Part 1:

Part 2:

What we don’t quite accept is that this leads to a fair amount of injury. There’s a great deal of avoidance of the topic, as if it might be cancer or mental illness. In conservatory, getting injured is viewed as a consequence of improper technique. In the professional world, it is seen as a career-killer. This stigma on playing-related injuries is apparent in the strange and alternative ways we often deal with them. Where an injured athlete would seek a sports-medicine doctor or physical therapist, a musician will enlist the help of an acupuncturist or a Reiki practitioner.

My own journey on the violin and piano has involved a good bit of pain and injury. I ignored an injury to my right hand, practicing through the pain until I couldn’t use my hand for six months. In college my left shoulder became so inflamed that I couldn’t even touch it without searing pain. Two months after joining the opera orchestra in DC, I had to have cortisone shots in my neck and shoulder to keep playing.

I’ve had years of Alexander Technique, Feldenkrais, acupuncture, and yes, even Reiki. I’ve also endured electric shock therapy (just on my arm) and plenty of psychotherapy. For a long time I was convinced that I was doing something fundamentally wrong on the violin. I would compare myself to so-and-so, who has never been injured – what does he know that I don’t? No shoulder rest, a higher shoulder rest, wrist vibrato, arm vibrato, higher chinrest, flatter chinrest – I tried every combination possible and spent a lot of time and money in my search for the Holy Grail of injury-prevention.

my collection of chinrests and shoulder rests

The lesson I’ve learned through all this is that there are two truths that we must face.

Truth #1: it’s possible to do everything right and still get injured. Playing an instrument is athletic, and spending many hours a day doing it is tough on muscles, tendons, and ligaments.

Truth #2: what I do with my body when I’m not practicing is almost more important than what I do while practicing.

After all, I really only practice for a couple hours a day. I spend a lot more time slumped in front of the computer. Even so, I treat my body as an athlete would. The better shape my entire body is in, the better able I am to deal with the demands of playing the violin. This is working so far. Strength training keeps my shoulder girdle and back strong so things stay in the right place whether I’m playing violin or checking my email. And when something hurts, I treat it and stop using it if need be.

my pain treatment arsenal

Have I stopped searching for the Holy Grail? Of course not. Even though I’m not in pain now, I just started seeing a chiropractor three times a week. I’ve ditched my shoulder rest and am currently trying out an arsenal of chinrests loaned to me by the violin setup guru Andrew McCann, who uses a custom chinrest built for him.

Andrew's monolithic chinrest

I might get one built for myself. But I’m no longer under any illusions that a certain chinrest or shoulder rest is the key to never getting injured. While I can make playing the violin more comfortable to a point, I accept that it is inherently an awkward endeavor – the only magic fix is to quit.

My curiosity got the better of me and I kidnapped Kurt, Andy, and Eric during the workshops for a little chat.  (If you’re wondering why there’s a soap dispenser in the background, that’s because the only space we could find was inside a small dressing room next to the toilet.) Unsurprisingly, they were all charming and intelligent, but as different from each other as their pieces were.

Okay, that’s a lie. That’s what I want people to think of me.  That’s what I’d like to think of myself. The truth is, I have immense shame about my lily-livered quitting nature. From a very young age, my mother has admonished me for quitting:

“You always give up so soon! I hate quitters!”

My mom’s right.  She especially likes to tell the story of how I would have quit the violin if it weren’t for her, and now I’m a musician. (Actually, I’m only a musician because I gave up on studying for the SATs.) When I was around twelve years old, I begged tearfully to quit the violin.  My mother, seeing my tragic flaw rearing its ugly head, repeatedly refused. When I persisted, she said I could quit only if I also quit the piano. That gave me pause, because I loved piano. But after some thought, I decided to take her up on her offer, only to discover that it had expired.  I imagined myself the victim of unspeakable abuse and spent the rest of my adolescence punishing her in my head. That might be the only thing I haven’t quit.

As fate would have it, I ended up developing a deep love for the violin, and made the choice to quit piano in my sophomore year at conservatory. Most recently, I quit my job as Assistant Concertmaster of the Washington National Opera in order to join eighth blackbird. This job was supposedly the culmination of all my efforts: a title position that paid the bills, that my mother could brag about, and that didn’t demand very much of my time or energy. I lived in a great city, had a nice condo, boyfriend with a dog, dinner parties with friends. Why would I want to quit?

Recently I listened to a Freakonomics podcast with the same title as this post.  I knew the title was provocatively spun in the way health and fitness magazines cover titles often are (Lose your gut while drinking all the beer you want!), but I was curious anyway.   Perhaps I would find some rationale for my lack of perseverance, some brilliant psychological advantage it gave me.  The first segment was a story about a woman who left a desk job earning $70k for a life as a high-end prostitute making over $300k.  Then there was a statistic about minor league baseball players earning 40% less 10 years after high school than those who never pursued baseball.  At the very least, quitting was looking like the smart thing to do if you cared about your bank account.

When I agreed to audition for eighth blackbird, Nick asked to have a conversation with me over the phone.  He asked me repeatedly why I would even consider quitting my cushy opera job – didn’t I know that I would be working much more and making less? Plus there was no guarantee in this quasi-freelance world.  Was I in a relationship? I’d never see my partner. Planning to have children? I’d better think twice. He seemed to be trying to scare me out of auditioning.  He might as well have offered me money not to audition, which, according to the Freakonomics podcast, is exactly what Zappos.com does.  One week into their employee training session, they make an offer: $3,000 to anyone who wants to quit, no strings attached.  Surprisingly, only 10% of trainees take Zappos up on this offer, even though it represents two months of pay at $11/hr.  When asked why they turned down the money, the trainees said,

“This job is worth a million dollars.”

Bring in the expert, please.  He (Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist) says, “This is about cognitive dissonance.  If you’ve acted in a certain way, over time you’re going to overly justify your behavior.” Meaning, once you’ve turned down the money, you’re going find all sorts of reasons to love your job. We like to suffer, and if we suffer for something, we will decide we love it.  If you think this is crazy, think about fraternities, the military, sports teams, religious cults – they all use this tactic. By the way, this segment ends with one trainee taking the money because she thought Zappos was too cult-like. The afore-mentioned prostitute ends up quitting her lucrative lifestyle because she falls in love. The whole podcast ends with two women who have finally quit their cultish religions to lead normal lives.

Oops.  Is it possible that I have joined some sort of new-music cult? Maybe I should have listened to this podcast before I quit my job, although I’m probably even more confused about quitting than before. Sometimes we don’t quit soon enough, sometimes we quit too soon. You can’t tell which is which until after you’ve made your decision. Whatever the case, it’s too late for me. I’m deep into my decision to join eighth blackbird and now I’m going to find all the reasons why it’s the right one.  I don’t have to look very hard.  I get to vote on what we play. I get to be onstage instead of in a pit. I no longer have to wear all black. I get to play viola — wait a minute…

(Pictured: Tim Munro, composer Andy Akiho, and Michael Maccaferri, during rehearsals for last night’s performance)

Last night the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, hosted the final round of eighth blackbird’s first composition competition.

The performance was the culmination of a year-long process. An initial pool of 504 applicants was winnowed to three finalists, who were each given a cash prize and invited to write a work for eighth blackbird. These three new works were workshopped in an intense, two-day period earlier this week. Last night saw the public premiere of the three pieces, in front of a crowd that included representatives of the competition’s generous partners, MakeMusic and the American Composers Forum.

The following works were performed last night:

Andy Akiho ERASE for sextet (2011)
Eric Lindsay Town’s Gonna Talk for sextet (2011)
Kurt Rohde this bag is not a toy: a very short concerto for mixed ensemble without orchestra for sextet (2011)

Andy Akiho’s work, ERASE, was chosen as the overall winner. He receives an additional cash award and the promise of a future performance by eighth blackbird of the winning work. You can watch videos taken during rehearsals of Andy’s piece here and here.

Say what you want about his playing stylistically–and I have some thoughts, but they’re not really pertinent to this particular blog post–but if you heard him on that concert, you couldn’t deny that the guy’s a technical wizard, solid as solid can be. Old Shosti has plenty of ground to cover and places to show off, culminating in a ginormous cadenza spanning the second to third movement, which he nailed. To the wall.

And yet…standing ovation? No. A healthy applause, certainly, but no O, and barely even a hoot. Why? After it was done, I turned to Tim, who said tellingly: “I dunno, maybe the piece was too easy for him?”

It sure sounded that way—he seemed impatient, always a hair ahead of the orchestra, executing difficult passagework with barely a modicum of effort, always looking towards the next hurdle to jump. Some of the fast bits in the cadenza were faster than I’d ever heard them, and he barely seemed to be breaking a sweat. I noticed myself tuning out a little, and then asking myself why. Did it all sound too easy? Or is it that hard music sound hard?

Musically, we’re already living in a world of wonders, in that I can’t imagine any other time in history where so many people have had such a mastery of any instrument you can think of. Or, if you allow me to have a cello geek-out moment, we’re living in a time where Pablo Casals, still considered the best cellist who ever lived ever by many, would have struggled to get into an undergraduate conservatory (sorry Master P–you’re musical but too out of tune) and Prokofiev Symphony Concertante is the new Dvorak (ie 10ths are the new octaves). Even the Shostakovich concerto used to seem hard, but is now routinely learned by high school kids, and younger.

Shosti’s an interesting example, though, and here’s my problem with this performance—the piece should sound like a struggle. It’s not Paganini, it’s not meant to sound easy–and really, should anything by Shostakovich ever sound “easy?” That being said, how do you communicate that struggle while still dutifully hitting all the shifts and hard bits, as the audience demands and upon which your career depends? Or is it just that if you see someone blazing through hard passagework that spans minutes like it was nothing, it just dulls the senses, like if you saw a world class gymnast on a high bar execute 40 perfect flips in a row; you’ll be wowed by the first few, and snoozing by the end. Or is it the piece’s fault? Should the hard stuff be parceled out a bit more, like a drug dealer making sure his customer doesn’t OD?

Reich Feast: A Sound Engineer’s Perspective

The music of Steve Reich, a joy that came into my life around age 17 when my drum line instructor first played us a recording of “Drumming” to get us to calm down about ourselves, is something that has always simultaneously taken me out of my body musically and constantly challenged me as both a performer, composer, and now as sound engineer.

I have performed Drumming, and Clapping Music has been a staple warmup piece for several electronic and improvisational ensembles I have taken part in over the years.   As a composer and appreciator of new music, I have realized that his music could perhaps be the most important of the 20th century.  Steve Reich has achieved, in a very clear and simple way, something I think all of the major composers of that century were trying to accomplish: overcoming the tyranny of the 4th dimension of time. But instead of eliminating a sense of measured time or pulse, as was the practice of Webern, Boulez, and Cage, he overcame the restrictions of time, by using the very pulse that others railed against.  He uncovered temporal relationships that had not yet been explored, and revealed the relativity of time by throwing off the pulse relationship between musicians by beats and measures, even doing it incrementally in his early tape and later live “phase” pieces.

When I had the opportunity to work with eighth blackbird on Double Sextet, I was both overjoyed to finally meet a composer I had idolized from a young age, and nervous that I might not “get it right”.  I was relieved to finally meet the man, who I found to be warm and amazingly supportive at the premier. I realized that he was a composer who had considered the role of sound engineer in composing a piece.  To Reich, the engineer is as important to the music as the musicians. The music is meant to be amplified, and to create his signature sound, and your interpretation of the music as a sound engineer, has a profound effect on the musical outcome. In short, Reich is perhaps the first composer who’s music is meant to be “played” by a sound designer and through which the engineer truly becomes part of the ensemble.

As we progress into the 21st century, music technology, the means of reproducing sound, and concepts of concert presentation, are changing and advancing worldwide. The two dimensional world of the proscenium stage and the stereo sound system are not always the most appropriate way to present new works, and more often new music is being presented in multi-dimensional and non-conventional concert spaces using multiple speakers at many levels.

When presented with the opportunity design sound for a concert of Reich’s music in a world class state-of-the-art sound facility such as the Pritzker Pavilion, I was immediately a flutter with ideas of how the space itself could be used in unique ways. I had previously taken part in a collaboration to create a piece of sound art using the pavilion’s surround sound setting for Train Time (facilitated and led by Lou Mallozzi at Experimental Sound Studio and commissioned by ESS and the Chicago Humanities Festival). Through that experience, I learned a great deal about how the system worked. When I learned about eighth blackbird and Third Coast Percussion’s Steve Reich Festival, I contacted Jon Laney, co-designer and current steward of the system to enquire about the possibility of mixing a concert live in surround sound at the Pritzker Pavilion.

Since that day, about a year and a few months ago, I have been involved with eighth blackbird performances of Music for 18 Musicians at various venues in Chicago and New York, and each performance has been a unique experience unto itself. In fact, no two performances have seemed alike to me and I think that is the genius of Reich’s music. The interlocking relationships that culminate in various contrapuntal relationships throughout his music cause you to hear something slightly different each time. Whether it be one of the older phase pieces, or a piece as new and, as some suggest, more traditional, like Double Sextet, repeated listening always yields a different experience or journey, as if you are traveling through multi-dimensional space-time and taking a different wormhole path, causing a riff that was once background noise on one listening to becomes your main focus on the next.

This is the beauty of being a sound engineer for his music. You are the one member of the ensemble who gets to hear the “whole” of the piece and who can make choices in the moment about how the piece, in its entirety, should be interpreted. In using the full spectrum of the sonic space that surrounds the Pritzker’s seating bowl and great lawn, I will be able to reveal different aspects of the multi-dimensional relationships between the various “licks” that make up the piece, and in doing so interpret the piece in a new way. Just as Reich’s music itself seems to transcend the time barrier, this performance of Music for 18 will utilize the extra dimension of space to explore the meta- and micro-interlocking relationships that make up the whole of this masterpiece. In quite different ways, both Mallet Quartet and Double Sextet also are explored under this microscope to accentuate the relationships of space that exists in these works.

We also decided that this would be a great opportunity to present Reich’s only three “tape” works, Come Out, Melodica, and It’s Gona Rain. These three pieces are based on samples, first from a victim of brutality during the Harlem riots of 1964, second, a short segment of a melody thought of in a dream and played on a Melodica, and the third, from a preacher preaching about the great flood.  Lou Mallozzi at Experimental Sound Studio again offered his assistance and we were able to create three surround mixes of all three pieces which rely heavily on the original spatial relationship between two stereo channels to create a new and slightly re-imagined version of the piece that utilizes the space available above the great lawn to capture and enhance the intensity of these three works. Though no liberties were taken with the pieces themselves, as to preserve the original intent, the two original tracks have been moved around in the larger space, sometimes subtly, sometimes radically, to capture and reflect the energy and intensity of the original texts and melodies and to emphasize structural shifts. These three early “process” works were instrumental in the way that Reich’s music evolved from that point and are an example of technology opening a door to a new way of thinking about art and music. I thought it appropriate to use the technology available at the magnificent facility we have in Chicago to further the musical journey started over 40 years ago with these three works.

Reich’s music is the kind that future generations to come will continue to interpret, shedding new light on and finding new windows and insights into its structure and form, much the way Bach and Mozart are still interpreted and reinterpreted to the present day. But as Reich’s music was perhaps the first whose life blood flows through speakers, it is also the first where the sound engineer takes on the honor and responsibility of an interpreter.

Ryan Ingebritsen

The contest is a partnership between MakeMusic, the American Composers Forum and eighth blackbird, and we thank our partners in this process for their significant financial, administrative and moral support.

All eighth blackbird members took part in the process, and, surprisingly, there was a significant amount of group consensus throughout the process.

The three finalists are: Andy Akiho of New Haven, Conn., Eric Lindsay of Bloomington, Ind., and Kurt Rohde of San Francisco, Calif. Each finalist will receive a cash prize and will write a piece for eighth blackbird, which will be workshopped and performed in the ensemble’s Chicago studio. One composer will be chosen to receive the final prize, which includes an additional cash award and a future public performance by eighth blackbird.

We were floored by the quality of submissions, and thought it fair to recognize twelve additional composers, whose pieces made it to our last internal round of judging. They were of such a uniformly high standard, with such diverse and distinctive voices, that we had to give them some sort of recognition.

They are:

Alex Freeman (Northfield, Minn.)
Sean Friar (Princeton, N.J.)
J.M. Gerraughty (Nashua, N.H.)
Aaron Gervais (San Francisco, Calif.)
Yotam Haber (Brooklyn, N.Y.)
Derek Johnson (Carmel, Ind.)
Amy Kirsten (New Haven, Conn.)
Zibuokle Martinaityte (New York, N.Y.)
Douglas Pew (Erlanger, Ky.)
Jeremy Podgursky (Bloomington, Ind.)
Mike Solomon (Gainesville, Fla.)
Daniel Wohl (New Haven, Conn.)

For more information, you can visit the American Composers Forum website. We will provide more details (with dates and location) of the finalists’ workshop sometime in the near future. Thanks to all who entered, and rest assured that there were many marvelous, creative, bizarre, accomplished composers who didn’t make it into the final 15.

When we last played at Carnegie Hall, in 2008, Allan Kozinn wrote in the

We return to Carnegie’s Zankel Hall next Monday to present a motley concert highlighting the kaleidoscopic diversity of recent classical music. English composer Thomas Adès takes us to a children’s playground for the high-spirited hijinks of Catch, while Stephen Hartke’s Pulitzer Prize finalist, Meanwhile, evokes the surreal world of an imaginary Asian court theater. Frenchman Pierre Boulez’s Dérive 1 conjures an other-worldly beauty, punctured by countryman Philippe Hurel’s dense, swirling hive of notes, ...à mesure, which challenges even eighth blackbird’s formidable skills.

Music by two New York natives round out the program. Philip Glass’s Music in Similar Motion, with its radically bald, hypnotic repetitions, retains its power to shock and delight, and rising star Missy Mazzoli’s Still Life with Avalanche gives musical form to a torrent of powerful and unexpected emotions.

Visit Carnegie Hall’s website for tickets. As an eighth blackbird fan, you can get a 10% discount if you use the offer code EBB11265.*

When: Monday, January 31, 2011 at 7:30 PM
Where: Zankel Hall, 57th Street and Seventh Avenue, New York, NY

Program:

Missy Mazzoli Still Life with Avalanche (2008)

Pierre Boulez Dérive 1 (1984)

Philip Glass Music in Similar Motion (1969)

Philippe Hurel …à mesure (1996)

Thomas Adès Catch (1991)

Stephen Hartke Meanwhile (2007)

*This discount is valid from 11AM on January 27th through 11:59PM on January 30th.  Limit of eight tickets per purchase. Some limitations may apply. Offer is subject to availability and prior sale, is not valid on prior purchases, and cannot be combined with any other discounts or promotions. Valid by phone, at the Box Office, and/or online. No refunds or exchanges. Internet and phone orders are subject to standard convenience fees.

Thanks to all those who applied for 8bb’s first ever composition contest. Let’s get the really great news out of the way first. We were totally flooded with new musical love, in the form of 503 entries that ran the stylistic gamut, embracing all known and several unknown -isms, and drawing influences from anywhere and everywhere and nowhere.

Unfortunately, the downside to this totally unexpected, glorious tidal wave of scores and CDs (currently clogging our office/kitchen/rehearsal-room/new-music-lab) is that it has taken us longer to narrow the field down to three sterling applicants.

We don’t want to compromise the quality of our judging, so we have decided to postpone the announcement of the three finalists until February 1st. Our sincere apologies if this inconveniences any applicants, but we feel it with ensure the best possible outcome for both entrants and the ensemble.