Kirill Karabits and the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra gave a “melodic and exciting” performance of Mason’s Auditorium at the Royal Albert Hall as part of the BBC Proms 2021 season. The program also featured Elgar’s Cello Concerto and Leoš Janáček’s Taras Bulba.
Listen now on BBC Sounds.
The birth of a new concert hall occurs so rarely that it always calls for special celebration and, often, a new work to christen it. When the San Diego Symphony unveiled its architectural masterpiece The Shell, they invited me to compose a piece to show off the new space, the superb orchestra, and the cutting edge sound system.
Soundcheck in C Major is a fanfare animated by sonic effects. The opening shimmering chords echo electronically and then fly over the audience, tentatively testing the concert hall, before the orchestra builds to a resonant unison. A resolute march ensues and then evolves into a quicksilver passage showcasing solo players, before soon building back triumphantly to the opening sonorities.
This short work is equally informed by the textural brilliance of Wagnerian overtures, the psychedelic sound design of Pink Floyd, and the famous THX ‘sound test’ that once kicked off many a night at the movies.
Driving to Skywalker Ranch has become a regular pilgrimage over the past two years. The country roads north of San Francisco become ever windier the closer you get to the ranch, which was built thirty years ago by George Lucas as an idyllic creative campus.
I’ve used these country drives to plan the work to be done that day, thinking through the sound design of Alternative Energy, Mass Transmission, and Art of War during visits over the past ten years to mentor under Gary Rydstrom, the leading sound designer at Skywalker Sound.
Most recently, my visits to the Ranch have been about Philharmonia Fantastique: The Making of the Orchestra, an animated film the journeys inside instruments as they’re played. Early in the project, Gary and I storyboarded the film with animation director Jim Capobianco. Then we’d gather there to consider the musical score, the art, the motion graphics, and various other elements of the film.
The last step, the topic of this column, is mixing the symphonic score.
That’s how I ended up in the room with two of Hollywood’s best sets of ears. Gary is a legendary sound designer, having one seven Oscars for his work on Spielberg films; and to handle the mix, he brought in Shawn Murphy, who mixes all the John Williams scores.
To sit at the mixing board between these legendary listeners is quite an experience. When not figuring out how to bring out a particular instrument in the mix or accentuate a piece of sound design, Gary and Shawn reminisce so casually about mind-blowing projects (last month, it was about the upcoming Spielberg remake of West Side Story). For this project, we were mixing the studio recording of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra made the month before (see the previous column about the magic of recording an orchestra during Covid).
So, what happens at ‘the mix’?
The mix is when all sonic elements are brought together. For a pure audio release, such as my opera The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs, that means integrating all the various microphones – close on individual instruments, singes, section mics, room mics. My music also comes with electronic beats and sound design, so these mixes are complex beasts. But an audio release only requires one mix – the CD or digital album.
For Philharmonia Fantastique, we need both an album mix and a film mix. That’s because people often listen to an album and a film on different systems, and because a film requires a more dynamic mix than a traditional audio album. For example, when the film’s Sprite flies inside the flute, the film mix brings up the close mic on the flute; or when the bassoon fills the entire screen like an alien spaceship, we add some low subwoofer to accentuate the bassoon’s role as the bass of the woodwind section.
At Skywalker, we mixed on the main mix stage, with Shawn and I at the board, and his assistance Erik in the editing room nearby. Erik is the master of the edit domain, the person we go to when we need to dig up a different take of a particular passage. That mostly happens when there are issues of sync: when a percussion hit isn’t lining up with something in the film, for example.
Philharmonia Fantastique presents very intricate sync issues because it features close-ups of instruments being played as we hear them. So, a year after the film was finished, thousands of miles away in Chicago a bunch of musicians had to perform exactly in sync with the fingers of a flutist. The handful of times things were slightly off, well we just called Erik in the editing room.
We finished the mix on Friday; took a lunch break; and then came back onto the mix stage to experience the film from start to finish. Conductor Edwin Outwater joined us at this point, and we both couldn’t stop smiling at hearing the full orchestra come together.
Coming together, after all, is the key thematic of Philharmonia Fantastique, a celebration of the ways an orchestra unifies its diversity of instruments and people. Perhaps we took for granted how magical an orchestra is before Covid; but now, the majesty of the medium will be especially appreciated.
I drove back through the windy roads of Marin with a smile, tapping the beats of the film’s finale on my steering wheel. Bringing this to life during the past two years has been one of the most fulfilling creative experiences of my life – and I can’t wait for Philharmonia Fantastique to premiere next season.
So many fascinating revelations have occurred while recording Philharmonia Fantastique: The Making of the Orchestra this month with Chicago Symphonywith conductor Edwin Outwater. The soundtrack for this 25’ animated film, which journeys inside the orchestra to see how instruments work, is a vivid concerto for orchestra. Recording an orchestra during Covid is no small feat – and a real-world illustration of the film’s key theme: the orchestra as a beautiful example of “coming together.”
All film scores are recorded with a click track – i.e., a metronome – to ensure tight synchronization between music and images. For safety reasons, we’re recording in smaller groups – in this case by instrument families – and then putting everything together in post-production. Our recording engineer Shawn Murphy is a master at this, having just recorded Spielberg’s West Side Story (and several other films) in this manner. The Jedi-knight skills aren’t only required in the studio afterwards; the engineer also needs to set up the sessions so the players are as comfortable as possible.
So Shawn and his assistant Erik Swanson have made it possible, for example, to play back the violins while the low strings record, or play the brass when the woodwinds lay down their parts. That’s crucial for pitch and texture.
While there are obvious challenges to recording in isolation, some advantages have become obvious with this project. Because the film’s Sprite flies inside various instruments as they’re playing, we need some very close mic’ing of specific instruments. (The film’s poster art shows the Sprite inside the cello, for instance.) Spreading out the recording sessions over five days allows us to take the time to capture those close-up sounds.
Additionally, it’s interesting for the cello section to lay down its part without the brass blasting over them, allowing the cellists to really focus on their sound. One possible pitfall is precision obsession: in some orchestral tutti passages, players lean into their instruments more aggressively than they do when isolated. The orchestra rages euphorically at the climax of Philharmonia Fantastique, and we’re encouraging players to add grit to their sound at those moments. The accumulation of those intense instrumental textures are what makes a climax so thrilling.
After a year without orchestras, I found myself overwhelmed with emotion during the first session with violins. Just hearing them tune provoked a visceral emotional reaction; it’s been so long since I’ve heard a section tune. The lack of public discussion about the plight of the performing arts – especially when compared to, say, restaurants – has made the pandemic especially challenging for so many artists. It’s nice to be back with an orchestra I love, finding creative ways to make music again. Let’s hope orchestras look to September 2021 as a time to come back together in big ways. While that may be a challenge, it’s so crucial to the well-being of our collective cultural psyche. Orchestras are defined by the act of coming together, so let’s look to them as we emerge from this long year.
Photos by T. Rosenberg
Something remarkable happened this month: a new symphonic piece was actually premiered. Under the baton of Maestra Marin Alsop, the São Paulo Symphony gave the world premiere of Undistant, a lyrical response to the social distancing of the Covid era.
The piece’s life began with a conversation last May between me and Marin, who has brought many pieces of mine to orchestras around the world. She asked if I’d compose something reflective and hopeful, a piece that could celebrate the necessity of true human connection.
Undistant follows a journey of past, present, and future: beginning with the distancing we’ve experienced over the past nine months, it looks towards the return of human contact in the coming year. Scored for chamber orchestra and electronics, the piece opens with the cold sound of digital stutters from communication platforms (Zoom and Skype), then slowly warms up with the bloom of a long melody that shares the first three notes with “Ode to Joy.” (The isolation of Covid seems reminiscent of the isolation of Beethoven’s deafness, and his most famous tune is the ultimate hymn to human fellowship.)
To vividly illustrate the concept of distancing, the piece scatters several of the musicians around the hall: a group of woodwinds in the left balcony, some brass in the right, and the strings and percussion onstage. As the orchestras emerges in a haze of digital static, these three ensembles drift closer and closer together. The work culminates in an ecstatically lyricism, with the digital world (electronics) disappearing.
The very fact that I had to hear the premiere online, sitting in California, enhanced the basic thematic of the piece. Traveling to Brazil was unfortunately out of the question given all the restrictions, but I found the experience of tuning in quite moving. In fact, several years ago the São Paulo Symphony gave the Brazilian premiere of another work of mine exploring distance: Mass Transmission, a choral work, sets transcripts of families speaking over the first long-distance radio signals.
The past year has been especially challenging for orchestras, a medium that is all about people coming together. As a symphonist, I continue to be fascinated by the way orchestras allow so many people to collaborate in real time – but that defining characteristic has kept many orchestras shuttered during Covid. But recent advances in medicine and politics offer real hope in the inevitable return of live music, and that hope is what Undistant is all about.
I just spent a month composing in a 19th Century barn in Virginia. This was a refuge from the plague, protests, political upheaval, and wildfires that pushed my mental health to the brink. Dark days descended in a very literal way: ignited by once-in-a-century lightning storms, California wildfires suffocated the skies with smoke so thick that it felt like night.
Fight or flight? We chose the latter. The very next day my family and I boarded on a near-empty plane clutching a keyboard and guitar.
The Bates farm in King & Queen County is not a fancy mink-and-manure outfit like the ones found on the outskirts of Washington DC. It’s a working farm that has been in the family so long, there’s a Bates graveyard full of folks named Thomas Jefferson Bates (an honorific name only).
Working at the first piano I ever played seemed a fitting place to write a new piano concerto. Daniil Trifonov, the Grammy-winning wunderkind-gone-superstar of classical piano, brings an almost mystical vision to his interpretations of Bach, Rachmaninoff, Pärt, and Chopin, and it’s been a joy to write this piece for him and two orchestras close to my heart, the Philadelphia Orchestra and the San Francisco Symphony.
Fortunately, Daniil performs on Steinways that all have a working low Bb, which is busted on my old upright. It’s also so out of tune, you feel like you’re playing in a saloon out of spaghetti Western. But that’s okay. Staying on the farm is always about returning to roots.
The barn is a marvelous place to write. For one thing, it’s separate from my family, whose Zoom calls for school and work dominated the house for six months. I’m a much better composer and family man when I can be solitary when writing.
The barn is also big enough for the obsessive pacing that accompanies my composing. As I walked circles like a caged animal, I listened to a lot of Renaissance madrigals. One goal of this concerto is creating textures so transparent that the beautiful subtleties of Daniil’s playing can be heard. I’m working on a chorale with all manner of delicate ornamentation in the five voices, allowing Daniil to create all manner of colors.
Renaissance music also features a surprising amount of small percussion instruments that intrigue me. Listen to any release by the Italian ensemble Micrologus, and you’ll hear an energetic folk combination of plectrum instruments, tawny winds, and percussion. That’s the opening musical landscape of the concerto.
While I didn’t add many minutes to the concerto while in Virginia, upon returning to California I immediately produced a toccata for the third movement. The sudden productivity was certainly the result of shaking myself out of the listless routine of the past six months. It’s hard to overstate the importance of emotional health on creative output, and for me the change helped enormously.
As we look to a possibly long winter ahead, we should all take extra care to refresh our perspectives. Whether it’s a house rental or a solo backpacking trip, an escape is always welcome.
If I had bonsai plants, I’d be clipping them right now.
Instead, I’m sitting at the piano. Reengaging with the only instrument I ever studied, I’m going through all manner of repertoire to prepare to write a piano concerto – and, let’s face it, to help me cope.
A peaceful endeavor with long-term payoff, such as gardening or basket-weaving – or, in my case, relearning Bach and Messiaen preludes – is a good balm for today’s challenges. Covid has upended lives in many ways, with performing artists facing an especially unforgiving environment, and we all could use some mindfulness.
Playing piano is good for that: what started as research has become therapy. I’m wondering why it’s taken me this long to take a serious look at piano music – it helps my composing in all sorts of ways.
Writing a concerto for the absolute mindfreak Daniil Trifonov, I’m reminded of the vow I made when writing for the superb mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke: let the soloist shine. That means transparent orchestration to allow all the wonderful subtleties to be heard.
Daniil has an unmatched tone and lyricism. Grammy-winning releases such as Transcendental showcase the marvelous colors he coaxes from the instrument. Technical pyrotechnics are in copious supply as well, but Daniil always complements virtuosity with a deeply poignant sense of phrase. If you close your eyes, you wouldn’t think you were hearing such a young man.
I want to hear all those subtleties, and honestly new piano concerti offer precious little in the way of transparency. There’s no shortage of pieces with everyone playing all the time, the pianist hammering octaves over blizzards of orchestral figuration. I’ll have that too, but maybe not until the last movement.
Pieces such as Grieg’s Hommage à Chopin, Messiaen’s Preludes, or Adès’s Traced Overheard create ear-tingling textures that are as rich as a symphony. Then there’s Bach, with his multi-voice chorales and fugues containing multitudes. Just voicing the various lines properly requires Jedi mind-tricks. Grieg is especially good at whipping up tapestries of seemingly impossible figuration that actually sit quiet easily under the fingers.
I’m developing my own 4-voice chorale that starts simply but becomes more and more ornamented, requiring a quiet virtuosity to manage all the florid grace notes between voices. In order to stay focused on the subtleties of the soloist, I haven’t even allowed myself to add any orchestral accompaniment thus far – that’ll come later (and lightly).
I’ve also been listening to quite a bit of contemporary work, from Keith Jarrett’s Munich (wow that finale) to Timo Andres’s album I/Still/Play. He’s the leading American composer-pianist and explores the work of many composers on the release. Equally impressive piano music can be found in the jazz-classical realm, such as Patrick Zimmerli’s Modern Music or Francesco Tristano’s Ground Bass (he’s done much since that, but it’s a remarkably catchy piece of pointillism).
Getting back to the piano has been good for me as a musician and a human, though I’m still losing my mind at the dearth of live music. We’ll get there – hopefully soon – but in the meantime, I’ll be tending to my piano.
There came a moment in late May when sitting still just wasn’t going to work. After a few months of lockdown, I started talking with my team at Mercury Soul about a way forward. After cancelling two of our biggest shows – one featuring legendary DJ Juan Atkins, one featuring the duo behind the music to Stranger Things – we devoted those resources to an immersive, beautifully-filmed miniseries featuring meditative classical music and electronica.
The result is Mercury Soul: Cathedral. Over the next month, each week will feature a new 15’ episode exploring mystical music with a fluid, floating viewer perspective. From Johann Sebastian Bach to Johann Johannsson, from Indian classical to Chinese folk music – all seamlessly mixed alongside downtempo DJing – this series is a soothing, lyrical journey at a time when we need it.
The series was created both as a soulful response to the current climate, and as a demonstration of a much more imaginative way to present classical music digitally. In the beginning of lockdown, it was great to see so many bedroom solos or Brady Bunch virtual performances, but soon those endeavors felt like such a shadow of the real thing. My curating projects, from the Kennedy Center to clubs, always use intricate production to animate the concert experience (more info on that here). To present classical music more vividly online, I imagined a kind of gliding camera that would never stop moving from one musician to the next.
So I reached out to Saint Joseph’s Society for the Arts in San Francisco, a magnificent cathedral-turned-art gallery designed by the renown Ken Fulk. As a cathedral with 22,000 square feet of opulent furniture and art, the space has plenty of room to safely space soloists and chamber ensembles. There are vast expanses of Persian rugs, decorative art, and light installations to provide stunning complements to performances of classical music.
I also reassembled the film crew from my animated film Philharmonia Fantastique (stay tuned for exciting news about that project). Having become more fluent in film production over the past few years, I knew we would have to move fast to get the crew and gear necessary to bring this vision to life. Everyone was sitting on their hands during the lockdown, but even in June things were starting to pick up.
Immediately evident in the opening minute is the sense of a journey – indeed, this series is all about the journey. For classical music to grab an online viewer, it has to be presented in a highly dynamic visual way. You almost have to make it work even if the sound is off. So the concept was a continually roving camera, gliding from one part of the cathedral to another. We wanted the viewer’s perspective to perfectly gel with the mystically lyrical music we programmed.
A key element of focus for all Mercury Soul shows is the transitions between sets, which are carefully choreographed with specially composed interludes and lighting shifts. That’s true too in this series: when each performance finishes, the shot begins gliding to the next musician. The journey’s the thing.
The primary challenge was actually light: when we drew up our storyboard, we realized the proximity to the Summer Solstice would require us to shoot between 9pm and end at 4am to achieve the lighting effects we desired. Luckily my key collaborator is Matthew Ebisuzaki, Mercury Soul’s managing director, who has a unique background in both performance and film. He took my shooting script and carefully designed the shoot schedule so that we could glide from one performer to the next – no small feat when we were restricting how many people could be on set at a given time.
I’ve taken to wearing a bandana. It hides unruly hair that hasn’t been cut since the lockdown started and double as a mask when necessary. But I noticed a slight change in my vibe when wearing it, like maybe I was part pirate or hippie or even the bad guy from Tiger King. Should I braid a few strands of hair, maybe add a holster to my pajamas? This is called mindstate drift, and it’s a symptom of the new normal we’re experiencing these strange days.
In short, we’re all getting a lot more perspective than we ever asked for – but there can be some productive benefits to a challenging time. The pause in live performance has led to some introspection about how we experience music, so I’ve created a miniseries called Curating the Concert Experience. The series is being hosted by the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, my home base of artistic activities even amidst shelter-in-place.
Curating the Concert Experience explores the ways we experience music in the 21st Century, from string quartets to club shows. As composer-in-residence at the Center, I have been inspired by its huge variety of spaces and the different ways we can animate them. In addition, my work as a DJ has highly informed my approach, and my classical-club show Mercury Soul has exploded the ways musicians are staged and information is relayed.
The first episode, Curating: Intro & Programming, introduces the series and examines how we choose music and the order we present it.
Curating: Production delves into the complexities of lighting, stagecraft, and ambient information, with a special look at transforming the program book into something cinematic, engaging, and welcoming to a broad range people.
Curating: Platform looks at the entire experience of a concert, asking us to consider ways to expand the platform to include pre- and post-concert artists from different genres to bring a wider audience and create a deeper impact. In classical music we talk about concerts – but to continue to engage new listeners in new ways, we should transform our concerts into events. This segment draws from the previous two episodes to examine the ways we can enlarge a concert into a richer experience.
As we look to ways to bring classical music into living rooms digitally, we must remain focused on animating the live experience – which will always be the core of what we do. The more vibrantly we can present music onstage, with fluid production and immersive information, the better our broadcasts will look on the small screen at home. It’s the model of sports, which in anchored by the live experience but has found ways to broadcast imaginatively. We can emerge from this tough moment in creative ways.
• Give everyone a synthesizer, and all shall be well on Earth.
• My exploration of the synth universe continues this month with Ekhodom, which KC Jukebox presents at the Kennedy Center’s new REACH campus. A project of Thievery Corporation’s Giamaria Conti and Eric Hilton, it’s a deep dive into the warm and beautiful world of analogue synthesis.
• This iconic instrument has played a leading cultural role for over half a century, from rock ’n roll to film scores. Less discussed is how “synthesizer symphonies” are descendants of the “organ symphonies” of Messiaen and other classical giants, a fascinating lineage.
• Without synthesizers, there would be no Beatles or Pink Floyd, Bladerunner or Stranger Things. What quality do these share? Psychedelia.
• Synthesizers allow us to slowly swirl a chord into filigree, or animate a baseline into twitchy pulsations, or blend the sounds of two disparate samples into one. That creates a kind of aural version of a paisley shirt or a kaleidoscope – a morphing color wheel that feels otherworldly. The effect is enhanced when using analogue synthesizers, which use actual soundwaves instead of the 1’s & 0’s of digital synths (vinyl feels richer than a CD for the same reason).
• Complementing Gianma and Eric’s synths was a string ensemble playing original arrangements written expressly for the occasion. Whenever I invite someone from outside the classical world to perform at the Kennedy Center, I make sure we throw a SWAT team of musicians at them. Strings are a great way to elevate an electronic soundworld, and creating new arrangements is a nice gear-shift from my normal zone of composing.
• This month also brings a ballet based on The B-Sides to Cal Performances, with stunning choreography from Joffrey Ballet’s Nicholas Blanc. He has a marvelous eye for geometrical compositions, arraying his dancers in a variety of imaginative shapes.
• Our collaboration began when New York City Ballet featured Mothership on their gala. Attending that event was one of the most exciting moments of my artistic life, since I’d spent so much time watching City Ballet as a Juilliard student. The Joffrey is one of the best companies in the country, and they are touring this work all over – so make sure you check them out if they come through your city.
• The rest of the month has me polishing sound design for Philharmonia Fantastique, premiering soon at the Chicago Symphony and San Francisco Symphony. Amidst the beats and sound effects, there’s a good bit of sound originating from, yes, my collection of analogue synthesizers.