PRESS: news
By James Chute
From the Friday, April 8, 2011 San Diego Union-Tribune (full article)
Composer Lei Liang has never forgotten the soldiers’ eyes, the blood on the street, his anguished friends.
“My school was not far from Tiananmen Square,” he said. “And I was there (protesting) every day for almost two months, my classmates and myself. It was a life-changing experience. I feel like everything I do today is motivated by that experience, by those two months.”
As it turned out, after literally wrestling with soldiers who were trying to enter the square, Liang had gone home the evening of June 3, 1989, exhausted, only a few hours before the shooting started in one of the pivotal events in modern Chinese history. To keep him from going back, his parents locked him in his room. But he returned in the morning and saw the residue of the violence.
“I saw the blood, the bullets, smoke everywhere …” recalled Liang, who was 16 at the time.
“When something you so passionately believed in is taken away overnight by violence, you start to think about what is the thing that guns cannot take away?”
Liang realized that one inviolate thing was his thoughts, and the way he extends his thoughts into the world — his music.
“Your way of thinking, your fantasies, your culture, your imagination, the things in your mind — those things cannot be taken away by violence,” Liang said. “So the best way to defeat violence is to cultivate that world, is to make that world so independent, so free, that it has the power to counter (violence). And that’s how I started on my path.”
That path soon took him from Beijing to Austin to Boston, and in 2007, to La Jolla, where Liang teaches composition in the University of California San Diego’s music department. A new compilation CD of his music on New World Records, “Milou,” was released last week, and his ever-growing stature as a composer is reflected by the dozens of ensembles that have performed his work, from the New York Philharmonic to the Shanghai Quartet.
“I’ve been greatly enriched by the UCSD environment,” said Liang. “I’ve felt like this is a place where I’m developing a lot and able to maintain my independence.”
Independence continues to be one of Liang’s core concerns, reflected in his extraordinary (or as The Washington Post put it, “far, far out of the ordinary”) music that in its inventiveness and originality confounds categorization.
“It’s true; I’m not a poster child for anything, for any type of music,” Liang said. “I love to learn from different things, so I have a lot of admiration for all kinds of music, all different kinds of orientations.” But Liang said his “motto” has been to say no to overt, readily identifiable influences in his music.
His music is most often located in the context of other contemporary Chinese composers (including Chen Yi, Bright Sheng and Tan Dun), but his music doesn’t sound Chinese. And it doesn’t necessarily sound Western either.
“I don’t even see myself only as an experimental composer, or a new music composer,” he said. “I’m just writing music. Because all these labels are kind of badges of laziness, at least for me.”
Playing with sounds
Liang, whose parents were musicologists, started piano lessons when he was 4; by the time he was 6, he was already composing, in part as a way to avoid practicing.
“My parents knew I was very bored by practicing,” he said. “But if I was making sound, it was OK. So I started making up pieces that sounded like the pieces I was supposed to practice. I didn’t know I was composing. It was like a playground where I could play with sounds.”
At one of his recitals, his pieces (which are still played in China) caught the attention of Rose Garrott, an American teaching English in Beijing. With her help, and assistance of family members already in the U.S. (greatuncle and greataunt David and Lillian Wong), Liang left China in 1990 to finish high school in Austin, Texas (where Garrott was doing graduate work).
“The first thing I did as soon as I left China and arrived in America was go to the library (at the University of Texas Austin),” Liang said. “I wanted to check as much as I could about what was not taught by the government. There’s the mainland China version of its history; I wanted to find out what the Taiwanese had to say, what the Tibetans had to say. And then I realized there was a lot more they didn’t teach me.”
As his education progressed, first at the New England Conservatory of Music and then at Harvard, he continued to explore the library, studying Chinese music, art, literature and philosophy, even hand-copying certain manuscripts.
“You can be born Chinese, but it doesn’t mean real membership in that cultural community,” he said. “I was born in a cultural and spiritual ‘ground zero’ (during the Cultural Revolution) after the worst political, social and cultural self-destruction in China’s long history. I grew up uprooted; I want to be re-rooted.”
At the same time, he distinguished himself as a composition student, examining, incorporating, and then often rejecting every new — and some old — musical trend and technique until he found his own voice.
“I was very inspired by a lot of new music I was hearing, but for me, something I still find very attractive is human warmth,” he said. “And I don’t encounter that very often in new music. I identify with (16th-century composer) Monteverdi’s idea about music: It’s the full expression of human passions.”
But it may be passion in its most subtle, refined form. In Kyoto, Japan, where he and his wife (Japanese harpsichordist Takae Ohnishi) occasionally visit, there’s a shop where all the items are made of bamboo, each crafted with uncommon care and attention.
“I’m holding this little cup made of bamboo, and it’s moving in my fingers a little bit because its so fragile,” he said. “And I can just really feel the person who made this. I’m almost holding their hand. It’s that kind of quality that I’m most vulnerable to.”
Listen carefully, and you can feel Liang in his music.
“I’m looking for music that seems to unfold memories in time, in the shadows, sort of like the moss on the ground of the temples in Kyoto,” he said. “That is the art of time. For me that is very, very important — to feel the thickness of time, to feel history is alive, it’s breathing underneath.”
Liang continues to study Chinese, and especially Mongolian, music, and write pieces that reflect those interests. But given his history, it’s inevitable that he also continues to write music that addresses what he saw and felt in China, where his parents continue to live and he occasionally visits.
“I’m still driven by that because I think it is even more pertinent today in China,” he said. “We might be a much richer country, but culturally and spiritually, where is our richness and our freedom? And that doesn’t always come with material wealth; it is harder to acquire.
“I think it’s very urgent for us to look at that. Basically, that’s what I’m doing.”
jim.chute@uniontrib.com visual-arts.uniontrib.com
Reviewed by Frank Oteri for New Music Box
With Restless, Endless, Tactless, New World Records has once again unearthed a treasure trove of previously unrecorded major American repertoire, this time a remarkable collection of percussion music created by seven different people in the 1930s, much of which was originally published in the now long out-of-print New Music Orchestra Series No. 18, edited by Henry Cowell.
When thinking of percussion music from that era, two names immediately spring to mind: Edgard Varèse for his landmark all-percussion Ionisation composed in 1931 and premiered in 1933, and John Cage, who probably more than any composer established the percussion ensemble as a viable and quintessentially contemporary chamber music medium through a series of iconic works beginning with the 1936 Quartet (which foreshadowed Cage's absorption with indeterminacy), followed by the still radical Imaginary Landscape 1 and the now almost standard repertoire First Construction (in Metal). But as the New World disc reveals, there was a whole range of music being created for percussion ensemble in the years in between Ionisation and Cage's first effort.
It should be pointed out that another now mostly forgotten major percussion composer of this era, William Russell (1905-1992), has been purposely excluded from the present collection since his complete oeuvre has been previously collected on an extraordinary disc released in 1994 on Mode records, in performances led by John Kennedy who, coincidentally, has provided the extremely detailed booklet notes for Restless, Endless, Tactless. Similarly, the contemporaneous output of Varèse and Cage—which has been frequently recorded—does not need to be reprised here and therefore is not. (New World has nevertheless made up for anyone who might feel inadvertently slighted by Cage's omission by featuring numerous heretofore unrecorded Cage works as part of its massive 10-CD collection Music for Merce, an Everest of listening that I still have only gotten through about half of.) All of the music that is included on this disc, however, equally deserves a present-day hearing, and the works of the most widely represented composer here, the once forgotten but now slowly re-emerging Johanna Magdalena Beyer (188-1944), are worthy of standing alongside Ionisation and the percussion music of Cage as cornerstones of the repertoire.
Yet before going into greater details about what makes Beyer's material so vital, the other music herein is also worthy of comment. Gerald Strang (1908-1983), a student of Arnold Schoenberg who is principally remembered for editing his teacher's seminal Fundamentals of Music Composition, has been badly represented on recordings. Although his cello concerto was once released as the B-side of a CRI LP featuring the world premiere recording of John Corigliano's Violin Sonata, the present Percussion Music is, as far as I know, his only composition currently available on CD. Written in 1936 while Strang was still in graduate school (at UC Berkeley), it seems light years away from his subsequent music; in fact, its unapologetic proto-primitivism hints at the corporeality of Harry Partch, though Partch had most certainly never heard a note of Strang's music.
Harold G. Davidson (1893-1959)—who, as far as I can sleuth out, is making his recording debut here—might very well be the most forgotten composer of the whole lot. In fact, even Cowell who published Davidson's Auto Accident (1935) recorded here, only knew of this Ohio composer through correspondence. Cowell invited him to submit this piece to his New Music Edition after Davidson had sent him a score for pitched percussion called HELL'S BELLS (I wish that New World had recorded that one, too.) Auto Accident is a pranksterish bit of hokum in which pitched percussion dominates, definitely a period piece but nevertheless delightful.
Pitch is also never completely abandoned in the Three Inventories of Casey Jones, a 1936 work by Ray Green (1909-1997), who perhaps today is most remembered for running the American Music Center from 1948 to 1961, the second longest tenure in the history of the organization. A few symphonic works by Green appeared on CRI LPs decades ago, and are now available through burn-on-demand CDs from New World, but Casey Jones is the first digital recording of his music to be commercially released. Its three short movements reveal the same breezy Americana of Green's orchestral output, with the prominent unpitched percussion adding some additional spikiness.
Once upon a time, John J. Becker (1886-1961) was grouped alongside Ives, Cowell, Carl Ruggles, and Wallingford Riegger as the five leading American ultra-modernists. Although quite a few scores by him are in the archives of the American Composers Alliance, today if he's remembered at all, it's for a somewhat caricaturish yet still thrilling piece of exotica called The Abongo, also for percussion ensemble, which was recorded by New World back in 1979. Vigilante 1938 (from 1935), his only other percussion work, was written to accompany a dance by Diana Huebert for the Carleton Dance Group in Northfield, Minnesota. It begins ominously with a tam-tam thwack but soon emerges as something of a mini-concerto for piano and percussion, albeit a piano whose solo passages consist primarily of tone clusters.
The strangest inclusion on the current disc is probably Dance Rhythms (1935), a work by the important early 20th-century choreographer Doris Humphrey (1895-1958). Humphrey did not consider herself a composer and in fact could not read music. However, with one of her principal dancers, Charles Weidman, she worked out a sequence of rhythms typical of the movements she shaped in time. Wallingford Riegger translated it into music notation and the ever catholic Cowell embraced it as a piece of contemporary music. Experiencing it purely as music more than 75 years later, it retains sonic interest despite its relative spareness when compared with most of the other works featured here. Cowell's own Return, which he composed while incarcerated in San Quentin (on a trumped up morals charge), is at times even more sparse, perhaps a response to his isolation. The work ends quite disarmingly with a vocalized wail from one of the players.
Finally, we come to Johanna Magdalena Beyer, who, after William Russell, was the single most prolific composer of percussion music in the 1930s and perhaps even more than Russell, presaged the contemporary percussion music soundscape. The fact that the earliest composer of truly contemporary-sounding percussion music was a woman is an undeniable challenge to the assumptions that unfortunately all too many people, women included, continue to harbor about female composers. Elsewhere on this site, there has been an impassioned refutation (as well as some extremely articulate rejoinders to the same effect from our readers) to Fiona Maddocks's contention in the Guardian that we have yet to produce a credible "female answer to Beethoven." Someone needs to mail Maddock's a copy of this CD tout de suite.
Beyer not only has the requisite last name initial of B, but has a biography that in some ways matches Beethoven's as well. She was also born in Germany even though her life as a composer, at least what we now know of it, only began after she emigrated to the United States in 1923. Like Beethoven, she composed a series of progressively challenging string quartets and also had a turbulent personal life involving an "Immortal Beloved"—in Beyer's case, none other than Henry Cowell, for whom she harbored an obsessive infatuation which remained unrequited. While Beyer's surviving compositions which are slowly surfacing on disc reveal a remarkably original voice, it is her percussion music that offers the greatest testimony in support of her historical significance.
The abstractly titled IV from 1935, with its relentless, throbbing insistency, creates an all-encompassing exotic soundscape despite lasting a mere two minutes. Percussion, opus 14 (1939), which like Ionisation requires an ensemble of 11 players, is a portentous assemblage of competing rhythms. March from July of that year, calls for the largest instrumentation of any of these pieces—some 30 percussion instruments—although it is playable by as few as seven players. The composition's oddball rhythm (4½/4), broad dynamic range, and periodic silences make it a march like no other. Similarly, Beyer's Waltz, which was Beyer's final percussion composition, confounds listener expectations by frequently juxtaposing a cross-rhythm of four against the triple meter.
The Three Movements for Percussion, whose individual movement names provide the title of this disc—Restless, Endless, Tactless—was dedicated to Cage and is perhaps the most experimental of all of her percussion pieces. "Restless" is a stern and somewhat ascetic waltz that is discernibly palindromic, that is to say it is identical forward and backward. "Endless," which at ten minutes is longer than any other movement (or full work) included on this disc, is a study in endurance in which an almost metronomic tapping on the woodblock is interrupted irregularly by silences and groans from bass drum, suspended cymbal, and lion's roar. In "Tactless," a quintuple meter is made to sound even more off-balance by various counter-rhythms and metrical interruptions.
While the Three Movements for Percussion is her most fleshed out overall statement for percussion ensemble and might ultimately be her most important contribution to the repertoire, her earliest percussion work, the Percussion Suite from 1933, is also extremely worthy of canonization. Similarly parsed in three contrasting movements, the work opens austerely and quietly with overlapping layers of bass drum, Chinese blocks, triangle, tambourine, and cymbal. In the middle movement, a xylophone takes center stage, adding clearly melodic elements to Beyer's otherwise pitchless haze, although the tunes Beyer forms are uncompromisingly chromatic and seemingly directionless. The concluding movement returns to the sobriety of the opening, with some of the same material here rescored for different instruments (including a rattle, tam-tam and castanets) and cast in a different overall metric pattern. (To get a clearer idea of how this all works, you can examine Beyer's original unpublished manuscript for all three movements which Larry Polansky has posted as a PDF on his website.) The Percussion Suite is bursting with the feeling that a new land has been discovered, one which nearly eighty years later remains extremely fertile.
JOHN LUTHER ADAMS WINS $100,000 2010 NEMMERS COMPOSITION PRIZE
In addition to cash award, Adams work to be performed by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra
EVANSTON, Ill. --- American composer John Luther Adams has been named the 2010 winner of the $100,000 Michael Ludwig Nemmers Prize in Music Composition. The announcement was made today (April 29) by the Northwestern University Henry and Leigh Bienen School of Music.
Adams’ music is influenced by nature, especially the landscapes of Alaska where he has resided for more than 30 years. He is currently composing an extended work for Glenn Kotche (the drummer/percussionist of the band Wilco) and writing a new book titled “True Places: An Atlas of Memory.” His latest CD for the Cold Blue label, “Four Thousand Holes,” will be released in September 2010.
The biennial award honors classical music composers of outstanding achievement who had a significant impact on the field of composition. Past winners include John Adams (2004), Oliver Knussen (2006) and Kaija Saariaho (2008).
“John Luther Adams was cited by the selection committee ‘for melding the physical and musical worlds into a unique artistic vision that transcends stylistic boundaries,’” said Bienen School of Music Dean Toni-Marie Montgomery. The Nemmers Prize committee that selected Adams is comprised of three anonymous individuals of widely recognized stature in the international music community.
As the recipient of the 2010 Nemmers Prize, Adams will receive a cash award of $100,000. In addition to the cash award, Nemmers Prize recipients have one of their works performed at a later date by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. However, Adams’ work for orchestra and electronic sounds, “Dark Waves,” was previously scheduled by the Chicago Symphony and will be performed Oct. 28 and 29 at Symphony Center in downtown Chicago. Adams also will be in residence at Northwestern’s Bienen School of Music during the 2010-11 and 2011-12 academic years. His first two residency dates are scheduled for Oct. 25 to 28 of this year and Feb. 22 to 25, 2011.
“When I learned I’d been chosen to receive the 2010 Nemmers Prize, I was stunned,” said Adams, who lives in the hills northwest of Fairbanks. “For most of my creative life I’ve worked in relative isolation. It’s deeply gratifying to know that my music resonates in the larger world. And since few things make me happier than working with young musicians, I’m especially looking forward to my residencies at the Bienen School of Music.”
The Michael Ludwig Nemmers Prize in Musical Composition is made possible through a generous gift from the late Erwin E. Nemmers and Frederic E. Nemmers, who in 1994 enabled the creation of the Erwin Plein Nemmers Prize in Economics and the Frederic Esser Nemmers Prize in Mathematics, leading awards in those fields.
John Luther Adams
John Luther Adams (b. 1953) came to music as a rock drummer. Through a youthful passion for the music of Frank Zappa he became acquainted with the works of Edgar Varese and Morton Feldman. Adams went on to study composition at the California Institute of the Arts, where he received a bachelor of fine arts in 1973. Two years later he made his first trip to Alaska, where he has lived since 1978. Adams has served as timpanist and principal percussionist with the Fairbanks Symphony Orchestra and the Arctic Chamber Orchestra. From 1994 to 1997 he was composer-in-residence with the Anchorage Symphony Orchestra, Anchorage Opera and Alaska Public Radio Network. He has served as president of the American Music Center, a New York-based national information and support center for new American music.
Adams’ music is deeply rooted in the geography and cultures of Alaska. While the influence of Feldman can be heard in the scale and contemplative spirit of expansive, slow-moving orchestral works such as “Clouds of Forgetting, Clouds of Unknowing” (1991-95) and “In the White Silence” (1998). Adams combines this with an almost physical embodiment of the natural world. His experience as a percussionist and his study of Alaska Native drumming can be heard in the rhythmic intricacy of his music.
Adams’ work includes pieces for orchestra, chamber ensembles, radio, film, television, theater and opera. His pieces have been performed by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Radio Netherlands Philharmonic, the California E.A.R. Unit chamber ensemble, Bang on a Can, Percussion Group-Cincinnati, New Music America, and Arena Stage in Washington.
He has earned awards and fellowships from Meet the Composer, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Rasmuson Foundation, Opera America, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts and the Alaska State Council on the Arts. In 2006, Adams was named one of the first United States Artists Fellows.
Adams’ music can be heard on the Cold Blue, New World Music, Cantaloupe Music, Mode Records and New Albion labels. He is the author of “Winter Music” and “The Place Where You Go to Listen” (Wesleyan University Press) and has written about music and nature in numerous periodicals and anthologies. Adams has served on the faculties of the Oberlin Conservatory, Bennington College and the University of Alaska, Fairbanks.
For more information on Adams, visit www.johnlutheradams.com or contact Ellen Schantz at the Bienen School of Music at eschantz@northwestern.edu.
NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY BIENEN SCHOOL OF MUSIC
MEDIA CONTACT: Judy Moore at (847) 491-4819 or jkm229@northwestern.edu
FOR RELEASE: April 29, 2010
NORTHWESTERN NEWS: www.northwestern.edu/newscenter/
Andrew Byrne (b. 1966) introduces the first three movements from White Bone Country, the nine movement work for piano and percussion which forms the crux of his first release on New World Records. He also talks his arrival in America and the influence of New York minimalists like Phill Niblock on his music.
Scott Fields
Music and Language
Composer and guitarist Scott Fields (b. 1956), alongside his work with mobile-like formal structures and rigorous, often guided, improvisations for large ensemble, has worked extensively on the creative use of text for composition. Most recently, he released Samuel on New World Records. The three compositions are based on a short monologue and two late pantomimes of Samuel Beckett. In his first New World podcast, he talks from his home in Cologne, Germany about the winding path from his youth in Chicago to his present work in Germany as an expatriate. He also provides some insight into the “songs without words� that make up his New World release.
We are pleased to announce the availability of the entire New World Records catalog on eMusic. Critic and radio host John Schaefer has contributed a great feature on our recordings:
eMusic Dozens Contemporary Classical from New World Records
Composers Recordings, Inc. Catalogue Officially
Acquired by New World Records
On-demand CD-Rs Now Available
The New York State Attorney General has formally approved the transfer of Composers Recordings, Inc. (CRI) to New World Records. CRI, a non-profit label devoted to works by American composers, shut its doors in 2003 due to mounting financial pressures, and its extensive back catalogue has since been largely unavailable. Founded in 1954 by composers Otto Luening and Douglas Moore, and Oliver Daniel of BMI, CRI issued nearly 800 recordings.
New World, also a non-profit specializing in American music, has begun preparing selected CRI back catalogue for re-release, and is now offering premium quality on-demand CD-Rs of the entire CRI CD catalogue.
In addition, the historic CRI catalogue of 400 LPs is being restored and transferred according to the highest preservation standards. One hundred titles will be available as on-demand CD-Rs by the end of 2007, and the balance by the end of 2008.
“CRI has a long and treasured history with American composers, and we are grateful to be able to include this wonderful catalogue alongside ours,� New World President Herman Krawitz said. “Although in some ways we were competitors, both companies remained dedicated to the cause of American music over the years, and specifically American composers. We are thrilled to be able to offer these recordings to the public once again.�
“New World is the ideal home for CRI’s priceless archive of American music,� CRI Chairman Frederick Jacobi said. “New World will not only carry out CRI’s unique mission of supporting innovative contemporary composers and making their records available in perpetuity. It will also insure this heritage by using the latest digital technology to preserve the masters of their works. The world of music owes a major debt of gratitude to New World.�
Thus far, New World Records has reissued four volumes Harry Partch’s works, several electronic music collections, and discs of music by Charles Ives, Vladimir Ussachevsky, and Morton Feldman.
New World-CRI on-demand CD-Rs include the original liner notes and cover art.
For further information, please contact:Paul Tai, New World Records, 75 Broad Street, Suite 2400, New York, NY 10004. Tel. 646-442-7933. Fax 212-290-1685.
Watch this space over the next few months for current New World Records news items.
In 1990 New York Times critic John Rockwell called Ben Johnston "one of the best nonfamous composers this country has to offer…." For years Johnston’s music has proved fascinating to theorists and musicologists because of its use of advanced compositional techniques (serialism with just intonation, for example). Frank Oteri's superb interview with Ben Johnston on NewMusicBox.com offers new insight into this important composer's extraordinary mind. NMB also includes an excerpt from Johnston's recently-published book of essays "Maximum Clarity" and Other Writings on Music.
Released in January of 2006, New World Records’s Ben Johnston: String Quartet Nos. 2, 3, 4, & 9 (NW 80637-2), features the Kepler Quartet and is the first of a series of three recordings, prepared with the composer’s support and supervision. This CD includes the first recorded performance of his String Quartet No. 3, "Verging."
From The New Yorker:
In the January 15 issue of The New Yorker composer and contributor Russell Platt posts his Best of 2006 recording list. In the number three slot is New World 80634, Sebastian Currier, Quartetset/Quiet Time. "Currier is a subtle yet potent artist whose impeccable craft never overshadows his gifts for lyricism and surprise. The Cassatt Quartet plays these unexpectedly moving works with all the nimbleness and warmth that they demand."
From Time Out New York :
Time Out New York's Steve Smith includes Ben Johnston String Quartets Nos. 2, 3, 4 and 9 (New World 80637) on his list of the Best Recordings for 2006. "The Kepler Quartet presses this American maverick's cause with the initial volume of a commanding complete run."
Sequenza21 's Jerry Bowles featured three New World recordings in his 2006 roundup of Best Recordings of the Year. In addition to the Johnston and Currier discs, he also included Thomas/Druckman/Hartke.
Britain's The Wire magazine lists Christian Wolff: 10 Exercises and Julius Eastman: Unjust Malaise among its fifty Records of the Year.
Finally, the January 2007 issue of Gramophone Magazine highlighted Works for Violin by George Antheil, Johanna Beyer, Henry Cowell, Ruth P. Crawford, Charles Dodge, David Mahler, Larry Polansky, Stefan Wolpe in its North American review section.
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