UC SAN DIEGO TELEVISION Music and Nature: Barry Lopez and Steve Schick -- Helen Edison Lecture Series (Rereleased September 2017) Content can be viewed at: https://www.ucsd.tv/search-details.aspx?showID=30337 National Book Award-Winning author and environmentalist Barry Lopez joins UC San Diego’s Steve Schick, a world-renowned percussionist, to explore the intersection of music, words and the natural world. (#30337)
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Fall arts: Top 10 classical music picks September 17, 2017 By Beth Wood
Music lovers will be blessed with a cornucopia of concerts this fall. Here are 10 of the top choices. [...] CAMERA LUCIDA: MOZART AND BRAHMS Chamber ensemble Camera Lucida will perform Mozart’s Piano Trios in G major and Brahms’ Sonata in E-flat for Viola and Piano. With UC San Diego professor and cellist Charles Curtis at the helm, Camera Lucida’s regularly featured performers are San Diego Symphony concertmaster Jeff Thayer, violist Che-Yen Chen and pianist Reiko Uchida. 7:30 p.m. Oct. 2. UC San Diego’s Conrad Prebys Concert Hall, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla. $26-$37. (858) 534-8497 or musicweb.ucsd.edu/concerts LA JOLLA SYMPHONY & CHORUS: “CONCENTRIC PATHS” Conductor and music director Steven Schick will lead sopranos Susan Narucki and Kirsten Ashley Wiest, as well as his percussion ensemble, red fish blue fish. These exceptional artists will perform works by Francis Poulenc and Thomas Adès and premiere the symphony’s Thomas Nee Commission, composed by UC San Diego doctoral student Tina Tallon. 7:30 p.m. Dec. 9; 2 p.m. Dec. 10, Mandeville Auditorium, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla. $15-$35. (858) 534-4637 or lajollasymphony.com [...] ###
La Jolla Light La Jolla Light’s Best Bets for events: Sept. 28 September 27, 2017 [...] The Camera Lucida season opener is 7:30 p.m. Monday, Oct. 2 at the Conrad Prebys Concert Hall at UC San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive. Program includes Mozart’s “Piano Trios in G major, K. 496 and B-flat, K. 502” and Brahms’ “Sonata in E-flat for Viola and Piano, Opus 120 Nr. 2.” Tickets: $28-$37, students free. (858) 534-8497. musicweb.ucsd.edu
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The Wright Museum to celebrate jazz legend Thelonious Monk October 1, 2017 By Roz Edward The Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History (The Wright Museum) presents an event-filled weekend Oct. 13-14 to commemorate the centennial of jazz legend Thelonious Sphere Monk. Special guests include Thelonious Monk’s son, T.S. Monk, the definitive biographer of Thelonious Monk, Dr. Robin D.G. Kelley, and the Marion Hayden Ensemble featuring Grammy Award winner Kamau Kenyatta. Thelonious Monk was one of greatest jazz musicians of all time and one of the first originators of bebop. The Wright Museum will honor the pioneer performer’s legacy with a two-night celebration. On Friday, Oct. 13, the program titled “The High Priest” will begin at 6 p.m. with a film screening of “Thelonious Monk: American Composer” followed by a conversation between T.S. Monk, and Dr. Kelley, who is a distinguished professor and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in History at UCLA. A book signing of Dr. Kelley’s “Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original” will take place after the program. On Saturday, Oct. 14, doors open at 6:30 p.m. for the Monk’s Dream Concert celebration featuring the Marion Hayden Ensemble and Grammy Award winner Kamau Kenyatta. The concert will begin at 7 p.m. in The Wright Museum’s General Motors Theater. Hayden is a Detroit native bassist, band leader and a 2016 Kresge Artist Fellow. “I agree with Dr. Kelley — the 100th birthday of Monk is arguably the most anticipated celebration of any jazz artist since Duke Ellington’s centennial in 1999,” said Charles Ezra Ferrell, vice president of public programs at The Wright Museum. “We are truly thrilled to devote two days of fantastic programming to celebrate Monk’s rich life, powerful music and enduring legacy.” The Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History was founded in 1965 and is located in the heart of Midtown Detroit’s Cultural Center. The Wright Museum’s mission is to open minds and change lives through the exploration and celebration of African American history and culture. And Still We Rise: Our Journey Through African American History and Culture — the museum’s 22,000 square foot, immersive core exhibit — is the largest, single exhibition surveying the history of African Americans. The Wright Museum houses over 35,000 artifacts and archival materials, and offers more than 300 public programs and events annually. ###
Angel City Jazz Fest: Dwight Trible, Jeff Parker and Jaimie Branch among the acts not to miss October 5, 2017 | By Chris Barton Now celebrating its 10th year, the boundary-pushing Angel City Jazz Festival opened last weekend with a tribute to the great Thelonious Monk, who would have turned 100 this year. [...] SUNDAY Mark Dresser 7, Jonah Levine Collective. A longtime standard-bearer for the avant-garde, Dresser performs from his wryly titled latest album, “Sedimental You,� with a band that includes flutist Nicole Mitchell and clarinetist Ben Goldberg. 8 p.m. Moss Theatre.$25. ###
La Jolla Symphony & Chorus prepares for its 2017-18 season October 10, 2017 | By Michael J. Rocha For its new season, the La Jolla Symphony & Chorus is looking to the past and to the future. The ensemble’s 2017-18 season — set to kick off Nov. 4 — features “an adventurous mix of traditional repertoire, premieres and contemporary music, and a nod to the ensemble’s 50-year affiliation with UC San Diego and its Music Department,” according to a statement. “We call the new season ‘Vectors.’ It’s a celebration of the twinned trajectories of the orchestra and chorus at UC San Diego — a half-century of partnership between a great university and cutting-edge orchestra and chorus,” says Steven Schick, who’s about to embark on his 11th season as LJS&C music director. “We will start the season with Cecil Lytle, renowned pianist and UC San Diego music professor emeritus, performing Gershwin’s ‘Rhapsody in Blue,’ along with a newly commissioned piece from graduate student Tobin Chodos, ‘Concertino for Two Pianos & Orchestra.’ In February, we’ll premiere a theatrical percussion concerto that French composer (and circus artist) Roland Auzet has written for percussionist Fiona Digney. We’ll conclude in June with UC San Diego Distinguished Professor of Composition Rand Steiger’s ‘Template,’ a concerto for orchestra and improvising trumpet player, in this case the phenomenal Peter Evans.” The new season will mark the debut of Patrick Walders as choral director. He takes the helm after the departure of David Chase, who retired in June after 43 seasons. Walders, an associate professor of music at San Diego State University, will work with the chorus for the December and June concerts and will conduct in March for the three performances of Carl Orff ’s “Carmina Burana.” The rest of the season as laid out by the La Jolla Symphony & Chorus Highlights of the 2017-18 season include: an oratorio in memory of African-American victims of violence by up-andcoming composer Courtney Bryan, along with new arrangements of music by jazz greats Duke Ellington and Ornette Coleman. San Diego Symphony Associate Conductor Sameer Patel will guest conduct a May program featuring music by Messiaen, Takemitsu and Stravinsky. Familiar favorites will include music by Gustav Mahler, Gabriel Fauré, and more. Pre-Season: The LJS&C’s fifth annual Young People’s Concert on Friday, November 3 (7:00-8:00 pm) features musical excerpts from the opening concert weekend. Steven Schick conducts and provides commentary from the stage with audience Q&A. Free reservations at EventBrite.com. Connections to UC San Diego faculty and student during the 2017-18 season are noted in the season line-up below, as follows: *UC San Diego Faculty or Emeritus Faculty. **UC San Diego Graduate Student [...] Some lines end too soon. The spiritual crux of this program is Courtney Bryan’s poignant memorial to Sandra Bland and other African-American victims of violence. We pair her music with improvisation, the historical voice of AfricanAmerican resistance, in Rand Steiger’s Template -- a new orchestral version featuring trumpet genius Peter Evans -- and a new arrangement by Tobin Chodos of Ornette Coleman’s late be-bop classic. We’ll remember the victims of violence with Fauré’s gentle Requiem. ###
BROADWAY WORLD LOS ANGELES Independent Shakespeare Co Announces Limited Run of LETTERS FROM HOME October 10, 2017 | BWW Newsdesk Independent Shakespeare Co. (ISC), presenters of the Griffith Park Free Shakespeare Festival announce performances of interdisciplinary artist Kalean Ung’s original solo work, LETTERS FROM HOME, directed by Marina McClure. LETTERS FROM HOME will play for four performances only: Friday, November 10 & 17, Saturday, November 11 & 18 at 7:30pm at Independent Studio in the Atwater Crossing Arts + Innovation Complex, 3191 Casitas Ave., #130 in Atwater Village. In 2016, Kalean Ung learned of a drawer in her father’s study, filled with letters from family and friends living in desperate circumstances in refugee camps and detailing their lives during the genocide that befell Cambodia with the rise of the Khmer Rouge. LETTERS FROM HOME examines her own life through the stories her father (acclaimed composer Chinary Ung) told her of arriving in America in the 1960s as a young music student, and his subsequent quest to rescue family members. Through song, storytelling, and the text of the letters, she navigates the boundary between her family’s history and her own experience as a bi-racial, first generation American. First presented as a reading at ISC’s iambic lab series, this extraordinary collaboration between father and daughter takes the next step in its development in the ISC Studio before embarking on tour. Comments Artistic Director Melissa Chalsma, “When Kalean first told me about her desire to create a performance piece based on her father’s life and her family’s experiences, I was immediately captivated. Although she shared her thoughts with me early in her process-before she had even begun writing - something resonated deeply with me, and I thought that Independent Shakespeare Co. would do all we could to support this project. For all its epistolary simplicity, LETTERS FROM HOME is a complex and richly rewarding theater experience. In it, Kalean negotiates the boundaries between her family’s frequently harrowing lived experiences and her own Southern Californian upbringing. She explores the impact of uncovering the past, and also the price of keeping it hidden. And through it all, she explores the power of art to help us make sense of what we come to know of the world, a kind of sense that is poetic and not rational: one that does not seek to answer questions, but rather create an environment where we can come to exist alongside the unendurable in a sort of trembling peace.” LETTERS FROM HOME is the first opportunity for audiences to preview ISC’s new, expanded Studio at the Atwater Arts + Innovation Complex (ATX). For the last six years ISC’s indoor home (just down the hall at ATX), has evolved through experimentation into a venue where we develop new works, explore performance techniques for classical plays, teach classes, and create the productions of the Griffith Park Free Shakespeare Festival. This much larger Studio will continue to be a space that is active and unpredictable, serving as a multi-purpose and multi-disciplinary laboratory. Named the Studio (and not “theater”) because it is where we work and discover. The Studio is a place of shared exploration for the artist and audience. ABOUT THE CREATIVE TEAM AND CAST Kalean Ung (Writer & Performer) is an award winning actress, singer, and interdisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles.. She has worked with critically acclaimed theatre companies such as Critical Mass Performance Group, Independent Shakespeare Co., Four Larks Theatre and CalArts Center for New Performance. Her recent acting LA credits include: “Measure for Measure” (Isabella), “The Snow Geese” (Viktorya), “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” (Titania), “The Tempest” (Ariel), “Richard III” (Margaret), “Othello” (Desdemona) with Independent Shakespeare Co., “Paul Sand Presents: Kurt Weill at the Cuddlefish Hotel” at the Actors’ Gang, “Pericles” (Marina) with Independent Shakespeare Co., “The Temptation of St. Antony” (Queen Sheba) with Four Larks Theatre (Ovation Award Winner), “Purple Electric Play” (The Vital Organ) at Machine Project, “Twelfth Night” (Viola) with Independent Shakespeare Co., “Prometheus Bound” (Chorus) directed by Travis Preston with CalArts Center for New Performance/ Getty Villa, and the title role of “Alcestis” directed by Nancy Keystone with Critical Mass Performance Group/Theatre @ Boston Court. Other LA favorites include: “Camino Real” (Esmeralda) directed by Jessica Kubzansky at the Theatre @ Boston Court and “Jomama Jones: Radiate!” (Sweet Peach) at The Kirk Douglas Theatre. Opera roles include: “Both Eyes Open” (Catherine) with First Look Sonoma, “Light and Power” (Tesla) with wildUp at the Hammer Museum, “The Mortal Thoughts of Lady Macbeth” (Witch) directed by Yuval Sharon, as well as “Fairy Queen” (Hermia), “The Magic Flute” (Second Lady), “Winter’s Child/ Moth” (Bird), and “Dice Thrown” a chance operations opera by John King at CalArts. She received her Master of Fine Arts in Acting from California Institute of the Arts and her Bachelor of Music in Vocal Performance from the University of California at Santa Cruz. CHINARY UNG (Music) was the first American composer to win the highly coveted and international Grawemeyer Award (1989), sometimes called the Nobel prize for music composition. Among other honors, Ung has received awards from The Kennedy Center (Friedheim award), The American Academy of Arts and Letters, Asia Foundation, Asian Cultural Council, Rockefeller Foundation, Ford Foundation, Guggenheim Foundation, Joyce Foundation, and The National Endowment for the Arts. Ung has been a featured composer/master composer at prominent festivals/conferences, including: Asia Society, The World Music Institute’s Interpretations Series- Four Generations of Asian Composers; 2007 Asian Composers League in Seoul, Korea: The 30th ACL Forum in Seoul, Korea; 2008 AURORA Festival, Sidney, Australia; Panel/Concert at The Library of Congress; Thailand International Composition Festival at Burapha University, Thailand; and in 2009, Other Minds: OM 14 Festival, San Francisco. Commissions include the Philadelphia Orchestra, Meet the Composer, Koussevitzky Foundation, Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, and La Jolla Summerfest and Santa Fe Summer Music Festivals. Ung’s music is published by C. F. Peters Corporation and is a member of Broadcast Music Incorporated. MARINA McCLURE (Director) helms the multidisciplinary art lab The New Wild and is a resident director at The Flea Theater. Her work has been seen throughout the US, Canada and South Africa. Recent: Tear a Root from the Earth, a new musical for Afghanistan in collaboration with Qais Essar and Gramophonic (New Ohio’s Ice Factory; Kennedy Center); CasablancaBox (2017 Drama Desk Nomination for Unique Theatrical Experience); Wing It! a giant puppet parade and large-scale community performance for the Tony-winning Handspring Puppet Company in celebration of South Africa’s National Day of Reconciliation; an episodic adaptation of Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics as a part of The Flea’s new initiative for young audiences, Cereals. Upcoming: Kalean Ung’s Letters from Home (ISC in Los Angeles; UC San Diego), Steph del Rosso’s Fill Fill Fill Fill Fill Fill Fill (The Flea), the premiere of Sara Farrington’s Leisure, Labor, Lust (The Tank). Marina teaches directing at The National Theater Institute at the O’Neill and frequently directs at Dartmouth College and NYU-Tisch. MFA: CalArts. Lighting Design is by Bosco Flanagan. Video Projection Design is by Hsuan-Kuang Hsieh. Costume Design is by Amanda Wing Yee Lee. Sound Design is by Chris Porter. Stage Manager is Jenny Jihee Park. ###
Ten Freedom Summers: Pulitzer finalist brings musical civil rights tribute to New Orleans October 12, 2017 | By Larry Blumenfeld When Wadada Leo Smith arrived in New Orleans in January 2016 for a two-week residency through The New Quorum, a local nonprofit, the Christmas tree still stood in his temporary Esplanade Avenue home. Soon its branches became improvised music stands, dotted with sheet music that looked like paper ornaments during nightly workshops for local musicians. As a trumpeter and composer, Smith’s 50 recordings through nearly a half-century establish him as a singular master of a style rooted in but not constrained by jazz tradition, which he calls simply “creative music.” In January, Smith described the basics of “Ankhrasmation,” his personalized system, for musicians including guitarist Jonathan Freilich, who had studied with him at the California Institute for the Arts, cellist Helen Gillet and trombonist Jeff Albert. “It’s a method of scoring sound, rhythm and silence,” Smith explained, “meant to inspire form and improvisation without inhibitions.” At one point, the group worked through “Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society and The Civil Rights Act of 1964,” a section of “Ten Freedom Summers,” the three-part masterwork Smith premiered in Los Angeles in 2011 and released in a four-CD set the following year, which also was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Smith will return to New Orleans on Saturday to perform Part Three of “Ten Freedom Summers” at Loyola University’s Roussel Hall. The complete work spills out Oct. 12-15, including concerts in Houston and Austin, Texas, and Tuscaloosa, Alabama — the first Southern presentations of this meditation on the civil rights movement. Smith’s work on “Ten Freedom Summers” began in 1977, with a composition dedicated to the slain activist Medgar Evers. “Just as our national transformation continues,” Smith said in an interview, “this music continues to evolve.” At Roussel Hall, he’ll premiere recently composed sections dedicated to the four girls who died in a 1963 Alabama church bombing and to activist Angela Davis. “Ten Freedom Summers” focuses chiefly on a 10-year stretch, from the landmark Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision declaring school segregation unconstitutional to the “freedom summer” voter-registration drive and Civil Rights Act of 1964. If it’s a personal reflection from a musician who came of age as the civil rights movement took shape, it’s also a statement of artistic empowerment, blending elements of jazz and classical music in decidedly liberated ways. At Roussel Hall, Smith will perform with his Golden Quartet (pianist Anthony Davis, bassist John Lindberg and drummer Pheeroan AkLaff, all longtime collaborators) as well as with The RedKoral String Quartet, which he assembled specifically for this work, and in front of archival footage and abstract images from video artist Jesse Gilbert. Smith, 75, of New Haven, Connecticut, plays trumpet pretty much the way he did in the 1960s, when he first gained acclaim. His tone can be boldly declarative or soft to the point of breaking. His most emphatic moments during the 2011 premiere of “Ten Freedom Summers” were often his gentlest, which is not to say he lacked fire. Minutes later, the music turned fierce and defiant. Born and raised in Leland, Mississippi, Smith began performing in blues bands led by his stepfather, Alex Wallace, a guitarist known as “Little Bill.” He wrote arrangements for his high school marching band and, after he enlisted, for military bands. He moved to Chicago in 1967 and quickly connected with multireedist Anthony Braxton and other founding members of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Music, a collective whose aesthetic spanned the range of black expression, defying genres and disciplines, and that remains deeply influential. Yet Smith has always been his own man, gone his own way. The New Orleans presentation of “Ten Freedom Summers” is produced by The New Quorum, a nonprofit founded by Gianna Chachere to bring musicians and writers from all corners to New Orleans for cultural exchange. The organization’s name honors the legacy of The Quorum, formed in the early 1960s — just as Smith’s aesthetic took shape — on Esplanade Avenue, not far from the house Chachere has established. “The Quorum was a haven for creative artists and thinkers that opened its doors to all races when that was a controversial thing to do,” said Roxy Wright, who was among its founding members and has served as an officer with many leading New Orleans cultural organizations. Smith describes the Association for the Advancement of Creative Music’s early days in similar terms. “When we played in Chicago, people would gain a clarity of purpose as citizens who could see through bigotry and politics.” Smith’s 2016 January stay in New Orleans workshops had a liberating impact on others. “Wadada turns your concepts upside down,” said Helen Gillet, “forcing you to looking at music from a new perspective.” It also inspired the first movement of “America’s National Parks,” the six-movement suite Smith released last year. That movement, “declares that New Orleans was the first cultural center in America,” he said, “and therefore produced the first authentic American music.” “Ten Freedom Summers” celebrates some indelible speeches, such Martin Luther King Jr.’s final address, yet it more so reflects Smith’s belief that “purely instrumental, wordless messages go straight to the heart.” Smith has refined such communication. One night during his New Orleans workshop, while playing a section of the piece, he motioned to a drummer for something he wanted from a ride cymbal. He kept motioning. Finally, in a stage whisper, he instructed: “Let it ring!” He meant a particular sound produced by the proper strike of a drumstick. He also meant his composition’s theme — that feeling of freedom. ###
The Pioneering Modernist Who Wrote an Audacious String Quartet October 13, 2017 | By William Robin
“In Europe one can work!” the young composer Ruth Crawford declared with excitement. Traveling abroad on a Guggenheim fellowship — the first woman to receive one — she had arrived in Berlin in 1930 planning to write her first orchestral piece. [...] Crawford’s “String Quartet 1931,” which the JACK Quartet will play on Oct. 21 at the Miller Theater at Columbia University, was a significant contribution to the canon of American modernism, a hyper-refined and densely dissonant work that foreshadowed the postwar avant-garde. But shortly after its completion, Crawford returned to the United States and married Seeger. In short succession, she became a wife, a mother, a leftist and a folk revivalist. And for the next two decades, before she died at 52 in 1953, she wrote only a handful of works. The JACK’s performance, part of its two-night festival at the Miller, Soundscape America, offers an opportunity to revisit her unusual life and astonishing music. The players have situated Crawford’s piece within a broader traversal of the American string quartet, connecting her work to later giants like Elliott Carter and contemporary composers including Erin Gee and Natacha Diels. “As a woman of that generation, she wrote this piece that’s so ahead of its time,” Austin Wulliman, one of the JACK violinists, marveled in a recent interview. “You see people dealing with these same musical ideas still, to this day.” [...] ###
Snowscape at SFCMP October 25, 2017 | By Joe Cadagin As a child, I used to spend hours gazing at a Hiroshige woodblock print hanging in the living room of our Michigan home. It’s titled Yabu Lane Below Atago and depicts a snow-covered street in 19th-century Edo (present-day Tokyo). A group of pedestrians, whose paper kasa umbrellas give them the appearance of mushrooms, leave footprints in the white powder with their wooden geta. Above them, three swallows flit between the falling flakes, passing beneath bamboo branches that sag gracefully under the weight of accumulated snow. The print perfectly captures the emotions I associate with new-fallen snow: that strange mixture of serenity, emptiness, and quiet oblivion. It’s a feeling I haven’t experienced since moving to sunny California — that is, until I heard Hans Abrahamsen’s Schnee (Snow, 2006–08), performed Saturday by the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players at Taube Atrium Theater. The Danish composer recently became an international success following the premiere of his orchestral song cycle let me tell you, which won the 2016 Grawemeyer Award. His earlier work Schnee doesn’t have the same impassioned, Romantic-leaning character of his big hit. It’s a wintery, hour-long tone poem of sorts scored for two pianos, violin, viola, cello, flute, oboe, clarinet, and percussion. Each of the five movements consists of two lengthy canons, though Abrahamsen’s music is indebted less to Bach than to Morton Feldman or John Cage — small, quiet gestures unfold at a glacial place, tracing sparse, desolate soundscapes. In the hypnotic first pair of canons, which reminded me of my Hiroshige print, pianist Kate Campbell entered with an inquisitive little melody in the keyboard’s upper octaves. This tinkling theme was backed by a steady accompaniment provided by violinist Hrabba Atladottir and cellist Helen Newby, who played a steadily repeating high A with delicate, sul ponticello bowing marked “icy” in the score. The resulting timbre, thin and grainy, elicited all the tactile sensations of snow — the sand-like consistency of fresh powder. At one point, it almost sounded like the ringing of distant jingle bells, as if some horse-drawn sleigh were approaching. But this is not to say that Abrahamsen’s work is some schmaltzy Christmas wonderland. It’s something far subtler — an empty white expanse speckled here and there with pointillistic dots. In a few simple brush strokes, the composer opens up a kind of meditative space for the listener to occupy, perhaps reflecting on winters past. As the piece progresses, however, Abrahamsen experiments with more active textures. The second pair of canons felt slightly out of place, with sonorities reminiscent of typewriters or ticking clocks. Allegra Chapman plunked out a syncopated rhythm on prepared piano while the woodwind players layered on Steve Reich-style ostinatos. Occasionally, Tod Brody would emit a blustery air tone on alto flute, kicking up a cloud of snow in the form of sparkling piano glissandi. This colorful gesture — along with some actual jingle bells — returned in the scherzo-like fourth pair of canons. In conductor Steven Schick’s hands, the unruly counterpoint took on the jubilant, carnivalesque atmosphere of a bustling Weihnachtsmarkt. Balancing this joyful image of winter were evocations of the crushing ennui that inevitably sets in come late January. In the third pair of canons, especially, I could feel my seasonal affective disorder flaring up for the first time since I left Michigan. Strings and woodwinds drooped feebly before moaning out a monotonous, three-note motive. Later, pianists Campbell and Chapman plodded through a series of jazzy blocked chords, muddied by dissonance. All the while, percussionist Christopher Froh rubbed pieces of paper on various surfaces, producing a sound that reminded me of cars passing through the brownish slush that lines city streets once the snow melts. But the movement was particularly tragic given events earlier in the performance, when a gentleman in the front row suffered a heart attack or other medical emergency and had to be rushed to the hospital. The ensemble and venue staff handled the situation with aplomb, though the incident likely colored the audience’s interpretation of the piece once Schick picked things up again following the unfortunate interruption. SFCMP’s engrossing performance of Schnee points to a larger revival of pictorial, nature-based composition. Abrahamsen and his colleagues on the new music scene (including Israeli composer Chaya Czernowin, who recently completed a similar set of icy ensemble works titled Winter Songs) have begun to revisit programmatic music without reverting to tired musical clichés — though Abrahamsen does ironically quote Vivaldi’s “Winter” from The Four Seasons. Other composers have come to rely too much on modern-day multimedia to impart an extra-musical program. This is certainly true of California-based Nicole Mitchell, whose Procession Time was given its world premiere on the first half of the program. The work, scored for flute, clarinet, piano, and cello, was held back by an amateurish video that Mitchell made herself. Behind the players flashed a poorly edited montage of protestors, adobe huts, ocean waves, and various children and adults of different ethnicities. Occasionally, the video would pan Ken Burns-style across pixelated, low-resolution images of canvases by abstract painter Norman Lewis, whose art served as inspiration for the piece. It wasn’t at all clear what message Mitchell was trying to convey. In the end, the montage distracted from what was, in terms of music, a wellconstructed chamber piece. The composer’s style, while conservative, has playful elegance, mixing the refined neoclassicism of Martinů and Stravinsky with folksy, often grotesque touches from Shostakovich and Bartók. She should let her music speak for itself. French composer Philippe Leroux’s 2016 Postlude à l’épais (“Postlude to the Thickness”) for flute, clarinet, piano, violin, and cello is a nine-minute piece bursting with all the kaleidoscopic whimsy of Joan Miró’s Carnaval de Arlequín. Much of the work is a mesmerizing exploration of instrumental color — every so often my head would shoot up from my notebook to see what combination of players could possibly be making the noises I heard. Violinist Aladottir and cellist Stephen Harrison posed question-like melodic lines that slid upward at the end, only to be answered irritably by bass clarinetist Peter Josheff, who produced some fantastic growling and squawking sounds. As in Abrahamsen’s piece, there were some glimpses of the natural world in the form of avian motives — the sound of fluttering wings in Campbell’s piano part, for instance, or Brody’s Messiaen-variety birdsong on the piccolo. SFCMP’s splendid interpretation, displaying technical virtuosity and brimming with energy and humor, was a pleasant reminder of why audiences continue to patronize new music.
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SANTA CRUZ SENTINEL Coast Line: UC Santa Cruz Pacific Rim festival features Korean music October 26, 2017 | Staff Writers
SANTA CRUZ PACIFIC RIM FESTIVAL FEATURES KOREAN MUSIC It’s not too late to catch a free performance of the 2017 Pacific Rim Music Festival, running through Sunday on the UC Santa Cruz campus; there is a charge for parking. Friday: New York New Music Ensemble and Festival Ensemble Korea will present new compositions by Benjamin Carson, Chaya Czernowin, Choe U-Zong, David Cope, Karlton Hester, Larry Polansky, Laurie San-Martin, Lim Jun-Hee and Richard Carrick. Saturday: Korean and American young composers with new music by graduate student composers from UCSC, UC Berkeley, UC Davis, Columbia University, Korea National University of Arts and Seoul National University. These works will be performed by the Borromeo String Quartet, the New York New Music Ensemble and Festival Ensemble Korea. Sunday: Premieres performed by the Creative Traditional Orchestra of the National Gugak Center, Korea. Composers include Baek Dae-Ung, Chinary Ung, David Evan Jones, Edmund Campion, George Lewis, Lee Geonyong, Hi Kyung Kim, Shih-Hui Chen, and from the New York Philharmonic’s Very Young Composer’s program: Madeline Schmidt and Lee Sangjin. This is the first time the National Gugak Center presents such a premiere program outside of Korea, according to Hi Kyung Kim, UCSC music professor and artistic director of the festival. ###
Michael Dessen fusing improvisation, technology in quest for new music vistas October 26, 2017 | By George Varga
Like the great George Lewis, his former teacher and mentor at the University of California San Diego, Michael Dessen is a maverick composer who specializes in both envelope-shredding electronic music and the trombone. Like his frequent collaborators, contrabass wizard Mark Dresser and piano phenom Joshua White, he thrives making carefully considered music in the spur of the moment. Now a professor himself at UC Irvine, Dessen is helping to direct a new doctoral program there in integrated composition, improvisation and technology. On Friday, he and his electro-acoustic trio — which features bassist Christopher Tordini and drummer Dan Weiss — will perform a Fresh Sound series concert at Bread & Salt. Expect an evening of music that wil be earthy and exotic, foreign and familiar, challenging and captivating. Michael Dessen Trio 7:30 p.m. Friday. Bread & Salt, 1955 Julian Ave., Logan Heights. $10 students; $20 general public. (619) 987-6214 or freshsoundmusic.com ###
Five-day Pacific Rim Music Festival to feature historic collaboration with Korean performing artists October 27, 2017 | By Scott Rappaport A dazzling array of traditional and contemporary Korean music will be performed at the 2017 Pacific Rim Music Festival, October 25-29, at the Music Center Recital Hall on the UC Santa Cruz campus. Five free public concerts of traditional music and 40 world premieres will be offered, featuring the 55-member Creative Traditional Orchestra of the Korean National Gugak Center, the Center’s Chamber Ensemble, the Borromeo String Quartet, the New York New Music Ensemble, and Festival Ensemble Korea This year’s festival features a special collaboration between the UC Santa Cruz Music Department and the Creative Traditional Orchestra of the National Gugak Center of Korea (NGC). The word “gugak” translates as “national music,” and the NGC orchestra is responsible for preserving ancient musical traditions, as well as developing contemporary works for performance. “The idea was conceived in 2014 when I resided in Korea as a Fulbright scholar,” noted Hi Kyung Kim, UC Santa Cruz professor of music and artistic director of the festival. “I shared the vision of a collaborative orchestra project with Director General KIM Hae-suk of the National Gugak Center: a world premiere program by several American composers written for the Korean Traditional Orchestra.” “This historical presentation at the Pacific Rim Music Festival will be the first time the National Gugak Center presents such a premiere program outside of Korea,” Kim noted. The theme of the 2017 festival is From the Root to the Living Tradition. It opens on Wednesday, October 25, with “From the Root,” a performance featuring traditional court music, folk music and dance performed by the Creative Traditional Orchestra of the Korea National Gugak Center. The following evening, Oct. 26, will focus on new works by contemporary Western and Korean composers, performed by the Borromeo String Quartet, Festival Ensemble Korea, and the National Gugak Center Chamber Ensemble. On Friday, October 27, the New York New Music Ensemble and Festival Ensemble Korea will present new compositions by Benjamin Carson, Chaya Czernowin, CHOE U-Zong, David Cope, Karlton Hester, Larry Polansky, Laurie San-Martin, LIM Jun-Hee, and Richard Carrick. And the October 28 concert will highlight Korean and American young composers with new music by graduate student composers from UC Santa Cruz, UC Berkeley, UC Davis, Columbia University, Korea National University of Arts, and Seoul National University. These works will be performed by the Borromeo String Quartet, the New York New Music Ensemble, and Festival Ensemble Korea. The festival closes on Sunday, October 29, with “Living Tradition”–a concert of all premieres by the Creative Traditional Orchestra of the National Gugak Center, Korea. The composers include BAEK Dae-Ung, Chinary Ung, David Evan Jones, Edmund Campion, George Lewis, LEE Geonyong, Hi Kyung Kim, Shih-Hui Chen, and from the New York Philharmonic’s Very Young Composer’s program, Madeline Schmidt and LEE Sangjin. Founded in 1996, the Pacific Rim Music Festival at UC Santa Cruz was designed to bridge the gap between different cultures and traditions, and to develop new musical traditions for contemporary global culture. Over the past 21 years, the festival has promoted numerous international collaborative projects and presented 120 world premiere compositions. “The Pacific Rim Music Festival represents a historically unprecedented collaboration between Korean and Western large-scale orchestras and ensembles and Western and international composers, with compositions performed using traditional Korean and Western instruments,” noted UC Santa Cruz arts dean Susan Solt. “This festival is an opportunity to embrace traditions outside of our own, and to take in the richness that the sharing of ideas and art in its many forms brings to all of our lives.” “The festival is also a reflection of the exceptional creativity that is a hallmark of the UC Santa Cruz Music Department and our commitment to bringing world music in its rich diversity to our students, to UC Santa Cruz, and to our community,” Solt added. ###
La Jolla Symphony & Chorus will jazz up season kick-off with eclectic pianist Cecil Lytle October 29, 2017 | By George Varga What’s better than an American in Paris, let alone one with a sterling reputation as a genre-leaping musical maverick and a distinguished résumé in academia at UC San Diego? How about two Americans in Paris, both with sterling reputations as genre-leaping musical mavericks and distinguished résumés in academia at UC San Diego? For good measure, those two mavericks — Steven Schick and Cecil Lytle — will perform George Gershwin’s epic “An American in Paris” next weekend as part of the La Jolla Symphony & Chorus’ 2017-18 season-opening concert, “Crossing the rue St. Paul.” The program also includes Gershwin’s equally acclaimed “Rhapsody in Blue,” Aaron Copland’s “Quiet City” and the Duke Ellington classics “Solitude” and “Mood Indigo,” both newly arranged by Los Angeles-born composer and jazz pianist Asher Tobin Chodos. Noted young trumpeter Stephanie Richards, a recent addition to the UC San Diego music faculty, will be the featured soloist on “Quiet City.” As its crowning touch, this weekend’s concert will feature Chodos and Lytle performing Chodos’ Concertino for Two Pianos & Orchestra. “I teach a jazz course in Paris every summer for the University of California and Steve came to Paris last summer to perform some concerts. While he was there, we went for walks and talked,” said Lytle, who is the former music department chair at UC San Diego, where he served as the provost of Thurgood Marshall College from 1988 until his retirement in 2005. Schick is the music director of the La Jolla Symphony & Chorus. After his Paris visit, he decided to create a special concert — tailored to Lytle’s unique skill set — with two specific goals. The first is to showcase Lytle’s prowess as a uniquely gifted jazz and classical pianist. The second is to traverse and erase the artificial divisions between the two styles. “Steve wants to showcase notated and improvised music, in order to underscore the false barrier between them,” Lytle explained, speaking from his downtown San Diego home. “The other feature he wanted to capture was Americans who lived and in Paris, like Copland, who studied there with Nadia Boulanger. And he hired a terrific young composer, Asher Tobin Chodos, to try and capture that French-American spirit.” Schick first heard Lytle perform in 1988 at Germany’s prestigious International Music Institute in Darmstadt. That encounter made an indelible impression. “I was still at Fresno State and not yet teaching at UCSD, but I vividly remember Cecil’s depth of musical interpretation in Darmstadt. And he made even more of an impression on me as a person,” recalled Schick, speaking from a recent Bay Area concert stop with the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, for which he serves as artistic director. “After I joined the faculty at UCSD, I heard Cecil play some fairly standard jazz tunes, but with unbelievable intelligence and sophistication,” Schick continued. “And I already knew I knew he was a masterful interpreter of the compositions of Franz Liszt. “For this concert with the La Jolla Symphony, we wanted to design the concert around Cecil as a pianist, because he’s extraordinary. He brings the same intelligence and artistry whether he’s playing Liszt or a jazz standard, and he binds those two genres together.” In 2015, Schick was the music director for the prestigious Ojai Festival. That high-profile role saw him dig deep into the music of groundbreaking 20th and 21st century composers — including Iannis Xenakis, Karlheinz Stockhausen and San Diego’s Lei Lang — whose envelope-shredding work mirrors his own devotion to creating transcendent music that defies easy categorization. In commissioning Chodos to compose Concertino for Two Pianos & Orchestra especially for Lytle and the La Jolla Symphony, Schick is seeking to further blur the lines between music that is written and arranged and music that is spontaneously created on the spot. Chodos’ piece is written to showcase the written score and the improvised piano solos concurrently. “The Concertino has fixed orchestral parts and many open improvisational parts for piano,” Schick noted. “But nothing is improvised by the orchestra, whose parts are very tightly structured, so we are a backing band for the two pianists, in a way.” The blurring of those lines comes as music to the ears of Lytle, whose career has seen him see-saw repeatedly between different idioms that he regards as aesthetic equals. “If there is a false barrier (between jazz and classical), we’ll certainly tear it down!” Lytle vowed. “My earliest musical experiences were improvisational,” he said. “My father was a Baptist church organist. Being the last of 10 kids who grew up in church singing gospel music, I gravitated to the piano. So my first introduction to music was through the ears and eyes. “Lots of jazz musicians, as you know, have classical backgrounds. But very few classical musicians have jazz backgrounds. For these concerts with the La Jolla Symphony, Steve was wise to program ‘Rhapsody in Blue,’ which is the apogee of jazz and classical music — and certainly the most popular piece in the program. It’s improvised music that found its way into concert halls early in the 20th century.” By also featuring acclaimed trumpeter Richards, 33, at next weekend’s concerts, Schick is underscoring a continuum within the perpetually forwardlooking music faculty at UC San Diego. “Isn’t it wonderful?” he enthused. “In a way, one of the attractions for me is that Stephanie is the future generation of the music department — in the same way Cecil was in the foundational generation of the department — someone with extraordinary polymath abilities and tastes, who also teaches. “There’s a similarity between Stephanie and other young UCSD faculty members and what Cecil and his generation did. She brings this unbelievable combination of straightforward trumpet chops and visionary music-making. There is no reason a symphony orchestra and an improviser shouldn’t be on stage together. And it shouldn’t be a matter of curiosity when they are.” ###
La Jolla Symphony, UC San Diego Celebrate 50 Years Of Collaboration November 3, 2017 | By Ebone Money The La Jolla Symphony and Chorus will be opening its season Saturday evening with a concert featuring music by George Gershwin and Duke Ellington. The concert, called Crossing the Rue St. Paul, also celebrates 50 years of collaboration with UC San Diego. Some of the musicians are UC San Diego professors and students, like pianist Cecil Lytle and composer Asher Tobin Chodo. ### Video content can be viewed at: http://www.kpbs.org/news/2017/nov/03/la-jolla-symphony-uc-san-diego-celebrate-50-years-/
Review | La Jolla Symphony pairs masterworks and a world premiere to launch new season November 5, 2017 | By Marcus Overton The La Jolla Symphony & Chorus launched its 63rd season — and its 50th year of affiliation with UC San Diego’s Music Department — Saturday evening in Mandeville Auditorium. Thoughtful juxtapositions of old and new brought out surprising freshness in music we think we know well, and the unexpected ways in which new music often transports us not forward but backward. That’s a long-winded way of saying that you are not likely to hear a program like this anywhere but in the hands of this band of dedicated volunteers, led by master percussionist-cum-conductor and music director Steven Schick. This season’s concerts — six programs in 13 performances between now and June — are loosely grouped under a one-word theme: vectors. Webster’s old Second Edition New International says that a vector is a “bearer” or “carrier;” in math, vector analysis is the study of changes in space and time as we move from one point to another. Two musical points by a singular American genius anchored the concert’s beginning and end: George Gershwin’s “An American in Paris” and “Rhapsody in Blue,” both composed in the 1920s and both so deeply embedded in our psyches by now that it is a wonder we can really hear them at all. UCSD music professor Cecil Lytle was the piano soloist in the “Rhapsody,” imbuing it with two things that rescued it from tedium: crispness of articulation lavished on details that seemed — even to this listener of 60 years — brand new; and spring-loaded rhythmic elasticity that kept it air-borne from start to finish. Schick commissioned three new works for this concert from Asher Tobin Chodos, a music composition/musicology doctoral candidate at UCSD whose background is a study in unexpected vectors: He holds a Columbia degree in classical languages and literature and is writing his dissertation on automated music recommendation. His “Concertino for Two Pianos and Orchestra” received its world premiere, with Lytle and the composer as soloists, playing parts that are both notated and improvised. Chodos is one of a new generation of American composers who don’t see music’s past as something to be evaded, dismissed or even transcended. In a program note, Schick warned us about taking omnipresent masterpieces (like Gershwin’s) for granted. But Chodos sees it differently, I think: He takes everything — and nothing — for granted. All music, from every period and place, is his heritage and he can acknowledge, quote, parody, transform it, producing not a pastiche, but a dialogue — as he did in two other commissioned works, re-thinkings of the Ellington classics “Mood Indigo” and “Solitude.” Chodos terms them “translations” that open the music to the present to reveal aspects that an earlier form had ignored or did not see. Lytle was the honey-toned soloist in both, and the orchestra produced veils of sound that were often silky and rough simultaneously. At the evening’s midpoint, trumpeter Stephanie Richards and oboist Carol Rothrock joined the orchestra for Aaron Copland’s “Quiet City.” Urban alienation has never been imagined so vividly, and the orchestra’s string sections shimmered with its aching urgency. The evening opened with the announcement that the symphony’s fund-raising efforts have met and exceeded its $1.5 million endowment fund goal. If that means that this kind of insightful music-making is here to stay for at least another 50 years, we are all beneficiaries of their hard work. Bravi tutti! ###
Alumni article: Local author talks about expereince November 8, 2017 | By Cheyanne Gonzales Local author Barbara Lyons isn’t originally from Alliance, but when her husband accepted a job at the University of Mount Union, she quickly made Alliance and Mount Union her home. Lyons was born in Mississippi, but she grew up in Southern California. She attended the University of California San Diego, where she received a degree in vocal performance. For Lyons, music has always been a part of her life. Along with singing, she plays the piano. Lyons attended the master’s program for ethnomusicology at Bethel University. When Lyons’ husband, Dr. Ivory Lyons, was looking for a job, he applied to numerous institutions. He accepted a position as a professor in the philosophy and religious studies department at Mount Union. In 2000, the couple moved their family from California to Alliance. Shortly after her husband started teaching, she accepted a job as the administrative assistant for Chapman Hall. “I think the move to Ohio was one of the best things that could have happened to us,” Lyons said. While Lyons’ passion has always been music, she has loved reading and writing as a creative outlet since she was in high school. While she didn’t pursue writing much until 2013, she chose to begin writing as a way to make extra money. When she started, she had two separate novels going at once. After discussing both stories with a colleague, it was suggested that Lyons choose only one of the books to pursue, since writing both didn’t seem to be working. “As much as I didn’t want to, I had to admit she was right,” Lyons said. Ultimately, Lyons chose to continue writing the book which has now been published. “Out of the Depths: The Jonson Chronicles Book One” is the first of seven in the series. Lyons began to write the series as a type of creative therapy and soon thought about it less as a way to earn money and more as a way for her to grow as a writer. “The desire to create income very quickly took a back seat to being a better writer,” Lyons explained. Lyons considers her book a romance novel since it tells the story of two main characters, Lettie and Bruce Jonson, as they deal with all parts of their marriage. In the book, Bruce has just returned from Afghanistan. He battles post-traumatic stress disorders (PTSD) and fights to control the rage and anger he feels and fears. The story is told from Lettie’s perspective. “Quite a bit comes from my own experience,” Lyons said. “And then there’s a lot that comes from others’ experiences and then there’s your imagination.” Lyons’ father suffered from PTSD after returning from the Vietnam War. He retired from the military at the age of 36, but wasn’t diagnosed until he was in his mid-60s. Lyon’s used a lot of what she remembers and experienced as a teenager to assist with writing her book. “I am a child of PTSD,” she said. “I saw the realities and I saw the difficulties, especially in his last tour, that he wasn’t the same man, he was radically different.” When writing her book, Lyons wanted to give the audience a story that would capture their attention and pull them in. She wrote the book to be realistic and not sappy like many other romance novels are now. “The book is very gritty. It is very real,” Lyons said. “It is up to date and it is timely.” While the first of the seven books in the series was published in May of this year, Lyon’s has six of the books completed. The writing process and the process to get the series published has been an eye opening one for Lyons. She has surrounded herself with a team of editors who assist in the revision process. The first book was published by Dorrance Publishing Company located in Pittsburgh. Along with the marketing team provided by the company, Lyons has been doing a lot of the advertising by word of mouth for her first book. Lyons is writing the novel under the pseudonym Antonia Harris. She believes by writing under a different name, it gives her the freedom to say what she wants and will allow people to read more closely and get more from what she is saying in the book. Aside from writing her books and working at Mount Union, Lyons enjoys spending time with her husband, two children and two grandchildren as well as playing music and singing. ###
Michi makes noise behind the decks and behind the scenes November 8, 2017 | By Torrey Bailey The past year has been a big one for Michelle Schonberg, otherwise known as Michi. The UC San Diego graduate entered college with plans to be a doctor, but took a chance on music technology. One month after graduation, the laptop she used for writing music and DJ performances was stolen. While it sucked at the time, she says the theft did lead to a chain reaction of opportunities that saw her doing the audio engineering for live shows at clubs like Blonde Bar. These gigs ultimately led to her being handpicked for sound control at multiple festivals. One of those festivals was the weeklong Global Eclipse Gathering in Oregon where she stepped in at the last minute to take charge of the two main stages. “I was able to go in there when they needed me and do what I had to do to make the show go on… It was a really humbling experience and it was a lot of work, but it was amazing,” Schonberg recalls. Michi considers the Global Eclipse Gathering to be a turning point in her career, yet much of her focus remains on DJing and songwriting. She plans to take advantage of the festival off-season to return to producing house and techno. Within the next few months, she will be wrapping up two EPs—one that is darker and another that is more melodic. With those releases, she hopes to capitalize on some of the contacts she made this summer. “[The releases] are on my short term goal list, and I’m very excited for it to happen.” Michi has also teamed up with Zain Effendi, a film score composer who worked alongside Hans Zimmer for The Dark Knight, Pirates of the Caribbean and more. “He’s taken me under his wing, but since I am very knowledgeable with what I do, we work really well together and are embarking on a bunch of music projects together,” Schonberg says. While she can’t yet reveal those projects, she’s staying busy by continuing her residency with Alpha Hyper, a local collective whose events showcase underground techno talent. While she isn’t booked that often, she is making a rare appearance at Spin Nightclub (2028 Hancock St.) on Friday, Dec. 15. She says each time she takes to the decks, she strives to be just as inspiring as some of the other female DJs she’s seen over the years. “When you meet another female DJ, there is an instant connection,” Schonberg says. “It’s really beautiful, the support that exists within that close-knit community.” ###
LA PHIL COMMISSIONS 50 WORKS FOR ITS CENTENNIAL November 10, 2017 | By Norman Lebrecht
Gustavo Dudamel has announced that his orchestra will present 50 commissioned works, most of them world premieres, in its 2018-19 season, marking the orchestra’s 100th birthday. Among the composers involved are John Adams, Julia Adolphe, Billy Childs, Unsuk Chin, Natacha Diels, Ashley Fure, Philip Glass, Adolphus Hailstork, Vijay Iyer, Andrew Norman and Steve Reich. The LA Phil has also commissioned Frank Gehry to design a permanent YOLA Center in Inglewood, for us by its outreach program among diverse communities in the city. ###
Review | UCSD celebrates Chinary Ung’s mysterious, ecstatic music November 16, 2017 | By Christian Hertzog In 1968, Chinary Ung was a Manhattan School of Music graduate with a one-way ticket to Cambodia in his pocket. Although provisionally accepted into the composition program at Columbia, he had no way to pay for it, and so he was returning to his native land after four years of living in New York. His departure was imminent. He told a friend about his wish to attend Columbia. The friend encouraged him to petition the new director of the Rockefeller Institute for assistance. Ung naively wrote a letter to John D. Rockefeller instead, requesting financial help, saying that he hoped “to infuse the rich traditional cultural heritage of Cambodia into the modern creativity of the Western orchestra.” Days before his scheduled return to Cambodia, Ung was awarded a scholarship that allowed him to get a doctorate at Columbia. Had he gone back in 1968, he would have inadvertently walked into the Khmer Rouge insurrection, where his intellectualism and Western contamination would have been a death sentence. It’s an extraordinary tale, fitting for an extraordinary composer. Kalean Ung told this and other stories about her father Chinary in her one-person play, “Letters From Home.” Her moving performance was part of a 75th birthday celebration for Chinary Ung on Tuesday and Wednesday at the Conrad Prebys Music Center at UCSD Department of Music. Twenty years after writing that letter to Rockefeller, Ung realized his ambition to successfully fuse East and West in his orchestral composition, “Inner Voices,” a work that made him internationally famous. Four of Ung’s 21st-century works were featured: “Cinnabar Heart” for marimba (complemented by Charya Burt’s Cambodian-influenced dance); “Spiral XIV: Nimitta” for clarinet, piano, and two percussionists; “Singing Inside Aura” for an instrumental ensemble; and his blissful, large-scale “Spiral XII: Space Between Heaven and Earth” for 13 voices and 10 instruments. All of these works display Ung’s musical personality. Textures are busy on the surface — every instrument and voice seems to have its own rhythm. Beneath this activity are slowly changing harmonies based on folk modes and artificially constructed scales. With most composers, motion from highly chromatic chords to modal harmonies is usually blindingly obvious. For Ung, these changes happen organically; we marvel at how the sonic environment has changed without us really knowing when we arrived. These four works also require instrumentalists to vocalize. Nowhere was this more dramatic than in “Singing Inside Aura,” a kind of concerto for Susan Ung (Chinary’s wife). Vigorously bowing her viola, she sang in a rustic, penetrating tone, at one point raising her head upwards to let out a loud whoop. It was a sincere, compelling performance. In “Spiral XII,” classically trained voices created a lush aural web, contrasted with instrumentalists whistling, yelling, or Susan Ung’s earthy folk-like vocalise. The earliest work on the festival was “Still Life After Death,” a 1995 musical drama evoking a Cambodian Buddhist ritual where a monk assists a dying person to leave life behind. Soprano Stacy Fraser hauntingly enacted the ritual using abstract movement and a net-like costume, trailed and ultimately joined by bass James Hayden. The musicians through the festival were outstanding in capturing the mystery and the ecstasy of Ung’s music, expertly led by conductors Steven Schick (“Still Life” and “Singing Inside Aura”) and Gil Rose (“Spiral XII”). Whenever Chinary Ung tells the story of his last-minute reprieve from the Khmer Rouge, he ends it by saying “I’m a lucky guy.” San Diegans are lucky to have such a great composer in our midst, and festival attendees were lucky to enjoy such forcefully emotional performances of Ung’s fabulous music. ###
SAN GABRIEL VALLEY TRIBUNE Class Act: LA Philharmonic has big plans for next season November 24, 2017 | By Bob Thomas The Los Angeles Philharmonic’s 2018-19 programmatic cycle will mark the orchestra’s centennial season, although — like the ongoing Leonard Bernstein centennial — the LAPO party will last longer than 12 months (the actual anniversary date is Oct. 24, 2019). The initial unveiling came courtesy of an event outside of Walt Disney Concert Hall to dignitaries and some media folks. Among the more interesting tidbits were: • Celebrated architect Frank Gehry, whose creations include Walt Disney Concert Hall, will design a new home for the Phil’s Youth Orchestra of Los Angeles (YOLA) in an existing 17,000-square-foot building that will be called the Judith and Thomas L. Beckmen YOLA Center @ Inglewood. The new center will serve 500 kids from the surrounding area — the current program serves about 1,000 kids in South Central L.A. and other neighborhoods and the Phil hopes to double the number within a decade. • The Phil will also form a new LAPO Fellow program. “Musicians selected to become fellows will be appointed as musicians playing with the Los Angeles Philharmonic for up to three years,” says the organization, “performing in subscription, chamber music, Green Umbrella and education concerts in Walt Disney Concert Hall and the Hollywood Bowl, with the goal of preparing them to successfully compete for, and win positions with the LA Phil and major professional symphonic orchestras.” • In addition to Music and Artistic Director Gustavo Dudamel (who will conduct 14 weeks of concerts), the conductor roster will include former music directors Zubin Mehta conducting a two-week Brahms cycle and Esa-Pekka Salonen leading two weeks of Stravinsky music. Current Principal Guest Conductor Susanna Mälkki and former PGC Michael Tilson Thomas are also on the schedule — notably absent is another PGC, Sir Simon Rattle. • One other living former music director, André Previn, is not able to travel cross-country at age 88 but he will be one of the composers who will contribute to the 50 commissioned works that will appear on the Phil’s various programs during the centennial. Other composers on the list are John Adams, Julia Adolphe, Billy Childs, Unsuk Chin, Natacha Diels, Ashley Fure, Philip Glass, Adolphus Hailstork, Vijay Iyer, Andrew Norman and Steve Reich. • The Phil will try to reach out to many local organizations, including CivicLAvia, the organization that sponsors days when various streets are closed to automobile traffic. On Sept. 30, CivicLAvia will run from Disney Hall to Hollywood Bowl, with performance groups along the way and a culminating free event in the Bowl with Dudamel leading the Phil and other groups. • The Phil will also undertake another new initiative, “100 for the 100,” which the orchestra hopes will expand access to Walt Disney Concert Hall performances across its centennial season. This initiative will distribute 10,000 free tickets across 100 concerts, and reach audiences with limited access to Walt Disney Concert Hall. Program details will be announced in February. Information: www.laphil.com. ###
Sax innovator Steve Coleman set for rare San Diego concert November 25, 2017 | By George Varga
2014 MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” recipient, Steve Coleman is equally notable as a daring alto saxophonist, composer and band leader. In the 1980s, he was a driving force behind M-Base — short for Macro-Basic Array of Structured Extemporizations — a genre-blurring movement that also included singer Cassandra Wilson, pianist Geri Allen and saxophonist Greg Osby. Coleman’s music, which salutes and extends the traditions of jazz and music from around the world, is earthy and deviously intricate. His latest album, “Morphogenesis,” is one of the best of the year. That should make his very rare San Diego concert Monday with three members of his Five Elements band — trumpeter Jonathan Finlayson, electric bassist Anthony Tidd and drummer Sean Rickman — all the more enticing. ###
Bravos for guest conductor, pianist at TICO concert December 11, 2017 | By Eileen Wingard SAN DIEGO — Robert Zelickman, professional clarinetist and retired UC San Diego Wind Ensemble Conductor, served as guest maestro for the Nov. 12 and 14 concerts of the Tifereth Israel Community Orchestra (TICO). He substituted for TICO’s music director, David Amos, who had suffered an injured ankle in an accidental fall. The opening work, the Overture to “Martha,” by Friedrich von Flotow, sounded well-rehearsed, with good intonation, rhythmic precision and attention to dynamic details. Most impressive was Zelickman’s handling of “An American in Paris” by George Gershwin. This expansive work, peppered with horn honks and simulated street sounds, jazzy rhythmic patterns and melodic blues, was well-executed. There were many admirable solos by the violin, the viola, the flute, the clarinet, the sax, the bass clarinet, the trumpet, the horns, and, even the tuba. Most of all, the orchestra played with spirit. After intermission, piano soloist, Daniel Wnukowski took center stage. He performed two works, the Symphonic Variations for Piano and Orchestra by Cesar Franck and the Burlesque for Piano and Orchestra by Richard Strauss. Although the orchestral accompaniments for these two works were a bit ragged compared to the tightly delivered performances in the first half of the program, the soloist managed to carry the day. Wnukowski is a first class pianist. He has technique and energy to burn, with octave runs moving so rapidly, his hands were a blur to watch. His lyrical passages sang, and his digital dexterity impressed in both works. The seldom-heard Strauss Burlesque, which he composed at the age of 21, had passages reminiscent of his later Rosenkavalier Waltzes. The slender, youthful-looking Wnukowski, a native of Poland, now living in Canada, has become deeply committed to the performance of Jewish composers of the Holocaust. As encores, he played two short works by composers who managed to escape the Nazi horror. The first was by the Austrian-Jewish emigre to Hollywood, Erich Korngold. It was one of a group of pieces Korngold called, “Little Waltzes,” each of which he named for one of his lady friends. This one was “Shelly Snodgrass.” It proved to be a charming confection. The second encore was “Obetik,” a dance in ¾ time with the accent on the third beat. Wnukowski zipped through it with rapid flare. This virtuoso gem was by a Polish-Jewish composer, Roman Ritterband, who escaped on the last train to Switzerland in 1942. Amos, although not on the podium, still gave introductory remarks as he maneuvered on a scooter with his elevated injured leg. The orchestra will be under his direction at the next concert, January 28, at the First United Methodist Church, 1200 East H Street, Chula Vista, and January 30, Tifereth Israel Synagogue, 6660 Cowles Mountain Blvd. San Diego. The program will feature the acclaimed Russian-born mezzo-soprano, Suzana Poretzky, with music by Mahler, Haydn and Von-Suppe.
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Review | Too much music? La Jolla Symphony dazzles — and nearly bewilders December 10, 2017 | By Marcus Overton The La Jolla Symphony and Chorus filled Mandeville Auditorium on Saturday evening — repeated Sunday afternoon at 2 p.m. — with a concert that might justly be called an embarrassment of riches. From another point of view, so many full orchestra works in succession, in so many styles — from Beethoven backward to late-Medieval, forward to two living composers, finally landing on a mid-20th century masterpiece — were both dazzling and at times nearly bewildering, all of it led with his trademark combination of seriousness and ebullience by music director Steven Schick. Beethoven’s “Egmont” overture was given a meditative reading as a tribute to the recently-deceased Mary Nee, widow of LJS&C founder Thomas Nee, followed by two strikingly different contemporary works: British composer Thomas Adès’ “Concentric Paths” violin concerto, and UCSD doctoral candidate Tina Tallon’s “luscinia”, a short, intense work for orchestra and electronic processor receiving its world première as this season’s Thomas Nee Commission. Perpetually approaching, perpetually withdrawing, perpetually struggling to sing, “luscinia” — the orchestra plays in real time, Tallon generated electronic responses from a processor in the auditorium — evoked those dreams in which we try to move or to cry out, but cannot. Phrases of momentary beauty evaporate into soft bird calls; a sense of terrible tragedy dissolves into catharsis or isolation. The music is all uncertainty, but one thing is sure: Tallon is the real thing, an artist slowly but surely finding her way to saying things she does not yet know completely. Violinist Keir GoGwilt vanquished the technical challenges of Adès’ concerto with simultaneous economy of effort and finger-busting virtuosity. He also displayed a beautiful, singing tone — when he was audible. Images tumble out of the work: great gongs ringing, tortuous ascent through rhythmic complexity to reach a serene vista. In the final movement, a lullaby breaks free of the orchestra altogether. Too often, though, the orchestra overpowered the soloist. But this is a major work, and I suspect it will enter the standard repertoire. Felipe Rossi is an educator, bass clarinetist, composer, sound engineer and, for this concert, an arranger of a poem-song by Guillaume Machaut (1300-1377) for orchestra, violinist (GoGwilt), soprano (Kirsten Ashley Wiest) and percussion ensemble red fish blue fish. In old French, “Je vivroie liement” laments a knight’s unhappiness at his lady’s hands. Violinist, soprano and discreet percussionists, with occasional orchestral interjections, fight love’s eternal combat between words and music. Rossi’s arrangement begins in the Middle Ages, briefly carries us into the present with fiddle tunes and sweetly sung high passages that almost sound like jazz improvisation, and then softly tucks us back into the past. The Poulenc “Gloria” is a masterpiece, and Schick, orchestra and chorus elevated the concert to a higher level in its outstanding execution. Patrick Walders made an auspicious debut as LJS&C’s new chorus director in this performance, and the chorus’s superb diction, rhythmic crispness and integrated sound — what the French call “suave” — augur a bright future under his leadership. If Walders was not able to tame a few tenors whose enthusiasm overpowered their ensemble instincts, well there is always work to do. Soprano soloist Susan Narucki brought beauty of tone and emotional intensity to this celebration of God’s love and mercy, and the orchestra was, in a word, superb. Dazzled, almost overwhelmed, audience members were humming Poulenc’s melodies as they left, carrying their jackets in their hands on a spring evening in December. ###
NEW CLASSIC LA Autoduplicity at WasteLAnd December 12, 2017 | By Paul Miller Extensive write-up of multiple faculty/alum involvement. See following link for entire piece: http://newclassic.la/tag/natacha-diels/
Rachel Beetz and Jennifer Bewerse, also known as Autoduplicity, curated the wasteLAnd concert at Art Share L.A. on Friday, December 1, 2017. The duo presented six pieces by women composers, ranging from an electronic work by Pauline Oliveros to a premiere by Celeste Oram. Bye Bye Butterfly by Pauline Oliveros was first. The lights faded to total darkness and the high whine of an electronic oscillator came from speakers hanging from the ceiling. The sound was reminiscent of an old heterodyne radio tuning in a far-away station. The pitches varied a bit, creating a somewhat alien feel. The oscillator was soon joined by a chorus of faint voices, and this served to add a human element to the mix of sounds. The piece proceeded with the voices overlapping the electronic tones so that it was hard to tell where one left off and the other began. The context shifted back and forth between alien and human, while the sounds themselves mixed together, blurring the distinction. Bye Bye Butterfly is classic Oliveros, inviting the listener to experience familiar emotions through unexpected combinations of sounds. DiGiT #2, by Mayke Nas followed. Ms. Beetz and Ms. Bewerse both seated themselves at a piano and the piece began in dramatic fashion with a great forearm crash to the keyboard. The massive sound rang into the hall, slowly dissipating into silence. After a few seconds, a second powerful crash hit in a somewhat higher register. This continued, alternating between the ominously low and the anxiously high portions of the keyboard. The length of the intervening silences decreased as the crashes shortened, and this built up a definite feeling of tension. At about the midway point, the two performers began clapping hands just before they struck the keyboard. This happened briefly at first, but as the piece progressed the clapping sequences became longer and more intricate. By the finish, the clapping predominated, creating a playful feel that dispelled the previously menacing atmosphere. DiGiT #2 artfully illustrates how even the most sinister musical foreshadowing can be overcome by a simple expression of optimism. 2.5 Nightmares, for Jessie, by Natacha Diels, was next. Ms. Bewerse, with her cello, occupied a low riser in the center of the stage. Ms. Beetz and Dustin Donahue took their places on either side, sitting at tables with a ukulele, a sand paper block and other assorted percussion. The cello began by playing short, scratchy strokes while the wood blocks were drawn across the sandpaper. Silence followed, and a mallet striking a pie tin combined with bowed ukuleles to create a sequence of wonderfully strange sounds. The players also choreographed their movements and vocalized as the piece proceeded. Weaving together found sounds, cello, ukulele and choreography, 2.5 Nightmares, for Jessie nicely expresses that precise blend of the formal and the surreal that populates our dreams. a…i…u…e…o…, a video piece by Michiko Saiki, followed. The opening scene simply showed a beautiful young woman alone in a room with red chairs lining an interior corner formed by two white walls. The soundtrack started with some vocal sounds which evolved into singing, often with lovely harmonies. The images portrayed a strong sense of loneliness mixed with a search for identity. There was also an element of the surreal to this – at one point the young woman was shown with several sets of arms, and again with something like sprouts of clover growing out of her skin. The technical effort was of a very high order, and none of the effects seemed contrived or forced. The powerful images and appealing vocals of a…i…u…e…o… made a strong impression on the audience. The thin air between skins, by Annie Hui-Hsin Hsieh, was next. Ms. Beetz and Ms. Bewerse seated themselves back-to-back on the stage. A low trill from the flute began the piece and the cello entered with soft tones, creating an air of quiet mystery. Skittering flute sounds mixed with the cello to create a remote feel, as if hearing a breeze sweeping through a lonely forest. The flute occasionally became more agitated, but The thin air between skins remained consistently understated and sensitively played. A short, overblown blast from the flute ended this peaceful and reserved work. [...] ###
SAN DIEGO STORY The La Jolla Symphony and Chorus Holiday Banquet of New Music and Poulenc’s ‘Gloria’ December 12, 2017 | By Ken Herman Because I enjoyed the Met’s recent HD live broadcast of Thomas Adès’ complex, brooding opera The Exterminating Angel, I felt I could not ignore the La Jolla Symphony’s performance of the composer’s Violin Concerto, Op. 23, “Concentric Paths,” at Mandeville Auditorium last weekend. Following his usual penchant for assembling inspired musical collages, Music Director Steven Schick placed the concerto at the center of a richly varied program of new works by young composers Tina Tallon and Felipe Rossi as well as the evergreen Poulenc Gloria. In retrospect, I was surprised that the Thomas Adès and Francis Poulenc works displayed several traits in common: each is a composition of brilliant concision and a remarkable showpiece for the soloist, and each managed to employ the colors and strength of the orchestra to great advantage. Like his recent opera, Adès’ Violin Concerto progresses through restless, dense textures, with the violin soloist constantly challenging or heightening the unrelenting agitation below him. But Adès has inverted the typical concerto structure, making the middle movement—usually a quiet, sweet interlude between the expansive outer movements that develop a composer’s main themes—the heart of the concerto, reducing the outer movements to short, brilliant frames to his turbulent musical landscape. This middle movement, titled “Paths,” opens with discrete, piquant chords in the brass, to which the soloist issues short, biting challenges, a procedure repeated with the strings taking over the brass function. The paths that follow include poignant slow melodies for the soloist interspersed with turbulent figures in the highest register of the violin. The young virtuoso Keir GoGwilt tore into Adès’ Byzantine solo violin part with fierce determination and amazingly supple technical finesse, earning wild cheers from the Mandeville audience. In spite of the complexity of the violin solo, GoGwilt maintained a lustrous sonority throughout. Schick conducted the concerto—the intricate type of contemporary score that is his catnip–with his customary precision and cool authority. Although the Poulenc Gloria is infrequently programmed today, I recall a time a few decades ago when it was a popular cantata that even parish choirs essayed. The La Jolla Symphony and Chorus brought vigor and conviction to Poulenc’s jaunty homage to the 18th-century cantata. This semester marked Patrick Walders’ debut as Choral Director, and I noted an immediate improvement in the warmer and more unified sound of the women’s voices. In the “Domine Deus, Agnus Dei,” they surrounded the soprano soloist Susan Narucki with a celestial aura like the nuns clustered around Sister Blanche in Poulenc’s Dialogues of the Carmelites, the opera he completed a few years before composing the Gloria. It was difficult to discern changes in the quality of the men’s sections because they are seriously overpowered by the size of the women’s sections. The men comprise only one-third of the chorus, an imbalance that needs to be remedied. Schick’s fast tempos worked splendidly in the sections of the Gloria such as the “Laudamus te” that reflect the composer’s infatuation with the Parisian cabaret music of the 1930s, and his orchestra responded with infectious elan. Narucki’s ardent projection and graceful phrasing made the more reverent “Domine deus” particularly moving. Overall, this was a memorable Poulenc Gloria. The orchestra also presented UC San Diego music doctoral student Tina Tallon’s “luscinia,” winner of this year’s Thomas Nee Commission. A starkly minimal, though not at all minimalist, single movement tableau, Tallon aptly described her work as “a meditation on silence.” Starting with a startling col legno flourish from the principal contrabass, “luscinia” quietly weaves a web of whispers and murmurs from the strings and grows into soft, birdlike chirpings (the title refers to the nightengale) presumably incarnated by the computer interaction with the orchestra. The composer participated at the computer, today’s equivalent of the 9-foot Steinway. Perhaps taking a cue from Ottorino Respighi’s Ancient Airs and Dances, Felipe Rossi arranged Guillaume de Machaut’s song “Je vivroie liement” (“I should lead a happy life”) for soprano, violin and orchestra. Kirsten Wiest’s lithe soprano declaimed the 14th-century French poetry sympathetically, aided by GoGwilt’s supple violin obbligato and alert percussion from red fish blue fish. The orchestra played such a minor role in Rossi’s arrangement, it could have been replaced with ease by a string quartet, but it was endearing to hear in the concert hall Machaut’s earthy rhythms and austere harmonies. Schick opened this musical marathon with Beethoven’s robust but ever dignified “Egmont” Overture; in my opinion, just the right proportion of standard repertory to new music on a program.
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WINTER TERM 2017 PRESS LINKS Links below picked up by Google news alerts. Please contact Kayla A. Wilson, Marketing and Promotions, for future additions. Email: kaw132@ucsd.edu •
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https://michronicleonline.com/2017/10/05/the-wright-museum-to-commemorate-the-centennial-ofjazz-legend-thelonious-monk/
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http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/music/la-et-ms-angel-city-jazz-festival-20171005-story.html
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http://www.theadvocate.com/new_orleans/entertainment_life/arts/article_9dab5a64-ade311e7-a6ef-5ffbe38eb495.html
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http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/entertainment/classical-music/sd-me-arts-1013story.html
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https://news.ucsc.edu/2017/10/pacific-rim-festival.html
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https://www.broadwayworld.com/los-angeles/article/Independent-Shakespeare-Co-AnnouncesLimited-Run-of-LETTERS-FROM-HOME-20171010
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https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/13/arts/music/ruth-crawford-seeger-jack-quartet.html
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http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/entertainment/music/sd-et-music-lajolla-symphony20171029-story.html
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http://www.santacruzsentinel.com/article/NE/20171026/NEWS/171029772
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http://www.kpbs.org/news/2017/nov/03/la-jolla-symphony-uc-san-diego-celebrate-50-years-/
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http://www.columbusalive.com/news/20171108/local-author-talks-about-expereince
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http://sdcitybeat.com/music/about-last-night/michi-makes-noise-behind-the-decks-and-behindthe-scenes/
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http://slippedisc.com/2017/11/la-phil-commissions-50-works-for-its-centennial/
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http://www.sgvtribune.com/2017/11/24/class-act-la-philharmonic-has-big-plans-for-nextseason/
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http://www.sfchronicle.com/music/article/Prolific-trumpeter-Wadada-Leo-Smith-brings-his12424766.php
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http://www.sdjewishworld.com/2017/12/11/bravos-for-guest-conductor-pianist-tico-concert/
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http://www.sandiegostory.com/the-la-jolla-symphony-and-chorus-holiday-banquet-of-newmusic-and-poulencs-gloria/
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http://newclassic.la/tag/natacha-diels/