First, a clip from the rockstar portion of the show:
Mono, Excerpt From “Wordless Music” Show @ The New York Ethical Society

Note: Look close and see Jeff Milarsky, one of the leading conductors of contemporary music, in front of the orchestra. I know I always talk about this, and to a certain extent is has received some publicity, but most people in contemporary music circles haven’t yet fully understood the magic of the Wordless Music series until they experience it in person. On the first half of the above show, as well as the following night at Le Poisson Rouge, Jeff and the Wordless Orchestra presented the East Coast premier of Arvo Pärt’s subtle, brooding Symphony #4, for string orchestra and percussion. Chalk it up to the programming genius of Ronen and Nadia; I can say with some degree of confidence that there has not previously been a performance of Arvo Pärt’s music to a sold-out standing room only audience of 20-something post-rock fans, which received rapt, focused attention and an exhilarated ovation. 

Wordless Music makes brilliant pairings of indy-rock (for serious lack of a better term) with contemporary/chamber music (also for lack of a better term), such that if you show up for one, you’ll most likely stay for the other. People have been complaining forever that the audience for concert music are too old… I’m not going to be delusional to think that these people waited in this line for hours to get the best seats to see an Arvo Pärt Symphony premiere. But they did see it, and the general vibe was open, curious, and excited. Its hard for me to put into words how thrilling it is to get a chance to do what I do for this kind of audience. Back in December, Line C3 got to introduce Steve Reich and John Cage to a couple hundred Kieran Hebden fans on a Wordless show at LPR… what could be more natural than moving between glitchy minimal electronica and Reich’s Drumming or a John Cage Construction? It just happens to be one of these amazing moments when everyone is learning from everyone and the possibility of a real scene has emerged. Moral of story: colleagues and friends are slowly learning about and experiencing first hand what’s happening and it was great to bring Mr. Milarsky (who most of us have worked with in very different musical contexts) into the fold.

The venues, specifically Le Poisson Rouge, are also part of the story and what is making it work so well. Galleries are great and I’ve done plenty of contemporary music concerts up in them, but when music is challenging, I think the whole experience benefits from making the environment more relaxed, not less. Sunday night the Wordless Orchestra did two more performances of the Pärt Symphony at LPR, opening with 4 of his riveting string quartets and one work for solo vocal and 2 strings, performed by ACME. A generally warm review in the NYTimes Monday did mention the usual complaints about this kind of music played at a club, but could have told the whole story: a lot of people are excited about the new audience and new approach that inherently comes with playing at a venue like LPR. 

Completely blissed out, we took the rock stars to Umino Ie and devoured stingray fin, monkfish liver, and pork belly. Rapture. 

Upcoming at LPR:
Alarm Will Sound plays Derek Bermel in June and Aphex Twin in July!

ACME shares a Wordless Music show with Johann Johannsson .

In other classical/rockstar pairings:  Stay tuned for ACME with Craig Wedren (of Shudder to Think) playing Jefferson Friedman’s Love Songs at Joe’s Pub in August.

From the program note for “Ryoanji” by the Yesaroun’ Duo:

Ryoanji is a rock garden in Kyoto, Japan, in which large beautiful boulders are surrounded by carefully raked fields of sand. The sparse, persistent pulsing of the percussion part designs a musical and temporal texture to represent the surrounding raked sand. Songful, animal-like melodic lines carve out the large boulders. Eight sections of piece, each lasting two minutes, follow eight gardens of Ryoanji.

Excerpt from “Ryoanji”, by John Cage. (Heavy Down)

3 of the sections (or “gardens”) in this piece have additional optional voices. One is me, the second is 100 of me, and the third is a synth patch I made. 

For some of the cues I sang a constant pitch, threw it into Reason’s sampler and drew the pitch curves out, letting the computer bend. For others I sang the line myself with the aid of my computer’s microtonal goodness. For all of them I completely freaked out the painter girl who works in the next studio over.

More importantly: this record, a double CD full of brilliant performances, is a staggering achievement for Eric Hewitt and Sam Solomon, one that has been a long time in the making. Everyone should buy it right away! In case you need convincing, here is some post-apocalyptic rage robot calculus death metal.

Excerpt from Wemcraftor: Limsniffer performed by the Yesaroun’ Duo. (Heavy Up…)

I’m doing the really bad thing again, which is to say Posting After the Fact, but I promise that soon I will be caught up and the great Matt Hensrud will have fixed this site once and for all so that each post takes minutes not hours. (above left to right: Thomas, Nico, Me, Sam, Nadia):

Nico had a great show last week at the Allen Room, of Jazz at Lincoln Center, featuring his song cycle based on texts from Maira Kalman’s illustrated version of The Elements Of Style (yes, the Strunk and White grammar textbook). In addition to regular percussive duties, I helped manage the “amateur percussionists,” who hit stuff, blew bubbles, played with squeaky toys, etc. I also accompanied Nico and Thomas aka Peter Pears, and Samamidon.

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The combination of a venue like (le) Poisson Rouge, a concert series like Wordless Music, and an advocate (not only for good contemporary music but for all good music) like Ronen Givoney, is awakening an awesome concept for how new music might happen in this city. We are used to giving concerts for a few die-hard new music types at galleries. There was rarely beer, and there were certainly never rock stars. Why not? I don’t know either.

This is the second performance of Jefferson Friedman’s Love Songs, composed for ACME and Craig, and also features Louis Andriessen’s Worker’s Union, and a full set by the band Shudder To Think. Jeff and Craig did this interview for New York Magazine. Be forewarned though, it tries to delineate who is and who isn’t a rock star. Someday we will kill these distinctions. I may have to start wearing aqua-net pink.