A CRAZY SUMMER

May is typically the month when our season begins to wind down, and although we might have a couple of summer gigs, the most intense and nutso stuff is usually behind us, and we can enjoy the slow emergence from hibernation of our wonderful hometown, Chicago.

Not this year, and I must say that it is mighty good to be busy given the current climate!

On May 30 we head to Ojai, CA, for two weeks of 12-hours-per-day rehearsals prior to our Music Directorship of the Ojai Festival. This will be a test of our powers of endurance, but, well, we only have ourselves to blame for programming so much music to play!

Then we make a six-day pit stop at the Great Lakes Festival in Bloomfield Hills, MI. This is a fantastic festival with a hugely diverse program, and if you come, you’ll hear us playing Bach, Haydn and Copland in collaboration with some of the festival’s outstanding guests, including Jeremy Denk, piano. There is a focus on the wonderful music of Stephen Hartke, and there will be performances of almost all of his chamber works during the festival. The history of the festival itself is worth mentioning; according to the website, it was founded as a “secular event,” but one that was “sponsored by three religious institutions (representing Catholic, Jewish, and Protestant faiths).”

Next is a flight to Europe for the Music09 Festival, newly relocated from its previous home in Cincinnati to the Hindemith Foundation in gorgeous Blonay, Switzerland. In addition to its own concert at the festival, 8bb will split up to perform the music of student composers in ensembles of student musicians. We will also give a performance of the Music09 composition competition winner, David Brynjar Franzson’s Il dolce fare niente. You can hear a recording of this fascinating and truly bloody crazy piece here.

Finally, after a few weeks off (during which I will try to get some of my Aussie accent back in the Motherland), 8bb makes a trip to the illustrious Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, where we will give the world premiere of hot English composer (and current CSO composer-in-residence) Mark-Anthony Turnage’s ironically-named Grazioso. Here is what the composer has written about the work:

It is one of a group of my recent pieces inspired by the music of Led Zeppelin. In this case the influence is mostly a general one, although there is a very slight allusion to the group’s 1971 Black Dog. The title refers to the first model of instrument played by Led Zeppelin’s guitarist Jimmy Page. Applied to this piece, it is ironic, as the music is not “grazioso” (graceful) at all. It is mostly aggressive and riff-based, using the extremes of register of the piccolo, bass clarinet and piano, and with a percussion set-up including a pedal bass drum, tom-toms and a large anvil.

The Mac, the Alb and I will also be taking part in Marin Alsop’s crazy festival of contemporary orchestral music, the Cabrillo Festival, which takes place in impossibly beautiful Santa Cruz, CA. Lots of reasons to get excited about this, not the least of which is working with and playing the music of two very different but equally interesting Aussie composers, Matthew Hindson and 2009 Grawemeyer Award winner Brett Dean. Also at the festival will be old friends of 8bb, Osvaldo Golijov, Michael Ward-Bergeman and Kevin Puts.

A wild musical party

I recently wrote an article for KUSC’s May Newsletter, which has just been published, about the experience of planning the 2009 Ojai Festival. You can read it here, but I’ve also posted it below:

eighth blackbird was named Music Director of the 2009 Ojai Festival way back in the summer of 2006. This was shockingly, overwhelmingly, nerve-rattlingly unexpected. Taking the reins of the Festival, we would be stepping into the shoes of some giants of 20th-century music, including Stravinsky, Copland, Boulez, and the Emerson Quartet. The weight of tradition has remained on the back of our minds throughout the process, but so has the “kids-in-a-candy-store” feeling: “Those crazy Ojai folks are giving us a whole festival? Woo-hoo!”.

Our first programming meeting with Ojai’s artistic director Thomas W. Morris in September 2006 was chaotic. Conversations collided, overlapped, intersected; megalomaniacal plans and utopian visions were hatched; hundreds of programs were planned. We all agreed the Festival should reflect the character of eighth blackbird, and two overarching ideas were settled upon: present unique, unexpected, groundbreaking chamber music experiences; and, make the Festival a wild, no-holds-barred musical party.

“Groundbreaking chamber music”? The Festival would expand the traditional definition of chamber music to include all of the bizarre things that we do as a 21st-century new music band: chamber-sized music theater (the world premiere of Rinde Eckert/Steve Mackey’s Slide); the collision of dance and small ensemble (Mark deChiazza’s radical new Pierrot Lunaire); unconducted “super-ensembles” (Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians; David Gordon’s everything-but-the-kitchen-sink Quasi-Sinfonia; Andriessen’s raucous, pedal-to-the-metal Worker’s Union).

“A wild musical party”? By cramming a diverse group of the country’s best musicians in close proximity, we would encourage cross-pollination, turning Ojai 2009 into a weekend-long jam session, concluding with a “marathon” concert that will be a rollicking good time for all!

There are good reasons that the designation “Music Director” is typically used in its singular form. Artistic decisions made by committee can be stilted, bureaucratic, compromised. This is where Tom Morris, former Executive Director of the Cleveland Orchestra and one of America’s most experienced orchestral “thinkers,” was essential. We met with him every few months until early 2009, and during the meetings he played many roles with ease and gusto: supportive dad (“That’s a great idea – nice work!”); experienced diplomat (“You both have interesting ideas, we just need to find the right place for them”); football coach (“OK guys, we’ve done solid work so far, but we still have a big job ahead of us”); the voice of reason (“I really think that is too much work for you”). He resolved inevitable disputes, massaged our egos, and focused our minds on the task at hand.

From the outset, we wanted Slide as the centerpiece of Ojai 2009. This project, eight years in the making, reunites prize-winning collaborators Rinde Eckert and Steve Mackey, who have created an ambitious night of “concert-theater” in which all eight performers speak, sing, play instruments, and take roles in this poignant drama. Eckert plays Renard, a psychologist whose 40-year-old experiment into perception and reality still haunts him.

Other highlights from Ojai 2009? The world premiere of a new production of Schoenberg’s tragicomic masterpiece Pierrot Lunaire, in which director Mark DeChiazza uses dance and gesture to connect to the human core of this bizarre, fascinating work. We will also perform Steve Reich’s new Pulitzer Prize-winner: the Double Sextet.

We have invited more than 20 of our favorite friends and collaborators to join us at the Festival, including the brilliant pianist Jeremy Denk, genre-bending ensemble Tin Hat, legendary soprano Lucy Shelton, surprising recorder quartet QNG, superstar guitarist/ composer Steve Mackey, rising Aussie star flutist Alexis Kenny, and a battery of amazing percussionists.

After three years of dreaming and scheming, the craziness of Ojai 2009 is almost upon us. I do hope you’ll join us for our wild musical thrill-ride!

Flutist Tim Munro is a member of eighth blackbird.

8bb’s response to the economic crisis

YouTube Preview Image

(As usual, watch in “HD” if you can!)

Desperate measures in harsh economic times?

Fortunately, no. Our Swingle Singers-like rendition of several songs from Pierrot Lunaire came about during a cue-to-cue (lighting rehearsal), in advance of last night’s studio concert at Chicago’s wonderfully unkempt Viaduct Theater. Lucy Shelton (our renowned prima donna) and Elyssa Dole (our prima ballerina) needed aural cues (so they could be in the right place at the right time), and so, without our instruments at hand, we resorted to some increasingly eccentric scat singing. My favorite moment? The ephemeral flutter of the song Raub (”Robbery”), during which the quartet sang every breathless, breakneck-speed 64th-note on the word “raub!”  (This was unfortunately not captured on film!)

The studio concert was a well attended and mostly very well executed run of our brand spanking new Pierrot production. Due to the fact that we spin, whir, sneak, embrace and drag chairs for much of the piece, it’s impossible for us to have an objective opinion about the production, which received its first-ever run-through during last night’s performance. So audience reaction becomes fascinating, frustrating and crucial. We talked to lots of people about almost every conceivable aspect of this quite abstract reading of the almost 100-year-old melodrama, and have a lot of data to mull over before the public premiere at the Ojai Festival in less than a month. Happily, we’ve received lots of positive comments so far, and, just as important, our rather frazzled, stressed-out director seemed very happy with what we have acheived!