“Contemporary Classical” (Used 29 times)

There are a couple of lucky accidents in my life that put me on the path I'm on now.  That's the way life goes, right?  You bounce like a pinball around adolescence and if you're lucky you have an older girlfriend at some point that plays Meredith Monk and Bill Dixon records before you go to bed, thus cementing a positive connotation with all things avant-garde.  It would have been just as easy to latch on to the Yellowjackets or some non-descript R&B trinklings in a similar fashion and you are off on another road.  No value judgments about other paths, mind you, but I'm very happy that my shiny round youth happened to hit the paddles it did.

One of those lucky thwackings was my dad buying a bass saxophone and wanting to get a listen to what the damned thing was supposed to sound like.  That brought Anthony Braxton into our house and into my life.  The record was Anthony Braxton and Muhal Richard Abrams Duets 1976.  My dad was fascinated for about a week by the cuts with the contrabass saxophone, then this record somehow disappeared below the typical sea of Paul Desmond and Stan Kenton (standard listening at the time for the jazz minded West Coaster).  For my part, the version of Maple Leaf Rag that was the rest of my family's favorite cut never really did it for me.  It seemed like kitsch, like something that Peanuts Hucko would do to clear the palate in the middle of the Lawrence Welk show.  I was twelve.  I needed something harder.  After the obligatory week of no play in the house, I "appropriated" Duets 1976 and began to listen to 36-MK74-128 and Miss Ann so much that I think this may have been the first record I actually wore out.  The  funny thing was that the more time I spent with these two pieces, and Nickie and the graphic titles (which I can't reproduce here), the more I "got" the reasoning behind Braxton's inclusion of Maple Leaf Rag, and that became probably the most valuable lesson I learned from Mr. Braxton, when couched in broad terms.

The thing I learned was how important it was to follow your interests, to set up your own rules and follow them until they were no longer valid to you. Not to hide the fact that you love John Philip Sousa and Paul Desmond and Scott Joplin or, in my case The Band or Lawrence Welk or Harry Nilsson.  There was a generation of musicians growing up at that time that were, like me, basing their aesthetics on Down Beat.  This led to a very narrow view of not only what "jazz" was, but what "music" is.  It's so much easier to have someone lay out a history and an aesthetic for you, especially when you're just starting to learn. But, all of a sudden I was presented with a giant middle finger, a big "I don't give a fuck" in the form of this gentle looking man in a cardigan sweater and glasses that blew all of the articles and record review sound bites about "so and so being the next what's his name" out of the water.  For a Scandinavian son of two school teachers in a small town in Oregon that was bigger than G.G. Allin setting your school on fire.  That was the first and last moment that I felt I had been granted permission to make music however I wanted to.  I say that it was the first and the last because it was so staggering to me that I have never felt I needed permission from that point on to be myself.  This is the power of finding Anthony Braxton at the right time in your life.

I've been lucky enough to work with Mr. Braxton for about 6 or 7 years now, and although usually I've found that meeting your hero is a bittersweet experience, my time in Braxton's world has always been positive, instructive, and has done nothing but reaffirm my love of art that follows its true interests and its own rules.  One of the things I hear him tell the people in his groups is that "if you stick with me, sir, you will make a million dollars".  This is sometimes told in the negative, in that you will LOSE a million dollars.  It's a joke, of course.  A lot of musicians, especially those on the fringe, joke like this, but with a guy like Braxton, there is something important in the flippancy with which he tells it.  You COULD make a million dollars.  You could make it doing any number of things, even related to music, but if you don't put it back into something you believe in, something that is yourself, your own strange amalgam of interests and aesthetics, then it's worthless. 

So, this is just an introduction.  It's timely, of course, because Anthony is presenting new and old music at a festival at the brand new Roulette space starting on Wednesday October 5th and finishing Saturday October 8th with a reading from the newest opera in his Trillium series.  DRAM is proud to present the Tricentric Foundation Archive as a part of its holdings featuring the releases from the mighty back catalog of Braxton House and New Braxton House.  For those not able to access DRAM, you can also become a subscriber to and member of the Tricentric Foundation, where you can get downloads of these records as well as bootleg (yes, bootleg!) material and monthly downloads of recent works!

We're in a golden age of listening right now.  Of course, the dissemination of new music has been greatly broadened due to the ubiquity of the internet and things like Sound Cloud and Band Camp.  That's one level of the new model of making music, and it has it's beauty.  For some reason, whenever I run across a sound cloud track of weird prog rock from Italy or yet another dub remix of the Imperial March from Star Wars, I wonder if this is what someone like Cornelius Cardew or Hans Werner Henze (during his "music for the people" phase) had in mind when trying to connect with the masses through new music.  Something tells me that it isn't, but that they would appreciate it on a certain level anyway. 

The next level is the proliferation of apartment sized record labels.  This is a commitment.  This is about serious people being serious about serious music.  It doesn't matter if it's grime or dubstep or lower case or ultra-minimalism.  These are the believers, the proselytizers and the people that we need to bake cookies for and buy a beer the next time we see them at the local bar.  They are sleeping on boxes of CDs and LPs.  They are desperately trying to get someone else's music noticed by the press and the listening public because they believe in it and think you should too. If there is anything that even begins to make up for the amount of my time the internet has wasted, the fact that it is easier for these people to exist has more than made up for it.

But, this post is about the OGs...the original proselytizers and educators, some who have stuck in there for years, bringing those that find their way to them a little joy and something new to think about...these are labels like Pogus, Mode, XI, Lovely Music, CRI, New World, Aum Fidelity, Tzadik, Intransitive, Broken Research, and the list goes on and on.  Some have sadly fallen to the dust, but others are going strong.  All of them existed before owning a label was easy and cool.

The Open Space is one such label.  Run alongside a publishing concern of the same name, Open Space has consistently had the good faith, courage, and audacity to produce music 99.9% of even the experimental labels active even now would most likely deem "marginal".  Note that "marginal" does not mean "unimportant".  When I began at DRAM, this label was a complete mystery to me.  The covers were very plain: white background, black lettering with the names of the composers and compositions on the cover.  I was attracted to them in the same way I was originally attracted to the simplicity of old Jandek LP covers.  I started diving in and listening to the pieces.  I didn't like them all.  That's easy to admit for any label.  However, there was an excitement of knowing you were going to get something new and fresh, something to think about and argue with your friends over in our cubicles.  That excites me. That's what music should do, right?  Well, the Open Space is doing it.

I was lucky enough to speak with Benjamin Boretz, who runs the label and whose music is featured prominently (as is J.K. Randall among others).  He was able to give me a very succinct philosophical synopsis of the way the Open Space works, and I think it makes more sense to leave you with that and a very generous playlist of some of my favorite pieces from the label, then to add any more of my memory and coloring to the proceeding.  I will say this though;

Open Space and labels like it....new and old....deserve your respect and attention.  They have a lot to offer.  I know FMA is the digital choir loft that I'm preaching too, but even us heavily enlightened types can forget to say thank you to the people that fill our ears with wonder sometimes.

OPEN SPACE Publications, and THE OPEN SPACE Magazine, are output from a community for people who need to explore or expand the limits of their expressive worlds, to extend or dissolve the boundaries among their expressive-language practices, to experiment with the forms or subjects of thinking or making or performing in the context of creative phenomena.

We want to create a hospitable space for texts which, in one way or another, might feel somewhat marginal — or too 'under construction' — for other, kindred publications.

The people who populate our contributing/editing/reading/listening community are composers (in whatever medium), performers, historians, ethnologists, theorists, critics, philosophers, scholars and seekers of any kind who feel drawn to participate with us in scouting expressive frontiers. We hope you'll want to join this exchange.

-Benjamin Boretz

I was sick this weekend.  That kind of sick where you actually feel like a new man when it is done.  The kind of sick where you spend the last day making deals with yourself about how you'll do things different when this is all over.  That kind of sick. 

One of the realizations I had was that it was time to stop taking in brand new material...mentally...musically...and put energy into drilling deeper into works that had proven their worth to me over a long period of time.  As Aldous Huxley said in one of his essays on aesthetics...the work of art that makes you continuously return to find a new point of entry is a great piece of art.  Please forgive my paraphrase. Basically, I have a need to find an artistic regeneration through the simple act of just paying better attention, being more rigorous about the information I already have, and in general allowing myself to probe deeper into the music I already know.

Just in case you think this is a personal tirade, I can assure you this has everything to do with DRAM, FMA, and the music that I've attached for download here, Dante Boon's spectacular reading of the first movement of Morton Feldman's Last Pieces (Edition Wandelweiser).

I've been asked by a number of FMA readers about individual subscriptions to DRAM, and the response has been strong enough that we've been able to make DRAM free on a trial basis for those interested in checking out the site.  Just by a stroke of luck, this trial period happened to coincide with Bowerbird's American Sublime Festival on Morton Feldman, and wanting to find a way to support the work that Dustin Hurt and Bowerbird were doing in bringing some of the great interpreters of Feldman's work to Philadelphia, we partnered with his organization to give away free trial subscriptions to those people visiting the American Sublime site.

Also, in the spirit of the festival, composer Matthew Welch wrote a series of short articles on Feldman's music: a playlist of good entry points to Feldman's music from the DRAM archive (which has one of the most extensive collections of Feldman's recorded output) as well as a two part paper on the composer's late period works (Triadic Memories and Patterns in a Chromatic Field) and an analysis of the movement of "Last Pieces" featured in this post.

Welch's insights sum up this idea of digging deeper into a subject you love...paying attention....paying deeper attention...and finding some new lights in which to see a subject.  Any fan of Morton Feldman's music knows about the composer's connection to the Abstract Expressionist painters in New York, or his fascination with middle Eastern rugs near the end of his life, but Welch takes apart the nuts and bolts of this "intuitive" composer and shows the elegance of the "machine" portion of the "ghost in the machine".  His papers talk about tendencies of semi-tone voice leading, registral displacement, oblique motion, and asymmetry brought about by Feldman's specific use of notational methods.

Now is the time for us all to dig a little deeper into this great composer's work.  There is so much more there than an iconoclast with thick glasses writing his scores on the wall.  To learn more about Feldman, you can read Welch's posts or download pdf versions of Welch's paper (with musical examples) here, and to get FREE TRIAL ACCESS TO DRAM!, go to American Sublime here

Once at the site, scroll to the bottom where you will find the DRAM logo.  If you click on that logo, a new page will open which will tell you how to gain free access to DRAM on a trial basis.  THIS TRIAL WILL END ON JULY 5TH, SO ACT NOW!!!!

When I first moved to New York in 2001, I was bussing tables for a living and absolutely on the edge of not making it financially.  The main obstacle produced by my poverty at the time was not a product of the mundane (i.e. food, rent, transportation), but the, for all intents and purposes, two year hiatus of buying records.  Anyone that is a record collector or hardcore music fan knows where I'm coming from.

Because necessity is the mother of invention, or in my case desperation the great aunt of getting my butt on a train, I became a fixture at the Lincoln Center Performing Arts Library.  I was overwhelmed, initially, by their recording collection, so being the pragmatist that I am, not to mention slightly obsessive, I started at the upper left of their holdings, checking out 5 cds at a time, and worked my way through until I hit the letter "I". 

What does this have to do with anything, let alone DRAM or New World Records, the people who, ostensibly, let me present music for download on FMA? It's a tenuous connection, but one I'm going to run with anyway, as the ends will justify the means. 

The last recording I really dug into from my time with the NYPL was New World Records recording of Lee Hyla's "We Speak Etruscan", performed by Tim Berne on baritone saxophone and Tim Smith on bass clarinet.   I listened to this recording over and over, even making a trip back up to Lincoln Center from Jersey City to renew the disc and listen some more.  I loved "Pre-Pulse Suspended" and the great Aleck Karis playing Hyla's Piano Concerto, but the piece that resonated the most with me was the title piece.  There was something very specific about the aesthetic knife edge that Hyla inhabited between jazz and contemporary composed music that has been stuck in my mind ever since.  Needless to say, when I joined the rank and file here at DRAM/New World, this was the first cd I pulled off of the shelves to revisit.

A dear friend and collaborator of mine, Josh Sinton told me a year ago that he was working on the bari sax part of We Speak Etruscan.  This is not unusual for Josh, he pushes himself.  It's one of my favorite things about him.  I was not expecting him, however, to tell me that he would be performing the piece on the Darmstadt month at Issue Project Room.  When I found out that the performance would be shared by one of my favorite flutists of a generation, Claire Chase, (whose work I also discovered in my obsessive visits to the stacks at Lincoln Center) would feature compositions by Darmstadt and IPR's own Zach Layton, and the words "virtuoso whistler" were set in print in relation to the event, I had a moment of artistic righteous indignation. 

I MUST LET THE WORLD KNOW!

IT IS MY MORAL IMPERATIVE!

WHAT GOOD IS SITTING IN FRONT OF A COMPUTER ALL DAY EVERY DAY IF YOU CAN'T ENFORCE YOUR OPINIONS ON THE PUBLIC!

And, so here we are. Me, feeling a certain satisfaction at being able to tell you what I think is right and good in the world of music.  You, being the lucky recipient of two great tracks of contemporary woodwind playing.

This post features the original Lee Hyla recording from the New World Records Release of the same name, and I was also lucky enough to get a recording from Claire of her performing Marcelo Toledo's "Aliento/arrguas", which will also be featured. 

Issue Project Room is located at 232 3rd Street in Brooklyn.  Claire Chase/Rebekah Heller plus We Speak Etruscan will be featured on Wednesday, June 22nd at 8 pm.  Get your tickets here, and while you're at it, why not check out the remainder of the Darmstadt Institute's month at IPR or make a donation to either organization.  Consider it your summer time good deed.

If Wet Ink Ensemble existed when "uptown" and "downtown" still had meaning, much of their programming would seem to land them decidedly north of 34th St. But like the capital-D Downtown groups, the bread and butter of their programming comes from the ensemble members themselves, with composers such as Alex Mincek, Kate Soper, Eric Wubbels, Sam Pluta, playing vital roles in the group. Lately, inching toward its teenage years, the ensemble has started to program ambitious portrait concerts of underheard-in-America European composers like Peter Ablinger and Matthias Spangler, usually in places like Columbia's Miller Theater or various cultural centers.

However, Wet Ink always seems to make two or three appearances a year at ISSUE. Tonight, for the annual Darmstadt Institute, Wet Ink Ensemble will play new works by composer, trombonist, early AACM member, and Columbia professor George Lewis, vocalist Kate Soper, and pianist Eric Wubbels, with older works by Rick Burkhardt and Alex Mincek. The tracks below are saxophone & piano duos from the group's March 2010 concert at ISSUE: "Pendulum III" by saxophonist and Artistic Director Alex Mincek; and "this is this is this is" by pianist and Executive Director Eric Wubbels.