7:00 PM: FAST>>FORWARD>>AUSTIN in NYC  w/Owen Weaver, Bel Cuore Quartet and special guests Concert Black and Vicky Chow

I am looking for people to hop on for some extra work and get some recognition in doing so. I need people that live in NY that can do gig reviews in particularly the NY area where it is hard for me to travel to for monetary reasons, and also if people can write CD reviews

No special training is necessary, but if you are a really good writer and love music, that is a huge plus. Please email me at chrismcgovernmusic@gmail.com if you are interested.

Reblogged from The Glass:

TRAG are (From L to R) Nora Tragianese (vox/kybd), Mark Tragianese (drums/vox), Bart Bruno (bass/bg vox), and Robert Iandoli (lead guitar) “Alterna-Prog-Eighties” This is the genre description that Shelton, CT-based band TRAG goes by these days, and at least lead-vocalist Nora Tragianese takes time to bear this out for me: “Mark is the progressive, and also the alternative–I’m semi-alternative, but I’m big on the eighties, so kind of throw that all together in a blender, and that’s what we sound like. He …

Simone Dinnerstein (THAT one, yes) is doing a Glass interview! Wow!

Simone, the lady that made a self-financed CD of the Bach Goldberg Variations and managed to eventually garner critical acclaim from the NY Times, LA Times, The New Yorker, and have a brilliant career as a concert pianist is giving some time to this still budding publication. Still need a pinch.

The new CD, Something Almost Being Said, is her newly-recorded collection of music by Bach (by now her trademark) and Schubert. Simone talks a bit about the record, Tift Merritt, correctional facilities, and that damn iPhone.

CM: Simone, can you talk about the new CD and the connection between the music and the poem from which its title comes from?

SD: I chose the works on the CD because I felt that they all had a sense of narrative in common. Though they are instrumental works, they have the quality of speech, or of song, and yet without words. I was looking for a title that could convey this idea, and so I turned to poetry. My husband suggested that I read Philip Larkin’s poem, The Trees. The opening lines perfectly evoked the music.

CM: I had seen you a few years back at LPR, and that was such a wonderful show where you played Bach on a piano in the middle of the room (like a theater in the round). Do you prefer smaller venues like that or the recital hall scenarios?

SD: I like lots of different types of venues. So many aspects of a venue affect the feeling of the concert: the acoustics, the piano, the proximity of the audience, the physical shape of the room. It would be hard for me to give one definitive answer.

CM: There is a clip of you performing for some inmates at Maryland Correctional Institution for Women. Can you talk about how that came to be and what it was like?

SD: I was in Baltimore for the week, performing with the Baltimore Symphony. The symphony’s administration asked if I might be interested in performing a short recital at the correctional facility, since they had read that I had done this once before in Louisiana. It was a truly beautiful experience, and definitely one of the highlights of my performing career. The women’s reaction was completely different than from what I had expected. They were completely open to the music, very emotional and communicative. They shared their stories of their children’s musical studies and of their own musical backgrounds. I learned a lot from the experience.

Bach: Goldberg Variations (excerpts; Maryland Correctional Institution for Women, Jessup, MD; 10/23/09)

CM: You have been making some interesting collaborative work for some time now with Tift Merritt. Will there be more of that with her, and do you know if there are any other artists outside of classical that you would like to work with?

SD: Tift and I will be recording this summer! We are very excited! This is one of the most interesting projects I’ve done so far, and it has really pushed me out of my own small, classical world. We are both interpreting the music from our personal aesthetic idea of the music, as opposed to focusing on conventions of style. I hope to do more of this type of collaborative work in the future.

CM: I have to tell you that the promo clip for your EPK is so beautiful with you and your family! What was this experience like for all of you to do a music video?

SD: It was a lot of fun! Tristan Cooke, the director, had a very clear vision of what he wanted. I gave him various ideas, locations and themes, but he came up with all of the scenes and how they were choreographed. I was very proud of how well my son dealt with having a camera pointing at him. He was so natural, just as he is in real life.

Promo for Something Almost Being Said

CM: This thing that happened in NY recently with an iPhone at the NY Phil is a cause celebre that has everyone on edge all over again about devices being brought to concerts. Can you talk about how you would handle that situation if it happened at your show?

SD: It happens all the time. In fact it happened recently when I was giving a recital in New York, right between movements in a partita. I felt sorry for the owner of the phone, who I’m sure felt terrible. But it is a real challenge when it happens because it breaks your train of thought. When you’re performing, you are so completely in another world that it is quite jarring when that spell is broken.

Schubert: Impromptu #2 in E-Flat Major, D.899 (Op. 90; Live at KDFC; Feb 2011)

Samples from the new CD (You can purchase it on iTunes as well)

Simone Dinnerstein.com
Simone’s official website

“It’s exciting! We have a lot to look forward to! It’s exciting times for Primitivity!”~Natalie Spehar

The DC-based all-cello ensemble Primitivity is a group featuring 3 classically-trained cellists (and a drummer) that’s part of a seemingly expanding genre known as cello rock. You’ll see there’s a few, but certainly more than I knew existed (I did know about Apocalyptica).
“Primitivity was just cellos”, explains cellist and leader Loren Westbrook-Fritts. “The 1st album is just a tribute to Megadeth, and I did that thing with just cello sounds–It was all acoustic, and then it grew from there into being more similar to Apocalyptica with processed cello sounds and drums, but it’s also become its own thing, different from that in the last year.”

Primitivity has existed in various forms with Westbrook-Fritts, drummer Robbie Burns and cellist Devree Lewis. Natalie Spehar is the most recent recruit.

Their first CD Plays Megadeth For Cello was, as Loren described, an all-Megadeth tribute CD and self-recorded by him, and this record, by the way, did catch the attention of Dave Mustaine of Megadeth. “He liked it a lot”, added Westbrook-Fritts. “The whole band listened to it on their bus! I gave them each a personal copy. He tells people about it, and they tell me he told them!”

Symphony of Destruction (Megadeth cover; Live at the Mansion at Strathmore, Bethesda, MD 2011)

As far as Primitivity’s compatibility with the dynamics of a rock band, Devree Lewis puts her spin on it: “Cello is great to cover the kind of music that requires a band, because we have the great bass sound, and they can sing really high. So, with 3 cellos in every song, we cover bass, middle, high at almost the exact ranges that you would find with bass, guitar, vocals. In Primitivity, we switch those out and cover it pretty well, I think.”
“It lends itself really well to being processed like that, too”, adds fellow member Natalie Spehar. “It’s not like an annoying string sound, especially using real cellos, you get a cello sound, and it’s rich, and then when you add distortion or anything on top of it, it makes it something that’s really unique, and seems to be pleasant for people listening.”
“We’re using cello with pickup”, added Westbrook-Fritts, “and after that we use a lot of effects processor stuff. Actually, once the sound goes out of the pickup, it’s processed very similar to the way a regular guitar would be processed in a rock band. After that, it’s kind of like a real rock band situation when we play an electric show. When we do acoustic stuff it’s just straight-up cello.”

The group is planning on making an all-new recording, and according to Westbrook-Fritts, it won’t be a covers collection like their previous one. “Right now the way it was originally planned out, was to have it be all original tunes, because the fees associated with doing a cover CD are ridiculous, and it doesn’t help with the direction of the band, which is to be as original as possible. We play a lot of covers live, because people enjoy them, but we also get a lot of positive feedback on original music, so that’s the direction we’re going to stay in. We’re going to work on it in the summer. It will be done, give or take in the fall, depending on how quickly we can get it all finished and mastered and everything.”
“We talked about the possibility of doing a live-in-concert recording, too!” added Spehar. “We’re playing with the idea of making that happen.”

Due to regional issues, a touring Primitivity has been a sort of “impossible dream”, but there have been efforts to make this happen.
Spehar explained, “We’re all very busy doing freelance things, and 2 of us teach in public schools, so, we’re sort of glued down into this area (D.C.), but we’ve been fortunate to do really well here, so we’ve been playing with the idea of of maybe this summer or sometime soon, securing a chunk of time and going on tour somewhere. We’re working out the details, but we definitely want to expand it!”

Has playing this kind of music expanded or enhanced their playing of classical music (the other half of their music careers)?
Devree Lewis thinks so. “Since I started playing with them, I feel so much more comfortable. I also solo with the Tango Orchestra [Pan American Symphony], and it has changed the way I play with them. It reminds you that you’re there to have fun. It’s not about the performance or the nerves, it’s about the music.”
Natalie agrees, “I definitely think that this kind of playing all along has made me versatile, within a classical situation, too, it’s just more comfortable.”

Convergence (Live 2/4/12)

PRIMITIVITY.COM
Official website

The Avant Music Festival, a 5-night event being held at The Wild Project in NYC between Friday, Feb 10th and Saturday the 18th, promises to be a compelling series of shows of music in the vein of avant-garde. Along with music by living composers Randy Gibson (whom you are about to hear from), Eve Beglarian (Songs From The River and Elsewhere) and Jenny Olivia Johnson (After School Vespers), there is a performance of Schoenberg‘s ground-breaking work Pierrot Lunaire and a 2-part show on Saturday the 11th celebrating the 100th Birthday of John Cage at 4 PM and 8 PM respectively (This concert, by the way, features Vicky Chow performing the great Sonatas and Interludes on prepared piano).

Randy, who is one of the curators of the event, spoke briefly about the festival as well as himself.

CM: How did you get started and what brought you to the world of contemporary music?

RG: I began playing percussion when I was very young, and the Marimba became my main instrument for many years. Of course, with percussion, you’re almost immediately exposed to contemporary music because there’s very little written before the 20th century, especially as a soloist. I was playing a lot of modern Japanese music that had been written for Keiko Abe, and I had been exposed to Steve Reich a bit, working up Marimba Phase… It wasn’t, though, until I heard Cage’s Ryoanji that I began writing music. The listening experience was revolutionary for me and changed my whole concept of what music could be. I began writing almost immediately after hearing it for the first time, and just completely delved into Cage’s conceptual world.

CM: Who were the people that helped shape your identity as an artist?

RG: John Cage was the first one, for sure. Early on my works were sort of Cage rip-offs, experiments with chance, extended techniques, space=time, that sort of thing. As I began to develop an identity of my own, I grew extremely interested in the Minimalists. With the music I write, I’ve always had a love/hate relationship with rhythm, I think because of my history with percussion. Early on I would work with extremely slow tempos, or overlapping rhythmic cells like those found in Riley’s or Reich’s work. When I moved to New York, I contacted the people I most respected, and, as fate would have it, began studying with La Monte Young.

This is when everything changed for me. Little tendencies that had existed in my work (static notes, sine waves, glacial tempos, &c.) were all suddenly free to grow and live their own lives. Since 2005, I’ve been studying raga performance with La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela, and that has had a truly profound influence as well. The work I’ve been doing the last few years draws heavily on both the extreme sine-wave compositions using prime numbers pioneered by Young, and the rich, codified raga tradition, but it also harkens back to those early experiment with chance and rhythmic cells. I often use delay lines now to both create denser textures and to subvert rhythm.

CM: When and how did the Avant Music Festival get started?

RG: We did a performance of a piece of mine (Doleo Æternus) at The Wild Project in the fall of 2009, and just fell in love with the venue. Since it’s used primarily for theatre projects, they luckily had two weeks free that next February, and Megan Schubert and I decided to put on a festival. That first one was pretty cobbled together, and a little bit insanely ambitious. Since then we’ve really honed in on what we want to present, which is composer-driven evenings of work where an audience can really get into the mind and ethos of the particular composer.

CM: Can you talk about your two works that will be presented on Friday the 10th and Saturday the 18th?

RG: The piece that came to define my contribution to the Avant Music Festival is Apparitions of The Four Pillars. Since beginning writing this work for the first festival in 2010, I haven’t written anything else. All of my work now examines facets of this very small series of tuning concepts built around stacks of identical pure harmonic intervallic relationships over a single fundamental (a 72hz D).

Circular Trance Surrounding The Second Pillar with The Highest Seventh Primal Cirrus, The Utmost Fundamental, and The Ekmeles Ending from Apparitions of The Four Pillars, the work that opens the festival this year, on Friday February 10th, is a sort of choral-raga journey into the seventh harmonic. It draws a lot on my raga studies, bringing these techniques, to a somewhat traditional choral setting. The singers, from the remarkable Ekmeles Vocal Ensemble (who commissioned the piece) are accompanied by Sine Waves built out of the harmonic series and the septimal pitches they must sing. It’s really very traditional in form, with a long alap introduction followed by a bandish with all its associated parts, but it’s all amplified and presented in a very ritualistic way with video, lighting, and incense that speaks to my ongoing interest in the ritual aspects of musical performance.

The piece that closes the festival (Saturday, February 18th) is something I’m really excited about, it’s be far the most ambitious, bonkers thing I’ve written. The trombonist William Lang, who I’ve worked with for a few years now, will premiere a new three hour solo trombone composition entitled The Third Pillar in Primal Imperfect Palindrome with The Souvenir of The Second Pillar, The Floating Cirrus over the Pumping Slush, and The Highest Moving Chordal Motif from Apparitions of The Four Pillars. This piece examines the pure 9:8 relationship and all its constituent parts. It’s going to be a truly mindbending experience. The Sine Waves for this composition move through a few different areas, examining first the stack of 9:8 intervals, then associated prime-numbered harmonics, and finally the extremes of range presenting high pitched primal sine waves over extremely low trombone tones. It’s a rich and enveloping tapestry, and the video artist I work with, Oscar Henriquez, has created a really stunning new video that will accompany it.

CM: What is it about the new music festivals that make them important to the audience?

RG: I think a festival like ours really presents an unusual opportunity for an audience to really deeply hear an artist’s work. It’s not often that a composer gets to present a whole evening of their work, and I hope that presenting the festival the way we do, where each composer is given free reign over a night, can lead to deeper and more focused interest in an artist’s work. We include the full programming of the whole festival in the printed program, and it’s our hope that, if you’re attending one night, something that one of the other composers is doing can spark a new interest, and the concentration of all this music into such a short time frame I think makes it more and more possible for an audience to discover something new.

CM: The highlights of course are the works by John Cage for his 100th birthday and the performance of Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, which is also seeing its 100th year. Would you say these two composers continue to have such a lasting effect on today’s music?

RG: Absolutely! I think you find very direct examples of this lasting influence all over the place. Interestingly enough the first things that come to mind are in “pop” music – an album like Aphex Twin’s Drukqs with all its prepared piano samples, or a few years ago Björk singing Pierrot Lunaire. I think in the classical world the influence has maybe become a bit more subtle over time, but just look at how much is being done for Cage’s centennial, and you can tell it’s still there, strong. I think as a performer, or as a composer perfoming, Cage is absolutely vital. It opens your ears to new sounds, and new possibilities, and if you can really accept the true ethos of his chance operations, you learn to embrace the unexpected, and that’s what the most fun.

2012 Avant Music Festival Preview from Avant Media on Vimeo.

2012 Avant Music Festival
Feb 10, 11, 15, 17, and 18 at 8 PM (also Feb 11 at 4 PM with a composer roundtable at 5:30 PM)
Wild Project
195 East 3rd Street
New York, NY 10009
p. 212.228.1195
f. 212.228.1154
info@thewildproject.com

Click here for schedule, tickets and performers for the Avant Music Festival

By James Holt courtesy of My Ears Are Open

“My name is Vicki Ray and I’m a pianist living in the Los Angeles area. I play in the California E.A.R. Unit and another new music ensemble called Xtet and I’m a founding member of Piano Spheres which is a solo piano series dedicated to modern piano music.”

Vicki Ray – Piano (My Ears Are Open podcast)

E.A.R. Unit

Piano Spheres.org

Harpist Bridget Kibbey is currently creating another household name for harpists as we speak. Having just come off of a short series of shows at LPR titled Music Box where she performed a compelling recital of commissioned solo harp pieces, she has even more shows on the horizon and a forthcoming CD that features a special guest (As far as letting us know who that guest is, it’s top secret information; She wouldn’t even say what instrument they play).

Bridget took the time to speak with me via Skype.

CM: How did you get started and what led you to harp specifically?

BK: I started taking Suzuki piano lessons at the age of 3, and my siblings and I were always practicing piano. After school there was always someone practicing trumpet or piano. Later on, I started taking oboe lessons because I wanted to play in the orchestra at school. One day my family was attending church, and [during the service] a woman was playing the harp (It was Jan Bishop), and I was just mesmerized by it. At that time, I was 9, and I started taking harp lessons with her. What made it really fun is that this woman was a great teacher, but also really generous. She would take me and her daughter on these 10 hour road trips to Wisconsin to go to harp conferences. If there was a masterclass within 12 hours, she would drive us, and we would stay in a hotel, and it was really exciting for me! I got to take lessons with these amazing harpists! So I really owe so much to Jan–She was actually at the second Music Box show [at LPR], and I was so thrilled she was able to make it!

I went on this tour with the Blue Lake International Youth Symphony Orchestra, and I was supposed to go just to play principal harp, but, what happened was the 2nd oboist ran away from home right before the tour, and the conductor found out I played oboe, and said “Would you play some etudes over the phone?”, so I played some excerpts, and some etudes, and he said “You got the job!”. I would literally run back and forth and play 2nd oboe and run back and play principal harp on the same concert, and as you can imagine I just loved it, because, here I got to play a Beethoven Symphony, then I got to go back and play [the Tchaikovsky] Romeo and Juliet’s beautiful harp part, and then go back and play oboe on some overture. I was in my glory, and I realized, I was going to Europe the first time, I was 13, and I was just loving the whole lifestyle. I thought ‘I don’t care what it takes, I don’t care how much hard work I have to do, I want to be a musician, I love this life’, and I’m sure traveling to Europe didn’t hurt either.

So, I started practicing the harp 4 hours a day, because the next summer I went to Interlochen and met Lynne Aspnes, who was at that time the head of the harp department and also the string department at University of Michigan. She was an incredible teacher, and my parents were very generous and drove me 2 hours one way, so, that’s a 4 hour commute twice a month to have a really long lesson with her, and she really prepared me for my conservatory auditions.

CM: Who were the giants of the harp that you really got into?

BK: I had a lot of role models growing up. One of them was Judy Loman, and I just really admired the diversity of her career, as well as just having met her and seeing that she had a family life, and just a rich personal life, and I thought to myself ‘Wow, here’s a woman who has a great career and has a family too!’, and I was just blown away by that. She was the principal harpist of the Toronto Symphony for many years, and she played lots of pieces on the radio in Canada! There’s also Nancy Allen, whom I ended up studying with at Juilliard for 6 years. Her recordings always blew me away. She’s the cleanest harpist, most consummate musician and incredible transcriber. Her baroque recordings are my absolute favorites, and both she and Judy are the most generous people I have worked with.

Rameau: L’Egyptienne (Brooks Center for the Performing Arts, 1/26/10)

CM: Somebody had tweeted after one of the Music Box LPR shows that you are the “Jimi Hendrix of harp”! What are your thoughts?

BK: That makes me so happy! I’m so flattered that anyone would say that about me, because Jimi truly rocks!

CM: How have you come to know the best repertoire by now, and who are your favorite composers now you have been working with?

BK: The truth is at my heart and at my core, I am in love with the classics for the harp. I think what makes the harp inherently special is the way pieces were originally written for it–Debussy and Ravel, they really exploited the natural colors of the harp, and I think that the composers and the collaborations I have most enjoyed are those composers who are able to hear the capabilities that are within the idiomatic range of the harp. I love standard techniques, but what really intrigues me more is working with a clever composer who’s able to reinvent the wheel within that idiomatic way of traditionally playing the harp, and I think that’s why I’m drawn to folk music. There’s so many incredible composers these days that use that as a springboard, but I think there’s some modern composers that I just adore, because they understand the inherent qualities of harp, it’s wide color-range, dynamic capability, and it’s literal range, as far as octaves and the fact that it’s just a wide pitch range, and for me, those composers would be Sebastian Currier, Kati Agocs and David Bruce.

Sebastian’s been writing for the harp for a number of years, and he’s definitely a colorist! I really put him in the same ranks as Stravinsky, Ravel and Debussy. And David Bruce is also a modern colorist who is able to dapple in different world cultures, almost like he’s able to put on one language or another, much like Ravel did, yet maintaining his own distinct voice and exploiting the unique color capability of the harp, so, I really enjoy collaborating with him. He’s a great orchestrator, and Kati would also be put in that same category as well. Both David and Kati are young composers, but they get the harp, they instinctually get the harp, and I think also through our collaboration and passages back and forth, they’ve really learned to speak the language of the instrument and take full advantage of unique resonance of the harp. Initially, that’s really why I chose the instrument. I just fell in love with the way the harp resonates and the way we get to control how long the harp’s strings resonate or how they resonate purely by nature of my fingertips. The first composer harp collaboration I had was with Kati–She wrote this piece called Every Lover Is a Warrior (from my CD Love Is Come Again), and each movement explores a folk tune from France, Hungary and Appalachia. The way that she’s able to bring across bluegrass on the harp, it’s just stunning! The way she’s able to weave Hungarian melodies like a modern-day Bartok–I just find her music so compelling, and completely doable on the harp at the same time, and I think it’s that combination of being rooted in the tradition of great harp playing, yet exploring the sonic and color possibilities of the harp that that’s the kind of music I’m drawn to. Sometimes when I hear myself coined as a “new music harpist”, I love it, but I’m also like “Well, I’m a traditionalist too!”. I really enjoy performing the range of repertoire. I’m just a fan of great music. [laughs]

Kati Agocs: John Riley (From Every Lover Is a Warrior; Brooks Center for The Performing Arts, 1/26/10)

CM: And the piece by composer Du Yun?

BK: It was really fun to tap into the ICE family! Du Yun is such an artist, and I think she created the most progressive (as far as extended techniques) piece on the Music Box project, and the way she hears the sounds of the harp is incredible. She tapped into the metal sounds of the pedal discs against the strings–She really took that to another level, and I think that it was really powerful for the audience. I was curious how they would react to it, and they loved it. I think it was really kind of a powerful theatre piece, compared to the more idiomatic traditional writing that existed in the other works, so it was really a lovely compliment to have her on the program!

CM: Can you talk about your own music that you worked on? One of the pieces was played at the LPR show.

BK: The first set that I did was a compilation of hymns–I actually just did that at the 2nd show, and then I ended the program with a set of celtic reels that I arranged. I’d been to one international celtic festival, the Festival Interceltique de Lorient. We danced the night away doing this incredible celtic dancing with 300 French Bretons, and I was really mesmerized how everyone in town knew these dance steps, and every time the reel would change or the music would change, their dance steps would change, and they knew exactly which dance went with which type of music. Doing these circle dances I felt such joy and a sense of community. I was really drawn to it, and that was really the inspiration for creating Music Box, because I kind of had this feeling of whimsy or nostalgia, like ‘Oh my gosh, look at these cultures, they’re still rooted to the folk music of their people’, and I thought ‘I’m living in NYC, I’m surrounded by the most diverse crowd I could ever ask for, why not put together some of my favorite composers that were born in other countries who immigrated to the states and showcase their cultures through the harp?’. So, that’s what I did.

As far as composing extended pieces vs. other composers, the bar is high, but, you know I find, I’ve been doing a lot of world music recently, playing with different artists, and I think that improvising on certain scales has really opened me up to the idea of writing more, it’s definitely a goal of mine that I’d like to explore more.

BridgetKibbey.com
Bridget’s official website

I cannot believe I’ve been doing this for a year now already! This has been such a great journey for me, and after speaking with so many great artists in the new music world and even a few great local rock bands in my first year, I have learned a great deal more about music, musicians, art, artistic ideas, composing, and how it all relates to me in the last year or so. There’s still more to come.

It feels like things have been looking up for me. Whether this carries over to my personal life remains to be seen, but I’m so happy that I have garnered almost 15,000 views now since this day a year ago. I can say this with great honesty: I do hope to expand The Glass to possibly something in the guise of a podcast, and eventually perhaps something bigger than that. You’ll have to stand by for news on any of this. I’ll know when you do.

In the meantime, I have some more profiles coming up. Stay tuned!

And BTW, Happy Birthday to Mozart (The blog changes dates at 7PM, so technically it’s still 1/27)!

Israeli-born composer Avner Dorman is yet another person that was a late-starter in the classically-trained world where everyone seemingly starts learning what they do at age 3 or 4, but he’s now proven to us again, just as quite a few others have in our journeys here, that age is only a number in this game.

If you click on his website, you’ll see that he already has a variety of great works and has been premiering even more as we speak, including one of the Hilary Hahn Encores (EDITOR’S NOTE: I couldn’t not ask him about that, and believe it or not, he hasn’t even heard this piece played yet. Huh?) and a narrated orchestral work titled Uzu and Muzu from Kakamaruzu premiering in March with the Stockton Symphony.
Avner had a few minutes to hang with me via Skype and discuss.

CM: Start from the top, how’d you become a musician/composer?

AD: I started studying cello when I was 9, and then I quit that and started piano at 12–Really late for most musicians, like, if you’re going to be a pro, that’s late! I think probably the biggest [thing] was that my dad didn’t really want me to be a composer!

CM: Oh boy! [both laughing] Don’t you love the parents when they try to crush your dreams any time you want to do something artistic?

AD: That was a good enough reason to really want to be a composer! But I was very drawn to music early on, even before I started learning an instrument, and even when I was studying piano or cello, I sort of never played what was on the page, I liked improvising and adding my own things. When I would do scales on the piano, I always played in 2 different keys at a time. I would change Beethoven and Mozart and what not–I think it was kind of ingrained in me that creating is the cool part, not playing someone else’s ideas. It’s fairly basic in my perception of the world that I like to contribute my own thoughts and not someone else’s.

CM: When did your composing actually gel?

AD: I’m still waiting for it! [laughing] Just kidding! I started writing out pieces at probably 15, and then when I was in 12th grade, I was starting to perform my own music–I wrote my Prelude #1, which is on one of my Naxos CDs. I wrote it, and I started performing it, and that was like the first piece that people were like “Oh my God, you’re like a composer, you’re like the real thing!”–I think every composer has that moment where they’re like “Okay, I managed to do it once! I can really do this! I’m not just dreaming!”. That piece I played a lot. I was a senior in high school, and I played it at some upper-level, university-level places where there were composition students, and some of them came to me and said to me “I think I’m going to be depressed now for a month that a 17-year-old could write that!”, so, that was sort of reassuring!

I remember I had one teacher, a counterpoint teacher I used to take private lessons from–he was a very good pianist, and one day he asked me for some pieces–the copies that he wanted to play, and I think that was also a very defining moment. A professional musician asked me for a copy of my music so he can learn it to play at his recitals.

CM: So, from that point on, you just knew because people wanted to get a piece of it, pretty much.

AD: Well, I’m thinking about it now, when I was a senior in high school, actually, I wrote this concerto for piano, violin, electric guitar and string orchestra, and the orchestra was a a string orchestra plus a drum set–That’s essentially what I had in my high school. I put it together, and I recorded it. The composer-in-residence of the Haifa Symphony came to our school, and he heard the recording from one of those magnetic tapes, and he commissioned a piece from me right away! I think that’s probably the defining moment, a real orchestra commissions a piece after they hear something else, I was like “Okay, this can really happen!”.

CM: Was it around the same time you wrote Concerto for Violin and a Rock Band?

AD: That was a few years later.

CM: Was that commissioned, or was that something you kind of wanted to try?

AD: I started writing it as a regular violin concerto, just for myself. And then I was taking composition lessons at the time with Amnon Wolman. He asked me what I was trying to do, and I said that I was trying to get the sound of a rock band here. And he was like “Why don’t you just write for a rock band? Why are you trying to make the orchestra sound like a rock band? Why not just write for a rock band?”. I was embarrassed and I didn’t think about it, so I essentially said “Oh yeah, I’m thinking of doing a version like that!”, and he was in charge of one of the new music ensembles in Israel, and he said “You know, if you write it, we’ll play it at one of our concerts!”.

CM: I’ve heard it, and it reminds me a bit of symphonic rock.

AD: It’s close to some sort of ’70′s progressive rock, I think. I was a big Genesis fan growing up.

Piano Sonata #2 (II: Presto; Alon Goldstein, piano; date and venue unknown)

CM: How did the call from Hilary Hahn go down about the piece Memory Games?

AD: She essentially gave me a call one day and said ‘Hi, this is Hilary Hahn, I’m a violinist…”, and I was like, “Yeah, I know who you are!”!

CM: [laughing] That’s so funny, she thinks there’s people that have never heard of her in the classical music world!

AD: I’m like “Yeah! I’ve heard of you!”, and she said “I want you to write a piece for me!”, and I said “Sure!”. That was it! She was like “I’m so happy you want to write a piece for me!”, and I was “What did you think?! You’re a great violinist, of course I’ll write a piece for you!”.

CM: Since neither one of us has had a chance to hear Hilary’s rendition yet, is there any way you can describe what the piece sounds like?

AD: It’s very fast, and it’s like this jumpy groove. My copyist said it’s like a Balkan samba. It has something Latin in the rhythm, but it’s all sevens and elevens and what not. It’s actually closer to Balkan music, which I’m very very fond of. What happens is the piano and the violin start together. And then they’re going together, and then I think from the audience perspective it just seems like they’re sort of drifting apart, but continuing to work with the same material. Technically it’s very rigorous–It’s kind of a formula that I created, how notes come in and sort of interfere with the patterns, but from an audience point of view, you hear them together, and it’s very tight, and then they start veering away from each other, until it gets really crazy and intense. It’s a very intense piece, I think!

CM: Wow, I can’t wait to actually hear it!

AD: Me too! [Both laughing]
One more thing about that piece–It’s actually conceived in a way that she can play it not only with piano. The idea is that she can play it with clarinet, violin, whatever! As I was doing those versions, it started getting more complex than I thought, so I never finished them, but I will soon! The idea is that when she plays a concert with an orchestra, and if she has a friend in the orchestra, she can play it, and it’s the same pattern repeating. She’s moving around, but the “accompaniment” is fairly strict in the pattern. It’s easy to learn it if you’re a good musician. When she goes and plays with an orchestra, she can play an encore with one of the musicians in the orchestra, or 3 of the musicians in the orchestra, and she doesn’t need the piano, so it’s sort of a modular piece. I just have to finish that version for her because different instruments have different ranges, it gets a little tricky!

CM: What’s great about chamber music for violin and piano is that even though there’s so much repertoire where the violin is the only thing that matters in those pieces, people like Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms and Ives, probably because those people were more pianistic, wrote pieces that were more like duets.

AD: Yeah, particularly it was more piano. Actually, if you look at the early stuff, it’s only in the romantic period in the 19th century where the violin became sort of dominant in the violin-piano [repertoire]. I almost feel like when it’s violin and piano or like a string quartet, I like to make it like a mass of sound together, like it’s not even a duet, they’re almost like this one thing, they sort of become like one entity as opposed to one being more important or even like a back and forth or something like that.

CM: Can we talk about Lost Souls, the Piano Concerto? I noticed a lot of references to Bach and other composers.

AD: The whole idea of the piece is that the piano concerto is dead. It’s a 19th century format. it’s not something of our time. The piece is sort of like a resurrection–The orchestra is doing a seance to resurrect the piano concerto. That’s why it’s called Lost Souls–Ghosts of piano concertos that come back to haunt the orchestra in this ceremony. And it actually starts without the pianist at the piano. And the lights are half-dim, they play the opening, the lights go down, and when the lights come up, the pianist appears. The pianist actually hides within the violin section, and sort of moves during the darkness, and then at the end the pianist disappears again when the lights go down. There’s a whole theater there. All the quotes are from dead composers and are all just part of the dramatic idea of the piece.

CM: But people still write concertos…

AD: Oh yeah, of course! I’m not discounting other people’s concertos, but I’m mostly thinking of romantic concertos. I started talking about this with Alon [Goldstein; pianist that Avner wrote it for]. Even though there’s a lot of piano concertos written in the last 50 years, none of them are sticking as repertoire pieces, and we were talking about why that is–Some of them are very good. We got to the idea that maybe it’s just a 19th century format that needs to come back from the grave.

CM: Boaz, the piece for soprano, harp and 2 pianos–Was that written for or about somebody in particular?

AD: That’s about a brother I had that died as a baby before I was born. He died 2 months before I was born. My mom wrote these poems about the whole process of his illness and death. She wrote them chronologically from the day that he was born until the day of his death, and I took 5 of them and set them backwards. It starts over the grave, and ends with a baby being born, and how beautiful he was. It’s a very personal piece and a very hard piece for me.

CM: It’s a great idea to set the story backwards…

AD: Yeah, it’s sort of the idea that the farther that you are removed from the moment of the tragedy, perhaps the more you remember the beginning rather than the end. It’s a little bit like the way the mind protects itself. My mom really remembers very strongly how beautiful he was when he was born, so the mind doesn’t want to remember how bad it was at the end. You could say it’s a little like losing reality, but it’s a way to protect oneself, remembering the moment that was good.

CM: Is there anything new of yours other than Hilary’s piece that’s coming out?

AD: I’m finishing now a huge, huge piece for narrator and orchestra, and 2 percussionists as well, Uzu and Muzu from Kakamaruzu, based on a beautiful Israeli children’s story, and the premiere is in March with the Stockton Symphony. I know Gil [Shaham] is currently recording the 3rd Violin Sonata. And then I have a piece called Astrolatry that I wrote last year for the Alabama Symphony that they are premiering at Carnegie Hall in May.

Spices, Perfumes, Toxins [I: Spices (duo version); Martin Grubinger and Manuel Hofstatter, marimbas; Germany, 4/2/11)

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