I understand it, gamelan and contemporary music have long shared listeners, players, and composers in the Bay Area [listen to music performed by Berkeley's Gamelan Sekar Jaya]. With this rich history, I think that the audience is uniquely familiar with these influences to hear the language, cycle, and arc of The Bright and Hollow Sky.

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Nathan Davis will join SFCMP to operate the electronics for a performance of The Bright and Hollow Sky on Monday, April 30 at Herbst Theatre (Zone 5: discussing a plan). A pre-concert talk with Steven Schick begins at 7:15 pm. Click here to buy tickets or to RSVP on Facebook.

Meet the Composers: Zone 5

Aaron Gervais

Brett Dean

Nathan Davis

Mark Applebaum

Lou Harrison

Edmund Campion

-- For more information about Zone 5: discussing a plan on April 29-30, click here.

From the Artistic Director

By Steven Schick

Momentum. Position. Acceleration. Vector. I was never a very good student in my high school science class. My best energy was spent perfecting vocal imitations of thunder and howling wind, with the goal of creating a stirring ventriloquy of stormy scenes that I could surreptitiously deploy in class on sunny spring days to amuse my classmates. I did perk up during discussions of the Heisenberg Principle though. I loved the idea that you could know either where a particle was or you could know where it was going, but not both. All that talk of uncertainty in a science class was pretty exciting. I hasten to add that I wasn’t really paying that much attention in class so please don’t write me to say I’ve misunderstood Heisenberg. I think that’s pretty much a given. But I’ve always really liked the way I understood the principle. And I’ve learned to apply it, after a fashion, to percussion playing.

Most people think that percussion is the art of striking things, but it really is an art of positioning oneself for the strike. About a related genre Toshio Hosokawa once told me that the most poignant moment in Japanese calligraphy comes just before the pen lowers toward the paper. In other words expression comes not by making a mark but by positioning yourself to make a mark. The same is true with percussion: every quality of sound from loudness, to color, to intensity, to rhythmic accuracy is a property of preparing, not executing, a stroke.

So the static qualities of percussion playing – arm angle and stick position, mallet height and even stroke speed – are inert topics not worthy of serious analysis. What’s fascinating about percussion playing is the body of the percussionist in flight, aiming not at some flatfooted point of contact with an instrument but moving towards a poised instant of coiled energy from which a stroke will emanate. In fact the technical side of a virtuosic percussion piece like Brian Ferneyhough’s Bone Alphabet is about very little else than the choreography of positioning. The only stillness – in other words a moment where you can tell where the body is and instead of where it’s going – is to be found in the infinitesimal pause at the top of each stroke cycle just before stick descends. Otherwise everything is fluid, in motion.

Wanting to begin tonight’s program with a birthday celebration for Bone Alphabet which turned twenty years old last month, I spent some time reflecting upon ensemble pieces of music that also trade in the tension between momentum and position, between the fluidity of preparation and the concreteness of arrival. Swiss composer Katharina Rosenberger’s scatter 2.0 consists of series of small, shall we say scattered, phrases that seem to be moving towards a complete thought. In a way the piece is misnamed since it starts with disconnected cells that are fractured by a frenzy of meter changes and gradually coalesces to lengthier phrases and more complete ideas. Perhaps it would be more accurate to call it “Gather.” But either way it’s the tension between momentum and position that I find appealing as fragments of ideas migrate and merge to wholeness. Her compatriot Heinz Holliger’s Ma’mounia, played brilliantly by Christopher Froh, follows suit as slow textural moments of distinguishable quidity – of musical “this-ness” – rub against fleeting passages of very complex metrical construction. The friction between momentum and arrival fuels the forward progress of this music.

But it’s not only in Switzerland that being somewhere and going somewhere act as distinguishable vectors. Historically one of the great tools to manage musical momentum has been the ornament. Like the downward stroke of a poised pen, an ornament is a means of approaching a goal. It describes an arc from maximum to minimum potential energy (or seen in reverse, from minimum to maximum rhetorical weight.) Ornaments therefore are fundamentally about controlling the energy of a phrase. They can conduct energy or resist it, and accordingly accelerate or retard momentum within a musical idea. Tonight you’ll hear a recent take on ornaments in their many guises in Fancywork, Geoffery Gordon’s fascinating study in musical filigree and handiwork scored for violin and guitar.

On its surface Olly Wison’s A City Called Heaven seems like the outlier in this concert. This is music seemingly too grounded in continuous rhythmic and metrical structures, too rooted in a compositional tradition self-consciously based on jazz and the blues, and too structured on a coherent and well-balanced scheme of orchestration to trade much in theoretical notions about momentum. Yet just as Bone Alphabet is, this music also is about preparatory energies and about the fascination we have for things that are in the process of becoming. Like all music that comes from the blues, A City Called Heaven ebbs and flows in time with the rhythms of breathing. And even in moments of dense instrumental writing the music is always flowing, never fixed in place; always arriving, never arrived.

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Zone 4: momentum, position, physicality
Monday, March 26 · 8:00 pm · Herbst Theatre
Preconcert talk with Steven Schick at 7:15 p.m.
More information

Contemporary Insights: Music and Conversation
Sunday, March 25 · 4:30 pm · ODC Studio B
Katharina Rosenberger's scatter 2.0 · Hosted by Steven Schick
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From the Composer: Katharina Rosenberger

Katharina Rosenberger

Katharina Rosenberger discusses her work scatter 2.0, written for flute, clarinet, piano, percussion, violin, and cello:

Are there aspects of scatter 2.0 that were inspired in some way by the ensemble für neue musik zürich, or are the result of writing it for that particular group?

I have been working with the ensemble für neue musik zürich (enmz) for the past five years on a variety of projects. Our first adventurous collaboration was in 2007 for the video opera x – suite filante. The group has an affinity for theatre and after having seen them in 2005 on stage in a delightful production by Anna Viebrock, their full talent came to light and I thought that this would be a perfect match. Not only are they remarkable musicians, they are also impressive at interpreting characters; I encountered them witty, sarcastic, a little stubborn, and with plenty of good humor. And to no surprise, the dynamic of the group and among themselves is not too far fetched from what I have noticed during the theatre performance. So when in 2009 the enmz had commissioned me to write a new piece for them, I wanted to write something very energetic, gritty, fast and snappy. Besides thinking of a kaleidoscope and “action patterns," in scatter 2.0 I try to capture the liveliness of the group with rapid (sporty) runs, spirited timbres, and at times a little edginess through extreme ranges and dynamics, fast figures and jumps.

Percussion plays an important role in the structure of the piece, particularly in the woodblock and crotales. How do the other parts relate to, and interact with, the percussion?

What fascinates me about these two percussion instruments is the beauty of their high-pitched, sharp and radiant instrumental color. At the same time, they oppose each other. The woodblocks belong to the instruments of indefinite pitch and produce an utterly dry and firm attack; hitting or bowing the crotales, on the other hand, produces a prolonged and intense vibration of the metal that can carry on over several seconds. The crotales are pitched instruments and may have a range of two octaves. This contrast is an aspect I play with in the last section of the composition: high pitched, jittery attacks played by the flute, percussion, piano and violin, followed by the low fuzzy rumble of the violoncello and low piano. Here and from midway on, the percussion blends in with the other instruments. Or, in other words, the entire ensemble takes on a percussion-like character. In the beginning of scatter 2.0 however, another hierarchy among the instruments manifests itself. Often, the percussionist is the catalyst that sets off the rest of the ensemble into motion. Except for the percussionist, the ensemble often plays in unison, but through the repeated wood block hits these uniform lines slowly burst into individual figures, scattering the musical motifs all over the instrumental body. The relationship between the percussion and the other instruments remains tense, and only little by little consolidates and finally merges into a harmonious and swiftly hovering contrapuntal texture, played by the bass flute, bass clarinet and the marimba.

Regarding the multimedia projects that form a large part of your work, what do you find most interesting about that kind of collaboration?

With every new piece I write, may it be for the concert stage, for the theatre or for a gallery setting, or even for an outdoor engagement, I think of the relationships that a particular work sets into motion: from a performer to the listener, from a sound source to the space, or relationships within the social that such gatherings and engagements produce. Working with intermedia, the connections between the different agencies become extremely vital and can have a decisive impact on structure and content. Every element of an art work is dependable on the other. We hear differently according to the space that we are in (acoustically, culturally, socially) and a different type of lighting might influence our perception of sound, or a particular placement or movement of the sound within the space might make us notice certain aspects of a musical work that we have not been aware of before. Offering the audience multiple perspectives on an art work does interest me.

Speaking of collaborations, I like to share my ideas and see how they resonate with other artists, how looking at them from a different angle challenges them and how then difficulties can be overcome by incorporating the expertise of others. I do learn a lot from these collaborative projects. It enables me to look at my own artistic practice from an enlarged horizon.

For someone who is about to hear a performance of your music for the first time, is there something that you would like them to know or listen for?

In my music, I like to play with timbres (instrumental colors) and textures; at times dense, complex and impenetrable, then again airy and transparent. I see my music leaning towards the “sculpturesque,” being visually charged rather than telling a story. In this, I would like to invite the listener to not only listen to my music, but also to “see” and feel it, to enjoy the physicality of sound and its resonance in space.

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Katharina Rosenberger will participate in a one-hour performance and discussion of scatter 2.0 on Sunday, March 25 at ODC Dance Commons. Click here for more information or to RSVP on Facebook.

SFCMP will perform scatter 2.0 on Monday, March 26 at Herbst Theatre as part of Zone 4: momentum, position, physicality. Click here to buy tickets or to RSVP on Facebook.