International Contemporary Ensemble: Concert

[Music] um [Music] um [Music] [Music] um [Music] [Music] hello everyone my name is ross carr one of the co-artistic directors of the international contemporary ensemble and i'm also a percussionist in the group and i'm calling to you broadcasting to you from sunset park brooklyn where the ensemble has its rehearsal spaces down the street from my own apartment where i'm quarantining and tonight we're going to offer a really special program which would have been two programs live in person one on april 30th in portland maine with the portland ovation series where we're going to feature the music of ashley fury and suzanne ferran the second on may 8th was a program at the library of congress on their stage with a program featuring composers like anathor valsdaltier suzanne ferran and sophia goodalina tonight we've decided to uh change approaches and take both concerts and combine them into one event a sort of radio style broadcast where we'll mix documentary footage footage from the archive live conversations between artists hosted by terence mcknight and participatory pieces world premieres written by ashley fury and suzanne farin before we start i'd like to take an opportunity to introduce our co-hosts co-presenters of tonight's broadcast the first is amy pietron from ovation series portland ovations is founded in 1931 it's entering its 89th season as northern new england's premier nonprofit performing arts presenter amy is the executive and artistic director of portland ovations greetings from portland ovations in beautiful maine my name is amy petrin executive and artistic director here at ovations we make connections between artists and audiences throughout the city thank you for inviting us into your homes this evening we're incredibly grateful for the international contemporary ensemble it is their innovation and creativity that brings us here this evening especially in times of crisis it is artists who lead us with their inspiration and beauty we're thrilled to be working with the library of congress and grateful for support from the national endowment and the new england foundation for the arts their partnerships are invaluable thank you again for joining us and for your commitment and passion for new music enjoy next i'd like to introduce susan vita from the library of congress the other co-presenter of this special evening good evening ross and amy and everyone tuned in to experience tonight's unique concert the library of congress is so pleased to be partnering with ice and portland ovations to bring you this imaginative project many of you may not know that for almost 100 years since 1925 the library has presented an extraordinary concert series absolutely free and funded by loyal and generous donors that tradition contingent continues today continues tonight and from the beginning there have been two noteworthy components to the concert series the vision of the series founder elizabeth sprague coolidge first the library has been an ardent champion for new music with a commitment to supporting contemporary composers indeed we have supported over 600 commissions to date and second we have a proud history as media pioneers having broadcast concerts from the library of congress heard on radio nationwide for more than eight decades so tonight's adventure is very much in the tradition of those commitments and about another step into a new interactive virtual realm suzanne ferran's knocked is a co-commission from the library's carolyn royal just fund and ice and it will be our first virtual premiere partnerships like this one are growing in immense circle of music lovers without the limitations of geography tonight our focus is on the poetic and powerful images and the sounds that bring us together in a path to a future we are just beginning to imagine thank you thank you so much to susan vita and amy petran for their partnership in this especially their staff and mclean from the library of congress has been a great partner in radically rethinking how these concerts could be reshaped and amy and her staff have been partners with us since the very beginning of this crisis tonight as i said we'll engage a radio style broadcast where we'll play both pre-recorded material from our archive and have live uh concert pre-concert post-concert chats with the artists and the artists chats will be hosted by terence mcknight but importantly we're all in our homes quarantining like all of you we hope you are well and safe but it's important to say that we're using standard bandwidth from from our home internet connections and so we may experience an interruption at some point and i will try and bring it back online as soon as we can um also i'd like to take it take a moment to thank in addition to library of congress and ovations in portland maine uh to thank the staff and the board of the international contemporary ensemble but especially bridget bergen and matria lewandowski for their production help and guidance and direction during this the preparation of tonight's event next up we're going to have a documentary about suzanne ferran a composer with whom we've worked for eight years on projects large and small in places all over the world suzanne is a friend who's been with the group uh collaborating really since the beginning of the group when we were all young uh performers in our college days and this documentary tracks some of that history the different venues that you'll recognize in new york city and around the world documentary was produced through uh the archive of the digitize.org media team we have collected dozens and dozens of concerts of footage that we're excited to share with you tonight many of them involving suzanne ferentz music and this tracks a little bit of a history of that so without further ado this is a documentary uh edited by marvakayen uh about suzanne farren [Music] [Applause] i feel like since i've been almost a grown-up i've known about ice and sort of also grown up alongside ice i remember hearing about this amazing project that was getting started with all these oberlin kids it was like a ripple rift in the force of the new music world and we were all so young worked with people in the ensembles such as noriko obviously josh david and then i had this idea um for an opera and that was kind of the first start to finish project with ice we had a really great workshop up at mount tremper one of the best artistic experiences i've ever had because i came with a lot of music written but then it was just such a fertile environment and there was so much literally just so much reverberation in the space and in among us and so i ended up writing a bunch of music there one of the movements actually completely during that workshop which i think was really only three or four days long but it felt like a huge period of time because so much happened james look at anthony because he has this little tiny glissandi yeah yeah and it would be great to spend a little extra moment on that so that your glissandi is sort of imperceptible and then the flutter tongue comes in [Music] later on we've went to greenland which was just a incredibly disruptive experience in every positive way you can imagine i still think it's the most beauty i've ever seen in a in a period of my life concentrated there we played even in a village of 14 people i think carrying the old marchino on boats and at one point right it down a snow bank and just hoping that the ice was gonna hold beyond has been to a lot of places as a result of our collaborations including the abrams arts center which was a much easier trip we created this work called martino's wave really my first solo recital it was something i had been working towards for a couple of years [Music] the own came to me as late in life i guess although hopefully not when it's all said and done [Music] really it was that i missed being an interpreter i wondered and wondered and went through a lot of crises about what that was going to mean and what i was going to do and then one day i came home from teaching and sebastian was playing a cd from the quartet to honduras montreal the movement that we know of as luang perle tarnite and it's based on the work called fete du belzo messian wrote fettu bezos in 1937 for the paris expo [Music] i came into the kitchen and heard this recording and just kind of fell over i mean it just kind of hit me and i recognized the music and i understood its shape but i couldn't identify it and sebastian told me what it was and then i connected it with that that instrument that was sort of a blank spot in my brain which was the on mart to know and i woke up in the middle of the night and said i've figured it out i'm going to play the old martino and that's that's when it started [Music] i like working with ice in a similar way that a person likes to be home i like to work with people who i understand deeply and who have the same kind of life project that i have i like to work with people who who also see the world as limitless and then kind of move back from that and deal with reality but for whom the start is that everything is possible that's important in every aspect of my life to think first anything is possible and then you know you deal but the first instinct is yes and the first answer is yes [Music] um and welcome to our artists here we have now uh terence mcknight joining as host as well as ashley fury and suzanne ferran the composers of tonight's program so terence i'll let you take it away thank you so much for being here with us thank you ross hey everybody thanks for hey ashley hey what's up thanks everybody for uh for joining us here for oral explorations baron fury and messian you know it's so encouraging knowing that so many people are joining us here tonight you know music on its own is moving and heartfelt enough and we could have a meaningful time just listening to some good music but what we'll do tonight is and what we're going through this few months is far from normal as far from nice so tonight we're going to offer some music that is related to these challenging times but as a way to uplift our spirits as a way to bring our community closer and give us a chance to really talk about the inextinguishable aspect of human spirit that motor that allows all of us to just keep pushing through all of this that motor that allows these creators to be creative through all of this and after the music is over we're gonna open up our chat lounge and we'll have a chance to have a conversation with everybody and just talk and come together as a community yeah we're physically distanced but we're spiritually closer and so this music isn't going to provide that opportunity so we're going to hear some music by suzanne tonight we'll hear music by olivier messian later tonight but first up we're going to hear a piece by ashley fury who wrote this piece she probably couldn't have written this piece last year this piece was really inspired by what we're going through about you know being so far from one another and i mean she just gets right down to the bare bones of of how people can make music and she's using um glasses so i brought one mason glass and i bought one beer mug so uh maybe during the chat conversation i can uh put both to use but if you have a glass at home or two glasses that your ears can fit into go ahead and get those ashley tell us about tell us about this piece tell us where you are um what what is going on where you are how you've been over the last you know eight to 12 weeks and how this piece came about terence i'd love to uh thanks for that intro i am dialing in tonight from steamy new hampshire um and this piece that we're all going to participate in the world premiere of tonight really comes to you directly out of my quarantine brain i think probably like a lot of you i sort of spent the first two weeks of lockdown just in a state of shock and stillness kind of trying to read everything i could and somehow try to process this sudden shift we were all going through but as i sort of slowly started making my way back towards sound i really tried to focus on what my specific sonic sensibility might have to offer this this new reality where we were all sheltering in place and kind of tethered to zoom compression algorithms and getting most of our contact through lo-fi computer speakers and flat screens that as a general set of boundary constraints doesn't really usually work that well for my music i really try to make spatially complex and immersive sonic experiences that really wrap your full body and sound um so i had to come at this with a with a sort of humble question of how with the basic objects around all of us and the sort of simple technological apparatuses we're dealing with how i might share or find one of these dynamic full-bodied listening experiences that i really crave as a listener myself and that i really try to offer in my work [Music] now i'm on radio most nights here in new york and i always i i remember when we first were sheltering in place i would say to my listeners you know i'm i've got some great music i'm keeping one eye on the news and i'm keeping two ears on the radio so you know if something happens you know here in new york city i can inform my listeners and i'm just wondering for you ashley how you know how you just found a way what did you was there someone you spoke with was were there other musicians you were talking to in order to keep your spirits up because the news was just it's been awful so how did you was there music you listened to to keep your spirits up yeah it's funny i think that's a lot of where the experiments i the reason i turned to those experiments i didn't really want to listen to stuff i like needed to listen to the world somehow and so there's something about what these jars do to my skull and my whole kind of being when i when they slowly close into my ears that helps me ground and helps me reconnect and then as they open back and let the air of the room in they sort of open me back onto the to the world around me so there was something in that that just slowed me down and i did a lot of listening outside and a lot of just listening really as hard as i could to the world around me i think more so than i was kind of streaming particular content or streaming particular albums that was just my experience i don't know that's cool because i haven't been i haven't done anything like this since i was a kid yeah messing around it would be nice to to have everything together um with your creativity so the piece is interior protocol one yes that's correct let's get to it and it just uh for our viewers at home it's important to take off your headphones to experience this that's really important because the sound is going to come through your speakers and into the jars and at the beginning of the piece you'll only hear the jars just the sound of the acoustic vessel of those jars so even though there's no sound coming from your computer it's not broken it's working just fine and furthermore the beautiful graphics by leah wolfman involve some of that familiar progress graphic that is not your computer freezing it's just a part of the beautiful uh work that leah has done to make make a visual experience for for ashley's music i do want to just underscore too to all of you that this is really a piece that has to be done to be heard i swear if you watch it like netflix you're just gonna miss the whole phenomenon it's almost like a quartet that happens between your skull like the resonant cavity of these jars the room around you and the things that are coming out of the speakers so you're sort of there as the conductor holding it all together and really launching this world premiere so i really uh thank you all in advance for your generous participation and uh we'll see you back here in about eight minutes this is the world premiere of interior listening protocol 1 on earl explorations farron fury and messian enjoy you so [Music] so so [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] from [Applause] [Applause] [Music] he's is [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] slimes [Music] [Music] if [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] you just heard a premiere of knocked that's music by suzanne farren i'm terence mcknight those musicians you just heard include elise tessier ross carr randall ziegler noriko wadden jacob greenberg is on the screen with me you will hear him next it also featured ryan strieber tonight we're bringing our community together through music talking with these musicians and composers about the process of creating during this time some of the music that's been created over the last few months it's about perseverance it's about meaning and music and largely it's about community so i'm happy that you all are here and i want to invite you all to stick around with us because after the music we're gonna just have chat and conversation we've got a lounge set up and i hope you'll stick around for that what we'll do next is go back to 1941 sort of contextualized the idea of musicians and composers writing during difficult times olivier messiah was a prisoner of war when he composed his quartet for the end of time we're going to hear a movement from this composition that the composer talked about when he played it 400 folks were listening and they were listening so intently and earlier suzanne and i talked about whether or not messian thought that he was perhaps living in his last days um and and what that means to us as a society and as a creator and as a human being you know if if you're faced with you know doing important work you know and being around the people that are important to you what that looks like so i want to ask you suzanne welcome jacob having spoken with you today great to be here taryn thanks yeah glad you're here man suzanne you you said something earlier about you know sheltering in place brought you a little bit closer to the music of olivier messiah i mean you're you you play on martino which is associated with that composer and there's something about the sound of that instrument that's that's similar to a cello and that is it does something to the to the human spirit it somehow echoes the human voice somehow or touches the the soul in a particular way talk about that suzanne talk about sheltering in place and and going back to your you know teenage days when you were into introduced to this music and and how it came back to you thanks terence yeah messian was my 20th century composer and i think he probably still is in the sense that he was the composer i first identified with and who brought me into my own time in a way that other composers didn't so i felt um he he kind of opened a pathway to me that yes i can be a composer now i i wasn't born in the wrong time because when you're when you grow up playing the piano and you know contemporary music is not exactly easy to come by you know especially if you grow up in you know a small town in the united states so i was pretty shocked by what i heard as a young person when i went from just writing music in my own community to writing music in a larger world that was you know living in the present so messian represented that to me because he he showed me that i could live in my own time and and so i loved his music always and i knew that he had written for this strange electronic music but electronic music wasn't exactly my scene and so i i just kind of held this place holder of like yeah there's an instrument that i know that he worked that he wrote for but it's just one other crazy thing about him and then one day i came home and sebastian was playing a recording in the kitchen and i recognized the music right away but it was in this kind of crazy familiar unfamiliar sound it was a human voice it was a cello it was a radio signal i felt deeply familiar and connected and close to the sound like i think the ond has that but i couldn't identify what it was and then of course i discovered it is the old mart to know that was that crazy instrument all of it was now filled the sentence was filled in in my head and uh since i was also going through a bit of a crisis about what kind of an interpreter i was going to be and i was missing that and so i woke up in the middle of the night and and woke up sebastian and said i'm going to be an aldi's and that that's kind of and it was luang that brought me there i'm wondering about the qualities in the music that you hear i mean is it because i i keep talking about this inextinguishable quality of the human spirit so do you hear i mean is there despair is there hope is there forward looking what what do you what do you take away from it i take so many things from the and um and one of them is this strange there are so many paradoxes within the sound it's electronic but it sounds like a human that alone kind of does something to us and there's a fragility and a strength at the same time it feels like the candle is is low but it's not out and the on just even just dynamically can go to such quiet places that it it it holds that i just i feel like the owned is kind of like it has the sound like in its hand and that's the world that i try to work in when i'm practicing so when messian composes quartet for the end of time he had to essentially use whatever instruments he could get his hands on one of those instruments was a piano and jacob you're you're playing in this next piece we're going to hear now where are you looks like you got a lot of bright sunshine where you are i'm looking at that chicago turns you're in chicago yeah it's a bright apartment i'm very grateful during this time yeah yeah yeah i bet tell us about tell us about your connection to this music what what what you hear and what you what you feel from from what he wrote back in the 1930s with this music well messiah was very important for me also in my introduction to 20th century music i think this particular piece has a lot of challenges and one of those chief challenges is in this movement the fifth movement of the work it's heard of course more often with cello which was the instrument that was available to messiah in the prisoner of war camp but it was written earlier and uh envisioned in a much different light but one of these challenges is to sustain this infinitely slow line that's the expressive direction that the composer gives infinitely slow and ecstatic and the piano is just playing a very very slow pulse and the the cello line in this case the online is just floating above it and when i play with cello i've done this piece a few times with ice and suzanne and i have also done it together with cello the line lies very high in the instrument and the pianist also has to think about the bow changes on the instrument and how the performance is just going to sustain this intensity of this infinitely slow processional and playing with with ond but by contrast a lot of those challenges are are made a lot easier because of the sound of the instrument because of uh the fact that it doesn't have to retake a bow and it can shape the line in a completely different way and it frees up the pianist quite a lot and recording in our separate apartments i i had that memory of playing with with suzanne and it was a powerful connection to to the sound and a different way of connecting with the piece so suzanne we're about to go on a journey through this through this movement tell us about this journey where we start where we end well we start right here in these two spaces in my space and for me right over here is jake but i don't know where he's on the screen uh so we start in our shelter and place environments and we're recording separately so jacob recorded his first and i have to say you know even though it was at a distance and i'm here you know jacob's in my my uh headphones and i'm playing and you sort of think that you can't be expressive under those conditions but actually i felt very connected to him and it is a kind of a communion with the pianist and that's why i really cherish the pianist that i work with on this piece because each one is is such a special relationship because it takes something out of us that's just different it's not the typical um sort of normal idea of virtuosity it requires a different kind of virtuosity patience and kind of fortitude and the other pianist that you will hear on this recording is vanessa perez who i work with often and love her playing as well so you're going to hear if we start off in our shelter in place and then we go back in time and you'll see jacob and i at abrams where we did a full recital of of martino of on martino music and and then even further back to roulette when i was um one of my first recordings ever and that's with vanessa perez it should i i'd love to mention also that this is the piece within the quartet of the end of time that actually was written previously it was written in 1937 during an extremely optimistic moment um it was with illuminated fountains it was fed to belzo it was to celebrate the beautiful water and so they had created fountains in the sun and they had illuminated these fountains and they put six old martinos outside um to perform this piece and he that's the only real extended composition that he took from his previous life and actually applied it to his work in confinement and i think that's also fascinating how he his relationship with the old and why he needed that music again when he was in confinement after this music we're going to open up the chat lounge so be sure to stick around for that before we get to it i want to personally thank portland ovations and library of congress for not canceling this after finding a way of just making it happen uh virtually you know this is what we got and so we're gonna do the best with it so here's the movement prayer to the eternity of jesus this is from quartet from the end of time quartet before the end of time by olivier messi yeah see y'all in the chat room [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Music] um [Music] [Applause] [Music] so so so so [Laughter] [Music] [Laughter] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] um [Music] [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Laughter] [Music] you

Channel: Library of Congress

Views: 2,024

Rating: 4.3846154 out of 5

Keywords: Library of Congress

Id: SSJItFR6Ysc

Length: 54min 47sec (3287 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 25 2021