March 27 – April 3, 2022
Kopleff Recital Hall, Orpheus Brewing, and Core Dance
Atlanta and Decatur, Georgia
Various ensembles performing a spectrum of contemporary repertoire
Mark Gresham | 5 APR 2022
The 2022 SoundNOW Festival concluded this past Sunday, having presented a total of eight concerts of contemporary music. Here are impressions of four of the programs EarRelevant was able to attend.
On the Festival’s opening Sunday, March 27, Terminus Ensemble presented their most smoothly produced performance, in my experience, in the second half of the afternoon concert. Artistic direction for the program was by composer Brent Milam, with two of his compositions included in the evening fare.
The Terminus selections opened with Insulator (2022) for piano and fixed media by Hanna Lisa Stefansson, with the composer as pianist. The two forces involved were musically well balanced, with the fixed-media part allowing time for the composer-pianist to enter and exit the stage within the boundaries of the composition.
That also allowed flutist Amy Caputo to be positioned on stage to begin performing Milam’s Because I Have No Words (2019) for unaccompanied flute. Caputo gave it a vital, convincing performance.
More flute music followed with a flute trio, Freilach (2015) by David Warin, performed by Perimeter Flutes (Kathy Farmer, Jeanne Herring Giager, and Laura Philpott). The group also played the first half of the concert before the Terminus program, a clutch of short flute ensemble pieces announced from the stage with commentary, much of the kind you might hear at music education conferences.
Percussionist Dominic Ryder performed Sapphire Heat (2005) by Paul Osterfield, which was followed by another Milam piece for fixed media, Framed In Shadow (2022). Finally, with Milam switching to a third role as a solo pianist, the concert closed with Glass (2016) for solo piano by Joshua Nunez.
Interestingly, there seemed to be a clean, almost nostalgic 1980s feeling to the sonics of the fixed media portions of the terminus program.
Bent Frequency Duo: saxophonist Jan Berry Baker and percussionist Stuart Gerber perform at Kopleff Hall, 2022 SoundNOW Festival.. (credit: Mark Gresham)
The Bent Frequency Duo and Duet for Theremin and Lap Steel shared the Monday night program at Kopleff Recital Hall.
Saxophonist Jan Berry Baker and percussionist Stuart Gerber comprise the Bent Frequency Duo, a subset of a larger Bent Frequency ensemble. But the Duo seems to have been appearing more frequently, perhaps due to greater portability and flexibility of scheduling, plus having a well-developed repertoire ready for touring.
Baker and Gerber kicked off the evening with their arrangement of the Laurie Anderson classic, From the Air, the opening track from her 1982 album, Big Science. It presents, from the flight captain’s point of view, the cynical narrative of an airplane crash in progress as an analog for the devolution of civilization.
Next, Bent Frequency Duo performed I Stood on the Shore and Looked Up at the Birds by Jeff Herriott, from their own 2017 album, Diamorpha (Centaur Records, CRC 3541).
Their final piece of the evening was Hazy Moonlight by Elainie Lillios, for soprano saxophone, percussion, and electroacoustics. Lillios’ inspiration for Hazy Moonlight came from five haiku by poet Wally Swist that depict the moon’s varied appearance across the seasons. The Duo premiered and recorded the 12-minute work at Bowling Green State University in 2017.
Except for a malfunctioning bullhorn at the beginning of Anderson’s work, Bent Frequency Duo’s performance on this occasion once again exhibited the professional excellence and strong programming that listeners have come to expect from them.
Coming off of a March 26 performance at Pretentious Glass Studio in Knoxville, Tennessee, Duet for Theremin and Lap Steel (Scott Burland, theremin, and Frank Schultz, lap steel) played the second half of this Monday night program in tandem with a film by Robbie Land projected behind them.
Improvisation at its very best is a matter of long and deep experience, which is something DfT&LS has in abundance. The sonic tapestry of kaleidoscopic textures and timbres they bring forth from their Odd Couple pair of instruments evolves and transforms slowly with both patience and grace.
Exhibiting simultaneously with the music, with neither confined to the other’s timeline other than total duration, Robbie Land’s film invoked vague, often flickering memories: images of daytime and nighttime skies and a sense of uncertain twilights between them. Trees, dogs, and rural scenes appear as if the viewer knows something is vital to their personal experience but cannot precisely recall it.
Pianist Laura Gordy (playing toy piano) and percussionist Caleb Herron of Chamber Cartel performing “The Toy Robot’s Mechanical Heart” by Christopher Adler at Kopleef Hall. (credit: Mark Gresham
On Wednesday, March 29, the performance by Chamber Cartel at Kopleff Hall opened with a work written for them nine years ago: Riding with Death by Drew Baker. Pianist Laura Gordy, violist Sprite Crawford, and percussionist Caleb Herron performed the work, named after the eponymous 1988 painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat.
It is significant that in addition to Riding with Death, another three of the six works on the program were pieces written for Chamber Cartel.
The next one of those in line was The Toy Robot’s Mechanical Heart (2015) by Christopher Adler, performed by Gordy and Herron on toy piano and percussion. (Most interestingly, this same piece would also crop up on Saturday’s program by SMOL Ensemble, with different performers, but we’ll get to that later.)
Another piece written for the group was Night of Pan (2016) by Aaron Jay Myers. Scored for flute (Matthieu Clavé), harp (Jennifer Betzer), toy piano (Gordy), and percussion (Herron), and although for only four players conducted in this instance by Paul Scanling.
Gordy and Herron returned to a duo piece for piano and percussion with the 17-minute Three Canticles of the Birds (2013) by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer John Luther Adams.
Cold Mountains, One Belt, Heartbreak Green (2018) by Carolyn Chen utilized bass flute (Clavé), violin (Crawford), cello (Alana Bennett-Garcia), percussion (Herron), and harp (Betzer) to present a sonic world of near-stasis, with gentle progressions and fascinating timbres. Here again, as he also would in the final work on the program, Scanling conducted the handful of musicians.
The concert ended as it began, with another work written for Chamber Cartel by Drew Baker: Domination of Black (2015) for tenor saxophone (Brandyn Taylor), bass clarinet (Ted Gurch), viola (Crawford), cello (Bennett-Garcia), percussion (Herron), and piano (Gordy). Just as with Riding with Death does, Domination of Black takes its title from another extant work of art, this time a poem by Wallace Stevens.
A slow, resonant chord progression, stated six times over eight minutes, began in the piano, which dominated the music at first. As the progression crept higher and higher, a methodical transformation began to occur. The other instruments slowly formed a floating halo of resonance around the piano part, ultimately replacing it entirely.
Smol Ensemble performing “Westminster Quarters II” by Justin Greene, pictured center. (credit: Mark Gresham)
On Saturday, we took in the performance by Smol Ensemble at Orpheus Brewing, off Monroe Drive just northeast of Piedmont Park.
Smol Ensemble is self-described as “a consort of toy pianists and percussionists with a particular interest in the curiosities and delights of new music.” Performers for this concert were Amy O’Dell, Monica Pearce, Paul Stevens, Justin Greene, and Olivia Kieffer. Four of them wrote music played in this concert.
That has its own story. The program was supposed to have taken place in 2020 were it not for the intervention of the COVID-19 pandemic. Works by Pearce, Stevens and Kieffer, as well as Boston-based composer Stefanie Lubkowski were written two years ago for the canceled concert.
The program opened with one of the latter, to prepare by Monica Pearce, performed on a quartet of sand blocks by O’Dell, Stevens, Greene, and Kieffer, and the small room was ideal for the size of the sound, with the rhythms and slight variations in timbre distinctly heard.
Greene and Pearce performed the premiere of Lubkowski’ Dyad, for two toy pianos and a shared toy glockenspiel.
Alan Shockley (1970-2020) with one of his toy pianos. (source: csulb.edu)
Then came the Southeastern premiere of If you know what I’m singing about up here (Sections 3, 4, and 5) by Alan Shockley. Again, the performance was to take place in 2020 but did not. Tragically, Shockley died on September 29, 2020 at the age of 50. The piece involved all five musicians playing electric guitar, bowed psaltery, keyboard melodica, two toy pianos, and percussion.
Stevens then stepped off stage to hear the other four musicians premiere his v smol for keytar, toy piano, and percussion.
Westminster Quarters II by Justin Greene was the newest work, composed during the final weeks before the Smol Ensemble rehearsals for this concert. Also the most avant-garde of the lot, Green’s piece used five performers playing individual tubular bells (chimes) with extended techniques, including harmonics and selective dampening, as well as gliding the bottoms of the bells on glass plates, producing eerie long tones.
The Toy Robot’s Mechanical Heart by Christopher Adler, heard on Wednesday in the performance by Chamber Cartel, made a reappearance in this Smol Ensemble program, this time performed by O’Dell and Stevens.
A bit of explanation seems in order: it was Caleb Herron and Amy O’Dell who premiered the work under the Chamber Cartel flag. Both have an equal share in the work’s origins and performance heritage. So the possibility of the two different performances in the same Festival week was well within possibility, even if accidental, given that as each group in the SoundNOW Festival plans their own programs, rather than a single Festival committee overseeing the artistic direction and planning of the concerts.
Smol Ensemble closed with Take it Anywhere! by Olivia Kieffer. The energetic, visceral piece, scored for a quartet of musicians playing two toy pianos and percussion, also calls for shouting on the part of the performers.
This Smol Ensemble concert was most lively and possessed a great sense of immediacy. It felt especially good to be so up close to the music making.
Unfortunately, EarRelevant was unable to attend all eight concerts of the 2022 Festival. Other performances included neoPhonia new Music Ensemble at Kopleff Hall on Tuesday; Whispers of Night on Thursday, Artifctaual String Unit on Friday (each at Orpheus Brewing); and Atlanta Contemporary Ensemble at the studios of Core Dance in Decatur on the final Sunday to close the series. ■
External links:
- Atlanta SoundNOW Festival: atlantasoundnowfestival.com
Mark Gresham is publisher and principal writer of EarRelevant. he began writing as a music journalist over 30 years ago, but has been a composer of music much longer than that. He was the winner of an ASCAP/Deems Taylor Award for music journalism in 2003.
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