(Above, Steve Reich talks to members of 8bb prior to the world premiere of Double Sextet at the University of Richmond on March 26, 2008.)

Steve Reich’s Double Sextet, a work commissioned and performed all over the world by 8bb, has won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for music. According to the panel of judges, it is “a major work that displays an ability to channel an initial burst of energy into a large-scale musical event, built with masterful control and consistently intriguing to the ear.”

This is the second year in a row that an 8bb-commissioned and premiered piece has been nominated (Stephen Hartke’s kickass Meanwhile was given that honor in 2008), but the first time a commission has won the coveted prize. We will be recording the work in September for Nonesuch Records, and that recording will hopefully be released in 2010.

Before that, you can learn about the piece on our website! Over in the projects part of our site there is a section named for the touring show that involves the Reich, The Only Moving Thing. There you will find program notes, an interview with Reich about the piece, blog entries (including videos), press highlights and a short excerpt from one of the early performances.

A very hearty congratulations to the fabulous Mr Reich on behalf of all us 8bb folks! And a hearty thank you to all of the co-commissioning partners who made this piece a reality: The Carnegie Hall Corporation, The Abe Fortas Memorial Fund of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Liverpool Cultural Company – European Capital of Culture 2008, The Modlin Center for the Arts at the University of Richmond (our wonderful second home, where the premiere took place), Orange County Performing Arts Center, The University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music – Music 08 Festival.

Update: NPR’s All Things Considered has a story on the Pulitzers this evening, which includes a short interview with Steve Reich and concludes with the last 30 seconds of 8bb playing Double Sextet.

Above, watch 8bb perform Eel – four funky, canonic minutes of Dennis DeSantis-created madness – on Chicago TV station WGN’s midday news. You can also click here. The footage features Dennis DeSantis (far right in the video) remixing his own composition live. Ryan Ingebritsen acted as balance engineer for the performance.

The folks at Channel 9 treated us very well, and we were even given a guided tour of the studio in which the legendary Bozo the Clown worked for forty years. (For Aussies: think Humphrey B Bear, who rather frighteningly has been on the air for 42 years)

The performance kicked off a second (very) short period of intense work with Dennis DeSantis in advance of our January 26 Harris Theater show (which is just a week away, so make sure you buy tickets!). Click here to read about our first session, which took place in December. I shot some video from rehearsals today, and will post more comments when that is uploaded to YouTube. (I also have teaser footage from our first rehearsals of Steve Reich’s brand new piece, which I will post this weekend, I promise!)

Each year the festival commissions one or two new works for 8bb to premiere. Last year it was pieces by Michael Barnhardt and Ashley Fure; this year it was a new composition by the polite, soft-spoken composer Frances White, called The Ocean Inside. As you will hear on a forthcoming podcast interview with Frances, since 1995 the composer has studied the shakuhachi (a Japanese end-blown flute). She particularly loves “honkyoku, the traditional meditative music for this instrument.” These melodies function in their culture rather like Gregorian chant did in ours: “like chant, they exist not so much as “pieces of music” but rather for the purpose of devotion.” In her slow, soft, lyrical piece, The Ocean Inside, Frances used one of these tunes as a cantus firmus, and as such “it is the hidden melodic heart out of which the entire piece grows – ‘the ocean inside’.”

Here is that interview, including excerpts from The Ocean Inside. Enjoy!

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Like all of our new works so far this season, this little electronic package came a little while past its due date.

A brief aside about due dates. Composers are often surprised by how far in advance of the world premiere we want score and parts. As an example, let’s take the Bang on a Can commission: the premiere is not until March 2008, while the score and parts were due August 2007. Why do we need so much time? The truth is we need every last millisecond: time to memorize 45 minutes of music; to rehearse the piece as an ensemble (and we are on tour, unable to rehearse, for several months in the Spring); and to work three times with Susan Marshall, developing the choreography from scratch.

The late delivery of the works left us with just three short days to bash through (sight-read) Michael, Julia and David’s interesting and diverse pieces before Susan arrived for a short and intensive workshop period, in our studio, prior to Thanksgiving. Susan had not previously heard any of the music, and had only chatted briefly with each of the composers about specific choreographic ideas. Our lack of musical preparation took its toll on the workshop process, as the necessity of music stands meant we were mostly unable to experiment with movement while playing.

For someone with a long history of working with her own dance company, Susan was remarkably open to new ideas and suggestions from complete strangers and total non-dancers. The workshop progressed much more like a fluid choreographic improvisation than hard-headed, logical process.

In person, Susan makes quite an impression. She is thin with striking, chiseled features; she carries herself with a dancer’s poise and possesses an aristocratic elegance that make her seem a foot taller than she is; she is wired with an electric intensity that gives working sessions a high energy level.

We started the first day working on Julia’s 15-minute piece, as it had the most explicit choreography marked in the score. At certain points the Kap and the Duv, then later the Mac and the Aussie, are directed to make noise on some sandpaper. In preparation for rehearsal, the Duv made a trip to the local hardware store, and came back with this wide selection of different types of sandpaper:

First, we tried various ways of walking upright on the sandpaper to create both interesting sounds and visual images. Nothing we tried was satisfactory. We also tried a little sandpaper slow dancing; below, the Alb and the Kap attempt to make beautiful music together, rubbing bits of sandpaper on each other’s backs:

Susan suggested real sand, so it was back to the hardware store for a big bag of playpen fun. Resisting the urge to build sandcastles, we spread handfuls of the stuff onto a big table, then began to experiment. You can see some of our experiments with Susan in the YouTube clip below.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Below, the Kap and the Duv do some dirty work in Julia’s piece:

Julia Wolfe’s composition is something of a study in contrasts. Repetitive, trance-like pulsing gives way to an extended, static, beautiful string/wind texture. An outburst of fast, polyrhythmic, violent music for the whole ensemble explodes suddenly; the expressive marking is “Funky”, then “Trance-like groove”. These different elements combine and collide until a climactic “Grand and Passionate” confrontation between the piano and the rest of the group ushers in a short, slow, “Lush” section.

In contrast, Michael Gordon’s piece is insistent and unyielding in its constant alternation of the same basic ideas. A funky low cello line, repeated obsessively for the 15 minutes of the piece, provides the backdrop to a variety of different textures that alternate and confront one another: a syncopated rhythm on very high piccolo, clarinet and vibraphone; fast, nervous, irregular scalic patterns; tolling bells. The pivotal dramatic moment comes when four ensemble members all start pounding, glissing and strumming the piano.

Michael’s piece presented the biggest choreographic challenge. All of us switch to play a variety of “alternate” instruments, including bells, piano accordian, guitar and keyboard; we have to make very fast switches from one to another with no rhyme or reason. Musical relationships are built up between players for just a moment, then destroyed. Any movements to highlight these relationships would be fast, furious, and probably distracting for an audience.

Below, Lisa jammin’:

David Lang’s three fabulous 5-minute pieces are very different from one another. The first is an aural assault: a hectic, chaotic barrage of irregular, loud, accented rhythmic gestures. The second piece is the glorious, funky bastard child of the heavily pounding, rhythmic cheating, lying, stealing. The music for both is full-on, all in, and any movement would just feel tacked-on. As a result, these pieces will remain un-choreographed, acting as musical interludes between more heavily choreographed sections of the whole Bang on a Can work.

The third of David’s pieces, a very slow passacaglia, is marked “thin, distant and creepy”. This is an odd sort of passacaglia, as the long notes of the passacaglia “theme” don’t occur until several minutes into the piece; a static, high flute/vibraphone texture begins. This provides aural wallpaper to accompany other members of the ensemble, who are called upon by the composer “to drop pieces of metal on floor and walk around”. The mood is funereal, and the piece has a ritualistic quality.

We experimented with having all four non-playing members walk aimlessly, dropping small metal objects, like silverware, buckets and nails. This seemed too comic for the character of the music. It became clear to Susan that the piece could deal with aspects of grief and loss in an effective way. The Mac took the role of suffering protagonist: he was loaded with an armful of found objects, and literally struggled to cope with his load, losing hold of these objects, which one-by-one fell to the ground.

Below, Susan Marshall works with the gang:

For more photos from our first two days working with Susan Marshall, click here.

“We have some music of this type, then, meanwhile, there is something else going on here. Meanwhile, over there there is something else entirely.”

This is how Stephen Hartke describes the origin of his new piece Meanwhile, a set of six character-pieces that 8bb premiered several weeks ago at University of Richmond, as part of an all-Hartke extravaganza. You can hear him talk about the genesis of the piece, and the experience of working with eighth blackbird, in the second of 8bb’s Composer Chit-chat podcasts, below.

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Hartke wanted to turn 8bb into an imaginary “court orchestra” from a non-existant non-Western culture, of which the composer himself is master. So the work deploys a bucket-load of odd-sounding percussion instruments, lots of unusual musical gestures and an endlessly creative instrumental combinations.

Hartke was inspired by a number of interesting sources to create his often truly madcap music. The wildly disjunct melodic contours and extended techniques of the hysterically dramatic bass clarinet solo in Meanwhile’s third movement, Narration, is inspired by the unique sound of Japanese bunraku narrator. Check out some fascinating video clips of Bunraku performances here. Hartke wants the shrill, thrilling C-major end to the work, in which two antiphonally placed flexatones, a prepared piano, cymbals and gongs throw clangerous sounds at one another, to sound like “a Chinese wedding celebration.” The Spike-fiddling movement turns the viola into an instrument like the Kamancheh, a thin, nasal-sounding 4-stringed Persian instrument that has melodies played both above and below a constant drone.

So when Linda Fairtile, librarian-extraordinaire at the UR School of Music, asked me to podcast with her about some new purchases she’d made for her library, I jumped at the chance. I mean, I like knowing about composers and what they’re doing, it’s just that I spend all day practicing and rehearsing and talking about new music — when I’m done, it’s hard to make more time to learn more about it. But I did, and had a great time in doing it. Linda’s posted this podcast on the UR website. Check it out, then check out the discs we talk about here, here, and here.

Bustard writes of a “sturdy cultural barrier”, marked by the “Beltway, a rail line and commuter highway that separates older central districts from more upscale neighborhoods to the west.” This barrier has separated 8bb “from much of its natural local constituency.”

Playing at First Fridays, we came into contact with the YH&A (“Young, hip and artsy”):

The YH&As responded enthusiastically, at times uproariously, to the ’birds. These musicians know how to play to a downtown crowd – that’s what they do in many of their tour engagements – and their repertory is unmistakably on the alt-side of the generational divide: upbeat, physical, quirky, whimsical, spicily sauced brain food.

Richmond’s downtowners audibly relished their taste of eighth blackbird. Now let’s see how many cross the Beltline for seconds.

Yes, let’s see…

In the meantime, below are some photos and a video compilation of performances from the Gala event on the previous evening.

Preparing the space in the afternoon:

Nick playing Ben Broening’s Dark Wood. The composer, cueing sound sample, is in the bottom, right-hand corner of the photo:

The Aussie playing Jen Higdon’s rapid-fire:

Boyish good looks, aw-shucks charm, laid-back good-naturedness, serious composition chops. Ben Broening sure has it all goin’ on – but, hmmm, haven’t you always wanted to know about the history of his renowned 3P electroacoustic fest at University of Richmond VA, where he (and 8bb) teach? Haven’t you been burning to find out why he was in Estonia for 6 months in the spring? Don’t you feel dirty for not being made aware of a possible new direction in his compositional style? Aren’t you just palpitating at the thought of a new flute/electronics piece to be premiered by 8bb’s illustrious “T-Money” next year?

Welcome to the first in what will hopefully, according to my introduction to Ben’s interview, “be a long and illustrious series” of amusing, insightful, gripping composer chats. If Ben sounds slightly distracted, it is because the interview took place during last-minute preparations for the 3P festival a couple of weeks ago.

Music extracts come from Ben’s work for clarinet and electronics, Arioso/Doubles, performed by Arthur Campbell, clarinet.

Next week, Frances White on how the shakuhachi changed her compositional life! Then, in episode 3, Stephen Hartke and the pain of working with a completely invented instrument – the “flexatone gamelan”!

Enjoy. Your comments and suggestions would be most welcome.

We were in Richmond the weekend of October 20 to take our regular place as artists-in-residence at University of Richmond’s stylistically diverse, sometimes frustrating but always popular and entertaining Third Practice Electroacoustic Music Festival. You can read my comments about last year’s festival here, here and here.

According to Ben Broening, the festival’s Artistic Director and an all-round nice bloke, this year’s festival focused “on pieces that incorporate, reimagine, reflect or respond to musical instruments, practices, sonic environments and traditions from around the world.” Hm. That definition really covers all music written anywhere at any time, but I suppose Ben was hedging his bets a little. For the big new pieces, the “sonic environments” concerned were those of non-western cultures: Japan and Indonesia.

Each year at the festival, 8bb features on one concert program, and the major piece on our concert this year was a Balinesian shadow puppet extravaganza that was a collaboration between a whole host of folks from many different traditions, hailing from all around the world. You can read more about this project, and watch some video from an early music rehearsal, here.

Here is the audience flooding the stage after the entertaining work’s conclusion:

This picture shows the working space of Gusti, our entertaining master shadow puppetier. You can see his pile of shadow puppets, including, face up in the box, one of the monk characters that really stole the show. For this performance, Gusti went out on a limb, working for the first time in English and without a script, and still managed to have the audience rolling in the aisles.

Also on the 8bb program was the second performance of Ben Broening’s new piece for cello and electronics, Dark Wood. As you will hear, on the first of 8bb’s new series of composer interviews (that I will post tomorrow), the work was something of a departure for Ben, containing a substantial, fast, violent section. The video attached to this post was taken at Nick’s dress rehearsal of the work, with the composer twiddling the knobs, and consists of the work’s slow, almost eerie end.

Each year the festival commissions one or two new works for 8bb to premiere. Last year it was pieces by Michael Barnhardt and Ashley Fure; this year it was a new composition by the polite, soft-spoken composer Frances White, called The Ocean Inside. As you will hear on a forthcoming podcast interview with Frances, since 1995 the composer has studied the shakuhachi (a Japanese end-blown flute). She particularly loves “honkyoku, the traditional meditative music for this instrument.” These melodies function in their culture rather like Gregorian chant did in ours: “like chant, they exist not so much as “pieces of music” but rather for the purpose of devotion.” In her slow, soft, lyrical piece, The Ocean Inside, Frances used one of these tunes as a cantus firmus, and as such “it is the hidden melodic heart out of which the entire piece grows – ‘the ocean inside’.”

I played a virtuosic, totally madcap work for flute and tape by Australian composer Martin Wesley-Smith. The composer chooses to construct his tape part out of the simplest of all possible electronic materials, a pure sine-wave sound, but the rhythmic complexity necessitated by the improvisatory feel of the piece makes flute/tape coordination anything but simple. Reactions to the piece ranged from the very possitive to the downright, stubbornly offensive. One reason for this passionate range of reactions could have been the odd disconnect in the work between the extra-musical material of the piece (the final hours of five Australian journalists murdered in East Timor in 1975) and the almost hysterical high-spirits of much of the music.

To open the four-concert-long festival, So Percussion teamed up with guitar/hardanger fiddle duo Trollstilt for an hour-long, multimedia meditation of the nature of gardens. Highlights included a percussion quartet performed inside a wheelbarrow, and during the work’s thirteen movements several famous folks’ gardens were “profiled”, including those of John Cage, Henri Mattise, Georges Noel. Interesting ideas, but I found the sections overlong and the video component strangely anonymous and lacking in variety.

For my money the most interesting work of the weekend opened the Saturday morning concert, a work by Paul Elwood for banjo, voice and computer
(all provided/operated by Paul). Called BorderRadioX, it was a tribute to illegal, across-the-border radio stations in Mexico, which for many years pumped out country music tunes all across America, totally unrestricted by US law. The work was something of a melange of wildly different musical styles, as traditional folk/bluegrass tunes both sung and played on banjo collided with complex computer- and human-generated sounds. It should, by rights, have been baffling and frustrating, but somehow managed to be both funny and oddly fascinating.

The concert came at the end of a satisfying but hectic week at DePauw University in Greencastle IN. Matthew and I made the uneventful eight-hour haul from Greencastle to Kansas City on the day before our performance, and arrived in the city early enough for me to attend the first half of the Kansas City Symphony’s first subscription concert of the season.

At the helm of this incredibly young orchestra (in which the average age of players looked to be around 35) was Michael Stern, a young conductor with a passionate interest in new American music and a friend of our group, having conducted 8bb in a concerto by David Schober with his Germantown TN-based chamber orchestra, IRIS.

I made it to the hall in time hear the pre-concert interview with Stern, and thought myself quite cheeky for asking a question about new music: “Maestro, you are a champion of new music. Can you talk about some of the rewards and challenges of programming new music in a big, conservative institution like this orchestra?” Stern seemed quite put-out by this question, and began a standard soapbox speech justifying the relevance of performing new music. At one point he compared new music to new scientific inventions, and claimed that “Brahms would have loved the toilet”.

There were many spare seats during the KSS concert. The very plain-looking hall was acoustically a very dead, dry space, but I was impressed with the high quality of the orchestra, especially the strings and brass. The brand new principal flute (apparently it was his first subscription concert since winning the audition) played a beautiful solo at the beginning of Jennifer Higdon’s moving, personal work, blue cathedral. I wasn’t too fond of Garrick Ohlson’s dour, straightforward Chopin, but there was a lot of nice detail in the orchestral accompaniment.

I had to rush away at intermission, missing what I’m sure would have been an impressive Pictures at an Exhibition, to do a late-night load-in at UMKC.

We were back at the hall by 10am the following morning, ready for what we anticipated would be a long, stressful day. Our UMKC concert was the first full run of our 2007/08 touring program, and there were huge technical challenges to surmount for every piece on the program: sound, lighting, movement and memory.

The dangerously-easy-to-work-with Ryan Ingebritson, our sound tech dude for the tour, flew in early that morning, and was as solid as a rock through whatever traumas came his way all day. The Mac and the Duv, as 8bb tech representatives, were also reliable figures of calm and confidence through the tech rehearsal. Also present was Mirrors‘ composer, Tamar Muskal, who was demanding, but mostly knew when to stand back and let things take their course.

Thanks again to all of the tech and support staff for working so efficiently to help us to get through what needed to be done, and a special thanks to the composition students, who were brilliant roadies after the show – lugging load after load of heavy gear. It is a wonderful feeling to be able to bark orders at willing slaves.

Below, the stage setup:

Below, the setup behind three enormous acoustic shells, hiding ensemble members who deliver spoken lines to a video camera in Martin Bresnick’s My Twentieth Century. Their images are projected onto the screen, visible to the audience:

Ten hours and some slightly frayed nerves later, at 6pm we ran off to get changed and down some food for the 7.30pm show. Many exclamations of 8bb’s new, ironic anthem could be heard, ringing through the hallways backstage:

“Keepin’ it simple in ’08!”

The Alb did the pre-concert lecture with composition professor Paul Rudy, and managed to find himself at the receiving end of a well-aimed barb from a conservative concert-goer. At one point, a strong, disgruntled voice boomed from the hall: “Won’t we all look back on music of the twentieth century and think, ‘what a tremendous waste of time’?”

Following the concert, Paul Rudy had all of us over to his lovely place to drink, eat, be merry, eat great pizza and have a relaxed meet-n-greet with enthusiastic, interesting members of the school’s large composition studio.

Staying with the “keepin’ it simple in ’08″ motto, we managed to sustain some transport injuries the following day. Twelve hours, one flat tire, some small navigational mishaps and at least one bruised ego later, we were home.

Below, after being told to switch tires so that the spare would be on the back, the Duv tries to remove the rear right wheel using the age-old stomping technique, with little success – it was rusted solid:

Below, Matt’s front right tire looking very much the worse for wear.

The attached video podcast was recorded during the dress rehearsal for Table Music, while the Kap’s lighting was still being adjusted.