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

Youth In New Music

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-- Jesse Langen, Ensemble Dal Niente Guitarist

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

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.