San Francisco Contemporary Music Players

The Renaissance Reimagined

2012-01-19T17:00:00.000-08:00

Our next concert features a performance of Salvatore Sciarrino's Le voci sottovetro, his elaboration on music by Carlo Gesualdo (1566-1613). The piece alternates between instrumental works and the madrigals for which Gesualdo is most famous, at least musically speaking (his tumultuous personal life is the subject of a recent opera by Dalbavie).

Sciarrino's transcriptions are true to the originals, but make use of contemporary orchestration, including the addition of percussion. In the two madrigals, the original five-part a cappella scores become instrumental works, with a soprano soloist covering one line and conveying the text.

Here are four videos of Gesualdo's original works, arranged in the order that they appear in Le voci sottovetro:

Gagliarda (a lively Renaissance dance form):

Tu m'uccidi, o crudele (You are killing me, o cruel one):

Canzon francese:

Moro, lasso, al mio duolo (I die, alas, in my suffering):

SFCMP performs Salvatore Sciarrino's Le voci sottovetro
at 8:00 pm on February 27 at Herbst Theatre.
More information

New music in the new year

2012-01-05T18:12:00.000-08:00

Now that 2012 is underway, we're looking forward to the remaining concerts of our current season. It's not too late to put all of these events in your calendar, and save up to 40% off single ticket prices, by ordering a mini-subscription today. Here are just a few of the many highlights of the rest of the season, and be sure to check back regularly (and like us on Facebook) for more news about participating artists as each concert approaches!

Mary Bonhag

February 26-27, 2012
Zone 3: in which an inscription is erased but leaves a trace

Soprano Mary Bonhag will join the ensemble for two works: Salvatore Sciarrino's Le Voci Sottovetro, an elaboration of four Gesualdo madrigals, and Pascal Dusapin's Comœdia, a musical setting of text from Dante's masterpiece. Local composer Luciano Chessa will further enhance this concert's theme, reading letters from the Italian Renaissance poet Torquato Tasso.

Katharina Rosenberger

March 25-26, 2012
Zone 4: in which momentum and position co-exist within the physicality of a musical performance
Composer Katharina Rosenberger will be present to discuss her work with Artistic Director Steven Schick at a pre-concert talk in Herbst Theatre. The ensemble will perform her scatter 2.0, recently recorded for a collection of music by women composers (available from Harmonia Mundi).

Nathan Davis

April 29-30, 2012
Zone 5: in which discussing a plan leads to some confusion
You may have heard about the upcoming world premiere of a new piece by Edmund Campion at this concert, but we'll also welcome composer Nathan Davis (featured in this New York Times article) for a performance of his The Bright and Hollow Sky. The piece electronically modifies the acoustic sound of flute, clarinet, trumpet, guitar, and percussion using software that he'll control in real time.

Remembering Marcella DeCray

2011-12-08T17:00:00.000-08:00

Marcella DeCray, with SFCMP co-founders
Charles Boone (left) and Jean-Louis LeRoux (right).

This week we mourn the passing of Marcella DeCray, a dear friend and co-founder of theSan Francisco Contemporary Music Players. She was the first Executive Director of the group, from 1974 until 1988, and served on the board of directors from its inception in 1978 until1989. In that time, she helped to establish the ensemble as the strongand well-respected organization that it remains today.

Her performances as the harpist of the ensemble during those years receivedwarm reviews from the critics of the time: Robert Commanday wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle that “DeCray’sdelicate treatment of the harp part…was rather haunting”; and Charles Shere wrote in the Tribune that “DeCray [played] withconviction, accuracy and real refinement."

Our next concert on February 27, 2012 will be dedicated to the memory of her life. UPDATE: An obituary is available here.

Marcella DeCray (far right) with the ensemble
and composer Gunther Schuller in 1985.

Zone 2: indispensable morphology

2011-12-01T17:00:00.000-08:00

November 13-14
Selected photos from our recent events, including a visit to San Francisco's Lowell High School as part of our ongoing residency. Steven Schick hosted a performance and discussion of John Cage's Credo In Us at the Contemporary Insights event on Sunday afternoon, and Credo was performed in Herbst Theatre the following evening along with music by James Tenney, Martin Bresnick, David Lang, and Frederic Rzewski.

Stephen Harrison and Daniel Kennedy perform
Bresnick's Songs of the Mouse People at Lowell HS.

Cage's Credo In Us at ODC Dance Commons.

Dress rehearsal of Rzewski's Bring Them Home!

Dress rehearsal of Tenney's Critical Band.

Credo In Us, with Steven Schick (right) operating the radio.

William Winant and Christopher Froh rehearse Cage.


William Winant spins a bull roarer while performing Rzewski.

Zone 2 and the TenFourteen Project

2011-11-17T11:00:00.000-08:00

Our season continued on Monday in Herbst Theatre with Zone 2: in which an indispensable morphology is identified, featuring music by James Tenney, Martin Bresnick, David Lang, Frederic Rzewski, and John Cage. Here are some reviews of the concert:

"In a lean and elegant program...the group made a case for expressive efficiency, yielding a maximum of impact with a minimum of music." (Joshua Kosman, SF Chronicle)
"[Credo In Us] is a celebration of sonorities in wild diversity; and any sense of morphology arises from how those sonorities bump into each other." (Stephen Smoliar, examiner.com)
"The level of performance, as usual, was very high." (Paul Hertelendy, ArtsSF.com)

SFCMP performs Tenney's Critical Band.

Word is also out about our TenFourteen Project: 10 new commissions to be performed in the 2014-15 season, in a process curated by Artistic Director Steven Schick. The composers are Chou Wen-chung, George Crumb, Lei Liang, Koji Nakano, Gabriela Ortiz, Elena Ruehr, Laurie San Martin, Ken Ueno, Du Yun, and Agata Zubel.

"The forty-one year tradition of the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players establishes it as one of this country's most venerable and important ensembles for contemporary music; and the terrific musicians of the group and their commitment to cutting-edge musical ideas mean that it is also an ensemble of the future,” Schick says. “We are the ideal group to present these ten exciting new works by an amazing array of internationally known composers.”

Read more about the project in SF Classical Voice's Music News, or in the press release.

From the Artistic Director

2011-11-10T10:30:00.000-08:00

By Steven Schick

The great Argentinean author Jorge Luis Borges once wrote that Franz Kafka was so important that he influenced even those who came before him. Certainly in his final story, “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk,” Kafka created an emotional geometry so sharp and exacting that for me personally the story has given leverage to understand such widely various experiences as reading Seneca, listening to Patsy Cline, and, yes, programming a concert of the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players.

“Our singer is called Josephine and anyone who has not heard her does not know the power of song.”

With that line Kafka begins his account of a mouse diva, who, while “piping” in an annoying and non-musical way, becomes an iconic performer for a downtrodden and not particularly musical population of mouse-folk. The story offers labyrinthine interpretive pathways – including commentary on the pathology of Kafka’s own voice as he was dying of tuberculosis. But for me the principal metaphor has always been that music becomes a point of contact between the real and the imagined, between the world and my world. This happens for me most vividly in communal musical situations, when people actually sit together and listen with each other.

Negotiating between the personal and the collective in music can lead us inward toward small sounds and private thoughts as it seems to in James Tenney’s Critical Band, where micro-perturbations result from the combination of slightly differing pitches. Arriving at a certain critical threshold of difference and complexity, sounds suddenly generate meaning, here in the form of harmony. Or the journey might be outward-bound and move us beyond our personal worlds and into the shared realms of politics and war. We are guided into the purgatory of human conflict by David Lang’s Illumination Rounds, which posits the extreme virtuosity of violin and piano writing as an allegory to the cool violence of long-distance killing, and by Frederic Rzewski’s more directly political appeal to Bring them Home! Even John Cage is less inscrutable than usual and comments directly on the din of popular culture in his Credo in Us.

Martin Bresnick’s Songs of the Mouse People brings us back to Kafka. In this music that might have come directly from Josephine’s songbook the point is not what is being said but that we come together for the saying of it. In very nearly the last words that Franz Kafka wrote, this togetherness resonates as a transitory state of grace.

“The time will soon come when her last notes sound and die into silence. She is a small episode in the eternal history of our people, and the people will get over the loss of her. Not that it will be easy for us; how can our gatherings take place in utter silence?”

--
Zone 2: indispensable morphology
Monday, November 14 · 8:00 pm · Herbst Theatre
Preconcert talk with Steven Schick at 7:15 p.m.
More information

Contemporary Insights: Music and Conversation
Sunday, November 13 · 4:30 pm · ODC Studio B
John Cage's Credo in Us · Hosted by Steven Schick
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From the Composer: David Lang

2011-11-03T11:00:00.000-07:00

By David Lang

I am really happy that my piece Illumination Rounds is getting done with the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players. It is a really important piece for me, and I still think about it a lot even now, thirty years after I wrote it. (And not necessarily for the most complimentary of reasons.)

The piece was a commission from a friend of mine, the violinist Leslie Shank, who at the time was a graduate student at Juilliard and who is now assistant concertmaster at the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra. Leslie had won a competition that gave her a debut recital at Weill Hall in the Carnegie Hall complex, and she wanted me to write a piece for her to premiere there, with her pianist friend Jon Kimura Parker. I knew they were both amazing and could play anything, and my first impulse wasn't musical but more technological - I thought how great it would be to write a really hard piece for them, so that they could show off what they could do. That I got so interested in going this direction scared me a little. I was so quick to forget what music does and sounds like, in order to concentrate just on how music could be flashy and impressive. I started looking around for other stories or experiences or instances around me that also required someone to pay so much attention to a technological situation that an artistic or moral situation might be overlooked. What I came up with was how new weapons were designed for use in the war in Vietnam. (I know this sounds so long ago - it is hard to remember that my piece was written only 5 years after the fall of Saigon. That is how old it is!)

I remembered reading (in Scientific American?) about the problem of using helicopters to fight at night. A helicopter would go out into the jungle darkness and the gunners wouldn't be able to see enough to aim their machine guns. How could this problem be solved? A team of brilliant designers invented a type of bullet that would leave a phosphorescent vapor trail hovering in the air behind it - the bullets themselves would still be invisible in the darkness but the trail of where they had gone would light up behind them, gravity pulling it down in a slow, incandescent arc. They called these bullets "illumination rounds." I loved that there were two entities married together in this image - the bullet and its shadow - and that I could use them as a model for how a violin could relate to a piano. But most of all I loved that it was a story about smart, creative people coming together to solve a problem, shutting out of their minds that problem's potential moral or spiritual implications; somehow this reminded me of my original impulse to write the piece.

The piece was so hard and so flashy, and Leslie and Jackie played it so well, that it was a big hit, and I was immediately inundated with offers of work, much of it from successful musicians asking me to write pieces for them that were exactly the same as the one I had just written, but for their instruments. And I have to say that this flipped me out. Because the subject of the piece was about how focusing on the technological kept one from paying attention to the moral, I began to think that I had done something really wrong. Had I done the same thing myself? After a while I started questioning whether the piece was popular because I wanted to create a certain musical experience that people ended up liking, or because I wanted to make people like something and I didn't care what it was. Was it flashy because the music I wanted to write required virtuosity or was it flashy because I wanted people to like me? I couldn't tell any longer which was which and I began to doubt my own honesty in writing the piece. After Illumination Rounds I put in place a whole range of mechanisms, so that I could protect myself from ever being able to question my own honesty again. And I have spent my composition time living with and exploring those mechanisms ever since.

I have to say, though, I still like the piece!

--
Roy Malan and Julie Steinberg will perform
Illumination Rounds on November 14.
More information

Conversation with the Composer: Martin Bresnick

2011-10-27T13:00:00.000-07:00

Martin Bresnick based his 1999 duet Songs of the Mouse People on the last short story written by Franz Kafka. In a recent discussion, he touched on the genesis of the work, the portrayal of an intriguing main character, and divas (both real and imaginary):

What drew you to Kafka’s story as the basis for a piece of music?

The commissioners Steven Schick and Maya Beiser wanted music that somehow took its point of departure from Kafka. As members of the Bang on a Can All-Stars they had both previously played and recorded two other Kafka pieces of mine - The Bucket Rider and BE JUST! When I recalled Kafka's final story "Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk" I knew I had the right piece for them. I think they had originally hoped the work would turn out to be a work for speaking musicians. But instead, taking Kafka's words only for the titles of the "songs", I explored the concept of a mouse diva by making her voice audible only through the exquisite cello playing of Maya Beiser (surely a diva in her own right) and the virtuoso mallet work of Steven Schick. That seemed a more interesting to me, and in the end a more musically satisfying, direction. Kafka's meditation on the nature of art and its star practitioners is complex and strange, but it is also poignant and, oddly perhaps, very funny.

For an audience member who is about to hear music you’ve composed for the first time, is there anything about this piece you would like them to know?

I would suggest listeners feel free to imagine for themselves what a mouse diva might sound like. How an animal's squeaking might be, or might eventually become, musical. I think my Songs of Mouse People takes a journey back and forth from noise to music. Enjoy the ride.

What were the challenges and rewards of writing for this combination of instruments?

There are a few (not many) places where the sounds of a cello and vibraphone overlap. I tried to find those places and exploit them - sometimes by having the vibraphone use a bow to excite the bars of the instrument and in other places letting the cello be a kind of percussionist. But then I also let each instrument employ its own unique virtuoso and expressive abilities. Songs of the Mouse People is music for divas, and not only for those with tails.

In what ways were Maya Beiser and Steven Schick (who commissioned the piece) involved with you in the process of creating it?

I tend to withdraw into my own imagination when I am writing music. My consultation with Maya and Steven was just to check if what I created was actually playable. I was delighted by their technical and expressive musical mastery and their generous commitment to my work. [Their recording is available here.]

--
Stephen Harrison and Daniel Kennedy will perform Songs of the Mouse People on November 14 as part of SFCMP's concert Zone 2: indispensable morphology.

Martin Bresnick will give the keynote address at this year's Festival of New American Music in Sacramento on November 8. Other performances of his work during the festival include: Ballade (Left Coast Ensemble, Nov. 6), For the Sexes: the Gates of Paradise and Willie's Way (Lisa Moore, Nov. 7), and Every Thing Must Go (Iridium Saxophone Quartet, Nov. 7).

Zone 1: crisscrossing vectors

2011-10-13T17:33:00.000-07:00

October 2-3, 2011
A gallery from our first events of the season: the Contemporary Insights preview, and the opening night concert at Herbst Theatre featuring music by Josh Levine, Edgard Varèse, and John Luther Adams.

Steven Schick speaks with John Luther Adams
during the Contemporary Insights preview.

The audience meets with members of the ensemble
following the Insights performance.

The reception at ODC Dance Commons.

Steven Schick hosts the pre-concert talk [click to listen]
with Josh Levine (left) and John Luther Adams (right).

The ensemble performs John Luther Adams's
Clouds of Forgetting, Clouds of Unknowing.

SFCMP percussionist Christopher Froh.

Composers Josh Levine (left) and John Luther Adams (right)
celebrate with Steven Schick at the post-concert reception.

Concert Reviews: Zone 1

2011-10-06T15:53:00.000-07:00


Zone 1: crisscrossing vectors

Our opening night concert of music by Josh Levine, Edgard Varèse, and John Luther Adams received a number of reviews:

"...a forceful and stately performance in Herbst Theatre..." (Joshua Kosman, San Francisco Chronicle)
"As conductor, Schick elicited the clarity of [the] architecture from his eight performers..." (Stephen Smoliar, examiner.com)
"...intriguing, carefully performed, and evocative at the core — despite problematic packaging." (Jeff Dunn, SF Classical Voice)
"Steven Schick, the SFCMP’s new artistic director, led the ensemble with clarity." (Paul Hertelendy, artssf.com)

We welcome feedback to any of these reviews on our Facebook page. If you're interested in attending the remaining concerts this season, pro-rated subscription packages are available.
Click here to order online, or call (415) 392-4400.

Conversation with the Composer: Josh Levine

2011-09-29T14:31:00.000-07:00

Composer Josh Levine discusses his percussion solo Transparency (Part I), which opens the first concert of our 2011-12 season:

In what way did the poetry of Octavio Paz inform the composition of the piece?
Octavio Paz’s poetry was not really on my mind as I wrote the piece, except for the decontextualized, almost magically revelatory line “Mortalidad es transparencia” [mortality is transparency] from which the piece’s title derives. This thought had long fascinated and touched me, and it became all the more reassuring at a time when my mother’s passing was clearly imminent. The fact that she had introduced me to Paz’s poems years earlier just reinforced the meaning for me of those three words.

I’ve never actually tried to formulate a verbal interpretation of the idea that “mortality is transparency” and I hesitate to do so now, firstly because I don’t doubt that it could be understood in ways I haven’t imagined and, more importantly, because the very incantatory power of the phrase for me resides in its indefinable quality. Be that as it may, as I composed the piece I was thinking about it along the following lines. Mortality, the temporal finiteness of beings, makes things transparent in the sense that it enables apprehension of the world through our recognition of beginnings and endings, the “outlines” of existence. At the same time, the transparency afforded by our transitoriness leaves us open to conceive the immaterial and infinite. Beginnings and endings as markers of the eternal…a beautiful paradox that somehow resides at the core of my piece.

What inspired you to write for this particular combination of instruments?
It was precisely the paradox of trying to write personal, ‘expressive’ music for instruments that are not often treated as voices so much as colors, that intrigued me about this admittedly challenging combination of bass drum and four triangles. (I might add that maracas were likewise envisioned at one point for a later movement—also not exactly an instrument that one would ordinarily imagine in the realm of molto espressivo!) Registrally these instruments are at opposite poles of the percussion spectrum, yet they share some important characteristics: persistent resonance; a certain resistance to differentiated articulation; and, as I alluded to earlier, a traditional functionality that rarely acknowledges their potential to speak as a multidimensional voice. Here again, paradox infused my decision to combine them, and so I treat them as incredibly different and yet kindred spirits, two faces of the same musical personality struggling to surmount its limitations. To extend the metaphor further, I suppose that mortality is the ultimate of those limitations.

What prompted you to revise the piece in 2010, and what changes did you make?
To be honest, back in 2004 I’d composed the piece more quickly than I would have liked in order to meet a deadline, and I wasn’t convinced by some of the rhythmic gestures, especially at the beginning. I had my first opportunity to hear a public performance of the work in the fall of 2010, at which point I realized two things. One was that I would never finish Parts II through IV as originally planned and sketched. This cycle of movements had been conceived metaphorically as a ‘life cycle’ in honor of my mother, but when she died shortly after the first performance in Geneva, Switzerland, it rather took the wind out of my sails; her passing seemed to complete the cycle for me before I could complete it myself. Hearing Part I live for the first time finally confirmed this for me. At the same time, since I’d imagined the work in four parts, I realized that the first part sounded too fragmentary on its own. The ensuing revision thus involved extending the piece on both ends so as to ‘complete’ it. I did not add any new material, but in stretching the beginning and ending outward—again, those critical, indispensable margins!—I incorporated a subtle element of repetition whose potential significance I hadn’t understood when first working on the piece.

--
Daniel Kennedy will perform Transparency (Part I) on
Monday, October 3, 8:00 pm at Herbst Theatre.
Josh Levine will participate in the pre-concert talk with Steven Schick at 7:15 pm.
For more concert information click here.

Conductor’s Note

2011-09-22T18:04:00.000-07:00

The day that I stopped thinking of New York as my artistic home and realized I was a Westerner was among the most purely happy days of my adult life. That moment came, very memorably, as I read the opening passages of Wallace Stegner’s masterpiece, “The Angle of Repose.” In a fresh take on the Doppler effect, Stegner said that an approaching “train, say – or the future – has a higher pitch than the sound of the same thing going away.” Time, he was suggesting, like all approaching and receding objects, makes sound.

What a magnificent arc of thought! That you can hear life coming at you! That history is not a ponderous weight but an accelerating force, an upwardly arching glissando that connects the past to the present! Such an idea could only have been born in the West – in a place of such capacious dimensions that an individual must triangulate his or her position amongst crisscrossing vectors by sound. In a vast and complex space one hears rather than sees his or her place.

This concert – my first as Artistic Director of the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players – bears the mark of the West by presenting the “most western” pieces of three fertile musical imaginations.

Some might be quick to object that neither Edgard Varèse nor Josh Levine, two composers whose artistic foundations were laid in Europe, should be considered Westerners. But in the echoing thumps and tintinnabulations of Levine’s Transparency distance and loudness are confounded as they often are in large spaces. Are the soft bass drum sounds near and quiet, or are they enormous booms arriving at our ears across great distances? As for Varèse, Octandre marks an important point in his steady westward migration. If the tone poems of his Berlin period – now regrettably lost to history – prompted Varèse to move west to New York and create Amériques, the serpentine and questing lines of Octandre set the stage for his spiritual pilgrimage to the desert near Santa Fe, and by extension to the stark landscapes of later pieces like Déserts and Etude pour Espace. Each of the three terse movements of Octandre begins with a single inwardly rotating line – heard in oboe, piccolo, and contrabass respectively. And in each case that line is turned outward, westward one could say, to become an outbound vector within the corporeal intelligence that is Varèse’s sound world.

As tonight’s concert itself expands outward from shorter to longer works, we arrive at Clouds of Forgetting, Clouds of Unknowing, John Luther Adams’s hour-long essay on the perturbations of tonality scored for large mixed chamber ensemble. John is my lifelong friend, so I feel I can say that the traditional view of his music as being “about the environment” is not completely right. In my view John’s music is not about place, it is place. More than thirty years ago when John mobilized northward to join a growing army of environmentalists determined to protect Alaska’s wild spaces he found – as he has told me many times – his true home. But this home is not located in Fairbanks; it does not have a zip code. His home is any space large enough to defy facile navigation. In John’s music, most particularly in Clouds of Forgetting, Clouds of Unknowing, a listener is challenged to locate him or herself within a large musical space without the aid of the compass points of traditional compositional architecture. Using the simplest device – an outwardly expanding series of intervals, from unison through minor second, major second, thirds and onward to the octave – he creates sonic clouds and chorales of increasing harmonic permeability and emotional agency.

On another purely happy day five years ago – this one higher on my all-time list than the Stegner realization – I arrived in San Francisco on foot. I had walked from San Diego to propose marriage to Brenda, who lived in the city then, and who is now my wife. After six weeks and 700 miles of walking I summitted the final hill, and the whole city – the bay, the Marin Headlands, the Golden Gate – lay spread out before me. John’s music had been very much on my mind in those final days. At the time I imagined this was prompted by the seductive soundscape of coastal California. Now I see it was a response to the great joy of traversing an unknown space and of arriving finally at a beautiful and promising place.

- Steven Schick

From the Composer: John Luther Adams

2011-09-15T18:01:00.000-07:00

Clouds of Forgetting,

Clouds of Unknowing (1996)

Love is most nearly itself

When here and now cease tomatter.

—T. S. Eliot

Quantum physics has recently confirmedwhat shamans and mystics, poets and musicians have long known: the universe ismore like music than like matter. It may well be that our most fundamentalrelationship to the great mysteries is one of listening. Through sustained,concentrated attention to the fullness of the present moment, we listen for thebreath of being, the voice of God.

Cloudsof Forgetting, Clouds of Unknowingis a work of musical contemplation, an aspiration to consecrate a small timeand space for extraordinary listening. The work is titled after The Cloud of Unknowing, afourteenth-century Christian text which has much in common with the teachingsof contemplative traditions throughout the world, be they Jewish, Buddhist,Sufi, Native American, or other. The essence of the contemplative experience isvoluntary surrender, purposeful immersion in the fullness of a presence farlarger than we are.

TheCloud of Unknowing teaches that we can achieve communion onlythrough the Grace of divine Love. To prepare ourselves to receive this gift, wemust enter a state of quiet stillness, suspended between heaven and earth.Above—between us and God—lies a “cloud of unknowing” that our understanding cannever penetrate. Between ourselves and the world, we must create a “cloud offorgetting,” leaving conscious thought and desire below. In this timeless placeof forgetting and unknowing, we may begin to hear that for which we arelistening.

T. S. Eliot said it this way:

We must be still and stillmoving

Into another intensity

for a further union, a deepercommunion

Through the dark cold and theempty desolation. . .

John Cage once inquired of a musiciantrained in the classical traditions of India: “What is the purpose of music?”

Her reply made a profound impression onthe composer: “The purpose of music is to quiet the mind, thus rendering itsusceptible to divine influences.”

Of course music can have many purposes.But in order to quiet the mind we must give up our attachment to that which is“interesting,” that which diverts and engages our intellect. We must letcrumble the walls of boredom we build between our awareness and the fullness ofeach moment.

Cage was fond of saying that if he foundsomething boring for five minutes, he would try it for fifteen. If it wereboring for fifteen minutes, he would try it for half an hour. If it were stillboring for half an hour, he would try it for an hour, and so on. Sooner oflater, he said, we discover that everythingis interesting. Beyond interest and boredom lie “another intensity” and “adeeper communion.”

To find communion we must loseperspective. What, after all, is perspective but a way of removing ourselvesfrom experience?

A painter friend once showed me slidesof his paintings from Antarctica. Among these was a view of the Ross Ice Shelfthat struck me as one of the most compelling of his images I had ever seen. Thecomposition is stark in its simplicity. A large field of azure and lavender skyis separated from a lower field of somber purples and coal black by thestartling yellow edge of the ice.

Although it occupies the middle groundbetween the open water and the plateau of ice and sky, that serrated yellowline appears to float—emerging into the foreground only to recede again intothe middle ground and the distance. The result is a continual shifting betweenvertical and horizontal, here and there, near and far.

“What makes this happen?” I wondered. Isit the interrelationships of the shapes? The relative weights and masses of thelarge color fields? The vivid contrast of the jagged line?

In the same portfolio was another imageof the same portion of the Ross Ice Shelf, painted from a vantage point only afew hundred feet away from the first. Despite breathtaking hues, this paintingstruck me as less effective. Initially I couldn’t say why. But my eye keptreturning to a rock outcropping in the lower right-hand corner. Finally itoccurred to me that this was the crucial difference.

The outcropping defines the foreground.In doing so it fixes the ice edge in the middle distance, freezing itsmysterious floating quality at a specific point in space. Because of theoutcropping, the second painting projects a more definite sense of the almostincomprehensible scale of the Antarctic landscape. At the same time it removesone from the full presence of the place. The country is so large it seems to disappear,as if viewed through too wide a lens.

The first painting has no definition offoreground. It invites no fixed perspective. By not telling us precisely wherewe are standing, it invites us to travel freely within the full dimensions ofan ambiguous space—from the farthest horizon to a veil of colored mistsuspended just before our eyes. This painting is so powerful because it createsa presence that demands our participation. It requires us to explore anddiscover for ourselves an imaginary space grounded in a remarkable naturallandscape. I aspire to a similar experience in music.

In Western music melody and harmony arethe equivalents of figure and ground. Together they constitute a kind ofmusical perspective, which evolved parallel to that of Renaissance painting. Inthe musical textures of Clouds ofForgetting, Clouds of Unknowing I wanted to lose musical perspective, toblend line and chord into a single sphere of musical space. Clouds of shortmelodic cells are superimposed on expansive harmonic clouds of the same tones.Figure becomes ground in dense clouds of expanding, rising lines. Groundbecomes figure in the glacial movement of large harmonic clouds, which (as thelistener enters the suspended time-frame of the music) begin to sound melodic—likeexaggeratedly slow chorales.

Near the end of the piece elongatedpiano arpeggios rise above sustained harmonic clouds in the strings andwoodwinds. But the chords are simply echoes of the arpeggios, extending andamplifying the effect of the piano’s sustain pedal.

Much of my recent work has explored thenatural intervals of the harmonic series, in just intonation and othernon-tempered tunings. But Clouds is areturn to the rich complexities and ambiguities of equal temperament andchromatic modes. This is my most complete and direct statement to date of apersonal harmonic idiom that has developed over the course of many years.Formally, the work describes a single, expansive harmonic arch—moving over thecourse of an hour from unisons and minor seconds, through the succession ofequal-tempered intervals, to major sevenths, and finally to the perfect clarityof octaves.

A somewhat unlikely pair of ghostshaunts this music: Morton Feldman and Anton Bruckner. These two have more incommon than might first meet the ear.

Bruckner, we are told, was a shy,simple, and retiring man of deep Christian faith. In contrast, Feldman was anurbane and outspoken man of strong opinions. Although he joked that he aspiredto be “the Jewish Mozart,” it’s not clear to me what role the practice ofJudaism may have played in Feldman’s life. But once in conversation, when hecomplained that most contemporary artists seemed to be in some form or other of“show business,” I asked him: “What’s your business?”

After a long, pregnant pause, he repliedwith a single startling word: “Religion!”

For me, both Bruckner and Feldman areessentially religious composers. Both worked with expansive scales of time andspace. Both were romantic idealists who—even at their most passionate andsensuous moments—aspired to transcend self-expression through concentratedimages, clarity of sound, breadth and balance of form. Both Feldman andBruckner created music that is not so much a language of tones as anarchitecture of sounding images, a sonic sculpture of transcendence.

One of the great powers of music is thatit can mean nothing and anything, sometimes at once. Living in Alaska for mostof my creative life, I’ve come to measure my own work and all human creationsagainst the overwhelming presence of the place itself. My music has long beengrounded in a strong sense of place and a deep response to the landscapes ofthe far north, exploring a territory I call “sonic geography. But thelandscapes of Clouds are moreessentially sonic and geometric than geographic in nature.

In this work I wanted not to compose a piece of music, but to create a wholeness of music with no extra-musicalreferences—a sonic presence somehow equivalent to that of a vast landscape.Still (perhaps unavoidably for me), the sound of this music has a certaincoldness, clarity, aridity, and starkness reminiscent of the light, atmosphere,and landforms of the Arctic.

I began work on Clouds immediately after the death of my father, in early 1991. ByMarch of that year I had completed a forty-minute fragment for large orchestra.The press of other commitments forced me to set this aside. Over the next fiveand a half years I returned to Cloudsas time allowed, following as it evolved through various forms and instrumentations.I worked on it throughout 1994 during a fellowship from the Foundation forContemporary Arts, finally completing it in late 1995.

In composing Clouds I was determined to sustain an uncompromising faith in themusical materials, surrendering self-expression for trust in the instrumentsand the essential richness inherent within their sounds. In retrospect, Ibelieve the only significant compromises in this music resulted from thelimitations of my own concentration and imagination.

From the book Winter Music

Available here

John Luther Adams will discuss his work in person with Steven Schick at these upcoming events:

Contemporary Insights

Sunday, October 2, 4:30 p.m. (more info)

Zone 1: crisscrossing vectors

Monday, October 3, 7:15 p.m. preconcert talk (more info)

Welcome Back!

2011-09-08T15:37:00.001-07:00

With the first concert of our 41st season less than a month away, we return to a regular schedule of weekly blog updates. You'll find news, reviews, interviews, guest articles, and more posted here and on our Facebook page.

It's the start of a new era for the Contemporary Music Players as we welcome Steven Schick for his first season as Artistic Director. Schick was recently the subject of a NY Times article that called our upcoming season "five fascinating programs of modernist staples and premieres." He'll be in New York Sep. 14-17 conducting and performing James Dillon's Nine Rivers, before returning to start rehearsals for our opening night.

With five concerts at Herbst Theatre, and a Contemporary Insights performance at ODC the day before each one, the best way to catch all the events this season is to order a subscription. Subscribe by September 15th, and you'll receive an invitation to a special pre-concert reception with Steven Schick on opening night. Subscribers also receive 2 free guest tickets for that concert, so you can share a very memorable experience with friends!

Subscribe online at City Box Office, or call (415) 392-4400.
Complete season information is available here.

Summer Blog Schedule

2011-04-21T11:04:00.000-07:00

Starting today, our blog begins a summer hiatus. The regular schedule of weekly posts will return this fall, as we approach the beginning of the 2011-12 concert season. There will be occasional news updates here in the meantime, but you can also keep in touch with SFCMP in these ways:

• Become a fan of our Facebook page.
• Subscribe to our email newsletter for concert reminders, information about special events, guest composer spotlights, and more.
• Join our mailing list to receive a season brochure and postcard reminders for each concert.
• Renew your subscription, or purchase one for the first time.

SFCMP's 2011-12 Programs

2011-04-14T10:27:00.000-07:00

Our upcoming season has just been announced. Single tickets go on sale in the fall, but subscribe now and receive substantial savings and other benefits. Subscriptions include pre-printed tickets to all five concerts and all five Contemporary Insights events and cost $130 (regular), $108 (senior) and $45 (student). Order online at City Box Office, or by phone at (415) 392-4400.

More detail about individual works is available here (pdf).

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Subscription Series Concerts
Herbst Theatre, 8:00 p.m.
Pre-concert talks with Steven Schick at 7:15 p.m.

Monday, October 3, 2011
Zone 1: in which crisscrossing vectors enliven the ear and oxygenate the sonic space
Steven Schick conducts. Special guest: John Luther Adams.
Josh Levine, Transparency (Part I) (2004, rev. 2010)
- Daniel Kennedy, percussion
Edgard Varèse, Octandre (1923)
John Luther Adams, Clouds of Forgetting, Clouds of Unknowing (1991-95)

Monday, November 14, 2011
Zone 2: in which an indispensable morphology is identified
Special guest: Martin Bresnick.
James Tenney, Critical Band (1988)
Martin Bresnick, Songs of the Mouse People (1999)
- Stephen Harrison, cello; Daniel Kennedy, vibraphone
Frederic Rzewski, Bring Them Home! (2004)
David Lang, Illumination Rounds (1982)
- Roy Malan, violin; Julie Steinberg, piano
Brett Dean, Intimate Decisions (1997)
- Nancy Severance, viola
John Cage, Credo in Us (1942)

Monday, February 27, 2012
Zone 3: in which an inscription is erased but leaves a trace
Steven Schick conducts. Special guest: Michelle Lou.
Luigi Dallapiccola, Piccola Musica Notturna (1954)
Michelle Lou, paralipomena (2011, world premiere, commission)
Salvatore Sciarrino, Le Voci Sottovetro (1998)
Pascal Dusapin, Comœdia (1993)
Iannis Xenakis, Palimpsest (1979)

Monday, March 26, 2012
Zone 4: in which momentum and position co-exist within the physicality of a musical performance
Steven Schick conducts. Special guest: Olly Wilson.
Katharina Rosenberger, scatter 2.0 (2010)
Brian Ferneyhough, Bone Alphabet (1992)
- Steven Schick, percussion
Olly Wilson, new work (2011, world premiere, commission)
Geoffrey Gordon, Fancywork (2007)
- Graeme Jennings, violin; David Tanenbaum, guitar
Heinz Holliger, Ma’Mounia (2002)
- Christopher Froh, percussion

Monday, April 30, 2012
Zone 5: in which discussing a plan leads to some confusion
Steven Schick conducts. Special guests: Edmund Campion, Nathan Davis.
Aaron Gervais, Culture No. 1 (2006)
- Karen Gottlieb, harp; Julie Steinberg, piano and laptop
Liza Lim, Philtre (1997)
- Graeme Jennings, violin
Nathan Davis, The Bright and Hollow Sky (2004)
Mark Applebaum, Pre-composition (2006)
- For 8-Channel Playback
Lou Harrison, Serenade (1978)
- David Tanenbaum, guitar; William Winant, percussion
Edmund Campion, Small Wonder (2012, world premiere, commission)

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Contemporary Insights: Music and Conversation
ODC Dance Commons Studio B, 4:30 p.m.

A companion to the subscription season, the Contemporary Insights: Music and Conversation series includes five intimate preview events devoted to the understanding and appreciation of new music. On each occasion, the ensemble presents one piece from the upcoming subscription series concert program, and Steven Schick moderates an open dialogue between composer, musicians, and the audience. Each hour-long performance is followed by a reception with complimentary wine and snacks.

Sunday, October 2, 2011
Selections from John Luther Adams’s Clouds of Forgetting, Clouds of Unknowing
Instrumentation to be selected from: 2 flutes, 2 clarinets, 2 horns, trumpet, trombone, vibraphone, marimba, celesta, piano, 2 violins, viola, cello, bass

Sunday, November 13, 2011
John Cage’s Credo in Us
Instrumentation: piano, 2 percussion, radio

Sunday, February 26, 2012
Iannis Xenakis’s Palimpsest
Instrumentation: clarinet, oboe, bassoon, horn, piano, percussion, two violins, viola, cello, bass

Sunday, March 25, 2012
A new work by Olly Wilson
Instrumentation: flute, clarinet, bassoon, piano, percussion, violin, viola, cello

Sunday, April 29, 2012
Edmund Campion’s Small Wonder
Instrumentation: mixed chamber ensemble and electronics

40th Anniversary - Concert Reviews

2011-04-07T09:18:00.000-07:00

SFCMP rehearses Terry Riley's In C

A collection of reviews from our April 4 concert:

Joshua Kosman, San Francisco Chronicle:
A 40-year history as rich and diverse as that of the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players isn't easily summed up in a single birthday program. But Monday's anniversary concert in Herbst Theatre covered at least a few of the bases, including pieces large and small...
Read more

Stephen Smoliar, examiner.com:
Last night the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players (SFCMP) gave their 40th Anniversary Gala Concert in Herbst Theatre, celebrating their formation as a group on March 25, 1971...
Read more

Looking ahead, our 2011-12 season has just been announced (and was mentioned on San Francisco Classical Voice) this week. There will be five concerts at Herbst Theatre, and five informal Contemporary Insights: Music and Conversation events at ODC Dance Commons. The season is entitled Zones of Intensity (a term coined by Edgard Varèse), and was programmed by newly-appointed Artistic Director and conductor Steven Schick with input from the musicians of the ensemble.

Highlights include: three world premieres commissioned by the ensemble from California-based composers Olly Wilson, Michelle Lou, and Edmund Campion; an hour-long piece by John Luther Adams; and significant works by Iannis Xenakis, Lou Harrison, John Cage, Salvatore Sciarrino, and others. In March 2012, Steven Schick will give the 20th anniversary performance of Brian Ferneyhough’s percussion solo Bone Alphabet, which was written for Schick and premiered by him in 1992.

Subscription orders can be placed online at City Box Office, or by phone at 415-392-4400.

Conversation with the Conductor

2011-03-31T13:35:00.000-07:00

Guest conductor Sara Jobin arrived in San Francisco this week to conduct at our 40th Anniversary Gala concert, and also to work with SF Opera on the upcoming Ring cycle. After the first rehearsal of Salvatore Sciarrino’s wind quintet Il silenzio degli oracoli, she shared some of her thoughts on the unique experience of preparing this performance, and about working with SFCMP's musicians.

You’re well-known as a conductor in the opera world, where you direct works that are large-scale in form and structure and complex in their production onstage. Do you take a much different approach to conducting a small chamber music ensemble?

The biggest difference, honestly, is in the structure of the musical relationships. Besides that, amount of rehearsal time and complexity of sheer forces involved. I’ll take my most recent opera production as an example, since it was a premiere. The orchestra only had a few short rehearsals to throw it all together, and our relationship was in the framework of a traditional hierarchy. I was their boss, my job was to get good performances and a live recording out of them in a very short time and their job was to play well so that they would get hired again in the future, since they were all freelancers. At no point in the process did I ask them their interpretive opinion, though maybe if we had had more time there could have been interesting dialogues between the players and the composer, who was present.

By contrast, at my first rehearsal with the Players tonight, we determined which spots worked better led by the flutist rather than the conductor, and at one point a musician very politely pointed out that my 4 beat pattern was looking confusingly like a 2 pattern from the side. Meanwhile, I helped the rehearsal process by beating time, having the score in front of me and knowing where things were supposed to be together that weren’t yet. We’re all equals in the chamber music relationship – though I am grateful for and always inspired by the way the Players talk to each other, and me, in rehearsals. Some decisions we arrived at by group discussion. Just trying to imagine that at an opera rehearsal makes me laugh. Can you imagine a bunch of Valkyries trying to decide how the music should go?

There’s also exponentially more rehearsal time for this concert, per minute of music performed. For the Sciarrino, 8 hours for four minutes, versus 11 ½ hours for a two hour opera. That’s a ratio of 120:1 compared to roughly 6:1. That’s why the relationships are structured so differently; a conductor in front of an orchestra saves time.

How do I prepare differently – well, with an opera there are words. So I learn the words, and I sing the music, and then I figure out what the orchestra needs from me. With the two pieces on this concert, there aren’t even melodies – it’s more about texture, and in the Furrer, rhythm. A lot of my preparation for the first rehearsal is almost mathematical – translating the unusual performance techniques from Italian or German, then seeing how things fit together, what I should beat, what determines tempo and how else I can be useful.

In general, what do you enjoy about performing contemporary music?

It’s the reason for me to be a conductor – to bring someone’s music to life, to help the composer develop and/or bring something new to the ears of an audience. To find, appreciate, and foster the development of talent in our lifetimes. I’m not only interested in classical music but there’s a specific role for me there.

What are some of the specific challenges contained in each of the two works you’ll be conducting in our upcoming program?

The Furrer [Spur, for piano and string quartet] is incredibly hard. For everyone. Difficult techniques of playing the instruments, combined with complicated rhythms and very fast tempi. You can’t just play what’s written – you have to figure out what it means first. And then you have to practice for a long time.

The Sciarrino also has extremely difficult playing techniques, but once you get them the rest isn’t so hard. The parts are actually not printed very clearly – it’s amazing how much that matters! Important for composers to know: if you want people to play your piece, make it easy for them to read.

Terry Riley’s best-known piece, In C, doesn’t require a conductor in concert. In fact, it could be said that to have a conductor lead it would defeat its very purpose – which is to let the musicians collectively (and spontaneously) determine the pace and expression of each individual performance. When you participate in this piece as a member of the ensemble, how do you think the experience will relate back to performing more structured music as a conductor?

I’ll tell you after we rehearse it – this will be a new experience for me too. I’ve done a fair amount of Philip Glass which counts as minimalism but this is really different – much more in the moment, almost improvisatory. It will be fun to play, and I won’t be leading. My role may be just to facilitate rehearsals as necessary, in cooperation with Willie Winant who has performed and recorded it several times.

Anything else you think audiences might like to know?

We deliver a finished product that’s pretty polished, but there are some funny moments getting there. Like tonight after Rufus played his multiphonics – which are produced by overblowing on the instrument so much that it produces four tones instead of one – anyway Rufus, who is one of the most incredibly talented musicians I know, and can play Mozart like nobody’s business - he played this and it sounded vaguely like . . . a cow . . . and we all looked at each other and laughed. “Is that what the composer wanted?”

Or a moment with Larry, who brought a horn that specifically sounds good when you blow air through it, because he barely gets to play it in this piece, but he’s supposed to blow into it a lot and slap the mouthpiece with his tongue. He got water somewhere in there in all that tubing and spent several minutes trying to find it, emptying one valve after another (“condensation,” they call it, despite a well-named composition called Quintet for Wind and Spit) but he couldn’t find it so eventually he gave up. We made a few brass jokes and then continued with the rehearsal.

Or in the Comments That Conductors Are Prone To Making department, there was “it sounds like wind in a garden with birds . . .” to which one musician politely responded, “So you mean I should play after the fourth beat, right?” Ah, the rehearsal process.

We hope you enjoy the final product! See you at the concert.

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Contemporary Insights: Music and Conversation
Sara Jobin will conduct Beat Furrer's Spur, and moderate an audience discussion. Wine reception afterward.
Sunday, April 3 at 4:30 pm
Studio B at ODC Dance Commons, San Francisco
Tickets available at the door ($10 regular, $5 student/senior)
RSVP on Facebook

Fortieth Anniversary Gala Concert
Sara Jobin will conduct music by Salvatore Sciarrino and Beat Furrer. Program also includes music by Charles Boone and Terry Riley. Post-concert party in the Green Room open to all ticket holders.
Monday, April 4 at 7:30 pm
Herbst Theatre, San Francisco
Buy tickets | RSVP on Facebook

Upcoming Performances

2011-03-24T10:08:00.000-07:00

Join us for one or both of our upcoming events. We hope to see you there!

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Sunday, April 3, 2011
Contemporary Insights: Music and Conversation
Sara Jobin, conductor/moderator
4:30 pm, Studio B at ODC Dance Commons

Beat Furrer, Spur
The ensemble will perform the Swiss-Austrian composer's 17-minute Spur, for piano and string quartet, and explore the work in a discussion with the audience. This hour-long event will be followed by a reception with complimentary wine and snacks.

$10 Regular, $5 Senior/Student
Tickets available at the door. No one turned away for lack of funds.
RSVP on Facebook | More information

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Monday, April 4, 2011
Fortieth Anniversary Gala Concert
Sara Jobin, conductor
7:30 pm, Herbst Theatre

Charles Boone, Elementary Particles, Part I (2011, world premiere)
Roy Malan and Susan Freier, violins
Beat Furrer, Spur (1988, West Coast premiere)
Salvatore Sciarrino, Il silenzio degli oracoli (1989)
Terry Riley, In C (1964)

The evening's world premiere arrives fresh from the hand of an old friend of the ensemble, co-founder Charles Boone. In a change from the original program, his Elementary Particles, Part I replaces a postponed new work by Olly Wilson. Next, the ensemble will import Beat Furrer's incisive, rambunctious style with the West Coast premiere of his Spur, for piano and string quartet conducted by Ms. Jobin.

A dynamic wind quintet (also conducted by Ms. Jobin) opens the second half in Salvatore Sciarrino's transient but transcendent Il silenzio degli oracoli, the last of the Sicilian master's Sei Quintetti. Terry Riley's legendary genius will inspire a large-ensemble performance of his 1964 classic In C for a riotous closing to the ensemble's 40th anniversary season.

Everyone attending our April 4 concert is invited to a gala celebration afterward in the Green Room. Music will be provided by special guest DJ Dennis DeSantis, remixing selected recordings from the SFCMP catalog.

$30 General, $25 Senior, $10 Student
Tickets available through City Box Office 415-392-4400
Buy tickets | RSVP on Facebook | More information

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Questions? Call 415-278-9566 or visit www.sfcmp.org

Meet the Composers

2011-03-17T11:07:00.001-07:00

Click to read a bio of each composer featured in our upcoming April 4 concert:

Photos: Riley (Betty Freeman), Furrer (Penelope Messidi)

More New Music in the News

2011-03-10T10:54:00.000-08:00

A review of our performance on SFSU's Morrison Artists Series:

Stephen Smoliar, examiner.com:
A scheduling conflict prevented my attending last Monday’s subscription concert by the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players (SFCMP), so I was delighted to have the opportunity to hear most of that program performed again...
Read more

Other recent news that we're excited to share:

Steven Schick, the newly-appointed Artistic Director of the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, was an integral part of several recent performances in New York. The New York Times reviewed his appearance at Lincoln Center's TullyScope (conducting Webern and Xenakis) as well as at the Armory's Tune-In Music Festival (as founder of the percussion ensemble red fish blue fish, in a monumental performance of Inuksuit by John Luther Adams). Interestingly, the latter article mentions an earlier review - of a performance of Iannis Xenakis’s Persephassa given last summer in Central Park - which also mentions Schick.

Our next opportunity to hear him perform in the Bay Area is right around the corner, with the hour-long solo show Schick Machine (created by the Paul Dresher Ensemble) running for two weeks at Z Space/Theater Artaud, March 16-27.

Ticket information available here.

Tradition, Influence, Evolution - Concert Reviews

2011-03-03T15:50:00.000-08:00

A collection of reviews from our February 27-28 concerts:

Joshua Kosman, San Francisco Chronicle:
One sign that a new-music ensemble is doing something right is when the group's commissions constitute the highlights of its offerings. That was the happy news out of an otherwise up-and-down concert in Herbst Theatre on Monday night by the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players led by guest conductor Donato Cabrera...
Read more

Matthew Cmiel, SF Classical Voice:
Monday night SFCMP presented an amazing concert, called “Tradition, Influence, Evolution.” The opening work was Du Yun’s Vicissitudes No. 1, which displayed beautiful orchestral timbres and colors, particularly in the wailing of the sax and the gorgeous combination of pizzicato high strings with high vibe and high notes on the piano...
Read more

Cy Ashley Webb, Stark Insider:
Stanford lecturer and SFSound composer Erik Ulman frequently pleads with his students to “give the new music a chance.” With Erik’s injunction in mind, I headed out to review the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players’ February 28th concert at the Herbst...
Read more

A review of the Sunday afternoon Contemporary Insights event:

Cy Ashley Webb, Stark Insider:
This afternoon was an excellent first entrée into the world of new music, called by others, avant garde, contemporary classical or simple modern. The San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, the region’s preeminent new music ensemble, premiered Four Movements by Ronald Bruce Smith...
Read more

Upcoming Performances

2011-02-24T22:47:00.000-08:00

Join us for one or both of our events this week. We hope to see you there!

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Sunday, February 27, 2011
Contemporary Insights: Music and Conversation
Donato Cabrera, conductor
4:30 pm, ODC Theater at the Dance Commons
Special guest: Ronald Bruce Smith

Ronald Bruce Smith, Four Movements (2010, world premiere, SFCMP commission)
The ensemble will perform the piece, and explore the work in a discussion with the audience. This hour-long event will be followed by a reception with complimentary wine and snacks.

$10 Regular, $5 Senior/Student
Tickets available at the door. No one turned away for lack of funds.
RSVP on Facebook | More information

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Monday, February 28, 2011
Concert: Tradition, Influence, Evolution
Donato Cabrera, conductor
8:00 pm, Herbst Theatre
Pre-concert talk at 7:00 p.m. with special guests Du Yun, Brian Current, and Ronald Bruce Smith; moderated by Richard Festinger.

Du Yun, Vicissitudes, No. 1 (2002)
David Tanenbaum, steel string guitar
Brian Current, Strata (2010, commission, world premiere)
Ronald Bruce Smith, Four Movements (2010, commission, world premiere)
György Ligeti, Trio for Violin, Horn, and Piano (1982)
Roy Malan, violin - Lawrence Ragent, horn - Julie Steinberg, piano

$30 General, $25 Senior, $10 Student

Buy tickets | RSVP on Facebook | More information
Questions? Call 415-278-9566 or visit www.sfcmp.org

Conversation with the Conductor

2011-02-17T13:06:00.000-08:00

In early February, composer Aaron Gervais interviewed Donato Cabrera, Resident Conductor at the SF Symphony and guest conductor for the February 28 SFCMP concert. In the interview, Cabrera discusses the differences between the American and European conducting traditions, the dangers of overspecialization, challenges facing the new music community in the United States, and how he thinks works by living composers should be programmed.

AG: You're an extremely diverse conductor, having led everything from chamber ensembles to orchestras, operas, ballets, youth orchestras—even ensembles performing for silent film. How did this eclecticism come about? Do you find that these diverse experiences as a conductor have shaped the way you interpret music and work with ensembles, or do you find that each setting requires its own musical world, separate from the others?

DC: This eclecticism came about through my desire to create the same experience that a young, aspiring conductor in Europe goes through at the beginning of their career. The education and initial professional opportunities for young conductors have become far too specialized in the U.S. The reason why most of the top American orchestras and ensembles have European-trained conductors at the helm is not because of the exotic accent, it's that they simply have better training for the myriad challenges and circumstances one is bound to encounter as a conductor.

AG: Within the different types of conducting that you do, what are some of the challenges that you seek out, things that you find particularly rewarding? What are some of your goals and aspirations for the next few years?

DC: I seek collaboration and inspiration. I truly believe that if I stay focused on these two things, opportunities will continue to reveal themselves.

AG: Working with so many different kinds of ensembles, you must also have some strong opinions on how to interact with different kinds of audiences. Do you present yourself and/or the music differently for a new music audience like the one that attends SFCMP concerts?

DC: Overspecialization has been a detriment to the arts, not a boon. It has created schisms in our audience that are simply unnecessary. Why can't one concert have a string quartet by Haydn, a symphony by Méhul, a piano sonata by Cage, songs by Nico Muhly, and madrigals by Gesualdo? I would argue that a concert with these very pieces could easily be billed as contemporary. Through our lack of imaginative programming, we have pigeonholed ourselves and our audiences into virtual irrelevance.

AG: I happen to know all the composers on this program fairly well personally (except for Ligeti). It seems to me there are certain common threads that run through their music, such as an emphasis on timbre. Most also have worked substantially with electronics. Do you find your interpretation of these works has changed because of how they are programmed together?

DC: No. While I agree that there are definitely commonalities found between these pieces, my goal is to amplify the uniqueness of the composer's voices, setting them in high relief from one another.

AG: What are your thoughts on working with living composers? Do you prefer to get some guidance from the composer on interpretation, or would you rather work through the score on your own and then incorporate composer feedback as appropriate?

DC: I am always grateful if the composer can be present during the rehearsal process. I remember feeling that it was crucial that John Adams was present for the first musical rehearsals of Doctor Atomic, for which I was the conductor.

AG: It is interesting for me, as an expat Canadian, to see two Canadian composers, Brian Current and Ronald Bruce Smith, giving premieres on this concert. Both have been fairly successful this side of the border and up north. Du Yun, a New Yorker, has been well received in both countries as well. Overall, however, I've found that there isn't a lot of interaction between the U.S. and Canadian new music scenes. What's so different about these composers' music that allows them to cross international borders so well? Do you find there is some unique quality or characteristic about their music that makes it more "international"?

DC: I would guess that the reason that Current and Smith have had success in the U.S. has a lot to do with the connections they established when they came here to study but, more importantly, because they are fantastic composers! I have also found that there is an artistic boundary between the two countries. I don't have an explanation for this.

AG: You've played a leading role in promoting new music in the United States via your work with the American Contemporary Music Ensemble and others. What do you think are some of the biggest successes and failures that the new music community has had in bringing the works of living composers to American audiences? What do you hope to see more or less of in the future?

DC: I am very proud of the fact that I was part of the formation of ACME...I remember coming up with the name ACME on the A-train in New York at about 1:00 a.m., and I immediately came home, wrote an email suggesting the name to my cohorts, then soundly fell asleep. Like many contemporary music ensembles, ACME has been crucial in performing the work of composers that deserve to be heard. One of our original tenets was to present a completely new piece with a work that we considered a modern classic. I think it is crucial to show that today's composers are part of a musical continuum, helping us to better understand our current state through reflections of and comparisons with the past.

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Contemporary Insights: Music and Conversation
Donato Cabrera will conduct Ronald Bruce Smith's Four Movements, and moderate an audience discussion with the composer. Wine reception afterward.
Sunday, February 27 at 4:30 pm
ODC Theater at The Dance Commons, San Francisco
Tickets available at the door ($10 regular, $5 student/senior)
RSVP on Facebook

Tradition, Influence, Evolution
Donato Cabrera will conduct music by Du Yun, Brian Current and Ronald Bruce Smith. Program also includes Ligeti's Trio for Violin, Horn, and Piano.
Monday, February 28 at 8:00 pm
Herbst Theatre, San Francisco
Buy tickets | RSVP on Facebook

Introducing Steven Schick

2011-02-10T12:33:00.000-08:00

We are pleased to announce the appointment of internationally renowned conductor and percussionist Steven Schick as our new Artistic Director. For the past thirty years Schick has championed contemporary percussion music as a conductor, performer, and teacher, by commissioning and premiering more than one hundred new works by composers as varied as Brian Ferneyhough, David Lang, and Iannis Xenakis. Schick will serve as both conductor and chief artistic administrator, and our 2011-12 season will feature Schick’s programming for the subscription series at Herbst Theater beginning in October.

"The forty-year tradition of the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players establishes it as one of this country's most venerable and important ensembles for contemporary music; and the terrific musicians of the group and their commitment to cutting-edge musical ideas means that it is also an ensemble of the future,” he said. “What a thrill it is for me to now be part of an organization that is both roots and rhizomes. We know where we're from; where and how we'll grow next is the exciting part!"

In great demand as a performer, Steven Schick will make a number of appearances in New York in February. He is to perform John Luther Adams’ Inuksuit and Louis Andriessen’s Worker's Union as part of the eighth blackbird-curated Tune-In Festival at the Armory and as conductor and percussionist in The International Contemporary Ensemble’s Alice Tully Hall performances. In March, he appears in Schick Machine, an evening length solo musical theater work created especially for him by the Paul Dresher Ensemble at San Francisco’s Theater Artaud. Schick’s percussion ensemble, red fish blue fish, will be featured in the new Peter Sellars production of George Crumb’s Winds of Destiny in June at the Ojai Festival in Ojai, California and at Ojai North! presented by Cal Performances in Berkeley.

“Steven Schick is an exciting, brilliant, and extraordinary contemporary musician,” says Richard Lee, President of the Board. “The unanimous choice among a field of 90 candidates, Steven brings an international reputation and a lifetime of engagement with contemporary music. We look forward to his inspiring leadership of our gifted ensemble.”

Percussion has often played a central role in contemporary music and there is no doubt that percussionists are more and more moving from within the ensemble to the podium. In a recent article about this trend, New York Times critic Allan Kozinn even proclaimed that “drums are the new violins,” going on to make a point that the percussion discipline is excellent training for understanding the dense polyphonic textures of today’s contemporary music. Steven Schick is just such a case, a musician who artfully combines conducting and percussion performance to weave a unique international career. In addition to working with SFCMP, Schick is Music Director and conductor of the La Jolla Symphony and Chorus, a post he has held since 2007.

Mark Swed from the Los Angeles Times described a recent performance of Xenakis’s Rebonds as featuring “the intelligence of a computer, the body of an athlete, and the pose of a dancer” and his performances of Stockhausen’s Zyklus “were enthralling” according to The Times in London. Also highly regarded for his teaching, Schick serves as Distinguished Professor of Music at the University of California, San Diego and as Consulting Artist in Percussion at the Manhattan School of Music.

He was the percussionist of the Bang on a Can All-Stars of New York City from 1992-2002, and from 2000 to 2004 served as Artistic Director of the Centre International de Percussion de Genève in Geneva, Switzerland. His book on solo percussion music, The Percussionist's Art: Same Bed, Different Dreams, was published by the University of Rochester Press; his recording of The Mathematics of Resonant Bodies by John Luther Adams was released by Cantaloupe Music; and a 3 CD set of the complete percussion music of Iannis Xenakis, made in collaboration with red fish blue fish, was issued by Mode Records.

From his roots on a family farm in Iowa, Schick’s first experience with music began as a drummer in a rock band. When he entered the University of Iowa, he realized that, in his words, "contemporary percussion music was rewriting all the rules. It was the newest, most exciting, and most provocative music around. I said good-bye to the rock band (and to my parents’ aspirations to have a doctor in the family) and embraced the raw, vital sounds of percussion music."

Textures and Layers

2011-02-03T16:15:00.001-08:00

From SFCMP program note writer Beth E. Levy, on Brian Current's Strata:

Brian Current’s music brims with energy—sometimes with the propulsive rhythms of minimalist music, sometimes with a more delicate sense of flux, but almost always with a sense of motion and playfulness about the treatment of time and texture. These features have won him numerous honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Barlow Prize for Orchestral Music and Italy’s Premio Fedora for his chamber opera Airline Icarus (2010).

Current’s temporal plasticity is especially compelling in his large ensemble scores For the Time Being (1999) and Symphonies in Slanted Time (2005). In the latter, Current explains, the music “is always speeding up or always slowing down. Rather than write music for a steady metronome, I wondered if it were possible to make the change in tempo the normal state of the music...using rejuvenation to create constantly changing textures.”

He has put these principles to a variety of expressive uses, in works such as Whirling Dervish (2010) or the orchestral tone poem Kazabazua (2002, revised 2006), which describes the “flow and restlessness” of a partially underground river in the Gatineau hills north of Ottawa.

Current’s virtuoso handling of instrumental ensembles stems in part from his work as a conductor. He has served at the helm of new music groups (the Esprit Orchestra, American Composers Orchestra, Ensemble Nouvel Moderne) and about 12 symphony orchestras. In addition, perhaps linked to his experience on the conductor’s podium, is a very sensitive, almost tactile treatment of musical texture—the interplay between discrete lines of material or groups of players in the moment of performance. This preoccupation is readily apparent in This Isn’t Silence (1998, revised 2001), which lends its title to a 1997 CD of his music released by Centredisques. It can also be heard in Current’s Concertino for flute, string orchestra and three flutes dispersed around the concert hall. Here, he “imagined blanketing the hall of with the sound of flutes positioned at the back of the room. At times they act as distant relatives to the solo line but more often they fill out the sound with tumbling gestures of their own.”

A similarly imaginative handling of texture can be seen and heard in Current’s new score, Strata. The title refers to the layering of musical material found throughout the work. “Often there are layers or patterns that overlap with themselves,” he says. “Musical shapes are also created by widening glissando lines played by the strings. In writing the piece I was looking for music that was very energetic and virtuosic, but also moments that are calm despite the surging activity.”

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Tradition, Influence, Evolution
Program includes the world premiere of Strata.
Monday, February 28 at 8:00 pm
Herbst Theatre, San Francisco
Buy tickets | RSVP on Facebook

Conversation with the Composer

2011-01-27T17:26:00.001-08:00

Ronald Bruce Smith discusses his new work Four Movements, which will receive its world premiere on February 28:

Each of the Four Movements has a descriptive title and an instruction to the players (for example, the first movement Waves is indicated “lightly, shimmering”), and they each create a unique musical image. How do the individual movements fit into the concept of the piece as a whole?

Unlike other multiple movement compositions I have written, there is not a programmatic connection between the movements. The aim then was to create contrast and balance among the movements. Regarding the movements themselves, the first one is principally centered around the violin part and, for a good amount of it, the other instruments are either reinforcing the violin part or are working off of it in some way. The title of this movement, Waves, has to do with the shapes of the lines (I believe one can even get a visual sense of this from looking at the score). The “lightly, shimmering” is both a performance indication as well as a representation of how I imagined the color of the sound to being analogous to light playing on water. The opening of the movement begins with a ripple. It then moves towards waves of larger amplitudes that gradually subside into a gentler though multi-hued contour that is constructed through the ancient device of hocket.

The second movement is titled Caoidh which is the Scottish Gaelic word for lament. Around the time that I composed the work, I had been reacquainting myself with the Highland Clearances, a very dark chapter in Scottish history. Among many things, it made me think again about immigration and how dire the circumstances must be for any group of people to uproot themselves from their homeland in order to move to a distant unknown land and an uncertain future. At the same time, I had been reacquainting myself with whistle music from both Irish and Scottish Gaelic cultures. The most accomplished whistle players can add an enormous range of expression to their playing through ornamentation, by fluttering their fingers over the sound holes producing an amplitude vibrato, and by releasing the energy they are putting into the instrument creating microtonal slides. Taking this as a cue, in order to add to the expressiveness of the music and to the anguish I wanted to convey, I began to employ microtones to the melodic material. The microtones were written intuitively rather than from a predetermined system.

The third movement, Scherzo, is obviously lighter in nature. It is a moderately fast composition that is built on two simultaneously recurring rhythmic cycles, one in quadruple divisions of the pulse and the other in triple divisions of the pulse. Each of the cycles is constructed from smaller, asymmetrical subdivisions using twos and threes. Toward the end of this movement, things seem to fall apart rhythmically and otherwise.

The fourth movement, November, is something of a reflection on that month of the year as experienced in northern regions. Unlike the earlier months of the fall during which the trees are filled with the rich colors of the changing leaves and the light in the sky can still contain some warm hues, in November the leaves are gone leaving only the limbs of the trees while the light in the sky begins to carry colder hues. November landscapes are a strong reminder of the transient nature of our existence on earth.

How did you arrive at the instrumentation of Four Movements, including your selection of the percussion? What are some of the non-traditional techniques used?

The instrumentation was arrived at after a conversation with Adam Frey, who was responsible for this commission and to whom, along with the SFCMP, I’ve dedicated the work. I wanted to use an ensemble with a good amount of color since I had spent the previous several years composing either solo pieces with electronics or pieces for timbrally homogeneous ensembles such as string quartet. It seemed logical then, and practical, to lean toward the ubiquitous new music ensemble of flute, clarinet, piano, percussion, violin and cello. Since I already have a couple of pieces for that particular ensemble in my catalogue, I decided to replace the piano with the harp. This immediately gave the ensemble a very different color. Besides the range of colors that the performer can get from the harp through the wide array of techniques they develop for performing notes with their fingers, harpists are also able to elicit a large range of unusual colors from the instrument. Some of these techniques include making thundering sounds through various percussive ways of striking the strings with the hands, by making whistling sounds by sliding a finger up and down on a string, or by striking the string with objects like a metal rod, wire brushes or percussion mallets. I have employed several of these techniques in Four Movements. Moreover, the harp, which in one form or another can be found throughout the world, allows one to reference the music of many different cultures.

While contrast was a large concern for the four movements, one thing that ties different movements together is the percussion. In the first movement, the marimba is used almost entirely throughout except toward the end where one hears a glockenspiel and then a snare drum being played with wire brushes. It is paired with the third movement which begins and ends with the snare drum being performed with wire brushes. This one also relies heavily on the marimba and it employs a couple of woodblocks, in order to fill out rhythmic materials at times, as well as a flexatone at the very end. In the second movement, the percussion that is used is a vibraphone and bass drum played with brushes. The vibraphone is paired with the harp. In the fourth movement, those two instruments are also used in much the same way though the percussionist is also required to play a few notes on the harmonica. I used two harmonicas in a percussion ensemble and electronics piece that I wrote a few years ago for the Manhattan School of Music Percussion Ensemble. I later had some ideas about using it to create harmonies with, perhaps, bass clarinet multiphonics which is what I wound up doing here. One other thing about the second and fourth movements is that the harpist is required to play a large tam-tam from time to time.

A somewhat unusual thing in the instrumentation is that toward the end of the third movement the flutist and the clarinetist are required to spray compressed air canisters. While I had been thinking of a way to augment the sound of some of the breath noises that occur at the end of this movement, I received news that the Los Angeles composer Arthur Jarvinen had passed away. I did not know Art but one of his pieces, Egyptian Two-Step, which I heard on CD some years ago, made an impression on me. In it, Jarvinen uses the sound of the spraying of aerosol cans to express rhythmic ideas. This then is a little homage to Arthur Jarvinen and his richly inventive imagination.

Four Movements was commissioned by SFCMP. Did the fact that our ensemble will present the premiere of the piece to an audience here in the Bay Area inform your compositional process?

I began attending SFCMP concerts in 1990 when I was graduate student at UC Berkeley and I have had the good fortune of having had the ensemble perform three of my works over the past 15 seasons. I am very familiar with the ensemble, and the high quality and dedication that they bring to their performances. It is one of the most highly respected ensembles in the country in this regard as well as for the immense breadth of the repertoire they perform. So, what I knew was that I did not have to make any compromises and that the SFCMP ensemble would be able to bring to life what I had in mind.

Contemporary music audiences in the Bay Area are among the most knowledgeable in the country. The fact that a number of highly adventurous ensembles, orchestras and presenters are able to thrive there is a testament to this. So, for me it is a real pleasure to know that the first audiences for this composition will be in the Bay Area. I lived in the Bay Area for about a decade and it is always special for me to return and to engage with the people and the culture there.

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Contemporary Insights: Music and Conversation
Ronald Bruce Smith will participate in an informal preview of Four Movements, including audience discussion and a wine reception afterward.
Sunday, February 27 at 4:30 pm
ODC Theater at The Dance Commons, San Francisco
Tickets available at the door ($10 regular, $5 student/senior)
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Tradition, Influence, Evolution
Program includes the world premiere of Four Movements.
Monday, February 28 at 8:00 pm
Herbst Theatre, San Francisco
Buy tickets | RSVP on Facebook

Meet the Composers

2011-01-20T14:45:00.000-08:00

Click to read a bio of each composer featured in our upcoming February 28 concert.

Photos: Ligeti-Peter Andersen, Current-Andrew Adams, Du Yun-Denise Anderson

Composers as Inspiration

2011-01-13T15:33:00.000-08:00

Artist and former SF Contemporary Music Players board member Ward Schumaker has shown in San Francisco, Shanghai, UC Berkeley, Los Angeles, Charleston, and Nashville. Schumaker’s work is included in the collections of painter Eric Fischl; television commentator Rachel Maddow and photographer Susan Mikula; designer Woody Pirtle; fashion/costume designer Han Feng; landscape architect/sculptor Topher Delaney; composer Allen Anderson; illustrators Dan Page and Jean-Marc Lanusse; and poet Sean Finney; among others. As part of his association with SFCMP, he has designed our postcards for the past five years, and began creating artwork for our program covers last season.

You're invited to the opening of Composers, a show of Schumaker's recent paintings. Among the composers featured in the exhibition are Gavin Bryars, Igor Stravinsky, Philip Glass, and others. The show will hang February 6-March 12. For information and to see many more examples of his work click here. (pictured: Louis Andriessen)

Gallery Opening: Thursday, February 10
5:30-7:30
George Lawson Gallery
49 Geary St., San Francisco

New Board Members

2011-01-06T13:58:00.001-08:00

The Board of Directors of the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players recently elected two new members:

Karen Gottlieb performs regularly with the San Francisco Symphony as second harpist, and has appeared on their tours and on many recordings and DVDs. She has been a member of the San Francisco Symphony's AIM ensembles since 1992, and the harpist of the Skywalker Recording Symphony. She served for 20 years as principal harpist with the California Symphony, until 2008. She received a Bachelors degree from the University of Washington and a Masters in Performance from the Cleveland Institute of Music. She is on the faculty of San Francisco State University and Mills College, and is a certified repair technician of the Lyon Healy & Salvi Harp Company.

Russ Irwin is currently a member of the Ojai Music Festival Board of Directors, and the former Chair of the San Francisco Symphony Concerts for Kids Program. He was also a former member of the Oakland Symphony Chorus Board of Directors and a research toxicologist at Bayer Corporation, now retired.

Print Project Update

2010-12-23T18:25:00.000-08:00

Electric Works has finished the run of 45 prints of Hung Liu's Dirge for our print project! The custom portfolio made for each print is shown above. Watch this 9-minute feature on KQED's Spark about the artist, and the fascinating story behind her work.

Download the flyer to learn more about the print project.

An End of Year Letter

2010-12-16T16:49:00.000-08:00

From Board President Richard Diebold Lee and Executive Director Carrie Blanding:

As the year 2010 comes to a close, and our 40th Anniversary Season continues, we are eager to share with you some new developments at the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players and to ask for your financial support.

We have three stimulating concerts yet to come, including two subscription concerts at Herbst Theatre, and an unprecedented invitation to be the first local ensemble to perform on the distinguished Morrison Artists Series at San Francisco State University. You will not want to miss any of them! (As an aside: the Morrison performance will include a new piece, as well as an opportunity to experience some of the pieces from our February concert for a second time – a rare treat!)

More exciting news is that we plan to appoint a new Artistic Director in the spring. This will complete our leadership team, and you can expect an infusion of new perspectives and energy in our programming in future seasons. The Board and the Players are delighted by this prospect, and we are confident that you will be, too.

An unanticipated benefit of our search for an Artistic Director has been the letters we have received from leaders of new music from around the world, heaping praise on our ensemble for its consistent adventurousness, broad reach, and excellence of performance. We should all be proud to be associated with this internationally known and admired group.

As we celebrate our sterling reputation and anticipate our bright future, we want to encourage you to make an especially generous year-end donation to the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players. Your gift will reflect both your appreciation of all we do to bring the best of new music to the Bay Area and your enthusiasm for our future prospects. If you have already made a donation this year, please consider an extra gift in the spirit of the season!

More 40th Anniversary Memories

2010-12-09T18:58:00.000-08:00

As part of the 40th Anniversary Season, we're publishing a series of reminiscences in each concert program from the many people who have been involved with SFCMP over the years. The following are more stories that were first published in our 30th Anniversary Season program book, and reprinted at last month's opening night concert.

Hall Goff, SFCMP trombonist:

In 1983, when we were in rehearsal for the Varese/Webern Centennial concert at the Opera House, my son Benjamin asked if he could accompany me to rehearsal to meet Frank Zappa. At that time, Ben was six, and both of us were great Zappa fans. Ben sat quietly enough, amusing himself, but at last a break came in the rehearsal, and I brought him up to Frank to introduce him. “What music of mine do you know?” Frank asked. “Reuben and the Jets,” says Ben. Zappa burst out singing the bass guitar introduction and continued right into the vocal line. Then he picked Ben up by the arms and swung him around. My son and I were both thrilled.

Wayne Peterson, composer:

From the moment of its inception to the present the SFCMP have played an enviable major role in bringing a wide variety of new music to the Bay Area audiences. By so doing they have contributed immeasurably to the artistic culture of the community. Whatever success I have had as a composer is in no small way due to the encouragement and many fine performances they have given my music.

John Adams, composer:

The SF Contemporary Music Players keep alive the notion that new ideas often come in unfamiliar and mysterious packages.

… when I first came to the Bay Area, the new music scene was a bizarre and wonderful hive of musical experiment, and small ensembles devoted to the performance of the avant garde proliferated almost everywhere. Among these ensembles the Contemporary Music Players was the flagship band. They coined the term “bring your own pillow,” a phrase which typifies the spontaneous, informal nature of their founding philosophy. It was at their concerts that I, as a young composer, first heard the works of George Crumb and Charles Boone and Richard Felciano. Today, as music has changed, so has the performing landscape, and many of these groups have disappeared. But the SFCMP continues to flourish with its devoted core of listeners and its skilled, passionate players.

Remembering 40 Years of SFCMP

2010-12-02T18:38:00.000-08:00

As part of the 40th Anniversary Season, we're publishing a series of reminiscences in each concert program from the many people who have been involved with SFCMP over the years. We'll begin with some of the stories that were first published in our 30th Anniversary Season program book, and reprinted at last month's opening night concert. (photo: SFCMP in 1989)

Jean-Louis LeRoux, Founding Director:

I can see in my mind, as if it were yesterday, the three of us, Marcella DeCray, Charles Boone and myself, walking along a street of the East Bay after a concert of new works organized by Charles (Bring Your Own Pillow) in which Marcella and I had been participating, and discussing the program. I remember stopping all of a sudden and saying, “There is no other concert of contemporary music except these ones. Milhaud is gone, the Mills Performing Group is no more, and I think we should organize your idea, Charles, in a more professional fashion.”

This is how the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players was born, but for a while we kept the original B.Y.O.P. name. Charles left almost at once to spend long years in Europe, and we were left to our own devices, Marcella and I. In a very short time the non-profit corporation was registered in Sacramento by Marcella, and a series of concerts in the Grapestake Gallery on California was planned. Of course, we needed some money. The San Francisco Foundation listened to our plans and we were on our way. Marcella, with the help of Larry Campbell, kept my wild dreams on a more realistic basis. And we played the music of the timee and we had a small audience and we were full of energy and enthusiasm. We progressed from the Mayers’ Gallery to the Museum of Modern Art. We weathered crisis with the assistance of a wonderful board and we survived and grew…

… We believed then and still believe today in that famous line of one of the pilgrims to Santiago de Compostela: ‘No hay camino…’ And we kept on going forward without really knowing where to, with the help of a great board and of an extraordinary group of dedicated musicians, the ‘Players’. I won’t mention any name, the list would be too large, but I am immensely grateful to all. Along the way, we had some incredible landmarks – I am thinking of the Webern-Varèse-Zappa concert and of the mega-productions – three-ring circus in the Museum. We never lost our faith in Music, the greatest invention of mankind…

Jane Roos, first Board Chairman:

Early in 1978, Jean-Louis LeRoux, the Music Director of the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, whom I knew only through his wife, Marta Bracchi-LeRoux, asked me to help in putting together a Board of Directors for the organization. The ensemble had just received a grant from the San Francisco Foundation and a Board of Directors became a requirement for the funding. By May 6, a remarkable group from the musical world of San Francisco was assembled for its first meeting, including Agnes Albert, Charles Boone, Larry Campbell, Susan Wanty and Alexander Fried, in addition to Jean Louis and Marcella DeCray. Two members, Gunther Schuller and Alan Stein were unable to attend, and Frances Varnhagen joined shortly thereafter. That was truly a memorable moment and the beginning of organizational growth.

The prime charge for a board is fiscal responsibility for the organization. Consequently some of my most memorable moments involved depths of despair over financial crises, especially at the beginning, or heights of delight over exciting concerts and rave reviews, but all were associated with a sense of accomplishment and fun.

The event featuring Frank Zappa on Feb. 9, 1983, conducting music of Varèse, his favorite composer, was a special high point, both exciting and scary, as we rented the San Francisco Opera House for a concert to be conducted in part by Zappa and hosted by Grace Slick. The hall had never been so full of rock fans giving Zappa traditional rock concert ovations. When he walked on stage, he responded with great dignity to the shouts from the audience and then hushed the crowd with, “Let’s get serious,” while his enormous body guards on the front row stood up facing the audience. He turned to the musicians, raised his baton, gave the beat audibly, and conducted the first piece - Ionization - with strict marking of time. It was a daring, exciting venture for a small organization – fiscally especially – but in the end was a rewarding experience financially, and gave the Players a lot of exposure.

Another long remembered occasion was the recording of the first record by the Contemporary Music Players, which, to save money, was done at Roos House after a concert, and between midnight and six AM, to minimize street noises. All appliances were turned off, including the furnaces, to eliminate other vibrations and sounds; the recording equipment filled the hall, and all went well until the musicians got numb with cold and the flute was too cold to stay in tune. With the help of hot water and a little heat, the recording was successfully completed.

The concerts at the Museum of Modern Art in conjunction with the educational department of the Museum provided the opportunity to stage a lot of remarkable events. One, also to raise funds, assumed a carnival atmosphere with various groups of musicians stationed around the galleries, along with coffee wagons, food stations and beverage carts. The audience sauntered from one performance to another, timed so that one could hear all the mini-concerts.

Another kind of memorable event took place at a point when financial disaster loomed. During a concert intermission in the Green Room, Board Member Claire Harrison Reed gave a stirring spur-of- the- moment plea for help. Several hats were spontaneously produced and passed in the audience with remarkable results.

Finally, there have been many memorable moments musically. From the earliest concerts there was always a focus to the programming and a very intelligent kind of neutrality in the choices, which distinguished the pieces and made them unforgettable experiences. Along with an emphasis on American works, contemporary music from all corners of the globe jostled for the audience’s attention, and some musicians were even brought to perform here, from such disparate places as Canada, South America, and Yugoslavia. Hans Werner Henze’s Voices became the experience for me that was the real turning point in my interest in contemporary music. Very early, Jean-Louis LeRoux dared to play Polish pieces, the music of Henryk Górecki, Genesis I. We were treated to wonderful performances of Morton Feldman’s The Rothko Chapel, Aaron Copland’s Sextet, and the unforgettable partially staged performances of Pierrot lunaire by Schoenberg, which was repeated many times and became for a while a sort of signature piece for the Players. How rewarding it has been!

New Print Project Announced

2010-11-17T17:01:00.000-08:00

Hung Liu's Dirge

The Contemporary Music Players has always had a close relationship with modern visual art, going back to its very foundation as B.Y.O.P. (Bring Your Own Pillow). In the early days, concerts actually took place in galleries, where new music was enhanced by new images as the audience sat on the floor.

Our collaboration with renowned artist Hung Liu and the Electric Works gallery presents an opportunity for one form of art to support another - the purchase of a print from this series directly funds the future programming of the Contemporary Music Players.

Hung Liu's painting Dirge captures a poignant moment: the harvest of a living tree for its wood, which will find new life in the form of an ancient Chinese stringed instrument, the pipa. In the foreground, a musician with a pipa performs the somber lament that gives the painting its title.

A limited edition of 45 numbered archival prints (18" x 18") will be produced by Electric Works. The print is mounted in a custom-made hardcover portfolio with cloth cover, suitable for storage or display. The print itself is removable, to allow for optional framing.

This exciting collaboration is made possible by Hung Liu's gift of the artwork, the efforts of Richard Lang and everyone at Electric Works, and the underwriting of Susan York. Thanks to these generous contributions, the entire purchase price of each print will support the ensemble.

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More information about ordering a print is available here or by contacting SFCMP at 415-278-9566.

Points in Recent History - Concert Reviews

2010-11-11T12:33:00.000-08:00

Monday night's concert at Herbst Theatre was a memorable beginning to our 40th Anniversary Season - here's what some of our reviewers had to say about it.

Joshua Kosman, San Francisco Chronicle:
One of the many ways of categorizing music is based on the relative importance it gives to motion - does the music take an active approach to rhythm, or is it content to stand still?

The five pieces on Monday's program by the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players covered that gamut pretty well, beginning in near-stasis and gradually working up to a frenzy of activity. And the more the music moved, the more interesting and rewarding it became...
Read more

Stephen Smoliar, examiner.com:
The San Francisco Contemporary Music Players (SFCMP) began their 40th Anniversary Season last night at Herbst Theatre with a program entitled Points in Recent History. Presumably the “recent history” was that of SFCMP itself, although the “points” did not appear to have been selected with any historical narrative in mind; and two of them could be said to occupy the “margins” of history, one at either end...
Read more

Aaron Gervais, composer:
SFCMP kicked off its 40th season with a characteristically eclectic program that reminded me why the concert producer has been able to draw loyal subscribers for decades. The pieces on the program showed an appreciation for the phenomenon of the concert as a social event belonging to a specific community, and the concert reflected the eclectic spirit of American new music...
Read more

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Share your feedback to the concert and these reviews on our Facebook page.

Our Season Begins

2010-11-04T17:46:00.000-07:00

Join us at one or both of our season-opening events this weekend. We hope to see you there!

Sunday, November 7, 2010
Contemporary Insights: Music and Conversation
4:30 pm, ODC Theater at the Dance Commons
351 Shotwell St., San Francisco CA

John Cage, Seven (1988, co-commission)
The ensemble will perform the piece, and explore the work in a discussion with the audience. This hour-long event will be followed by a reception with complimentary wine and snacks.

Tickets: Regular $10, Senior/Student $5
Available at the door or with a subscription.

Monday, November 8, 2010
Concert: Points in Recent History
8:00 pm, Herbst Theatre
Pre-concert talk at 7:00 p.m. with special guest Gabriele Vanoni
401 Van Ness Ave., San Francisco CA

Jérôme Combier, Essere pietra (2004, U.S. premiere) and Heurter la lumière encore (2005, U.S. premiere)
John Cage, Seven (1988, co-commission)
Gabriele Vanoni, Space Oddities (2008, West Coast premiere)
- Tod Brody, flute
Philip Glass, Music in Similar Motion (1969)

Buy tickets ($10/$25/$30) or subscribe

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For more information call us at 415-278-9566 or visit www.sfcmp.org

Art and Music

2010-10-28T16:33:00.000-07:00

From SFCMP program note writer Beth E. Levy, on the work of Jérôme Combier:

The composer writes, “Vies Silencieuses is closely linked to the Villa Medicis in Rome for which I conceived this project in 2003 and where I gave it its definitive form between 2004 and 2006. These ‘lives’ were inspired above all by the pictorial universes of several very different artists. Yet I believe I recognized in each of them something which spoke to me directly and echoed my preoccupations as a composer–what I might term patience, ‘the making use of the world,’ appearance and effacement.”

Two artists in particular captured Combier’s imagination while he was in Italy: Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964), a renowned twentieth-century still-life and landscape painter, and Giuseppe Penone (b. 1947) best known for his nature-inspired sculptures and mixed-media work.

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SFCMP will perform two works from Vies Silencieuses on November 8 at Herbst Theatre.
Beth E. Levy will present a pre-concert talk at 7 pm.
more information

From the Composer

2010-10-21T13:00:00.000-07:00

Gabriele Vanoni discusses his piece for solo flute, and the challenge of writing music for one performer:

Space Oddities comes as probably the first piece in my recent music where a single detail, a simple and "naked" object, becomes the main feature in the definition of the whole form. In this piece I am trying to describe, in a coherent and consistent musical context, the peculiarities and differences – or, better said, "oddities" - of an object like an arpeggio (that can be actually heard in the piece) when it is put in different time and speed and in different spaces. Thus a silent and still environment could hide the object and gradually reveal it in its delicacy, as much as a violent expansion would reveal a dramatic side, and so forth…when it comes to filtering, repetitions and dissolution throughout the piece.

Solo pieces are probably the most difficult to write, as many composers before myself have said. It is like being without a safety net, and silence and space necessarily become the other instruments you're writing for. This is why I stole (and pluralized) Bowie's famous song, as I felt that even if we are talking about a different "space", nevertheless it is the other real protagonist of this piece.

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Tod Brody will perform Space Oddities on November 8 at 8 pm in Herbst Theatre. Gabriele Vanoni will participate in the pre-concert talk at 7 pm.
more information

New Audio Clips

2010-10-14T17:22:00.000-07:00

This week we updated the multimedia section of our website with new audio clips, taken from the archival recordings of last season's concerts. Revisit some of the innovative works we performed by clicking here:

Ed Campion, 600 Seconds dans le vieux modèle
Morton Feldman, the viola in my life (1)
John Harbison, The Seven Ages
Charles Wuorinen, Trombone Trio
Philippe Leroux, De la texture
Donnacha Dennehy, As An Nós
Ken Ueno, Archaeologies of the Future
Oscar Bianchi, Zaffiro
Brian Ferneyhough, Flurries
Michael Jarrell, …more leaves…
Helmut Lachenmann, Trio fluido
Philippe Hurel, Figures libres
Manolis Manousakis, One minute of silence

Meet the Composers

2010-10-07T12:16:00.000-07:00

Click to read a bio of each composer featured in our upcoming November 8 concert.

Cage: photo by Betty Freeman.
Combier: by courtesy of Jérôme Combier / Editions Henry Lemoine, Paris.

Welcome Back!

2010-09-30T12:25:00.001-07:00

A message from Richard Lee, President of the Board of Directors:

On behalf of the board, staff, and players of the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, welcome back to the regular weekly schedule of our blog. We are working hard to bring you a terrific 40th Anniversary Season. During the coming weeks we will present guest posts from musicians, composers, teachers, and other noteworthy figures. Our blog will keep you posted about new music, upcoming events, and more. And, of course, we will bring you the latest on what’s happening inside the organization. Visit us often, we welcome your attention and participation.

Summer hiatus

2010-05-13T09:48:00.000-07:00

Dear Readers,
Our 2009-10 season has come to a close, and we will now be taking a break from posting on this blog. We may post occasional updates during the summer, and we'll resume our regular weekly schedule in the fall.
We hope to see you next year for our 40th Anniversary Season!

2010-11 Season Announced!

2010-05-06T13:32:00.000-07:00

2010-11 Season Events

Next season, San Francisco Contemporary Music Players will celebrate its 40th Anniversary with three subscription series concerts, and three Contemporary Insights: Music and Conversation events. In addition, the ensemble has been invited to perform a fourth concert as part of the prestigious Morrison Artists Series at San Francisco State University. Each concert is packed full of innovative new music that looks to the past, present, and future.

Subscription tickets go on sale on Wednesday, May 12 at City Box Office.

SUBSCRIPTION SERIES CONCERTS:

CONCERT #1
Monday, November 8, 2010
Points in Recent History
8:00 p.m. Herbst Theatre
7:00 p.m. pre-concert talk
Unconducted. Special guest: Gabriele Vanoni.

Program:
Jérôme Combier, Heurter La Lumière Encore (2005), Essere Pietra (2004) (U.S. premieres)
John Cage, Seven (1988, SFCMP co-commission)
Gabriele Vanoni, Space Oddities (2008, West Coast premiere)
Tod Brody, flute
Philip Glass, Music in Similar Motion (1969)

CONCERT #2
Monday, February 28, 2011
Tradition, Influence, Evolution
8:00 p.m. Herbst Theatre
7:00 p.m. pre-concert talk
Donato Cabrera conducts. Special gusts: Du Yun, Ronald Bruce Smith, Brian Current.

Program:
György Ligeti, Trio for Violin, Horn, and Piano (1982)
Du Yun, Vicissitudes, No. 1 (2002)
Ronald Bruce Smith, new work (2010, commission, world premiere)
Brian Current, Strata (2010, commission, world premiere)

CONCERT #3
Monday, April 4, 2011
Fortieth Anniversary Gala Concert
7:30 p.m. Herbst Theatre
Post-show Gala Celebration event in the Green Room!
Sara Jobin conducts. Special guests: Terry Riley, Olly Wilson.

Program:
Olly Wilson, new work (2011, commission, world premiere)
Salvatore Sciarrino, Il silenzio degli oracoli (1989)
Beat Furrer, Spur (1988, West Coast premiere)
Terry Riley, In C (1964)

SPECIAL EXTRA CONCERT:

Sunday, March 6, 2011
Morrison Artists Series Concert
3:00 p.m. McKenna Theatre, SF State University
Program TBA
A FREE event.

CONTEMPORARY INSIGHTS: MUSIC AND CONVERSATION:

Sunday, November 7, 2010
John Cage's Seven
4:30 p.m. ODC Dance Commons
A co-commission from 1988.

Sunday, Februrary 27, 2011
A new work by Ronald Bruce Smith
4:30 p.m. ODC Dance Commons
Conducted by Donato Cabrera.

Sunday, April 3, 2011
Beat Furrer's Spur
4:30 p.m. ODC Dance Commons
Conducted by Sara Jobin.

Reviews of the April 26 concert

2010-04-29T07:11:00.000-07:00

Monday's concert was a huge success! Thanks to everyone who came and enjoyed the music with us!

Here are the reviews we've had so far:

Financial Times by Allan Ulrich
San Francisco Classical Voice by Jessica Balik
SF Classical Music Examiner by Stephen Smoliar

Plus, a blog review by composer Aaron Gervais.

April 26 concert

2010-04-22T07:00:00.000-07:00

Our final events of the season are right around the corner. Here are the dates, the times, and a list of the pieces in concert order with a quick summary of the concert:

April 25, 2010
4:30pm
ODC Dance Commons (351 Shotwell St., SF)
Contemporary Insights: Music and Conversation
Christian Baldini conducts and moderates a performance of Philippe Hurel's Figures libres for eight players. Complimentary snacks and wine to follow.

April 26, 2010
8:00pm (pre-concert talk at 7:15pm)
Herbst Theatre
His Own Space of Freedom (concert)

Manolis Manousakis, A Time to Break Silence: Speaking Truth to Power (2008, World Premiere)
Rufus Olivier, bassoon
Tan Dun, Water Music (2004)
Guo Wenjing, Parade (2003)
Philippe Hurel, Figures libres (2001)

The concert opens with a short video - part of a piece of music by Manolis Manousakis honoring Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and grappling with the legacy of the civil rights movement.

Two unusual percussion pieces follow. In Academy Award-winner Tan Dun's Water Music, four percussionists (Daniel Kennedy, Christopher Froh, Loren Mach, and Benjamin Paysen) use water-based instruments to perform a piece that is as beautiful visually as it is aurally. In Parade, three percussionists (Kennedy, Froh, and Mach) simultaneously play six Chinese opera gongs arranged on a small table. A video camera will be suspended above the table, and live feed will be projected above so that the audience can see the intricate choreography of the musicians' hands. (Read more about these pieces in Christopher Froh's recent blog entry.)

The closing piece is Philippe Hurel's Figures libres, for eight players. Hurel writes, "What I wanted to show in the title is that certain emblematic figures escape the constraints given at the beginning: the idea that it is possible for an artist or an athlete... to find, within a formal discourse or a network of constraints, his own space of freedom."

A Time to Break Silence: Manousakis and Olivier pay tribute to Martin Luther King

2010-04-15T06:00:00.000-07:00

There is one piece on our upcoming concert that we still haven't introduced on our blog. That piece is Manolis Manousakis's A Time to Break Silence: Speaking Truth to Power, for solo bassoon and video. The idea for the piece, which references a famous speech by Martin Luther King, Jr., came from SFCMP bassoonist Rufus Olivier, who will also perform the piece.

Olivier's performance on SFCMP's April 26 concert at Herbst Theatre will be the World Premiere of this new work.

Read below for Manousakis's program note and a bio of Rufus Olivier, edited by SFCMP program note writer Beth E. Levy.

The composer writes: “If only he had lived.... This composition draws its inspiration from the life and tragic death of Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., one of the most prominent leaders of the American Civil Rights Movement, and the youngest person to accept the Nobel Peace Prize for his work as a peacemaker, a promoter of non-violence, and an advocate for the equal treatment of all races.

“As with many major public figures, a nation-wide one minute of silence in memory of the deceased was observed. In several parts of the country, however, more often than not, this minute was not honored. In some schools it was the headmasters who didn’t allow it, elsewhere it was white pupils; racism and the oppression of black people were widespread in the late ‘60s.

“Forty years later, King’s fight for an equal society is as relevant as ever, with evidence showing that there is still a considerable racial gap in our society. Social issues abound in the domains of security, human rights and education. The scarcity of black political leaders of King’s or Malcolm X’s stature is evident and this has an obvious effect on the everyday lives of hundreds of thousands of people especially the poor–Hurricane Katrina’s effects on New Orleans is one sad example.

“The notion of ‘silence’ in the composition’s title is twofold: On one hand there’s the silence not honored in memoriam of King. On the other hand, it’s the silence instead of an answer that people receive from their political leaders when burning questions are asked. Why did people die in New Orleans? What turns everyday people into rioters? Why doesn’t social welfare work? What underlies police brutality cases? King himself had delivered a speech entitled ‘Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence.’ His speech could not be more up to date.”

Rufus Olivier is the principal bassoonist with the San Francisco Opera and the San Francisco Ballet, and former bassoonist with the San Francisco Symphony, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra. He is a founding member of the Anchor Chamber Players, the Midsummer Mozart Orchestra, and the Stanford Wind Quintet. He has been guest soloist with numerous orchestras throughout the United States, Japan, and France, and has premiered many new works for the bassoon. A member of the music faculties of Stanford University and San Francisco State University, he is also known for his many movie and TV soundtracks including the Grammy-winning soundtrack Elmo in Grouchland. In 1993, Olivier received the Seal of The City and County of San Francisco, as a recognition of “Exemplary Accomplishment on the Occasion of Black History Month.” In 2005 he won the Award of Merit from the United States Postal Service and was featured in a cover story for the magazine International Musician, published by the American Federation of Musicians. Olivier joined the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players in 1991.

An interview with Christian Baldini

2010-04-08T07:00:00.000-07:00

Guest conductor Christian Baldini sits down with Aaron Gervais to talk about his inspirations as a conductor and composer.

PART 1

How did you start conducting and how did you start composing? Were these two interests connected for you, or were they separate things that you both happened to like?

I actually started composing when I was little. I was a pianist and was completely mad about Mozart. So I only wanted to play Mozart on the piano -- no other composers. Then I started composing myself, which opened up the spectrum to a broader range of composers.

Conducting came later. I was in desperate need of somebody to conduct my music, so it ended up being me and I enjoyed it very much. Some of my fellow composers in college started asking me to conduct their music, and that is how it all started. I founded my own orchestra in Buenos Aires and there I was conducting.

You have said elsewhere that you actively promote the music of great Argentine composers, such as Piazzolla and Ginastera, and clearly your background as an Argentine musician has been influential for you. Do you think growing up with this music helped to cultivate your personality as a conductor/composer? Or in other words, say you had grown up in the same family, but in a place like Davis, or maybe Buffalo, NY. Would you still have become the same musician?

This is an interesting question. Growing up in different places of course influences who you are and it instills flavors and idiosyncrasies that you would not otherwise necessarily have. I had the fortune of having as my piano teacher a great pianist called Juan Pedro Carletto, who aside from being a phenomenal classical pianist, was also an incredible tango pianist. I would go to his house and we would wander around playing different pianos (he restored pianos too) all over the place.

I attended college in Buenos Aires, at the school that Ginastera himself founded (Catholic University of Argentina). So there was a big tradition both for Ginastera's music, and for the experimental composers that had influenced my teachers there. I was exposed to all corners of musical aesthetics, which really facilitated me.

I also think it is important to consider what one listens to. I try and surprise myself with new music all the time. And by new I mean completely new. Not just academic/art music, but also popular music. For me, to just listen to classical, romantic, and contemporary music would be the equivalent of a chef only eating gourmet food. I mean...we all like a bit of bread and butter occasionally. So I very much enjoy listening to Radiohead, jazz, folk, tango and more.

You've stated that you want to conduct opera. What attracts you to the opera medium? Have you conducted any new operas?

Opera is the most wonderful combination of all the arts. Music is clearly its heart, but the intrinsic connection with literature, painting, design, dance, and theatre make it particularly attractive to me. It is a medium that will never be obsolete. It can always refresh itself and it is so flexible that it can be expanded and contracted without losing its identity. I also love the human voice. It is the most expressive of all instruments. I have enjoyed wonderful collaborations with the Aldeburgh Festival in England, which was founded by Benjamin Britten in 1947, and for which I have conducted Britten's The Rape of Lucretia.

For your own compositions, do you like conducting them, or would you rather sit back and let someone else do it? Do you write music that is to be played without conductor?

I have gone through different stages. As I said before, I started by conducting my own music. Then I went through several years of hearing my music conducted by other musicians, and I must say I find it important for a composer to experience this both ways. Hearing somebody else do your music gives you a different insight about what you do.

I also enjoy conducting my own music. Conducting and composing go really well together, one feeds the other. I have also written music to be played without conductor. I have done quite a lot of chamber music and solo music. I wrote a solo violin piece called Whimsical Spheres that is rather theatrical: The violinist completely owns the stage and there is some humming as well as a relationship between his/her movement and the sound.

PART 2

What were some of the challenges involved in preparing the Hurel for this concert? [Philippe Hurel's Figures libres, played by SFCMP on April 25 at ODC, and on April 26 at Herbst Theatre.]

Figures libres is a fascinating piece. It has a rhythmical energy that is difficult to describe. So working in rehearsals we will concentrate very much on bringing all this brightness out of the page. It is a work full of details and it will be a beautiful task to bring them out. I am very much looking forward to this collaborative work with the musicians in the ensemble. As a conductor, I feel a big part of my job is to help inspire the players.

How do you address the question of interpretation as a conductor when you are working with a living composer? Have you found that composers are generally useful to have around, or do they mostly get in the way of your work with the ensemble?

Working with a living composer can be a really wonderful thing. In music from previous centuries we always bump into the matter of tradition, and what people are used to or how they expect us to perform certain things. Style and tradition can be hindering if not approached with freshness. Let's remember though that even great conductors like Mahler did reorchestrations of several works. And Schumann was retouched and reorchestrated by many conductors. Mahler also reorchestrated all of the Beethoven symphonies.

Now, working with a living composer is a different matter. It can be very refreshing and eye opening. Each composer is different to work with. Some composers just come to the rehearsal and will be very happy in general and make only minor comments. Other composers might come and start by giving long speeches to the musicians. Some will simply give you notes. It is a matter of personality and preference really.

Some composers are very open to changes. They are happy if you decide to take a somewhat faster or slower tempo from what they wrote. Some others really want you to stick to exactly what they put on the page. I have had situations in which very experienced composers can be so humble -- they ask you, as the conductor, if there are any suggestions that you have in terms of changes of instrumentation for a certain passage. It can be very humbling to work with great composers who are so open and flexible.

What do you think are the most important characteristics of a conductor who wants to conduct new music?

I don't see many differences really between conducting new music versus conducting music from previous centuries. In a sense, in contemporary music you do need an absolutely accurate and infallible technique, due to the complex textures that are in the music. I guess familiarity with types of repertoire and openness for possibilities of sound are a big advantage for a conductor who would like to perform new music. Somebody who is not very familiar with extended techniques will probably feel somewhat out of touch conducting Lachenmann or Sciarrino.

What for you are the biggest differences between conducting a chamber group versus an orchestra? Or is it just the size of the baton that's different?

As far as I'm concerned, the baton makes absolutely no difference in terms of the group in front of you. Depending on the circumstances, I have conducted a 100-piece orchestra with my hands, and a 5-piece ensemble with a baton.

I would say that I try to work with an orchestra as if it were a chamber group. With this I mean that I like orchestra members to listen to each other as much as possible. In the end, they are the ones producing the sound. As the conductor, you just channel what is happening, and you create a focus of energy in order to achieve a coherent, organic performance. I also like to think of an ensemble as a larger entity, several individuals working together like a really excellent machine, like clockwork, completely latched into one another, and each performing an indispensable job.

What do you like to do when you're not doing music?

I love cooking, reading, swimming and playing with my 16-month-old son, Dante.

April highlights on the new music scene, by Russ Irwin

2010-04-01T07:22:00.000-07:00

Audience member Russ Irwin is one of those rare music connoisseurs who seems to make it out to every great event. He has given us a summary of his best bets for music in California in the month of April, including our own concert at Herbst Theatre.

With the Chanticleer National Youth Festival having just completed Monday night with the North American premiere of Daniel Lesur’s L’Annunciation, sung by nearly 500 singers from all over the USA, and Switchboard Festival’s completion on Sunday of their marathon of over eight hours of nearly non-stop music (set changes were the only breaks!), even April is looking pretty full, but maybe not as intense.

A couple of events in the Los Angeles area are inviting. On April 19th and 20th, Monday Evening Concerts will be presenting two performances of Georg Friedrich Haas’ Third String Quartet (In iij.Noct.), to be played by the JACK Quartet in total darkness at the Neighborhood Church in Pasadena. The word from NY where this group played it a few years ago indicates that it should be a memorable performance and experience. A few days following these, Pierre Boulez will receive the prestigious Kyoto Prize on the campus of UC San Diego accompanied by a performance of his rarely performed Sur Incices, an extraordinary composition scored for three pianos, three harps and three percussionists.

On the 23rd, the Oakland based chorale and children’s choirs, Cantare con vivo, will perform a world premiere of Lee Kesselman’s Measuring the Holy employing over 300 singers utilizing texts in Spanish, Arabic, English and Native American languages (First Baptist Church of Oakland, 7:30pm.)

April 26th finds The Players presentation of music by Tan Dun, Phillipe Hurel, Manolis Manousakis and Guo Wenjing at Herbst Theater. Hurel’s Figures libres will be the focus of the insight session the previous afternoon in the Mission. Having never heard any of these pieces, the allure level is high. And for me, the rest of the month will be filled in with preparing elementary school students for Concerts for Kids at the SF Symphony.

Christopher Froh on "Water Music" and "Parade"

2010-03-25T06:46:00.000-07:00

Our April 26, 2010 concert at Herbst will have two unusual percussion pieces. SFCMP percussionist Chris Froh shares his thoughts on Tan Dun's "Water Music" and Guo Wenjing's "Parade".

Regular SFCMP concertgoers are familiar with massive percussion batteries occupying a significant chunk of the stage (and often stage set-up time!). Marimbas, xylophones, and tom-toms intermixed with gongs, cymbals, and various automotive parts are typical fare for many of our concerts. But these two works for percussion ensemble by Tan Dun and Guo Wenjing are anything but typical.

In Tan Dun’s “Water Music,” Dan Kennedy and I will be joined by guest artists Loren Mach and Ben Paysen for a romp through amplified water. Tan (famous for, among other things, his film score for “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”) intricately notates dozens of inventive splashing techniques and other fabulous water-based sounds. Loren will be the soloist, leading the rest of us through this unique sound-world. The piece is a whole lot of fun to play and beautiful to watch unfold. I’ll be bringing my raincoat: by the end of the piece, the four of us will be soaked from head to toe!

Guo Wenjing adopts a very different approach in his “Parade” for percussion trio. Employing a tiny set-up of six small Chinese gongs placed on a table that the three players surround, the composer milks every last possible sound out of his minimal instrumentation. We’ll each use a dozen different sticks and mallets, finger and hand pressure to affect pitch changes, and lots of other tricks and surprises over the course of this fantastic piece. Because we all play on the same six instruments, there’s just as much choreography as there is music for us to rehearse. We’ll be projecting a live-feed, bird’s-eye view of the piece so that the audience will be able to see the flurry of activity on the table.

If you have kids who you’d like to expose to new music, both of these pieces are ideal. They’re fun, creative, and guaranteed to give you lots to talk about on the way home from the concert. We’re all looking forward to seeing you on April 26!

Spring Fundraising Drive

2010-03-17T17:41:00.000-07:00

It's that time of year when we send out spring our fundraising letters to remind you that we are a nonprofit and we need your generous donations to survive!
You can donate through the secure form on our website.
These are challenging times for all nonprofits, and we hope you'll consider giving.

Christian Baldini on "Figures libres"

2010-03-11T08:00:00.000-08:00

Guest conductor Christian Baldini shares his thoughts on Philippe Hurel's "Figures libres," which he will be conducting for us on April 25 and 26 in San Francisco.

There is a complete sense of clarity in the musical discourse of Philippe Hurel. "Figures libres” – which the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players and I will perform on April 26 – poses a philosophical question: How can one seek to achieve freedom within a restrictive and precisely structured context? The answer is not an easy one, though this exciting work for eight instruments certainly proposes many exquisite aural channels for the listener to interpret.

The ensemble is treated in a thematic way. There are clearly defined groups, and rhythmical patterns are born exclusively for each of these groups. At a point, some of these clearly defined characters evolve into different versions of themselves. This gives a sense of flexibility to the overall shape of the work that is icing to a very refined sound world. Clear textures support very personal sonorities, achieved by the different instrumental combinations – for instance, the intrinsic relationship between the piano and the percussion part.

There seems to be a dramatic journey throughout the three movements. The first presents a big statement that limits the material and positions the starting point, almost like a "you are here" sign on a map at the airport. The second movement brings an entirely new flavor to the table – there is a sense of "sfumato” as the instruments begin almost to melt away into a completely different mass. In the third, there is a very dramatic change and the music behaves as if we suddenly had a recitative appearing completely out of the blue. However, it fits right in place and leads the way to a very imaginative finale.

I very much look forward to this concert. It will be a pleasure to perform this marvelous piece with such terrific performers and to share our excitement with all of you.

Photo is of Philippe Hurel (right) with Pierre Boulez.

Reviews of the March 1 concert, so far

2010-03-04T13:09:00.000-08:00

We didn't get a lot of reviewers this time, which is unfortunate because it was a really fantastic concert.

Reviews that we can post today...
SF Examiner
a student blog

SFCV also did a nice preview piece on the concert last week

Some choice quotes from Gidon Kremer (from the March 1 program)

2010-02-25T07:00:00.000-08:00

Beth E. Levy has assembled some excellent quotes from Gidon Kremer, who originated La lontananza nostalgica utopica futura, for Monday's program notes. Here are our favorites:

Kremer on Nono:
"While not wanting to shroud [Nono] in mystery, I can best describe him by using the metaphor of a magnetic field with its forces of attraction and repulsion. Everyone who came into contact with Nono was able to feel this for themselves. He too was motivated by it: it brought him into apparently spontaneous contact with the world around him or with a specific idea, thereby igniting the spark for conversations, sounds and actions.”

Kremer recording the tape parts for La lontananza:
“It did not seem like work to me. I enjoyed every minute of the concentrated time that we spent together in the studio. Gigi [Luigi] simply encouraged me to play for three, four or five hours every day. He invited me to produce whatever sounds I wanted. We had arranged only that, if at all possible, I would keep well clear of familiar territory and avoid works I already knew. This had to do with improvisation, which was something I had never learned. And so I played simply notes and looked for a possible binding force within them. Only rarely did Gigi speak to me. He was always on the move, constantly passing to and fro between recording studio and playback room.... I moved round the room with my violin or stood rooted to the spot, recalling past sounds or looking for new ones. It was the most unusual way imaginable of working with a composer. At the time I thought that this was Nono’s way of getting to know me better.... I did not suspect that the sounds committed to tape during these days in Freiburg had already been transformed into an integral part of the work that was even then in progress. I myself and my search for new sounds had become his instrument.”

Kremer on the premiere of La lontananza:
“For the premiere that evening I was keyed up as never before... Now and again Gigi would surprise me by his handling of the tape, which his feeling for silence – a feeling which, he emphasized, was a very real need for him – would make him forget to turn on. But there was nothing I could do to object: after all, it was he who was sitting at the mixing desk, he who had written the piece. Yet our ‘conversation’ acquired its own vocabulary, stimulating us both. As a result, we felt we were playing a duet. The premiere was a success. Avoiding every vulgar or familiar sound. Nono had created a type of music which had never before been heard, never before been answered.”

Looking ahead to our Nono extravaganza

2010-02-18T17:00:00.000-08:00

In just 8 days, our Nono events will take off. There are probably more events than you realize, including a preview performance in San Diego. Here's the full list of events:

Friday, February 26
8pm at UC San Diego
Performance of Luigi Nono's La lontanaza nostalgica utopica futura
Graeme Jennings, violin
Christopher Burns, sound diffusion

Saturday, February 27
2-4pm at UC Berkeley (125 Morrison)
Symposium on the life and work of Luigi Nono
With Nono experts Prof. Bruce Durazzi (Washington University, St. Louis), Prof. Ken Ueno (UC Berkeley), and Prof. Luciano Chessa (SF Conservatory of Music).
The performers, Graeme Jennings and Christopher Burns, will also be there to talk about the piece.

Monday, March 1
7:15pm at YBCA Forum
Pre-concert talk about Nono by Prof. Bruce Durazzi, who is one of the foremost experts on Nono's work.

Monday, March 1
8pm at YBCA Forum
Performance of Luigi Nono's La lontanaza nostalgica utopica futura
Graeme Jennings, violin
Christopher Burns, sound diffusion
The performance will be followed by an audience talk-back with Durazzi, Chessa, and the performers.
Stay afterward for a reception with free prosecco, donated by our collaborators on this production, the Istituto Italiano di Cultura!

Graeme Jennings on "La lontananza nostalgica utopica futura"

2010-02-11T07:06:00.000-08:00

CAMINANTE, NO HAY CAMINOS. HAY QUE CAMINAR

Wayfarer, there are no pathways. Only the journey itself.

Luigi Nono came across this inscription on the walls of a Franciscan monastery in Toledo, Spain during one of his own travels. He traveled widely throughout his life, across Russia and Siberia, Latin America and even to the North Pole. This inscription became a kind of motto for Nono in many of his late works that really sums up his artistic motivation. Music as a metaphor for travel and travel as a metaphor for life. Three of his last works use variants of this inscription in their titles and are now known collectively as the "Caminante Cycle" although it is debatable as to whether they were meant to be grouped or performed together as a cycle. These works are recorded together on the Kairos Label ( 0012512 KAI ) and include his last work, the violin duo "Hay Que Caminar" Sognando (performed by Irvine Arditti and myself). This duo is constructed entirely of material from the violin part of La Lontananza and also uses elements of spatialization with the performers playing from stations set up around the audience. To quote Gianmario Borio, "In 'Hay Que Caminar' (Nono) surely recognized his own lifelong principle of continual creative restlessness, of perpetually being en route, which guided him from the outset."

So, what then is the experience of performing this music? "La Lontananaza Nostalgica Utopica Futura" is an hour length work with the further title description of "Madrigale per piu 'Caminantes' con Gidon Kremer, for Solo Violin, 8 pre-recorded tapes and 8 to 10 music stands". The audience is surrounded by loudspeakers as well as a forest of music stands from which the violinist may or may not play (there are some dummy stands). The piece begins with the tape part and after a few minutes the violinist enters the room and begins to play. The violin part consists of six separate sections of music that are distributed throughout the room and are performed in sequence with the violinist slowly walking from one station to the next in between sections and moving through the audience like a pilgrim on a spiritual quest. Where one stops and starts these sections of the violin part is not predetermined and is only affected by how quickly or slowly one walks from one position to the next. Therefore, how the violin part is coordinated with the tape part is extremely loose and the timing can only be adjusted by the imagination of the violinist and his use of rubato, holding of fermatas and pacing of when to stop and start sections.

The tape part runs continuously for slightly longer than one hour. The performance of the Tape part and the job of the Sound Diffusionist is another matter altogether. As Andre Richard (Nono's assistant at the SWR studio in Freiburg) has explained "The one thing you must never do is to simply press play and sit back with your arms folded at the mixing desk". The Tape part was constructed by Nono out of 5 or 6 days of recording his friend, the violinist Gidon Kremer, improvising. This was new territory for Kremer at the time, not being familiar to the world of free-improvisation, and Nono had to constantly direct him (like a film director) to make certain kinds of sounds but to play whatever he felt like as long as there were "NO CONCERTOS". Nevertheless, plenty of Concertos and other classical cliches did find their way onto the final edit but even so, the choice remains for the Sound Diffusionist as to whether to turn these classical quotations up or down in the live mix. There is a whole variety of different types of material on the tape: sustained tones, vibrati, melodic material, harmonic material, percussive sounds, gettato, high harmonics, arpeggio figurations as well as non-musical sounds such as talking, moving music stands or chairs around, slamming doors, even trains from outside at one point. Many of these sounds have been further manipulated by Nono in the electronic studio. What is left then, from what was originally many days of field recordings of Gidon Kremer in the studio, is 8 hours of manipulated and overdubbed tapes, distributed across 8 tracks which the Sound Diffusionist then mixes live in the performance, interacting with what the violinist is playing and choosing what is heard and what is not according to the musical situation of the moment. This piece is a Duet in the true sense of the word (perhaps even a quartet if you include the hands of Luigi Nono and Gidon Kremer). The Sound Diffusionist creates a sonic landscape that the violinist journeys through.

No two performances, even by the same performers in the same space will ever be the same either and there is plenty of scope for radically different interpretations as well. Of the numerous available recordings of this work, it is most interesting to compare the one by Irvine Arditti and Andre Richard with the one by Melise Mellinger and Salvatore Sciarrino. The former recording brings out much more of the harmonic content of the tape part while the latter favors much more of the noise components.

I have not spoken yet of the nature of the writing for the violin part or for that matter the writing in the other late string works such as the violin duo "Hay Que Caminar" or his masterpiece for String Quartet "Fragmente-Stille, an Diotima", works that I have performed now countless times. It is not difficult in the traditional sense but it is nevertheless very extreme writing. Even when it is very slow and quiet, it is still very restless in character. He constantly uses markings such as "non-statico" or "searching for the sound", "Varying it every time". He sometimes indicates for the pitch to be varied by less than a 1/16th of a tone. The dynamics range from ppppppppp to fffffffff. The quality of the string sound is varied from molto ponticello to molto sul tasto and alternations and combinations of using the hair and the wood of the bow (col legno tratto + crini). Bow speed is also varied from molto flautato to ordinario to a slow pressato. He makes use of extreme high registers at times, harmonics, as well as unusual double and triple stopping. In one section you have to sustain triple stops at a dynamic of ppppppppp! (It's actually possible.) The pacing of the music across the page is also quite unpredictable ... its mostly very slow, with tempi of c.30 or less but occasionally there are sudden fast outbursts of 180. The String Quartet is famously overlain with a whole meta-structure of fermatas, so much so that the notated rhythmic structure often loses its original shape altogether. At one point there is even a 1/16th note with a c30" pause over it! The first page alone of the quartet takes about 5 minutes to play so you know you are in for a long journey. These are large canvas works and they do alter your perception of time and space in strange ways.

I'll end by quoting Gianmario Borio again: "At the end of his artistic pilgrimage, Nono was still as rigorous and tireless in his experimentation as at the start. He tackled head-on many of the salient questions of musical language of his time, and in doing so opened up new horizons in composing and listening. He occupies a position at the very forefront of 20th Century Music. "

Graeme Jennings is a former member of the legendary Arditti String Quartet (1994-2005). Jennings has made over 70 CDs, given over 300 premieres, and appeared as a soloist with top orchestras around the world. Having served on the faculties of UC Berkeley, Mills College, and Stanford University, he was recently appointed Senior Lecturer in Violin and Viola at the Queensland Conservatorium in Australia.

Christpher Burns on "La lontananza nostalgica utopica futura"

2010-02-04T06:57:00.000-08:00

Our upcoming concert (March 1 at YBCA) will center around Luigi Nono's hour-long work for violin and electronics. We asked composer/producer Christopher Burns, who will realize the electronics in our performance, to write a few words about the piece. He writes:

It's my job to prevent you from hearing Luigi Nono's La Lontananza Nostalgica Utopica Futura.

Well, not exactly. But the instructions for the sound engineer in the score are very explicit: at any given moment in the performance I can choose to play some of the eight channels of taped music Nono created, or none of them. The one thing I'm not allowed to do is let you hear all eight channels at the same time.

Which means that you're going to hear fragments, elements, and aspects of the tape, but not the whole thing. It's an extraordinary idea - where most composers want you to hear every detail of their efforts, Nono wants to hide his work from the listener. It's also incredibly empowering, placing the sound engineer on equal musical footing with the violinist. We listen to one another, lead one another, and make interpretive choices favoring continuity or disruption, complement or contrast. The work becomes a genuine dialogue between two musicians - with Nono and Gidon Kremer (the violinist featured on the tape) hovering nearby.

In the rehearsal room, I can listen to the complete eight-channel tape. I feel incredibly fortunate to have that experience, not available in any concert or recording - it's an abundant and moving work. But the abundance means that there are many meaningful paths through the music. In performance, it's not a question of censoring Nono's music - instead, it's my task to find a particular journey through the tape part, and to express that trajectory as fully as I can.

Christopher Burns is a composer, educator, and producer specializing in chamber and electroacoustic music. The former Technical Director of the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) at Stanford University, Burns now teaches composition and technology at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He is a co-director of sfSound Series, and he co-founded and produced Stanford's strictly Ballroom contemporary Music series.

Reviews of the January 25 concert

2010-01-28T11:35:00.000-08:00

Below are some reviews of our January 25 concert at Herbst Theatre.

San Francisco Classical Voice
San Francisco Chronicle
ArtsSF.com
SF Classical Music Examiner

If you came to the concert or the Contemporary Insights performance, please comment on this post! We'd love to hear what you thought!

Concerts this Sunday and Monday

2010-01-21T12:28:00.000-08:00

SFCMP is bustling this week! Rehearsals are going full speed ahead with guest conductor Brad Lubman in preparation for the first events of the Spring Season. We hope you'll join us!

Sunday, January 24, 2010
4:30-5:30 p.m.
Contemporary Insights: Music and Coversation
Michael Jarrell's ...more leaves...
Moderated by guest conductor Brad Lubman, and featuring Nanci Severance on viola.

Monday, January 25, 2010
8:00 p.m.
(pre-concert talk at 7:15 p.m., moderated by Sarah Cahill)
Concert
Natural Phenomena
Brad Lubman, guest conductor

Program:
Michael Jarrell, ...more leaves...
Nanci Severance, viola
Oscar Bianchi, Zaffiro
Helmut Lachenmann, Trio fluido
Matthias Pintscher, nemeton
Christopher Froh, percussion
Brian Ferneyhough, Flurries

Tickets and Subscriptions are available on our website.

About the music on our January 25 concert...

2010-01-14T15:52:00.000-08:00

Our upcoming concert at Herbst Theatre, Natural Phenomena, represents a mix of composers who are well-known giants in the field (Ferneyhough, Lachenmann), and younger composers whose careers are taking off (Pintscher, Bianchi). Then there is Michael Jarrell, who has been showered with honors in his native Europe, yet remains less well known in the U.S. You can read more about the composers in Beth E. Levy's program notes, which we'll be posting on our website next week and handing out in booklet form at the concert. In the meantime, here is a little more information about the pieces you'll hear at the concert, adapted from Levy's notes. Featured performers are indicated in parentheses.

Michael Jarrell, . . . more leaves . . . (2000)
for viola (Nanci Severance), clarinet, trumpet, trombone, piano, double bass, and live electronics

Jarrell's . . . more leaves . . . takes its place within a cluster of works closely related to his viola concerto, From the Leaves of Shadow (1991). Here, instead of the original, rather massive orchestral accompaniment, the viola soloist has as its counterpart and sometime adversary a chamber ensemble of five instruments enhanced by live electronics. According to the composer "the electronics are not a substitute for the original orchestral parts but, like a sonic shadow, enrich the solo instrument with deep and matte colors."

****
Oscar Bianchi, Zaffiro (2005)
for bass flute, baritone saxophone, guitar, and viola

The composer describes his quartet Zaffiro: "This unique combination [of instruments] inspired me to create an image of a solid and metamorphic object like sapphire. All four instruments are voices that alternate between fast, rhythmical connections and voluptuous, relatively static harmonic cohabitation."

Hear a recording of this piece on the composer's website.

****
Pintscher, nemeton (2007)
for solo percussion (Christopher Froh)

[The word nemeton] suggests a sacred space in ancient Celtic mythology, usually a grove of trees.

Like the druid among his trees, the soloist finds himself in a forest of instruments. These he must master, treating each, by and large, with surprising delicacy. The marimba takes center stage, but it is in reality the first among equals, enveloped by otherworldly sounds: crotales (or antique cymbals), Chinese cymbal, tubular bells, sandpaper blocks, a spring coil ("very large and heavy, rich sound"), suspended cymbals, and tam-tam, in addition to an array of metal blocks, woodblocks, and bongos. Although the score is replete with expressive marking, the soloist must also develop individual preferences about how the score should be executed.

****
Lachenmann, Trio Fluido (1966)
for clarinet (Carey Bell), viola (Graeme Jennings), and percussion (William Winant)

As [Lachenmann] puts it, “In almost all of my compositions there is a moment of repose–in the manner of a fermata–in which the music glances around like a mountain-climber who only becomes aware of his surroundings upon standing still, and only now experiences the characteristic stillness of the plateau he has reached.... Where the path is the goal, I would rather not be brought to the summit of a mountain by helicopter; such quick service should be reserved for Sunday walkers.”

****
Ferneyhough, Flurries (1997)
for piccolo, clarinet, French horn, piano, violin, and cello

Like the virtuosic Terrain (1992), which Graeme Jennings performed with the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players in 2007, Ferneyhough's chamber work Flurries makes reference to one of the composer's favorite poets, Archie Randolph Ammons (1926-2001)... Ferneyhough... took the epigraph for Flurries from the title of a poem published in the collection Brink Road (1996): "...but motion undermines meaning with meaning."

As Alessandro Melchiorre points out, the piece begins with three pairs of voices (violin and cello, clarinet and piano, piccolo and horn), each of which proceeds according to its own formal model: "double cyclic re-readings, variations with quodlibet, and march/fantasy." The duets of the first half combine and re-divide in the second half, first featuring the trio of wind players and then dispersing: combining and re-combining like water droplets on uneven glass or dancers in Ferneyhough's own, intricately choreographed ballet.

-program notes by Beth E. Levy

New Subscription Package for Spring 2010

2010-01-07T12:57:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year! SFCMP is back for an exceptional spring season. Guest conductors Brad Lubman and Christian Baldini will lead the ensemble in music by such composers as Brian Ferneyhough, Helmut Lachenmann, Luigi Nono, and Academy Award-winner Tan Dun. Ensemble members Christopher Froh, Nanci Severance, Graeme Jennings, and Rufus Olivier will all take the stage for featured solos.

For a limited time, you can subscribe to all three spring concerts and both Contemporary Insights events at a reduced rate. This package is available until January 22. Purchase the Spring Subscription Series Package from the secure order form on our website.

Spring Concerts:
January 25 - Natural Phenomena (Music of Brian Ferneyhough, Helmut Lachenmann, Matthias Pintscher, Oscar Bianchi and Michael Jarrell)
March 1 - Longing for Utopia: Graeme Jennings Plays Nono (Performance and discussion of Luigi Nono’s La lontananza nostalgica utopica futura)
April 26 - His Own Space of Freedom (Music of Philippe Hurel, Tan Dun, Manolis Manousakis, and Guo Wenjing)

Contemporary Insights: Music and Conversation events:
January 24 - Michael Jarrell’s …more leaves… Conducted by Brad Lubman. Featuring Nanci Severance on viola.
April 25 - Philippe Hurel’s Figures Libres Conducted by Christian Baldini. With composer Philippe Hurel.

Reviews of the November 2 concert

2009-11-19T16:34:00.000-08:00

Our November 2 concert polarized the critics. Some loved and some hated this concert of music by Donnacha Dennehy, Ronald Bruce Smith, Ken Ueno, and Philippe Leroux.
sfcv.org
artssf.com
sf classical music examiner

39th Season Opener Reviews

2009-10-09T13:09:00.000-07:00

The opening concert of the season was a success. On Monday, October5, we played music by John Harbison, Edmund Campion, Morton Feldman, Charles Wuorinen, and Steve Reich to a large crowd at Herbst Theatre.
Check out these reviews!
sfgate.com
sfcv.org
artssf.com
SF classical music examiner

Hear "Outside Music" on the radio tomorrow night

2009-06-23T15:28:00.000-07:00

Listen to the streaming broadcast of Edmund Campion's "Outside Music" tomorrow night (June 24) at 8pm. Radio KKFI.org in Kansas City will broadcast the entire CD, as well as Dr. Mike's interview with composer Edmund Campion.
The CD "Outside Music" (released in 2008) was recorded by the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players with David Milnes conducting. (Read January's rave review of this CD.)

Report from Ojai

2009-06-22T00:09:00.000-07:00

Last week I joined a group of San Francisco Contemporary Music Players supporters at the Ojai Music Festival, curated this year by the new music sextet, Eighth Blackbird.

A self-directed group of musicians, Eighth Blackbird has won respect for their dedication to new music and to a shared vision of what they stand for as a group. Showing remarkable restraint, they programmed themselves alone on the stage only one time in the entire four-day festival. That single, guestless performance--of Stephen Hartke’s recent piece, Meanwhile, written on their commission—made me want to hear the piece again on a future San Francisco Contemporary Music Players concert.

As a full-time ensemble that benefits from playing each piece many times over during their extensive tours, Eighth Blackbird performs from memory. Freed from pages and music stands, they are able to engage more directly with each other and with the audience than would otherwise be possible. Besides Hartke’s piece, highlights of their performances included Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians, and an exciting, if not quite wrinkle-free, staging of Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, with Lucy Shelton, soprano, and Elyssa Dole, dancer. To hear Eighth Blackbird play this famously gnarly piece from memory was, for me, to hear it as if for the first time.

“They made it sound so straightforward, like cabaret music!” was the general reaction. I could quibble with subtleties of the ensemble’s interpretation of this and other pieces, but I never for an instant questioned their commitment and conviction.

Among the performances by guest artists in the festival, the highlight, for me, was pianist Jeremy Denk’s beautifully controlled account of Bach’s Goldberg Variations. This hefty, sublime piece was not out of place in a contemporary music festival in which so much of the other music, especially the numerous minimalist pieces, seemed to reach across the years to clink glasses with Baroque musical ideals and forms.

Not everything on the festival worked perfectly. Some pieces, especially ones that were being presented for the first time, were not quite ready, like dresses still pinned and basted rather than properly hemmed. For the most part, though, rough edges did not spoil the enjoyment. One could see where the performance was headed, almost hear how it would sound when they repeated the piece in a festival in some other state two weeks hence. The evident pleasure of the musicians in working together spread readily to the listeners.

Since the Ojai Festival is curated each year by a different artist, its artistic focus varies significantly. The Festival’s Executive Director, Jeff Haydon, his staff, and volunteers, however, remain consistent, and they form an impressively heads-up team. The San Francisco Contemporary Music Players was resident at the festival in 1990 and, perhaps for that reason, our group was welcomed like family. From what I saw, though, pretty much everyone who attended the festival—a large number of folks, mostly from greater L.A.—was made exceptionally welcome and comfortable. It would be tempting to go back and see what the festival is like another year.

Peter Josheff's INFERNO

2009-06-16T14:13:00.000-07:00

Starting tomorrow night you can see INFERNO, a new chamber opera composed by one of our favorite clarinetists, Peter Josheff. Read below for more details...

Wednesday & Thursday, June 17 & 18, 2009, 8:00 pm

Sunday, June 21, 5:00 pm

Live Oak Theater, 1301 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley, California

$20 general admission, $15 seniors and students

Telephone reservations: (415) 289-6877

Online reservations: www.goathall.org

INFERNO, Part One, The Second Circle of Hell: The Lustful (2006-2008) is the culmination of a decade-long collaboration between Peter Josheff and Jaime Robles, a collaboration that began with readings and musical improvisations and has progressed to vocal and instrumental works of ever-increasing scope and complexity. INFERNO is their first large-scale theatrical project and is envisioned as the first of a two-part chamber opera dealing with themes from Dante’s Commedia. In librettist Robles’ re-imagining of Dante’s second circle of hell—a place of eternal suffering for those who were unable to control their passions in life—the murdered lovers Paolo and Francesca are trapped in a world of dreams and fantasies, where they are doomed to be forever yearning, forever unable to touch.

Jaime writes: “When I first read Francesca da Rimini’s 'confession' from Dante’s Inferno, I was struck by the story’s dramatic potential. All of Dante’s Commedia is very dramatic, set as it is in realms beyond every day life and encompassing a huge spectrum of human emotions. Each story contains the cathartic potential that we find in opera. But unlike Tchaikovsky’s opera, this version of Francesca’s story focuses on the moral—rather than romantic—content of story. Like Dante, we have set the opera in hell, and, although we have used contemporary references in the sets and costuming, I have woven ideas found in medieval texts about love and melancholia throughout the libretto. In this way, I hope to remain truer to Dante’s vision.”

The cast includes dynamic Bay Area singers Adam Flowers (tenor) and Eliza O’Malley (soprano) as the murdered lovers, Paolo and Francesca, and Richard Mix (bass) as the demon, Hell’s Wind, accompanied by the wonderful pianist Eric Zivian. INFERNO will be directed by San Francisco Cabaret Opera Artistic Director Harriet March Page. The production will feature theatrical movement designed by Bay Area choreographer Jenny McAllister, with members of Huckabay McAllister Dance as the tormented inhabitants of the Second Circle of Hell. McAllister's unique choreography replaces the usual chorus of singers with a cast of dancers, filling the stage with sensual movement.

SAN FRANCISCO CABARET OPERA PRESENTS

INFERNO

A New Chamber Opera by composer Peter Josheff and librettist Jaime Robles

WHEN:

Wednesday & Thursday, June 17 & 18, 2009, 8:00 pm

Sunday, June 21, 5:00 pm

WHERE:

Live Oak Theater, 1301 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley, California

TICKETS:

$20 general admission, $15 seniors and students

Telephone reservations: (415) 289-6877

Online reservations: www.goathall.org

Last chance to join our trip to Ojai

2009-04-22T17:33:00.000-07:00

Don't miss your last chance to join our trip to the Ojai Music Festival in Southern California.
You'll hear exciting new music in a beautiful outdoor locale, with luxurious lodgings and excellent seats. Learn more and sign up on our website.
Part of the price of your trip will go toward supporting the SF Contemporary Music Players!

Hear music from Peter Josheff's new opera

2009-04-17T16:40:00.000-07:00

Clarinetist Peter Josheff, who performs regularly with our ensemble, has composed a chamber opera based on Dante's Inferno. While the full opera won't be performed until mid-June, you can get a sneak peak at the music on Monday, April 27 when the Laurel Ensemble premieres Josheff's Instrumental Suite from the Opera Inferno.

Monday, April 27, 2009
Music at Meyer
Temple Emanu-El
2 Lake Street, San Francisco
Tickets are $23-$25

Learn more at www.laurelensemble.com.

Daniel Kennedy reflects on his upcoming performance

2009-03-24T11:55:00.000-07:00

Before I was given the honor of performing Loops IV for solo marimba, I wasn’t familiar with Philippe Hurel’s music. But now, I’m very interested to know much more about it, and Loops IV is a piece that I intend to keep in my repertoire for a long time. It’s definitely in its own class; I can’t compare it to any other marimba solo that I’ve ever done. There’s something about the language of the work that is simultaneously logical and abstract, and it’s also invigorating and physically exhausting at the same time! It presents itself as a kind of otherworldly fantasy, at times producing a roller coaster effect, rising and falling as it moves from dense to sparse; loud to soft. At points of rest, it settles into a haunting lull, then gradually builds to swirling patterns that hint at tonality, but not for long. Fragmented rhythmic gestures expand and contract, sometimes while rapidly spanning the entire marimba without warning. The overall effect is a brilliantly transformative work of many shapes, sizes, and colors.

Reviews for "Things Fall from the Sky"

2009-03-02T12:20:00.000-08:00

Click below to read the rave reviews for last Monday's concert:
San Francisco Chronicle
San Francisco Classical Voice

San Francisco Tape Music Center

2009-02-13T17:38:00.000-08:00

The San Francisco Tape Music Center, flourishing between 1962 and 1965, holds a powerful, but elusive, place in my conception of Bay Area new music history. Flickering beyond the edges of memory and populated by such storied composers as Ramon Sender, Mort Subotnick, Pauline Oliveros, Terry Riley, and Steve Reich, the Center’s half-forgotten past touches the wound in those of us who yearn for Northern California’s substantial contributions to new music to be recognized widely.

Now David Bernstein of Mills College has rescued this fragile history in a colorful, thoughtful UC Press book, The San Francisco Tape Music Center: 1960s Counterculture and the Avant-Garde. Combining interviews, contemporaneous documents, and well-drawn historical summaries, the book revivifies the feeling and culture of the Center, in a narrative studded with lightning flashes of humor, irony, and synchronicity.

The story has more than one heart. My favorite is captured in Tom Welsh’s interview with Michael Callahan, in 1962 a truant high school student and inveterate tinkerer who made himself indispensable at the Center, becoming technical director. Holed up under the Center’s staircase during school hours engrossed in reading electronics magazines, he exemplifies the mercurial spirit that found value in cast-off equipment, refashioning lead into gold. An irony is that a subsequent infusion of actual gold (from the Rockefeller Foundation) brought about institutional calcification, transforming an interdisciplinary creative ferment into something more rational and pedagogic. The book can be read as a study in the flowering and waning of artistic culture.

First Meeting with Lukas Foss

2009-02-04T11:23:00.001-08:00

Composer Ken Ueno writes:

Sometime in early September 1995, I walked into a studio at Boston University for my first lesson with Lukas Foss. He asked me my age. After I told him, he responded, "By that age, Koussevitzky had brought me to Boston to be the principal pianist of the BSO. (Long pause.) What do you do?" I was kind of taken aback. "Well," I said, "I'm here to study with you."

Had I engaged in such an exchange with anyone else, I might have been offended. Instead, even upon our first meeting, it was became apparent to me that Lukas operated on another plane from the rest of us. He was the most naturally gifted musician I have ever met. Everything was so natural to him that it was almost savant-like. Mozartian might be a better word.

As a teacher, he always seemed to be looking above our music, as if he was in touch with what the music itself wanted to be. In playing through our sketches, local details were often sacrificed, but we got a glimpse of a flow more natural than what we were clumsily committing slavishly to paper. He was like some guru who could sense the soul of nascent pieces. Realizing that I had an intrinsic inclination to rationalize my process, he often prodded me to trust my intuition.

That first day, the second question he asked me was if I was still in my Wunderkind period. I said, "No, I was never a Wunderkind." "Oh, no. Everyone has a Wunderkind period." He had this childlike quality that assumed that everyone was like him. Of course, none of us are, or ever will be like him.

Lukas Foss (1922-2009)

2009-02-03T12:47:00.000-08:00

Pianist Jay Gottlieb writes:

For those of us who had the good fortune and privilege of being close to Lukas, the news of his passing (even though we were perfectly aware of his serious decline over the last years) can only be perceived in utter disbelief. The eternal wunderkind, so talented, so fast, so witty, so brilliant, so much fun--gone? Well, Mozart has been gone for quite some time, and I guess this will be the only comparison that will help me to accept the fact that Lukas is no longer around...on the terrestrial plane. Like Mozart, all of that light and genius may have charmed his contemporaries, but of course belongs to the ages.

But I will treasure forever his running frantically from the other side of the planet, guest conducting and performing, to be on time for lessons. I will treasure forever his generosity, the incalculable hours we spent at the piano, the role of teacher-student always flexible and interchangeable. I will treasure forever his extraordinary eloquence and imagination as a pedagogue, the deep well of his vast culture dipped into as he deemed necessary to enable full enlightenment. I will treasure forever his advice to young composers: to be wary of too great a divorce between head and heart; in composing, to make "all the right notes and events available while ruling out undesired ones"; to structure, notate "so that things can happen of their own accord"; to read Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet; to heed Beethoven's suggestion to never listen to anyone's advice. I will treasure forever the professional collaborations we had, post the student years. The surreal mock symposium we did together in Paris. His coaching me and members of the London Sinfonietta doing his masterpiece Echoi at the Aldeburgh Festival, culminating in his giving me his personal copy of the score saying, "You play it better than I could ever play it again. It's yours." And in that same spirit of transmission, I will endeavor to keep his spirit alive. It's yours.

Lee Hyla's Polish Folk Songs

2009-01-27T13:56:00.000-08:00

Coming up on the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players' February 23 concert. Richard Pittman, Music Director of Boston Musica Viva writes: Polish Folk Songs is the third work commissioned from Lee Hyla by Boston Musica Viva. Originally requested for a program with an Eastern Euopean theme, Hyla finally finished the work several seasons later in 2007 for a program called Roots. The other works on that program, all commissioned (or co-commissioned) by Boston Musica Viva, were Mario Davidovsky's Sefarad: Four Spanish Ladino Folkscenes, Olly Wilson's A City Called Heaven, and the world premiere of Chou Wen-chung's Twilight Skies.

Hyla is of Polish extraction and the inspiration for his Folk Songs came from a visit to his grandmother's ancestral home in Poland and the folk music he heard there. Hyla's music makes direct references to Polish folk songs and the raucous playing by the two clarinets is in the style of the performances he heard in Poland. The Folk Songs are in a completely different style from his longest work for Boston Musica Viva, The Lives of the Saints. The cheeky nature of the Polish Folk Songs, however, is typical of many of Hyla's pieces.

Boston Musica Viva

Rave review for Campion CD

2009-01-21T15:04:00.000-08:00

Edmund Campion's CD "Outside Music," featuring the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, recently received a particularly thoughtful and positive review by music critic Robert Carl in Fanfare Magazine.

Here it is:

Fanfare (The Magazine for Serious Record Collectors) January/February 2009

While I'd heard of Edmund Campion (b. 1957) for a while, I had not heard his music, nor did I have a fix on his creative profile. This extremely successful collection brings him into focus and highlights a series of strengths that announce a confident and highly imaginative composer. Campion's most evident specialty is with electroacoustic technology. He studied with Mario Davidovsky, one of the field's great pioneers; then went to Paris to work with Gérard Grisey, perhaps the greatest of "spectralist" composers; and finally he did a residency at IRCAM before coming to the University of California at Berkeley to head its electronic music studios. An impressive pedigree, and Campion probably could coast on the technical expertise thereby gained for the rest of his career. Fortunately he's driven by a greater need than staying abreast of the latest software release. Instead, what comes through all this music is his deeply expressive nature and a wonderfully quirky worldview. Two things make Campion's music fresh and distinctive. One is his sensitivity to sound itself. Via his technological chops, he knows how to remake acoustic sounds into something hyperrealist- sounds that seem even more present, etched, and colored than in their original form. There's a magical quality to much of this. Outside Music(2005) for keyboard and a quintet of flute, bass clarinet, harp, vibraphone, and bass, constantly fools you. Just when you think it's a clarinet playing, you realize something too improbable is occurring within that sound, and it must be a sample coming from the keyboard. But that other figure that seems pianistic, where is itcoming from, then? And so it goes. The notes say that Campion developed an interface of four pedals that allows soloist Julie Steinberg to switch and superimpose samples virtuosically. I suspect the only way really to understand who is playing what (aside from the score) would be to watch a performance carefully. Similarly, Melt me so with thy delicious numbers . . . (2002) fooled me on a first listening, since I'd not looked at the notes. I assumed it was for at least a string trio, but in fact it's a solo viola, whose real-time performance is snatched by the computer and processed/multiplied upon itself. The second component in the composer's bag-of-tricks is rhythm. Campion writes a lot of notes, but to a purpose. He creates tricky time shifts that keep you attentive. It's groovy without falling into an easy repetitive rut. I hear the influence of both jazz and Balinese gamelan, though neither is explicit, and I suspect another listener might find a different set of similarly sophisticated antecedents. Whatever the provenance, the music feels very Californian this way, despite its often real, Eurocentric complexities. Three works show an impressive range of technological approaches: Outside Music, with its constantly morphing hybrid instrument; Melt me . . . , with its real-time interactive transformation of the acoustic player; and Losing Touch(1994), with its more traditional "fixed" electronic part. It is the earliest of these three after all, and one of its virtues is that the blend between instrument and tape begins so subtly (little inflecting bends of the notes) that its later divergence feels simultaneously natural and exhilarating.
On the all-acoustic front, A Complete Wealth of Time (1990) for two pianos seems to have been a landmark/breakthrough work for the composer, written during his French sojourn. It has far more overtly jazzy elements than the later pieces, though it never cops to easy references. It's also a complete rush over its 17-minute span, with energy and interesting ideas never flagging. Domus aurea (2000) for vibraphone and piano is similarly fast, intricate, and sly, though it was the only work that wore me down slightly, perhaps because it seemed to "end" a few times before it actually did. The composer is extremely lucky to have a true roster of California "All-Stars" from that new music community to present his work. Their energy of performance matches his fertility of invention. In the end, a happy surprise, and highly recommended.
-Robert Carl

CAMPION Outside Music. *ALBANY TROY 1037 (66:47)

2009 trips to Ojai and Nice

2009-01-12T13:00:00.000-08:00

Last summer our Board of Directors organized a trip to the Santa Fe Opera with David Milnes and a small group of new music fans. The trip was so successful that we have decided to offer two more trips this year: one to the Ojai Music Festival (June 11-14, 2009); and one to the MANCA Festival in Nice, France (November 10-17, 2009), where the players will also be performing.

Don't miss this chance to travel, make friends, enjoy great music, and support the Players all at the same time!

Click the links below for a brief overview of each trip:
Ojai, California
Nice, France
More details will be available soon.

Remembering Betty Freeman

2009-01-08T14:33:00.000-08:00

One of the most important patrons of the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players and indeed of new music in general, Betty Freeman, has died at 87. A sensitive and accomplished photographer specializing in portraits of composers, Freeman is quoted in the New York Times obituary characterizing her own taste as follows: "I like complexity, challenge, ambiguity, abstraction."

In the 1990s, Freeman's hands-on philanthropy made possible the ensemble's recordings for Newport Classic of Morton Feldman's For Samuel Beckett, Steven Mackey's Indigenous Instruments, John Cage's Quartets for Orchestra and Music for 17, and a whole CD of music by Earle Brown. Sony Classical later bought the rights to the first three of these CDs, but owing to subsequent cataclysms in the recording industry has never reissued them.

Music People & others, Freeman's 1996 book of portraits, lets us see freshly many of the twentieth century's most interesting composers. The book itself is music-like, one of many ouststanding legacies left by this talented, quirky, and brilliant woman.

New article on the life of founder Jean-Louis LeRoux

2009-01-06T15:37:00.000-08:00

Jean-Louis LeRoux, one of the founders of San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, was recently featured in an article on sfcv.org by Janos Gereben.

Click here to read the full article, entitled "Leroux: A Life in Music and Motion".

A listener's reaction to Boulez's Le marteau

2008-12-13T18:06:00.000-08:00

First of all let me say that I am not a musician. Nor am I particularly knowledgeable about music. So for what it's worth let me tell you what struck me about Boulez's "Hammer without a Master" as performed by the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players last Monday night. Here was a piece played by no two instruments alike. A piece devoid of repetition, its singular instruments and crystallized moments circumscribed by the sameness of its middle range (no soaring highs, no sudden drops, no crushing lows). For me the piece was about everything it was not; not lyric, not chordal; neither harmonic, nor percussive; even the overtones and undertones seemed disallowed or cut short; instead we heard distinct, isolate units; closure the common denominator. But the effect of this stringent economy (of metrical variations and pitch shifts) was, surprisingly, what one was left to imagine that wasn't there: wild dynamics, insistent beat patterns, playing up and down the scale. Throughout the performance I imagined a constant musical line, a sonorous lyric, one the music made me compose in my head, then visualize as a dancer weaving between the players, coming dangerously close to their instruments. Could I not tolerate simply listening? All I know is that in the silence of the empty field left by his composition, it was desire I heard; the thing we cannot grasp; the full bore romance of the ineffable.

Post by Ramsay Breslin

Concert Reviews for "Furious Craft"

2008-12-10T17:19:00.000-08:00

Last Monday's concert, "Furious Craft" featured the music of Boulez, Francesconi, Saariaho and Zhou. Read reviews in the San Francisco Chronicle and in sfcv.org.

Charles Shere on "Le Marteau"

2008-12-04T10:38:00.000-08:00

Writer and composer Charles Shere has recently written a thoughtful blog entry about "Le Marteau sans maitre."

Guitarist David Tanenbaum on Boulez's Le marteau sans maître

2008-11-13T18:54:00.000-08:00

Le Marteau is a landmark piece and as far as I can tell it hasn't been done in the Bay Area since the mid 1980's. I had the pleasure of playing it a few times with the great Ensemble Modern of Frankfurt, with Boulez' assistant, Peter Eotvos, conducting. It takes many rehearsals (I think we had 12) and I distinctly remember the first performance. It was in the beautiful Alte Oper in Frankfurt, a midnight concert to a full crowd. There was a buzz in the hall and of course we players felt quite nervous and excited. And I remember that once the piece began I felt part of one big musical organism, which is kind of the point of the piece, since Boulez explores the sonic connection between each instrument. The audience felt like they were a part of that too, as they were intensely focused - Boulez is common fare in Frankfurt. So here was this intensely modern piece, almost a caricature of modernism, the kind of music that can turn a lot of people off, and I felt incredibly free and connected playing it. The audience went wild at the end. Since then I've been talking to various people about doing the piece in the Bay Area, as Boulez is not often heard here. SFCMP is the natural home for this piece, and I mentioned it now and then to Adam Frey and David Milnes. In January I happened to run into David at Carnegie's Zankel Hall, where Boulez was conducting Le Marteau. In a pre-concert talk Boulez asked the audience not to concentrate on all the complexity or the way it was composed, but rather to think of the ensemble as a quasi world music group. Then the guitar becomes a kind of zither, the mallet instruments are like a gamelan and the piece takes on a new dimension. I think that performance clinched the deal for David, and I'll be happy to devote much of late November, Thanksgiving holiday included, to bringing this piece west.
-- David Tanenbaum