It’s a beautifully sunny day in downtown Los Angeles.  The birds are singing, a cool breeze blows through my window as I sip my morning coffee (Peet’s, to be sure) and gaze out from the penthouse guest suites at the Colburn School at the resplendent Disney Concert Hall. In a few minutes, I’ll head down to the seemingly unlimited supply of acoustically pure practice rooms (open 24 hours a day!) to do my warm-ups and some memory work on the Adès and Hartke in preparation for our show in La Jolla tomorrow. On the way I might pick up a healthy snack at the Colburn Café which is a far cry from any campus dining hall I’ve ever been to.  A great selection from carb-conscious nibbles to indulgent sweets.

This state of the art facility is home to 110 or so of today’s brightest upcoming young performers who have come to hone their skill, expand their range and hopefully open their minds to consider new and different ways of expression.  For the next week, 8bb will make our home here as we collaborate and cross-pollinate with several of the top students here.  On Sunday April 26 at 3pm we will present a program where we’ve split the group down the middle and filled in the gaps with young players to perform Stephen Hartke’s Meanwhile, the seminal Pierrot Lunaire of Arnold Schoenberg starring the inimitable Lucy Shelton, and Steve Reich’s Double Sextet.

Yesterday we held our second rehearsal for Meanwhile which is getting some extra attention this week since we’ve asked the students to memorize the score and learn our choreography for the piece.  The group as it appears below in the gorgeous Olive St. rehearsal room is 50% Aussie and 50% American.  Tim now has a chance to speak his native tongue in rehearsals, excusing himself to the dunny, correcting someone’s unevenly executed, semi-quavers and planning for a bloody bonzer arvo trip to Amoeba Records.

Did I mention the students are good?  Bloody good. Well prepared, musically sensitive and all around fun folks.  I’m sure more documents of this exciting project will come out over the next week so keep a look-out.  I’ve got to get to the practice room!

Last week we (well, most of us (Lisa was traipsing around the country playing Varese. Always a good thing to do with your time off)) were home in Chicago, where we rehearsed, voted, answered emails, ate/slept/showered, crammed a couple month’s worth of social life into eight days — basically we did everything except perform. That was the first week since September without a performance, and unusually for us, those previous four weeks featured four different programs. Our first week was spent in Chicago at the beginning of October, during which we prepared a program of Benjamin, Boulez, Messiaen, Ptaszynska, Levinson, and Takemitsu for University of Chicago Presents’ Messiaen Festival. Second week was in Richmond, preparing for and recording a disc of works by Benjamin Broening, one of our colleagues on faculty at the University of Richmond. Week three was spent going to and from Australia to play The Only Moving Thing, and week four we played our new program Meanwhile (works of Adès, Agócs, DeSantis, Donatoni, Etezady, Hartke, and Rzewski) in Arizona and Colorado. Then last week was off (see first sentence of this paragraph), so that makes this current week number six, and we’re back in Richmond preparing for the Third Practice Festival, where we’ll perform together and separately in works by Balter, Broening (a repeat from week two!), Chandler, Hird, Maltis, Mok, Saariaho, Stebbins, and Tulev (a world premiere) . Next week (seven), we go to Oberlin and New York to do our American Mavericks program for the first time (repeat Reich from week three and Rzewski from four, but collaborate with live musicians (current Oberlin students) on the Reich Double Sextet for the first time and add a world premiere by Rzewski to the mix), and then travel to Vermont to do Meanwhile. The following week (eight, if you’re still keeping count) we go back home to do our first Harris program of the season, our collaboration with Glenn Kotche (in addition to his music, we’re playing Rzewski (again!) and Andriessen (first time!)), and then we fly to Europe to play The Only Moving Thing in Liverpool and Rotterdam.

And then, believe it or not, we’re taking off the week of Thanksgiving.

So that’s seven different programs in eight weeks: Messiaen festival, Broening disc, The Only Moving Thing, Meanwhile, Third Practice, American Mavericks, and Kotche. Yes, there’s some overlap, but you get the idea. Don’t get me wrong, we LOVE being busy and playing concerts, but we’ve never had to do this many different concerts in such a short period before. It’s definitely not as easy as it used to be, with the travel and logistics not seeming to get any easier the more years (working on thirteen of those, BTW) we’ve spent on the road. On the other hand, that’s a lot of cities and schools that want to present us, and people all over the world who want to come to those concerts. Much of this rep is among the best that we’ve ever played: I’m particularly fond of the Adès, Hartke, Benjamin, and Andriessen. Doing a tour in which you get to play with a younger generation of students from your alma mater on one program and a member of Wilco on another isn’t too shabby. And if you’ve gotta fly thousands of miles, Australia and Europe are pretty cool destinations, after all.

So forgive us if we’re not blogging too much. There’s lots going on, and we’re trying to give great performances everywhere we go. We promise we’ll tell you all about them. Later.

Oh, and yeah: we’re all now premier members of United’s Mileage Plus program. Booyah.

(Nick adds: even the cello is a premier member. Yeah, you heard right.)

Popular American composer Jennifer Higdon will compose a concerto for eighth blackbird and orchestra, to premiere in the 2009/10 season. Although we can officially announce this exciting news, it is not possible to mention publicly which orchestra will present the world premiere performance (and is in fact commissioning the whole shebang). So watch this space!

Jen seems to be America’s current official, salaried Concerto Composer, with a new violin concerto for Hilary Hahn to be premiered this season, and recent concertos for Time for Three, Jennifer Koh and Colin Currie receiving performances across the US and around the world. I was in London for the British premiere of the Percussion Concerto last year, and as the incredible Colin Currie interacted with the orchestra in imaginative, entertaining and virtuosic ways (culminating in a thrilling cadenza for percussion soloist and five orchestral percussionist), I must say that I became increasingly excited by the prospect of a concerto for 8bb.

We’re sure Jen will deliver a fabulous piece, but for what it’s worth here are some of my hopes: that Jen exploits our memorization and take-no-prisoners theatricality in interesting ways; that the ensemble’s members interact with our orchestral mirrors (orchestral flutes, clarinets, etc); that she pours all of her affection for the group into the score, giving us lashings of virtuosic, schmaltzy, cheeky, harsh music…

This is not 8bb’s first concerto. In 2003 New York composer David Schober wrote a concerto for 8bb and orchestra that was premiered with the Oberlin Orchestra, and also performed with the American Composers Orchestra in Carnegie Hall and the IRIS Orchestra in Germantown, TN. Hear a sample from the work’s premiere here.

Here’s my blurb about our forthcoming concerts with students from our old alma mater, Oberlin College (pictured above, conducted by Tim Weiss, in a photo from the NY Times) in Oberlin and at the Kitchen in New York, American Mavericks:

Steve Reich Cello Counterpoint (2003)
Frederic Rzewski Knight, Death and the Devil (2008) WORLD PREMIERE
Rzewski Les Moutons de Panurge (1968)
Reich Double Sextet (2007) WORLD PREMIERE OF LIVE VERSION

Grammy-winning ensemble eighth blackbird joins forces with Oberlin College’s renowned Contemporary Music Ensemble to form an unconducted “super-group” in important world premieres by two legendary American mavericks. Commissioned for this collaboration, Fred Rzewski’s Knight, Death and the Devil, inspired by Dürer’s haunting engraving of the same name, is a bizarre fantasia on songs associated with war. Steve Reich’s engaging, funky Double Sextet will receive its first performance in a version for twelve live musicians. eighth blackbird will walk Rzewski’s grueling musical tightrope, Les Moutons de Panurge, and two Oberlin students will present their moving, unique multimedia interpretation of Reich’s Cello Counterpoint.

This collaboration was already set in stone by the time I joined the group in August 2006. Oberlin had pledged the money to commission Fred Rzewski, a name that 8bb put up for the project, to write a work for sextet (8bb) and string quartet (Oberlin students). Reich’s Double Sextet joined it on the program in 2007, when we received Reich’s piece and were sure it would work effectively in a live version for twelve musicians.

In asking Rzewski to write a piece for string quartet and sextet, 8bb requested that the composer keep the quartet and sextet parts musically “separate” so that the two groups could rehearse apart extensively, only coming together shortly before the performance.

Above, the engraving that inspired Rzewski’s composition. You can read more about this amazing work of art here. During the early stages of composition, in an email from January 2008, Rzewski shared with 8bb his fascinating ideas about the structure of the piece:

There will be, I think, 12 or 13 numbers, ranging in duration from 30 seconds or so to 3 minutes.  But I’m probably underestimating.  All of them use six different songs associated with war: “L’Homme Armé” [YouTube], “Siùl A Ruin” [YouTube], “Johnny I Hardly Knew Ye” [YouTube], “Le Départ du Conscrit” ["The Conscript's Departure"], “Die Moorsoldaten” [or "The Peat Bog Soldiers"; [YouTube with Paul Robeson], and “Taps” [YouTube]. They appear in six different tonalities. These songs represent the “Knight on horseback” [from the above engraving] (string quartet is the “Horse,” actually the star of the show). 

The songs interrupted by “stills”, where nothing happens.  That’s “Death”.  And periodically there are interruptions of irrelevant material.  That’s the “Devil”.

This is all based on an idea I had almost 20 years ago. I wanted to write a piece for solo cello based on this same engraving. I wrote the first part, “Knight”, about 6 or 7 minutes long. I thought about incorporating it in the new piece, but then decided against it. It might, however, go in front of the new piece. I kind of like this idea. Do you know the Schönberg 2nd Chamber Symphony (one of his finest pieces, in my opinion)? He wrote the first movement in 1906 and the second in 1936.

The Contemporary Music Ensemble has for many years been an essential part of the Oberlin Conservatory curriculum, a fact underlined by this New York Times article. Tim Weiss, director of the CME and all-around great bloke, said in the article that the CME “has a certain “sex appeal” on campus,” and you can hear evidence in the typically riotous, rock star response of Oberlin students to the performance in the YouTube videos below.

The videos preserve an interesting multimedia interpretation of Steve Reich’s Cello Counterpoint by Oberlin students Ted Rankin and Alex Overington, which will be part of 8bb’s American Mavericks concerts:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Below, some photos from the post-concert reception at Seppi’s, courtesy of proud dad Ken Kaplan:

“Tim, it’s been nice working with you.”

“Um?”

“Well, since Reich has praised us today, I’ve reached all my career goals, so I’m ready to retire…”

This was the Mac’s only comment after we ran through Steve Reich’s new Double Sextet last Wednesday for the composer, in advance of the work’s world premiere that night.

I was desperate not to appear star-struck in front of this living legend, practicing over and over in front of the mirror: “Oh, hey Steve”; “Oh yeah, Steve, great to meet you, man”; “Hi, Steve, don’t mind my clammy hands, quivering lip, nervous tic motion of the head to the left and uncontrollable stutter, I’m really very relaxed to meet you.” My relationship with Reich’s music is as intense, complicated and ultimately satisfying as a long marriage: I fell passionately in love at 15, turned deeply resentful by 18, came gradually to an acceptance by 21, loved it despite its faults by 24, then loved it BECAUSE of its faults by 27.

To be honest we were all pretty giddy after the tech. We had been thoroughly prepared for the worst: Reich knows how his music should be played, he is known for being demanding, he could get frustrated if not satisfied. So imagine our relief when, at the conclusion of our first run for the composer, his only reaction was, “Wow, fantastic. I really have nothing to say.”

Reich was relaxed, amiable, charming; a joy to work and hang out with for his two days in Richmond.

Reich was in charge of knob-twiddling (that, of course, is the technical term) during rehearsal and performance on Wednesday, balancing our amplification to the CD playback. Ryan, our sound engineer, said he learned a lot and would be able to incorporate composer’s quite demanding intentions.

One example: “Often he would bring the levels of flute and clarinet up lots, much more than I would consider doing, but you know…it really WORKED.”

Another example: The original plan was to send both live (amplified) and pre-recorded (CD) signals through both speakers, so the audience would hear live sound out of both speakers and pre-recorded sound out of both as well. Reich vetoed that, and instead sent the pre-recorded signal through one speaker (stage right) and the live signal through the other (stage left). This mimicked the midi recording (that we were sent with the score), which had each part in a separate channel, clarifying the complex textures of the piece while also creating a dramatic hocketing effect across the stage.

Below, the gang sitting “cross-legged” at the feet of the master, listening to him muse on trends in new music, particularly the recent shift towards a very “natural” sort of crossover between indie rock and new music groups.

Working with Reich was great fun, but Wednesday was still very, very long. We began setting up at 9am, and didn’t rest until we struck percussion gear from the stage around 11pm. Our schedule included a long dress rehearsal for the Bang on a Can portion of the program, a tech rehearsal for the Reich, a comprehensive (and very helpful) “notes” session with Susan Marshall over lunch, much wailing and gnashing of teeth, several student coachings, a percussion ensemble class with Reich and then a lot of nervous giggling. Oh, and (as is usual at University of Richmond) an absolutely fantastic spread for dinner, including a french onion soup to start, pesto tortellini (“I’ve been saying ‘ravioli’ for the last 10 minutes. Why didn’t you correct me?”; “Because I didn’t want to be ‘that guy’”), crumbed chicken fillets, salads and a tasty assortment of desserts.

Below, how do we memorize this quite complicated music? A cheat sheet, stuck innocently to the back edge of the piano (hidden from the audience), gives one of our members a little helping hand during Michael Gordon’s piece. A plastic fork to anyone who can guess whose part it is….

Below, Reich is reunited with Bang on a Can husband-and-wife team, Michael Gordon and Julie Wolfe, in the Modlin Center’s spacious green room:

Below, I have bled on several pianos since joining 8bb (in David M Gordon’s savage, violent Friction Systems), but here Lisa proves that she too can suffer for her art:

Below, the 71-year-old composer (who wears his years incredibly lightly) talking at a post-concert talkback session, as the three Bang on a Can composers (who would mostly likely be writing very different music if it weren’t for Reich’s influence) attentively look on:

Below, most of the gang at the palatial Jefferson Hotel. L to R, the Alb, David Lang, Mary McNaughy, the Aussie, the Duv, the Phot, Susan Marshall, Michael Gordon, the Ing, Julie Wolfe, stage manager Barbara Whitney, the Mac, our fabulous New York manager Nicole Borrelli-Hearn (who jetted into Richmond, just for the show, along with our equally awesome 21C publicist, Louise Barder), the Kap:

Below, 8bb, shameless marketers that we are, gave Reich his very own 8bb-brand “American yarmulke”:

I conducted an interview with Reich about Double Sextet, and once I’ve transcribed it and gained the composer’s approval, it will appear on the blog. I was a little trigger-happy this week, so there are about a hundred photos in a set on our flickr.

A substantial review of our world premiere performance of The Only Moving Thing has appeared in the Washington Post, written by Anne Midgette.

Her entertaining, evocatively written review begins:

Six musicians are playing a duet with recorded versions of themselves. It is like looking into an electronic mirror. The mirror refracts the rapid, driving beat of piano and marimba; it adds a reflected gleam to long-held chords of strings and winds. The players, live and recorded, create layer upon layer of sound, a rich mille-feuille of music, while pinwheeling light-images create visual parallels on the wall behind them.

Apparently we are “the straight-A students of the contemporary scene. It’s new music you could bring home to your mother. In performance, eighth blackbird embodies a slightly geeky spirit of earnestness.”

Midgette seemed most taken with Reich’s new work, fruit of “a warm late period that verges on the downright romantic.”

The second half generated a more complex reaction. She thought that the “controlled chaos” of Michael’s “jam session” and the “intense quiet and complexity” of Julie’s work overstayed their welcome, while Lang’s “had a tonic delicacy in comparison,” including the “wistful, elegiac second movement.”

So it was unfortunate that in the middle of an open “airing” of Reich’s Double Sextet in front of 40 music students at U of R today, everything came to a grinding halt. Nothing exploded; nobody was injured. The scratched CD skipped a few times, we all got lost, and the thing just died. With a whimper.

“Um. Well, I guess we should be glad that this happened now, rather than tomorrow night…”

Below, under full concert lighting the Kap writhes on autumnal leaves during the final moments of Julia Wolfe’s piece:

“OK, don’t say it. Don’t say it, Tim.”

“Say what?”

“NICE KNOCKERS! HAHAHAHAHAHAAAHAHHAHA”

Below, we were given our final “kitting up” this morning by our gorgeous costumer, Mary McNaugher. Clearly she is aware of our, um, somewhat tight budget. These are the Duv’s stylish shoes:

Below, the Mac (posing for the camera, as always), looking every inch the dapper gent (dare I say “dandy”?) in his sexy threads:

Below, we love U of R. I don’t say it enough, but we love them. Love. It’s hard to express, but they treat us like royalty. Not just any old royalty, but “ReadyBrush: Prepasted Toothbrush” royalty:

Below, the Kap in a somewhat vulnerable position under our stage cloth:

Below, our patient Stage Manager, Barbara Whitney, who clearly didn’t see the “sorting fake leaves into different colors” line in her contract:

Tomorrow, Reich and Co arrive; we freak out during eight hours of dress rehearsals and soundchecks; play a freaking good show; spend two hours packing up; drink awesome beer; I go home and blog. Stay tuned….

Over the past two weeks we have essentially been hibernating in our Chicago rehearsal studio for the last two weeks, in frantic final preparations for the project. Below are some rehearsal notes:

Firstly, there was the “to monitor or not to monitor” question. We will perform Steve Reich’s Double Sextet with a pre-recorded, 8bb-played CD. It is essential that we clearly hear the recording, but in-ear monitors can ruin a sense of live performance, isolating us in a way that can drain the energy from a performance. The quartet (flute, clarinet, violin, cello) felt that was unnecessary, so opted for two speakers, while the “engine” driving the piece ended up with in-ear (piano) and over-ear (percussion) headphones.

The “Sextet 2″ CD consists of a stereo track, with one “ear” heavily weighted towards quartet, and the other highlighting piano and percussion. We split this signal so the quartet heard mostly quartet-sound through the speakers, while piano and percussion could hear themselves. Balancing the elements took hours of rehearsal time; patience will be required in every venue, as even minute adjustments can mean the difference between a switched-on performance and a studio run-through.

We recorded several dry runs of Double Sextet to send to Steve Reich, each time trying to put his comments into practice. Comments mostly dealt with issues of balance (“more strings!”) and expression (“get rid of accents in that section”; “not so much separation”), but Steve also compared us to Metallica in one email, not entirely positively. Rock stars!

singing in the dead of night: Michael Gordon’s unhinged, virtuoso extravaganza needed mock-performances to ensure fluid, natural movement, which hopefully will bring out the comedy of the piece more easily; we had spent many hours on the choreography (or “chore-eography”, according to Susan Marshall) of Julie Wolfe’s piece, so much more time was devoted to music rehearsal (lots of metronome work, especially on the difficult canon near the work’s final climactic outburst); David Lang’s three short works were in danger of getting stale from over-rehearsal, so we let them out into the backyard to give them some air and a chance to wee.

Our preparation culminated in a full run of the show in our studio on Friday – minus lighting, costumes, sound and pizzazz – for a few friends. Many comments after the performance dealt with “intention”: viewers felt that the intensity of our movements was not enough to convey meaning to an audience, especially not to the paupers in the nose-bleeds. One person felt that our natural communication while playing hadn’t transferred to non-musical or non-playing actions. Several guests were moved, several confused, several very impressed. A perfect 8bb split!

“Imagine you are an egomaniacal, mid-20th century Russian violinist. It should have that sort of hysteria.”  

“That should be fine; it’s my favorite sort of violin playing anyway…”  

Working with composers is one of the chief joys of this job, especially when the composer at hand is as personally engaging as David Lang.

David worked with us on Monday (he was in town for a MusicNow performance of his entertaining, effective Increase), and it was a relief to find that he was genuinely happy with the shape his three-movement piece, a component of our big singing in the dead of night project (premiering in just two weeks, god help us), was taking.

The “egomaniacal” quote above comes from David’s attempts to get us to shape the first movement’s lines (marked ”hard, lyrical”) more convincingly. I was initially surprised by how much Romantic-ish “emoting” he wanted for this clean-lined, angular music, but the interpretation certainly gave this challenging music a greater sense of purpose; the movement became one long, disjunct Wagnerian endless-melody, rather than a clinical dissection of the key of g-minor.

Amusingly self-effacing, David several times proclaimed, “You know, a professional composer would have done that differently.” Explaining how the Bang on a Can composers take different roles when they work together, David laughed: “My job is to write the opener. I guess that’s what I’m good at.” He admitted that, when collaborating on a piece, “we do tend to second-guess each other.”While we were working on the second movement, I asked David about the Passacaille subtitle. He looked sheepish for a second, then cheerfully admitted that he had “borrowed” the slow, descending bass line from a older piece of his own which sourced its material from a Handel passacaglia.

Moving on to the fast, rockin’ third movement, David admitted that he wanted to write us a piece that could stand alone as an encore. The funky, irregular bass line had been sitting at the bottom of a drawer for several years and this seemed like a great way to build the music. (I love the idea of composers rifling through dirty laundry or a trash can full of rotting meat, in desperate search for the kernal that might generate a great masterpiece.)

David has a fine ear for ensemble balance and texture, and is clear and concise in his demands. He is also careful to choose his battles. Following a run-through of the pedal-to-the-metal third movement, the composer wanted more overall “shape”. He suggested starting lightly and softly, then increasing the intensity throughout the movement. We tried this, and David seemed mostly happy with the result. Several 8bb-ers chimed in with alternate expressive possibilities (soft piano intro, ensemble outburst; soft, contrasting middle section). Knowing that we understood his desire, he clearly didn’t want to get bogged down in the details: “You know, whatever you do, it doesn’t matter to me.” He trusted in our judgement as performers, and was happy to cede some artistic control. This was refreshing. 

“The last section of the movement originally went for much longer. When I wrote it, I would just set the midi running, and listen to this passage over and over. I really find it very emotional.” The “tune” in this section is made up of the high, long notes that Michael and I trade off in the course of playing a repeated surging figure. We were separating all of the notes, as written, but David sang the line with such passionate, throbbing intensity that we decided to “slur” (join) the notes. David fidgeted and paced the room; “When you work on it more, it will come.”