Three Cities, Seven Cacti

by Emma Hospelhorn

You know where the best place to hear Helmut Lachenmann’s Guero is?

From the stage.

I know – impractical! But honestly, if you get the opportunity, it’s incredible. And I got to experience it three times this week, as Mabel Kwan performed Guero immediately after Carola Bauckholt’s intensely rewarding Zopf for flute, oboe, and clarinet – in Chicago, Boston, and New York. Our decision to perform the two pieces in sequence, with all performers on stage, was the culmination of a week’s worth of practicing, rehearsing, refining, and thinking about the way these pieces interconnect. I hope it worked for the audience; I know that it worked for me.

What’s it like touring with Dal Niente, you ask? Well, it’s indescribable. Please hold while I try to describe it.

Some Things That Happened on Dal Niente’s Neue Musik Tour

12/4/2015

Rehearsal, Chicago, IL

We’ve just finished rehearsing the extended bass flute/ percussion duet in Enno Poppe’s Salz. “Now there’s a sound with a 50 inch waist,” someone says.

12/6/2015

Constellation, Chicago, IL

8:30pm: The band is hanging out backstage. It’s showtime, but apparently we can’t go on yet, because there are too many people and there’s a line backed up past the door and they have to put out more seats. SUCCESS! 

8:45pm: At the end of Zopf, the instructions state that the oboist should turn a squeaky crank and the flutist should make noises with an empty cassette case for an indeterminate length of time. In rehearsal, Andy and I have been staring into each other’s eyes while we do this, and the mood has been intense. It’s intense now, but I’m losing control of my facial muscles. I can feel them curling. I don’t want to give in to the smile. The smile has a mind of its own. I’m smiling. I’m smiling at my colleague and he is turning a crank and I am scratching a cassette case and I’m smiling and the audience is staring and you can hear everything because it’s so quiet and I am so focused and I see his eyes widen, his chin rising, the barest hint of a cue, and we freeze. The piece is over. From somewhere behind me, I hear a delicate rustling as Mabel, who has been sitting at the piano this whole time, begins the Lachenmann.

12/7/2015

Midway Airport, Chicago, IL

6:15am: apparently our flight is delayed till 8:30.

8:30am: apparently our flight is delayed till 10am.

10:30am: oh, it’s because of the fog. I look out the window. Yep, fog.

11:30am: hey, we’re boarding! And they said it couldn’t be done.

4-ish pm: We arrive at our hotel. It’s a well-known chain, so I think I know what to expect. I am wrong. There is a giant atrium with streetlights and trees inside, leading to a raised area with a giant chessboard on it, which leads up to a pool. It kind of feels like a couple of small ghost children might appear and ask us to come out and play.

12/8

Busted trying to hang out in the hot tub past closing time, after a full day of composer workshops and readings at Boston University. NO REGRETS.

12/9

Tsai Performance Center, Boston. My aunt and uncle are here. They take a picture of me setting up chairs a half an hour before the concert begins.  I am a professional musician.

I can hear things in Mark Andre’s “...zu staub...” that I never noticed before – even as I am playing. I think I am falling in love with this piece.

12/10

NYC. Permutations.

Goddammit Andy don’t make me laugh

Lachenmann: I am spellbound. There is a strange ticking sound that I can’t place – is it part of the piece? What is happening?

Andre: I knew this piece was good. But I think tonight it is transcendent.

adieu m’amour (hommage à Guillaume Dufay) * I am spellbound again. That ticking’s back. What IS it? Oh. Andy’s watch.

Poppe. POPPE!!!!!!

Beer.**

 ----------------

*My sister thinks that the Spahlinger sounded like “a wistful cowboy ghost.” I think that my sister should be a professional music critic.

 **We make it to McGillicuddy’s for the After-Party.  I’m pretty sure it’s not called McGillicuddy’s. Our conductor takes a picture of the Manhattan he ordered. When I look at him, he says “What? It’s a Manhattan in Manhattan.” 

Dal Niente and the Magical Gloves!

Dal Niente and the Magical Gloves!
by Katie Schoepflin

Preparing for and performing the world premiere of Marcin Paczkowski’s Deep Decline at the University of Washington, Oct. 30 was a unique and surreal experience. The prep with my colleagues in Chicago was straight forward as the piece is full of beautiful melodies and phrasing that is intuitive. We were instructed to skip over the large sections that included electronic components as they were reliant upon the software Marcin had been building.  I was surprised to find out how prominent and vital a role the electronics played in this piece. There have been times when I’ve felt that strapping on a microphone and playing through some filters made for some cool sound effects, and that was the extent of their purpose. But this piece came to life for me when we started sound checking the electronic sections. After wading through technical difficulties that dominated the first couple of hours of our rehearsal in Seattle, we were rewarded with super powers which Marcin bestowed upon each of us.

Before I get into the super powers, let me set the scene. This was our first rehearsal at UW, after a long, painfully early flight from Chicago. We had no idea what to expect with this piece. First came out the clip-on mics and second, the magical gloves. We each wore a handmade fingerless glove on our right hand which, secured with safety pins, had a sensor inside. The Michael Jackson references began immediately, and ‘Annie are you OK’ became the residency’s theme song (for better or for worse) for the duration of our stay.

Marcin’s sensors react to each performer’s individual movements, and he sets their level of sensitivity according to how much an individual naturally moves while playing. The idea is to have them set in a way that allows the performer to trigger the electronics without having to move wildly about, but not so sensitive that, when sitting still, the sensor will pick up motion from, say, breathing. This was the first soundcheck I had ever participated in where I needed to pretend to play my instrument and I was struck by how cool and comical it was. The temptation was to move a lot more than I would normally. The more I tried to move naturally, the less I felt like I had any concept of how I actually move when I play. They are so tied into each other that doing one without the other feels nonsensical. I feel a tiny bit more sympathetic towards actors who have had to pretend to play instruments in films now that I’ve experienced it myself.

I’d like to state for the record: It is always a good idea to give the conductor a solo. The times when Michael Lewanski has crossed over into performing with the ensemble have all been exciting moments. The first electronics section featured solos by each performer. One after another, we took turns playing short fragments and contorting our own solos with our sensors. This section culminated in a climactic conducting solo, in which Michael controlled the electronics with the velocity and direction of his beating patterns.

Near the end of the piece, recorded material from an earlier section overlapped slightly with our live playing, and the two seamlessly cross-faded into each other. The goal was to disguise that anything was changing. The first real indication the audience had that we were not playing was when we all slowly stopped moving, and the music wound down, dropping in pitch and speed until there was silence. And then we started right back up again, moving, not playing, a row of wind-up toys holding instruments. It was awesome.

A little Q and A with Marcin…

Q: What went into constructing the gloves?

A: Each of the gloves (or adapted headbands actually) contains a custom built circuit that includes a sensor - 3-axis accelerometer, a microcontroller with wireless radio that's transmitting data, and a battery. Information about acceleration (rate of change of the speed of hand's movement) is transmitted continuously to the computer for each of the players, as well as the conductor. I started thinking about using physical gestures for controlling music about 3 years ago, as a way to incorporate my education and activity as a conductor into my computer music practice. In 2013 I created a piece "Restrained meters" jointly with a dancer/choreographer Wilson Mendieta, where he was wearing the sensors and his movement was influencing computer-generated sound. Later I started using sensors myself in a conducting-like project which developed into the piece "...where odd things are kept". Then I used them in the solo percussion piece "Percussivometers", where the player's movements were influencing sound transformations in realtime. So I'd say that it was 3 years of on-off research and development, along with some electronics and programming, that went into making the gloves.

Q: Can you describe any meaning, story, inspiration behind writing this piece?

A: There’s no clear story behind the piece. However, like with any creative process, the piece itself is a mirror of personal experiences, mediated through music. Struggles, frustrations, moments of peace and melancholy all emerge through the elements of the composition.

Q: Is there a relationship between the tonal, gentle melodies and the by-product of the quick, harsh-sounding electronic outbursts?

A: These two are results of 2 different directions of development in the piece. What you describe as harsh-sounding electronic outbursts are developed from my previous experiments with improvisation with the computer and aesthetically relate to those earlier improvising pieces. Now the more tonal section was composed as a "vehicle" to carry the underlying variations of rhythmic density, which were algorithmically structured throughout it. Finally, the more calm nature of this section helped with fusing the acoustic and the computer playback sounds.

Watch video of Dal Niente's performance of Marcin's piece here!

Vanishing into the Clouds: Dal Niente at ICMC

Vanishing into the Clouds: Dal Niente at ICMC

by Ammie Brod

I like doing things that push me to learn new skills, or that use skills that I already have in new and interesting ways. This is, in part, what drew me to new music in the first place—I love the more or less constant innovation taking place within the art form. Whatever else I may believe about the world at large I can rest assured that there will always be something new to learn, and that knowledge is a springboard for excitement and inspiration.

I was one of six members of Dal Niente who attended the International Computer Music Conference at the University of North Texas in Denton at the end of September. ICMC was an unusual experience for us as an ensemble—usually when we travel, we’re rehearsing and performing as a group, but this time almost all of our performances were for solo instruments and electronics. The conference itself was a jam-packed experience for all involved, with 31 concerts, as well as a large number of paper presentations, demonstrations, and installations, all in just seven days. (Hat tip to the staff: In the concerts I was able to attend there was only one real technological blip, which is highly impressive given that nearly every piece contained a technological component.) The Nientes alone performed twenty different pieces in six different performances during our two-day stay.

I wasn't sure exactly what to expect at a computer music conference, a genre that I'm admittedly less familiar with than other areas of contemporary performance. In particular, playing solo works with live electronics was an experience that I hadn't had yet, and as I worked on my parts at home and listened to recordings and communicated with composers, I felt simultaneously prepared and aware that there was going to be an unknown factor to the performance: I wouldn't be able to experience the piece in its entirety until just before the show, when I finally got to hear my part paired with its electronics and explore how I wanted to interact with the,. All of my pieces involved my performance being run through various programs, under the supervision of either the composer or another knowledgeable party, and then manipulated or incorporated into an electronic texture. Essentially, I would be playing against my own sounds (among other things), in some cases making artistic decisions on the spot depending on the flexibility of the notation and what I was hearing in real time.

I played three solo pieces during my time at ICMC, all quite different. Mikel Kuehn's Colored Shadows combined notated lyrical passages with a certain amount of interpretive freedom—there are several improvised sections on open strings where the performer chooses from a number of different gestures in order to augment and interplay with the electronic textures that are building up in the performance space. Joel Hunt’s Material, on the other hand, begins with quiet percussive effects, building from unpitched sounds to defined pitched phrases; I tapped different parts of my fingers in various rhythms on the body of the instrument, tapped the bridge with my fingernail, and knocked on the front before finally moving into more melodic material. As I played (at a bar, trying to make sure my tapping was making it over the clink of glasses and small talk), my own textures leapt out at me, finally building to a roar that lasted until I reasserted myself with a quietly moving line, ending with a gentle decrescendo into silence.

All of that, as well as performances of two ensemble pieces by Clarence Barlow and Johannes Kretz, took place on our first day at the conference. I only had one piece scheduled for the second day, Jacob Sudol’s Vanishing into the Clouds. Jacob’s piece begins with a series of long tones (at one point I played an open C string for a minute and a half) with subtle timbral shifts, varying the bow speed, pressure and placement to change the quality of a single note over a set period of time. Many of the notes are unstable, so the timbral shifts bring out different pitches and overtones over the course of time. The piece eventually moves into a series of subtle microtonal shifts played high on the D string, a range and placement that robs them of some of their warmth, while still asking the performer to phrase and shape the line. The contrast between the somewhat flattened nature of the notes and the desire to express something through them had been difficult, and I was interested to meet their composer and see what more I could learn by talking with him in person.

There are conversations about music that focus on pragmatic things (how to produce a certain sound, what overall aesthetic the composer was writing within) and there are conversations that reach a step beyond that, into a realm of excitement and exploration and inspiration. My conversation with Jacob moved seamlessly between those realms, from pinning down a specific timbre to discussions of how I’d be interacting with the electronics to something larger, a feeling about what the piece was meant to convey. I couldn’t put into words, but the discussion made it come together for me in a new way. It felt like an idea coming into focus, a clarity of interpretation that I’d been trying to reach on my own but hadn’t quite hit yet. The microtonal section I’d been struggling with came together, and I could feel that my brain and body finally knew how to produce the sound I wanted to create. It was, in a word, thrilling.

I carried that feeling with me into that evening’s performance, and it was deeply satisfying to not only present it to a live audience but to also hear it reflected back at me through Jacob’s electronics. I played over a chorus of textures created in part from the sounds I’d produced, and I felt deeply calm and present onstage. As the last almost inaudible harmonic faded out, I felt like something had been accomplished, and communicated, and learned.

When Dal Niente attended the International Summer Courses in Darmstadt, Germany, we were identified not as musicians or performers but as interpreters. To me, that distinction has always felt important—it feels like I’ve been given an investment in the creative process of a performance that isn’t always acknowledged, and it’s something I try to live up to when I play. In Texas, I felt that I succeeded.

Canciones

On “Latin American” music

To speak about Latin American music probably makes about as much sense as to speak of North American music.  Which is to say, it is immediately apparent that the term is of limited usefulness: all that can be definitively made is a claim about geography (and it is immediately apparent that this is not particularly definitive; how does one characterize the music of a composer born in one location and living in another, as many on this program are?).  My limited, unscientific, anecdotal experiences in Mexico, Colombia, and Panama on tour with Ensemble Dal Niente in June 2015 (having been to each of those countries once before) suggested to me that the only generalization about Latin American music was that a generalization was impossible.  Yet, rightly or wrong, one makes an attempt to generalize; the geographies, political situations, and languages of Latin and North America are different; surely culture reflects this.  Just as an attempt to make a generalizable distinction appears, though, it collapses.  North America and Latin America also share a word in their names, a landmass, time zones, a history rooted in conquest, colonialism, violence; an argument could be mounted that these cultures have more in common, than, say the US and Europe.  Hesitatingly, I ask: might it make more sense to simply speak of an “American music” in the broadest sense?  But for now: let us attempt to live in these contradictory thoughts.

A trend I provisionally perceived in the works that Ensemble Dal Niente took on its tour involved what seemed to me to be an unmistakeable willingness to write about political situations.  But the way in which this is manifested in each work is very different; and none of them are facile or seem to make naive claims about their direct efficacy in, say, an electoral arena.  I’ll talk about three that appear on our 10th anniversary season-opening program, Canciones.

Regarding his work verdaderos negativos ("real negatives"), Colombian composer Rodolfo Acosta writes the following:

Its title refers to the deplorable phenomenon of so-called "false positives", especially in its  most tragic use: the killing of civilians by military forces in order to prove the latter's supposed effectiveness. In the most recent Colombian case, these crimes have been perpetrated in order to make the victims pass as guerrilla combatants killed in battle. Unfortunately, this is not a recent practice, nor is it  exclusive to the Colombian Armed Forces, as is witnessed by other societies in Latin America and in the world generally. On the other hand, although the term refers to "presenting the false positive results" of a military institution (and the killing of innocent people is not the only kind), we cannot lose sight of the fact that considering a person's violent death as something "positive" is grotesquely inhumane.

Thus, its concept and title is a play on opposites: the false is the radically real; the positive is the negative. Musically there are, similarly, contradictory forces at work that create an experience for an audience of unusual directness.  On one end are the drumkit and bass parts, whose rhythms are rigidly notated.  They can be read as representing the forces of a violently aggressive way of organizing time (along the lines of what a military force or tyrannical government might do); but also, simultaneously, as a reference to popular music styles that can be themselves seen as both resistant and compliant.  The melodic parts (the work is for an open instrumentation, requiring the performers to choose) are notated permissively, with suggestions for thematic contours and instructions like “fluctuating dynamics.”  They force the listener to consider individual voices, and force the players to be individualized – the opposite of what governmental forces do in killing civilians and passing them off as guerillas.  Which is to say, the action of creating “false positives” is an attempted erasure of the individual on multiple levels – in the act of murder, and that of attributing to the victim an identity that is not theirs.  The melodic sections of the piece make it so that the players (both as musicians and human beings) do the opposite. They must thematize their own particularity, such that their musical effort goes into being not together; and they must also make choices regarding their specific life circumstances, i.e., what instrument they're playing.  Yet on top of these layers of meaning, the overall affect is one of a certain unified rage (on the part of the musicians and composer and, hopefully, the engaged audience) against injustice – a visceral feeling of disgust and anger.

On the opposite end of the affective spectrum is Francisco Castillo Trigueros’s Geografias.  According to the composer, in the work

several poetic and musical visions of Mexico coexist.  The text, constructed from symbolic and narrative fragments, builds a dramatic arch, illustrating different facets of the natural, cultural, political, and mystical geography of the country, from a distant and semi-nostalgic perspective.

The music is understated, its unflappable character often of a mimetic nature that masks an underlying subtlety and sophistication.  We are introduced to a narrative subject, one that surveys the landscape.  As the music gradually moves on, with an epic patience, it becomes increasingly clear that this is not an ordinary narrative subject.  Phrases like “the heavy air was burying my body into the humid earth,” and “my pulverized bones crunching under its pressure” give us clues that the fate of the narrator is not a happy one.  As the work develops, the status of all elements become increasingly blurred – are the piece’s sounds natural or musical or in a fluid state between those two?  Is the narrator asleep or awake or alive or dead or does s/he even know?  Is the genre an accompanied narration or an art song or both?  In the end, we know the whole time that something has happened to this narrator, an event, an occurrence, a trauma.  The question remains for us until the end: what is it?

On our program Canciones (“Songs”) perhaps the most clearly “sung” is Federico Garcia-de Castro’s Memoria.  The composer writes that

[t]he idea for [the work] stems from the last 3 things that Bernardo Jaramillo Ossa, then presidential candidate for the Colombian left-wing party Unión Patriótica, said to his wife while dying in her arms after being shot in the Bogota airport in 1990: "Sweetheart, I can't feel my legs;" "Those assholes just killed me;" "I am dying, embrace me, protect me."

“High culture” art songs have a long, complicated history; when the so-called classical music lover recalls it, perhaps Schubert comes to mind first.  Easily passed over (but maybe quickly remembered) is how much sense his works made in his culture: so much so that the phenomenon of Schubertiades, essentially, listening parties for Schubert’s songs, were common events in the Vienna of his day.  It’s tempting to forget that Schubert wasn’t setting the poetry of Heine, Goethe, Schiller, Müller because they were “canonic” figures but rather because they were the widely read poets of his day.  Returning to the work in question: while the words spoken by a dying man were assuredly not intended to be poetry, it requires but a few conceptual leaps to see the setting thereof in an art song as part of a tradition of topicality.  Or one might view it ironically – whereas German 19th century poetry is highly refined, nothing could be more spontaneously uttered than a person directly confronting their own mortality.  Regardless, both Schubert’s and Federico’s contemporaneous audience are the best interpreters of their music.  To put it another way: the impact of a musical setting of the words of a public figure relatively recently assassinated, from a country with a history of a fraught political relationship with our own, is likely to impact us in a unique way.  

The musically conservative elements of Memoria emphasize a certain radicality.  It contains an acoustic guitar cadenza that could fit right into Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez; its harmonic language relies heavily on open intervals and triads; its music contains conventional reflections of the semantic content of the text.  Yet at the same time, the instrumentalists break out of their traditional role as simple accompanists.  They come across as (because they are) human beings who comment, respond, exhort, complain; they envelope the lonely soprano in whirlwind of whispered secrets while she meditates on fundamental questions of human existence.  

In closing, I wonder this: will an audience find its conception of what it considers “American” music changed as a result of these encounters with “Latin American” music?  I’m interested to find out, and I certainly invite your opinions.

-- Michael Lewanski, Conductor
Ensemble Dal Niente

10th Latino Music Festival Presents
Dal Niente’s 10th Anniversary Season Opener:
Canciones

Sunday, September 20, 2015
2:00 PM
Cindy Pritzker Auditorium, Harold Washington Library
FREE Admission