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Program Note. Nick Deyoe on A New Anxiety
a new anxiety for 20 players – Nicholas DEYOE
Loud. Fast. Aggressive. When Chris Rountree invited me to compose a piece for wild Up, he asked for something loud, fast, aggressive, and inspired by Slayer or Meshuggah. With styles existing at opposite ends of a particular spectrum, I took this as an opportunity to engage with forms of acoustic intensity and brutality rather than literally transcribing Slayer or Meshuggah riffs. The intensity I experience from metal results from the combination of timbre, volume, and production techniques on top of the actual riffs. It was difficult to imagine how I would overcome the difference in sound between a metal band and an acoustic ensemble to create something of appropriate aggression. I was worried that, by not achieving my desired intensity, this piece could result in an unsatisfying appropriation of something that I love. Attempting to avoid this, I looked to bands whose styles/languages are more congruous with my own for structural and material inspiration.
A significant focus of mine over the past several years has been an exploration of the coexistence of contrasting musical elements. Cephalic Carnage, with their ability to enthusiastically and convincingly combine starkly contrasting styles/materials, offered structural inspiration. Decapitated provided ideas for how to handle intensity, speed, texture, density, and harmonic insistence. Strategies toward the unification of melody and brutality were guided by Death. Chuck Schuldiner, the creative force behind Death, had an incredible ability blend melodic, harmonically sensuous materials with raw death metal. Chuck Schuldiner’s musical output has always been inspirational to me, though this piece is my first attempt at similar transformations to Death.
Density and speed are used to achieve a raw, aggressive, and physically engaged sound. Often, passages are played at speeds that flirt with the boundaries of physical possibility. Streams of sixteenth notes unfold so quickly, and with so many players that any chance for clarity is destroyed, hopefully simulating the raw energy I experience from metal. The combination of physically raw acoustic sounds with an amplified bassoon creates a less predictable, difficult to control, and unyielding ensemble. The sounds of the amplified bassoon are inspired by Archie Carey’s ability to create rich sound worlds while manipulating and looping feedback, distortion, and delay lines. He provides the treacherous terrain that the ensemble must contend with, traveling from the viscerally charged beginning to the melodically longing end.
The melodic fragments driving the end of the piece are quotations from Death, and their inclusion is my tribute Chuck Schuldiner. On December 13th, 2001 he died of complications relating to Brain Cancer, and his 45th birthday would have been the day after the premiere of this piece. His music is a source of inspiration to me, and this piece is dedicated to him.
- Nicholas Deyoe (www.nicholasdeyoe.com)
The following songs are awesome:
Death Crystal Mountain http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_bO_yKbW1I
Cephalic Carnage Pseudo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTElpejgDMY
Decapitated Post(?) Organic http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UgQ1GQhA6p8&feature=related
Meshuggah Bleed http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qc98u-eGzlc
Slayer Dead Skin Mask http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdhXIPyMvt4
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Program Note. Andrew McIntosh on Inch and Mile
There are 63,360 inches in a mile.
At the time that I was writing this piece I was thinking a lot about the cumulative nature of human interactions. For instance, it takes thousands (or millions, rather) of little arrogant, adverse, or uncompromising actions between individuals on a daily basis over a long period of time to create a military conflict. Likewise, it takes just as many little understandings, compromises, humblenesses, and forgivenesses to create large-scale social change. While this doesn’t necessarily have any direct relationship to Inch and Mile, it is perhaps reflected in the way the music is assembled. Rather than grouping the instruments together into sections, as is more traditional in orchestral writing, the 20 musicians all have unique and individual parts. Many of the parts are paired with some kind of complementary link between two instruments, with the pairings changing throughout the work. As it progresses, these pairings sometimes accumulate into larger groupings of musicians, until at the end one could almost say that the orchestra was unified.
Much of Inch and Mile is in just intonation, meaning that the intervals between instruments are tuned very precisely to pure intervals from the natural harmonic series, as is most of my music. I am fascinated by this interaction between the very rational and elegant side of the natural world and its wild and organic counterpart. In this case one could say perhaps that the notes are the rational part, while the humans playing them are the wild part. The piece is entirely an exploration of the relationships between the instruments, their sounds, the people playing them, and between the various lines of music present. I may have accidentally written a sort of socialist piece.
Andrew McIntosh
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PREPARED PIANO FOR KIDS!
Chris Kallmyer and Melinda Rice — teachers. Awesome.
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From Ornithology
Richard Valitutto talks about playing Messiaen, Highland Park roosters, and being a librarian.
(Source: vimeo.com)
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Notes Ornithology Premieres: double tui
double tui
piano and ‘small orchestra’ of winds and percussion
~ ~ ~
the fantasy of being mobile
finds you cycling through the
night to find the
dawn chorus
which turns out to be quite complicated
as the farewell symphony
{to the wondrous memory of maurice till -
a fantastically enabling and generous mentor}
~ ~ ~
double tui is part of a series of compositions i’ve written
with the subtitle 22 new zealand birds
MARK MENZIES 2012
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Notes Ornithology Premieres: Andrew Bird arrangements
I am nowhere nearly as hip as anyone else associated with wild Up, including the guy who tends the bar. So when Chris contacted me about orchestrating some Andrew Bird songs I had to take an auditory crash-course through the artist’s body of work. Fortunately, being a fan of acoustic indy pop in the Elliot Smith tradition and self-overdubbing madmen like Jon Brion, I found myself in familiar territory. I immediately liked Bird’s sense of lyricism, his interesting spins on pop harmonies, and above all his distinctive chamber orchestrations. This last presented an interesting challenge to an arranger; most orchestrations of pop tunes end up re-concieving the music from scratch, but in this case I’ve expanded the music’s existing orchestral elements, amplifying the big moments while bringing out the color and texture implicit in the songs. That isn’t to say I didn’t add my own creative touches, but the transformation was prepared by Bird’s own instincts and groundwork.
I selected “Nervous Tic Motion of the Head to the Left” and “Banking on a Myth” for arrangement because both were overtly melodic and divided into dramatically contrasting sections, which makes for fertile ground, orchestration-wise. wild Up’s makeup is alluringly eclectic, offering less-common instruments like the contrabassoon and harmonium; I realized that these two songs would be well-served by the group’s rich and unusual acoustic palette. Hope you enjoy!
Michael Gordon Shapiro writes music for film, television, video games, and the concert hall. His concerto for orchestra and guzheng (Chinese zither) is about to have its digital album release via Hanyi Productions. Visit Michael on the web at www.mikemusic.com . -
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Notes Ornithology Premieres: Bird of Paradise (in Paradise)
I was browsing through a Charlie Parker tunebook to get some ideas for the upcoming wild Up concert when the title “Bird of Paradise” caught my eye. To be honest I was originally interested because it reminded me of those amazing Planet Earth documentaries involving unique birds, but soon after the notes became attractive as well. The tune has a simple four-bar melody played over a Db7 chord followed by a C7 chord, repeated once. At the bottom of the page it says “Solo on ‘All the things you are’” (a tune by Jerome Kern) so in a nutshell “Bird of Paradise” is two chords, and a little melody. What could be a better recipe for an elongated spectral haze of woodwinds and strings?
The Db7 and C7 chords Parker uses in his piano part take notes from the first 7 partials of their respective harmonic series. I’ve extended the note content up to the 16th partial, giving these chords rich microtonal harmonies. Playing with timbre and rhythm I’ve spread the notes throughout the orchestra, letting these two series exist and overlap over the period of six minutes.
Who knows, maybe this is what it sounds like when the bird of paradise goes home to paradise…..
Archie Carey is a bassoonist, a composer, and a tree climber living in Los Angeles.
Much of his work uses field recordings, alternative tunings, and enlarged subtleties. He has performed in Germany, Italy, Israel, China, and throughout the USA playing anything from Mozart to a metal plate with a contact microphone through distortion pedals. www.archiecarey.com -
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Ornithology Premieres: this nest, swift passerine
I often work with field recordings, but i don’t often work with chamber orchestras. I make recordings of rivers, trains, farms, cows, trees, wind, fog horns, church bells, traffic noise, and coffee shops. These mundane things yield the most rigorous and beautiful sounds that I use in installations, and compositions.
When asked to work on a piece for wild Up, I jumped at the chance to use this recording of birds that i took last year in northern California. I was at a dairy farm, and found was this giant oak filled with tiny birds all chirping. Baby cows were waking up and rattling around their pen, interrupting the recording with huffs and such. I created a speaker system embedded in bird houses to play these sounds and install them in the space as an environmental installation. The ensemble, playing within the soundscape of birds, acts to put a frame around the everyday or mundane sounds. They help us listen in a more critical and musical way. The instrumental material comes from harmonium improvisations made for the piece. Here is an early one made last May:sketch for “Ornithology Project” — wild Up by ckallmyer
The title of the work comes from Dan Beachy-Quick’s poem of the same name: this nest, swift passerine. Beachy-Quick’s work is beautiful, and I like the sounds of the words together. Also, the birds in that oak tree were probably of the passerine genus of birds. Nests imply inhabiting, and it is with our habitation that we share a time in a space listening in humble contemplation. Hope to see you on saturday!Chris Kallmyer is a performer, composer, and sound artist living in Los Angeles, CA who works in sound installation, composition, trumpet, and electronic music. He has presented work at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), the Walker Art Center, the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, the Hammer Museum, the Getty Center REDCAT, Machine Project, the Goldwell Open Air Museum, and other spaces in America and Europe. His work is influenced by a sense of place, architecture, field recordings, and outdoor listening.
Chris is the Curator of Sound Programming for Machine Project, is a member of wild Up, and earned his MFA in music from the California Institute of the Arts where he studied with Thomas Stevens, Vinny Golia, Wadada Leo Smith, and Edward Carroll. He holds a BA in trumpet performance from St. Mary’s College of Maryland.
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Ornithology Premieres: Fake Palindromes
“Fake Palindromes” is the first song I ever heard by Andrew Bird, and it is my mind’s aural portrait of him. The title’s reference to palindromes calls to mind one of Messiaen’s trademarks: the “non-retrogradeable rhythm”, or a rhythmic palindrome. With the inclusion of Bird’s music on this wild Up concert featuring Messiaen’s Oiseaux exotiques [Foreign Birds], I knew I had to arrange this particular song by Andrew Bird. The piece is not really composed à la manière de Messiaen, not that I would profess the ability to do so. What I did do is borrow a lot of Messiaen’s rhythms and gestures, as well as his ideas of “color chords” and “modes of limited transposition”, and I used a tempo that is très modéré compared to Bird’s original. And I couldn’t resist quoting some of Messiaen’s “birds” (invented or transcribed) in addition to my own “Bird transcriptions”. The other interpretive lens is one of memory and simultaneity. When I remember this song, I hear several versions of it simultaneously (Bird’s own performances are very improvisatory and spontaneous). The introductory material is treated with all sorts of palindromic manipulations, while the chorus is filled with the hyper-sweet planing string melody (reminiscent of Messiaen’s early Debussy-inspired music). In the verse Bird’s melodies mix with those of Messiaen’s birds, very much like Messiaen’s cacophonous aviary in the piano concerto. ~ RV
Richard Valitutto is active in the Los Angeles area as a piano soloist, chamber musician, accompanist, teacher, and writer. He holds degrees from the University of Cincinnati (BM) and CalArts (MFA). In addition to playing with wild Up,he is a founding member of two LA-based chamber ensembles, The Joshua Trio and Gnarwhallaby. More information at www.richardvalitutto.com
The Show: Ornithology
Messiaen, Haydn, Ferneyhough, Charlie Parker and Andrew Bird. And 8 premieres.
January 14th 2012 at 8pm Armory Center of the Arts in Pasadena
Tickets: $15 online at Eventbrite $20 at the door
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Notes The Salt of the Earth - a record release awaits…Dear friends -
We’re working hard on releasing a limited number of vinyl copies of the recording that’s just been remastered from last May’s show at the Jensen Rec. Center. It includes Shostakovich’s Chamber Symphony, Op. 110a, and the B-side is Rzewski’s Les Moutons de Panurge.
To support the record release and learn more about the project, please visit the Kickstarter page here: Kickstarter — wild Up: “The Salt of the Earth”
You can stream the recording or download it digitally here: http://wildup.bandcamp.com/
What follows is the liner note which will be included on the beautiful album jacket, designed by Traci Larson. It gives you a little background on the creation of Shostakovich’s String Quartet No. 8/Chamber Symphony.
Shostakovich on Soviet Party loyalty:
“It is as if someone were beating you with a stick and saying, ‘Your business is rejoicing, your business is rejoicing.’”
Shostakovich’s son Maxim said, “My father cried twice in his life: when my mother died and when he came to say they’ve made him join the Party.” Crying is actually an understatement. The man who publicly withstood Stalin’s entire, painful regime finally capitulated to the Party’s pressure in 1960, and he was a sobbing, uncontrollable mess. Then he wrote his 8th String Quartet in only three days.
After writing the quartet, Shostakovich wrote a letter to his friend confessor Glikman explaining,
“The title page could carry the dedication: ‘To the memory of the composer of thisquartet’ […] while I was composing it I cried as many tears as I would pee after half-a-dozen beers.’”
In this man of paradoxes, one thing is certain: he was not ashamed of life’s rawness. And his music is the same. Rudolf Barshi - a composition student of Shostakovich - and the arranger of the String Quartet No. 8 as the Chamber Symphony, relates stories about Soviet copyists and editors changing Shostakovich’s dissonant, crunchy writing to be less offensive.
Barshai said: “His aim was to demonstrate that ambivalence exists. Wonderful harmony is suddenly interrupted by great discord. He was saying, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, things are not always harmonious. They are hard and tragic too.’”
As a pianist, Shostakovich’s playing was volatile and exhilarating, with fistfuls of wrong notes, tempos that seemed impossible and out of control. The legendary Soviet pianist Sviatoslav Richter said one time he played a duet with Shostakovich:
“Shostakovich would start at a certain tempo, then get faster or slower. He ignored the pedal completely. And he played incredibly loud all the time […] I was fighting a losing battle.”
Apparently, Richter always had interesting encounters with Shostakovich, his first goes like this:
“I was outside the Odessa Opera. It was dusk, and the street lights hadn’t come on. There was a man staring at me. He had white eyes, with no pupils. Suddenly I realized that it was Shostakovich. I went weak at the knees […] I was always ill at ease in his presence. He was very odd: tense, yet extremely refined. A genius, but quite bizarre. A terrible depressive. He was totally crazy too.”
The essence of Shostakovich’s music-making, as composer and performer, was pure vitality, whether slow or fast, major or minor. His music cares not for posterity, only for the moment. And the moment is the only thing this music needs. It whispers and screams: “I am alive! Living hurts real bad. It also feels so good. Here I am.”
Ironically, the man who never seemed to care one bit about cataloguing and recording his own music has become one of the most recorded twentieth-century composers. So why should we join the ranks and make another recording of an already ultra-famous piece? The same reason anyone goes through the insane amount of time and effort to relive something: there is always more to say.
When we made this recording a couple things happened. The performance felt great. The visceral and emotional energy in the small, packed venue was palpable, and everyone played hard, fast, and beautiful. We assumed the recording would display these things.
But the live recording sounded terrible.
To our conservatory-trained ears and minds we heard a slew of mistakes, rough patches, and moments of near collapse. We were confused and worried.
This recording is not edited from that performance. In the process of mixing the raw recording, the goal was to make it more raw, to relive the performance itself by proxy. We weren’t just making a live recording, but making a recording that feels alive. The mistakes we made in the performance are definitely there; in fact, they’re magnified. The bass is loud, the licks are fast, and the chords are crunchy. We hope it hurts good.
~ wild Up Modern Music Collective
(Source: worldcat.org)
