Interview: Wang Lu on Pecking Orders

Dal Niente violist Ammie Brod sat down with composer Wang Lu to talk about her piece Pecking Orders, commissioned by Dal Niente with support from the National Endowment for the Arts. Dal Niente will give the world premiere of Pecking Orders at Constellation on October 13.

Pecking Orders deals with order in a number of contexts, from chickens to the arts to high school social hierarchies. Was there anything in particular that got you thinking about different kinds of order, or about order in general?

The order of things around us that we obey can be simply taken for granted, as if they are the same as the order of events that happened in history, or elements in chemistry. As Foucault’s “The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences” pointed out, the foundation of what we believe as the orders is shaky. I thought about how orders shift and transform from culture to culture, and then I thought, “what if we look at AI generated ideas on orders?”

The text for this piece comes from your searches for the term “order” using AI. Were you surprised by any of the results that came up? Do you have any particular favorites?

I’m very amused by the results that came out of AI on what “pecking order” is in music. As you’ll hear, it says that since the human voice is a gift from God, therefore voice is at the top of pecking order. Percussion instruments that don’t play any melody are at the bottom. And in visual arts, the AI-defined pecking order puts oil painting above watercolor painting. 

I find that many societally acceptable orders are as arbitrary as these AI generated ones — because AI only generates ideas from the data it gathers, and the data is from us and existing materials created by us. Going through AI brings out the humor and highlights the ridiculousness of assumptions we already have. 

What are some of the ways in which the music either reinforces or undermines the text?

The soprano has a beautiful vocalise at the beginning of the piece, which reinforces the idea that voice is the most divine in the music pecking order. But later in the piece, the soprano shows various distorted and sometimes incomprehensible sides of herself, which supports ideas of alternate pecking orders. 

Are there specific musical sounds or techniques that you use to work with or against the meaning of the words?

The AI-generated text at one point explains how we might avoid human pecking orders. It mentions that we could achieve this goal by constructing social orders. Following this text, I used layered homophones of a modal but microtonally twisted simple marching band like idea to comment on and question the feasibility of the suggestion.


The text mentions the historical cultural view of vocal music as superior to instrumental music, as well as melodic vs non-melodic material. This is an ensemble piece with a soprano soloist; can you talk about the vocal part with (or versus) the instrumental parts in the framework of those hierarchies? Do they work differently? Does that itself create a hierarchy within the piece?

I definitely thought about voice in this piece playing two functions. One is as the narrator, who reads the texts like an announcement-like way, outside the character. The other role the soprano plays is a series of characters with singing voice or half singing voice. 

The text started with chicken pecking orders, then talks about music, art, high school, and society as a whole. Later it goes back to how humans make chickens surrender to the order. This journey of starting from chicken to human and back to the chicken makes the soprano kind of an in between character. She has space to explore her emotional range throughout the piece, and to go beyond the human.

Interview: Jeff Parker on Water on Glass

Dal Niente flutist Emma Hospelhorn sat down with Jeff Parker to talk about his piece Water on Glass, which was commissioned for Dal Niente in 2016. Water on Glass will be released as part of object/animal, out March 25 on Sideband Records. Pre-order the record here.

Tell me about the starting point for composing Water on Glass.

When you guys reached out to collaborate on something, I had this older piece that I had written that I composed as part of a film score that I did many years back —probably 20 years ago at this point—for a film called Decades Past. It’s a film by Tatsu Aoki—he teaches film at the Art Institute and he’s a bass player. And he asked me to put a score in one of his films. And, you know, I came up with that piece, and I’m like, “oh, this might be a good way to revisit that thing.” And it’s called Water on Glass because that’s what’s happening in the film. It’s glass with droplets of water going down it.

So the visuals of the film inspired the music?

Yeah. But you know, it’s kind of an improvisation. For me, the lines get blurry between improvising and composing, especially when you record an improvisation and then it becomes a composition. And that’s kind of what this was. I improvised these pads of chords, and then I edited them together to make them into a chord progression. And then when I did a live performance of the score with the film, for the other musicians I had to transcribe what I had done. So it didn’t start in the kind of traditional way of composing, with score notation. It started on guitar. I made the pads on electric guitar and a digital delay pedal and some filtering.

That’s so cool. How did it work when you orchestrated it for Dal Niente? Because the orchestration feels so specific.

I think Ben told me the instrumentation and I orchestrated it for that. And I had never written for harp. I consulted some people to get some advice. I’m still not sure if it—you know, I put the part down in front of Ben, and he was like, “what is this?!”

I thought it worked well! Especially that ringing melody that comes through in the second half of the piece— it’s just so satisfying to listen to.

Thanks! Actually, I initially didn’t have that melody that comes in the second half. That’s something that I added for this version of it.

It’s so effective. And how did the synthesizer join the party? Can you talk a bit about the synth that you perform on the piece?

Of course. That’s actually from the film score. The kind of percussive pitter-pat of the sound is to emulate the sound of water—droplets of water hitting the surface of the glass. Technically, it’s me playing my Korg MS-20 with a kind of frequency modulated percussive sound. And then that triggers this kind of granular delay in Ableton Live. And the sound of the synthesized tone, it goes faster or slower to create or release tension in the piece. It creates drama with the dynamics of the ensemble, coupled with this kind of fluctuating rhythm.

It feels very much like a journey with peaks and valleys, with the synthesizer and the ensemble kind of playing counterpoint to each other.

Right. Yeah, that’s a good observation.

(laughs) Thank you! Do you play the MS-20 a lot in other projects?

Yeah. In almost everything, really. Especially in recording, yeah. On my own records, it’s all over all of my own records. And with Tortoise, and lots of different stuff.

I didn’t realize that was part of your work with Tortoise.

Yeah, totally. I mean I’ve had it for probably—I probably got it in 1996. So I’ve had it a long time. And I like it because I feel like I still can’t play it very well, even having had it for that long, you know. I’m still learning stuff every time I employ it.

Thank you, this is so wonderful to talk to you about this! Do you have any other thoughts about the piece?

I’ll say a lot of my compositional approach in my body of work is about process. And weirdly that’s something I really rely on as a composer. It’s not even necessarily about—well, I was gonna say it’s not necessarily about the way the music sounds, because it definitely is. But the way that the work is made I think is interesting. And I think if the listener, or the person who consumes the work, is aware of that process, it can make it more interesting.

So in terms of the step-by-step…

It comes from a very clinical place. I created these sonic pads and I edited them, and then I put them in a line and I kind of rearranged the blocks in order to create a chord progression. And there were dynamics in the sonic pads. Some were soft, some were louder. And that kind of created dynamics. And then I used the percussive synthesizer sound to create tension and drama within the dynamics. And for me it was kind of more about—like there was a blueprint. I had a blueprint for how I wanted to do it. I could have used the same process with different sound elements, and it would have sounded completely different, but the process would have been the same. And a lot of my work, it comes from a place like that. It’s definitely about the way the things are put together, and kind of exploiting that process.

That’s fascinating. I love the idea that this very cohesive, orchestral sounding piece that you’ve created—that I can think about you playing this piece as chords on your guitar with different volumes and patches.

Yeah. And you guys, it was really great working with you guys. I mean you put so much soul and intent, and, I mean, you guys already have cohesion in your ensemble. So you have that vibe, and then you put everything into making it. I really appreciated that, and I was very—I was blown away. I couldn’t have asked for a better experience.

Thanks! Same here. I was personally so excited to get to play on a recording with you. I think we all were. And it’s a beautiful piece, and the fact that we got to record it actually with you was so awesome. So thank you.

Thank you!

Interview: L.J. White on We Don't Eat Dead Things

Dal Niente violist Ammie Brod sat down with LJ White to talk about his piece We Don’t Eat Dead Things, which was commissioned for Dal Niente in 2017. We Don’t Eat Dead Things will be released as as a single on February 16, 2022 and as part of object/animal, out March 25 on Sideband Records. Listen to the single here.

So I know this piece had an interesting starting point, can you tell me a little more about that?

Totally, sure. This piece came out of a commission through the Des Moines Civic Music Association, to be performed during a Dal Niente residency there. They wanted a piece that had some connection to the music of a local artist, Christopher the Conquered. I’ve worked with non-classical music as source material in the past, with pieces like my string quartet Zin Zin Zin Zin, as well as a recent project I did with Sleeping Giant where we wrote a group piece based on Elliot Smith’s music. For that project my contribution was mostly sub-lingual - I took a bunch of small melismas that I’d found in the vocal lines of his songs and worked them into the fabric of the music I wrote for the singers. 

For We Don’t Eat Dead Things, I instead focused on Christopher the Conquered’s lyrics, because they were one of the things that immediately struck me about his music. In a lot of his songs he has these moments where he just suddenly says something really out there and unexpected, with these weird and totally out of the blue sentiments, like, what did he just say? And it’s really evocative and dystopian and cool. I used a lot of those phrases - “don’t make me take off my shame jacket” is one, or “400,000 ants on a shaky leaf”. You can hear another example in one of Carrie’s lines: “Everyone will hate me”. That line is from a song called “I’m Not That Famous Yet” which I also used as inspiration to think about the structure of my piece. It has this repetitive strophic structure that feels like a slow processional, and I wanted to make something that had a similar feel but in my own style. I repeated and recycled material through the piece in different ways: using different instruments, playing it upside down, putting it through temporal shifts. It’s all really one line that gets inverted and reversed and expanded and contracted over and over.

I began with words and fragments of lyrics from all throughout his work, but by the end of the piece I started drawing more on complete lines and phrases from single songs. For both this and the Sleeping Giant project, I made huge charts of lyrics and gestures that I heard in the music and then tried to match things up with the line I was writing, looking at structural stuff like how many syllables I needed to see what fit and whether it worked. Then I started pulling fragments and phrases and fitting them into what was happening musically.

That reminds me a bit of what it’s like to learn a tricky piece of music as a performer. I start by just kind of assembling my tools, going through gestures slowly and out of time, and then I start pulling in the other details until each part works together inside of my desired framework. But eventually all of those bits come together and hey! It’s a piece.

I wouldn’t have thought of that! That’s an interesting connection.

So did you ever meet Christopher the Conquered?

Yes! He and his mom actually came to the premiere in Des Moines. He seemed into it, although apparently his mom heard one of his lyrics (“honey, I stole these earrings for you”) and gave him a hard time about it.

That is excellent.

Can you talk a bit about the sounds you used in this piece? There are some unusual techniques here. Cough cough beer can cough…

Ha, yes. I stuck with the idea of taking things out of context, doing that instrumentally as well as with the lyrics. I wanted to take a bunch of discrete musical objects and put them together in different ways in this slow fake-solemn content, and just like with the lyrics some of those objects are funny or don’t usually go together, or they’re like sonic events from other musical worlds (or just another part of this musical world). So there’s a flexatone, an ebow, muted guitar strumming, a vocal imitation of the guitar-strum sound, these cello quadruple-stops that are kind of like an Elgar sample… And there’s the beer can. I wanted a crinkling, crushing sound from the harp strings and foil and parchment weren’t working - I wanted the sound to be long enough to have a “tail” at the end that could change. I wanted it to be different every time, and crushing a beer can against the strings ended up being a great way to get the sound quality that I wanted and also have more control over things like pitch, duration, and oscillation.

I appreciated that Ben used a Goose Island 312 can at the Chicago premiere - that’s just such a Chicago beer.

I’m pretty sure Matt was using a Dal Niente shirt to mute his horn, too! That’s an interesting thing to bring up, though. Ultimately, I wanted it to be an isolated sound, an artifact from somewhere else, and a beer can has such an informal and casual place in regular nonmusical day-to-day life that it sort of comes from outside of what you expect to be happening. One of the things I wanted to incorporate about were things that would seem comically, awkwardly out of place in this context: a beer can, loud sax multiphonics, a vibraslap, and also little sounds to articulate a sense of the beat in a really skeletal way.

Well, I did jump at those sax multiphonics, so I think you succeeded. Another thing that’s pretty noticeable in this piece is that there’s a definite vibe going on. Let’s talk about that a little.

Honestly, the hardest thing to figure out in our initial rehearsals was how to sell the piece visually, to figure out a character for it. Carrie and Amanda ultimately went with a kind of zombie stare/deer in the headlights thing, and I think that even without the visuals you can still hear that in the recording. We decided to go for this intense sincerity, like when someone *really* believes what they’re saying. You know, slightly menacing, that kind of zealous enthusiasm of somebody who’s overly into things that maybe you don’t think warrant it.

The title, We Don’t Eat Dead Things, really brought me back to college, becoming a staunch vegetarian and getting involved with campus activism. Don’t get me wrong, I sincerely think that both of those things are great, but I often felt some amount of that intense unswerving dedication around me and it could be a bit unnerving, even if it was for a good cause. 

Yeah, I can see that. I like the title because at first it seems sort of straightforward, like yeah, something an animal rights activist would say. But then I started thinking about it more and it was like, wait, what do we eat that isn’t dead? Are vegetables dead? Then I had to really think about it. And it becomes something that’s actually sort of sinister.

Dude, you just blew my mind.

I Won't Be Outrun by a Cavalry of Snails: Interview with Osnat Netzer

In this interview, Dal Niente violist Ammie Brod sat down with Osnat Netzer to talk about her upcoming world premiere, I Won’t Be Outrun by a Cavalry of Snails. Dal Niente will premiere the piece online on June 26 as part of Party 2021: Once More, With Streaming.

A: Hi. We’re excited to put this piece together with you!

O: So am I! I was supposed to work with Dal Niente in 2013 and wasn’t able to, and I really regretted it. I’m glad it’s finally happening now!

A: Great! So what was the starting point for your piece?

O: I created a list of adjectives, like "bleaty," "rigid-ragged-square," "round," and asked Carrie and Amanda (our fabulous singers!) to improvise sounds inspired by each adjective. I then took the recordings of these sounds, slowed them down substantially, and transcribed the textures into the whole ensemble. Many of the weird textures and sounds in the piece are transcriptions of these slowed down vocal sounds, supporting the vocalists who are (sometimes) singing the original sounds.

I also took inspiration from pieces that challenge the idea of form, like Erin Gee’s Mouthpieces. I've had a tendency to create somewhat teleological forms in the past (where we're always moving towards a destination, like a musical climax), and I wanted to try and break away from that. We think about form as a container, something that you pour musical your material into, regardless of what that material is, but I don't like thinking of form in that way! For me there is no real difference between form and content, so I wanted to parody the idea of formal containers and take the metaphor much, much further. Containers have dimensions, but they can also have permeable walls, they can be set next to other containers and things can seep out or through in different ways. I tried to think about my musical material that way, and you can hear material from sections seeping into one another, or recontextualizing previously heard materials.

A: I like the idea that we’re working from those slowed down sounds. Can you talk a little more about how that worked?

O: Yes, I sent Amanda and Carrie this list of adjectives and asked them to send me sounds in the high, middle, and low range for each adjective. We also talked about the individuality of their voices, which Carrie described by telling me "I'm sort of a weird oboe, and Amanda is a violin that can talk.” I wanted to honor that individuality, and I paid close attention to it in the recordings. I usually blew the sound up by about 400%, sometimes 800%, and found a lot of nuance and texture that I was able to approach analytically and then use to create my own interpretation and decide how I wanted to use the voices inside of those instrumental textures. In the final piece, they don’t always sing what they did in the recordings, and sometimes they sing each other’s material.

A: Ha, I love that description of their voices! And it’s interesting to hear about how you came into this piece. Where did you go from there?

O: This was a somewhat unusual process for me. I usually have a pretty clear map/plan in place when I write a piece, and this time I was working solely from the sketches that I described before, without knowing anything about proportions or order of ideas. In many of my previous pieces, the piece tells a story of materials and their transformations over time. In this piece I worked and reworked the materials in the sketching stage, and often what you get in the piece itself is the final result of these sketch transformations. You don't get to hear the materials presented and transformed in a traditional way, and you don't get these "origin" materials. This is another way in which I try to break away from the teleological approach of my previous pieces.

A: Neat! What happened from there?

O: Well, even without a plan and a directional kind of approach, midway into writing the piece I felt the need to ask myself "where am I in the piece right now? beginning of something? middle? end?" It suddenly became apparent to me that there might still be things that we want to cling onto in a piece. If we're hearing a lot of these short musical containers, we might be able to sense that suddenly there are containers that are a bit longer, or that do have some direction (even if they never reach their destination). It was important for me to stop what I was doing and look at how these containers were clumped together, and perhaps tell a story: they do become longer as the piece progresses, but the longest one is still only 90 seconds.

A: That’s not very long!

O: It’s really not! But some containers do provide a kind of formal "service." In addition to the textures that I created from Carrie and Amanda's adjectives, I created a material that I call "bells," whose purpose is mostly to clean the palate and allow both performers and listeners to breathe and regroup. As I was constructing the piece it also became clear to me that the tempo of each adjective-material was used in a structural way, to denote almost a state of being. There are many tempi in the piece, often even simultaneously, and each tempo is associated with one of the main materials of the piece. Often materials seep from one container to the next by existing as a secondary material (with a secondary tempo, referential to the main tempo), and then becoming the main tempo in the next section, with their associated material becoming the primary material. This gives the piece a constant feeling of tug-o-war between identities and speeds. I love playing with time in weird ways!

A: So to get slightly away from the nuts and bolts, I do have to ask about the name. I was 100% delighted when I saw it. Where does “a cavalry of snails” come from?

O: It comes from a line I gave Carrie in the piece, although I don’t know if you’ll actually be able to hear it in the finished work. Most of the text in the piece was stream-of-consciousness in various languages (English, Hebrew, Italian, etc.). When I finished the piece I checked to see if maybe one of the texts could be used as a title, and I found "I won't be outrun by a cavalry of snails." There are other snail references in the piece! Like the word "shablulim," snails in Hebrew. So I came up with the term "cavalry of snails" entirely by accident, but when I looked up the term cavalry, I learned that “cavalry” initially referred specifically to soldiers on horses, but eventually it came to mean soldiers in any armed vehicles. I thought that it worked really well with snails because they carry their own “tank” on their back. The other reason I loved this title is because of how I enjoyed playing with time and tempi in the piece.

A: Well, I very much look forward to learning more about this cavalry of snails. Thanks for your time, and we can’t wait to bring this piece to life!

Interview: Katinka Kleijn on Forward Echo

Ammie Brod interviews Katinka Kleijn about her work Forward Echo, which was premiered by the Instigation Festival Orchestra in 2019 and which Ensemble Dal Niente will perform on March 24 at Thalia Hall and March 28 at the Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, TN.

You wrote a piece! Tell me about it!

Forward Echo was written for the Instigation Festival Orchestra and its co-founder Steve Marquette. The Instigation Festival is this awesome thing that happens in New Orleans and Chicago every year, with a very diverse group of musicians and musics, improvisation and dance, and performance art. It’s this incredibly inspiring and fertile experience because everybody involved is down for whatever you can come up with, so it opens up a space to push yourself in new directions as a performer and creator. My recent collaboration with Lia Kohl (Water on the Bridge) started there, and so did Forward Echo.

I love those kinds of spaces. Why not do all the things? Opening up creative space is a great way to make experiences feel welcoming instead of careful or even suspicious, and that’s really the way it should be.

Definitely! Steve’s festival has a lot of hungry and curious artists, and I bring a background that includes experiences with contemporary classical music, notated as well as improvised, to an increasingly eclectic mix. I love that all of the worlds are coming together more. It can be hard culturally or in terms of training to cross lines like that, but it helps to think about what you love doing as a performer, and what another performer might love, because then you can write and perform as a whole person. 

I’d dabbled in composing before, and I’ve enjoyed previous exploratory projects around the combination and interaction of composers and performers/interpreters. The advantage of being a performer is knowing how other composers have worked with me and what I’ve liked about those experiences. I like music that uses processes, like Lucier and, you know, Bruckner [laughs], and I like knowing that when composers use improv it implies trust and a sense of giving. It feels very inspiring. I wanted to create a sense that as interpreters, the performers could make the piece new and their own every time, because when the lines get blurry it can open you up to be invested in more than just playing the notes. Music is always a learning process for individual musicians, and I want this music to be something people feel excited about playing.

Yeah, that’s a great feeling! I have pieces that feel like that to me, and it’s hard to describe the joy and inspiration that gives me as a performer. So how did you go about actually composing the piece, coming from these particular places?

Well, I knew the piece was going to be premiered in the May Chapel in Rosehill Cemetery, and I knew who the performers were going to be, people like Aurora Nealand, for example, and Ken Vandermark. I didn’t want to perform in the piece myself, but I wanted it to feel like a performer, like it was the extra person in the ensemble and I was present in that way. I was thinking about the specific musicians, and about New Orleans and its musical history, and about the chapel itself. I started with ideas of things that I would love to hear these amazing musicians run with, specific clusters and combinations of sound, and I wrote down a bunch of concepts on cards (a hymn by female voices, loud tutti interjections, let’s use the organ! Stuff like that) and then put them together like a puzzle so I could think about different flow scenarios for the piece. I liked that combining the same ideas in different ways can tell different stories.

Of course that makes me think of George Lewis’ “Artificial Life 2007”, which includes a grid of descriptive words that players can follow in an order they choose.

Yeah, totally. I like things that move from a kind of connected individuality towards a structured coming together, and I wanted to create something that let that happen.

How did you approach that, after you got the basic ideas down?

I wanted to connect the piece to the space, and when I started looking into the history of the May Chapel I found out that there are six drummer boys from the American Civil War buried there. I didn’t realize that boys who were too young to fight were sometimes conscripted as drummer boys. Not only that, but the drums were actually used as communication because they could be heard over the sounds of battle, so there were all of these drum beats that meant different things to the men fighting. 

It really got me thinking about sound as communication and how that was different in pre-tech societies, and how people would have used music in more and different ways. I found out that a lot of books about the rudimentaries of drumming were written after the Civil War, and that part of the musical heritage of New Orleans comes from all of those wartime brass instruments being sold in pawnshops after it was over. New Orleans has traditionally and famously forged a special connection between death and celebration, and I wanted that to be part of the piece too. I started thinking about two armies meeting and how that could happen sonically à la Charles Ives. 

 The piece starts from silence, and then a drum triggers small tiny sounds, like wind in a cemetery. We used the sounds to activate the space in a circle using things you can barely hear, and then the performers improvised to extend the echo of the space (I was thinking of Pauline Oliveros). We wanted to engage the hall as an element of the piece instead of being incidental to its performance. 

Eventually, we had five musicians upstairs in the choir balcony and six below, with a regular drum downstairs and child’s drum set upstairs. The upstairs people were completely hidden from view. Both groups would listen simultaneously for the opposite group’s drum commands and then follow guidelines in the score regarding how to react individually, whether that was musically, conceptually, or with movement. On a battlefield you have to try and follow commands in the midst of larger things, and I wanted to create a balance of structure and freedom for the performers. Retreat can mean different things to different people at different times, you know? But when things really got cacophonous people had to start following more specific commands as a group. I thought about each individual performer and assigned people to each other in specific combinations, and when things eventually entered a new section with irregular jazz rock-out rhythms they grouped themselves together and turned into a New Orleans jazz party. The piece ended when they all dispersed into the cemetery to walk around quietly by themselves. 

Damn! That sounds awesome! How are you going to translate this piece for new spaces and new performers? Because Dal Niente is a lot of things, but New Orleans jazz band we are not.

What I want is for the piece to be able to become a different “person” in new places and with new people, so we’ll be refiguring parts of it to fit with the people of Dal Niente and the spaces we’ll be performing in. Everything you play leaves something inside of you, and so each person has their own extensions and experiences and  flexibilities and information about what is meaningful to them. We all carry our own compositional messages and techniques from the things we make our own. I love processes that make pieces into themselves, music as a live organism. I love watching something create itself. Forward Echo is going to be a different piece with Dal Niente in Thalia Hall, but it’s also still going to be itself. 

I for one can’t wait to hear it. Do you have any final thoughts for us?

Just that doing something allows you to know more about it. One of the things that I learned from Water on the Bridge, my project with Lia Kohl, is that cellos slowly rise to the surface even when they’re full of water, and how that has its very own quiet beauty. It’s the resistance of the materials to be in their own state; even underwater, they’re still cellos. I’ve been a cellist my whole life and I didn’t know that. But when you look at something on another horizon you can learn new things about it.

I think we’ve reached a point where we more readily cross-pollinate between different types of art, and festivals like Instigation and Big Ears are super important because they just have such a wide variety of things in them. Quality speaks, and when we open up spaces where people can hear new things they can discover for themselves what they find to be good. It gives us keys to new doors, and new worlds.

Cover photo credit: Todd Rosenberg

Interview: Pierce Gradone on writing for Andy Nogal

Ammie Brod interviews composer Pierce Gradone about On a Blue Burst of Lake, which will receive its world premiere on January 18, 2020.

“The Harbor
Carl Sandburg
Passing through huddled and ugly walls,
By doorways where women haggard
Looked from their hunger-deep eyes,
Haunted with shadows of hunger-hands,
Out from the huddled and ugly walls,
I came sudden, at the city’s edge,
On a blue burst of lake,
Long lake waves breaking under the sun
On a spray-flung curve of shore;
And a fluttering storm of gulls,
Masses of great gray wings
And flying white bellies
Veering and wheeling free in the open.”

AB: I *love* the Sandberg poem that the title comes from. Who brought that to the table, and does it factor into the piece in musical ways? And does this piece have a special connection or resonance with Chicago, either musically/artistically or emotionally? 

PG: I’m fairly certain that I’ve wanted to set Sandberg’s “The Harbor” since I moved to Chicago. I live about a block from Lake Michigan, so it’s played a large role in my daily life, be it walking my dog on the water or barbecuing at Promontory Point. I think I chose this title because Andy and I share a love for this part of the country, and the lake in particular; so I wanted this piece for him to reflect that. 

The poem does play a musical role in the piece, albeit in a somewhat subtle way. The two movements represent the dual nature of the lake: the first as a tempestuous duel between piano and oboe; and the second as the placid calm on a sunny day, when the lake is nearly transparent. It also roughly mirrors the two-part structure of the poem, in which the narrator walks through the industrialized gloom of early 20th century Chicago and suddenly finds himself captivated by this “blue burst of lake."

AB: How much did you and Andy collaborate through this process? Are there specific things about Andy as a person and/or performer that had impact on the piece itself? 

PG: Andy and I have worked together many times, so many of the technical issues were already understood. However, we did have one workshop in which we explored some of the timbral and harmonica possibilities of combining some of the oboe’s richer multiphonics (multiple notes played at once) with chords in the piano. I would also (as I tend to do with most commissions), send mostly completed sections or movements for review.

AB: Do you have any nuts and bolts stuff that you'd like to mention about the piece? 

PG: I think this piece is as close to a “sonata” as I’m likely to get (except that it’s perhaps a sonata for both instruments in terms of technical difficulty). In certain ways, the piece has a romantic sensibility, despite a richly chromatic harmonic structure. Perhaps it’s the voice-like nature of the instrument, or that I simply have a romantic notion of the city and its lakefront. I often struggle with slower movements, but I must say that I really love the slow second movement of this piece, especially its simplicity of line and color.  As I’m growing older, I’m far more accepting of simple, unadorned moments in my music, and I think that this movement is a good example of that.

Listen to Andrew Nogal perform the world premiere of On a Blue Burst of Lake at the Holtschneider Performance Center on January 18, 2020.

Luis Fernando Amaya on Bestiario: Tres - Animacy, Agency, and the Secret Life of Music

Ammie Brod sat down with Luis Fernando Amaya to talk about his new work, Bestiario: Tres for percussion and guitar, which Kyle Flens and Jesse Langen premiered in August of this year and which they will perform at Elastic Arts on Friday October 11.

Cover art by Daniel Robles Lizano

Kyle told me that your piece had an interesting story behind it, so maybe that’s a good place to start.

Well, it’s kind of weird, maybe…

Weird is good! I can work with that.

I’m going to back up a little bit then. Bestiario: tres for percussion, electric guitar, and electronics is from a cycle of pieces that I’ve been composing, and it’s part of an ongoing effort on my part to think about agency, not just in humans but in plants and animals and objects as well. For example, I could think about how these chairs we’re sitting in have agency, because the way that they interact with us has concrete effects. If they’re uncomfortable, we move. If they invite us to sit in a certain way to be more comfortable, we do. They might even determine how long we will be talking! They’re part of the story of us sitting here together, even if we don’t think about them that much.

Okay, I get that. I’ve been reading a book (Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer) that talks about this as well. It’s by an indigenous botanist, and while beginning to learn her native language as an adult she realized that it was structured to give concrete living identity to things like lakes and forests and flowers, which implies a very different world view than most of us seem to be working off of lately. She calls it animacy.

Yeah, exactly. I wanted to use composition to connect with others (not just people) differently, and I actually did start this train of thought with plants. We experience plants in all of these different ways, sight and smell and touch and taste, but what we can't do is hear them. We can hear things that happen to them, but it's not the same as hearing them. What would it sound like if we could? I feel like it would be completely different from animals—humans included! I wanted to enhance my attention to relate to these different beings, to see if I could think more about what it would be like to experience the world as a plant. 

My dissertation piece, Árbol de Bocas (Tree of Mouths), is going to be an opera where the only character is a tree. The tree grows animal (or at least animal-like) mouths instead of leaves, and the opera lets us listen to one year of the tree’s life. 

Um, that’s *really* cool. So how does that relate to the Bestiario cycle?

The premise behind this cycle is basically that I try to write a piece that helps me to create an imaginary animal in my mind and compose with it. And I mean actually compose with it, where the animal has volition and ends up helping to drive the form and ideas in the piece.

Whoa. Okay, so how does that work? I’m asking both intellectually and functionally.

Functionally, I start by thinking about a sound I’d like to hear. For example, I might think about a small, fast, very high sound that maybe doesn’t sound like an instrument at all. Then when I meet up with the performer or performers that I’m writing the piece for, we try to figure out ways to create that sound or something close to it. I record what we come up with and spend a lot of time listening to it and thinking about what kind of animal might make a sound like that. Eventually that sound leads to another sound, and at some point in the process (usually kind of late, actually) I figure out what kind of animal I’ve imagined and what it’s doing that would make these sounds. I follow the path of the sounds until I find the animal.

It’s often a different type of animal than I thought it would be or sometimes it’s multiple members of the same species. They usually want to do animal things (which are also human and even vegetal things) like eat or sleep or mate or communicate, and their desire to do these things forces me to negotiate around and with them. For instance, when I was working on this piece for Kyle and Jesse I realized that one of the sounds they were making was the animal breathing, and then I had to constantly make sure that I made space for the animal to breathe throughout the piece. At one point, the animal was calling to others of the same species, which I imagined being miles away, and I had to wait for their response before I could move on. So even though this creature technically exists only in my head, its existence still drives the structure of what I write and sends me in directions that I wouldn’t have gone on my own. I really do feel that it has agency as an active participant in the creative process.

Photo by Ana María Bermúdez

It’s so interesting to think about something being imaginary and real at the same time. 

It’s not really any different from a character in a novel. An author creates a character and defines a bunch of traits and things about them, and then if they hit a point where they can’t force the character to do what they want that changes the course of the story.

True. Can you tell me a little bit more about the piece itself, apart from this concept?

Of course. The piece starts with Kyle and Jesse whistling very low, so low that it doesn’t even really sound like a whistle, and at the same time Kyle is bowing a vibraphone key and pressing on it with a rubber mallet to create microtonal gradations in the sound. The next sound is an expansive swell, and that’s when I started to realize that what we were hearing was breath. 

Kyle and Jesse also make a sound that I really love by rubbing a superball over an amplified ceramic tile. It’s really wild! They also use a bowed flexatone to play the highest harmonics possible. It sounds kind of organic and kind of like a noise an animal would make, and it reminds me of a bird I used to hear when I was younger. I’d always hear it in mesquite trees, and it sounded like a cross between a factory machine and some kind of space bird.

That reminds me: one of the things I like about this whole thing is its synthesis of art and science, biology and music. Can you talk a little bit about that and how you came to it?

I grew up in Aguascalientes, México, in an area that was basically a semi-desert sprinkled with houses when I was a child but was radically transformed over the years until many of the trees I grew up around were destroyed and the animals moved on to other places. Watching that happen, I had a deep feeling that it was a really unwise thing to do and that, obviously, it would come back to affect us in various ways. It felt like people just didn’t want to have the responsibility of cohabiting with anyone but themselves. I haven’t heard the bird I just mentioned in five years, I think because of people cutting the mesquites down without any consideration.

There’s a word, solastalgia, that means either a global or local sense of distress at environmental destruction, and for me it’s the feeling of watching my homeland being destroyed by construction companies. That feeling made me want to rethink how I related to the environment and non-human subjects. A lot of indigenous cultures in America (the continent) had and have a very different conception of how they fit into those things, and those ideas always made more sense to me than an ideal of perpetual growth and destruction in the name of "progress." It made sense to bring some of those ideas into how I think about composing as well as how I think about the world.

Is there some overlap there? It seems like you view these pieces as an outgrowth of your efforts to live in the world differently, and I’m wondering if there’s a reciprocal relationship between them. If rethinking your place on the planet influenced your writing, did your writing also influence how you think about the world?

Definitely! In my daily life I really experience others’ agency very differently now. Here's a small and funny example: I was in Paris recently, and while I was there I found a mouse in my room. As soon as I heard it, I sat and watched it. Was it a rat? No, it was a tiny mouse. What was it doing? I watched it and it never quite did what I expected. Like, it was climbing up the curtains in this strange way that didn’t make sense to me, and it never went where I thought it would. And I found that I experienced that lack of understanding in a much more open way than before. We were in the same space and doing our own things, and even if we didn’t want exactly the same things we could still both be there. Yes, the mouse's presence was inconvenient to me, but my presence was a threat to the mouse's life! But it probably didn’t understand what I was doing anymore than I could understand what it was doing.

Thinking about how the creatures I imagine need to behave structurally within my pieces also makes a lot of behaviors more understandable to me. Think about animals competing for resources, for example. They’re trying to get what they need to survive, and they’re negotiating with their environment to find a way to do that and sometimes that’s a violent thing because other creatures need some of the same things. Humans, who are also animals, are exactly the same as we try to coexist with each other, and even if it seems less violent I don’t think it really is. Personally, I’d rather deal with the inherent violence of sharing the space I have with the needs of others than commit the much larger violence that would be required so that I don't have to do that. Unfortunately, human society isn’t really doing a great job at this overall, and we're doing terrible things to everyone on the planet, directly and indirectly, for the sake of comfort.

I can’t and won’t disagree with that. But let’s end on a brighter note. What have been some of the best and/or more unexpected parts of this project for you?

I think that understanding and changing how one relates to others can fundamentally make a change in the world. That's why I believe that such a personal project can also be socially and politically meaningful—the "personal" always makes its way into the "collective"! With my Bestiario, I usually don’t tell people about what specific animal I’ve imagined for a piece, because I want them to imagine their own animals (or whatever else they might come up with.) That means that each piece actually holds all of our imaginary beings inside of it, and it can keep growing with every new listener. It makes the piece personal on an individual level, and every new performer and listener I talk to or who hears it makes it larger. It's a very small thing overall but it's something that is meaningful to me and I've found that’s also true for others, which makes me happy.

Interview: Ben Melsky on the many voices of the harp

Ammie Brod sat down with Ben Melsky to talk about his new record, Ben Melsky / Ensemble Dal Niente, and the process of creating new music for the harp.

So, how did this CD come into being? Did you have a specific idea or goal in mind, or was it a more open-ended process?

Well, in a lot of ways this was a practical project: I commissioned a bunch of pieces, and then I wanted to record them and make a CD. 

What about the commissioning process itself? What were you looking for in a collaborator, and what prompted you to reach out to these specific composers?

There’s a few answers to this. First, I wanted to do was work with composers who hadn’t necessarily written a bunch of major parts for the harp but that I knew had written some really imaginative and ‘out there’ stuff for other instruments. The harp as a musical instrument has its own specific set of musical grammars, and I wanted to see what kinds of new languages and material we could come up with by approaching it from more of an outside perspective. 

The harp is an instrument with so much historical background, and that can obscure its essential identity as an object that makes sounds. I wanted the harp’s potentials to be more forgrounded than its historical roles and usage. I wanted to find some new ideas, things that made people question  how on earth a harp could be creating that sound profile. 

In new music we sometimes talk about expanding the vocabulary of an instrument. Is what you’re talking about a way of doing that?

Expanding vocabulary suggests a point of departure, or a home base. I think that starting from that place can really limit the scope of what you can imagine an instrument doing, particularly with an instrument like the harp that has so much historical baggage to deal with. I wanted to figure out ways to work non-linearly and find whole new ways of looking at the instrument instead of beginning with a set of assumptions.

Can you give me some examples of how you did this?

Actually, the first sound on the CD doesn’t sound like a harp at all; it sounds kind of like a muted guiro. Tomas (Gueglio) and I started with the idea of a sound and then messed around on the harp until we found something that created what we wanted, and that became the central technique for the entire piece.

For Alican (Çamcı’s) perde, we started in a different place entirely. Alican took the vocal inflections from a recording of a poem being read, and he mapped them directly onto sounds and techniques from both the flute and the harp. The harp writing in particular is very multidimensional and distinct. How the writing explores the registers and timbres, all based on the inflections of a recitation, is rather remarkable. 

I’ve always found harp to be a really fertile medium for extended techniques and interesting physical interactions with objects that aren’t inherently musical. While the instagrammer in me confesses to a weakness for a good photo op (viola+espresso cup=internet gold, for instance), on a musical level I’d love to hear you talk more about the role this plays on your new album. 

It’s true that there are  a lot of objects in this album. I use everything from superballs and mallets to poster tack and my own harp calluses to create some of these effects. One of my favorite instances of this is in Eliza Brown’s On-dit for harp and voice, where I use a paintbrush on the harp’s strings to create a kind of dialogue with vocalist Amanda DeBoer Bartlett’s breathing. Beyond loving the sound, I like that we can create a conversation between objects from different artistic spheres; paintbrushes are traditionally in the realm of visual art, and using them to create sound and interact with our breath and our bodies like this creates multiple layers of connection, between both objects and ideas. It allows both the performer and the listener to connect to the objects and the sounds they create in uniquely personal ways.

Any last words you want to share with us about this show?

I can’t talk about this album with out quoting Igor Santos’ program note.

""anima" highlights the anthropomorphic properties of both harp and percussion through an interplay between instruments and performer vocalization. For each non-linguistic utterance and articulation there exists an instrumental equivalent, and a continuum between voice and instrument is established at every point. Orchestrated as such, the piece dramatizes the instruments as entities with physical—organic—bodies, in search of some kind of "soul"." 

What or where are instruments’ souls? And what does it mean when we add others to the mix? If the soul of a piece is in the playing and the performance, it’s also in the performer and their approach to the material, and the objects creating the sounds. Maybe by thinking about where the soul lies, we can start to reinvent how we create music.

Ben Melsky, Constance Volk, and Alejandro Acierto, Berlin 2019

Chris Fisher-Lochead: Stutter-Step Revisited

One of the cornerstones of Party 2018 is “stutter-step the concept” by longtime ensemble friend (and fan) Chris Fisher-Lochhead. Originally premiered by Dal Niente at the Ear Taxi Festival, we’ll be playing an updated and expanded version on June 2nd. Dal Niente violist Ammie Brod chatted with CFL about his revision process, creative sources, and baroque object rotation.

Ammie: So we played this piece before, in 2016, but I know you’ve made some substantial revisions since then. Wanna talk about that?

CFL: I wrote stutter-step during a really chaotic period in my life - I was finishing grad school, working on my dissertation, and moving to a totally different part of the country - so my original creative process felt a little rushed and hectic. Basically, I liked the piece but I also knew I wanted to do more with it. In addition, I like it when creative processes are allowed to have multiple stages, and my revisions had more of an additive quality than anything like a total reworking. I wanted to layer more material on top of the structural skeleton I’d already built, to embellish and flesh it out, not to totally reconceive the piece. 

Ammie: When we initially played this piece, I know we were all really struck by a sentence in the performance notes where you describe the piece as “a baroquely detailed physical object which is slowly rotating, exposing its many aspects,” and then you go on to talk about how the piece is a series of sonic “slices” of musical material. Those two ideas really form an interesting picture of the piece before it even gets going, and I’d like to talk about how you got there.

CFL: My basic approach to this particular piece came from a desire to consciously channel my love of hip-hop into a notated work. I intentionally drew on the tradition of building beats out of samples, discrete units of material, which are the “slices” I’m talking about. I love how hip-hop uses unexpected juxtapositions to create something new that can’t really be achieved through other means, and I wanted to use that idea to build a sonic surface like a mosaic of heterogeneous musical atoms. I mean, I don’t think anybody could reverse-engineer their way from my piece to hip-hop without knowing the connection, but there it is. The initial work was very pointilistic and intentionally didn’t smudge boundaries or create larger washes; it wasn’t really trying to go anywhere, but was instead an exploration of ways to look at the components that it’s built from. In this updated version, I did allow some amount of more intuitive creativity. Basically, I wanted to take the sampling technique and allow the ways in which those samples are combined to give rise to a fuller musical language. In my mind, I was thinking of this as an analog of the linguistic process of creolization, in which severed and decontextualized pieces of different languages integrate throughout generations to form a new systematic whole.

The way I intuitively crafted these embellishments on the slice structure feels reminiscent of improvisatory group dynamics. As an improviser myself, I've thought a great deal about how to create some sense of coherence and individuation within an ensemble where everyone is improvising. Of course, in this case, the level of detail and complexity that is prescribed in the score is totally unlike the ethos of freedom in improvised music; but, for me, both approaches serve a similar purpose. Reflecting on this kinship between improvisation and notational complexity reminds me of a personal epiphany I had in my early twenties. At the time I was really anti-complexity, but one morning as my music library was playing on shuffle, I ended up hearing John Coltrane's Sun Ship and Brian Ferneyhough's Second Quartet back-to-back. Right then, it clicked for me that both musicians were trying to do similar things in entirely different ways. Coltrane was using these unruly rhythmic gestures and pairing them with an intimate and extensive knowledge of how his instrument worked to articulate a revelatory catharsis of musical energy; Ferneyhough was applying a deeply considered critical awareness of how musical notation works and what instrumentalists are capable of within that framework and doing the same thing by stretching notation and technique to the breaking point. Realizing that these two different approaches could provoke similar outcomes broke the spell of some pretty naive aesthetic prejudices that I was holding on to at that time.

Ammie: Yeah, I definitely wasn’t like, ah yes, hip-hop, when I got my part, but that makes sense. What else went into this piece that the listeners (and musicians) might not know?

CFL: When I was looking back on this, I realized that it was written in the middle of the 2016 presidential campaign. I remember thinking a lot about the overt use of images and words to coerce, cajole, or persuade people, and I was so disgusted by that constant manipulation that I think I subconsciously tried to avoid narrative musical devices. I came to think of the music as something formally concretized, not as a temporal succession of sounds organized tendentiously to elicit an emotional reaction. In other words, I imagine that the experience of listening to the piece would be more like viewing a sculpture than hearing a story, thus the object rotating metaphor.

“stutter-step the concept” comes to Constellation Chicago on June 2nd as part of Party 2018. You can find more information about the other pieces on the program (shadow puppets! escalators!) and ticket information here.

Teaser: Chris Fisher-Lochhead's "stutter-step the concept"

One of the centerpieces of Party 2018 is Chris Fisher-Lochhead's "stutter-step the concept". We'll have more from Chris in a few days about his ongoing work with this piece, but for now here's a look back on our 2016 premiere (and a few words from Chris about his process).

"In hip-hop beat-making, I am drawn to the way that samples, found sonic objects pried from their original contexts, are able to reassemble a musical intelligibility in their new settings, much like the linguistic process of creolization. In stutter-step the concept, I tried to mimic and leverage this formal process." 

Party 2018 hits Chicago June 2nd at Constellation Chicago. Are you ready?