“Band of Fire.” I’m amazed that I couldn’t locate a rock band with that name. Maybe it’s out there, but the name didn’t pop up in any of my searches. Nope. No Band of Fire to rock me out of the pain and misery I’ve been experiencing over the past five weeks. The “Band of Fire” refers to an affliction that weirdly is all too evident in my world these days: Shingles. I learned from my friend Nada Kherbike, who is from Syria, that the term “Band of Fire” is used by Syrians as a synonym for Shingles. And I’ll tell you, that’s about as good a description as you’ll ever come across. It is one nasty, nasty thing to deal with. And it is the sole reason that I have not been posting anything over the past couple of weeks. This concerns me since I had hoped to establish a dialog among my friends here in Albuquerque and around the planet concerning issues of interest and concern in the worlds of “chamber music in the 21st century.” But, it couldn’t be helped.

Shingles, for those of you who do not know its history, is a virus, a herpes virus (herpes zoster) the result of having Chicken Pox as a kid. The virus that causes Chicken Pox lives on in one’s body and emerges later in life due, I’m told, to undue stress. The syptoms are a rash (that usually laces the back, under the arm and across part of the chest on the left-side of the body). The rash is accompanied by severe pain, due to the nerves becoming inflammed. And the pain can become worse after the rash either eases or disappears entirely. The pain is debilitating and it can last for a month or months. In my case I’m in the 6th week of dealing with the pain. I guess this is as good a reason as any to be a bit inactive over the past month or so.

I’m slowly coming out of the stupor that I found myself in, the result of the energy being zapped out of my body. Although the pain persists as I attempt several differing treatments, I’m not out of the woods quite yet. I am, however, determined to get back into action, so look for a posting in a day or so.  And for those of you in New Mexico, check out the website for Chamber Music Albuquerque to learn more about the upcoming June Music Festival that starts on June 6th.

On March 28th ETHEL performed in Albuquerque as part of Chamber Music Albuquerque’s 2007-2008 Season, specifically as part of CMA’s Chamber Music X Series dedicated exclusively to newer musical works and ensembles that don’t fit easily into the tried-and-true classical music categories that haunt most chamber music presenters. ETHEL was terrific and they played to a surprisingly large and enthusiastic audience. As a veteran of the worlds of new music, there isn’t very much that I haven’t heard, or seen for that matter. But, despite some cynicism, I was taken by the concert not only because ETHEL plays with ferocious abandon, but due to the added presence of Robert Mirabal.

Robert is from the Taos Pueblo in Taos, New Mexico and is among his generation’s most respected artists. A flute player and flute maker, dancer, singer and storyteller, Robert has developed a performance style that is, to say the least, captivating. He was invited by ETHEL to collaborate with them on the development of a new work in the context of a project they call “ETHEL’s Truck Stop.” The project is similar in many ways to a project I was involved with in the mid-1990’s named Music in Motion whereby new music ensembles collaborate with composers and composer-performers to develop a new work through a carefully defined series of collaborative sessions. Often the composer selected by a particular ensemble was from a very different background. And that is where the Truck Stop project and Music in Motion are somewhat similar. (Incidentally, I discuss at great length Music in Motion in my book titled Settling Scores: A Life in the Margins of American Music published by Sunstone Press.) ETHEL’s intention with the Truck Stop project is to collaborate with artists who bring very different cultural references to the project to find some kind of common ground to produce a unique musical work. Among the artists they have engaged on this project is a Navajo composer/poet and a conjunto singer. And now Robert Mirabal.

So far ETHEL and Robert have spent about three full days working together, exploring shared ideas, piecing together those ideas that work while dispensing with those that do not. While in New Mexico, they spent time together in Albuquerque, Taos and Santa Fe. On March 28th they presented an excerpt of the evolving piece, with a working title of “Awakening and Ascensions.” The result of this performance showed real promise as everyone worked hard to avoid the cliches that often result when more “exotic” cultures clash with Euro-American ones. In other words, the piece was not simply constructed of musical drones over which Robert laid down flute licks that one expects from Native American flutists. There was real interaction between ETHEL and Robert, dissonances fleetingly appeared, giving the excerpted work a nice sense of drama and unexpectedness. But what really floored me was Robert’s presence within, of course, the mise-en-scene they established. Each gesture he made, from lifting one of a half-dozen wooden flutes from their rack and articulating his line or, better yet, hoisting his didgeridoo from it’s tree-like altar and aiming it out at the audience to project the guttural sound of the instrument was simply beautiful. The man moves in his defined space so elegantly that one easily follows the sonic logic through the visual image of a body in motion. There is a real spirit at work there, one that was shared generously with the members of ETHEL and the appreciative audience. The 12-minute excerpt felt twice as long, such was the power of their shared performance. I look forward to hearing - and seeing - the full work, hopefully in Albuquerque in the near future.

Other than the Quartet for the End of Time and a cursory examination of Catalogue d’oiseaux I must admit to being somewhat unfamiliar with Oliver Messiaen’s music. Although I did attend a performance by the Philadelphia Orchestra many years ago of his magnificent Turangalila-symphonie conducted with great clarity by Seiji Ozawa. Lately however I find myself strangely drawn to Messiaen. Perhaps because some of his music (the QFET primarily) is being programmed in honor of his 100th birthday and is relatively available to me these days, including an upcoming performance by the ensemble, Antares on the June Music Festival presented by Chamber Music Albuquerque. Or perhaps I’m fixing my ears on Messiaen because - at this time of my life - I find satisfaction in listening to composers from the post WWII European avant-garde. After sort of soaking myself in their music while in graduate school, I began a long-time personal rebellion against the European modernists in favor of the then emerging American school of so-called “minimalists” and “experimentalists.” I pretty much deleted Messiaen, Boulez, Stockhausen and others from my field of sonic vision, preferring to champion the coruscating cyclical melodies of Phil Glass , Steve Reich and others of their (and my) generation. Don’t misunderstand, I still love their music as well as the generations who have followed them but I think it’s safe to say that as the executive director of Chamber Music Albuquerque for the past four years I have been in a position to listen to music from earlier periods and, well, I find that I’m enjoying it more and more. I think that this, more than any other reason, is why I’m listening again to these composers who have been no-shows in my sonic world for some 25 years.

Last week I heard a performance of Messiaen’s organ work, Les Corps Glorieux (”Seven Short Visions of the Life of the Resurrected”) in, of course, a church and on, of course Good Friday. The church was the Cathedral of St. John in downtown Albuquerque. Les Corps Glorieux was performed by organist and choral conductor Maxine Thevenot who is also the founding director of Polyphony: Voices of New Mexico, a fine new choral ensemble based in Albuquerque. As befits much of Messiaen’s music, this work embodies his deeply felt religious convictions.

Composed in seven clearly defined movements, each a musical commentary on biblical texts from the New Testament and each movement preceded by a vocal recitation of the text, the work is conceptually stunning yet the overall experience was oddly disappointing. My disappointment was not due to the performance. Maxine played it beautifully while the narrative voice was miked using a very weak projection system that made it sound distant and mysterious. Structurally the piece holds together pretty well with floating monophonic lines alternating with rich spiky harmonies that yearned to resonate more deeply than they did for me. I think my reaction was due in part to the dryness of the cathedral.

In a previous concert by Polyphony featuring, among other works, Benjamin Britten’s Ceremony of Carols, the women’s voices carried real authority, with phrases that lingered in the resonant cavity of the cathedral for a reasonable duration of time, so I was surprised at the lack of resonance in the space from the more punchy organ sonorities. Each time a loud chord was released it seemed to die on the vine. Perhaps that’s fitting given the intent of this piece but it left me a bit, well, dry. I wanted to be lifted out of my chair (pew) and transported to a place that Messiaen wanted to take me. Didn’t happen, though. But it was still a great experience.

Then just days later I heard for the first time a recording (via a BBC stream) of Messiaen’s first work for the ondes Martenot. I think it was the Fete de Belle Eaux for six ondes Martenot. What a beautiful work! It really knocked me out. I’m now looking forward to Antares’ performance of the Quartet for the End of Time on June 11th at the Simms Center presented by Chamber Music Albuquerque and for Polyphony’s celebration of Messiaen’s choral music on June 21st and 22nd in Albuquerque and Santa Fe.

A few weeks ago I attended a talk given by composer Daniel Lentz (who lives in Albuquerque) at the University of New Mexico sponsored by the music department titled “Music and the Visual Arts.” Since moving to Albuquerque in 2004 Daniel has been creating both musical works and sculptures using Plexiglas, acrylic paint and other sensitized media to, essentially, create transparent musical scores, that ideally would be interpreted by living musicians. I assume that the folks at UNM Music thought the music students would benefit from having a world-class composer like Daniel share his ideas and concepts of making music in the 21st century and how his music might find an audience. They did, but they also got something else to chew on.

As an old friend of Daniel’s, and as a member of a rather small community of new music practitioners living in Albuquerque, we hang out a lot, allowing me to track Daniel’s progress as he builds these things. They’re pretty impressive. Some of them remind me of my erector set constructions of many years ago. (Many years ago!) But it’s the music that Daniel creates as part of his sonic-visual constructions that gets my attention. Unfortunately I’m not sure that they got the attention of those music student who attended his talk. Here’s why I say this.

Daniel Lentz makes visual art works. That is, they are designed to sit in somebody’s house or perhaps in a museum where they can be anointed as a “work of art.” If he’s lucky. Nothing new here, its the way artworks have been sold for a long time. Now here’s where things get a little complicated. Daniel also creates a piece of music, usually rendered with MIDI or sampling software that is captured on a computer then burned to a CD. As Daniel explains, it’ s cheaper to use this method rather than hire the musicians to play the score, because he can’t afford to hire the live musicians. But the intent is to have musicians perform the work from the score. The sounds captured on the CD are intended to a”accompany” the visualization that has been made, the artwork. The sonic realization then is Daniel’s interpretation of the “score” that has been created as a visual work of art, leaving open the question of how the visual score might be interpreted by another performer playing on the instrument that Daniel assigns to the “score.” The sculpted work is then placed on the market with a price assigned to it, say $50,000. Whoever purchases it also receives a CD of Daniel’s sonic realization of the “score.” The new owner of the artwork then owns the musical work that has been recorded on a CD. The owner owns the rights to the musical work as well as owning the “work of art” that he or she has purchased. They can then do whatever they wish with the music. For example, they can hire other musicians to interpret the “score” and record it or use the original or newly interpreted/recorded work as musical accompaniment for a TV commercial selling Grape Nuts Cereal or a new perfume hawked by Lindsey Lohan, or some other equally horrific notion of free market excess. Needless to say, you get the idea.

When Daniel first explained this to me a few years ago I was knocked out. “What a radical idea,” I told him. This gesture completely upsets the system that has ill-served composers for generations, namely relying on a middle man - the publisher - to distribute and promote a musical work. As has been reported in Blogs and articles over the past couple of years, composers are beginning to assume complete ownership of and authority for his/her music. Philip Glass understood this 30 years ago and has successfully created an infrastructure that controls his work from creation to distribution.
And now, on a much less sophisticated level, composers are beginning to take control and, from what I hear, are having a reasonable amount of success managing their music. But Daniel Lentz has taken this notion of individual control in a totally different direction. By selling a work of art that happens to have a sonic component and giving up all residual revenues from the musical works’ potential distribution (royalties, performance rights, etc.) he’s shooting an arrow into the system. Will he benefit from this approach? Only if he sells enough of his art works at a fair-market price to live on the earnings while re-investing in the materials he needs to make another piece will he be able to continue to, essentially, screw the system. I for one am pulling for him.

Getting back to where I started this post… when Daniel revealed his thinking to the gathering of students at UNM I looked around the room trying to gauge their reactions to the one specimen they could view (one of Daniel’s artworks was brought into the classroom prior to its being displayed in an adjoining gallery space) while listening to Daniel’s musical realization of that particular piece. The few questions that were asked pertained solely to how one might go about interpreting the “score,” or artwork. When I asked the students how they felt about Daniel’s decision to give up complete control of his music, there was a rather disturbing silence. That particular part of the equation did not enter into their thinking. When I opined that this was a radical gesture, nobody challenged me. In an age of unlimited possibilities to use technology in a true entrepreneurial manner to promote and distribute their music, there was no awareness of how they would deal with this issue. This took me back some 20 years when I was the executive-artistic director of Relâche. We had commissioned a work from Phil Glass and part of our agreement was to have Phil perform with the Relâche Ensemble at the premiere performances in Philadelphia and to give several master classes for composition students at area schools. To our surprise the Curtis Institute of Music invited the ensemble and Phil to give a master class on performing his music. In the question-and-answer session that followed several students asked Phil how to go about finding a publisher. Phil’s response was direct and, I’m certain, startling to these students…”never give your music to anyone…publish it yourself and maintain control of it.” Collectively, those Curtis students were horrified and stumped. One could almost read their minds, “…jeez, what do I do now?…”

What I’ll do is keep an ear out for Daniel’s music that might find a way to infiltrate our lives in ways that are completely unexpected.

It was somewhat ironic to experience an afternoon of Morton Feldman’s music alongside of an exhibition of artworks that documented lives lost to yet another repressive dictatorship’s quest to silence its critics. It happened last January at Site Santa Fe in a concert presented by Santa Fe New Music on the final day of a dramatic exhibition titled “Los Desaparecidos,” or “The Disappeared,” a collection of artists’ reactions to those who disappeared in Latin America during the final years of the 20th century. The exhibition occupied most of the gallery space at Site Santa Fe with the exception of one gallery that was cordoned off and turned into a performance space for that afternoon. It represented the quintessence of a chamber music experience: an intimate listening environment and musicians sharing their insights to sculpt a work of art. In that space in Santa Fe, New Mexico Morton Feldman’s music took on a more-than-usual ethereal quality.

For those who might not be familiar with the name Morton Feldman, I direct you to an article written by the composer-writer-musicologist Kyle Gann titled “Painter Envy” that appeared in the Village Voice in 1996. This article will give the reader an introduction to Feldman and his legacy and, hopefully, will urge one to listen to more of his magnificent music, much of it now available via recordings or download. Sadly, yet predictably, Feldman has been among those disappeared artist/musicians whose music never found a rightful place in the symphonic and chamber music worlds in the United States.

As a veteran new music professional I had the honor of performing and programming Feldman’s music while serving as the director of Relâche in Philadelphia. And when I produced the 1987 version of New Music America, we dedicated the festival to Feldman who, sadly, had died just two month’s before the festival. (The dedication was shared with Vincent Persichetti who had passed away earlier that year and was a mentor-teacher to many of us young musicians in Philadelphia during his lifetime.) In the years since I left Relâche and strayed farther from New York City, I haven’t had that many opportunities to hear Feldman’s music, so it was especially meaningful to have had the chance to not only hear his music beautifully performed but to hear a work that I had only read about titled “For Philip Guston, named in honor of Feldman’s close friend, the painter Philip Guston.”

This work, like many of Feldman’s is a long listen; in this case it lasts between 4 1/2 - 5 hours. The performance I attended on January 19, 2008 ran approximately 4 3/4 hours. Performed beautifully by a trio consisting of flutist Margaret Lancaster, pianist Deborah Wagner and percussionist David Toler, the piece unfolded layer upon layer against the white background of the performance space, revealing the crystalline tonal and timbral elegance of Feldman’s musical universe. There were moments of stunning beauty as when the tensility of a minor second interval was suspended in air when struck and sustained on the vibraphone while the flute and piano seemingly peeled away its timbral layer with short diatonic runs in opposite directions. Subtle shifts in timbre using repeated notes created a spectral scrim that hovered not only within the demarcated performance space but throughout the entire museum as well. Throughout the long performance one could take advantage of the sonic environment being created and shaped by the musicians and walk around the galleries to view the altered photographs while listening to Feldman’s music. It was, overall, a reflective afternoon, time well spent on a winter weekend day in Santa Fe.

While living and working in my home town of Philadelphia, I often counted the days leading up to my many visits to New Mexico, primarily to seek solace in the relative quiet of the high Sonoran Desert and lift from my soul (temporarily anyway) the sometimes heavy urban crust of cynicism that settled in the bones of the unsuspecting meta-designer. (The term I used to describe what it is I did for a living in those days.) Much of my creative time was spent as the founding artistic-executive director for the Relâche Ensemble with the jobs of concert development, presentation and the myriad tasks of keeping a working new music ensemble afloat. When I left Philadelphia in 1998 I wondered how long it would take me to forget the music and the people who populated my busy and adventurous life. It didn’t take long. Three years in Montana then three more in Louisiana did it for me. When I decided to finally move to New Mexico I hoped the rapidly growing city of Albuquerque (where I live) and the art-conscious city of Santa Fe (where I often visit) would provide me with the kind of demanding musical fare that I had been used to. I’m happy to say that it has, although mostly of a different kind.

For the past 3 1/2 years I have served as executive director of Chamber Music Albuquerque. In this position I have helped to program many terrific chamber music ensembles and, in conjunction with the board of directors and staff, presented some truly brilliant concerts by a number of ensembles featuring a variety of musical works. Fortunately by the time our staff has done all it can do to bring the artists to the stage, I’m in the position of being able to settle back and listen to the performances. I have, after ten years away from Philadelphia, New York and points east, been able to hear the music that keeps me coming back for more.

I’m especially pleased with the variety of musics that I have to chose from in central New Mexico. The Outpost Performance Space continually presents balanced jazz programs and other improvisers along with “world music” artists while Santa Fe New Music remains just about the only presenting organization in New Mexico dedicated solely to the fading genre known as “new music.” And of course, there is the breadth of programming available from Chamber Music Albuquerque and the fairly standard repertoire of the New Mexico Symphony Orchestra. There are other presenting organizations as well that present everything from world and folk musics to the traditional music deriving from the rich Hispanic and Spanish cultures that have shaped New Mexico since the 19th century. This variety of choices makes for a lively musical life so that the aforementioned solace of the high desert does not completely overwhelm me. It might have taken a bit of the edge off of my behavior but, well, just a bit.

I’ve begun this blog as part of my mission to enhance the audience for 21st century chamber music from my position as executive director for Chamber Music Albuquerque. In future postings I will discuss programs and performances that impress, intrigue or disappoint me, all with the intention of creating a dialog to energize people to attend more performances in the area and become more active in supporting the organizations that are making an effort to bring the music of the 21st century to central New Mexico.

We have identified four categories to begin this dialog: 1) Chamber Music Albuquerque to discuss organizational issues relevant to music presenters in the 21st century; 2) 21st Century Chamber Music to discuss issues relevant to the concept of contemporary “chamber music;” 3) Music Programming to discuss/review concert programs that I’ve attended in the area and explore issues of programming music for a sometimes fickle public; 4) Ideas and Issues, a category that embraces anything and everything else. As this thing evolves, I’ll provide links to other appropriate blogs and websites. I might even comment on the mysteries of handball, the game that has allowed me to maintain some sense of sanity amidst the madness of a life in the arts. So, with that brief introduction, let the games begin, as someone once said.

In this category, we will discus issues relevant to the performance and praxis of early 21st Century Chamber Music.

In this category, we will discuss issues relevant to Chamber Music Albuquerque’s mission and commitment to the community.