A new record, a new ballet, and performances from orchestras to choruses to clubs: this month is a multi-headed beast.
The big news is the April 19th release of Mass Transmission, my 2012 work for the San Francisco Symphony Chorus, organist Paul Jacobs, and electronic sounds. This album comes from the SFS chorusmaster Ragnar Bohlin and his group Cappella SF, a stellar pro-bowl of choristers who have already made waves during their short existence.
Mass Transmission tells the true story of a distantly-separated family communicating over the earliest radio transmissions. It’s 1920’s-era Skype: on one end of the line is a Dutch girl sent to be a page in the colonial government of the East Indies; on the other end is her mother, thousands of miles away in the Dutch Telegraph Office. The piece explores the warmth of human emotions pulsing through a mechanistic medium.
Two obscure texts are set to music. I came across an old publication by the Dutch government that compiled recollections and transcripts of these ground-breaking communications, giving us the mother’s perspective in the outer movements. The central movement gives us the daughter’s perspective of jungle-life in Java, drawn from recollections by Elizabeth van Kampen about her early years there.
The chorus sing these texts, comprising the ‘animal warmth’ of the piece, while the electronics give us a ‘musical scrim’ of static and short-wave radio sounds. The organ connects the two: sometimes it supports the chorus, sometimes it plays the toccata-like music of the Dutch Telegraph Office. On this recording we hear the amazing Isabelle Demers, protégé of Paul Jacobs and a longtime collaborator.
Chorus master Ragnar Bohlin made this piece happen: when he heard the SF Symphony premiere The B-Sides and Chanticleer premiere Sirens in the spring of 2009, he immediately suggested we take a piece to Michael Tilson Thomas. This resulted in perhaps my most personal piece, dedicated to my wife Jamie and my son Toliver, who are always at ‘the other end of the line’ when I ring them up from various cities.
Chanticleer continues to sing Sirens, which they most recently performed on my KC Jukebox series as part of the Kennedy Center’s Direct Current festival of new work. While they’ve performed excerpts of the work over the past ten years, this was the first time they’ve reprised the entire 30-minute piece. It was fascinating to hear how this superstar chorus retains its trademark blend even though many of the twelve choristers have changed. (Cf Ship of Theseus conundrum: if a ship’s board were changed one at a time while en route to a destination, so that all the boards were new when it arrives, is it the same ship? In the case of choruses and orchestras, the institutional memory is so strong that the answer is often Yes: same ship, new boards.)
Also on the Direct Current festival were two superb National Symphony concerts organized around the theme of water. Alongside pieces such as Sibelius’ Oceantides and Glass’ Ipietu, my Sea-Blue Circuitry sounded the least watery – by design. The piece was one of the first acoustic works I wrote after pushing into electronic sounds, and I was primarily focused on creating a circuit-board surface of shattered jazz minimalism. Teddy Abrams did a marvelous job conjuring the complex web of novel sounds. He’s a longtime friend who, just watch, continue to impact American music in deeper and more profound ways.
A few days later, the Washington Ballet premiered a new ballet set to my Omnivorous Furniture, one of my earliest electro-acoustic compositions. The choreographer, Dana Genshaft, was already known to me through her reign at SF Ballet. She has a gift creating a clear emotional arc while also integrating a huge variety of dance styles within a singular, original voice. I also enjoyed collaborating with a stellar group that works outside of the Kennedy Center. Washington Ballet has superb dancers and a hugely supportive audience.
On the way back to California, I dropped into Sioux City to perform Passage with Sasha Cooke, who brought the role of Laurene Jobs to life in my opera The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs. I wrote Passage for the Kennedy Center’s celebration of JFK’s centennial, and the works pairs a poem celebrating American exploration (Whitman’s Passage to India) with recorded fragments of JFK’s moonshot speech. Sasha leaves a wake of enthralled audiences wherever she goes, and this performance was no exception. We also performed Alternative Energy under Ryan Haskins, the energetic and visionary young conductor of the SC Symphony. I always enjoy seeing a regional orchestra performing inventive programming for a supportive audience, and Ryan’s work is a fine example.And…one more thing: a club show. On April 26, Mercury Soul presents “Jazz Mafia” at San Francisco’s DNA Lounge, where some of SF’s finest DJs and musicians explore the varied hues of jazz, from Stravinsky to Ellington and beyond.
No rest for the weary!