Fragmentary Thoughts on Kate Soper’s “Voices from the Killing Jar” at NUNC

At an event like the Northwestern New Music Conference (NUNC!) one finds oneself asking the question “what is music?” every 5 minutes or so.  Though I’m sure it wasn’t intentional, that Ensemble Dal Niente will perform excerpts from Kate Soper’s Voices from the Killing Jar at the end of our residency on the conference seems fitting: this is a work that has a lot to say about what music is, and, as it should be, it’s complicated.

Kate says the following about her work: "A killing jar is a tool used by entomologists to kill butterflies and other insects without damaging their bodies: a hermetically sealable glass container, lined with poison, in which the specimen will quickly suffocate. Voices from the Killing Jar is a seven-movement work for vocalist and ensemble which depicts a series of female protagonists who are caught in their own kinds of killing jars: hopeless situations, inescapable fates, impossible fantasies, and other unlucky circumstances."  

This is an ambitious, striking conception, one that invites imaginative analogies and connections between characters both historical and fictional from widely varying cultures and times.  The notion of a killing jar, though, also has a deeply immediate, visceral sense -- the music and the musicians are implicated as well.  The composition is only rarely constructed to accompany the soprano.  More often, it mimics or mirrors or expands upon her pitches and rhythms -- as if to amplify or comment on something she is singing, as if to inflect this or that thought or feeling in a way that gives it a heightened significance, emphasizing the extent to which the very mode of expression is part of whatever trap she is caught in.  The music and the musicians can never simply let the soprano "be;" rather, they're always invading her voice, changing it, distorting it.  (In some cases the distortion is quite literal -- electronic processing changes the vocal timbre into something artificial, alien, disembodied.)   They force her into a musical situation that is not a product of her body, but an encounter between her subjectivity and an other whose will seems mysterious and capricious.  Even the very instrumentation of the piece -- featuring the triangle, crotales, and piccolo above her register, and the saxophone, violin, and piano often below -- find her put in an uncomfortable middle.

Musical style sometimes comes across as a vehicle for expression; sometimes it seems political; sometimes it seems otherwise polemical.  We’ve seen all of the above at NUNC.  In Kate’s piece, it is at least partially a menace, a prison, an enactment of forces of repression.  For instance, in the movement entitled Mad Scene: Emma Bovary the soprano performs operatic fragments and vocal warm-ups with a mechanistic repetition.  These aren’t innocently deployed musical gestures that are merely conventional: they come across as brutally preparing the soprano to be the object of desire -- indicting you as an audience member just while you are one.  What to say about the fact that these gestures become increasingly frenzied?  Is that liberating?  Or is the narrative subject just being driven crazy by things beyond her control?

In the The Owl and the Wren: Lady MacDuff the style of an ostensibly straightforward Renaissance dance is used to cover up and paper over the brutal murder of the title character and her children.  Of course, it the dance is not simple and straightforward.  It’s metrically unstable and written in the soprano’s low register (so she that her music is occasionally covered up).  The seeming period-appropriate addition of the recorder becomes sinister as the overblown timbre becomes frantic, inviting speculations as to whether it is mimetic of children screaming, be they the Wren’s chicks or Lady MacDuff’s children.  The music seems to say that style, as manifestation of culture, is what allows such barbarity to be normalized.  (Feel free to contemplate, in this context, the ironies in my use of the word “barbarity,” and its fabled etymology.)

Mostly strikingly ambiguous is the last movement: Her Voice is Full of Money (A Deathless Song): Daisy Buchanan.  The soprano both is and is not the famously shallow and self-centered character from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby -- on the one hand, the singer speaks Daisy’s lines, surrounded by sounds that may initially seem reminiscent of the “romantic outdoors” that cause her to be “paralyzed with happiness.”  To end the work, though, the very same soprano flatly states that “her voice is full of money” (referring to the character she once portrayed), making the open’s metallic triangle, bells, crotales, and inside-the-piano sounds seem like the jangle of coins.  

It would be woefully oversimplified to read soprano of Voices from the Killing Jar simply as a victim.  This is a work by a female composer who was also, initially, the singer.  Thus, there is a very literal and multi-layered assertion of control by the artist over the the materials, tradition, and history she has inherited.  The soprano is not straightforwardly a powerless figure who is merely put upon; but neither is the work self-deceptively confident about its possible achievements.  The history of culture is too complicated for that.

I was not struck until afterwards by a change Kate made in our rehearsal the other day -- she altered the writing of some voice-accompanimental violin octaves to be, instead, a single line in the instrument’s very high register.  The texture, I only later realized, reminded me of Richard Strauss’s solo violin writing in his tone poems when he patronizingly and misogynistically attempts to portray women.  I doubt this invocation was intentional on Kate’s part (though I could be wrong).  But sometimes culture does that to you, and that Kate’s piece does not make facile claims, but rather manipulates inherited musical material in sophisticated ways is precisely the work’s strength.  The music that closes the work continually returns to an open 5th: C-G, as if making an attempt at or a reference to C major, history’s most optimistic key.  But there is no third of the chord, and there are too many problematizing pitches in the highly figurative piano, flute and saxophone parts that create the sense that a minor mode lurks around the corner.  Thus, the music remains in an untranscended state; indeed, as does our whole, continually developing artform.

Finally: I haven’t run any of these theories by Kate, and I could be wrong about everything.  I guess, though, I don’t mind being wrong if it prompts someone to think and feel this piece a little bit deeper.

-- Michael Lewanski

Youth In New Music

Dal Niente guitarist Jesse Langen describes his experience with youth new music ensembles from Germany and Chicago. This extraordinary collaboration culminates on October 16, 2015 at the first-ever International Youth New Music Festival in Chicago.

Studio Musikfabrik performed at Darmstadt 2012, and all of us who were there felt that their concert was as good as the concerts by professional ensembles that we’d been hearing all week.  Obviously it was a revelation to hear teenagers playing at this level, and we all came home full of ideas and energy.  Over the course of the next couple of years I organized my students into a new music ensemble, and we commissioned pieces that year from a number of Chicago composers.  In the summer of 2013 Thomas Osterdiekhoff, the director of Ensemble Musikfabrik, visited Chicago and heard a recital my students gave.  They had been studying with Fred and Morgan, and Thomas heard my students play pieces by these professional composers next to pieces my students wrote that came from coachings with those composers.  He was impressed enough to propose a collaboration between Studio Musikfabrik and my students.

I was simultaneously ecstatic and terrified.  The way I saw it at the time, what my students had going for them was a relatively high level of composing skill, sensibility, and experience, and performance instincts shaped by these strengths.  What they didn’t have was technique on their instruments anywhere near those of Studio Musikfabrik, who are all essentially professional level players.

At the same time, I think Thomas understood for the first time what my students actually are.  For the year leading up to that summer concert, Thomas and Peter Veale would occasionally ask questions like “Are your students composers or performers?  Or do you have two sets of students?”  The educational system in Germany is very different from ours; they focus earlier.  It was foreign enough for them that I had a group of students who composed for themselves that it took a year of emails and a visit for that picture to make sense.

Our tendency with talented kids is to encourage them to do everything; so the first chair violin will also be a composer, and play guitar in a band after school, and play in the jazz combo, etc.  This tendency showed in an evolution in my youth ensemble; the kids went from playing commissions to writing pieces for themselves to writing collaboratively.  The collaborative writing started within a year, and it was new territory for me and for all of the coaches I hired.  More than once I got questions from my American colleagues like, “if no one is composing the piece, who is supposed to get credit for writing the piece?  Who is responsible?  Whose vision are they supposed to be executing?”  And I didn’t know how to answer these questions, to my wonder and embarrassment.  After all, this is supposed to be my field, both as a teacher and as a player; but more and more I would show up to my students’ rehearsals knowing that I had no idea what was going to happen.  These kids were becoming a super-mind that I couldn’t always keep up with.

In November 2013 I went to a youth new music ensemble festival in Berlin.  Germany has many youth new music ensembles, and there was a day of concerts of ensembles from all over the country.  Seeing all of these ensembles, I had a two-part revelation.  First, every one of the kids I heard played at a higher level of technical proficiency on their instruments than my students.  Second, none of these ensembles did anything like what my students did; they exclusively played pieces by professional composers.  By this time, my kids were more like a rock band than like any equivalent in classical music or new music.

At dinner that evening, we discussed the event and all of the performances.  I expressed my perspective on how my ensemble fit into the picture (with some trepidation!), and happily the feeling across the table was one of enthusiasm.  My ensemble does something that none of the other ensembles do.  It’s hard to imagine a youth new music ensemble, modeled after a normal adult ensemble, contributing to Studio Musikfabrik’s experience, as they are simply the best youth new music ensemble of that sort in the world.  However, what my ensemble does may not have any equivalent at all, educational or professional.  We have something to contribute.

In my wildest dreams, the way these kids work will shift the ground in my field, or create new ground, where a number of players who were educated by learning to compose, perform, improvise, and collaborate simply continue doing all of that into their adulthood, and find ways to generate audiences and get paid.  At my most enthusiastic moments I allow myself to imagine that my students will make a new new music, or that they are already doing that.

The concert next Friday night at DePaul will have four parts: Ensemble 20+, Studio Musikfabrik, Chicago Arts Initiative Ensemble, and a collaborative concert with Studio Musikfabrik and Chicago Arts Initiative.  The collaborative concert will involve creative contributions from Studio Musikfabrik, both in material they’ve sent us and throughout our rehearsal process next week.  I can say that this is the most important thing that I’ve done, and I believe it will be an important night for education and for music.

A number of people and institutions have been instrumental in all of this.  The students in the ensemble are all either current or graduated students of Chicago Academy for the Arts.  Monica George, executive director of Chicago Arts Initiative and a true visionary, has made this project conceivable on the American end.  There is no doubt in my mind that Monica will change the world for the better, starting with this project.  It probably comes as no surprise that Ensemble Dal Niente is deeply involved in a number of ways.  Reba Cafarelli, Dal Niente’s executive director has been immensely enthusiastic, supportive, and full of indispensable help.  Michael Lewanski has worked with all of my students for years, knows my teaching inside and out, and has facilitated this project in particular in more ways than I could count.  DePaul University opened their doors to this project without hesitation, and have gone to great lengths to help us with a variety of elements of the project.  Irmi Maunu-Kocian from the Chicago Goethe Institut has been working with me on this idea for more than a year; I’d go as far as to say that many of the good ideas and clear thoughts in this project have been hers. 

Finally, a number of composers and performers deserve mention with this project as coaches who have shaped both my own teaching and the culture of my students.  Jenna Lyle worked with the students extensively last summer, and upped every aspect of our game.  Rachel Brown has had that role this summer, and walked in the door the first day seeming to already understand everything we were doing.  Fred Gifford has worked with the kids many times over the years, and his ideas are in the room with us all the time; he will eventually run into a teenager he’s never met who can explain “timbre wheel” and other unique ideas of his to him. Eliza Brown, Chris Fisher-Lochhead, Morgan Krauss, Ray Evanoff, Marcos Balter, and Pablo Chin have all had a significant impact on this ensemble.  Amanda DeBoer Bartlett has coached my students extensively to our great benefit, and Quince, both as an ensemble and as individuals, has been instrumental.  Among the many Dal Niente players I owe thanks to I would mention Mabel Kwan in particular, who has probably been involved in the majority of my students’ creative activities.

-- Jesse Langen, Ensemble Dal Niente Guitarist

International Youth New Music Festival
Friday, October 16, 2015
8:00 PM
DePaul University Concert Hall
802 W. Belden Avenue
ADMISSION FREE

Why cat videos are awesome: New Music, Score Follower, and YouTube

Why cat videos are awesome: New Music, Score Follower, and YouTube
by Michael Lewanski

The history of music is also the history of the circumstances of its production.  

This statement, I add hastily, is not meant to take anything away a from a l'art pour l'art (that is, “art for art’s sake”) way of talking about or interpreting music (one which focuses on its intrinsic value or asserts that it is its own justification, separated from how it came to be)  -- such an approach has numerous and obvious benefits in terms of understanding how music does what it does.  

It’s just that it seems to me that a tacit, unthought ethos of “art for art’s sake” unconsciously underlies a vast majority of our cultural conversations about music among musicians and audiences alike. Musicians do this all the time: at its best and most sympathetic, they pay attention to a work's form or harmony according to guidelines they learned in school.  Or perhaps they evaluate the professional skill of performers during a concert.  I would even argue that musicians in a rehearsal complaining that a piece is not well-written for their instrument, or saying that they like playing new music but don't like listening to it are extensions of this basic attitude.  And concert-goers regularly make some version of these statements: “I just like the way it sounds” or “I don’t understand it but I like it."  Paraphrasing Dahlhaus, even the habit of not paying attention to the meaning of the words of Schubert songs is the same basic attitude.  (And it may often mask an economic-ideological function, following Marx -- music as a thing for relaxation, something to help you take a break and not think too hard… in short, a commodity, a sit-com, a piece of furniture, that by its nature as photographic negative, reinforces the system that makes commodities possible.  Don’t think it’s coincidental or accidental that Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer has “ars gratia artis” when the lion roars at the beginning of their movies.)

Anyway, I don’t want to get hung up on that, because there are good sit-coms and nice furniture in the world; and, like I said, there’s a lot of merit to a l’art pour l’art approach.  I want to claim, simply, that it’s not the only approach; the problem for me is that it is tacitly prioritized over many others.  A more realistic interpretative stance, it seems to me, is one in which we attempt to hold contradictory frameworks in our head simultaneously.

Let me, therefore, make some broad assertions about other ways of thinking.  

Lots of music, for a very long time in European history, was written (by which I mean both “composed” and “written down”) for performance in church.  The church had a particular use for music, thus enabling its development from plainchant to organum to polyphony over the course of many centuries.  Which is say, something about its use-in-church-ness ends up defining the way it sounds, what form it takes (masses, motets), its musical architecture (church modes and their descendants), its instrumentation (rather, that it tends to be for voices), and the circumstances of its performance.

The Enlightenment, and the development of 19th century industry, brings along with it various notions of bourgeois freedom and self-determination.  People can pay for stuff.  "Those that had some leftover wealth want, not only to pay for stuff, but also to show that they can pay for stuff, because flaunting their wealth is a sign of their status."  It seems sensical that an industry would develop to allow the middle class to affordably have music in their households, in their chambers… so we get “chamber music.”  Such a setting also enables an intimacy that other venues might not allow; that, in turn, enables the rise of connoisseurship, as well as a trend in chamber music for compositions to be more affectively complex than the public statements of symphonic music.

While one might argue that pop songs are three minutes long because of shortened attention spans, it seems to me that an equally plausible argument is that it has something to do with the fact that 78 RPM records last three to five minutes.  (Not that these arguments are mutually exclusive; it’s just that it’s easy to blame kids these days and to forgot that making those kids how they are these days may have been a calculated decision and had a particular mass-produced, real-world object associated with it.)

All of the above paints with a very broad brush and without much nuance.  But while the precise details of these historical claims can be debated, it would be hard to question a basic, general premise: the historical, on the ground, nitty-gritty, stuff-in-the-world, accidental-thingy-ness aspects of musical production are deeply related to the content of the music itself -- its form, its timbre, its affect, etc.  As Jacques Attali (in Noise: The Political Economy of Music) put it, more specifically about instruments themselves, “Beethoven’s Sonata no. [sic] 106, the first piece written for piano, would have been unthinkable on any other instrument.  Likewise, the work of Jimmy [also sic] Hendrix is meaningless without the electric guitar, the use of which he perfected.”  (I like this juxtaposition of “high” and “low” culture because it accords with a subtext of this essay.)

I don’t mean to suggest that this stuff-in-the-world quality of music is a detraction.  If anything, it’s the opposite, because it means music is always related intimately to life.  (Tangentially, there is so much hand-wringing in professional music performance circles about new music and its “accessibility” that I just can’t figure out.  What could be more accessible than the stuff being made in the world by your fellow humans?  But also: why do we expect that new pieces must be instantaneously fully comprehensible?  Nothing else in your life is, from the behavior of your co-workers, to the stuff your mom says, to why this stoplight is so long, to why you did that dumb thing last week that surprised even you.)

And so, here we are in 2015.  We at Ensemble Dal Niente were approached by the team behind Score Follower/Incipitsify, an organization that “makes recordings+score videos of modern compositions and posts them to their YouTube channels.”  They wanted to commission a new piece of music.  When I first heard about this, it seemed incredibly bizarre and unlikely -- a YouTube channel wanting to commission a piece of music.  YouTube is hardly 10 years old, and it is full of cats doing cute thing, too-much-information confessionary videos, commercial music, highlight reels of athletes, all six Star Wars movies playing at once, family vacations shot on iPhones, grainy academic lectures, Mozart vs. Skrillex, high school orchestra concerts, cartoons, and people going Super Saiyan; in short, the strangest, most beyond-imagination collection of diverse, life-affirming weirdness that human culture has ever created.  But this is why a SF/InciP commission makes so much sense -- because that is exactly our experience of life in 2015, and it seems a trend unlikely to go in the opposite direction (assuming, as I should not, that a cataclysmically violent political-military disaster won’t occur).  

Something in US culture today allows an organization to arise that wants “to provide access to a type of experience (viewing a score while listening to the recording) only otherwise available to the privileged (students/faculty who happen to be affiliated with a university that has a large catalogue of new music scores).”  Of course, one might argue that the very ability to read a score is itself privileged. One would not be wrong.  However, let us not use the political history of cultural institutions to hamstring the future.  The recent history of (much but not all) new music, is, as SF/InciP’s website hints, a history of privileged people having access to things that are privileged in multiple sense: the (physical) location (of their performances and notated materials) in a fancy university/concert hall, the hermetic code of their notation, even the language and style of their discourse (omg, and isn’t “discourse” such a word that would appear in such discourse).  Ironic for a field with so many Marxists, new music for so long had such reified character -- where it came across to an outsider as a thing, an already-fully-formed impenetrable and uninterpretable object, profoundly unrelated to the world that made it and to the circumstances of its production.

In a world full of increasingly more humans, ever-more-rapidly-developing technology, and ever-less trustworthy institutions, it only makes sense that a complex, long-developing, multi-step process of putting “modern compositions” -- or, to use a term that is no less problematic because of the seeming simple claims it makes, “new music” -- out there to be listened to, looked at, demystified, misread weakly or strongly, accords with the character of current social development.  From a strictly personal point of view, I’m super excited to be the conductor of an organization that would embrace such a project.

To take it a step further, this process of “putting stuff out there” changes the character of the art that is made; it becomes part of the circumstances of the production of music.  I’ll take a risk and offer a bold prediction -- one of the sort that can be empirically proved wrong (making me look like a idiot) in September 2016, when we play the new piece.  A characteristic of the winning work will be such that it could only have been conceived, following Attali, because it was commissioned by a YouTube channel.  Its online-media-ness will somehow, in some way I don’t yet know, be thematized and audibly/visually? instantiated in the work’s form and/or character and/or materials and/or whatever.  It won’t just be a piece that simply says “I’m a regular old concert piece” because, first of all, there are no such pieces and it is ideological to think there are; and secondly, because it will have been conceived under circumstances that precludes such an artistic statement.   I can’t wait to hear and see what that is.

---

Visit Score Follower/Incipitsify's Indiegogo Campaign here to read more about this commissioning project and to make a donation!