19 September 2009
Bridging a Dissonant Divide
Group Lures Listeners to its New Music
By Michael Huebner
News staff writer
There's no denying that new music has had a troubled relationship with mainstream classical audiences. From the early 20th century, when Igor Stravinsky's "The Rite of Spring" provoked a riot, to the post-war ostracism to academia, the dissonances, clusters and seemingly errant bloops and bleeps have not been received well.
"We did a concert a couple of years ago when after the first piece, this guy said, very loudly, 'When does the music start?,'" recalled Tim Munro, flutist for the Chicago-based new music ensemble, Eighth Blackbird (the group prefers the lowercase spelling). "He actually stayed until the very end. Our violinist got to talk to him about why the things he was expecting didn't appear. He found it much more engaging than if people had silently hated it and gone off."
That kind of engagement, on and off the stage, explains how Eighth Blackbird has catapulted from a student ensemble at Oberlin Conservatory to Grammy winners and commissioners of a work that earned the 2009 Pulitzer Prize in music.
Consisting of flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano and percussion, the sextet will open the 2009-10 Davis Architects Guest Artist Series at Samford University's Brock Recital Hall on Tuesday with compositions from the past three decades.
Ranging from the "sea of trills" in Pierre Boulez's "Derive I," to the choreographed stage movements and reverberating gongs and flexatones in Stephen Hartke's six-movement "Meanwhile" (a 2008 Pulitzer nominee), the program promises an adventurous, ear-expanding romp, what Munro calls ''a roller coaster ride through the wildness and weirdness and diversity of new music."
Also programmed is "Still Life with Avalanche," a new piece by New York composer Missy Mazzoli, who draws from her work with Victoire, the all-girl Indie rock band she founded. From Thomas Ades, whose violin concerto was performed in January by Leila Josefowicz and the Alabama Symphony, comes "Catch," which the Australian-born Munro describes as a musical "Piggy in the Middle" ("Keepaway").
"There's a person who is left out and is trying to get in," he said. "That's our clarinetist, and three others play playground kids who really don't want him to get the ball. It's entertaining and still a phenomenally beautiful piece of music."
Marc Mellits' "Spam," Mark-Anthony Turnage's "Grazioso" and George Perle's "Critical Moments 2" round out the concert.
Making the experience appeal to a broad audience while not compromising aesthetic principles has been high on the ensemble's agenda since its inception in 1996.
"We program to draw people into our world, to take us into their trust," Munro said. "We try to take people with curious minds and not slam them in the face with the tougher stuff. This is not that horrible phrase, 'dumbing down.' We genuinely think we can bring people into it if they can see, oh, the flute and clarinet have this important duet; or, my God, the violin and percussion are doing battle. We use just about any hook we can to people into the arena, then hope they enjoy the rest of the program. It's a delicate balance."
SHEDDING ACADEMIC ROBES
The strategy appears to be working. On the strength of a 2008 Grammy for the album, "strange imaginary animals," Eighth Blackbird's touring schedule is filling up. In addition to concerts for residencies at the Universities of Chicago and Richmond, its 2009-10 tour travels from New York to San Diego, ending with a premiere of a Jennifer Higdon concerto next June with the Atlanta Symphony. It was given two more boosts with Steve Reich's 2009 Pulitzer Prize-winning "Double Sextet," which it commissioned and premiered, and a flurry of accolades for its direction and performances at the Ojai (Calif.) Music Festival in June.
"It has actually helped us weather this financial storm," Munro said. "We're actually sustaining gigs through all this, which is crazy."
Munro estimates that two thirds of his salary comes from university work, but he is encouraged to see the increasing number of new music organizations outside academia that are presenting new music. The Birmingham Art Music Alliance, which presented five concerts last season and plans four more in 2009-10, is an example. So is the ASO, whose innovative programming and number of commissions are on the rise.
"Whenever we visit a place, people talk to us about the local new music scene," he said. "These groups are not dying, they're not fading, and they're very much outside the academic world. In New York, there are between 40 and 50 active new music groups across a hugely broad spectrum, getting excited young crowds and doing innovative stuff. Obviously, universities are very important to us. They subsidize the ridiculous things that we do. But as far as new music freeing itself from academia, this has been a really important development."
Munro advises the uninitiated to keep an open mind, and to remember that there are no wrong opinions.
"There are so many twists and turn in an Eighth Blackbird concert. If you don't enjoy this five-minute segment, you're surely going to enjoy the next five-minute segment, and we're going to tickle your ear with something in the meantime."
Michael Huebner is classical music and dance critic and fine arts writer for The Birmingham News.
THE POEM BEHIND THE NAME
The Grammy-winning sextet, Eighth Blackbird, takes its name from the Wallace Stevens poem, ''Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.'' The eighth verse reads, "I know noble accents And lucid, inescapable rhythms; But I know, too, That the blackbird is involved In what I know."
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