Contemporary Classics April 3, 2018 Celebrating Contemporary Classical Music At the Big Ears Music Festival

Bela Fleck had written and premiered his first concerto banjo and orchestra.  He was convinced by his cellist stepfather Joe Paladino into writing a piece for playing chamber music.  He had written a work with Edgar Meyer back in the early 1980s, for the Blair String Quartet. So he decided on a piece for banjo and string quartet.  Now he needed to figure out who he was writing this piece for. He asked around about the string quartet Brooklyn Rider, who he was told about by Neil Benson, my new classical agent at OPUS 3. The reaction was very positive from everyone he asked.  He was told that Brooklyn Rider was really good at new music and had a youthful sensibility that could make sense on a piece that likely would have many influences from outside of classical music. He listened to their music and really enjoyed and respected their work. When Bela Fleck brought up the idea to them, they were intrigued by the idea too - so it was on!  I started out writing Night Flight Over Water by composing a dozen or so sketches. I took these up to New York City and Brooklyn Rider and he read through them together. The idea was that the ones that really worked out for this combination were the ones he would use to build the piece from. Unfortunately, he discovered that Brooklyn Rider were such good players that they made everything he had come up with sound amazing, so it was very hard to figure out what not to use. The good part is that now he knew that he could write virtually anything, and Brooklyn Rider would be able to make it come alive. So I dug in and wrote the piece.  One time Bela Fleck was up in Brooklyn, he stopped by for a cup of coffee on the way to the studio where he was working with Brooklyn Rider.  The barista asked what was in the case he was carrying – and Bela said a banjo.  So the barista said.  “So you play the banjo.  Do you play like Bela Fleck”.  To which Bela replied emphatically “No one plays like Bela Fleck”.

Bela Fleck workshopped the piece with Brooklyn Rider in August in Stillwater, Oklahoma. Workshopping it in this case meant doing several days of work rehearsing the piece followed by a run-through in front of an audience. At the end of this, I was able to study what we had done, make some final adjustments and be ready for the recording in Pittsboro, North Carolina in November of 2012. Emil Kang at Carolina Performing Arts helped us to connect with Michael and Amy Tieman at Manifold Studios, and Bela and Brooklyn Rider did an informal performance there before we began the recording process. This really helped them to feel the arc of the music, and give it a live feel in the studio. This piece was commissioned by Butler University and premiered there on October 14th and 15th, 2013.

Anna Thorvaldsdóttir:   Transitions           

The theme of Transitions is “man and machine,” and was commissioned by Michael Nicolas. The theme is represented in that the cello becomes both - man and machine. “Man” indicates performing expressively with emotion, and “machine” indicates more precision with a stricter approach to the music. These two approaches gradually transition from one to another throughout the work. The cellist here conjures the mechanical without the aid of electronics, tapping the fingerboard in steady rhythms or swiping white noise from the strings before diving back into the expressive, “human” interludes, with man and machine progressively infiltrating each other’s material across the piece.

Susan Alcorn            Time Was Nothing           

I fell in love with Susan Alcorn’s music just this past week at the Big Ears Festival in two spectacular performances.  Baltimore-born Susan Alcorn growing up in a home filled with music fell in love with the sound of the pedal steel guitar as a child.  She began playing with country bands but her desire to improvise thrust her out of that genre. Over the last 20 years or so Alcorn has lifted the instrument far from its usual roots and dropped it deep into the realm of the experimental and the avant-garde through music that is informed by jazz, minimalism, Gamelan and Indian classical music.  Her album “Concentration” was recorded live at Maryland's High Zero Festival in 2005. Rob Fitzpatrick in The Guardian describes her music as  “wild and beautiful and disturbing”  and “trying to describe Alcorn's music is bit like trying to paint wind: you're better off just turning it on and let it happen” and “A very special record”.   I agree wholeheartedly.  Believe me in upcoming weeks you will be hearing more of Susan Alcorn.

Pauline Oliveros            Applebox Double

Apple Box Double is an electronics duet and Apple Box Orchestra which is ten percussionists playing apple boxes.  Written in 1965, it was performed at San Francisco State College and it is considered on of the “hidden gems” of the 1966 ONCE Festival in Ann Arbor Michigan on March 28, 1966 where this recording was made.  Pauline Oliveros was fond of the resonance of apple boxes which she enhanced by placing objects in the boxes and attaching piezo-electric microphones.

Colin Jacobson:  BTT (2015) 

BTT started off in Colin Jacobsen’s mind as an investigation into and celebration of the incredible creative ferment and experimentation of the 1970's/80's downtown New York scene as embodied by the likes of Glenn Branca, Meredith Monk, Arthur Russell, John Zorn, the Velvet Underground, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, the New York Dolls, Laurie Anderson, Mother Mallard's Portable Masterpiece Company, the Lounge Lizards, to name a few. However, he also found myself thinking about two Johns - John Cage and Johann

Sebastian Bach. This happened in part because a colleague of his suggested that Cage was really the spiritual father of that whole scene. He then realized that Cage was tapping into the same elemental "stuff" as Bach, even if perhaps from an opposite point of view and an obviously different era. While Cage is known as a proponent of chaos, he most often set up a system of rules, welcoming whatever unfolded within that system. When we think of Bach and the cosmic order in his fugues, there's also a setting up of parameters with an almost pre-determined quality which then unravel in a natural and larger than human way. Colin also felt that even within the incredible eclecticism that defined the downtown NY scene and continues to influence so many diverse musical worlds, he found it interesting to juxtapose two other opposing musical streams in this piece; the "minimalism" of Glass and Reich (music that unfolds over spacious time) and the "maximalism"

of somebody like Zorn (music that constantly seeks to smash and subvert itself even as it's happening).

All this to say that most of the musical material in BTT emanates from a spelling of B-A-C-H and C-A-G-E (D), which in and of itself sets up an interesting juxtaposition of tonalities. The BACH motif is chromatic and curls in on itself while the CAGE motif has an open and pentatonic feel. Over the course of the piece, the two motifs interact in a variety of ways; sometimes contradicting each other and sometimes in harmony. The resulting mix of sections may or may not relate to some of the above mentioned musicians.

Béla Fleck   Griff           

This was developed in collaboration between Bela Fleck and Brooklyn Rider.  During the development if was called riff in G.  When time came to complete the record – no better title had come forward so G riff became Griff.