I couldn't be more pleased that on Saturday, December 10th Jeremiah Cawley of The Box Is Empty will be conducting my piece Kugami, which is for men's choir and soprano with piano, cello and bass clarinet. The event will be at 3:00pm in Brechemin Recital Hall on the campus of the University of Washington. This piece was originally debuted at Seattle Pacific University under the direction of Ken Pendergrass. Jeremiah's ensemble, The Box Is Empty is a project-based New Music ensemble that is interested not only in playing the hits from contemporary repertoire, but also in expanding undeveloped areas of New Music such as the choral realm. If the amazing performances at the all-Andriessen concert earlier this year is any indication, this new ensemble will be an exceptional addition to New Music...don't miss their next concert on January 21 at The Chapel here in Seattle.
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Last week I finished writing a short piece for another project presented by DoTank in Brooklyn - an event that will be a part of the Make Music Winter festival on December 21st. The event, Bell by Bell, is a parade - a roving hand bell choir moving through the East Village - and it engages the neighborhood not only by creating music on the street, but by inviting people to participate as well. You can read more about it here. Writing the piece was an interesting challenge because I was constrained to exactly 5 notes within one octave - so it was an opportunity to consider and utilize the human aspects of the ensemble such as what the reaction time will be like with dozens of people following commands from conductor wielding a flag, how sound might bounce around amongst the Brownstones, if people’s arms are going become tired and thus some notes lose intensity in their ringing, the manufacturing irregularities of the bells, etc. I won’t be in New York for the event, but you should go have a listen or participate if you live nearby...besides myself there is also a piece on the program by SO Percussion’s Eric Beach. In news of the Mycological sort, a farmer at the market was selling the largest oyster mushrooms I’ve ever seen. Usually at their biggest one finds them to be silver-dollar sized, but as you can from the picture this one is around ten inches wide! Being the Mycological paradise that the NW is, it’s not unusual to see a small farm or farmer occasionally selling mushrooms beyond their normal fare that they found on their property, but this exceptional. Also exceptional is that with the way the season has worked out there are still Chanterelles popping up in the woods...not cold enough yet to deter them from growing at the lower altitudes and lots of rain but only at favorable times. Listening list 12/4 Jefferson Friedman - SQ Christopher Roberts - Last Cicada Singing Wu Tang Clan - 36 chambers of Wu Allen Ginsberg - first blues Ravel - String Quartet Shabazz Palaces -Black Up Animal Collective - Strawberry Jam  Every half-bookish NPR listener the world over probably heard this radiolab episode that begins with a detailed analysis of Kristen Schaal and her pal Kurt Braunohler doing their Kaufman-esque absurdist routine, and now it has been pointed out by Rebecca Haithcoat in LA Weekly that this Kaufman moment may be making another appearance with Jay-Z and Kanye West...in other news, these Jefferson Friedman string quartets are really great - as is Chiara’s performance, and there are even two Matmos remixes of the quartets on the album. I’ve been really taken with the remix idea myself after doing one for NewVillager’s song Lighthouse. Going through the audio stems that I was sent to do the remix was akin to taking apart a Kaleidoscope then reassembling it into something else entirely, and the process challenged me to use materials that I wouldn’t normally associate with my own work or sound...but I digress...beautiful juxtapositions seem to abound as of late whether it be Beethoven and Black Metal or thoughts on screen savers and office novels. Well, perhaps David Foster Wallace can sum all of this up for us via The Pale King, “above and below were a different story, but there was always something disappointing about clouds when you were inside them; they ceased to be clouds at all. It just got really foggy.”
Henry Cowell - Piano Music of Henry Cowell - Sorrell Davis Hays
Outkast - Big Boi & Dre Present... Sonic Youth - Daydream Nation Benny Goodman - Carnegie Hall Jazz Concert James Tenney - Spectral Canon for Conlon Nancarrow Fats Waller - Jitterbug Waltz J.S. Bach - Goldberg Variations (Simone Dinnerstein) Panda Bear - Person Pitch Atlas Sound - Parallax  At long last, the Yellow Foot Chanterelle (left) has made an appearance here in Seattle. A week ago I went mushrooming for Chanterelles - slightly unusual for this time of year - usually they're either A. giant and soggy or B. it's become too cold and they've gone to sleep for the year - but it was so incredibly dry in late summer/early fall that their season was pushed back a bit and it hasn't been too rainy yet thus far. All in all it was a good haul (see below). However, this unusual season also meant that the Yellow Foot Chanterelles weren't out yet, yet last year in early November (the very end of usual Chanterelle season) they were out in droves. But...they must be out now as the foragers at the market had a soggy basketful. Wandering in the woods causes one to reexamine listening in our daily lives - the thick moss beds covering everything creating a completely different way of not only hearing sound, but interacting and moving through it and realizing one's own participation in the creation of sound. These ideas show up in my own work all the time - mainly in abstract ways - but recently I finished a piece for men's choir and percussion ensemble for Ken Pendergrass at SPU, and the work requires the percussionists to improvise at the end of the work using a tray full of natural objects they've collected to create the sound of moving through the woods. The singers are also required to play natural objects - rustling branches to create additional textures. Listening in new contexts seems to be happening all over - when I embarked upon the Sunset + Music tour over the summer I met a number of interesting people doing similar things, among them Tom Peyton. He and his group at DoTank do listening experiments like this one quite regularly. Technology has surely changed how we listen to music and media in general; hopefully positive contributions like that will be a counterbalance to the potential for sound to become less consequential in these strange times of fear and loathing. 11/21 listening list Talking Heads - Remain in Light Open Graves with Stuart Dempster - flight patterns Smog - dress sexy at my funeral Django Reinhardt - All Star Sessions F. Couperin - Harpsichord Suites Tom Baker - Hunger Django Reinhardt - Souvenirs  After the sun set on the tour de sunsets in October, a great deluge of work and events came rolling on in, so up until now I've been spending most of my time doing lots of organizing and emailing (and thinking about organizing and emailing) for events next year. Occasional collaborator Ross Simonini and I are working on a new electro-acoustic score for Catherine Cabeen for March, I just finished another 'composerly' remix for NewVillager as well as a piece for Seattle Pacific University's Men's Choir and Percussion Ensemble, and then there are two guest-composer events on the east coast this spring that I've got two commissions for. One is for Beta Test Ensemble - a work for electronics and unspecified number of winds, and the other will be an electro-acoustic work in the vein of my sunrise and sunset pieces that will begin at sunset and take the listener into the black of night. The latter work is for Scott Comanzo's Private Works series at The Hartt School. Add to that a commission for a site-specific work for the 100 Acres Sculpture Park and a last minute invitation to write for Tom Peyton's roving bell choir (Bell by Bell) for MATA's Make Music Winter and it seems as though I won't be slowing down the composing train until the end of September 2012. Hopefully I'm not spreading myself too thin...
In other news, if you find yourself in need of more Evans Kammer, I recently released a couple of singles. One is called Collective Resonance, which is for percussion ensemble with electronics, and this little ditty was featured in the 2011 Music Issue of The Believer as well as on BBC3 and a couple other radio shows here stateside. The other is In a Shifting Landscape, which is for viola and cello with electronics, and has a brief write-up here. Both are available on your favorite online retailer. Bill Evans - Everybody Digs Bill Evans
Lounge Lizards - Voice of Chunk Gavin Bryars - Biped Art Blakey - The Big Beat Copland - El Salon Mexico Villa Lobos - Bachianas Brasiliera No. 5 NewVillager - S/T Shabazz Palaces - Are you...Can you...Were you? (felt) Shabazz Palaces - A treatease dedicated to The Avian Airess from North East Nubis (1000 questions, 1 answer) Wagner - Prelude from Tristan und Isolde (at Lars Von Trier's behest...hmmm) Olivier Messiaen - Livre du Saint Sacrement - XVI |
Nat Evans
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