Ringmasters: Julia Holter

I've known Julia Holter since my undergraduate years at the University of Michigan.  While I didn't know her well back then, I've followed her amazing progression into an indie sensation after her move to Los Angeles for grad school at Cal Arts.

Among several good friends of the quartet (and in the spirit of full disclosure: fellow Michigan alums Chris F-L and on our blog Alex Temple), long discussions were had about her intriguing and labyrinthine song Marienbad.   And I've been nothing short of enthralled with her new album Loud City Song.  I'm pretty confident I've listened to Into The Green Wild at least 30 times.  Check it out now:

Ringmasters: Jen Wang

I first became acquainted with Jen Wang's music in Darmstadt last summer.  As a recipient of a "Staubach Honorarium", she had composed a new work for New York's excellent Talea Ensemble.  It was a great moment in the festival from my perspective as it showed that even in a place as famously rarified as Darmstadt, the zeitgeist has shifted toward acceptance of a wide range of musical aesthetics.

I've kept an eye on what she's been up to ever since with keen interest in what's happening in the Bay Area.  Jen is incredibly active as a composer and administrator as a co-Director of the Wild Rumpus collective and as curator at the Center For New Music.

A wonderfully sonically aware composer, Jen's sense for the development of sounds is on full display in this wonderful percussion quartet (make sure to click through to the second half):

Ringmasters: Jay Alan Yim

I've known Jay Alan Yim since my time as a graduate student at Northwestern University.  I had a fantastic time in his "Music Since 1975" class, including sprawling conversations about aesthetic issues that somehow wound up talking about initially unrelated issues and being forced to engage with music I thought (and continue to think, in some cases) that I hated.

Jay is a composer of incredible intellect and wide-ranging interests.  His scores can range from the carefully constructed and sculptural "Blue Voice of Air" (that you can check out below) to this spacious multi-layered structure with elements of improvisation I was a part of performing back in 2009.

I always imagine a bold, geometrically bristling modern sculpture when I hear this piece.  Also, fish making music...c'mon!

Ringmasters: Liza White

We've gotten to know Liza White well since this last spring.  We premiered her "Zin Zin Zin Zin" (a raucous short work based on a scat by Mos Def) back in May, and had a fantastic time getting all its moving parts and criss-crossing lines into place for our debut disc.  You can look forward to the full piece then, and in the meantime we'll be working with her on a brand new ringtone.

Were you wondering if Liza knows how to put together an exciting and energetic piece of music?  If so, you haven't heard "Zin", but check out "Freestyle" on her website...each section of this barn-burner is based on different hip-hop dance moves!

And, because great music is great, check out Mos Def with The Roots...ZIN ZIN ZIN ZIN!

Ringmasters: Ted Hearne

On a personal level, I am nothing short of squealing with joy that Ted Hearne agreed to be a part of our Mobile Miniatures project.  I've listened to his album under the guise of R WE WHO R WE, his project with Philip White, countless times.  Check out the project and his music...two things I'm independently and mutually pumped about!

Check out the madness live, linked above, or listen to what may be my favorite cover of all time: his version of Mariah Carey's Emotions.  Y'know that original is pretty darn good too...

Old Man and the NostalgiC

In writing up the press materials for our upcoming Sampler Pack concert on August 31st, I've found myself referring to Britten's Three Divertimenti as "pop-music-posing-as-classical." As a music writer doing daily battle with reductive genre labels, this hyphenated moniker is a little cheap on my part, and when it comes down to it, only applies to the second movement Waltz.

 

In any case, "pop" is not a pejorative term in my world. While studying this piece, I've been continually astounded by the simplicity and ear-worm-iness of each melody. Where it becomes distinctly Britten is in the sterling orchestration, clarity of the primary voice, and of course, the occasional gnarly harmonic breakdown. What struck me when I first heard the Waltz, though, was how perfectly this innocent tune would slip into pretty much any Wes Anderson film ever. Like Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums or Moonrise Kingdom, the naiveté of adults and children alike is thrown into stark contrast with the often cold realities of life. 

 

During an early rehearsal of the Waltz, Aurelien commented that the music evoked for him the picture of a young girl who, while twirling about, has tiny glimpses of future hardships. Shifting harmonies that lead back to the theme and a mid-movement agitato/con fuoco passage are the broken hearts here. There is something about 3/4 time signatures that stirs the nostalgic, the wistful and the unblemished in us. Perhaps it is because it's the first style we learn in ballroom dance class. We all did cotillion, right? Right? Oh boy…

 

Not all 3/4 tunes are waltzes, but that fact notwithstanding, there's something about 3/4 and 6/8 that is perfectly situated for a pop ballad. Here are a few of my favorite examples:

 

Metallica - Nothing Else Matters

 

Elliott Smith - Waltz #2

 

These songs instantly shift me into the bliss of nostalgia, and in each, the charm of the meter and the melancholy of the lyrics create a compelling dichotomy. The same can be said for Britten, and before I get completely lost down this rabbit hole, here's what you're in for on the 31st:

 

Comic Cadences: Test Run - Richard Lewis

As any follower of this blog knows, this quartet likes to have a lot of projects cooking at any given point.  With our debut album recorded and mid-preparation for our disc with Julien Labro that we'll put on tape in September, it was really exciting and somewhat odd to have Chris Fisher-Lochhead come to the rehearsal studio some days ago to work on a project that won't see the concert hall until beyond this upcoming season.  I'm talking 2014-15, people!

I'm planning to document what will be a long, and detailed process of engagement with the world of standup comedy from a musical standpoint.  Chris has already been thinking about this for years (as evidenced by the repeated Richard Pryor clips I used to hear coming from his desk when we were roommates), and we're excited to endeavor with him in digging deep into the musical aspects of a fascinating and rich performance medium.

Our first session came together over this clip excerpted from a Richard Lewis appearance.  Check out the audio, and then see where Chris and my conversation begins.  I hope you'll enjoy following along as the conversation unfolds.

JAW: How did you come to decide upon this short clip from Richard Lewis to tackle first?

CFL: As a little background, I had started to transcribe the deliveries of standup comics in the spring of 2011 as a way to study the use of the human voice in performance situations.  I first transcribed 30 second clips by Paul Mooney, Richard Lewis, Woody Allen, George Carlin, Richard Pryor, Lenny Bruce, and Dave Chappelle.  The Richard Lewis clip seemed to me to be the most "musical" in a traditional sense; it had a clarity of pitch and regularity of rhythm that eased with the translation between media.

JAW: Musically speaking, how does the string quartet work for you as a medium for this concept of transcribing the cadence of standups?

CFL: In some ways, the string quartet as an ensemble is actually rather inadequate as a means to capture the various aspects of human vocal delivery.  Unlike wind and brass instruments (and of course, the human voice), string instruments do not rely on the use of breath for sound production, they do not employ the tongue for articulation, and they do not have the same possibilities for noise production that are so important for the production of linguistic meaning.  However, for my purposes, the string quartet is an excellent fit.  First of all, as a string player, I am very comfortable writing for string instruments.  Secondly, as the point of the project is to focus on those aspects of comedic delivery which are properly "musical", the choice of a medium that necessitates some form of translation can actually accentuate those aspects.

JAW: How do you feel affect of Lewis' nervous, neurotic patter effects the music you wrote to fill out the arrangement?

CFL: Although Richard Lewis' onstage persona is certainly very neurotic and nervous, it's interesting that his delivery is a lot more traditionally musical than those of the other comics I studied.  One of the things I plan to do in the future is compare the musical characteristics of a specific comic's delivery with the way that delivery articulates their onstage persona.  For example, is there some correlation between the regular rhythms and songlike pitches in Richard Lewis' routine and its nervous character?  Is there a correlation between the long pauses and monotone delivery of someone like Tig Notaro and their "dryness"?  Regardless, in transcribing the exact rhythms of human speech, the resulting rhythms will inevitably be more irregular and jagged than those of a traditionally metric music.

JAW: You said after we put together this quick recording of the Richard Lewis excerpt that you were glad we did something this early because unexpected problems came to light.  What aspects of this transcription process proved to be the most vexing?  Which aspects of the notation or approach to transcription are you currently wrangling with conceptually?

CFL: I would say that the biggest unexpected obstacles that became evident as we did this arrangement were all practical in nature: creating a tempo map and click track to exactly match the source material, creating an arrangement within the limitations of an absolutely strict click track, and synching up the live performers with the click track.

JAW: It's amazing how far this excerpt has come toward a fully expressed musical aesthetic even in this incredibly early stage of this project's development.  Check out the quartet music without Richard Lewis' voice and see for yourself:

 

Chambers is in the Can

Hark! I bring you tidings of great joy! Spektral Quartet and Parlour Tapes+ have all six pieces on Spektral's debut album on tape!

Our final session.

I'm so excited about this record, and couldn't be prouder to have recorded such challenging, intelligent and expressive music for our first disc.  Here are some things I can tell you:

-Recording Ben Hjertmann's piece on Friday and Eliza Brown's on Saturday was one of the biggest challenges this quartet has ever faced.  Both pieces are incredibly difficult individually and for the ensemble, and in drastically different ways: the wild virtuosity and rapid-fire changes of Ben's piece versus the intricately interwoven web of microtonal harmony, pulsating rhythms and subtle timbres in Eliza's work.

-The record is titled "Chambers", a nod to Marcos Balter's piece on the album, the unique sound world of each piece, and that thing the four of us do every day.

-I am a danger to my instrument...after breaking my good violin during our first collaboration with Julien Labro (that video has me playing on a second-rate loaner after I ripped the top off my fiddle with a bow whip), I've proved once again "why we can't have nice things".  Luckily, I was using my secondary violin to play the guitar-picking sections of Ben Hjertmann's piece in our session on Friday.  Check out the sound of me knocking the bridge off my instrument with a big hit behind the bridge:

Also, things get a little loopy when we're hunkering down in the studio.  Our coping mechanism seems to be extreme wackiness...thanks to Jenna Lyle for taking notes on our silliness during Friday's session:

“And THAT’s why they call him ol’ One Take Armbrust!”-Austin

“What do we want?? Time travel!! When do we want it?? That's irrelevant!!”-Aurelien

“Are there any shorter chairs? I can’t hunch over the way I like with these.” -Austin

“Bar 60 was the best we’ve ever done it that time.”-Russ
“Yeah, seriously. Speed it up, do a little pitch correction in post... It’ll be great.”-Doyle

“Why Guitar Players Have Frets: Part 800”-Austin

“Ya know, it should be more like ‘da-doo-dat-doo-dat--dat’”-Russ

“Well that was definitely tragic.”-Russ

“Ca-Kaww!”-Austin/Aurelien

“There’s the performing phase, and there’s the judging phase. And when you go too long....one takes over...How about 5. Take 5?” -Russ

Stylistic Maneuvers

I've never been the kind of musician (or music fan) who feels the need to be exclusive in my tastes.  While it may surprise some of you who are more familiar with me writing about Haas or Carter, I'm just as likely to listen to Ke$ha or Chick Corea's "My Spanish Heart" without the slightest tinge of irony.

If I spend too long playing strictly concert hall music, I get a bit itchy.  I'm certainly listening to other stuff, like my recent obsession from an amazing super-group.

That's why the the beginnings of our collaboration with Julien Labro for an album on Azica Records have brought me musical energy just when I thought I was burnt out from a long concert season.

First of all, Julien sent us a new arrangement of this scorcher a few months back to start work on:

Given the mixed meters and quicksilver solo lines, it's a good thing we've had some time to absorb the tune.

I'll be honest, I'd never heard of any of the artists on this track before Julien sent it our way.  And, it's more of the same with a few other composers and tunes on the record.  That includes the thorny hubbub of Fernando Otero's "De Ahora en Màs" and a couple tunes by the incredibly talented Diego Schissi, whose adventures in nuevo tango have a flavor of Stravinsky.

It's not like I've never listened to Latin jazz before, but diving into the styles and listening with actually playing these different moods and grooves in mind has been an adventure in uncovering some really special musical personalities.

Our first shows with the new material are on Tuesday at the Clark Street location of Uncommon Ground and on the Pittsburgh Chamber Music Society the following day.  Look for more shows this fall, and the album later in the concert season!

But, it's not our first time playing together and we'll be bringing back some familiar arrangements from familiar names:

Old Man and the C: Live at the Hide-opolis

Remember our end-of-the-year party at High Concept Labs last June? What you probably didn't know is that the power went out on half of Wabansia Ave just hours before you showed up. Across the street, the folks at the Hideout were scrambling to figure out what to do with the sizable crowds queueing up for its Just For Laughs Festival (and acts like W Kamau Bell, Pete Holmes and Brody Stevens) that very same evening. The Hideout pleaded with us to use the downstairs space at HCL and I immediately envisioned the Andante movement of Beethoven's Op. 59 No. 3 with Reggie Watts's dulcet ballad, F**k S**t Stack, wafting up through the floorboards. Short story long, we offered to help them out (don't worry, the power came back on prior to show time) and Hideout owner Tim Tuten offered us a slot in his 2013 season lineup…which we are cashing in on this Saturday.

Personally, I couldn't be more excited to play this joint. The Hideout is intimate, the stage is low and inviting, the crowd open-eared and the drinks silly cheap. If there is any question how much I love this venue, might I direct you to one of the photo locations from my wedding in 2011:

This house-shaped club isn't really a secret in Chicago, but sitting as it does in the middle of a public works campus, fans have made an effort to be there, and the riff raff is minimal or non-existent. It's played host to some outstanding talent, such as:

(get ready for some QUALITY audio, folks…)

Glen Hansard

Jeff Tweedy

Shellac

CAVE

The Fiery Furnaces

Jay Reatard

Alabama Shakes

Spektral can't wait to get the sounds of Alex Temple, Steve Gorbos, Ben Hjertmann, Liza White, Francisco Castillo Trigueros, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Verdi inside these hallowed walls. Make sure you come up and say hi after the show…or during the show for that matter. See you on Saturday!

Scrapbook of a Recording Session

This past Tuesday morning, we made the trek down Lakeshore drive to the Performance Hall in the Logan Center at U. Chicago.  Our friends from Parlour Tapes+ were already mostly finished in their setup as we warmed up and got situated.  We came into this session feeling confident about our preparation and eager to get Hans Thomalla's "Albumblatt" on tape.  It may be the piece we've played the most over our first three seasons as a quartet.

Adjusting to the incredibly clear acoustic of the hall took some time, but once we started playing full takes of the piece we began getting in a rhythm.  Once the initial concern about getting it perfect wore away, it came down to playing the piece the way we know how...microphones be damned.

Having Hans' exacting ears there for the session was a boon, helping tweak our dynamics and articulations for the room and the microphones.

As the session wore on and it came down to making sure we were happy with everything, we realized we were better off having a coffee than continuing the session.  We're looking forward to refining the sound of the recording the same way we've tweaked our conception of the piece over the last year.

Introducing Parlour Tapes+

A first foray into any realm of great importance is best made with friends.  So, as we programmed our debut album it was self-evident that we record works by our composing comrades here in Chicago. And when we were approached by our pals Jenna Lyle and Kyle Vegter (who have teamed up with more amazing people in Andrew Tham and Ellen McSweeney) to be part of launching their new record label the choice was clear: an album of Chicago composers on a Chicago label.

We're thrilled to be a part of the birth of the first Chicago label devoted entirely to contemporary art music, Parlour Tapes+.   You can come see the label take its first public steps at "The Guilty Party" on May 16, an evening of music and mystery.  We'll be there, helping to score the action as we unmask the "killer" of Third Coast Percussion's David Skidmore!

And the good news is, this recording is really happening!  We already have Chris Fisher-Lochhead's "Dig Absolutely" in the can, and recently recorded Marcos Balter's "Chambers" in Northwestern University's reverberant and spacious Alice Millar Chapel.

Check it out.

Getting the mics set with our inimitable producer Kyle Vegter:

In case you were wondering, this place is pretty majestic.  We had mics getting room sound up there...

Doyle preaches the good news of the viola to the congregation:

Old Man and The C: Free Hugs

Humans of Earth,

What a week. What a terrible, horrible, very bad, no good week. I prefer The Onion's take on the conclusion to the Boston manhunt: 

It's times like this when I feel fortunate to be a musician; to have an artistic outlet for confusion and rage and despair and hope. I watched this tragedy unfold from a distance here in Chicago, and I don't mean to make any part of it about me (because it sure as hell isn't). I can't pretend to know what it must be like to have one's life indelibly transformed by the loss of mobility, or the death of a loved one to such an unfathomable disaster. A magnified sense of vulnerability is something we all share, though, and today I'd like to express how much I value all of you. 

To my wife and my family: I love you and thank you for fostering this crazy dream of playing music for a living.

To the Spektral fans: chatting, laughing and nerding-out with you at our shows is really what makes every performance inspiring for me.

To my musician friends: thank you for making Chicago the unstoppable sonic engine that it is. 

To my composer friends: thank you for making each day of rehearsal hair-pulling-ly challenging and artistically exhilarating. 

We're headed back into the recording studio (two down, four to go) these next couple months, but we hope to hear from you soon. Just don't be alarmed if I hug you a little tighter when I see you next.

Stay safe everybody,

Doyle

Jacob Bancks: Approaching the Quartet

This Friday, Spektral takes to the road for a day of masterclass and performance at Augustana College in Rock Island, IL. We're very much looking forward to premiering a new work by Jacob Bancks, entitled Canticle, who I've known for several years since he was a student at the University of Chicago and I played Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time with his wife Kara, an excellent clarinetist.  Here are some thoughts from him about his personal approach to composition and the string quartet genre.

JAW: In approaching a new work for string quartet, do you find the tradition of the repertoire inspiring or encumbering? What are your favorite quartets and did you draw any inspiration from them for this work?

JB: A lot of composers talk about being weighted down by Mozart, Shostakovich, whomever, when writing string quartets. Honestly, I never let old, famous works in any genre get in my way; that would be like my three-year-old daughter getting her crayons jumbled by the specter of Picasso. And plenty of people can't tell the difference between the two anyway. There are however a few canonical string quartets that I'm constantly engaging, in this project and elsewhere. As a nerdy undergrad I went up to Performers' Music on Michigan Ave. and devoutly bought that red faux-leather volume of the complete Bartók quartets like it was the Book of Common Prayer. Every couple of years I go back to those, and my mind is newly-blown; they're like six new works each time I hear them. Of late I've also become an unwitting fan of Joseph Haydn's quartets. I tell my theory students, Haydn's like your dad: you think he's boring now, but the older you get, the more grotesquely fascinating he will become. And I always go back to Beethoven, especially Op. 130 (B-flat Major) which is personally very sentimental to me, and Op. 131 (C-sharp Minor), which I find both exhilarating and baffling. But my real string quartet fetishes of late, which might be obvious from the new work for Spektral, have been Ravel and Debussy. They each wrote only one quartet: why mess with perfection?

JAW: How did you approach putting pen to paper for this work? Did you begin with an idea of the piece as a whole or smaller moments?

JB: In this particular piece, I started with several musical images that I attempted to shape into a cohesive whole. The centerpiece of the work is this temperamental, bold, coarse cello solo, which has the other instruments responding in various stages of confusion and amazement. The rest of the piece centers on two basic ideas, both of which are transformed through the lens of the cello solo: excruciatingly slow, solemn polyphony; and uncontrollable, quietly nervous flickering.

JAW: How has life as a composer changed with your new role as a faculty member, compared to your past life as a composition student at University of Chicago?

JB: I loved UChicago, so leaving was hard. I was actually teaching for two terms before I came back to defend my dissertation, which was when it struck me that I had spent the last six years around some of the most brilliant musical minds on earth. But Augustana has been an ideal gig for so many reasons: I have excellent colleagues, I enjoy my students, my class sizes are small, and I have been able to build a composition program essentially from scratch. And I can swim to Iowa any time I want. Teaching has, without question, made me a better composer. For one, I nag my students enough about their productivity that I've started expecting more out of myself as well. And I love teaching undergraduates from all kinds of backgrounds: there's nothing like playing Firebird for someone who's never heard it before, or helping a student progress from barely reading notes to beginning to digest works of Berio and Feldman within a couple of years. More than anything, teaching keeps me constantly working toward expressing only the most worthwhile ideas with clarity, passion, and coherence, which is exactly what I hope for in my music as well.

(Re)Arranging the Seven Last Words

This Holy Week marks the third year that Spektral Quartet has played Haydn's "The Seven Last Words of Christ".  We view it as a yearly tradition and approaching this incredible work, full of reverence and depth, is humbling every time.  However, while billed as adapted by Haydn, the quartet version of this masterpiece has moments of thorny voice leading and awkward doublings, while leaving out some interesting lines from the chorus and orchestra original.  We have our suspicions that an eager publisher hired out the creation of this quartet version to make a quick buck.  

 

So, we decided to engage our friend Joe Clark to arrange a new version for string quartet, while maintaining as much of the original as possible.  Below, Joe describes his process and shares a bit about what it meant for him to grapple with this work. Tonight, we debut the new version at University of Chicago's Rockefeller Chapel.

I began exploring Haydn's Seven Last Words of Christ by researching the history of the work's inception, revisions, and publication. Since there were many different arrangements of the work during Haydn's own lifetime (for orchestra, solo piano, string quartet, and choir), there were a lot of places one could start and a lot of resources to refer to.  Since I didn't want to radically reinterpret the quartet treatment, I used the Trautwein plates of the string quartet version as a point of embarkation and began entering that score, in its entirety, into Finale. I received some assistance with this step from my friend and copyist Jeff Schweitzer.

I then cross-referenced each measure of the newly entered score against the 1801 Breitkopf und Härtel choral version: my primary source.  Throughout the project, I also referred to the Bärenreiter Kassel edition of the orchestral score, and the Edition Peters and Henle urtext editions of the string quartet. And, just in case I needed a second (or third or fourth) opinion, I made a Spotify playlist of every version of the piece I could find.

One of the reasons I love arranging is that each project is different and requires different ways of assessing musical problems and thinking both creatively and practically.  Sometimes, the principle challenge of a project will come from adapting an idea for a large ensemble to a smaller instrumentation (or vice versa). Other times, a challenge will arise translating material from one instrumentation to one with radically different strengths and limitations.  However, for this project, those kinds of broad issues were not particularly applicable since I was adapting a work for string quartet for, well, string quartet.

Instead, the challenges that I encountered  were making changes that would fix tuning, balance, voice leading, textural consistency, contrapuntal clarity, etc. while being subtle, stylistically appropriate, and always respectful of what Haydn, a master of the string quartet, put on the page. I was extremely fortunate that the Spektral Quartet prepared a list of passages in the work that were especially thorny and I was surprised when I found some considerable inconsistencies between the string quartet and choral versions: sections originally marked fortissimo marked pianissimo, missing melodies in the winds, omitted chord tones from the tenor line, etc.

I sent  finished drafts of each movement to Dr. Cliff Colnot, who would edit my work.  It was Dr. Colnot who introduced the quartet and me, and I have been very fortunate to work with and learn from him on many projects. After implementing those changes, I sent the score to the quartet, who then played through the work and offered thoughtful suggestions, which resulted in the final version of the score.

Arranging "The Seven Last Words of Christ" required focus and fastidiousness, but the process was very meditative. I found myself suddenly recalling memories of observing Lent as a child: attending "The Stations of the Cross" devotions, traveling to different churches on Holy (Maundy) Thursday, and fish on Fridays. Regardless of one's faith, there is a beauty in remembering dying and their last moments. I am very thankful for the opportunity to work on this project with the Spektral Quartet and I look forward to our next collaboration.