Past, Present, Future

PAST, PRESENT, FUTURE

By Chris Wild, Cellist and Lead Artistic Coordinator

The following video preview of Stefan Prins' Generation Kill uses material from our pre-recorded video sessions as its musical content. The sounds and sights in this video will be barely recognizable at our April 30 performance, but are an important part of the whole puzzle. And while this video takes a humorous approach to political ineptitude (thanks to Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove), the live experience of Generation Kill at Dal Niente's 10th Anniversary Party on April 30 promises to be a sensory and emotional wallop.

I will abstain from mentioning all the music I'm looking forward to at Dal Niente's 10th Anniversary Party simply because it's difficult to isolate one particular piece without relating it to another. Speaking as someone who coordinates programming for our ensemble, I'd like to acknowledge that when I started doing this work a couple years ago, I felt a responsibility to continue Dal Niente's musical tendencies, as our programming has played a large role in earning a loyal following in Chicago. In addition to embracing our unique traditions, we've been conscious of including American composers, and as an extension of that, composers that reflect the diversities of contemporary American society. This consideration is another reason why it's difficult to isolate repertoire for us - each composer we collaborate with has been influenced by others we've worked with, and so it becomes the totality of our programming that best reflects the society we live in, and also our mission. This is certainly the case with our upcoming Party, which in typical Party fashion will present a diversity of styles.

In addition to keeping an eye on our internal traditions, and on our regional present, being a contemporary ensemble also demands that we keep an eye towards the future. That brings us to Stefan Prins' Generation Kill, which is a piece that we'd been thinking of performing for a couple years and needed appropriate circumstances to attempt. To carry it out with our traditional level of musical preparedness, some of us Nientes are being hard pressed to acquire new technical skills so that our performance on April 30 may live up to the composer's ambitions.

The impetus for Stefan's piece is one that I find myself reminded of in the wake of each successive act of global terrorism. Stefan describes it thus:

Last year, while I was working on "Piano Hero #1 and #2", the Arab Revolutions had ignited the Middle-East. Protesters in several Middle-Eastern countries made the whole world witness the revolutionary events by making video's with their smartphones or webcams and uploading them to the internet. With the use of the social media -such as Facebook and Twitter- the whole process was accelerated, and before anyone realised, the people of Tunisia and Egypt had overthrown their dictatorial regimes, while full-blown civil wars started to split Libya and to paralyse Syria.

In the same year, 2011, a large-scale investigation was released, which calculated that there is one CCTV surveillance camera for every 32 persons in the UK.

October 2011: the Americans started to withdraw their troops in Iraq, while they were still fighting the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. More and more images were released of successful (at least according to the official bulletins) bombings by so-called "drones" -"unmanned aerial vehicles" who are remotely controlled by military personal in secret control centers in the US. Parallel to these images, an increasing stream of eye-witnesses started to appear on the internet, telling of innocent people who were killed by these bombings.

Strolling through the internet, I found at around the same time a 7-year old video-clip on Youtube which was a teaser for the TV-series "Generation Kill", based on the homonymous book in which Evan Wright chronicled his experiences as an embedded reporter with the 1st Reconnaissance Battalion of the US Marine Corps during the 2003 Iraq invasion. One of the statements which shocked me the most was made by one of the soldiers: "It's the ultimate rush -- you're going into the fight with a good song playing in the background". Evan Wright explained further: "This is a war fought by the first playstation generation. One thing about them is they kill very well in Iraq."

At that point, I realised that my next piece had to musically reflect on all of these connected facts, on a society which is more and more monitored, on the increasing importance of internet, networks and social media, which are fueled by video's taken with webcams and smartphones, on video-games and on wars fought like video-games, on the line between reality and virtuality which gets thinner by the day.

Stefan is able to make such associations perceptible by employing multiple perspectives in the piece, facilitating access to and shifts between the multiple agents he describes. The participants facilitating this experience are 4 live musicians (playing violin, cello, electric guitar, and percussion), pre-recorded videos of these musicians that are triggered by 4 assistants using Playstation game controllers (fulfilled by the members of Parlour Tapes+ and Dal Niente's conductor, Michael Lewanski), images of drone warfare, and webcams that can flip our attention from the warfare to those purportedly responsible for the attacks.

Stefan has designed an elaborate network of devices to make all of these factors integrate into a cohesive aural and visual experience. The setup includes 4 semi-transparent projector screens that can both display the pre-recorded videos in front of the live musicians, and also allow the audience to see through the screens to the musicians performing behind them who are at times illuminated by independent LED lighting systems. Other technical requirements include video projectors, laptop computers, external webcams, interfaces, microphones, various cables, multiple speakers and subwoofers, and a culminating sound board controlled by a sound engineer.

Making all of this work without a budget dedicated to the piece has been quite a challenge, one that requires generosity and flexibility from many. We are indebted to Stefan for his mentorship throughout the process (and who will be flying to Chicago to attend our performance thanks to the Flemish Government), to Dan Nichols, Brian Wach, and Northern Illinois University for their technical support, to Eric Fernandez for guiding me through the early recording sessions, and to Parlour Tapes+, Michael Lewanski, and my colleagues in Dal Niente for taking on this challenge with enthusiasm, and apparently with some lost sleep as well.

Getting Plucky: No Strings Attached - Q&A with Ben Melsky and Jesse Langen

Getting Plucky: New Music for Harp and Guitar

Q: When and how did the two of you dream up the idea of collaborating to commission new music for harp and guitar?

Ben:  Jesse and I have consistently remarked, after every ensemble piece that we’ve been included on,  (I think the first time was when we did a Radiohead arrangement in DN’s early days at Northwestern) at how well we play together.  It’s just really solid - which is rare - especially considering our instruments and how difficult it can be to pluck notes at precisely the same time.  In an ensemble, harp and guitar are often their own “sections” so to speak, which is kind of uniting in a way. We  face similar challenges incorporating our sound with the ensemble while trying to lining things up rhythmically. Anyway, we did some repertoire searches and decided we needed to add some pieces to that list.   It’s interesting how alike the two instruments are in sound, technique, and role within an ensemble and yet there is remarkably little written for two as a duet.

Jesse:  It seems like such a natural combination; it makes sense for the same reasons that a string quartet or a wind quintet make sense.  It seems strange that there isn’t already a large repertoire; and in that light we saw it as a rare undeveloped opportunity, which we’re eagerly exploiting.

Q: Can you tell us how you identified the composers that you ended up working with? What are the highlights of each piece that we'll hear on the January 23 performance at Elastic Arts?

Ben: We pretty much agreed upon Fred, Drew, Tomás and Kasia immediately and I’m beyond thrilled that they all agreed to write for us.  I think we were interested in approaching composers who had experience with harp/guitar (and with us as performers) who would explore the tiniest timbral details because of the breadth of sound colors available between the two instruments.

I don’t want to give away the game completely but I’ll say the four pieces are totally different approaches to the duet, and have some unique challenges as chamber music. You’ll hear some mysteriously beautiful microtonal tuning, a good heap of character/gesture/pantomime, and a kind of plucky kaleidoscope of sound. Stay “tuned”...

Jesse: When I heard Tomás’ solo piece (After L’addio/Felt) for Ben, my first thought was that I have to get this guy to write me a solo piece!  Followed immediately by the realization that even better might be a duo for Ben and me.  His plucked string writing is virtuosic in an intimate way that comes from a hands-on mentality, and sure enough in rehearsals Tomás is able to take my guitar from me and show me corrections and ideas.  Fredrick Gifford is very familiar with both the guitar and the harp, and the very idea of this duo evokes in my mind a Gifford-temperament soundworld. Kasia is an accomplished harpist herself, but the real reason we thought of her is her creativity with drama in performance, which we thought would (and, in fact, most certainly does!) mesh well with our pursuit of ensemble virtuosity.  I think Drew was an impulse...we just had a feeling that asking him was a good idea.  This impulse paid off richly in the incandescent ass-kicker we got from him.

Q: What are the challenges and rewards of uniting these two instruments as an ensemble?

Ben: 
Challenge: Playing all the notes exactly together.
Reward: When we do, it sounds awesome.

Jesse: I would add on the rewards side that it’s therapeutic to rehearse together.  If you play violin, or flute, or any normal instrument, you get to play with people who play in your family of instruments all the time.  For Ben and for me, if we’re on a gig, it usually means there aren’t any other guitarists or harpists in the room.  So rehearsing together is not only a joy, but a kind of relief.  Ben plays when I think he’ll play, at the volume I expect, with the phrasing I expect.  I think string players, wind players, singers and so forth have this experience all the time, but it’s novel for us.

Q: It's Dal Niente's 10th Anniversary Season. In honor of this special occasion, what have been some of your favorite experiences as part of the ensemble?

Ben: Certainly the Deerhoof Variations come to mind, both performances of In Vain, Schnee… I feel like this season I’ve watched the group really embrace its identity as a music collective, with the blog and the DN Presents series, everyone has contributed in original ways to generate excitement around what we do.  It’s not a specific memory, but I also would have to add how much I love hearing everyone’s ideas at meetings concerts etc.  It’s kind of like a little musical “think tank” - thinking up repertoire, concert ideas, composers to approach, then figuring out how to turn them into reality.

Jesse: At the first Party, neither Matt Oliphant nor I were on any of the pieces, and I remember us exchanging a moment as we realized how great it was to sit back and listen to our favorite people entertain us (and eat and drink all the while) for hours on end.  When I think of Dal Niente moments that I revisit and savor in my head, it’s always my friends playing, and my sitting back thinking how lucky I am to be in the room and listening.
 

Dal Niente Presents: Ben Melsky and Jesse Langen
Saturday, January 23, 2016
8:30pm
Elastic Arts
3429 W. Diversey, #208
Chicago, IL 60647
Tickets $20/$15 (cash only at door)
BUY ADVANCED TICKETS HERE!

Photo credit by Aleksandr Karjaka

Q&A With Mabel Kwan

Q&A With Mabel Kwan

Q: Tell us about your new album, one poetic switch. When did you decide you wanted to record an album and how did you choose the repertoire?

In the last few years I've gotten a lot of new pieces for various keyboard instruments, and I was interested in making an album where you could hear these pieces and instruments side by side. For my first solo album, one poetic switch, I chose pieces that were for piano and clavichord. I’m deeply grateful to Ray, Eliza, Ramteen, Santiago, Fred and Mauricio for their compositions, and for being such wonderful collaborators. The pieces on this album are highly contrasting, even though they were all composed within a few years of each other. I hope you'll give it a listen and I would love to know what you think of it.

Q: We'll be hearing the World Premiere of Fredrick Gifford's Graft Blossom on January 3 where you will perform on toy piano, clavichord, and prepared piano all within the same piece. How did you approach learning a piece that asks you to move from instrument to instrument?

I'm really looking forward to playing this piece on the concert! So actually, the prepared piano part is pre-recorded; it's eight separate layers of piano harmonics in the bass strings and the same pitches played ordinario in the middle range of the piano. You should've seen the intricate web of rubber mutes Fred and I devised to prepare all the harmonics! The clavichord part has two sections, one with lots of running notes, the other percussive and unpitched. The toy piano part works similarly to the running part that you'll hear in the clavichord. Like many of Fred's pieces, you can choose the order in which you put these sections together. It takes some getting used to switching between the different instruments; the width of the keys are different on each instrument so leaps take some practice, and also on the toy piano you have to remember that middle c isn't the one in the middle!

Q: What are some of the objects you will utilize in the performance of one poetic switch by Santiago Diez-Fischer? Was it a challenge to obtain any of the objects you've been asked to use?

I'm really glad to know Santiago's music through a previous work for Dal Niente, and I'm thrilled that he wrote this solo piece for piano. The objects are basically plastic tupperware containers, a plastic wine glass, and a bass bow. It took some time to find the right plastic material; also it needed to make a certain pitch around G/G# which you'll hear is a central note in the piece. There are actually quite a few pieces with objects on this concert. Alex Lunsqui's Glaes or "glass" uses marbles, sandpaper, wine bottles, glass jars. Mauricio Pauly's Patrulla reliquia has intricate playing techniques for metal slide, plectra and effects pedals. Of course I always enjoy playing pieces like Rebecca Saunder's shadow which is on the keys with the hands (and in this case, arms and elbows too).

Q: How long have you been a member of Ensemble Dal Niente? Can you tell us about one of your most memorable moments as part of the ensemble?

My first concert with Dal Niente was in December 2007 at the Green Mill. I don't remember what we played, but I remember the rehearsals, and the personnel, and how clear it was that everyone in the group was in it for artistic reasons, and that we would always seek to challenge ourselves artistically. So much has happened since then! There's the time we played in complete darkness for Haas's in vain, you couldn't see any of your colleagues, the music, your instrument, or the audience, and it was terrifying and profound. Then there are times like after they announced the Kranichstein award and Jesse photobombed our photo, or when Michael came out of the dressing room in pink pants for our New York concert with Deerhoof. I love that the group is always evolving, asking questions about how to do what we do even better, and I look forward to the things we will accomplish together in the coming years.

Dal Niente Presents: Mabel Kwan, piano
Sunday, January 3, 2016
8:30pm
Constellation Chicago
3111 N. Western Avenue
$15/$10
Buy tickets here!

Photo credit: Marc Perlish

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-- Michael Lewanski

Hasco Duo Set to Kick Off Dal Niente Presents Series

(Photo: Aleksandr Karjaka)

Soprano Amanda DeBoer Bartlett and guitarist Jesse Langen joined forces in 2013 to form Hasco Duo, and have been commissioning, performing, and recording at a breakneck speed ever since. As part of Dal Niente’s 10th Anniversary Season, Hasco Duo will perform twice this Fall- first representing Dal Niente at the New Music Chicago 10th Anniversary Birthday Bash on September 11, and in a full length Dal Niente Presents program on September 14 at The Hideout.

We asked Amanda a few questions about the ensemble’s history and a preview of what to expect on September 14:

Q: How long has Hasco Duo been together? What was the inspiration that led you to form the ensemble?

A: Our first duo show was a Dal Niente Presents show at the Empty Bottle May 2013, which was part of a series called (Un)Familiar music run by Doyle Armbrust. It was originally supposed to be a solo show for Jesse, but after working together on Aaron Einbond's Without Words, we decided to collaborate. We commissioned 7 new pieces for the show; it was quite an undertaking! After that, we played shows together sporadically in Chicago and Omaha, but it wasn't until we put together our first improvised show at the Experimental Sound Studio in the Fall of 2014 that we came up with the name - a respelling of the word chaos - and started recording our first album.

Q: How many new works has Hasco Duo commissioned or premiered? What's your approach to programming a concert that features both older and brand new works?

A: Our approach to programming is very intuitive and impulsive. Half of our output is improvised, and we're always devising new schemes and material on our own or with collaborators. We've also commissioned music from Marcos Balter, Eliza Brown, Ray Evanoff, Fred Gifford, Morgan Krauss, Max Grafe, Jonn Sokol, Ravi Kittappa, and Chris Fisher-Lochhead. We haven't played much older music, although Jesse made some pretty stellar arrangements of DuFay songs for the Mathias Spahlinger festival "there is no repetition" back in March.

Q: What have been some of your most memorable past performances?

A: Our first show as Hasco Duo at the Experimental Sound Studio last Fall was very formative. It was our first improvised show, and we honestly didn't know if it would work. We sort of shot in the dark during the whole process, which was exciting. For that show, we mixed in some of our commissions alongside improvisation and tried to create a narrative for the material. During one piece, I was just laughing the entire time and Jesse was trying to do something very serious. The combination was a little absurd, and the audience was laughing along with me. I remember loving that moment and feeling like we had accomplished something since people were reacting to the performance. I loved that people felt comfortable enough to laugh along with us.

Q: Tell us about your upcoming program on 9/14 at the Hideout. What are some things that audiences can look forward to?

A: We've commissioned new pieces from Ray Evanoff, Morgan Krauss, Max Grafe, and Jonn Sokol for the show, and will be interspersing our own work in the mix. Ray's music is very active and demanding, layering complicated vocal and guitar techniques to create completely novel textures and sounds. Morgan's music, like Ray's, can be very physically demanding, but she creates worlds of repetition with subtle perturbation and fluctuation. Jonn Sokol's piece uses rules from the Magic the Gathering card game and text from one of my favorite books, The Prairie and the Sea by William Quayle. I'm not sure a piece has ever been written more suitably to Hasco's interests! And finally, Max collaborated with a poet friend to create a piece which takes the perspective of the first Mars colonizers.

I absolutely love this program! All of the composers involved are long-time friends and collaborators, and it really shows in the pieces they created. Morgan and Ray were both part of our first project at the Empty Bottle, so it's very meaningful to work with them again as the ensemble continues to develop. Max and Jonn's music is so beautiful, and I want to hear more of it performed in Chicago.

Don’t miss Hasco Duo at The Hideout on September 14 at 8:00 PM.