With so many musical ideas in use, and overuse, it can be hard to avoid the neighborhood of any given cliché. This is especially true when it comes to sampling sounds. I tend to hammer on my students when they get too close to one, but often they don’t hear it the same way. Mostly this is due to a different level of experience, but the ensuing discussions too often make me sound like an old lunatic.

Friday night’s concert might have been the most whiplash-inducing mix of styles I ever experienced. It certainly encourages some thought about whether to “ghetto” styles or mix them together. (“ghetto” referring to lumping together pieces of one style or instrumentation.)

Tending towards the soft and gentle side of new music were works by Alexander Nohai-Seaman, Derek Healy, Richard Brooks, and Michael Young. Young gave an impressive performance of his work. Healy’s work is part of a set of Chinese folk songs that my colleague Mei Zhong is releasing on CD.

Tending towards the modern were works by Eric Nathan, a gorgeous chamber ensemble work title Onement, Tom Wells’ Kisa, and of course, Elliott Carter. Notably different about the Carter guitar work, Shard, was its interpretation on electric guitar by Derek Johnson.

The work that generated the most discussion was Jeff Stanek’s Love and Aggression, for electric guitar and amplified cello. What was interesting to me was the reaction by the college students, who seemed to be against the very idea of a cello playing through an amp, and playing with distortion. Many people have written about the connection between certain avenues of experimental rock and new music among younger composers, as exemplified by the Bang on a Can All Stars, the Wordless Music concerts, and others, but the connection seemed to be lost in this locale. Knowing the success of the above groups, it says more to me about the culture of young people locally.

I might be more interested in this than most, since I was also a student there, but I tend to see the development of institutions as being similar to composition. Both are combinations of planned decisions and serendipitous discovery. You try things out, you revise along the way. Sometimes you don’t move on to new material soon enough. Some institutions are monothematic; others diverse collages of style and idea that you can navigate.

Wells’s talk reminded of how much international exposure the university has provided to the community, and for how long. As a high school student Wells heard a talk by Karlheinz Stockhausen in 1963, and said that listening to Kontakt “blew my mind.” He studied with Stockhausen in 1968 and 1972.

I’ll be posting more about the festival during and afterwards, and posting pictures to my Flickr stream, as well as the Facebook event page.

Counterstream is a wonderful online radio station for contemporary American music, mixing heavyweights and newcomers in equal measure. It also has a number of interviews available for streaming.  It’s “ON DEMAND” series links artists from different genres, so far pop and concert music, who themselves have some link. Besides the Carter/Lesh program, there is also an interview with Meredith Monk and Björk. The Special Programs page has links to other interesting broadcasts, but you must tune in at specified times to listen. (no archive)

On Friday, March 14th at 3pm (ET), Elliott Carter and Phil Lesh will be interviewed together on Counterstream radio, the online radio station of the American Music Center. On Sunday, March March 16 at noon PT (3pm ET), UCLA radio will feature experimental electronic(a) composer Carl Stone.

The show should be interesting, and more than a little mind-bending for people who rarely venture outside of their personal pleasure genres. Carter is a titan of 20th/21st-century modernism, whose music features beautifully layered material highlighted by complex metrical relationships. Lesh is best know as the bass player for the Grateful Dead, whose live shows spawned legions of faithful “Dead Heads” that followed the band across the country. But Lesh has a significant background in contemporary art music, studying with Luciano Berio at Mills College in the early 1960s. Along with classmate Steve Reich, he formed an improvisation group that blended acoustic and electronic music with theater. According to Alex Ross in The Rest is Noise, he dropped out of composition to play bass for a band the would become the Grateful Dead after listening to Mahler’s Sixth Symphony while tripping on LSD.

Wordless Music produced the U.S. premiere of Greenwood’s Popcorn Superhet Receiver last week (which a great deal of the soundtrack for Blood is based on). There was a pre-concert article in the NY Times, and a concert review.

Wordless Music delves into genre mixing, with a philosophy that there is common ground between experimental classical and experimental rock and jazz. Usually there is a pairing of rock with classical chamber music. This concert made the juxtaposition of Greenwood’s works with two early minimalist pieces by John Adams and Gavin Bryars. While this pairing might not have made the most sense (Greenwood’s piece isn’t really minimal at all), the concert series has been a success. It’s also worth noting that Greenwood isn’t dabbling, like a Paul McCartney or a David Byrne (of the Talking Heads). Greenwood is trained violist with an avid interest in the music of Olivier Messiaen. While he sometimes develops his orchestral works through multi-layered improvisations in the recording studio, he handles all aspects of orchestration and notation himself. And the genre mixing seems to be paying off. The concert review notes the most recent performance was “packed.” And as I’ve posted before, younger audiences are interested in classical concerts that feature music by composers closer to their age, not the mindless classical pop that older symphony boards think will draw them in.

Alsop is a big supporter of new music. Ross writes that “in previous appointments [she] has shown a knack for charming both players and audiences into enjoying music that they think they won’t like. She has become a star, in part, by making composers the stars.” After recent years of financial struggles, Baltimore has gotten on board with the idea that modernizing the repertoire, along with aggressive marketing, can lead to a bigger audience.

It’s noteworthy when Ross writes that orchestras aren’t necessarily sexist in not hiring women conductors. He says that “the classical business is temperamentally resistant to novelty, whether in the form of female conductors, American conductors, younger conductors, new music, post-1900 concert dress, or concert-hall color schemes that aren’t corporate beige.” While Ross is probably correct about the situation today, it would be wrong to think that it never existed.

That last paragraph warrants a whole post (or more) at some point. Also on the burner is a reaction to Ross’s writings on race in The Rest is Noise. Pointing out that racism virtually excluded the participation of blacks in classical music in the U.S., blacks developed their own art form – jazz. After establishing an art of their own, many saw no need to try to gain access to the white world of classical performance. Now, music schools, symphonies and the like are wringing their hands over what to do about their institutions that hardly resemble the rest of American culture.

Two other people related to the project also received nominations. Jennifer Higdon received a nomination in the Best Classical Contemporary Composition Category for Zaka, and Judith Sherman was nominated for Classical Producer of the Year. In the producer category, each person had 4 or 5 CD’s noted. In addition to Sherman’s work on strange imaginary animals, she also produced releases by the Kronos Quartet and the Ying Quartet.

The members of eighth blackbird are understandably exuberant.

This recent journey took me to the Third Practice Festival, at the University of Richmond (VA). Ben Broening started this festival in 2001, and quickly carved out an interesting niche in the EM festival calendar. Ben has always had a good ear for programming a variety of interesting music, and since 2004 the festival has benefited greatly from having eighth blackbird as their ensemble in residence. But 3p07 moved a step further, with a range of concerts and performers that one rarely sees at an EM Festival.

While a more complete review will appear in an upcoming SEAMUS Journal, it is worth highlighting 3p07’s book-ends: an opening concert featuring So Percussion and Trollstilt; and a closing concert featuring eighth blackbird and I Gusti Putu Sudarta (shadow puppetry). The opening concert consisted of the hour-long performance of Five (and a half) Gardens, music by Dan Trueman, with texts by Jennifer Trueman and animated paintings by Judy Trueman. The percussion battery presented by So ran the gamut from resonant tubes to wheel barrow. More striking than their instrumentation was their ability to shift and meld a widely diverse range of styles and musical ideas. Trollstilt expands the musical realm even further, incorporating folk-inspired (Norwegian and American) new music into the already extensive landscape. This was a fascinating work and performance, and I found myself constantly impressed by how easily the piece and performers shifted among musical styles. It went beyond the basic ideas of postmodernism into something truly new.

The closing concert featured eighth blackbird and I Gusti Putu Sudarta in a presentation of experimental Balinese Shadow Theater. The merging of the western classical tradition with traditional gamelan was a starting point, but the most fascinating elements were the merging of traditional shadow puppetry with virtual shadow puppetry. Working with technology developed by Semi Ryu and Stefano Faralli, Sudarta could combine leather shadow puppets with virtual counterparts controlled by a Nintendo Wii-mote.

My own contribution to the festival consisted of a new work, Bent Metal, for live laptop performance. It’s still very much a work in progress, with another performance upcoming on the 12th here at BSU. Perhaps I’ll keep the blog sounding and share some reflective thought about working in this new (for me) domain.