pmp2006

pmp The Annual Magazine of the Philadelphia Music Project 2006

A Celebration of Traditions by Frank J. Oteri Choir Crazy by Daniel Webster To Honor a Legend: The John Coltrane Legacy by Vic Schermer Remembering György Ligeti by Peter Burwasser Twenty-first Century Presenters by Alyssa Timin Resonating Space by Thaddeus Squire

Message from the Director

A Celebration of Traditions by Frank J. OteriChoir Crazy by Daniel WebsterTo Honor a Legend: The John Coltrane Legacy by Vic SchermerRemembering György Ligeti by Peter BurwasserTwenty-first Century Presenters by Alyssa Timin Resonating Space by Thaddeus Squire

Twenty-three Projects: A Musical Feast! PMP Announces 2006 Grants 2006-2007 Calendar of Funded Events PCAH Awards its First Interdisciplinary GrantsHello Goodbye: PMP Welcomes Emily Sweeney, Bids Adieu to Alyssa TiminGreeting the Season: PMP’s Annual Holiday Party* News Corner—In the CommunityIn Conversation with New Orchestra Directors

Dynamic Planning: David Bury Seminar*Sector Marketing Initiative: Online Advertising*Arts Marketing and Audience Development Consultancy Summary*Straight Talk: Q&A with Cindy Byram, Don Lucoff and John ElliottSecrets of Success: A Seminar with John Elliott*

New Frontiers in Music: Composer Symposium*Navigating Styles: Streven Mackey and Charles WuorinenNew Frontiers in Music: New Instruments*Field Trips: An Introduction Runouts: PLOrk, DJ Spooky, Mandance* Lincoln Center Festival 2006*

Painted Bride Arts CenterNetwork for New Music

Front and back cover: John Coltrane; photo by Ray Gibson

*Written by Alyssa Timin; additional unattributed articles written by Emily Sweeney

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This third installment of PMP magazine showcases an eclectic col-lection of articles, covering many of the adventurous public programs supported by the Philadelphia Music Project this season and reflecting on a host of professional development activities PMP produced last year.

Feature articles by Daniel Webster, Alyssa Timin, Frank J. Oteri, Peter Burwasser, Vic Schermer, and Thaddeus Squire testify to Phila-delphia’s rich musical life—past, present, and future. Webster, the veteran Philadelphia Inquirer critic, contributes “Choir Crazy,” an insider’s look at Philadelphia’s burgeoning choral scene, from the 134-year-old Mendelssohn Club to the many contemporary gospel groups born of the city’s African American churches. As Webster tells it, choral ensembles from a spectrum of ethnic and social traditions form a mosaic of vocal practice and artistic enterprise.

”21st Century Presenters” by PMP alum and NewMusicBox writer Timin signals the emergence of a new generation of impresarios whose organizations are offering Philadelphians something out of the ordinary. Avant-garde jazz, experimental interdisciplinary work, and contemporary chamber music all have new advocates with the rise of Lifeline Music Coalition, Sound Field, Bowerbird, Ars Nova Workshop, and others. Conversely, NewMusicBox Editor Oteri proves what’s old is new again. His “A Celebration of Traditions” spotlights PMP grant-ees that have unearthed long-forgotten musical treasures, including recently discovered Hebrew music of the High Baroque and the work of Francis Johnson, the 19th century African American bugle virtuoso who founded America’s first racially integrated ensemble and whose programs “seamlessly blended classical and folk music, serving as a harbinger of today’s polystylistic eclecticism.”

All About Jazz’s Schermer and the City Paper’s Burwasser weigh in with profiles of Philadelphia jazz master John Coltrane and Hungarian composer György Ligeti, who both, in their way, shaped the course of twentieth-century music. According to Schermer, Coltrane’s influence on local musicians, composers, and presenters is profound, pervading every nightclub and concert venue in Philadelphia. Likewise, Burwas-ser describes Ligeti’s oeuvre as “music for the ages” from a composer who has “amassed an enormous influence in the musical community, and in subtle ways, the cultural sphere as a whole.” This season, the work of both artists is being championed by PMP grantees Interna-tional House and Orchestra 2001.

In “Resonating Space,” Squire of Peregrine Arts explores the philo-sophical implications of creating work in uncharted social and historic spaces away from the proscenium theater, in order to contextualize and amplify the meaning of art and allow for greater curatorial flex-ibility and growth. In Squire’s view, Philadelphia’s apparent deficit of performance venues is illusory.

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Two PMP grantees are featured in this issue: the Painted Bride Art Center and Network for New Music. Founded in 1969, the Bride has served as an incubator to many of the region’s most progressive visual and performing artists. Music Curator Lenny Seidman discusses his vision for jazz and world music at the Bride with PMP’s Emily Sweeney. NNM, in its 22 year history, has established itself as one of Philadelphia’s most avid proponents of contemporary chamber music, having premiered more than 450 works, many by preeminent Ameri-can composers including Pulitzer Prize-winners Bernard Rands and Melinda Wagner. Network’s Artistic Director Linda Reichert reflects on her organization’s growth and the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead.

PMP’s professional development initiatives are highlighted in the Building Capacity/Developing Audiences and Expanding Horizons sections of this publication. The first describes seminars by David Bury and John Elliott on strategic planning and marketing, provides an up-date on PMP’s Sector Marketing Initiative, and features candid Q&As with Elliott, world music publicist Cindy Byram, and jazz publicist Don Lucoff, each of whom met one-on-one with local music organizations under PMP’s auspices. Expanding Horizons covers PMP activities in-tended to stimulate dialogue in curatorial practice and support the artistic development of participants, including symposia on new mu-sic and technology and field trips to performances of significant new work outside of Philadelphia. PMP produced two symposia in our New Frontiers in Music series; an article on the Project’s Composer Sym-posium with Charles Wuorinen, Steven Mackey, and Jeffrey Mumford offers insight into the intuitive and theoretical approaches to compo-sition by three of America’s most distinctive composers, and a piece on the PMP symposium New Instruments examines how technology has become increasingly available to composers as a means for enhancing artistic expression through the exploration of electronic sound.

This publication also includes announcements of the first ever Interdisciplinary Professional Development Grants made by the Phila-delphia Center for Arts and Heritage, as well as the Project’s own 2006 grantees. A news corner spreads the word about recent developments at music nonprofits around town. Finally, I had a chance to chat with James Undercofler and Peter Gistelinck, the new CEO and Executive Director at the Philadelphia Orchestra and Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia, respectively. In the Q&As that follow, each describes how past endeavors in music education, record production, composition, and conducting are informing artistic and managerial emphases in their new roles.

For over 100 years, Philadelphia has boasted a well-earned repu-tation as a first-class music town. Founded at the start of the 20th century, the Philadelphia Orchestra, with its lush sound and virtuosity, has long been regarded as a national emblem. The Curtis Institute of Music, founded in 1924, stands among the world’s great conservato-ries. And many American jazz icons, including saxophonists Stan Getz and John Coltrane, trumpeter Dizzie Gillespie, and drummer Philly Joe Jones were born or pursued important stages in their careers here. But a recent explosion of creativity suggests that there may be no greater time for music in Philadelphia than the present. Movers and shakers for music new and old are ubiquitous, mounting evocative, experimental, genre-melding projects at an unprecedented pace. With generous funding from The Pew Charitable Trusts, the Philadelphia Music Project is pleased to encourage this multiplicity of music. We invite you to read about it. But more importantly, take in a concert and support the musicians, ensembles, composers, and presenters whose energy and imagination enrich all of our lives.

FEATURES

ANNOUNCING

BUILDING CAPACITY/DEVELOPINGAUDIENCES

EXPANDING HORIZONS

SPOTLIGHT

MESSAGE FROM

THE DIRECTOR

MATTHEW LEVYpmp Contents 2006

A substantial percentage of the activities funded by the Phila-delphia Music Project has always involved the commissioning and premiering of new work, music which hopefully will one day enter the repertoire and become part of our tradition. But there have also al-ways been projects nurtured by PMP that keep important pre-existing musical traditions alive and in the ears of the people of Philadelphia. Notable among the many fascinating endeavors funded in 2006 are several projects involving major contributions to our shared musical heritage that have been heretofore largely unknown and in some cases unheard.

Take, for example, the music of the early 19th century African-American composer, keyed-bugle virtuoso, and bandleader Francis Johnson (1792-1844). Johnson’s pioneering social feat of assembling America’s first racially integrated ensemble, despite great obstacles and occasionally life-threatening conditions during one of the bleak-est periods of inequality in our history, should alone make him a national hero. Plus his concert programs, which seamlessly blended classical and folk music, serve as a harbinger of today’s polystylistic eclecticism. Yet, while this Philadelphia native was an international celebrity in his day (he even traveled to England to perform for Queen Victoria), today his music is almost never performed.

But all of that may change as a result of an upcoming revival of his music presented by the West Philadelphia Cultural Alliance. In keeping with the spirit of Francis Johnson’s pluralism, the Cultural Alliance’s concert on Sunday, June 3, 2007, at the University of Pennsylvania’s Ir-vine Auditorium, will bring together musicians from different genres including jazz legend Branford Marsalis, the classically-trained blue-grass-infused trio Time for Three, and Philadelphia Big Brass fronted by Rodney Mack who has been the driving force behind this concert

whose fate will forever be bound together as we journey through life.” While Francis Johnson’s contributions have been unjustly ignored up to now, at least his

name has survived which affords him the possibility of eventually being recognized as an im-portant musical and socio-cultural icon. But as the Philadelphia Baroque orchestra Tempesta di Mare is setting out to prove with their upcoming concert “Hoshanna!: Hebrew Music of the High Baroque,” there is also music which transcends the importance of the person who wrote it; in fact, in some cases, the identity of the person who wrote it is completely lost to history.

“Hoshanna!” offers a rare opportunity to hear three 18th century European Jewish-themed cantatas, all of which are sung in Hebrew. The first of these, Elyon, melits u-mastin (“God, De-fender and Accuser”), is an anonymous work that has never before been heard in the United States. It was composed in the 1730s for Ashkenazic Jews in Casale Monferrato, a small Italian town boasting one of the world’s most beautiful synagogues.

The other two compositions—Bo’i beshalom and Kol ha-neshama (“Let everything that has breath praise the Lord!”), a cantata based on the text of Psalm 150 which will also be receiving its American premiere—were both composed in the 1770s by Giovanni Cristiano Lidarti. These two works, commissioned for Amsterdam’s flourishing Sephardic Jewish community from a now little-known Austrian-born Italian composer of primarily instrumental works trained in a Jesuit seminary, serve as a reminder of the religious tolerance of the Enlightenment period in Europe, a tragically short-lived era that was followed by an era of mounting persecution culminating in the Holocaust. And, this music is unlike any other Jewish-themed music known to present-day listeners.

“I think it’s an amazing discovery,” exclaimed Tempesta di Mare’s Artistic Co-director Richard Stone. “When you think of Hebrew or Jewish music, what comes to mind? Synagogal chant? Israeli folk songs? Sephardic songs? Klezmer? Yiddish operetta? The repertoire that we’re performing in “Hoshanna!”—music in the style of Vivaldi and Haydn—completely turns that equation on its head. It’s so unexpected. On a personal level, because I’m Jewish and all the Jewish music I’ve heard to date comes from those other genres, including hearing recordings of Billy Crystal’s dad singing cowboy songs in Yiddish, it’s a total joy. I’d always been envious of the Catholics and Protestants who had such wonderful composers as Monteverdi and Bach writing music for their rituals. Now there’s at least a smidgen of that kind of music for Jewish affairs too.”

The scores for all of these pieces had been tucked away in European libraries for centuries until Israel Adler, founder of the Jewish Music Research Center at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University, unearthed them. The process of bringing this music back to life in performance will involve more than 50 people—a 30-voice chorus and a 20-piece orchestra performing on period instru-ments—plus five vocal soloists. Tempesta di Mare will present the program twice, first at the University of Pennsylvania’s Irvine Auditorium on Saturday, March 31, 2007, and then on the following day, Sunday, April 1, at Haverford College’s Roberts Hall in Haverford, Pennsylvania. At the concerts, Professor Adler will speak about his 40-year efforts to revive forgotten musical artifacts from the past.

A program being assembled by Piffaro, The Renaissance Band, digs even further back into history for a program that will recreate a concert by the Habsburg Hofkapelle who performed large ensemble music long before it is popularly assumed that such music existed. For the 1568 wedding of Renata of Lorraine and Wilhelm V, son of the Bavarian duke Albrecht V, this large ensemble of strings, winds, brass and voices was led by the illustrious composer Orlande de Lassus who even composed some special music for the ensemble’s performance on that occasion. While musical notation at that time did not specify ensemble size, accounts from travelers as well as iconographic evidence from these festivities survives, offering a musical Rosetta stone for modern-day interpreters.

“One of our aims is to correct the popular notion, fostered inadvertently by modern perform-ers of Renaissance music, that all Renaissance music-making was small-scale, one-on-a-part and intimate,” explains Piffaro’s Artistic Co-director Bob Wiemken. “There was certainly plenty of that, but there is also sufficient evidence from the 15th century on that special occasions regularly brought together ensembles of almost orchestral proportions and variety. With the exception of a few attempts by European ensembles, we as performers of Renaissance music never manage to present this side of Renaissance musical life, resulting in the common mistaken notion. The main reason for this is, I think, economical. It costs a lot to garner ensembles of suf-ficient magnitude to approach the proportions of these various historical occasions.”

Over the past three years, Piffaro has managed to convince funders and audiences of the

PMP 3PMP 2

BY FRANK J. OTERI

and who is something of a modern-day Francis Johnson. A trumpet prodigy who made his solo debut with the

New Orleans Symphony at the age of fifteen, today Mack performs an extremely wide range of repertoire from Baroque classics to world premieres to collaborations involving jazz, klezmer, and latin music. But there’s a more unsettling parallel as well. In 1843, Johnson was the victim of a race-based attack by a mob hurling stones and rotten eggs. In 2002, Mack was brutally beaten by a group of undercover policemen allegedly looking for a “black car thief.” Discovering the music of Francis Johnson and learning about his life and legacy has been an inspiration to Mack, who hears in this early 19th century music an important message for our own time.

“Despite adversity and sometimes violent opposition, Francis Johnson dreamed of musicians from all walks of life performing many different styles of music together nearly two hundred years ago,” according to Mack. “It is a wonderful treat to be a part of the realization of that dream here in Philadelphia.

“Musicians and artists have always known that the universal nature of music and the arts tends to break through limiting boundaries and lines of race, religion, and political affiliation. We are becoming more and more polarized in the beginning of the 21st century. Perhaps hope can be found by looking back in time to brave pio-neers like Francis Johnson for whom music was a place where we can all realize that the only ‘race’ that matters is the human race and that we are all brothers and sisters

A Celebration of Traditions in Philadelphia

Page 2: Nineteenth Century band leader

Francis Johnson will be honored this

season by the West Philadelphia Cultural

Alliance.

Page 3, top: Portrait of Giovanni Cristiano

Lidarti, a Baroque composer whose work

will be presented this season by Tempesta

di Mare.

Page 3, bottom: Trumpet soloist Rodney

Mack of the West Philadelphia Cultural

Alliance. Photo: Anna Tas

Page 4, left: A sixteenth century painting

of the the Münchner Hofkapelle from the

Mielen Codex

Page 4, right: South African percussionist

Mogauwane Mahloele of the Philadelphia

Folklore Project

Prepare yourself: the Philadelphia Mu-sic Project’s 2006 project grant awards promise to deliver some of the area’s most ambitious and artistically signifi -cant programming to date! Twenty-three local music organizations received awards ranging from $4,700 to $80,000, for a grand total of $875,860. Area mu-sic lovers can look forward to 89 public concerts, encompassing traditional and contemporary forms of classical, jazz, and world/folk music.

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worthiness of this large-scale early music repertoire through col-laborations with choirs and other instrumental ensembles. Piffaro’s directors have also researched and commissioned reproductions of a wide variety of instruments necessary to perform this music. For their recreation of the Habsburg Hofkapelle on Saturday, March 24, 2007, at the Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill, several of these instruments will be making their concert debuts and Piffaro will be joined by guest vocalists and instrumentalists including the viol consort Parthenia.

When Renata and Wilhelm were married, Liberia, which began as a beacon of hope for liberated African slaves returning to their home continent from the Americas, was still centuries away. But since the founding of the Liberian Republic in 1847, the people of this small West African country have developed their own distinctive vocal and instrumental traditions. And over the course of the last two decades, Philadelphia has become home to a substantial Liberian émigré popu-lation who have fl ed from this now tragically war-torn nation. The Philadelphia Folklore Project has been working with Liberian artists for the past 15 years in its Musicians in Residence Program, but the upcoming residencies of Zaye Tete and Fatu Gayfl or are PFP’s fi rst to focus on Liberia’s rich vocal music heritage.

Traditionally, the performing arts have been intimately woven into the personal lives of Liberians. All of the important stages of a person’s life are expressed through performance and most people are expected to sing, dance and/or play a musical instrument. But the abilities of both Zaye Tete, a member of the Dan ethnic group originally from Toweh Town in the northeast county of Nimba, and Fatu Gayfl or, of the Lorma ethnic group in the northwest village of Kakata, are unique among their compatriots. In the 1970s, both had been select-ed to perform in the pan-ethnic Liberian National Cultural Troupe in Keneja, Liberia’s national art village, becoming repositories of the musical traditions of all of Liberia’s numerous ethnic groups. While prior to the current civil war both had become nationally renowned icons, today both struggle to sustain these musical tradi-tions here in the United States, performing for Liberian communities around this country while maintaining demanding day jobs and try-ing to bring family members out of refugee camps.

As part of their PFP residencies, both will be presented in two con-cert programs in the spring of 2007. Ms. Tete will sing praise songs and laments, accompanied by percussionists and back-up vocalists, while Ms. Gayfl or will perform graduation, wedding and other ritual songs. In addition, both will pass on Liberia’s rich musical heritage to younger generations for whom this vital cultural lifeline serves as a positive alternative role model to the gangs that have spawned among these recent immigrants. Zaya Tete will teach a 10-session residency in Liberian song in West Philadelphia, at PFP’s new home, where her stu-dents will come from the Liberian communities of West and Southwest Philadelphia. Fatu Gayfl or will teach an intensive residency in Liberian

song at the Folk Arts and Cultural Treasures Charter School (FACTS), a new school started in 2005 by Asian Americans United and PFP. Finally, PFP will produce a short documentary videotape on Liberian songs and their cultural context here in Philadelphia which will be broadcast on local public television and hopefully reach an even broader audience.

“Music can foster connections and continuity as it both responds to and helps shape the drastic transformations that people and com-munities experience,” says Dr. Toni Shapiro-Phim, associate director of the Philadelphia Folklore Project. “Liberia’s devastating civil strife in the late 20th century had an enormous impact on the cultural life of the country. In both refugee camps in neighboring West African countries, where so many sought sanctuary from war, and here in the United States, Liberians have purposefully created opportunities to engage in time-honored cultural practices, including music. When

Liberian émigrés in Philadelphia and beyond ask Fatu or Zaye to perform at wedding, graduation, and other celebrations, they are doing what they perhaps couldn’t imagine NOT doing—continuing artistic traditions that are still meaningful to them, even if the meanings evolve in these new surroundings.”

Of course, as émigré communi-ties adapt to the environs of their new homelands, new musical possibilities frequently emerge. A third artist in residence this year with the Philadelphia Folklore

Project, Mogauwane Mahloele, who was exiled from South Africa for decades because of his anti-apartheid activities and now lives in Philadelphia, creates music which forges new traditions from his im-mersions into several cultures. A born drummer from the BaPedi people adept at both the playing and crafting of a wide range of traditional instruments from the entire continent including the West African kora and the Southern African kalimba, Mahloele currently explores music merging these older traditions with more contemporary American jazz idioms in his ensemble, Tharo, which includes American musicians such as saxophonist Bobby Zankel and bassist Tyrone Brown. In 2005, this group performed in South Africa during his fi rst trip back home since emigrating. For his residency, Mahloele will create new songs for this group in at least three different South African languages, which will then be presented in a local concert.

Every time musical traditions converge the seeds of new music are sown. The many vibrant musical traditions, whose reintroduction into contemporary American life has been nurtured in part by the Phila-delphia Music Project, offer further possibilities for musical renewal. Concerts such as the West Philadelphia Cultural Alliance’s program devoted to the music of Francis Johnson, Tempesta di Mare’s “Hoshan-na!,” or Piffaro’s reimagining of the Habsburg Hofkapelle, while each rooted in the past, also offer new directions for the music of the pres-ent; meanwhile, the Philadelphia Folklore Project’s residencies with artists immersed in living traditions from Liberia and South Africa that are little known in the United States directly initiate a process of cultural renewal.

A CELEBRATION OF TRADITIONS

IN PHILADELPHIA

Left Latin Fiesta

Top, right: Organist Alan Morrison of the Curtis Institute of Music will premiere a piece for the Kimmel Center’s new Dobson pipe organ.

Bottom, right: The Kronos Quartet will make its Kimmel Center debut this season.

PMP ANNOUNCES 2006 GRANTS

This season, Philadelphia’s audi-ences will be treated to world premieres of 35 new works, 23 of which were commissioned with support from PMP. These inspired projects feature distinguished composers, both local and inter-national, and will be performed by some of the region’s most prominent music organizations.

The Curtis Institute of Music received $33,000 to fund the commissioning and world premiere of a new work by Eric Sessler—an organ concerto for Alan Morrison and the Curtis Symphony Orchestra. The performance will feature the new Dobson pipe organ in Verizon Hall at the Kimmel Center, to be led by Mark Russell Smith, music director and conductor of the Richmond Symphony Orchestra.

The Kimmel Center Presents received $60,000 in support of its Fresh Ink series, featuring new music virtuosos in the Kimmel Center’s Perelman Theater. Vio-linist Jennifer Koh will premiere a Jennifer Higdon piece co-commissioned by the Kimmel Center. eighth blackbird will present an intriguing program including recent works by Joseph Schwantner, Derek Bermel, David M. Gordon, and Steven Mackey. And the Kronos Quartet will make its Kimmel Center debut with a multimedia production of Terry Riley’s Sun Rings. Each concert will conclude with an Artist Chat, and all of the performances will be recorded and broadcast on WRTI-FM.

The Philadelphia Chamber Music Society received $60,000 to make possible Chamber Music Today, a special series of performances that will offer the fi rst Philadelphia performances of ten new works—includ-ing two world-premieres of compositions by Richard Wernick and Robert Capanna—at concerts in the Kim-mel Center, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania Convention Center, and Curtis Institute of Music. Cham-ber Music Today will feature appearances in the city next season by such exceptional artists as the Orion and Miami String Quartets, Imani Winds, Meridian Arts Ensemble, pianists Peter Serkin and Ursula Oppens, the Beaux Arts Trio, Guarneri String Quartet, and the Phila-delphia Orchestra ensemble with fl utist David Kramer. The project will also include educational outreach pro-grams for Philadelphia students.

Latin Fiesta received $30,000 to present the second annual Hispanic music festival, Hispanos... Many Roots... Many Faces, at the Arts Bank on the Avenue of the Arts during the spring of 2007. The highlight of the festival will be the world premiere of the Hispanic suite Tabla Raza, commissioned from acclaimed composers Tania León and Arturo O’Farrill. Two concerts and a workshop will explore the richness of Hispanic musical heritage and include performances by Latin Fiesta; Badal Roy, tabla master artist; La Cumbiamba eNeYé, a leading Colom-bian music ensemble from New York; and Cristian Puig, fl amenco guitarist and singer.

The Network for New Music received $60,000 for a

23 ProjectsA Musical Feast!

Frank J. Oteri, a New York-based composer and music journalist, serves as the

American Music Center’s composer advocate and is the founding editor of its

web magazine NewMusicBox (www.newmusicbox.org).

PMP 6 PMP 7

two-year commissioning and performance project, involv-ing the creation of six major chamber works by emerging and established composers David Ludwig, Zhou Long, Richard Festinger, George Tsontakis, Richard Brodhead, and Shulamit Ran. The project will feature a collaboration with Group Motion Dance Theatre, and performances will take place at the Arts Bank.

Relâche received $30,000 to commission and perform new works by composers Elliott Sharp and Jennifer Barker in its Future Sounds series. Elliott Sharp will compose a work entitled Evolute, inspired by both differential geom-etry and recent public debate surrounding Darwinism and Creationism, for the eight-member Relâche ensem-ble and laptop processor. Jennifer Barker will compose a piece for Relâche drawing from the heritage of her native Scotland. These pieces will be performed at the University of Delaware in Wilmington and at Philadelphia’s Trinity Center for Urban Life.

Orchestra 2001 received $30,000 in support of a series of five concerts called Ligeti: Life Cycle and Legacy. Each program will include a work by the influential Romanian composer, as well as world premieres by five Philadel-phia composers: Andrea Clearfield, Philip Maneval, Larry Nelson, Luis Prado and Andrew Rudin. Guest soloists are

in support of The Cinematic Cello, a concert featuring local cellist Ovidiu Marinescu in a multimedia recital in which he will perform alongside video and electronic accompaniment. CMN will commis-sion four musical works for the concert, pairing local composers and filmmakers to produce collaborative compositions inspired by life in Philadelphia. The commissioned composers include Richard Belcastro, Andrea Clearfield, David Ludwig, and Paul Geissinger. Geissinger will produce his own film; the three other filmmakers will be Deron Al-bright, Ed Feldman, and Can Yegen. The concert will take place at the University of Pennsylvania’s Harold Prince Theatre.

Several significant vocal projects will grace Philadelphia’s stages this season, highlighting some of the region’s most expressive singers as they perform rarely heard and newly commissioned works. Center City Opera Theater, a first time PMP grantee, was awarded $30,000 to present a new chamber orchestra version of Lowell Lieberman’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. This will be the regional premiere of the opera, and just its third production since it was composed in 1996. Vocalists will include Justin Vickers (tenor), Jody Sheinbaum (soprano), Joseph Spector (baritone), Richard Ziebarth (bass baritone), and Timothy Mix (baritone). The performances will be held in the Kimmel Center’s Perelman Theater.

The Academy of Vocal Arts received $60,000 to support a concert performance of Carl Maria von Weber’s opera, Der Freischütz (The Freeshooter). Vocalists will include Evelyn Pollock (soprano), Ariya

clockwise from top leftt:

Composer Elliott Sharp will compose a new work for the Relâche ensemble. Photo: Andreas Sterzing

Group Motion Multi Media Dance Company

Violinist Jennifer Koh will perform a program of personal favorites with Orchestra 2001. Photo: Janette Beckman

Sound artist Robin Rimbaud was commissioned by Temple this season.

Left, top: Rova Orkestra Ascension will honor John Coltrane’s legacy at the International House.

Left, bottom: Center City Opera Theater soprano Jody Sheinbaum

Below, left to right: Academy of Vocal Arts Mezzo-soprano Elspeth Kincaid; Choral Arts Society soloist Suzanne Duplantis (photo: Aaron Warkov); Composer Andrea Clearfield was commissioned this season by Chamber Music Now.

Sharla Nafziger (soprano), Jody Karin Applebaum (soprano), Gloria Justen (violin), Diane Monroe (violin), Jennifer Koh (violin), and Ulrich Boeckheler (cello). These programs will be presented at Swarthmore College’s Lang Concert Hall, University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Center, and the Trinity Center for Urban Life.

Further establishing Philadelphia as a landmark on the contem-porary music scene, several projects blending improvisation, theater, and installation will make their mark this season. The American Composers Forum, Philadelphia Chapter, a first time PMP grantee, received $20,000 in support of Soundexchange 2007, a project bring-ing the composer/improviser Pauline Oliveros and her Deep Listening Ensemble to conduct artist workshops with Philadelphia composers and performers, and to present programs for the general public at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Center’s Studio Theater.

Temple University’s Boyer College of Music and Dance, also a first time PMP grantee, received $80,000 for the Boyer College Atelier Series, produced in partnership with Peregrine Arts. This three-pro-gram series features The Fantastic Voyage, a revision of Gavin Bryars’ The Sinking of the Titanic, performed by the Momenta String Quartet and Boyer College students. New York City’s Ridge Theater will also contribute a multimedia staging of this program. Also featured is Asian-American jazz composer and saxophonist Fred Ho, who will stage his full-length music theater work, The Black Panther Suite, per-formed by his Afro Asian Music Ensemble, members of his theater company, Big Red Media, and Temple students. This concert will open with a newly commissioned work by Ho for a student ensemble. In addition, British sound artist Robin Rimbaud (a.k.a. “Scanner”) will develop an electro-acoustic performance-installation work called The Gentle Madness, to be performed by the Momenta String Quartet, Rim-baud, and student musicians. Each program will be accompanied by master-classes and concerts featuring works by faculty and student composers. Collaborative partners for the project will include The Rosenbach Museum & Library and the Ryerss Museum and Library.

Chamber Music Now, a first time PMP grantee, received $4,700

PMP

ANNOUNCES

2006

GRANTS

Sawadivong (soprano), Jessica Julin (soprano), Angela Meade (soprano), Elspeth Kincaid (mezzo-soprano), and Bryan Hymel (tenor). Performances will take place at the Kimmel Center’s Perelman Theater and Centennial Hall at The Haverford School.

The Choral Arts Society of Philadelphia was awarded $30,000 to produce a program of symphonic choral music at Congregation Rodeph Shalom. This concert will cele-brate CASP’s 25th anniversary and will feature a major commission by renowned composer Roxanna Panufnik as well as Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 2. Guest Artists will include Jacqueline Horner (soprano), Suzanne Du-Plantis (mezzo-soprano), William Yeats (tenor), and Diane Meredith Belcher (organ).

Ambitious jazz and blues concerts constitute a signifi-cant portion of this year’s projects, with a special focus on Philadelphia’s contribution to these quintessentially American art forms. International House Philadelphia was awarded $30,000 to present Seraphic Light, a year-long celebration honoring the oeuvre and 80th birthday of John Coltrane. This series seeks to commemorate and continue Coltrane’s legacy through unique performances with Coltrane’s former band mates as well as those who continue to explore and celebrate the boundaries of jazz. Guest Artists will include Rova Orkestra: Ascension, with the Rova Saxophone Quartet; Spiritual Unity with Marc Ribot; the David S. Ware Quartet; Cecil Taylor; and the Dave Burrell Ensemble.

Musicopia, Inc. (formerly Strings for Schools) received $40,000 to bring the Appalachia Waltz Trio, under the direction of fiddler Mark O’Connor, to Philadelphia to perform with jazz violinist John Blake, Jr., a Musicopia roster artist. The project, which integrates jazz, country, and classical elements, will feature performances in a

in support of its Musicians-in-Residence program. The program will feature three outstanding African immigrant musicians—Zaye Tete, Fatu Gayflor, and Mogauwane Mahloele. Both Tete and Gayflor are from Liberia and sing a range of traditional Li-berian songs. Mahloele sings and plays his native BaPedi South African music, as well as developing new material based on this heri-tage. The Musicians-in-Residence program will include residencies, the commissioning of collaborative work, performances in two public concerts, and broadcast video post-cards. Collaborating Organizations include WHYY-FM and the Folk Arts Cultural Trea-sures Charter School (FACTS).

Keeping Philadelphia in touch with the roots of chamber and orchestral music, three projects that will bring to life rarely performed music from the 17th and 18th centuries received funding this year. Tem-pesta di Mare, a first time PMP grantee, was awarded $30,000 for a concert entitled,

“Hoshanna,” featuring two anonymous Hebrew cantatas from 1730s Italy for solo-ists, chorus and orchestra, and a motet for soprano and strings from 1770’s Amsterdam by Lidarti. This seldom heard repertoire represents an important period of Jewish

culture during the Enlightenment. Two of the works will be US premieres. WHYY 91-FM will broadcast the performance on its classi-cal music program “Showcase.” Guest Artists include Sheryl Heather Cohen (soprano), Nell Snaidas (soprano), Daniel Bubeck (alto), Marc Molomot (tenor), David Newman (baritone), and the Chamber Singers of Haverford and Bryn Mawr Colleges.

Piffaro, The Renaissance Band, received $30,000 in support of two concerts, “Iberica Resplendens: Music from the Great Cathe-dral Collections of Spain and Portugal” and

“The Bavarian Hofkapella—A Wedding Celebration,” both of which stage music of the Renaissance and early Baroque from historical events in which ensembles and specific repertoire have been documented or depicted in artwork. These large-scale, fes-tive occasions used sizeable musical forces and are seldom, if ever, recreated in modern concerts. Guest Artists will include Daphna Mor (recorder); Parthenia, A Consort of Viols; Laura Heimes (soprano); Tony Boutté (tenor); Philip Anderson (tenor); Sumner Thompson (baritone); William Dongois (cornetto); Mack Ramsey (sackbut and recorder); and Erik Schmalz (sackbut).

When all is said and done, the projects of

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student workshop, a guest appearance at the 188th An-nual Philadelphia All City Youth Orchestra, and a public concert premiering newly commissioned works by O’Connor and Blake.

Montgomery County Community College was awarded $30,000 to present a series of three concerts entitled Back to the Roots. The concerts will feature two ensembles, The Dirty Dozen Brass Band and The Holmes Brothers, and a legendary icon of American folk music, Odetta. Through pre-concert lectures given by Dr. Gloria Goode, the series will explore the cultural origins of this music, as well as the artists’ individual influences.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art was awarded $30,000 to support performances by two jazz orches-tras presented as part of the Museum’s Art After 5 series. Concerts by the Mingus Big Band and Vanguard Jazz Or-chestra will enliven the Art After 5 repertoire and draw new and returning audiences during the extended Friday evening hours.

The West Philadelphia Cultural Alliance, a first time PMP grantee, received $23,660 to produce a concert highlighting the music of Francis Johnson (1792-1844), a virtuoso keyed bugle player and band leader whose ra-cially integrated band performed a mix of classical and folk music both in Philadelphia and abroad, arguably making him America’s first international star. The Rod-ney Mack Philadelphia Big Brass will collaborate with saxophonist Branford Marsalis, Philadelphia-based Time for Three, and pianist Karen Walwyn to perform works

PMP

ANNOUNCES

2006

GRANTS

from Johnson’s repertoire, celebrating one of the country’s most important early musicians.

Programs featuring music from around the world will lend an in-ternational sound to Philadelphia’s arts scene. The Painted Bride Art

Center was awarded $80,000 over two years to present XL, four concerts featuring large ensembles spanning global and cultural influences. The featured groups are Philadelphia’s own Odessa to Istanbul, a 14-member collaboration between Arabic/Jewish Middle Eastern traditions with Eastern European Klezmer; Cudamani, a 25-member Gamelan orchestra from Bali; Papo Vazquez’s Pirates Troubadours, a 14-piece ensemble that integrates jazz and Afro-Caribbean traditions, and Philip Hamil-ton’s Voices, a 15-member choir featuring vocalizations from a wide spectrum of global traditions. Collaborating organizations include Swarthmore College, Asociación de Músicos Latino Americanos, Philadelphia High School for Creative and Performing Arts, and WRTI-FM.

Sruti, the India Music and Dance Society, was awarded $24,500 to support three concerts: a recital by the renowned vocalist Sudha Raghunathan in the South Indian (Carnatic) style, a sitar concerto for western clas-sical orchestra by Shafaatullah Khan and the Mansfield University Orchestra, and a symphonic work by the Jaya-mangala School of Music and Dance.

The Philadelphia Folklore Project received $30,000

clockwise from top left:

Cudamani, a Gamalan orchestra to perform at the Painted Bride this season. Photo: Jorge Vismara

Branford Marsalis will be presented by the West Philadelphia Cultural Alliance. Photo: Palma Kolansky

The Holmes Brothers will perform this season at the Montgomery County Community College.

The Mingus Big Band will perform at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Fiddle player John Blake, Jr, a Musicopia roster artist

PMP’s 2006 grantees will result in 191 events, including the world premiere performances of 35 new works, 23 of which will be commis-sioned with support from PMP, U.S. premieres of 4 works, and regional premieres of 11 works; 89 public concerts encompassing 37 chamber music, 16 orchestral music, 2 choral music, 56 new music, 17 world/folk music, 16 jazz, 7 early music, 7 opera, 10 electronic/electro-acoustic, and 12 multi-media performances; 103 residency and educational activities; 409 local artists and 657 guest artists supported, including 40 guest ensembles; 36,000 live audience members in the five-county region; and 2.9 million radio audience members through broadcasts on National Public Radio and Philadelphia’s WRTI and WHYY.

Philadelphia Music Project grants are awarded on a competitive basis and are selected by a panel of internationally recog-nized artists, scholars, and administrators with a broad knowledge of the field. A dis-tinguished eight-member panel reviewed this year’s applications and was comprised of Martha Gilmer (panel chair), Vice Presi-dent for Artistic Planning and Audience Development, Chicago Symphony Orchestra; Ray Allen, Professor of Music and American Studies, Brooklyn College; Harolyn Blackwell, soprano, Metropolitan Opera, EMI, RCA-Vic-tor, and Telarc recording artist; Michael Cain, pianist, Professor of Jazz Studies and Impro-visation, New England Conservatory; Karen Chester, Founder and President, Sound Vision, Inc., former Director of Merkin Concert Hall; Lee Hyla, Professor of Composition, New Eng-land Conservatory of Music; Michael McCraw, bassoonist, Director, Early Music Institute, In-diana University; and Mark Shapiro, Artistic Director, Cantori New York.

clockwise from top left:

Tempesta di Mare

The Parthenia Ensemble, which will perform this season with Piffaro. Photo: William Wegman

Liberian musician Fatu Gayflor of the Philadelphia Folklore Project

Vocalist Sudha Raghunathan will be presented this season by Sruti. Photo: Prabhakar Chitrapu

SEPTEMBER 2006

9.16.06 The String Orchestra: György Ligeti’s Ramifications, George Rochberg’s Transcendental Variations, and Leonard Bernstein’s Arias and Barcarolles, with soprano Suzanne DuPlantis and baritone Randall Scarlata Orchestra 2001; www.orchestra2001.org The University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Center

9.17.06 The String Orchestra: György Ligeti’s Ramifications, George Rochberg’s Transcendental Variations, and Leonard Bernstein’s Arias and Barcarolles, with soprano Suzanne DuPlantis and baritone Randall Scarlata Orchestra 2001; www.orchestra2001.org Lang Concert Hall, Swarthmore College

9.23.06 A Bharatanatyam Performance and Carnatic Vocal Concert by Ramya Ramnarayan and Sudha Raghunathan Sruti, India Music and Dance Society; www.sruti.org Colonial Elementary School, Plymouth Meeting, PA

OCTOBER 2006

10.7.06 Back to the Roots: The Dirty Dozen Brass Band Montgomery County Community College; www.mc3.edu Science Center Theater, MCCC

10.14.06 Seraphic Light: Celebrating Coltrane. World debut of the Philadelphia Four International House Philadelphia; www.ihousephilly.orgInternational House Philadelphia

10.15.06 Orchestra Underground: Composers Outfront! American Composers Orchestra performs world premiere of new works by Evan Ziporyn, Brad Lubman, and Michael Gatonska, as well as works by Ives and Gandolfi Annenberg Center for the Performing Artswww.pennpresents.org Irvine Auditorium, University of Pennsylvania

10.21.06 Violinist Jennifer Koh performs the world premiere of Jennifer Higdon’s String Poetic Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts; www.kimmelcenter.orgPerelman Theater, Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts

10.27.06XL: Cudamani Painted Bride Art Center; www.paintedbride.org Painted Bride Art Center

NOVEMBER 2006

11.4.06 Seraphic Light: Celebrating Coltrane. Pianist Cecil TaylorInternational House Philadelphia; www.ihousephilly.orgInternational House Philadelphia

DECEMBER 2006

12.1.06 Imani Winds performs the world premiere of Richard Wernick’s Quintet and works by Mendelssohn, Carter, Bunch, Coleman, and Shorter Philadelphia Chamber Music Society; www.philadelphiachambermusic.orgPhiladelphia Museum of Art

12.2.06 Back to the Roots: Odetta Montgomery County Community College; www.mc3.eduScience Center Theater, MCCC

12.2.06 XL: Odessa to Istanbul Painted Bride Art Center; www.paintedbride.org Painted Bride Art Center

12.8.06 Seraphic Light: Celebrating Coltrane. Philadelphia debut of Spiritual Unity International House Philadelphia; www.ihousephilly.orgInternational House Philadelphia

12.10.06 Orion Quartet performs the Philadelphia premiere of Kirchner’s Quartet No. 4, as well as Haydn’s Quartet in F Major, Op.77, No.2 and Beethoven’s Quartet in F Major, Opus 59, No. 1Philadelphia Chamber Music Society www.philadelphiachambermusic.org Pennsylvania Convention Center Auditorium

12.12.06 Pianist Peter Serkin performs the Philadelphia premiere of Carter’s Intermettences, and works by Des Prez, Schoenberg, Bach, and Beethoven Philadelphia Chamber Music Society; www.philadelphiachambermusic.org Perelman Theater, Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts

12.17.06 Music of Our Time: The Mannes Trio performs the world premiere of Robert Capanna’s Magic Numbers V: Hymns and Dances and work by Wolpe, Kirchner, and ManevalPhiladelphia Chamber Music Society; www.philadelphiachambermusic.org Field Concert Hall, Curtis Institute of Music

JANUARY 2007

1.5.07, 1.6.07, 1.9.07 Double bassist Harold Robinson performs the world premiere of John Harbison’s Double Bass Concerto, works by Wagner and Copland Philadelphia Orchestra; www.philorch.org Verizon Hall, Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts

1.7.07 Ursula Oppens, Mathias Tacke, and Gail Williams perform Philadelphia premieres by Carter and Nancarrow and works by Picker and Ligeti Philadelphia Chamber Music Society; www.philadelphiachambermusic.org Field Concert Hall, Curtis Institute of Music

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1.12.07 Seraphic Light: Celebrating Coltrane. World debut of the David S. Ware Unit International House Philadelphia; www.ihousephilly.orgInternational House Philadelphia

1.19.07, 1.23.07 Anton Weber’s Der Freischütz Academy of Vocal Arts; www.avaopera.org Perelman Theater, Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts

1.26.07 Anton Weber’s Der Freischütz Academy of Vocal Arts; www.avaopera.org Centennial Hall Performing Arts Center, The Haverford School

1.26.07 Art After 5: Vanguard Jazz Orchestra Philadelphia Museum of Art; www.philamuseum.org Philadelphia Museum of Art

1.27.07 From Mozart to a World Premiere: György Ligeti’s Bagatelles, world premiere of Andrew Rudin’s Canto di Ritorno, and works by Mozart and Augusta Read Thomas Orchestra 2001; www.orchestra2001.org Lang Concert Hall, Swarthmore College

1.28.07 From Mozart to a World Premiere: György Ligeti’s Bagatelles, world premiere of Andrew Rudin’s Canto di Ritorno, and works by Mozart and Augusta Read Thomas Orchestra 2001; www.orchestra2001.org Trinity Center for Urban Life

FEBRUARY 2007

2.2.07 Meridian Arts Ensemble performs Philadelphia premieres by Sanford and Babbitt and works by Sharp, Villa-Lobos, Piazzolla, Pixinguinh, and Lacerda Philadelphia Chamber Music Society; www.philadelphiachambermusic.orgPhiladelphia Museum of Art

2.4.07 World premiere of Eric Sessler’s Organ Concerto performed by Alan Morrison and the Curtis Symphony Orchestra Curtis Institute of Music; www.curtis.edu Verizon Hall, Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts

2.10.07 Seraphic Light: Celebrating Coltrane. East Coast premiere of Rova: Orkestra = Electric Ascension performed by the Rova Saxophone Quartet International House Philadelphia; www.ihousephilly.orgInternational House Philadelphia

2.13.07 The Glaux Ensemble performs works by DeVaron, De Lise, Canada, McIntyre, Micofsky, Contraras, and Carpenter Temple University’s Boyer College of Music and Dance www.temple.edu/boyer/ Rock Hall, Temple University

2.17.07 strange imaginary animals: eighth blackbird performs works by Joseph Schwantner, Derek Bermel, David M. Gordon, and Steven Mackey Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts; www.kimmelcenter.orgPerelman Theater, Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts

2.23.07 Jennifer Koh and Jody Karin Applebaum: Personal Passions. György Ligeti’s Violin Concertos, world premiere by Luis Prado, and works by Earl Kim and Gian-Carlo MenottiOrchestra 2001; www.orchestra2001.org Lang Concert Hall, Swarthmore College

2.23.07 Iberica Resplendens: Music from the Great Cathedral Collections of Spain and Portugal Piffaro, The Renaissance Band; www.piffaro.com St. Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

2.24.07 Iberica Resplendens: Music from the Great Cathedral Collections of Spain and Portugal Piffaro, The Renaissance Band; www.piffaro.com Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill

2.25.07 Jennifer Koh and Jody Karin Applebaum: Personal Passions. György Ligeti’s Violin Concertos, world premiere by Luis Prado, and works by Earl Kim and Gian-Carlo MenottiOrchestra 2001; www.orchestra2001.org The University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Center

2.25.07 Iberica Resplendens: Music from the Great Cathedral Collections of Spain and Portugal Piffaro, The Renaissance Band; www.piffaro.com Sts. Andrew and Matthew Church, Wilmington, DE

2.27.07 Momenta String Quartet performs works by Martignoni, Galganski, Bryars, and Beethoven Temple University’s Boyer College of Music and Dance www.temple.edu/boyer/ Rock Hall, Temple University

2.28.07 Miami Quartet performs the Philadelphia premiere of Daniel Godfrey’s Quartet and works by Haydn and SchubertPhiladelphia Chamber Music Society; www.philadelphiachambermusic.org Perelman Theater, Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts

Calendar of Funded Events 2006 – 2007

PMP 12 PMP 13

MARCH 2007

3.15.07, 3.16.07 World premiere by David Ludwig and George Crumb’s Quest, performed in collaboration with Groupmotion Network for New Music; www.networkfornewmusic.orgArts Bank Theater, University of the Arts

3.17.07, 3.18.07 Boyer College of Music and Dance and Peregrine Arts present The Afro Asian Music Ensemble performing Fred Ho’s The Black Panther Suite: All Power to the People Temple University’s Boyer College of Music and Dance www.temple.edu/boyer/ Freedom Theatre, John E. Allen, Jr. Theatre

3.17.07 Going to Extremes: György Ligeti’s Mysteries of the Macabre, world premieres of Larry Nelson’s Seven Clay Songs and Philip Maneval’s On Love and Remembrance Orchestra 2001; www.orchestra2001.org Trinity Center for Urban Life

3.18.07 Going to Extremes: György Ligeti’s Mysteries of the Macabre, world premieres of Larry Nelson’s Seven Clay Songs and Philip Maneval’s On Love and Remembrance Orchestra 2001; www.orchestra2001.org Lang Concert Hall, Swarthmore College

3.20.07, 3.21.07 Boyer College of Music and Dance and Peregrine Arts present the world premiere of Robin Rimbaud’s The Gentle MadnessTemple University’s Boyer College of Music and Dance www.temple.edu/boyer/ Wagner Free Institute of Science

3.22.07 Evolute: World premiere of music by Elliott Sharp and works by Fred Frith, Randall Woolf, and John King Relâche; www.relache.org University of Delaware, Wilmington

3.23.07 Evolute: World premiere of music by Elliott Sharp and works by Fred Frith, Randall Woolf, and John King Relâche; www.relache.org Trinity Center for Urban Life

3.24.07 25th Anniversary Concert: World premiere by Roxanna Pnufnik and Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 2 Choral Arts Society of Philadelphia; www.choralarts.comCongregation Rodeph Shalom, Philadelphia

3.24.07 Piffaro and Parthenia present The Habsburg Hofkapelle of Munich and the Music of Orlande de Lassus Piffaro, The Renaissance Band; www.piffaro.comPresbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill

3.25.07 Orchestra Underground: Composers Outfront! American Composers Orchestra performs world premieres of works by Steven Mackey, Kurt Rohde, and Vijay Iyer, as well as works by Meltzer and León Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts www.pennpresents.org Zellerbach Theatre, University of Pennsylvania

3.25.07 Guarneri Quartet with violist Hsin-Yun Huang and cellist David Soyer perform the Philadelphia premiere of Danielpour’s Quartet No.5 and works by Mozart and DvorakPhiladelphia Chamber Music Society www.philadelphiachambermusic.org Pennsylvania Convention Center Auditorium

3.25.07 Piffaro and Parthenia present The Habsburg Hofkapelle of Munich and the Music of Orlande de Lassus Piffaro, The Renaissance Band; www.piffaro.com Lutheran Church of the Holy Communion, Philadelphia

3.29.07, 3.30.07 Boyer College of Music and Dance and Peregrine Arts present Gavin Bryars’ The Sinking of the Titanic Temple University’s Boyer College of Music and Dance www.temple.edu/boyer/ Union League, Lincoln Hall

3.31.07 Hoshanna! Hebrew Music of the High Baroque Tempesta di Mare; www.tempestadimare.org Irvine Auditorium, University of Pennsylvania

APRIL 2007

4.1.07 Hoshanna! Hebrew Music of the High Baroque Tempesta di Mare; www.tempestadimare.org Founders Hall, Marshall Auditorium Haverford College

4.4.07 Beaux Arts Trio performs the Philadelphia premiere of Turnage’s Slow Pavane and works by Schubert and ShostakovichPhiladelphia Chamber Music Society www.philadelphiachambermusic.org Perelman Theater, Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts

4.4.07 Temple University Jazz Ensemble performs works by Fred HoTemple University’s Boyer College of Music and Dance www.temple.edu/boyer/ Klein Recital Hall, Temple University

4.5.07 Boyer College Atelier Series presents a performance of works by Falconi, Jacob, Greenbaum, Brodhead, and Pausina Temple University’s Boyer College of Music and Dance www.temple.edu/boyer/ Philadelphia Ethical Society

4.6.07 Shafaatullah Khan and the Mansfield University OrchestraSruti, India Music and Dance Society; www.sruti.org Perelman Theater, Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts

4.14.07 Commemorating an Artist’s Life: Györgi Ligeti’s Chamber Concerto, world premiere by Andrea Clearfield, works by Oliver Knussen and Joseph Schwantner Orchestra 2001; www.orchestra2001.org Trinity Center for Urban Life

4.15.07 Commemorating an Artist’s Life: Györgi Ligeti’s Chamber Concerto, world premiere by Andrea Clearfield, works by Oliver Knussen and Joseph Schwantner Orchestra 2001; www.orchestra2001.org Lang Concert Hall, Swarthmore College

4.19.07 The Kronos Quartet performs a multimedia production of Terry Riley’s Sun Rings Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts; www.kimmelcenter.orgPerelman Theater, Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts

4.20.07 Bali and the Beguilement of the Gamelan: World premiere of Evan Ziporyn’s Concerto for Gamelan and Strings, music by Ravel and Grainger, McPhee, Vivier, and Harrison.Philadelphia Classical Symphony; www.classicalsymphony.org Trinity Center for Urban Life

4.21.07 Zaye Tete, Fatu Gayflor, and Mogauwane Mahloele perform music drawn from the traditions of Liberia and South AfricaPhiladelphia Folklore Project; www.folkloreproject.org World Café Live

4.21.07 World premiere by Jennifer Barker and works by Eve Beglarian, David Lang, Arthur Jarvinen, and Eric Moe Relâche; www.relache.org Trinity Center for Urban Life

4.22.07Soundexchange 2007: Pauline Oliveros and her Deep Listening Ensemble American Composers Forum, Philadelphia Chapter www.composersforum.org The University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Center, Studio Theater

4.28.07 Back to the Roots: The Holmes Brothers Montgomery County Community College; www.mc3.edu.Science Center Theater, MCCC

MAY 2007

5.10.07, 5.11.07, 5.12.07 World premiere by Oliver Knussen, works by Schubert and Brahms Philadelphia Orchestra; www.philorch.org Verizon Hall, Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts

5.12.07 World premieres of new works composed and performed by John Blake, Jr. and Mark O’Connor with his Appalachia Waltz Trio Strings for Schools/Musicopia; www.stringsforschools.org Independence Seaport Museum

5.18.07, 5.19.07 Hispanos…Many Roots…Many Faces: World premiere of Tabla Rasa by Tania Leon and Arturo O’Farrill with Latin Fiesta, Tabla player Badal Roy, and La Cumbiamba EneYeLatin Fiesta; www.latinfiestainc.com Philadelphia’s Avenue of the Arts

5.19.07 Four Ways to View a City: World premieres by Richard Belcastro, Andrea Clearfield, David Ludwig, and Paul Geissinger performed by cellist Ovidiu MarinescuChamber Music Now; www.chambermusicnow.orgThe University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Center

JUNE 2007

6.3.07 The First International Superstar: Branford Marsalis with The Rodney Mack Philadelphia Big Brass, Time for Three, and Karen Walwyn perform music by Francis JohnsonWest Philadelphia Cultural Alliance; www.wpcalliance.orgIrvine Auditorium, University of Pennsylvania

6.6.07, 6.9.07, 6.10.07, 6.12.07 Lowell Lieberman’s The Picture of Dorian GrayCenter City Opera Theater; www.operatheater.orgPerelman Theater, Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts

DATES TBA

Momenta String Quartet performs works by Bresnick, Rimbaud, Falconi, and McIntyre Temple University’s Boyer College of Music and Dancewww.temple.edu/boyer/ Rock Hall, Temple University

Jayamangala School of Music and Dance Sruti, India Music and Dance Society; www.sruti.orgColonial Elementary School, Plymouth Meeting, PA

Calendar of Funded Events 2006 – 2007

There was abundant evidence for her vision. Amateur choruses had existed in Philadelphia from its earliest days. German male choruses, church choirs singing Handel or Palestrina; Moravians drawing on ancient German traditions to bolster their courage in a new world; Swedish choirs, freed slaves singing powerfully of lost heritages, Huguenots preserving their French ties through song, Italians singing nostalgically and proudly their operatic choruses. Choirs represented their cultural histories, keeping memories alive, reinvigorating musical and cultural values.

The pattern continues, but in ever shifting ways. The Bethlehem Bach Choir is well past the century mark; the Mendelssohn Club Choir is looking hopefully toward its 150th year in Philadelphia; the Orpheus Club sings into its 134th year. Colleges and universities have fielded choirs and glee clubs almost from their founding. Others struggle for stability, for choral singing is mainly amateur singing, and the pressures of personal schedules—work, school, travel, personal travail—defeat many singers who would rather be exploring Bach than working overtime. And a peculiarly American bias ranks choral singing be-low instrumental performance. It’s not the 134-year old Mendelssohn Club that towers over Philadelphia music; it is the 107-year-old Philadelphia Orchestra.

Choirs continue as the voice of social change. Singing City has bashed through national hatreds—singing in Israel and the West Bank at a time when such crossings were unheard of; taking black, white, and Asian singers to sing in the South before the Civil rights marches.

Working men’s choirs of the 1930s have given way to others. The Gay Men’s Choir and the Anna Crusis Choir have taken on gender issues as the propelling force in music making. Afro-American church choirs have long sung the anger of discrimination and the militant hope of equality. Orthodox Church choirs help Ukrainian and Russian immigrants preserve ties with their deep musical history, language and homeland. The Korean-American Chorale and the Chinese Musical Voices preserve their historic music.

Choirs have responded to changing musical tastes, and many have furthered those changes. Jazz, pop styles, coun-try, rap, and Beatles songs have all leavened programs and challenged the standard repertoire. Mendelssohn Club and Temple University choir conductor Alan Harler said,

“Don’t get me wrong. I love the big masterpieces—but we’ve done them. Give us new things.”

The Philadelphia Boy Choir’s artistic director, Jeff Smith, conducts only American music at home. That means bal-lads, anthems, folk music, Bernstein, Copland, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Lerner and Loewe. On international tours, the choir sings some pieces in the language of the host countries—Chinese, Spanish, Arabic, whatever.

The relative newcomer in this resounding amateur scene is the professional choir.

Musical activist Michael Korn worked years to create the Philadelphia Singers, a 32-voice ensemble with sing-ers under contract. He achieved his goal 14 years ago, just before his death. The ensemble continues under David

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BY DANIEL WEBSTER

Hayes.Hayes protests that “paid choristers” is

perceived by would-be funders as an oxymo-ron. “People tell us: ‘Everybody can sing. Why pay them?’” Hayes reports. Hayes’ aspirations and drive have carried the singers to a level of success that fits choral singing in America: survival. Yes, they sing and sometimes record with the Philadelphia Orchestra, but finan-

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The Choral Arts Society Of

Philadelphia

The Mendelssohn Club Of

Philadelphia

The Philadelphia Singers

Singing City, the name Elaine Brown chose when she founded her chorus 60 years ago, encapsulated her vision of music’s cohesive social power but also reflected a cultural tradition that antedated Europeans’ landing in America. Her shared vision was of a city held close by groups singing in clubs, in churches, in concert halls, in schools, in cellars, singing in many languages, singing everywhere.

cial pressure caused the ensemble to reduce its season last year and continue that auster-ity path this year.

“I’m amazed at the flow of really fine sing-ers available,” he says. “The conservatories and universities are turning out far more singers than can be absorbed by existing professional ensembles. We’re making slow strides in changing the ideas of conventional music making. Singers in our ensemble also have to teach, to sing in church choirs, and to job around. It’s a strange life.

“Our goal is to raise the profile of all choruses,” he says while recalling the anger the Singers created when they were named official chorus of the Orchestra. Until that happened, the Orchestra parceled out its cho-ral concerts among Singing City, the Choral Arts Society and Mendelssohn Club. Things

Choir Crazy

era long attracted singers who loved the stage, knew the repertoire and stayed with the company for a lifetime. Its conductors have had to choose between experience and younger voices, but critics have agreed the OCP chorus has gained stature in the last decade.

Prominent in the choral mix is the Philadelphia Boys Choir. Willed into being 29 years ago by Robert Hamilton, the ensemble has become the city’s traveling ambassador. It has its own home and rehearsal hall near 30th Street Station. The boys pay $700 tuition and pay for their part in tours, often $2,000 and more. The ensemble of 90 boys and 30 men in the Chorale have visited all civilized conti-nents, touching down in China, Africa, South America and extensively in the middle East and Europe. This year, they sing in Greece and Turkey, staying in homes of families to gain experience in life elsewhere. Jeffrey Smith, music director, oversees a $600,000 budget and guides a staff of two full-time and four part-time administrators. He says the ensemble is restructuring, and will add a develop-

CHOIR CRAZY

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and the Loce Fellowship Ensemble in a program with the Brockington Ensemble and the Blair Brothers produced an audience almost entirely Afro-American. “We worked with churches here and the response was tremendous.”

A second season in 2004-5 followed the same formula with Dottie Peoples and the David Winslow Singers. “One of our best programs was having Cool Bernie and the Choir College here for three days. We had workshops, and the churches really turned out for it. We had Pew Founda-tion support for those programs, and that let us discount tickets for the churches. We want to keep this going, but we need solid funding to let us make it easy for our audi-ence to be there,” he says.

At Mother Bethel Church in Society Hill, M. Barry Cur-rington leads two adult choirs and a children’s ensemble. The pastor Jeffrey Heath says, “People are hungry for this music—it’s part of our experience—but they don’t want the old. Many of our hymns are outdated. We have one choir singing old Gospel. But the churches are singing

fell apart during Riccardo Muti’s tenure with the Orches-tra; a former conductor of the Mendelssohn Club provided a chorus which Muti angrily said was unrehearsed. The Orchestra turned to the Westminster Choir, ending that important community connection with amateur choirs.

Korn had envisioned forming a chorus specifically for the Orchestra, and had enlisted Riccardo Muti’s and Wolfgang Sawallisch’s support. The Singers and the larger—and older—Singers Chorale were in; the three city choirs were out. The Singers performed in Muti’s final concerts as music director, sang Sawallisch’s major choral concerts, and continues in Christoph Eschenbach’s season. This year, the ensembles will sing Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 and traditional Holiday music with the Orchestra. Hayes will lead Bach, Israel in Egypt, and its “Christmas in Logan Square” programs on its own.

The Singers’ budget is $415,000, with only one full-time staff member, Rebecca Bolden. Like some other local choruses, the Singers received Pew Foundation support

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disguise, Harler points out. “It freed us to plan our seasons independently and to be more adventurous. We’ve com-missioned 30 pieces. The board believes in my craziness, and the singers believe in the chorus.”

Harler notes the choir, which employs 8 to 10 profes-sionals, will sing Orff’s Carmina Burana along with a commissioned work by Jan Krzywicki based on bits of Carmina. All this with the Leah Stein Dance Company. They keep to tradition with Mendelssohn’s Elijah with tenor Stuart Neill in the spring.

The schismatic Choral Arts Society survived and prospered, first under Sean Deibler, then Donald Nally and now under Matthew Glandorf. It, too, shared in the Philadelphia Orchestra’s bounty, but rode out the change programming classics. It marks its 25th anniversary this season and has no problem recruiting—and los-ing—singers.

“We were founded by singers who wanted to perform with the Orchestra,” says Peter Grandell, executive di-

Left to right: The Philadelphia Gay Men’s Choir; The Brockington

Ensemble; The Wilmington Chester Mass Choir; Chinese Musical

Voices; The Philadelphia Boys Choir

to sort out its administration and to coordinate its outreach programs. Pew recognized that almost all the choruses shared problems of fund raising, management, promotion and devel-opment. The Mendelssohn Club is a survivor, too. When Alan Harler was engaged as artistic director 20 years ago, “The cho-rus had a $60,000 deficit and only about 60 singers remained.” The former conductor’s policies led half the chorus to leave and found the Choral Arts Society.

“But our singers were not going to let this group die. The force of history was at work, and I saw that strength in the chorus. We got out of debt, mostly through negotiation, and have stayed on an even keel since then.”

The chorus has a budget of $285,000, according to Lynn Faust, the only paid staff leader. The singers, like most chorus members, pay dues, or membership fees every year and buy their own music. Choristers fund their own art.

Faust points out the endemic problems of amateur choruses: 15% turnover every year and low recognition. Harler says the chorus misses the Philadelphia Orchestra link which attracted singers and gave the chorus visibility. “Still, we sing with the Orchestra at Saratoga—a different management—and we sing repertoire at home with an orchestra, things we might have sung with the Philadelphia Orchestra.”

Losing the Orchestra connection proved an advantage in

rector. “We’re proud that we did in our very first season. But we realized the Orchestra was not our only gig. We wanted an independent season, and we’re in the middle of a long-term rethink about who we are. We don’t need a symphonic-size choir; we can have a leaner organization that performs another repertoire. I think we have found our niche. We do music not often heard. That gives us our unique character.” Deibler keeps a tie with the city with his a capella Music Group.

Not all choruses are urban products. Valentin Radu, the Romanian pianist and conductor, founded Vox Ama Deus 20 years ago in Devon. The choir and orchestra have made baroque works the focus, using period instruments in the orchestra and scholarly singing styles. Radu’s high energy has attracted top singers, and the ensemble has recorded some of the Bach and Handel works. He will lead 12 concerts this season, including Dido and Aeneas and the full-romantic Verdi Requiem at the Kimmel Center. This 20th season has programs of Mozart, Bach, a Renais-sance Christmas and a Viennese bill.

Professional singers gravitate to the Opera Company of Philadelphia now that its season is longer. Conflicting dates sometimes make singers have to decide whether to sing the opera or with the Philadelphia Singers. The Op-

ment director and then an executive director.A tour of the region reveals a wealth of church-related

choir singing, but also community programs: the Bucks County Choral Society, The Mastersingers in Montgomery County, choirs at county Community Colleges, the Mary Green Singers in Kennett Square, and church choirs. No one has counted how many people sing in weekend church and synagogue services.

A big part of that is in Gospel music. It is a tidal wave of music. Churches and virtually every university and college in the region has a Gospel choir—even Eastern Mennonite University. Prominent Gospel choirs include the Wilmington-Chester Mass Choir, the Philadelphia Gospel Choir, the Antioch Baptist Church Choir, the choir at St. Thomas AE Church, the Love Fellowship, the Brockington Ensemble, the Freedom Choir, and the David Winslow Singers. A Gospel choir sang in the Philadelphia Bach Festival in 1998. Others have appeared with the Philly Pops, with the Philadelphia Orchestra, and in series at the Annenberg center.

That series, beginning in 2004, brought nationally known soloists with local ensembles and produced sell-out crowds at Irvine Auditorium. Roy Wilbur, associate director of Penn Presents, says matching Hezekiah Walker

fewer of the great old anthems.” The church founded the children’s choir to teach musicianship. “Youngsters just don’t know harmony and singing. We’re trying.” Singing City? The name resonates.

The choir with that name maintains Elaine Brown’s vision and vitality with Jeffrey Brillhart, its third music director. The 110-voice choir honors women composers in its first concert, and will perform with Dave Brubeck later. The group actively helps in schools, offering mentoring for young singers and supporting teenaged composers. It takes singing to settings all over the city.

“We come for the music, but stay for the Mission,” says Angela Bleckener, the administrator.

Daniel Webster was music critic for the Philadelphia Inquirer from 1964 to 1999.

TO HONOR A LEGEND:

In Philadelphia, the Coltrane legacy has been passed down not only through recordings, but through Philly musicians who were early on exposed to him in person and sometimes performed with him. Tyner (pianist in the celebrated John Coltrane Quartet), Liebman, Golson, drummer Mickey Roker, saxophonists Ba-yard Lancaster and Odean Pope, vibraphonist Khan Jamal, guitarist Pat Martino, and organist Trudy Pitts have all had a direct personal impact on today’s play-ers of Philly Jazz. Their own musical debt to Trane is immeasurable. According to Martino, the legendary guitarist of international fame who resides in South Philadelphia and performs and teaches locally when time permits, “John Col-trane influenced my intuitive insight far greater than merely its application to the craft of musicianship. To me Coltrane was a prophet as well as a musician. Along with spending precious moments at a very early age talking with Trane, being absorbed in works like Giant Steps, A Love Supreme, Ascension, and First Meditations literally amplified my interest in a study of Love itself.” In Phila-delphia, there is a constant passing of Trane’s torch to each new generation of musicians.

Adding to this glorious mix, the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts held a critically acclaimed tribute (during September 2004 to May 2005), “Take the Col’Train,” emphasizing Coltrane’s impact on Latin jazz from Argentina, Brazil, Peru, Venezuela, and Panama, under the aegis of pianist Danilo Perez. The May concert featured an appearance by Coltrane’s son, Ravi, an outstanding saxophonist in his own right. Many of Ravi’s Philadelphia friends came out to hear him, lending a very personal note to this outstanding set of concerts featuring top musicians from around the world, such as Perez, trumpeters Claudio Roditi and Bryan Lynch, and trombonist Conrad Herwig.

On the occasion of Trane’s 80th Birthday (he was born on September 23, 1926), this ongoing testimony to Coltrane is complemented by special occasions and fes-tivals. International House and Ars Nova Workshop, under the sponsorship of The Philadelphia Music Project, are featuring a five concert series called “Seraphic Light.” An eclectic mix of established traditions and new musical ideas, the series includes The Philadelphia Four, with bassist Reggie Workman and drummer Rashied Ali, both of whom performed extensively with Trane; a night with the inimitable pia-nist, Cecil Taylor, one of the most innovative musicians in the business; and groups such as Spiritual Unity, The David S. Ware Unit, and Rova Orkestra=Electric Ascen-

In the short span of about ten years, prior to his untimely death in 1967, Trane changed the face of jazz, and his influence is continually felt to this day. It has been said that he was the most influential musician in modern jazz, not only in terms of his own technique, innovation, and self-expression but also his soul-searching attitude, which has served as a role model for so many musicians. As saxophonist Dave Liebman says, “Besides specific technical aspects, Trane’s influence forms the basis of everything I have done musically, the reason I play at all, the meaning of music beyond the obvious, the possibility that music can raise consciousness and improve human kind.” Many others, including the pop star Santana, have echoed these sentiments.

If you go to any night club, concert hall, or festival venue in the Philadelphia area, you will hear and feel the Coltrane influence. The jazz artists who perform regularly at local clubs such as Chris’ Jazz Café, Zanzibar Blue, Ortlieb’s Jazzhaus, and Tritone—among them, pianists Tom Lawton and Jim Ridl, trumpeter John Swana, saxophonists Bootsie Barnes, Ralph Bowen, Larry McKenna, and Ben Schachter, clarinetist Norman David, drummers Tony Deangelis and Jim Miller, and big band leader Bobby Zankel—will tell you how much Coltrane meant to their musical evolution. Lawton says, “For me, it was actually listening to Coltrane’s song Brazilia on the radio that connected me to jazz forever. It was the harmonies and the rhythmic intensity. The best example of Coltrane is to stay true to yourself and bring that kind of intensity and integrity to your work.” According to Ridl,

“Coltrane continues to inspire me. Lately I’ve composed a few things that have that Coltrane-like chant inside of them: simple melodies with an open field for improvisational exploration. This form and model for composition and improvisation is ancient and at the same time fresh.” Bobby Zankel:

“John Coltrane represents the potential for beauty, compassion, and positive action—so you jump out of bed and start practicing or maybe first listen to Bakai or Moment’s Notice, or Vigil, or Chasin’ the Trane. I have spent countless joyful inspired hours playing along with Trane’s records, trying to absorb all of the different aspects that define his playing.”

BY VIC SCHERMER

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The John Coltrane Legacy in Philadelphia

sion, with the latter performing Coltrane’s monumental work, Ascension. Series impresario Mark Christman says:

“John Coltrane embodies the rigorous experimentalism that we find most engaging in music, particularly his late period which broke every boundary imaginable. He was clearly an improviser in search of answers, and we can only hope that today’s progressive music continues to defy convention and educate.”

In September, the Tranestop Resource Institute spon-sored a two day celebratory event entitled “Tranestop: Giant Steps over Philly,” held at the Awbury Arboretum and nearby locations, featuring such luminaries as Archie Shepp, Stanley Cowell, James Spaulding, Jymie Merritt, Allen Nelson, Sumi Tonooka, Stanley Wilson, Sid Sim-mons, Robin and Duane Eubanks, Billy Paul, and the Dixie Hummingbirds. The power of Coltrane’s contemporary importance is reflected in the fact that all of the musi-cians participating in these Coltrane festivals are doing so because of their debt of gratitude for Coltrane’s many-faceted contributions to their own musical lexicons.

No discussion of Coltrane’s influence on Philadelphia music would be complete without a tribute to his beloved cousin, Mary Alexander, who grew up with him in North Philadelphia. Mary was present at the inception, and John composed the song Cousin Mary in her honor. In recent years, she initiated the designation of John’s home as a national historic site, co-founded the John W. Coltrane Cultural Society, and has been a felt presence in Philly jazz circles, encouraging the musicians and participating as facilitator and mentor at numerous jazz festivals in the Delaware Valley. It could honestly be said that Coltrane lives on in Mary, his son Ravi, his wife Alice, and all his family members as well as in so much of the music we hear, even in the very air we breathe.

What does John Coltrane have to do with Philadelphia music? The answer is: “not less than everything.” “Trane,” as he has been affectionately called, came up in Philadelphia, where he studied theory with the legendary Dennis Sandole, performed with then up and coming local musicians Benny Golson, Trudy Pitts, McCoy Tyner, and many others, and was first inspired by hearing the likes of Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker at the Academy of Music. So it is appropriate that Philadelphia honor Coltrane’s 80th Birthday through the music itself, which was his passion, and which he pursued to its outer limits.

Vic Schermer is a contributing editor for the All About Jazz

website. He lives and works in Philadelphia.

Page 18: John Coltrane, photo: Ray Gibson

Page 19, left to right: Ravi Coltrane; David Liebman (photo:

David Coulter); Odean Pope; Bootsie Barnes; Bobby Zankel

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György Ligeti is one of those artists who, while hardly a household name, has amassed an enormous infl uence in the musical community, and in subtle ways, the cultural sphere as a whole. He has become a great source of in-spiration to a generation of composers, but there are also obvious references in pop culture, most famously, the in-clusion of his music in the landmark Stanley Kubrick fi lm, 2001, A Space Odyssey. Ligeti’s Lux aeterna became, at the time of the movie’s release in 1968, the voice of the future, brashly devoid of conventional technical parameters, but very direct, and certainly emotional. Almost paradoxically, this voice of the future was far more accessible than what was then the paradigm for new music, namely, a strictly serialist approach which was alienating listeners in droves. By the time of the composer’s death, in the spring of this year, Ligeti’s style had become even more inclusive, even as it retained a highly individual profi le.

If the music of Ligeti has made its way into the con-temporary artistic esthetic by way of stealth, this season in Philadelphia presents an unusually generous array of the music of Ligeti up front and center. It is not as if his music has never been played here. In recent seasons, Kim-mel audiences were treated to a luminous performance of the Violin Concerto, courtesy of Yasmin Little, with the

thereafter. Like nearly all aspiring Hungarian musicians at the time, his early heroes were Bartók and Kodaly. A life in music was launched in the intensely musical city of Budapest, but war and politics came to dominate most of Ligeti’s youth. The Holocaust consumed most of his family, and Ligeti himself survived a Nazi labor camp. After his liberation, he witnessed, like all of Eastern Europe, the grotesque irony of one awful tyranny replaced by another.

The Hungarian communists were very faithful Stalinist toadies, and by 1948 all of the arts, including music, were highly proscribed by the cultural commissars. Even the music of Bartók, the national musical hero, was largely prohibited, with the exception of his most conventional sounding works, such as the Concerto for Orchestra and the Piano Concerto No. 3. The exploding new music scene in the West was made invisible to Hungarian artists. During this period, Ligeti wrote beautiful folk infl uenced music, much of it vocal, in the manner of Kodaly. At the same time, Ligeti, and many of his colleagues, were writing what they called “bottom drawer” work, that is, music which could not be performed but was merely hidden away for some future op-portunity for exposure. And the carefully built walls were not completely impassable; Ligeti’s wife was able to procure underground copies of treatises on twelve tone composition.

And yet nothing of his extraordinary imagination or inklings of new trends could prepare Ligeti for the reality of the new music scene he would encounter in the West. In 1956, following the heartbreaking and brutal suppression of the Hungarian revolution by Soviet tanks, Ligeti and his wife walked across the Austrian border to begin a new life. Ligeti found himself in Cologne, Germany, where he met Stockhausen and Boulez, among other leading lights of the avant-garde. For the still youthful Ligeti, the experience was akin to a little boy let loose in a candy shop. He was especially enamored of the concept of Klangfl ächenkomposition, which stresses the primacy of the mass and texture of the sound itself, as opposed to any clear ar-ticulation of melody, harmony and rhythm. This philosophy, which is embodied in the Lux

extraordinary accompaniment of the Berlin Philharmonic conducted by Simon Rattle, and the Pennsylvania Ballet has danced to his music. The main showcase this season is from Orchestra 2001, which presents a season long tribute, originally conceived as a celebration of an amaz-ing career, but now appearing as a memorial. Each of the fi ve Orchestra 2001 programs will include a work of Ligeti, crossing a range of styles and vintages.

In October, pianist Linda Reichert played a Ligeti Etudeat a Settlement Music School concert. Reichart, the artis-tic director of Network for New Music, and no slouch at the keyboard (she is also on the Settlement faculty) slyly described the work as one of the “easy” Etudes. These wonderfully lively works, daunting though they may be, deserve a wider audience. On January 7th, from the stage of Field Concert Hall at the Curtis Institute of Music, the fi rst lady of American new piano music, Ursula Oppens, will be joined by Mathias Tacke, violin, and Carl Williams, horn, in the Horn Trio of Ligeti.

But who was Ligeti? As is the case with so many twen-tieth century artists, it is indispensable to examine Ligeti’s biography when considering his evolution as an artist. He was born in Transylvania, Romania in 1923 into a Hungar-ian-Jewish family, which moved back to Hungary shortly

Remembering György Ligeti

aeterna, would come to dominate his style for the mature period of his career. Much of this music was harsh and forbidding, but there was also a great deal of humor and even joyousness in his work, especially in contrast to the grim work of so many of his modernist colleagues.

Ligeti himself described the change in his work after 1956 as a 180 degree turn. By the late sixties and early seventies, he shifted his focus again, this time away from the total chromaticism of his most daring work. This he described as a 90 degree turn; he refused to abandon his affi nity for avant-garde art, but became interested in the U.S. West Coast scene, in particular, the exotic micro-tonal music of the great American original Harry Partch. He also explored more non-Western material, including African music. The result of this late in life cultural tourism resulted in a vibrant, distinctive body of work that managed to include, in a masterfully co-hesive manner, a remarkable lifetime of infl uences.

This musical season in Philadelphia pres-ents a rare opportunity to experience the delightful, strange, provocative and profound work of a twentieth century giant. Perhaps this modest celebration will presage more Ligeti in seasons to come. Every generation of artists produces a small sliver of work that transcends their time; there is every reason to believe that Ligeti has given us music for the ages.

BY PETER BURWASSER

Peter Burwasser is the classical music critic for the

Philadelphia City Paper and a regular contributor to

Fanfare magazine and Philadelphia Music Makers.

As a freelance writer, he has also contributed

articles and reviews to the Philadelphia Inquirer,WRTI Program Guide, and Carnegie Hall Playbill.

Page 20: György Ligeti, photo: Kimmo Mántylá

Page 21: György Ligeti, photo: Gunter Glücklich

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A few years ago, I was on a plane chatting with the woman next to me. I told her I lived in Philadelphia. “Great music town,” she replied. I smiled. Philadelphia’s reputation as a destination for music has existed for over a hundred years, and it keeps getting better. Since 2000, new presenting organizations have cropped up across the region, including Lifeline Music Coalition, Ars Nova Workshop, Sound Field, Bowerbird, Chamber Music Now, and Peregrine Arts. These emerging presenters are offering an unprecedented breadth of jazz, experimental music, contemporary chamber music, and genre-melding multimedia productions this season and beyond. These organizations not only present daring concerts, but also innovate on the very idea of what it means to present music, making now a great time to be listening in on Philadelphia.

Lifeline Music Coalition’s Artistic and Executive Directors, Warren Oree and Graziella D’Amelio, form a constantly evolving pair of jazz advocates. Previously known as Spotted Bushes Entertainment and pro-ducers of the 2003 Philadelphia Jazz and Poetry Festival, they were approached that year by Jack Kitchen, Executive Director of the Ogontz Avenue Revitalization Corporation (OARC). Kitchen and the OARC wanted to bring attention to the good things happening in the neighborhood of West Oak Lane, and the 7100 to 7200 blocks of Ogontz Avenue in particular. The OARC had already been sponsoring an annual one-day community event, but Kitchen had a hunch that an enlarged street festival would be a real benefit.

Starting in 2004, Oree and D’Amelio produced the West Oak Lane Jazz and Arts Festival. They’re cur-rently planning 2007’s festival, scheduled for June 22 through 24. Its first year, the free festival spanned two outdoor stages and additional venues, and attracted about 5,000 people. In 2005, Lifeline Music Coalition doubled the stages, brought in special guest Roy Ayers, and drew an astounding 100,000 attendees. Despite a rainy weekend in 2006, the numbers grew again to over 150,000 people.

The West Oak Lane Jazz and Arts Festival employs, as they put it, “99.99% professional Philly area artists.” Oree is one such musician; a busy bassist, his own group is the Arpeggio Jazz Ensemble. His connections to the Philadelphia jazz community are strong and deep, and he has been quick to recognize the largely unknown talent in the region. He and D’Amelio describe the “cats” as, “An eclectic mix of musicians and

Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) Award for Adventurous Programming. Clearly, Christman is doing something right.

Ars Nova Workshop’s history shows a particular affinity for Free Jazz, in its many fre-netic guises, as well as New York’s Downtown and “post-loft” scenes. Christman affirms, “I believe that the contemporary practices of Anthony Braxton, Cecil Taylor, Ornette Cole-man, and others are just as important and rigorous as they were forty years ago. And I’m interested in emerging work that reflects that relevance and rigor.” At the International House last season, ANW presented Anthony Braxton and fellow “elder-statesmen” of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, Inc. (AACM), an important or-ganization founded in 1965 by avant-garde musicians centered in Chicago. This season at International House, he’s working on a series of concerts called “Seraphic Light” cel-ebrating local hero and jazz über-icon John Coltrane. Cecil Taylor will be performing as part of the series on November 4th. One of

tending to. When he moved to the region a few years ago, composer and clarinetist Gene Coleman brought his presenting platform, Sound Field, with him from Chicago. Cole-man had already been producing concerts for over a decade, including the first major presentation of German composer Helmut Lachenmann’s work in the United States, when in 2000 he recognized the opportu-nity to bring together several musical events happening that season under the banner of a festival. When the festival was received well by the media, Coleman kept at it and continues to produce an annual festival, co-operating with seven or eight venues per year. Though he has left the area, the relationships he has built, as well as the reputation of the festival, motivates him to keep presenting concerts in Chicago. He has also launched a third Sound Field festival in San Francisco.

Over the past two seasons, Sound Field partnered with the Slought Foundation, a theory-minded art space at 40th and Wal-nut Streets, for its Philadelphia series. While

ing with musicians who are interested in the “ongoing definitions of what is music.”

To that end, he invites musicians from around the world compelled by this style of experimentation to collaborate with him in the Sound Field festivals. Japanese guitarist Kazuhisa Uchihashi, joint American/Swedish cellist Helena Espvall, and Lebanese/French saxophonist Christine Sehnaoui performed with Coleman in his first Philadelphia concert this season. Then it was “What is the Sound of China?” featuring Coleman’s Ensemble Noamnesia with guests Chao-Ming Tung, a composer and guzheng player from Taiwan; Wu Wei, a sheng player from China, and Hong Wang, a huqin player and the director of Melody of China in San Fran-cisco. At the end of October, Sound Field will present two concerts that pair Coleman’s group of American and Japanese perform-ers, Ensemble N_JP with, respectively, three local dancers (including PMP’s own Em-ily Sweeney) and the 1926 film A Page of Madness, directed by Teinosuke Kinugasa.

vocalists who seem to get more work and recognition outside of Philly and the country.” They continue, “Many of the musicians in Philly are highly regarded in Europe, Asia, South America, etc., and find it dif-ficult to get steady work in Philly. The artists are as well-known as Odean Pope and the Sun Ra Arkestra, and as obscure as Kenny Gates and Rob Henderson, but they are equally talented and seasoned. LMC has made it a mission and priority to provide them with opportunities — especially high profile gigs.”

In 2006, LMC brought Ayers back, as well as WAR and Joey DeFrancesco, to round out the solid roster of area players. They have also partnered with various entities such as Jazz Times, the Greater Philadelphia Tourism and Marketing Corporation (GPTMC), the Multicultural Affairs Congress (MAC), and the Daily News to, for example, make the festival accessible to tourists by providing shuttle service to and from the Independence Visitors Center.

Now that the West Oak Lane Festival is up and running, LMC is looking at other projects and collaborations to pursue. They have worked with the music education non-profit and sometimes-pre-senter Musicopia (once Strings for Schools), and for the 2007-2008 season, they’re planning to work with both the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Longwood Gardens. Likewise, they’re in conversation regarding both a documentary on jazz and a project with Jazz in the Planetarium. These tireless in-dividuals who like their jazz “honest and from the heart” hope to help keep innovative music at the forefront of Philadelphia’s scene and show the world the quality of performance that thrives in the city.

Jazz has an equally driving force in Ars Nova Workshop (ANW) and its Director, Mark Christman. Christ-man got interested in “the business side of music” early in his college career while he acted as default manager of his band. After taking “frequent excursions” up to New York to see acts he was interested in, he detected an opportunity to make more of what he was interested in happen in Philadelphia. In 2000, Christman took it upon himself to foster “organized support” of improvised music. Crowned Best Jazz Series in 2000, 2001, 2002, and 2005 by the Philadelphia City Paper, ANW has been responsible for more than 200 avant-garde performances since its inception, and was also recently awarded an American Society of

he enjoys presenting concerts at Slought, Coleman says, he wants to branch out. In all cities, Sound Field operates between the various venues and organizations that host its concerts. Venues, he adds, “...are a very important connective element. This is one of the next steps for us.” This year, Coleman will add the CEC and International House to his repertoire of collaborating venues.

As a composer, performer, and presenter, Coleman focuses on bridging musical and cultural categories. His interests combine notated and improvised music, conventional and extended technique, disciplines external to music — especially dance and film — and, perhaps most importantly, the many musi-cal systems beyond the West. Coleman’s practice attempts to create common ground among these multiplicities, not only within the vocabulary of his compositions, but be-tween musicians as well. “A big premise of Sound Field is to create linkages between these areas of practice,” he comments. He’s committed to presenting and collaborat-

“My philosophy is that I’m a composer,” Coleman says. “I’m also, in a way, an entre-preneur. Those things are all commingled for me.” Deeply aware of the limitations composers accept in their traditional sepa-ration from the presenting process, Sound Field is Coleman’s way of taking action. “If composers are going to have any kind of sustainable practice outside of universities,” he says, “my model has to be one of the ones they consider. You can’t just sit around and wait for people to call you.” Coleman plans to develop Sound Field in the 2007 season by ar-ticulating four of the strands that he believes have been growing within the series over time. One category, “Eurethos,” will identify the ongoing influence of European aesthetics on American culture. The second, “Transonic,” will feature cross-cultural programs involv-ing East Asian traditions. “Crosswork” will name the multi-discipline performances, and

“American Independents” will take on individ-ual composers, beginning with Alvin Currin.

Along with Ars Nova Workshop and Sound

Christman’s biggest concerts of the season, on February 10th, 2007, will feature the Rova Saxophone Quartet in a performance of Coltrane’s rarely-performed Ascension.

In addition to International House, ANW works with numerous other venues concen-trated in West Philadelphia. The presenter has ongoing partnerships with the University of Pennsylvania and the Community Education Center (CEC). “Continually providing appro-priate spaces for this music is particularly difficult,” Christman confesses. “But,” he adds,

“partnerships are key, and I hope to continue building new and unique ones in and outside of Philadelphia.” With reassuring ambition, Christman looks ahead to possibilities on Ars Nova Workshop’s horizon: new partnerships, new series, commissions... In the meantime, Philadelphia concertgoers have ready access to some of the most gratifying improvisa-tional performers, diverse and passionate audiences, and affordable tickets around.

West Philly has helped spawn additional presenters of improvised music worth at-

21st Century Presenters:The Changing Face of Philadelphia’s Music Scene

BY ALYSSA TIMIN

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Field, a third, even more recent and more grassroots presenting organization contrib-utes to the rising presence of experimental music in the city. Dustin Hurt founded Bow-erbird just in February 2006. Hurt had been a longtime listener of iconic modern compos-ers like Morton Feldman, Iannis Xenakis, and Pierre Boulez, though he felt their music had been “relegated to the universities.” In the autumn of 2005, Hurt started attending a se-ries called Good Fridays at the Philadelphia Record Exchange. The series, organized by active experimental musician Eugene Lew, is now defunct. However, Hurt says, “The music I saw that night was in many ways my first introduction into another world of sounds and a whole ‘underground’ scene of music...It was dissonant and complex, challenging and unusual, but driven by the artists. It seemed vital and essential and not lofty and untouchable as music in concert halls.”

Hurt got more acquainted with the burgeoning experimental scene in West Phila-delphia. Ars Nova Workshop and Sound Field,

ciation of the city of Philadelphia. Composers Belcastro, Geissinger, Andrea Clearfield and David Ludwig are matched with filmmakers Deron Albright, Can Yegen, Ed Feldman, and Chris Garvin. Each work shares a common structure of film, electronic sound, and live cello, performed by cellist Ovidiu Marinescu.

CMN is equally excited about the other concerts planned for this season. In Septem-ber they hosted the Serafin Quartet for a program that featured works by American composers influenced by jazz and blues. No-vember will bring the New York ensemble Flexible Music for a program including music by Louis Andriessen and Nico Muhly. In February, pianist and CMN favorite Mari-lyn Nonken will offer a program of socially minded music, including Frederic Rzewski’s The People Will Never Be Defeated and pre-mieres by emerging composers Laurie San Martin and Yu-Hui Chang. Together, the concerts comprise an eclectic sampling of contemporary chamber music unlikely to arrive in the city by other means. They also

A small or “boutique” organization can hold different expectations about audience size or visibility than a large organization. As Squire puts it, all organizations have a “ho-rizon of value.” He hopes to build Peregrine’s by presenting and producing interdisciplin-ary projects that will appeal to different segments of audiences. He believes that moving to a “project-based model,” rather than a generic or discipline-specific model, will breathe flexibility into Peregrine. Squire points out that in the traditional organiza-tional model, variety is the currency through which seasons or series are promoted. In-stead, he aims to build interest in a “lower volume” of “larger, thorny, exceptional proj-ects that find an uneasy home elsewhere.”

Squire works closely with the artists creating the projects he presents and offers significant contributions to the develop-ment of the works. Ultimately, he aims for a

“deep co-ownership” of each project, as well as “a certain degree of sustainability”: these projects, he argues, should be able to be per-petuated in further forms, whether as a tour, or a kind of franchise. In general, he pursues

“a business logic that I think makes sense,” generating investment in the life of the proj-ect on both organizational and artistic sides. He sees himself as reinvigorating and per-haps redeeming the role of the producer, in which Squire can facilitate artists’ personal visions and create intelligent collaborations among musicians and other performers.

In an important sense, presenting is only the most public aspect of Peregrine, through which, over the course of the next four years, Squire plans to cultivate producing, consult-ing, and research practices. Each year, he plans to host an Expo for Peregrine in which he can explain what’s new and showcase artists with whom he’s working. These days, he is primarily laboring behind the scenes to bring projects that are mid-process to fruition. Late last season, Peregrine presented two performances: Locus Solus, a site-specific work based on the novel by Raymond Rou-sell with composer Phil Kline, vocalist Theo Bleckmann, and violinist Todd Reynolds at the Ryerss Museum and Library, and Deadly She-Wolf Assassin at Armageddon, a “martial arts music-theater spectacle” that combines a drama of murder and revenge with com-poser Fred Ho’s signature Afro-Asian jazz.

This season, Peregrine is working with Temple University’s Boyer College of Music and Dance to produce an involved series of concerts and master-classes in March. Fred Ho will return to present The Black Panther

Suite: All Power to the People! Electronic musician Robin Rimbaud, aka Scanner, will present a new work at the Wagner Free Institute of Science, and the Ridge Theater will offer a new version of British composer Gavin Bryars’s work, The Sinking of the Titanic. Additional concerts by the Glaux Ensemble, the Momenta String Quartet, and Temple faculty and students will com-pliment these large-scale performances.

Peregrine is in the process of developing other exciting projects for further seasons: in Spring 2008, Who Killed Erdnase?, a new music-theater work by the Ridge Theater and Gavin Bryars team in conjunction with author Glen David Gold; also in Spring 2008, a continuation of Ho’s martial arts epics in Dragon vs. Eagle, and, in Spring 2009, Hidden City, a “one-month festival-exhibition that will rediscover and reinterpret Philadelphia’s ‘hidden’ cityscape by re-animating obscured, endangered and normally inaccessible heritage sites through contemporary art installations.” This stupendously ambitious project will involve both international ar-tistic and regional historical professionals working in dozens of sites across the city.

The energy and excitement buzzing from the efforts of Peregrine Arts, Lifeline Music Coalition, Ars Nova Workshop, Sound Field, Bowerbird, and Chamber Music Now create a powerful sense of how much lies ahead for Philadelphia’s music and wider arts community. From warehouse spaces to university classrooms to revitalized neigh-borhoods to the common concert hall, musicians are transforming old boundaries into new beauty, stale antagonisms into refreshing conversation, and persistent ob-stacles into enlightening opportunities. The determined and optimistic attitude within the city’s most recent swell of presenters offers a great boon to concertgoers eager for harmonies they’ve never heard before.

Alyssa Timin, a former PMP program associate, has

written for NewMusicBox and is currently pursuing

her MFA in Art Criticism and Writing at the School

of Visual Arts in New York City.

music it programs. Hurt is also transform-ing the organization into a collective. “The collective,” he explains, “is an effort to, one, spread the work around, two, give key people a greater voice in the direction and mission of Bowerbird, and, three, create a situation of sustainability by avoiding burnout and over-commitment by any one individual.” More than 20 people are currently sharing responsibility for facilitating and promot-ing Bowerbird events, while Hurt manages curatorial and administrative decisions. He plans to maintain a “strong guiding hand” regardless of the collectivity’s ultimate shape.

Bowerbird hosts events in venues, es-pecially art galleries, across the city. While West Philadelphia persists as an important foundation for Bowerbird’s activities, Hurt puts “considerable effort” into programming elsewhere. West of the Schuylkill, venues include the Rotunda, Community Education Center, LAVA (Lancaster Avenue Autono-mous space), and AIRSPACE. On the second Saturday of each month, there’s a Bowerbird show at the Satellite Café. In South Philadel-phia, Bowerbird has shows at the Pageant: Soloveev Gallery; in Old City, they program at the Nexus Foundation; in Kensington at the Mascher Space Cooperative, and in Center City, at the Broad Street Ministry. The largest-scaled event of the season will be a four-day festival of experimental music, held at the Rotunda from May 3 through 6, 2007.

Though Hurt and Bowerbird are just getting going, his great ambition is to help make Philadelphia “the definitive metro-politan area for experimental culture.” Steps along the way will include incorporating as a non-profit and increasing the organi-zation’s visibility. “Bowerbird ultimately strives to improve the artistic lives of the individuals it serves,” Hurt emphasizes. That means both creating performing op-portunities for local artists and bringing in

“exceptional talent” from other regions, as well as coordinating with fellow organiza-tions such as ANW and Sound Field to avoid schedule conflicts and create cooperation, rather than competition, among the dif-ferent presenters. Hurt sees Bowerbird as a way to organize musicians at all stages of their careers and build a network of support while refusing to compromise the “often challenging nature of the work it exhibits.” These interconnected organizations can’t help but bring an unprecedented degree of vitality to the city’s experimental music.

Back across in Center City, another up-and-coming presenter is taking a differ-

ent angle on bringing innovative music to Philadelphians. Two local composers, Richard Belcastro and David Laganella, are heading up Chamber Music Now (CMN), an organization that concentrates on commissioning adven-turous composers, hosting talented young performers, and having fun in the meantime.

“As active composers,” says Belcastro, “we’ve developed close relationships with peer art-ists.” CMN presents a series of concerts each season that reinvigorates the new music community with surprising performances by promising local, national, and international talent.

Belcastro and Laganella share responsibil-ity for the organization and choose to include one new work of each of theirs per season. They seek out composers and performers open to collaboration and the wider dialogue of formal innovation. However, Belcastro quali-fies, “We are focused first and foremost on the quality of our programming.” In addition to balancing the drives toward both consistent quality and adventurous attitudes, the two di-rectors enjoy bringing chamber music down

to earth. “David and I often joke about not being your typical classical musicians. I’m sure not many other Philadelphia classical music groups work their meetings in around the Eagles season or negotiate with artists at the local pub,” says Belcastro. Like others, CMN appears eager to affirm the relevance of chamber music outside academic contexts.

In 2005 to 2006, CMN’s season took inspi-ration from rock and pop music. With concerts loosely based around, for example, Led Zep-pelin and the electronic music genre of drum n bass, CMN began to explore the work of younger musicians who have been equally inspired by Stravinsky, George Crumb, and Radiohead. Local laptop artist — and winner of the 2005 North American Laptop Battle — Starkey, aka Paul Geissinger, has contributed opening sets to multiple concerts. Their final concert in the upcoming season, which will be hosted at the Annenberg Center in May through its Philadelphia Presenting Project, pairs four local composers with four local filmmakers to produce a sort of cubist appre-

represent the exuberant force of young com-posers and musicians in the life of new music.

Also emerging within the new music community, Peregrine Arts is positioning itself as a specialized presenter of complex, often multimedia projects. Thaddeus Squire founded Peregrine after he left his role of executive director with the ensemble Relâche. In addition to managing the group, he had “found an opportunity for curatorial direction” and developed an interest in the dynamic processes of building non-profit arts organizations. At the same time, Squire felt frustrated with the traditional shape of careers in composition and conducting. When he moved on from Relâche, Squire dedicated himself to tailoring his own or-ganization in a way that would allow him to both pursue the projects that interested him and create a new model within the field.

Squire refers to a number of insights that he hopes will guide Peregrine. One is the importance of maintaining a scale of opera-tion that’s appropriate for an organization.

it appears, are the tip of an electro-acoustic iceburg that extends into the neighborhood’s

“DIY [Do It Yourself] house show culture” through spaces including, for example, the Avant Gentlemen’s Lodge. At a winter solstice show at the “Lodge,” Hurt saw double bassist Evan Lipson perform a Hans Werner Henze work and receive as much wild applause as the indie rock bands playing before him. To Hurt, the event proved that young audiences were ready and willing to hear complex mu-sic. With the aid of Rich Wexler, director of Sherman Arts and West Philadelphia event promoter, Hurt presented his first concerts at the Green Line Café and the independent record and comic book store, the Marvelous.

From there, Bowerbird took off. “Over the next eight months,” Hurt says, “Bowerbird presented 40 concerts of music, with over 150 sets of music (including six world premieres), more than 200 musicians from all over the U.S., Europe, Japan, and Lebanon, at almost 20 different venues.” This fall, the presenter has moved to increase the amount of composed

Page 23, left to right: Gene Coleman, artistic

director of SoundField; Mark Christman, director

of Ars Nova Workshop, with composer and

musician Anthony Braxton; Richard Belcastro,

executive director of Chamber Music Now

Page 22, left to right: Bowerbird posters;

Thaddeus Squire, artistic and producing director

of Peregrine Arts; Warren Oree and Graziella

D’Amelio of Lifeline Music Coalition

PMP 26

No art, whether monumental or ephemeral, can avoid the imprint of space. The idea that there exists “neutral” or “sterile” space for art—space that allows the art to speak for itself without regard to its spatial context—is a highly questionable notion today. Yet this presumption about the severability of art and space, drawn largely from classical artistic practices, has maintained a curiously high degree of purchase within the fi ne and performing arts, as evidenced by the frequent lack of consideration given to space in many artistic and curatorial processes. To situate a performance or artwork outside the prosce-nium theater or gallery no longer reads as sharply critical or carries the avant-garde tenor that it might have had twenty-odd years ago. But in this “post-political” era in the relationship between space and art, there is much more at stake. As artists and curators struggle increasingly to create artistic meaning and value for audiences, the role of the site, and its potential to literally “ground” art in a community and serve as a connector to audiences are becoming more central to the conversation around the meaning of art within our broader cultural fabric. Space, more than ever, is imbued with the power to create, am-plify, thwart or undermine artistic meaning and value.

Concepts such as “non-traditional” or “alternative” space, as well as “site-specifi c” and “installation”—all of which have become integral ideas in contemporary practice—strongly suggest counterparts. As a conse-quence, they have created a pervasive and dangerously false dichotomy between practices that integrate con-

PMP 27

“The more one explores and the more one gets to know, the more one sees. Sooner or later one is bound to fi nd the Hidden City, those numberless little back streets of old houses, or old houses newly restored...that slip through the city from one river to the other...” Nathaniel Burt, The Perennial Philadelphians (1963)

Resonating SpaceBY THADDEUS SQUIRE

sideration of space into artistic or curatorial process, and those that do not. I argue that there is a great deal at stake in removing these distinctions from practice today, so that space, whether traditional or alternative, may always be an integral consideration in the artistic and curatorial process.

Describing the norm against which a space becomes alternative or a practice site-specifi c is challenging. The most general answer may be found in the early 20th-century avant-garde rebellion against the proscenium theater, gallery and museum, which were then—and perhaps remain today—the prototypes for traditional, or “non-alterna-tive” space. Traditional spaces such as the theater or gallery are often regarded as empty vessels or receptacles, capable of accommodating a great volume and diversity of art. It may also be implied that creative practices that use these kinds of venues often leave profound spatial consideration out of their creative processes, or at best consider an idealized, abstracted space. Art needs to enjoy a high degree of inde-pendence and mobility to move freely from venue to venue over time. As Ludwig van Beethoven composed his monumental Symphony No. 9, was he thinking about the space of the Kärntnertortheater in Vienna, where the work was premiered in 1824? Most likely not.

Yet, we fi nd history rife with examples of artists deeply engaged in spatial dialogue, even in the context of more traditional spaces, art-works, interpretive frameworks and practices. Gustav Mahler regularly re-orchestrated or revised his own works and those of his predeces-sors to fi t to the acoustic and other aesthetic needs of different halls, curatorial contexts and modern tastes. An extreme example of this practice was his revision of Beethoven’s ninth symphony, which he transformed in 1902 into a chamber version for performance in the intimate setting of the Secession Building in Vienna. The revision was

designed to create a kind of musical-visual installation to surround the unveiling of Max Klinger’s sculpture Beethoven. Here, working with historic repertoire, and in the context of a rather conventional sculpture exhibition, Mahler becomes an early practitioner of instal-lation, joining various artistic and historical elements to fi t a space. It is arguable that his approach was demanded both physically and philosophically by the Secession, whose space defi ned a political and aesthetic alliance between the arts at the dawn of the 20th century.

The genre designation installation, which is synonymous with site-specifi c and increasingly applied to a staggering range of visual and performance work, implies a mode of curatorial and creative work that is both custom-created for a space and also permanently or semi-permanently tied to the space, physically and conceptually. These modes of practice are also often associated with notions of alternative space. There seems to be a presumption that with alternative space, the presence and infl uence of the space is foregrounded for both artist and audience, and is presumably integrated into creative and curato-rial practice. As with the above example, we fi nd a degree of play in these ideas as well, in particular in the idea that installation involves an unbreakable tie with space.

In June 2006, Peregrine Arts presented the world premiere of com-poser Phil Kline’s Locus Solus in Philadelphia. The work is based on the 1914 proto-Surrealist novel of the same title by Raymond Roussel. In the novel a fi ctional genius-inventor and collector, Canterel, takes a group of visitors on a tour of the wild and eccentric menagerie of curiosities housed on his estate, Locus Solus (“Place of Solitude”). The work had been originally conceived by Kline as a concert music-theater work for violinist Todd Reynolds, singer Theo Bleckmann and Talujon Percussion Quartet to be premiered at The Kitchen in New York. When

the work—yet unwritten—was bumped from the venue’s schedule in 2005, Kline and I began a conversation about how to present it in Philadelphia with an eye toward site-specifi c treatment. I searched for sites focusing on the themes of science, invention and collecting pathologies that emanate from the novel and eventually happened upon Ryerss Museum & Library, the little-known former home of 19th-century merchant and passionate collector Joseph Waln Ryerss. Built in 1859 and currently operated by the Fairmount Park Commission, the mansion is home to Ryerss’ wildly eccentric and incongruous collection of 20,000 objects from around the world. Kline fell in love with the site and developed an installation-based compositional approach for the piece, which was staged throughout the house, taking audiences on a simultane-ous visual and acoustic tour of the collections of both Canterel and Ryerss.

The resonance and dialogue between the work and its chosen location added a galvanizing layer of meaning and interpretation—both for the work and the site—that would have been lost in a more conventional performance space. It may be diffi cult to imagine Locus Solus extracted from the space of Ryerss, but the idea has been proposed to tour the work to other sites that resonate with the

“gentle madness” and legacy of passionate collectors. Though not originally conceived as site-specific, Locus Solus became such on its road to presentation, and in the process acquired a rich and very unique ability to tour while retaining (paradoxically) its site-specifi c import.

Below: Ryerss Mansion blueprint and exteriorLeft: The second fl oor gallery at Ryerss Mansion,

a site of composer Phil Kline’s Locus Solus project

PMP 28 PMP 29

Peregrine’s current projects offer three more variations on the conversation between art and space. In March 2007, we will present composer Fred Ho’s All Power to the People!: The Black Panther Suite (1998), in partnership with Temple University. Black Panther Suite is a multi-media and live jazz “vision quest” about the life and times of Malcolm X. An older work, Black Panther has toured extensively through conventional theater venues, yet for our presentation, we chose to partner with the Freedom Theatre, Philadelphia’s oldest African American theater, located on North Broad Street. Freedom Theatre’s building was a former meeting place of the Black Panthers. Not only is the history of the site tied to the subject of the piece, but also the Theatre in general is connected to an African American com-munity in North Philadelphia for which Ho’s work may be very new, but the topic at its heart nonetheless familiar and perhaps profoundly contemporary. In this case, the work is historic and unchanged and the theater space conventional, but the choice of site and organizational partner transformatively significant.

This season Peregrine is also producing a new installation of Brit-ish composer Gavin Bryars’ landmark work The Sinking of the Titanic (1969). Bryars created the piece with variable instrumentation and the invitation to artists and humanists to “intervene” with the work’s open concept, blurring the boundaries between creative authorship and interpretation. For our intervention, Peregrine is focusing on the life and legacy of the famous Philadelphia book collector Harry Elkins Widener, who perished on the Titanic and whose collection figures as one of the greatest monuments to humanism of our time. Working with the archives of the Rosenbach Museum & Library, whose founder, A.S.W. Rosenbach, was Widener’s mentor and book dealer, Peregrine and New York’s Ridge Theater will create a music-theater installation of the work in Lincoln Hall of the Union League of Philadelphia, where Widener was a member. The project is a partnership with Temple University, whose students will perform, and the Abraham Lincoln Foundation, whose mission is to preserve and interpret the League’s history. Here an historic work is created anew by engaging the rich fabric of Philadelphia’s social, industrial and scholarly history and po-sitioned in the seemingly unlikely, but powerfully appropriate visual and historical space of the Union League.

Of final note is Peregrine’s largest production, Hidden City, which is a festival-exhibition of site-specific art in under-known, obscured or endangered heritage sites throughout Philadelphia, produced in partnership with the Preservation Alliance for Greater Philadelphia. The project, which is intended to become a triennial, is slated to open in spring 2009 and will prospectively encompass roughly 30 sites and 25 artists/projects. At the core of Hidden City is a mission to balance in equal dialogue artistic and humanistic investigation, and to explore new modes of reciprocal interpretation between historic sites and ar-tistic practices as well as community engagement. This mission will necessitate an extensive and very intimate conversation between the sites, their communities and the artists, making Hidden City an engine for the ideas at the core of this article.

The foregoing examples illustrate that distinctions between traditional/non-traditional and site-specific/non-site-specific, with regard to space and artistic practices, are highly flexible and dubious at best, and are most interesting and potentially meaningful if left

that way. All space adds a dimension of meaning to art, and all art may be brought in conversation with space. Even the most generic theater or alkaline gallery space inserts itself inexorably in the dia-logue between art and audience. The curatorial and artistic dialogue necessary to engage space can happen in many ways and on many levels, ranging from the history and significance of a site, to matters of pure architecture and acoustics. By far the deepest and most effective approach to engaging space is to regard it as an essential collaborator in the artistic or curatorial process. In Peregrine’s mission to multiply meaning and value for art, our lack of space has become one of our greatest artistic and operational assets. At every step in the develop-ment and positioning of projects, site is compelled to be our most important collaborator.

Peregrine’s low-volume, project-based curatorial model and long-term commitment to projects makes this approach possible. More traditional producing and presenting organizations that are designed around high-volume, season-based programming and fixed venues must contend with both the virtues and vices of dedicated space. A home space does offer logistical ease for high turn-over production, and can become a familiar beacon and safe haven for audiences. On the other hand, dedicated space also can become a liability, not just in terms of operating sustainability, but perhaps more significantly in the way it can rob an organization of the flexibility to grow and change with practice, and can even become, in some cases, a literal

RESONATING SPACE

The Philadelphia Center for Arts and Heritage last year announced a new Interdisciplinary Professional Development Grant (IPDG) program, designed to increase the capacity of Philadelphia artists to create work drawing from disci-plines outside of their principal areas of practice. This year, IPDGs funded five such investigations.

Miro Dance Theatre received support for travel to the Netherlands and Germany to meet with artists and organizations involved in explorations of new media in the arts. Through visits to the V2 and Piet Zwart Institutes in Rotterdam, and the Netherlands Media Art Institute and The Waag Society in Amsterdam, Miro’s artis-tic directors were able to investigate possible uses for audio, visual, and interface technologies as tools for performance and composition, laying the groundwork for a deeper investigation of the ways humans interface with technology and the degree to which they can control or be controlled by it.

Theater and visual artist Whit MacLaughlin was awarded a grant that allowed him to consult with international experts in virtual reality technology at the Na-tional Center for Supercomputing Applications and the Ars Electronica Fest in order to explore virtual space as a medium for artistic expression.

Group Motion Multi Media Dance Theater received a grant to collaborate with composer Philip Kline to develop a series of site specific pieces featuring “mov-

able music” emanating from electronic playback devices attached to dancers’ bodies. The project will focus specifi-cally on the meaning of public art in the consciousness of Philadelphians.

Visual artist Peter d’Agostino conducted research for a collaboration with several quantum physicists, gaining knowledge in the phenomenon that occurs when mat-ter meets anti-matter—what physicists term a “puff of light.” D’Agostino seeks to develop work that will give equal status to science and art, so he set out to learn first hand the research methods and techniques employed by quantum physicists.

Nichole Canuso Dance Company received funds to embark upon a one month exploratory/training process with Director Jennifer Childs in order to enhance the company’s capacity to perform works that employ the-atrical methods.

The IPDG program is co-directed by PMP Director Mat-thew Levy and Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative Director Paula Marincola. Marincola believes that interdisciplinary work is especially fertile ground for inspiration. “Artists are often intensely curious about and stimulated by disci-plines other than their own. I think that kind of curiosity is one hallmark of creative individuals of all kinds—they

and symbolic barrier between programs and new audiences. Lack of adequate performance and exhibition space has been a

perennially hot topic of conversation within the Philadelphia arts community. Perhaps this deficit is more illusory than real. Philadel-phia—maybe more than many cities of its size—possesses a staggering variety and abundance of space, if one is willing to keep looking beyond the proscenium and white box. Peregrine’s Hidden City is de-signed to be a mechanism for exploring the uncharted social, historic and artistic space of Philadelphia. It also is meant to inspire a broader and deeper approach to artistic and curatorial practice in general—one in which art permeates the space of our Hidden City, transforming sites from convenient meeting places for artists and audiences into powerful catalysts for meaning and significance in contemporary culture and society.

Thaddeus Squire is the artistic executive director of Peregrine Arts.

see analogies in and find inspiration from many places and many modes of thinking and doing. Supporting collaborations for artists with other kinds of specialists and practitioners from outside their immediate areas of expertise ultimately enriches and expands their practice. It also allows them to explore and research within param-eters that they themselves define.

“There is a long history in avant-garde practice of art-ists working in an inter-disciplinary or multi-disciplinary manner. What we’re doing at the Center now with these IPDGs is simply recognizing that this way of working has become increasingly attractive for many artists in our community as well. Our hope is that by providing seed money at the early stages of inter-disciplinary explora-tions, we’re also laying some groundwork for future large-scale projects of ambition and high achievement. That such major projects might eventually be commis-sioned by Philadelphia institutions and premiere in our city would be icing on our cake!”

PCAH Awards its First Interdisciplinary Grants

ANNOUNCINGLeft: Ryerss Mansion

Right: Founders Hall at Girard College, one of the sites for Peregrine Arts’

Hidden City project

Clockwise, from top left: Composer Phil Kline; Choreographer

Nichole Canuso and MIRO Dance Theatre (photos: J.J. Tiziou); Peter

d’Agostino walking in a tunnel of the LHC (Large Hadron Collider)

at CERN, Geneva, the world’s largest particle physics laboratory;

Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative Director Paula Marincola

PMP 31PMP 30

Emily Sweeney joined PMP as Program Associate in Au-gust 2006. She holds her B.A. in Dance and Literature from Bennington College, and comes to PMP with a variety of professional experiences, including previous employment as a publicist and copywriter for Breslow Partners, and also as a production intern for WNYC New York Public Radio. Emily is an active member of Philadelphia’s mod-ern and improvisational dance scene, performing with Amnesiac Dance, as well as making and presenting her own work as co-founder of Perpetual Mvmt< >Snd, an interdisciplinary performance group in residence at the Mascher Space Cooperative. She grew up in Vermont the member of an adamantly musical family, and has been involved in the arts ever since she requested violin and ballet lessons at the age of fi ve.

Alyssa Timin, PMP Program Associate since January 2004, began working towards her MFA in Art Criticism and Writing in September at New York’s School for Visual Arts. She is also working with music publicist Aleba Gartner.

PMP WELCOMES EMILY SWEENEY,

BIDS ADIEU TO ALYSSA TIMIN

Piffaro is planning to pique the interest of young recorder players across the nation by holding a recorder competition open to middle and high school age students. The winner will have the opportunity to perform with Piffaro in their program, “Sweet Pipes: The Art of the Recorder,” which will take place on February 23-25. With this concert, Piffaro will also release a new CD featuring music for the recorder, including a sampling of hits from Piffaro’s three CDs recorded on the Dorian label, as well as double choral works and early 17th century works with plucked strings.

Astral Artistic Services President Vera Wilson was honored in March 2006 by Temple University’s Boyer College of Music & Dance with its Tribute Award, for her arts advocacy and mentorship of emerging artists. Astral roster ensemble Chiara String Quartet developed a school residency program that was awarded the 2006 Guarneri String Quartet Residency by Chamber Music America. Astral pianist Spencer Myer won the 2006 Christel DeHaan Classical Fellowship from the American Pianists Association Competition; Spencer also earned the Compe-tition’s special prizes for Chamber Music and Lieder Accompanying.

Mendelssohn Club collaborates with the Leah Stein Dance Company on the Philadelphia premiere of their exciting new choreographic version of Carmina Burana (1937). Orff’s orchestration for 2 pianos and percussion will be conducted

by Alan Harler in the stunning setting of Girard College Chapel. The performance will feature soprano Carol Chickering, tenor Dana Wilson, and baritone Dmitri Lazich.

The Boyer College of Music and Dance at Temple University celebrated many accomplish-

ments during the 2005-2006 season. The Temple University Jazz Band played a sold-out concert at the Kimmel Center’s Perelman Theater and won several awards and competitions, including recognition from the Notre Dame Jazz Festi-val and the Villanova Jazz Festival. Faculty member Helen Kwalwasser received the American String Teacher Association’s Artist Teacher Award and Luis Biava was honored by the Musical Fund Society.

To commemorate the broad legacy of Michael Korn, the Bach Festival in-vites the public to join his induction on the Avenue of the Art’s Walk of Fame on Saturday morning, October 14, 11 am. Korn, a Curtis Institute graduate and only organist to take part in Leonard Bernstein’s famous TV show, founded the Philadelphia Singers (one of America’s few professional choirs) as well as Chorus America, and was Chorus Master and Assistant Conductor of the Opera Company of Philadelphia.

Noted ethnomusicologist Dr. Ruth Stone will be a guest at concerts of the Philadelphia Folklore Project this season, leading discussions with audiences about the cultural and historical contexts of various African song traditions. PFP’s new offi ces, which opened at 735 South 50th Street last fall, feature reading and viewing rooms for research into Philadelphia’s folk history. In addition, The Folk Arts and Cultural Treasures Charter School, a K-8 school organized by Asian Americans United in association with the Philadelphia Folklore Project, opened in a newly rehabbed building at 1023 Callowhill Street in September 2006.

The PRISM Quartet’s 2006-07 season features special programs with Cantori New York and Miro Dance Theatre. On March 11 at the Trinity Center, PRISM and Cantori will present North American premieres of works for choir and saxo-phones by Hugi Gumundsson (Iceland), Giya Kancheli (Georgia) and Erkki-Sven Tüür (Estonia). In May, PRISM and Miro perform the world premiere of Pitch Black,an evening-length multimedia production combining video installation by Tobin Rothlein and choreography by Amanda Miller. Pitch Black will be set to music for saxophones and ghetto blaster by Dutch composer Jacob ter Veldhuis.

News Corner: In the Community

About sixty Philadelphia-area music professionals and guests came shivering out of the cold for PMP’s second annual holiday party, held on Tuesday, December 13, 2005, at the Ethi-cal Society of Philadelphia. In addition to good food, drink, and company, the party featured a hypnotic and genre-defying performance by jazz guitarist Ben Monder and vocalist Theo Bleckmann. The duo presented those assembled with a world premiere, an as-yet untitled piece—Rumi 2, for now—whose lyrics originate from two poems by Sufi poet and teacher Jalal al-Din Rumi.

Ben’s performance and recording credits include collabora-tions with Jack McDuff, Marc Johnson, Lee Konitz, Paul Motian, George Garzone, Tim Berne, the Carnegie Hall Jazz Orchestra, the Kenny Wheeler Large Ensemble, Guillermo Klein’s Los Gua-chos, and the Maria Schneider Jazz Orchestra. Theo Bleckman’s latest recording, origami, garnered great critical praise, includ-ing 4 1⁄2 stars (out of 5) from Downbeat Magazine. His voice can be heard on over twenty recordings found on ECM, CRI, Label Bleu, Polygram, Songlines, Traumton and Winter & Winter.

PMP Holiday Party 2005

Hello Goodbye:

ANNOUNCING

Top: PMP Program Associate Emily Sweeney, photo: Bilwa

Bottom: Guitarist Ben Monder; Vocalist Theo Bleckmann,

photo: Jörg Grosse Gelderman

Top to bottom: Leah Stein’s Carmina Burana with the Mendelssohn Club (photo: Gabriel

Bienczycki); Temple University Jazz Band; Chiara Quartet, Astral Artistic Services roster

ensemble; PRISM Quartet (photo: Pierre Dufour)

PMP 33PMP 32

find interesting is I think we open the 2007-08 season with Rite of Spring, and we posed the question to each other, “What could we program with Rite of Spring that would make Rite of Spring seem dated?” Isn’t that fun? Take on that exercise! So, to go back to the “Adventures Series,” which is really a concrete possibility, I think that being an advocate for living composers is kind of a twenty-four hour, seven-days-a-week activity if you’re in my job. Every day there may be two or three opportunities to influence something along those lines.

PMP: What are your short and long term organizational goals for the Orchestra? Describe any artistic initiatives that you hope to implement.

JU: We’re looking at a number of technology initiatives right now. I’m particu-larly interested in interactivity and so we’re exploring how this can be useful in illuminating symphonic music. Having come out of working with college age stu-dents, you can’t help but be aware of the various websites that they’re addicted to right now: YouTube, YouMixIt, and Facebook. I’m interested in how we can engage that kind of energy through an interactive website with the Philadelphia Orchestra. Also, we have these new robotic, high definition cameras in Verizon Hall, and one thing we could do is have people zooming in on the section they’re most interested in—stuff like that. But I’m also interested in Internet II, and how you can have interaction globally. We’re going to be working with UPENN to do a master class with the New World Symphony. It’s time for us to move out of the experimentation phase into something functional.

PMP: What are your impressions of the music scene in Philadelphia?JU: You know, I’m going to pass for now! I’m embarrassed to admit that the only

thing I’ve been exposed to completely is the Philadelphia Orchestra. But what I can say is that it’s definitely one of my top, top goals to get to know the entire musical community here. Because I need to as a person as much as I do as a professional.

Peter GistelinckExecutive Director, Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia

PMP: Tell me about your background as an artist, musician, and composer. PG: I grew up the member of a very musical family. My father was the former

director of the Belgian Public Radio classical music station, so I was exposed to all sorts of music as a child. My father said, “Don’t go into music—it’s too difficult!” But it turned out that my whole family went into music anyway.

PMP: Are you still an active performer? Do you still compose?PG: Yes, I remain active because I think it’s crucial for all good arts administra-

tors to maintain a link with their artistic interests. Otherwise, if you leave the art itself, it’s too late before you realize you’ve lost touch. However, since the early years I’ve always been very interested in the business side of music.

PMP: Would you describe your music?PG: I compose, orchestrate, arrange, and produce a variety, including jazz and

also pop/rock these days. I refuse to put music in boxes—music is music and it’s really about what people feel when they hear it. I can as well appreciate a classical artist as a jazz, pop or rock musician. As for myself, I’ve worked a lot with Michel Legrand producing film scores but I also produced recordings for Jose Van Dam, Jaap Van Zweden and other well known classical artists. But on the artistic side, I keep my work pretty low profile and behind the scenes.

PMP: How did you work your way into arts administration and orchestra man-agement?

PG: After I studied at the Ghent Royal Music Conservatory, I taught at the Royal Flemish Conservatory of Music at Antwerp. Then I began working for Roland Musical Instruments, a Japanese musical instruments company, managing their education and publishing departments for the whole of Europe. I really loved it! It was a seven year project and very successful. After that, I managed the I Fiam-minghi Chamber Orchestra in Belgium, Le Concert Spirituel in Paris and before I was appointed Executive Director of the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia I managed the Flemish Radio Orchestra and Choir in Belgium.

PMP: How will you help to shape programming with the Chamber Orchestra of

Philadelphia?PG: We have a wonderful Chief Conductor and Music

Director in the person of Ignat Solzhenitsyn—he decides about the artistic programming. My job is to keep up on trends and make sure he’s fully informed. In fact, my primary concern when I came to work with COP was whether I would be able to cultivate a productive work-ing relationship with the artistic director, as that’s one of the most important aspects in order to be successful with the career of the ensemble. And Ignat and I get along very well!

PMP: What are your first impressions of Philadelphia’s music scene?

PG: Well, speaking very generally, since I’ve only been here two weeks and a couple of times before, I’d say this is a very diverse city, especially culturally, but in all other ways as well. There’s a lot going on, which I immediately compared to Paris. It’s like a melting pot here—there’s so much great food, and many different cultures are promi-nently represented. It’s very impressive and I’m really thrilled about the city.

PMP: What are your short and long term organiza-tional goals for the Orchestra?

PG: I applied to this job because I saw the great poten-tial of this organization. I’m starting out by going into the different departments and investigating how we can optimize those, including marketing and development. I’d like to put the Orchestra on the map also by focusing on securing recording contracts and arranging some tours. Recording is extremely important as a PR tool, as it allows an orchestra to achieve worldwide recognition. I have a lot of experience producing recordings and I have good alliances with the major production companies. It’s a mat-ter of negotiating properly so we can take advantage of all these opportunities.

PMP: What is your view on the role of the Chamber Orchestra as an agent for social and cultural enrichment?

PG: Again, this comes mainly back to programming, the backbone of any orchestra. We should play a main role to all sorts of different people, which means we may eventually need to diversify. I want to attract different types of people. I want the Chamber Orchestra to go even more towards the city of Philadelphia and its people and thus widen our audience circle.

This season, two of Philadelphia’s most prominent music organizations welcomed new leadership: James Under-cofler joined the Philadelphia Orchestra as President & CEO, and Peter Gistelinck is now Executive Director of the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia. PMP sat down with each to ask about their plans.

Mr. Undercofler comes to The Philadelphia Orchestra Association from the Eastman School of Music in Roch-ester, N.Y., where he has served as Director and Dean since 1997 and created the highly acclaimed Institute for Music Leadership. He also established a state-of-the-art Music Technology and Production Department at Eastman that maximizes educational use of web-based innovations, including Internet II. Peter Gistelinck, who began work with the Chamber Orchestra of Phila-delphia in early September, is a native of Belgium, and was formerly the Director of Sales and Marketing and Co-Artistic Director for the Flemish Radio Orchestra and Flemish Radio Choir (Vlaams Radio Orkest and Vlaams Radio Koor) in Brussels, Belgium.

James UndercoflerPresident & CEO, Philadelphia Orchestra Association

PMP: The Philadelphia Orchestra has embarked on ambitious educational and outreach programming in recent years. As a longtime leader in music education, how do you see the Orchestra’s role continuing to evolve as a catalyst for cultural change?

JU: That’s a very rich question—my goodness! I see the education program of a symphony orchestra in two categories. One is that it’s the responsibility of a large arts organization in a particular area, this one being music, to provide leadership in the education community, as a catalyst, in a sense to use its weight to make things happen that other organizations probably can’t make happen. For instance, Sarah Johnson (Director of Education) has been pulling together music educators in the school district, the Youth Orchestra people, and working with Settlement folks to identify their key issues and how as a group we can move forward. I think we can al-ways expand that effort. The other is the direct educational mission of the Orchestra, which is to educate young people in the music that we do. That’s being done directly in the schools and we’re now exploring new ways to enhance it with technology. I think we’ll be rolling out a number of initiatives along those lines soon.

An area that interests me particularly, and that will be new for us, is how do you mature audiences? I’m really interested in this, especially being such a new music buff myself. We’ve identified four categories of listeners: the access group, which is approaching so-called classical music for the first time and need it to be enhanced in some way dramatically, visually, or taken apart and put back together. There’s the core, or historical group that wants to hear the Brahms 2nd Piano Concerto and Tchaikovsky’s 6th every week, which we did last week. I call it the historical concert series and the marketing department doesn’t like that. There’s the core-plus, or what we call the blended program, which we’re doing this week. We’re doing two new works with Dawn Upshaw, and then Sibelius 2 on the second half. This is a formula that orchestras have used a lot: “You’re not going to like the first half, but you’ll stay for the second.” Here, we have the whole first half as new music—that’s very bold! And then we’ve identified what we call the adventure group. Six percent of our ticket buyers identify themselves as very interested in new music. I’m very pleased with that percentage, believe it or not. So, we’re actually looking at the development of a new music series that would be called the “Adventure Series.” But getting back to education—what I’m interested in is how you can use your education efforts to entice people to try something they haven’t tried before. That’s marketing and sales. But more on the education side: what are the specific things you do in terms of program formatting, preparation, follow up, etc. to move some-body out of historical to say blended and from blended into adventure?

PMP: Tell us about your background as a musician and conductor. Are you still active?

JU: I was a French horn player. I still have one, which I enjoy playing at times. Actually, I don’t enjoy playing it. When I can practice, it aligns my brain, and so it’s kind of an interesting thing to experience. It fixes my head. I never considered myself a conductor, and I still don’t. I conducted the Greater New Haven Youth Orchestra for a number of years, but I was a teacher who conducted. Working with young people is quite an experience. What was amazing to me after doing, say Beethoven 6 three times was that each time the students revealed an entirely dif-ferent piece to me. It was just awesome!

PMP: Describe your role in shaping repertoire choices for the Orchestra. To what extent should the work of living composers be a part of programming?

JU: The traditional way is still the way here (there’s nothing wrong with tradi-tion!), and that is that the music director essentially determines the repertoire. That being said, Christoph is easy to work with and has a commitment to new repertoire. Kathleen van Bergen (V. P. of Artistic Planning) and I have recently met with Christoph to look at programming for 2007-08, and had a wonderful discus-sion about various composers and pairings that could be made that would be kind of fun, interesting, and exciting. One that isn’t resolved yet but that I think you’ll

Q&AIN CONVERSATION WITH

NEW ORCHESTRA DIRECTORS

ANNOUNCING Page 32:

Philadelphia Orchestra

President and CEO

James Undercofler,

photo: Ryan Donnell

Page 33:

Chamber Orchestra

of Philadelphia’s

Executive Director

Peter Gistelinck,

photo: Michael

Eberhard

PMP 35

BUILDING CAPACITY/DEVELOPING AUDIENCES

PMP 34

BUILDING CAPACITY/DEVELOPING AUDIENCES

Bury began the event by going around the room and asking the attendees to summa-rize what brought them to his talk. Answers both helped to orient Bury’s presentation and offered a quick glimpse into the array of planning and fundraising challenges facing these organizations. Some organiza-tions were just getting started, planning to double their budget by next season; other organizations were looking to reconfigure their images or fundraising approaches on a broad scale; some organizations focused on increasing contributed income and strategic gifts; a few organizations seemed simply to be on the hunt for good ideas.

Following this collective introduc-tion, Bury distinguished fundraising from development work and presented these defi-nitions: fundraising means asking for money, while development—a process that’s never done—means building networks among people who share values with you, who are inclined to be involved with your work, and who have the means to help (whether with money, connections, knowledge, or profes-sional experience). However, fundraising and development function together. Proposing two poles of efficiency, Bury noted that per-haps the least effective means of fundraising

Dynamic Planning: Strategies for Institutional TransformationSeminar with David Bury

is sending an impersonal bid letter. The most effective, he then pointed out, is having a relationship in which a supporter identifies personally with an organization and finds unacceptable the idea that the organization could cease to exist.

A good project with which to begin a development initiative, Bury explained, is to establish a list of potentially most help-ful people. Then, convene them to ask what they value about your organization. Having facilitated numerous conversations such as this one, Bury attests that the conversa-tion frequently builds in and of itself into enthusiasm and support. However, he noted, it is your responsibility to “choreograph that conversation so that it ends in commitment.” Even if some of the invited individuals never come, “Your name will cross their desk.”

Bury proposed a spectrum along which to classify the involvement of a supporter or potential supporter: ignorance, awareness, interest, participation, commitment, and ownership. Development workers should keep questions in mind such as, “What can I do next month to move someone toward ownership?” and “What are we doing next month that we can show them?” Bury pro-posed taking an individual to lunch and

asking him or her for something, for ex-ample, an opinion. He offered as a powerful example, “Read our vision statement, and tell us what you think.” Smaller scale options in-clude sending a newsletter, an event review, or complimentary tickets. Don’t forget the possibility of including a potential supporter in community events or a staff meeting.

Rather than adopting the conventional term “cultivation,” which Bury feels implies a one-dimensional relationship, he prefers the phrase “creative engagement.” He put an emphasis on how being involved with an or-ganization benefits supporters as well. Such involvement, at its best, provides supporters with their own opportunity for self-actual-ization, a chance to define who they are as individuals. Significantly, Bury added, the planning process itself can act as a platform for meaningful engagement. Involving sup-porters in the details of your organization, both present and future, connects people to the creative process. “Cultural participation,” he said, “is not just attendance.”

Broaden, deepen, and diversify: the work of development leads supporters and con-tributors to understand artistic work on a

“rich intellectual and visceral level.” He clearly holds rigorous standards for what planning and development can deliver: “If you’re not building capacity, you’re wasting time. If you’re spending your time inefficiently, you’re taking a loss.” Bury is confident that the activities of planning, development, and fund-raising can and should take place in tandem, as a unified effort of bringing sup-porters into enthusiastic intimacy with an organization. “If people help shape your vi-sion,” he indicated, “they’re buying in. They will be there to support the realization of that vision.”

Group process techniques such as brain-storming meetings are a key element in integrating planning into development and fundraising efforts. While Bury readily ad-mits that some bad ideas emerge from these meetings, good ideas also surface, and, as he puts it, “Planning is the place for people to take ownership.” Like shaping a vision, if supporters themselves name a financial goal, they will be far more likely to commit to it. Organizational leaders are called to bring supporters and potential supporters into increasing involvement, and to share the definition and meaning of their work with those who will play a significant part in con-tinuing to make it possible.

Since founding David Bury and Associates in 1981, Mr. Bury has helped arts organizations raise tens of millions of dollars. PMP brought this expert in arts management, planning, and fundraising to give a seminar called “Dynamic Planning: Strategies for Institu-tional Transformation” at Settlement Music School on Tuesday, May 16, 2006. Close to forty members of the Philadelphia-area music and arts community—development staff in particular—attended the event, representing a total of about 25 nonprofit organizations.

This fall, PMP is supporting the creation of web portals for New Sounds Philadelphia (newsoundsphiladelphia.org) and Voices of Philadelphia (voicesofphiladelphia.org). Portals will promote the consortia and their public programs online, provide comprehensive performance calendars for their Philadelphia events, and link to each member’s website. The early music groups have joined forces with the Bach Festival of Philadelphia and the Greater Philadel-phia Cultural Alliance to collectively advertise their programs on the Philly Fun Guide’s Blockbuster webpage (phillyfunguide.com/blockbuster.php).

PMP’s cooperative sector marketing program helps to build core audiences by familiarizing dedicated listeners with a uniquely branded genre-specific consortium of ensembles. The initiative also enables participating groups to develop advertising income and corporate sponsorship.

Sector Marketing Initiative Online Advertising

In the fall of 2004, PMP began a marketing ini-tiative to help a consortium of four new music ensembles—Orchestra 2001, Network for New Music, the PRISM Quartet, and Relâche—gain wider exposure in Greater Philadelphia. The groups cooperated to produce the first New Sounds Philadelphia brochure, which was mailed to their consolidated mailing lists and distributed citywide. In 2005, PMP also helped to produce early music and choral music bro-chures. The collaborating early music groups were Philomel, Piffaro, and Tempesta di Mare. The Choral Arts Society, Mendelssohn Club, Philadelphia Singers, and Singing City have collaborated for the choral music publication, titled Voices of Philadelphia.

APMP 36 PMP 37

PMP: What is the value of marketing col-laborations among groups that are working along parallel tracks?

DL: Well, that issue came up with almost all of the groups with whom I consulted. It’s very clear that in Philadelphia, many of the arts presenting organizations work in a very focused manner. Yet, they speak to a very similar demographic. If you look at the Kimmel Center, the Gershman Theater, and Zanzibar Blue, all three organizations are within walking distance of one another. And if you put the Philadelphia Museum of Art into the mix, which is not too far away, I think those orga-nizations are operating independently but chasing the same demographic, relatively. So I suggested that they find synergistic ways to work with one another, to find some common ground where they can all benefit. In the case of the Art Museum, they’re not really a conflict for a Zanzibar Blue, per

From April 10 – 12, jazz publicist Don Lucoff met with 15 groups: 88 Keys

Productions, the Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, Ars Nova Work-

shop, International House Philadelphia, Jazz Journeys Educational Institute,

the Kimmel Center, Montgomery County Community College, Musicopia,

the Painted Bride Art Center, Peregrine Arts, the Philadelphia Chamber

Music Society, the Philadelphia Clef Club of Jazz and Performing Arts, the

Philadelphia Museum of Art, Settlement Music School, and Siora.

From April 24 – 26, world and folk music publicist Cindy Byram met with

11 groups: Compassionate Heart Productions, Dikoma Aesthetics, the Kim-

mel Center, Network for New Music, Pennsylvania Performing Arts on Tour

(PennPAT), the Philadelphia Classical Symphony, the Philadelphia Folklore

Project, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Relâche, Spoken Hand Percussion

Orchestra, and SRUTI, the India Music and Dance Society.

From July 24 – 28, direct marketing database expert John Elliott met with

16 groups: Ars Nova Workshop, Slought Foundation, Peregrine Arts, Curtis

Institute of Music, Relâche, Latin Fiesta, Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia,

Network for New Music, Center City Opera Theater, Piffaro, Academy of

Vocal Arts, Philadelphia Classical Symphony, Philadelphia Live Arts Festival

& Philly Fringe, Montgomery County Community College, Mendelssohn Club,

and the PRISM Quartet.

Organizations participating in the consultancy span various relationships

to jazz, classical, world and folk music; some are musicians who perform

primarily within these formats, while others are classically-based ensembles

pushing the boundaries of genre or presenters who host national and inter-

national artists throughout the season. PMP sought to offer each of these

groups expertise in the business of familiarizing media with the particulars

of these genres and the performers who sustain them, as well as offering

strategies for strengthening their direct marketing capacity in order to tar-

get audiences more effectively and measure campaign results.

Arts Marketing and Audience DevelopmentMarketing and Publicity Consultations with John Elliott, Don Lucoff and Cindy Byram

PMP continued its Arts Marketing and Audience Devel-opment Program this April by inviting two experienced music publicists and a direct marketing database expert to conduct up to five days each of meetings with music performers and presenters. Each year since 2001, PMP has invited two consultants for such meetings, including arts marketing experts Deborah Obalil and Kate Prescott, new music publicist Aleba Gartner, and internet marketing specialist Vicki Allpress.

& print media support in this market. And when you don’t have consistent media support from your largest daily paper, you have to look for other ways to co-op and do other creative types of marketing.

PMP: Did you offer suggestions on developing a stron-ger online presence?

DL: I told them all, virtually, that they should find ways to create programs with, for example allabout-jazz.com, which is very strong in the Northeast. Also to maybe approach some influential bloggers, you know—tastemakers. I feel that this is a tremendous growth area. I’ve hired a new media jazz publicist this summer who’s complementing our traditional PR efforts here, and we’re getting a lot of good response. It’s a brave new world out there! You know, we’re the first jazz PR agency to do that.

PMP: Do you find there are advantages to publicizing interdisciplinary work as opposed to strictly music?

DL: Absolutely. Somebody like Jason Moran, who has made a new record having to do with music that was commissioned by various art institutions around the United States, the Walker Art Center in particular, with their works in mind, is giving me a new way to promote an artist. Now Jason Moran is into the art world. It makes him relevant to art trade publications. It makes him ap-pealing to the Museum of Modern Art, where he’s going to be doing a program of his music and talking about art and music and how they influence one another.

QStraight Talk:

Don Lucoff

se. Their jazz programming is three Fridays a month, they start relatively early, and they’re attracting their ongoing museum members. But perhaps they could do a cross-promotion with Zanzibar Blue where patrons show a ticket for the late set and get a price reduction. And maybe there can be some sort of reciprocity going back from Zanzibar to the Museum; anyone who shows their receipt from a show at Zanzibar gets a dollar off their Friday night series or something like that. That was just one example that I used.

PMP: Do you find these sorts of collaborations in other cities?DL: If you look at New York City, there’s a lot of competition.

The clubs don’t directly help one another, but during certain times of the year, during JVC Jazz Festival, for example, and during the International Association for Jazz Education Con-ference, clubs will offer discounts and reciprocity with jazz concertgoers so they can come to a late set at the clubs for a reduced rate. IAJE registrants can also go to jazz clubs at a reduced rate. So there are some ways that it works in New York, and that’s a much more cutthroat environment as far as the jazz audience goes.

PMP: What are your views on some of the existing collabora-tive marketing efforts in Philadelphia?

DL: A lot of organizations tend to go right to Philly Fun Sav-ers, the discount ticketing website. But there was one group in particular that said it really dilutes their product if they throw it up online because their audience gets used to it and they’ll just wait till the last minute and buy tickets cheap. But there are others that feel it’s an essential and critical part of their marketing. I bring it up because there’s also a lack of strong

Below, on left: Don Lucoff

PMP 38 PMP 39

ARTS MARKETING AND

AUDIENCE DEVELOPMENT

on themselves to make graphic decisions—but they’re musicians. And even though they wouldn’t for a moment let a graphic designer weigh in on their performances or choice of repertoire, there’s a much greater comfort level for musicians deciding that they know what great graphics are. They feel like they can pretty much do it themselves—and they like the control. But I think it would take only a few mo-ments in a bookstore for anyone looking at those coffee table books of great album cover designs to realize that the greatest packaging for music, graphics that have stood the test of time, resulted when artists basically turned those decisions over to professionals and didn’t get in the way. They partnered with people who were creative and inspired and they just put their own desires on the back burner.

I just think musicians don’t always understand that it’s not putting all the information you want on a postcard that makes it look good. It’s putting less information on it so that when people look at it they want to read what’s on it. They need to defer to the people who really understand how the human eye is drawn to something, what makes for graphic balance, what makes something look compelling, why when you’re looking at an end rack of CDs at Tower Records, why someone would pick up a certain cover as opposed to another. And there is a science to that—there is an art to that. They need to find great designers, and then know when to have input, and when to get out of the way.

PMP: For organizations with a limited budget, what are good methods for test marketing materials?

CB: I would say that organizations get a lot done simply stopping people on the street outside of a concert and saying, “What do you think of this?” They’ll let someone look at something for a second, and then pull it back from them and say,

got to make his own decisions about what he covered are rapidly coming to a close. That music editor now has to go to an entertainment editor, and that entertainment editor generally has no knowledge of most of the artists or organizations that a music editor might know about. They want to understand the big picture; this needs to make sense to them on a level that doesn’t depend on name recognition.

PMP: Or on artistic merit.CB: Merit? Forget about it! It’s never been simply about

whether an artist is a great performer. That’s just static. People are always looking for a story that gives them something interesting and fun to write about. I think sometimes people don’t spend enough time looking at the arts and leisure sections and thinking about what the headline is, and why a particular story might have been chosen over another.

The media is looking for stories. They like stories that show someone is struggling against something. They like things that are active as opposed to passive. They’d be more interested in writing about the struggle of an artist with a lack of success and what they learned from that than they would about, well, “I have an artist here who has one success after another under their belt.” They’re

PMP: What do you see as the value of cross-pro-motions and other marketing collaborations for music organizations working in similar musical genres?

CB: For one thing, I think that there’s always strength in numbers. You can always learn from people who are doing things in your field. And although it may seem a bit threatening to ex-pose yourself to the competition, there are many times when you can actually help each other, and create more of a message than you could individu-ally. You can come up with some creative ways to collaborate in performances or in repertoire and build up the entire genre that you’re working

Q&AStraight Talk: Cyndy Byram

... there’s nothing more D.O.A. than a press release that reads, “Blank Ensemble to play Blank Blank Blank.” It’s just not going anywhere.

The fact that you’re doing that particular piece has no interest in and of itself, unless you happen to be doing a performance of Saddam Hussein’s

secret concerto, stolen from the Baghdad Museum.

situation where they try to work out a collaboration with someone and find out that they gave more than they got, or that the trust they put into the situation didn’t work. But by in large, it’s kind of the norm. It’s a much more fluid and interconnected network in New York be-cause everybody’s operating under the same pressures.

PMP: Do you think that New York City is the exception in this way?CB: In New York City, everybody hangs by their fingernails... every-

one is basically sitting around and brainstorming on ways in which you can do something on a shoestring and operate. There are so many arrangements that people make that are not about paying a fee be-cause people just don’t have it. And I would say the only time someone would actually draw a line and say, “We can’t help you in promoting your event because...” would have to be an exact conflict: “your show is the same date as mine.” It couldn’t be just a philosophical discomfort that “you’re working in my field.”

I’ve had some people suggest to me that Philadelphia and Boston are very different from NYC, and that they have a patrician history and that that personality is reflected in the way all businesses are run in those two cities. Boston and Philadelphia are quite similar in their history, and even though you might think that because New York City is right between them, that it would be all of a piece, it’s really not.

PMP: How might local arts organizations improve branding efforts and design materials?

CB: I think that my main concern is that organizations are relying

“What’s your lasting impression of this?” You want to get the opinions of people who are not inside your group or organization, to present materials to your target audience and the age group of people you think you want. Or at a concert during intermission, you just ask people, “What do you think of our press materials—how would you rate them?” and, “What do you not like about them?” and, “How would you describe them in one word?” I also think it’s just taking the time to shop around and find someone who’s really a professional you can work with. And there are a lot of people who are willing to do things at a very low cost for organizations they believe in, for nonprofits—people who will work in exchange for being able to go to every concert of the season and bring a friend. You can work out lots of deals that are not just writing a big check to someone.

PMP: How do the press releases/PSAs of nonprofit organizations typically com-pare to those of for profit organizations more accustomed to working in modern media?

CB: Nonprofit press releases tend to be much more informational: this is what we’re doing, and when. And for profit press releases tend to have much more of a sense of knowing that they need to answer the question: “Why should I care?” That’s one of my mantras that every organization has to think of when they put together a press release, and the answer isn’t just, “We’re doing this great thing, and aren’t we great because we’re doing it.” But we need to do things like look at the calendar and in the headlines and figure out if there’s anything that makes this event more relevant. Think of things you can hitch a ride with in terms of this program. Can you connect the dots between a trend in entertainment or in modern life that your program fits with? Realize that the days when a music editor

looking for a narrative, and they’re looking for something that gives them a story to dig into, as opposed to a perfor-mance that exists in a bubble and then disappears.

PMP: So it’s really about paying attention to and analyzing the media landscape that you’re trying to get yourself into.

CB: It’s not about being hype-y or trying to do some-thing you feel isn’t respectable or mature. Groups just need to understand that there’s nothing more D.O.A. than a press release that reads, “Blank Ensemble to play Blank Blank Blank.” It’s just not going anywhere. The fact that you’re doing that particular piece has no interest in and of itself, unless you happen to be doing a performance of Saddam Hussein’s secret concerto, stolen from the Baghdad Museum. I mean, the work itself would have to have true resonance with hard news headlines to survive a dry headline release like that. I can’t say it often enough: there’s a sixth “w” beyond “who, what, when, where, why” that is almost more important than the others—“why should I, or my readers, care?”

within, instead of just working as individuals. You actually make more of a statement when you show that there’s a range of people operating in the same field, while everybody has a slightly different perspec-tive and a slightly different personality. But in general it shows the vibrancy of a particular area when there is a group of people working within it.

PMP: Is there typically a resistance to partnering efforts, and if so, why?

CB: I think this was the thing that surprised me the most in Phila-delphia, was some resistance to partnering efforts. In New York City, where there’s so much competition and so little money for arts, what happens is that people have to work harder; they have to collaborate with other people, and help each other. Of course there are collabora-tions that don’t work; there are times when people do wade into that

PMP 40 PMP 41

PMP: What are raving fans, and what are some interest-ing ways that they can help an organization grow?

JE: A raving fan is someone who will come back, and will come back multiple times. Raving fans are impor-tant because those return single ticket buyers are the most likely people to become subscribers. People who subscribe multiple years are the most likely to become donors. People who give multiple years are the most likely to leave $20 million to an organization in their will. Have you ever had a situation where you’ve enjoyed a piece of music, and then you share it with someone who’s going to hear it for the first time? Through the act of sharing, it’s as if you’re hearing it again for the first time. That’s how you can leverage raving fans to bring other people to the experience: it helps their experience because now they’re able to share and recreate that first time for themselves.

PMP: How can organizations with very limited budgets best capture, manage, and exploit data?

JE: Many of the people that I talked to, we would get to the point where they’d say, “We have almost no tickets sold in advance, and people show up.” Well, what I sug-gested was that they do some really high-tech things (laughing). I said, “You know, if you see a face that you don’t recognize, you introduce yourself and you get the person’s name, and you write it down.” The experience of the concert is the core experience. You have time be-fore and you have time afterwards. It is important that when you see the same faces there time after time, you get to know who they are. For many of the organiza-tions, that’s 20, 30, 40 people—totally manageable. It’s a personal networking issue. Particularly the smaller orga-nizations should never think that direct marketing and networking are different things. They’re not. So I think that organizations need to see their events as networking opportunities, both before and after. It’s important when you’re doing the networking that you’re getting a sense of who’s coming how often. Then there will have to be, at some point, some organization of the data. Yes, it can be done electronically—it can be done by ticket sales. But if that’s not what you have, it’s a human interaction. Once you have data, then you store it, however that is. Data-bases do not have to be electronic, and that’s something I try to remind people.

Straight Talk: John Elliott

PMP: What is the most important information to collect?JE: You want to have the name information, the physical address,

phone information if they’ll give it, and email information. Now, you also want to have a notation, or some way to connect that name to the performances they have attended—even those people who are collect-ing names at a concert fall short here. They have a name once, but if you’re going to find out who your raving fans are, by definition, these are people who keep coming back. If you have no way to determine how many times a particular individual has been there, then if you have a database of 1000 names, you aren’t able to clearly see your 75 raving fans.

It is very much the case that what people do is much more impor-tant than who they are when figuring out what they might do next. I like the idea that you can evaluate people based on what they do, not where they live, the color of their skin, their age, their income, this sort of thing. It is the choice to experience certain things which is the greater predictor. All the other demographics don’t really say anything.

PMP: What is the best approach for soliciting contributions?JE:The people who will give are primarily raving fans. I think the

best appeal relates to the experience you have provided them. In direct marketing there’s an idea of lifetime value, where you can measure a customer’s financial value to you over time. But in all those cases, lifetime value is an exchange. And, in requesting a donation, I think it makes sense to know who you’re asking, and why you’re asking. So, if you just ask everybody, you know, well, no. But if you’re asking a raving fan, and it’s something like, “You know, you’ve been coming here for every performance for three years, and we’ve gotten to know each other, and I just wanted to let you know that we’re trying to raise money to do whatever the objective is, and we think that this is an important experience for you—can you help us out?”

PMP: Did any other themes emerge during your PMP consultancy?JE: One of the things I talked about with people was the difference

between their marketing materials and the artistic experience they offer. There’s a certain type of language that organizations some-times adopt in trying to describe cultural experiences. Oftentimes it becomes more Latinate, and people begin to talk in longer words. And yet, heightened language is very poor at portraying emotion. And so we have abstract language to describe music that has a very emotional effect. And while conveying the artistic experience can be difficult, the closer you can come to achieving it, the truer your offer is. And I had this conversation with a number of people, where what they described to me was very powerful and emotional, and their materials weren’t.

Elliott began his presentation by asserting, “The more limited your resources, the more important these tools are.” Especially in the arts, where time and funds are short, no one can afford ineffective market-ing. The first two concepts to understand here, he said, are “target” and

“offer.” The offer is the what you are making to whom, the target. For an arts organization, the offer comprises, as Elliott put it, “at the core, who you are.” Arts organizations compete more for audiences’ time than for their money. His research has shown that arts audiences rarely display the mentality of switching out patronage of one arts organization for another, or excluding one on the basis of choosing another. Rather, the true currency of the arts consumer is time.

As for these six dirty little secrets — starting with number six — Elliott noted that 90% of direct marketing success is driven by get-ting to the right person with the right offer and then “not messing it up.” Elliott’s philosophy is to learn as much about probable buyers as possible, pitch to them, and then be on the ball when someone responds.

Secret five, “Lifetime value goes both ways.” Keep in mind that cus-tomers get as much from your work as you get from their patronage. Don’t underestimate the genuine value that your organization has for buyers.

Secret four, “Actions trump demographics.” This insight applies to marketing practices that focus on zip codes that include a high concentration of consumers. Just because a zip code is a hot spot for high-income families doesn’t mean that they should be where you focus your efforts. It’s more important to seek out each individual customer who has already bought from you.

Secret three, “Experience drives brand.” Elliott expanded on this

point to indicate that one of the most important goals your organi-zation can pursue is to create raving fans. More than just good for self-esteem, such fans play an immense part in keeping your organiza-tion and its brand alive.

Secret two, “Collaborate aggressively.” In Elliott’s view, the more data that organizations have on hand about who has attended simi-lar events, the better. Collaboration allows everyone involved to use marketing resources more effectively.

Secret one, “You can’t be too rich, too thin — or test too much.” Sys-tematically experimenting with different types of offers and keeping close track of responses from buyers with a current and reliable data-base always gives you more information about how to best sell what you do. “It is entirely possible,” Elliott affirmed, “for you to know, with certainty, what works and what doesn’t.”

In all cases, he said, “Love your data.” Elliott derives the bulk of his insights about how to market an offer to whom on the basis of past purchases from the same organization. Thus, it’s crucial to be able to retrieve this information from your organization’s database. He rec-ommended rules of database hygiene such as keeping parts of names separate and tracking parts of addresses consistently and separately. He also recommended never getting rid of customer data. “Keep it for-ever,” said Elliott. Over time, old data may reveal useful information. Organizations may also find it worth sending offers to targets who haven’t responded for some years. Using standardized addresses cuts down on undeliverable mail, as does taking advantage of the postal service’s national change of address service.

Elliott offered further information on the stakes of direct market-ing. He presented a scenario of someone looking through his or her mail. Rarely taking more than three seconds to look at any given piece of mail, that’s the amount of time an offer from your organization has to “make the counter,” rather than the trashcan. The most important element of mailings can be the envelope.

People who have bought or given a donation to your organization in the past are multiple times more likely to purchase again than those who have never bought from you. To that end, data should include “RFM” information: Recency and Frequency of purchase, as well as the Monetary contribution. Databases should also distinguish between multiple buyers and single-purchase buyers. And as you test your marketing success, try to get a sense of how far back, in terms of years since last purchase, your organization should go when sending an offer. For the Pops, Elliott has found that 10 years back is profitable; another organization may find that after three years, response drops. Usually, Elliott argued, organizations don’t contact their best prospects often enough. Lapsed subscribers are still good targets.

Insisting on such rigorous differentiation within purchasing in-formation helped a theater company specializing in Shakespeare to realize that 80% of its revenue was coming from 40% of its mailing. Likewise, the New York Philharmonic confirmed that the bulk of its audience lived within a very limited number of Manhattan zip codes, earned over $75,000 per year, and were all heavy catalogue buyers. 80% of their audience has graduate degrees.

Elliott concluded his presentation with a bid for the efficacy of col-laborative marketing. In Pittsburgh, arts organizations nervous about sharing data learned that the vast majority of frequent buyers had in fact already purchased from their supposed competitors. “You share

— you don’t own — your best customers,” Elliott said. Even though the arts face a shrinking market, revenues in his city have grown, with an increasing number of single ticket buyers and new subscribers.

Secrets of Success: A Seminar

with John Elliott

On July 24, 2006, PMP hosted John Elliott at Settlement Music School, where he presented a seminar titled, “The Six Dirty Little Secrets of Suc-cessful Database Marketing.” Elliott specializes in applying the tricks and insights of the catalogue world to the non-profit sector. As president of Elliott Marketing Group, he tracks and analyzes consumer data for companies in order to im-prove marketing efforts. In Pittsburgh, where he is based, he has been lauded for his work with the Pittsburgh Cultural District and several par-ticipating arts organizations.

Q&

A

PMP 42 PMP 43

On Thursday, April 27, 2006, the Philadelphia Music Proj-ect held the fourth installment of its “New Frontiers in Music” professional development series. This composer symposium, attended by approximately 50 musicians, music administrators, composers and composition stu-dents, featured Steven Mackey, Jeffrey Mumford, and Charles Wuorinen. The panel was moderated by Frank J. Oteri, also a composer and editor of the online magazine New Music Box.

Each panelist shared samples of his work and dis-cussed aspects of what the audience heard. Mackey spoke fi rst; the Princeton University professor of composition noted that he had just turned fi fty: “I’m an old man now.” He claimed to have had a hard time picking pieces to represent his growing body of work, which he divided into fi ve areas—orchestra, chamber music, electric gui-tar, musical theater, and dance collaborations. Mackey began his career as a rock guitarist, and the fi rst piece he shared was a 1992 work called Physical Property scored

New Frontiers in Music: Composer Symposium

My music was formed over a long period of time,

and now I don’t even think of it as navigating a path.

This is how music goes to me. Even when I say, “OK,

I’m going to really do something different,” I fi nd

that everybody else thinks it’s still by me. One of

the most formative experiences in my musical up-

bringing was growing up in northern California in the

late sixties. I was too young to be a bona fi de hippie,

but I had two older brothers who were. I would be

their designated driver when they would trip. They

would actually take LSD and say, “OK Steve, you play

the guitar.” I’d play for eight hours straight with a

feeling of great responsibility for taking them on

a memorable adventure. I was only 12 or 13 at the

time but I felt like some sort of a Shaman priest. I

thought, “This is an interesting line of work; this is

what I want to do.” Then I went to school and got a

formal education and studied with many composers

including Don Martino. I got a real taste for allowing

intellect and rigor to inform and teach me how to

imagine music.

Steven Mackey

a recent work, the inspiration for which he linked to observing clouds at different times of the day. The piece seemed full of angles and leaps, hard attacks that dispersed in energetic phrases. His second piece, an orchestral composition featuring the brass section—“I hadn’t written much for brass,” Mumford noted in passing—built layers of tension and felt moody and atmospheric in comparison to Mackey’s fast clip. Mumford’s third piece, toward the deepening stillness beyond visible light, was a piano quintet written for the Pacifi ca Quartet and pianist Amy Dissanayake. Finally, Mumford shared video footage of a 1990 solo cello work, Serious Joy, choreographed and danced fi ve years later by Clara Gibson Maxwell.

Charles Wuorinen then took the fl oor to discuss his work. A Mac-Arthur Fellow and winner of the Pulitzer Prize, as well as Professor of Music at Rutgers University, he introduced the fi rst movement of his third piano concerto in which, as he described it, “The soloist invents the orchestra.” The piano began alone, peripatetic, joined eventu-ally by drums, horns, and fl ute, each instrument doubling the piano at its entry and then taking off on its own. For his second example, Wuorinen chose a “little song” he’d written setting a poem by James

Fenton, a love song sung by soprano Elizabeth Farnum and played by the Cygnus Ensemble. Next, he shared an Agnus Dei for choir and a score that he’d written for the New York City Ballet, “which doubles as a cello concerto,” called Five.

The composers then moved into moderated discussion. They talked about how they’ve managed to propagate their work, the importance of having personal contacts and creating a community within the fi eld, the frustrations posed for composers by politics within large performance institutions. Mackey and Wuorinen both commented on how their careers were positively infl uenced by the support of one individual—for both of whom this seems to have been the same per-son, the virtuoso cellist Fred Sherry. Wuorinen also commented that an important variable in a composer’s career is whether he or she is also a performer: “Non-performing composers are at a disadvantage,” he remarked, and felt that composers should be able to conduct their work.

The group then refl ected on the changes in their careers in light of the shrinking market for classical recordings. Mackey said he actually feels more optimistic now that the proverbial sky has fallen, in that, with the internet and media technology boom and the development of niche markets, artists such as himself are now more able to negoti-ate contracts with labels and others. The discussion continued with questions from the audience, provoking conversation regarding a per-ceived rise in careerism in composition students. All three composers

Steven Mackey and Charles Wuorinen Navigating Styles

You are condemned to be yourself. No matter how much you think you are

changing from one point to another, there are strands of personality that

run through your work. They are essentially out of your control, I think.

When Stravinsky was alive, he was always regarded as someone for whom

every new work was different: it was fantastic or it was terrible, depending

on your point of view. When you now look back over his work, even the last

period—the twelve-tone pieces—they are all, without any ambiguity, of that

personality. The personality is constant from Firebird through the Requiem

Canticles. That is something that is very fundamental to the making of any

kind of art: the personality remains the same, the means may change. So,

especially for a young person to worry about, “What is my voice?” my an-

swer is, “You’ve already got it baby.” The problem is to develop it, whatever

it may be. That’s what we have to work at. The other thing is, I want to put

up a caution against any tendency to divide the intellect from the emotive

or the rational from the intuitive. For me, these are continuous. I always

regard intuition as speeded up reason, and vice versa, in the making of

art. Yet if you ask me to describe the process of reason in one of my works,

as I made it, I would be completely at a loss because, if I could (again the

old cliché), I’d write words instead of notes. So the question of how one

navigates a path in a multi-polar world is almost irrelevant. Of course you

are going to be affected by the environment, and various contaminations

of other stuff will come into your work. That is good rather than bad.

Charles Wuorinen

remarked on the necessary pacing in career development, having observed others overreach themselves and lose, as Mumford put it, “their sense of wonder.” Finally, the group began treading the diffi cult topic of the neces-sity of pop and its place within the classical world and academy. “I don’t think there’s any danger of academics staying away from rock,” Wuorinen observed wryly. Mackey, who reasserted his connection to pop and rock, also affi rmed that concert music’s special ability is in “distilling the most ambitious human feelings.”

Page 42: Composer Jeffrey Mumford

Page 43, left to right: Steven Mackey, photo: Alice Arnold; Composers Charles

Wuorinen, Jeffrey Mumford, and Steven Mackey with panel moderator Frank J. Oteri

for string quartet and electric guitar, which he described as a “very ebullient and joyful piece.” He explained how spherical speakers had been designed at Princeton (also demonstrated by Dan Trueman at the March 2006 New Instruments event) to match the resonance of the guitar to the resonance of the acoustic string instruments. Con-ventional speakers, he said, created an unwanted “laser beam effect.”

“I continue to take my vitamins and write pieces like that,” Mackey noted, but he wanted to darken the mood for the next piece, Time Release, a percussion concerto per-formed by soloist Colin Currie and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra. The third piece, Eating Greens, for symphony orchestra, he qualifi ed as weird and psychedelic. Mackey then gave a lengthy introduction to a scene from his one-man opera, Ravenshead, which was scripted and sung by Rinde Eckert and played by the Paul Dresher Electro-Acoustic Band. Based on the true story of a mediocre sailor who was “skillful with radios” and determined to win a world wide sailing race, Ravenshead narrates the man’s misguided voyage. In an excerpt from the opera’s con-tinuous second half, Eckert appeared sunburned and oily, performing in his distinctive half-spoken, half-sung style. His speech, Mackey explained, was notated rhythmically and then adjusted throughout rehearsals.

Jeffrey Mumford, Composer In Residence at the Ober-lin Conservatory of Music, as well as recipient of both the Academy Award in Music and a Guggenheim Fellowship, spoke second. The fi rst work he shared, for solo violin, was

PMP 44 PMP 45

On March 21, 2006, PMP hosted “New Frontiers in Music: New Instruments” in Presser Auditorium at Settlement Music School. Four individuals—composers, performers, inventors, and engineers—discussed their work in this unusual stream of musical practice. The panel consisted of Dan Overholt, Dan Trueman, Laetitia Sonami, and Eric Singer, who also moderated the event. Approximately 25 representatives of Philadelphia’s non-profit music community were in attendance.

Each panelist first discussed his or her work and then gave a demonstration on one of their instru-ments. Dan Overholt began. A composer, performer, and instrument builder based at the University of California, Santa Barbara’s Center for Research in Electronic Art Technology, Overholt designs instru-ments and software that allow increased and innovative performance control. He expressed an interest in computer interfaces that function differently from the standard computer-keyboard-mouse configura-tion and focuses especially on sensor technology, in which he teaches a class at UCSB. He explained his MATRIX, an interface he built for his master’s thesis “before the movie,” consisting of a square field of vertical sensors on which a performer could lay her or his hand to manipulate sound. He also described his Graphonic Interface, a clear, Plexiglas plate on which one can write like a whiteboard. The writing is translated into sound and projected by the entire Plexiglas plate, which acts as a speaker.

Finally, Overholt explained and demonstrated his Overtone Violin, an instrument shaped roughly like a violin, with a body, bridge with strings, and bow, but modified to include six strings, rather than four, and several electronic sensors. The shadows of vibrating strings are captured by optical sensors, which creates the sound; an accelerometer in a glove worn on the bow hand measures changes in gravity as the bow moves; wireless video captures additional motion. And, Overholt added, “There are knobs to control whatever you’d like.” He was able to create sounds waving the bow in the air without touching the strings of the instrument and also manipulated the speed of playback.

Eric Singer complimented the design of the Overtone Violin for its ability to communicate to an audi-ence what was actually being controlled by the player’s gestures. Such transparency, he commented, is difficult to achieve. Singer then introduced Dan Trueman, who also has a background working with string instruments, but for whom such traditional models are only jumping off points.

Trueman, a professor of composition and electronic music at Princeton University, started with a performance on his Bowed Sensor Speaker Array (BoSSA), using a traditional bow with a sensor on it to play on a violin finger board that replaced strings with additional sensors. These sensors triggered prerecorded sounds—in this performance, a recording of Trueman’s wife reciting the first four lines of the “Lobster Quadrille” from Alice in Wonderland. Depending on the direction he bowed, the recordings played forward or back. The poetry recitation combined with a virtual bamboo instrument, all of which played through a spherical speaker that Trueman had designed to imitate the resonance of traditional in-struments. He sought, he said, “a sense of presence and intimacy” and “acoustic engagement” with other instruments. The instrument, he explained, has no particular sound and could be configured to process

Left to right, top to bottom:

ForestBots, designed by Eric Singer

Laetitia Sonami demonstrates her Lady’s Glove.

Dan Trueman’s Bowed Sensor Speaker Array

(BoSSA)

Panelists Eric Singer, Dan Overholt, Dan Trueman,

and Laetitia Sonami

the performance of another player. In order to build the speakers, he and his colleagues had studied the radiative properties of various traditional instruments and had actually built a database of these properties.

Trueman then went on to discuss the Princeton Laptop Orchesta he co-founded, and com-municated the challenge of writing for the group as a composer, how to identify and work with what the performers could actually do. (PMP later took a group PLOrk’s concert on April 4—see page 46.)

Laetitia Sonami, who currently teaches at the San Francisco Art Institute and the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College, is an electronic composer, performer and sound installation artist focused on translating objects and movements into sound. She brought her Lady’s Glove, the invention for which she is best known. This glove is the fifth and final version of the instrument; the original was built 15 years ago using a rubber glove. Sonami admitted, “It started as a joke, I must say.”

The current glove is a black evening glove studded with an enormous number of sen-sors and connected by a thick cable of wires to a belt. Sonami’s performance consisted of a complicated set of hand gestures and arm movements, which she combined to trigger and manipulate sounds. Having worked with versions of this instrument since 1991, she said, has allowed her to go through a learning process. Now, she is fluent in performing with the glove and intuitively responds to its particularities: “Like any physical object,” she said, “it has its own parameters and demands.”

Sonami reflected further on aesthetic evolution within the field of music technology. She identified a nostalgia for hands on work, for errors and mistakes. In the 1980s, she said, there was a desire for predictability and efficiency, which made sense for use by consumers, but perhaps not so much, she suggested, for art. The process of growing with a system and mak-ing it better seemed to her an important aspect of this work. “At the beginning,” Sonami added, “I thought I had to prove that I could make [the glove] work.” It seemed important to validate the technological project by getting the invention to be able to imitate a traditional instrument. She continues to be interested in creating hybrid systems that privilege expres-sive power over control.

Singer followed up on Sonami’s comments with his own sense that new instruments mature as performers “stop thinking about individual sensors and begin thinking about gestures.” As fluency increases, performance becomes rooted more in intuition. Singer then discussed his own inventions, which are primarily robots that respond to MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) software. His work on LEMUR, the League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots, for example, included building ForestBot, the idea for which was spawned by

New Frontiers in Music: New Instruments

imagining what would happen to another robot that had “evolved far into the future.”

Singer has built musical sculptures that have been installed at the Angel Oren-sanz Foundation in New York, which were manipulated over the internet from Califor-nia. He refers to this style as “open-source composing.” He also offered footage of his Pyrophone, a device that combines musical performance with computer-controlled py-rotechnics. He ended by demonstrating his GuitarBot, a large, freestanding robot with rollers that restrict four strings at a time, creating various chords. Its eerie, self-pro-pelled twang was worth waiting for.

The panel concluded and took time for discussion and questions and answers from the audience, and a catered lunch offered further opportunities for conversation.

PMP 46

During the first week of April 2006, PMP took two “runout” trips to innovative music events. Both events focused on the rising in-fl uence of electronics in concert music. The fi rst, on Tuesday, April 4, was the Princeton Laptop Orchestra, cleverly nicknamed PLOrk. The second, on Thursday, April 6, was “New Strategies with DJ Spooky,” an evening of di-verse, mostly solo acts, curated by the young deejay.

PLOrk was founded by two Princeton pro-fessors, Dan Trueman and Perry Cook, both of whose work treads the line between compo-sition and computer science. Trueman builds electronic instruments and participated in PMP’s “New Frontiers in Music: New Instru-ments” event in March. During this concert, which took place in Princeton’s Richardson Auditorium in Alexander Hall, about 15 stu-dents sat on cushions onstage with Apple iBooks on their laps connected to specially-designed hemispherical speakers. Pieces on the program were contributed by Trueman, Cook, Paul Lansky, Brad Garton, Curtis Bahn

PMP enjoyed its third runout trip of 2006 on Friday, June 9th. As part of its efforts to expose local artistic leadership to interdisciplinary projects, the group attended a performance of the “Mandance Project” by Ballet Tech, a tuition-free public ballet school founded by choreographer Eliot Feld. The program featured special guests So Percussion and was held at the Joyce Theater in New York. The program featured fi ve works, all cho-reographed by Mr. Feld: Op. Boing, Pursuing Odette, Sacred Steel, Proverb, and A Stair Dance.

Op. Boing was danced in three parts by fi ve dancers. The percussion quartet performed only in this fi rst piece, playing Iannis Xenakis’ Rebonds and Okho. The choreography paired the fi ve dancers with a trampoline. In some sections of the piece, the trampoline was set up as a wall to climb or lunge into; in other sections, it was set up as the traditional horizon-tal plane, magnifying the effects of the dancers’ movements.

Pursuing Odette was performed by a solo female dancer, Ha-Chi Yu, to the fourth movement of Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 5. Ms. Yu summoned an arresting and lyrical performance, conjuring romantic imagery of a wounded swan. She put her capacity for grace and extraordinary fl exibility to use in con-veying longing, stretching up and then out along the fl oor.

Sacred Steel made another dramatic change in tone. Danced to three sacred steel guitar spirituals (Jesus Will Fix It For You,

FIELD TRIPS:

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by Sonny Treadway, God is a Good God, by the Campbell Broth-ers, and Don’t Let the Devil Ride, by Oris Mays), this piece was another solo work, this time for Wu-Kang Chen. Mr. Chen performed a concentrated dance on top of a dias, in a tense contrast to the free, ebullient energy of the accompanying music.

The fourth dance on the program, Proverb, featured Chris-topher Vo and was accompanied by an ethereal choral work by Steve Reich, also called Proverb. Vo performed with small lights attached to his palms on an otherwise dark stage. He fl ipped his hands to reveal, alternately, himself in silhouette and fragmented detail.

A Stair Dance, the evening’s fi nal piece, was a playful fi ve-member dance dedicated to Gregory Hines, “a great dancer and the avatar of cool.” Accompanied by a recorded So Percus-sion performing Steve Reich’s Tokyo/Vermont Counterpoint, the dancers bounced up and down several short sets of stairs. Reminiscent of a step routine with more fl ow and complex timing, the quick, rhythmic patterns of ascent and descent shared many qualities with Reich’s work and made them a sensible match.

and Tomie Hahn, Scott Smallwood, Seth Cluett, and Ge Wang. The program also featured three well-known guest artists, com-

poser and electronic musician Pauline Oliveros, So Percussion, and tabla master Zakir Hussain. In Oliveros’s work, her accordion’s sounds were transmitted to and processed by the PLOrk ensemble. So Percus-sion and Hussain performed in the fi nal piece of the concert, a partial improvisation that also featured Trueman on violin. The percussion quartet, whose members include Douglas Perkins, Adam Sliwinski, Jason Treuting, and Lawson White, were limited to pushing buttons on keypads to process Hussain’s playing, who was free to display his drumming virtuosity and wowed the audience.

Two days later, Symphony Space, at 95th and Broadway in New York, hosted “New Strategies with DJ Spooky.” Spooky, whose given name is Paul Miller, hosted several of his musical friends and col-leagues for an evening of performance that he likened to a mix-tape.

Matthew Shipp, a promising jazz pianist, opened the program. After his set, Vijay Iyer took the stage. Iyer is also a pianist, but he comple-ments the traditional instrument with electronic music, playing piano and laptop simultaneously. Guillermo E. Brown, a percussionist and electronic musician, sang and performed on a heavily modifi ed guitar and additional tech equipment, a “solo performance system” he has called the Explorer.

Pamela Z sang and performed with body-based technology, so that her gestures and movements determined the sounds she created, inte-grating elements of spoken word poetry. A club deejay, Rob Swift, spun a hiphop set and displayed his skill on the turntables, joking that the audience was quiet. “Feel free to make noise,” he encouraged us.

DJ Spooky performed with Ben Neill, a composer and inventor of the Mutantrumpet. Spooky offered a multimedia piece also meant for the club; projections of juxtaposed footage of Jimi Hendrix, the Beatles, and Outkast. The fi nal performer was Suphala, a young tabla player who has studied with the same Zakir Hussain PMP saw per-form that Tuesday. She played solo on the drums and then layered her performance with a composition she played from her iPod. A group improvisation didn’t quite get off the ground, and DJ Spooky invited the audience to an after party.

PMP’s trip participants had mixed reactions to both events. Both concerts presented experimental technologies and performance techniques, and the integration of pop and deejay culture can still appear forced or uneven. However, whatever succeeds out of these experiments will no doubt pave new paths for future musicians and their relationships to technology.

April Runouts:

were transmitted to and processed by the PLOrk ensemble. So Percus-

Runouts: were transmitted to and processed by the PLOrk ensemble. So Percus-sion and Hussain performed in the fi nal piece of the concert, a partial Runouts: sion and Hussain performed in the fi nal piece of the concert, a partial improvisation that also featured Trueman on violin. The percussion Runouts: improvisation that also featured Trueman on violin. The percussion quartet, whose members include Douglas Perkins, Adam Sliwinski, Runouts: quartet, whose members include Douglas Perkins, Adam Sliwinski, Jason Treuting, and Lawson White, were limited to pushing buttons Runouts: Jason Treuting, and Lawson White, were limited to pushing buttons

April Runouts: April

the Princeton Laptop Orchestra

and New Strategies with DJ Spooky

PMP 47

Left: DJ Spooky

Right: PLOrk

PMP 48

PMP’s annual large-scale professional development trip took about 20 leaders from the area’s music and arts community to New York from July 12 to 16, 2006 for a whirlwind trip including four performances, four related panel discussions, and a tour of public art on Coney Island. Three of the performances and two of the discussions were produced by this year’s Lincoln Center Festival. As ever, trip participants debated the merits of each event and found much to commend or contest. Members of the group, which this year included representatives from the dance and visual arts sectors, made several promising connections and took advantage of the opportunity to reflect on their fields on both local and national levels.

The first event of the trip, on Wednesday, July 12th, was a roundtable discussion with the creative team behind the new opera Grendel. Moderated by Lincoln Center Festival director Nigel Redden, the panel included Grendel director Julie Taymor, composer Elliot Goldenthal, and co-librettist J.D. McClatchy. Though the opera was receiving its premiere performance in the summer festival, Taymor and Goldenthal had been working on the project for 30 years. Based on the 1971 novel by John Gardner that reinterprets the story of Beowulf from the perspective of the monster Grendel, the opera developed through decades of planning, revision, and fundraising. Redden commented that Lincoln Center had been interested in the opera from its inception. Goldenthal and Taymor remembered the various concepts they toyed with: a rock opera, opera on ice, whether Grendel’s part should be sung or spoken, and in what language.

Taymor admitted that it had been a test to keep interest in the project for so long, though she found its content “more potent than 20 years.” She went on to suggest that the significance of the opera had changed; recently, she has seen its political implications in the myth of heroism and the creation of enemies. When asked by Redden about choosing to frame the project as an opera, rather than as the potentially less intensive musical theater, Goldenthal replied that the form stuck from the mid-1990s, when he brought some of the music he had composed to conductor Seiji Ozawa. “Ozawa was adamant,” he said, that it be kept an opera.

From there, the conversation turned to the character of Grendel himself. In the opera’s final version, Grendel’s role is sung in modern English; the chorus performs in Old English. The team made this decision, Taymor said, because they wanted the audience to be able to identify with him. As in the novel, Grendel transforms from a brute monster into a sympathetic figure, more philosophical than vicious. “The monster is really man, of course,” said Taymor. Goldenthal said he composed music that was semi-traditional in order to bring the audience close to the human elements of the story. “Unfortunately for Grendel,” she added, “he was born with an intellect.”

Goldenthal spoke about how he composed music for the climax of the opera. He wanted Grendel’s thoughts to approach the listener like telepathy, and so had them sung, rather than

by the soloist, by the chorus. “Opera does two things at once,” he observed. “It encapsulates, and it stretches.” He slowed the quarter note to a beat per second, hoping to achieve the expansive effect of the seminal moments in one’s life. Beowulf, played by a dancer, moves triple time to this slow music. Grendel is in the “process of coming to understand what has been ordained by fate,” said the composer. The opera itself faced a bittersweet end — three decades in the making, their production was over in four performances. However, Goldenthal took an optimistic stance:

“Humans wait 70 years for one decent kiss, so four performances is not bad.”The group rushed from the Grendel discussion to STREB vs. GRAVITY, a “POPACTION” per-

formance choreographed by Elizabeth Streb. Streb developed POPACTION from dance, and chose the term to bring attention to her high energy, intensely athletic choreographic style. Sharing as much with gymnastics as dance, her performers leap, fall, collide, dive, and run through precisely timed routines that pit them against swinging cinder blocks, tightropes, and a human-sized hamster wheel. For STREB vs. GRAVITY, her performers wore tight, bold suits that accentuated their action-figure parallel. They lunged and caught each other with speed, confidence, and also humor. Streb spliced the routines with video segments that explicitly tied her work to considerations of space and time, and she paired her choreography with pulsing dance music that shook the theater. The kids loved it.

Thursday, July 13th began with introductions and discussion among the participants in the trip. Attendees mentioned the current central concerns of their organizations, which ranged from audience expansion to re-articulating their mission, and from site-specific prac-tice to listener education. The morning continued with a panel discussion featuring three prominent music curators in New York: Ara Guzelimian, former Senior Director at Carnegie Hall, Ethel Raim, Artistic Director of the Center for Traditional Music and Dance, and Bill Bragin, Director of Joe’s Pub. John Schaefer, host of WNYC’s “New Sounds” and “Soundcheck,” moderated the discussion.

The curators spoke about their work as forming differing links in the vast musical web in the city and beyond. Raim emphasized how embedded her work is in community, and excitedly described the validation that her Center’s programming offered to immigrant artists. Bragin spoke about his work in terms of making intimate concerts with established artists available, as well as offering opportunities to emerging artists. He sees Joe’s Pub as a place for “hyphen-ated,” or cross-genre music. Guzelimian began by pointing out the healthy contradiction of Carnegie Hall: it represents the high classical tradition, but it is also a very democratic institu-tion. He offered by way of example a 1912 “Concert of Negro Music.” Together, they discussed the pleasure of, in Guzelimian’s words, “the risk well-taken,” such as when a complicated artist

brings together different audiences for a very live concert.

The concert Thursday evening was indeed live. Goran Bregovic’s Wedding and Funeral Orchestra, an enormous ensemble with a brass band, a male chorus, a string section, and two female soloists, all driven by a singing percussionist with a bass drum and Bregovic himself outfitted like a rock star with a white suit and cobalt blue electric guitar, were welcomed with Beatles-esque cheers by their audience. Bregovic is a household name in the Balkans; he has composed for the likes of Cesaria Evora and Iggy Pop. This was his group’s first appearance in New York. Indeed, the concert felt like a sort of comfortable rock show, with young women shouting, getting up to dance, and leading a parade of revelers around the concert hall as the band toured through their two albums. Most of the force of the music flowed from the indefatigable drummer and the burly brass band. They blasted away while Bregovic sang or shim-mied his shoulders. He played a gracious encore and roped the audience into yelling

“Charge!” infantry-style, on his count.Friday morning, PMP’s group piled into

a bus and headed to Coney Island. On the boardwalk, Maureen Sullivan, Director of External Affairs at Creative Time, gave a per-sonal tour of “The Dreamland Artist Club.” Creative Time is a non-profit organization that supports public art. Their Dreamland Artist Club brought together a wealth of

PMP 49

Anti-hero and Acrobats, Brass bands and Boardwalk: PMP at the Lincoln Center Festival

FIELD TRIPS:

AN INTRODUCTION

Left to right:

Coney Island Freak Show building facade

Grendel with baritone Eric Owens

and dancer Desmond Richardson,

photo courtesy of Stephanie Berger;

www.stephaniebergerphoto.com

Goran Bregovic’s Wedding and Funeral

Orchestra, photo courtesy of Stephanie

Berger; www.stephaniebergerphoto.com

Page 50:

Lincoln Center Festival Trip participants at

Coney Island

emerging painters, mostly from New York, to paint new handmade signs for the carnival games and vendors. The hand-painted signs, she told the group, are a long-standing tradition at Coney Island. In addi-tion to the signs, Creative Time commissioned an enormous mural from Os Gemeos, twin brothers from Brazil, who executed a whimsical dreamscape in fi nely detailed spray paint. After such edifi cation, the tour headed for a walk down the beach and a trip to both Coney Island Museum and the famed freak show.

The evening continued at The Stone, a bare-bones concert venue founded by John Zorn where 100% of ticket revenue goes to the musi-cians. The concert featured bassist Devin Hoff and guests, a young group of experimental musicians including Ches Smith on drums, An-drea Parkins on accordion, piano, and electronics, and Jessica Pavone on viola. Dissonant and cerebral, the music made quite a counterpoint to the afternoon. The musicians played well together, bringing an air of explorative focus to the room.

Saturday, July 15th, the fi nal full day of the trip, was packed with speakers and concluded with the dramatic Grendel. In the morning, representatives of the French and Dutch consulates’ gave informative presentations on what kinds of artistic activities and collaborations they support, and how. Cees de Bever, Director for Performing Arts for the Consulate General of the Netherlands, and Emmanuel Morlet, who serves as both Director of Music at the Cultural Services of the French Embassy and Program Offi cer at the French-American Fund for Con-temporary Music, described their work in supporting programming that highlights their nations’ artists. Following their presentations, culture staff from The Pew Charitable Trusts gave a brief news update on their projects, especially those of the Philadelphia Center for Arts and Heritage. New forms of support are on offer through small Inter-disciplinary Professional Development Grants, and both a marketing initiative and software-training program through the Philadelphia Cultural Management Initiative.

John Schaefer then moderated another panel, this time with so-prano Harolyn Blackwell, saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa, and guitarist Bryce Dessner. Each musician, to some degree, blurs the boundaries of his or her primary genre. Blackwell, who has sung with the Metropolitan Opera, noted that she started in musical theater and conceives of herself under a more general heading. “I’m a performer,” she said. Mahanthappa, who is usually branded a jazz performer, feels that the genre connotes a lot of things that don’t fi t with his musical interests. More signifi cant to his identity as a musician, he said, is as a fi rst-generation American. Dessner plays guitar in both the indie rock band The National and in a classically-trained group called Clogs. The National, he said, can fi ll a thousand seats. This is not the case with Clogs, but in the concert halls where that ensemble performs, they’re able to explore more conceptually.

The musicians considered an array of examples of crossover art-ists, shows, and projects. Dessner mentioned Sufjan Stevens, a friend and indie musician who’s being appreciated as a composer. Likewise, Mahanthappa’s best friend Vijay Iyer is known as a boundary-blurring jazz pianist and multimedia afi cionado. Harolyn recalled her experi-ence learning the musical Sweeney Todd and her surprise at the real diffi culty of the music. Schaefer pointed out that a rock musician plays the leading role in the current production. Mahanthappa described

his recent collaboration with an Indian classical saxophonist named Kadri Gopalnath in an expanded ensemble with drumset, electric guitar, and mrigindgam. Each musician shared excerpts of her or his work: Mahanthappa played from a live recording of the Gopalnath collaboration; Blackwell played a gorgeous excerpt of her singing Sum-mertime, and Dessner played tracks of both of his bands.

In the afternoon, the group attended a panel discussion on STREB vs. GRAVITY with Streb; choreographer and fi lmmaker Yvonne Rainer; Jennifer Tipton, lighting designer and Professor at the Yale University School of Drama, and a friend of Streb’s named Gordon. Streb made several observations about working with and against traditions in the performing arts. “I pretend that I have more control over you in a darkened space,” she said. She said she deliberately turns up the volume on the music because she wants young people in the house.

“More is more,” she affi rmed. “Here in New York, I fi gured, what the hell. I wouldn’t be that careful with the audience.”

Throughout the discussion, Streb displayed a simultaneously ir-reverent and dedicated attitude, tossing off lines like, “I do anything I want for as long as it interests me,” while meaning it in earnest, and going on to add, “My job as an artist is to stay on the subject that most fascinates me.” For one, she is interested in physics and “inher-ent timing that tells the truth.” These classics of movement, including velocity, momentum, and acceleration, form the foundation of her creative process. At the same time, she hopes to make a certain hom-age to the factory worker in the danger and precision of her style of choreography.

The fi nal event of the PMP professional development trip was a visit to the opera. Grendel featured a masterful performance by Eric Owens in the title role, a cameo appearance by Denyce Graves as a nonplussed dragon, an equally brief but stunning appearance by the dancer Desmond Richardson as Beowulf, and fi ne performances by tenors Richard Croft and Jay Hunter Morris, as well as soprano Laura Claycomb. The opera begins late in Grendel’s life, though it fl ashes back to traumas of childhood and the rampages of his earlier adult life. Grendel’s fellow creatures, whom he abandons, including his mother, were particularly moving, sad yet elegant hybrids of, perhaps, trees and gazelles. The existential villain blustered, railed, and moped his way through his rivalry with society and offered the audience a strik-ing and sophisticated journey to his inevitable end.

PMP hosts an annual large-scale professional development trip to New York on an annual basis. Last year included Robert Wilson’s I La Galigo, Sunny Murray at the Village Vanguard, Merce Cunningham’s Ocean, and Basil Twist’s La bella dormente nel bosco. In 2004, partici-pants saw the American Composers Orchestra with eighth blackbird, a jazz organ summit at the Iridium, a concert of traditional Mexican music at Town Hall, and Sweeney Todd at the New York City Opera.

FIELD TRIPS:

AN INTRODUCTION

From the moment one sets eyes on the Painted Bride’s exterior, a kaleidoscopic mosaic designed by Philadelphia artist Isaiah Zagar, one senses that this is a place where creativity lives. Dedicated to the potential art has to inspire, heal, and af-fect social change, the Painted Bride is an intimate, artist-focused performance space and gallery in the heart of Philadelphia’s Old City. In the current climate where idealism is too often set aside in the interest of commercial viability, the Bride provides a home base for artists developing new ideas and challenging art that explores vital questions raised by gender, religion, sexual orientation, economic class, race, and other relevant issues.

Founded in 1969 by Gerry Givnish and a group of visual artists who had re-cently graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts, the Bride began as a coop gallery in a former bridal shop, an oasis on what was then a desolate South Street. Not long after the gallery was founded, it became host to impromptu jazz concerts, improvisational dance performances, poetry readings, and other performing arts. The Bride has evolved organically into an internationally recognized art-ist-centered, multi-disciplinary space, located in its permanent home on Vine Street since 1981.

For 37 seasons, the Bride has infused Philadelphia’s cultural landscape with compelling programs of world and jazz music, poetry/spoken word, theater, and dance. It also presents a vibrant series of art exhibits and installations in the bi-level Independence Foundation Gallery for the Visual Arts. The Bride’s “Jazz on Vine” series, initiated in 1975, is the longest continuously running jazz series in Philadelphia.

Lenny Seidman, music curator at the Painted Bride since 1986, shared with PMP his thoughts on how music fi ts into the Bride’s broader artistic vision: “My world outlook has a lot to do with my musical vision, and my wish to bring cul-tures together not only onstage, but in the audience.” Acknowledging that his work at the Bride is inseparable from his own journey as a musician, Seidman pointed out that it always made sense to him to focus on both jazz and world music. “Jazz is a deep motivator for me. I’m a Philly guy, and some years ago you could be on one street corner and be able to hear the John Coltrane Quintet, and then after that set was over just go about 200 yards to another spot and hear Mingus or the Chicago Art Ensemble or Thelonius Monk. So this is the music I got exposed to and that really had a tremendous impact. When I think about

PMP 50 PMP 51

Spotlight: Painted Bride Art Center

the jazz musicians that have influenced me, there’s Coltrane, who was going really deep into Indian music, and Miles Davis, who included sitar and tabla players on the 1970 CD, On the Corner. So I started out doing these parallel things: world music and jazz as two separate series. Then I wanted to hear how the branches of jazz keep forming new sprouts from other infl uences around the world. I think this is a distinctive characteristic of the Bride, and I’m starting to see it in other places, too. Traditions grow—they move, and they’re not stagnant. That’s an understanding I have all the time. I’m not a purist in that way.”

When asked about some of the artistic ideals he strives to preserve in his musical programming at the Bride, Seid-man said, “I want to have an emotional experience with the music. I feel it’s really important that it’s passionate—that it moves me deeply, because that’s what got me into music. So if it’s just super-intelligent and not emotional, then it leaves me wanting. I bring that sensibility into the music series, and that’s just personal. But I always felt like the series was personal anyway.”

This fall the Bride introduces a number of new pro-grams and projects that continue to incubate artistic exploration while connecting artists to the larger Phila-delphia community. These programs include “XL,” a new two-year music series featuring large ensembles funded by the Philadelphia Music Project, “Under Construction,” a dance residency for Philadelphia choreographers, and

“Telling Tales,” a digital storytelling opportunity for teens affected by gun violence. The Bride also continues to present “4-Sites,” which features two-fl oor, solo instal-lations by Philadelphia artists.

Left to right:

Coney Island Freak Show Building Facade

Grendel with baritone Eric Owens and dancer Desmond Richardson—photo courtesy of Stephanie Berger—www.stephaniebergerphoto.com

Goran Bregovic’s Wedding and Funeral Orchestra—photo courtesy of Stephanie Berger—www.stephaniebergerphoto.com

Papo Vasquez performs at the Painted Bride

The Philadelphia Music Project (PMP) was initiated by The Pew Chari-table Trusts in 1989 to foster artistic excellence and innovation in the region’s nonprofi t music community. PMP meets this objective by sup-porting commissions and productions of new works, presentations of large-scale or long-neglected works, interdisciplinary collaborations, and similar programmatic enhancements. PMP maintains a com-prehensive professional development program, producing seminars, conferences, and fi eld trips; providing consulting services in strategic planning, public relations, and audience development; and offering modest grants for professional development to the leadership of local music organizations. PMP is a program of the Philadelphia Center for Arts and Heritage, funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts and adminis-tered by The University of the Arts.

Philadelphia Center for Arts and Heritage

1608 Walnut Street, 18th Floor

Philadelphia, PA 19103

T 267 350 4960

F 267 350 4998

www.philadelphiamusicproject.org

[email protected]

Editor

Matthew Levy, PMP Director

Managing Editor

Emily Sweeney, PMP Program Associate

Design

fl uxism.com

The idea for this Philadelphia-based organization, whose purpose is to support the develop-ment and performance of contemporary chamber music, originated in 1983 when Reichert and composer Karl Middleman produced a very successful concert featuring their own works and those of other young Philadelphia composers. This positive reception opened Reichert’s eyes to Philadelphia’s untapped new music audience. The next year, Reichert and Waters founded the nonprofi t membership organization Network for New Music in “a fi t of youthful optimism,” as she recently put it. As it turns out, that burst of energy had a lot more behind it than anyone

could have guessed. In the 22 years since its founding, Network has commissioned, premiered and presented more than 450 works by world class American and international composers, representing a broad range of musical styles and visions.

What began as a forum for Network’s members to present their own music soon became a laboratory for the creation and presentation of new chamber music by composers worldwide. As Reichert remembers, “I felt that the fi eld of new music in Philadelphia and around the country could be better served if Network was not a membership organization, but an ensemble-based group. That’s the point at which the organization really took off.”

Network released a CD called Dream Journal in 2002 to critical acclaim, helping to familiar-ize the public with composers Augusta Read Thomas and Philadelphia’s own Jennifer Higdon. A new CD, At the Still Point, was just released in the spring of 2006 and features commissions by Melinda Wagner, Gerald Levinson and Thomas Whitman. Reichert is also seeking new ways for Network’s audiences to experience music, collaborating with dance groups, spoken word artists, video artists and fi lmmakers.

Network continues to nurture young talent through educational initiatives. One current project involves composer workshops in Philadelphia’s Springside School for girls that are meant to encourage young women to pursue composition, a fi eld in which women are signifi -cantly underrepresented. Network is also in residence at Haverford College, where its musicians will coach students in new chamber music, culminating with a concert in December.

As artistic director, Reichert recognizes that her biggest challenge is remaining open to emerging forms of music. “I think the new music scene has been changing a lot, and I think Network is positioned well to respond to the changes. The American scene is so wonderful because of the incredible diversity of styles. I mean, it’s easy to continue to perform and present works that one likes or feels an affi nity to. But I think it’s really important to stay open to new styles and ideas, those that we are not necessarily comfortable with, but that are interesting and have merit.”

Network’s success is due in no small part to the caliber of performing artists that it attracts. The Ensemble now draws two-thirds of its players from the ranks of the Philadelphia Orchestra, and a signifi cant number from the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia. Reichert points out that these exceptional musicians are often focused primarily on traditional repertoire, but they’re very enthusiastic about interacting with and performing the work of living composers. “I know that a Network musician will bring the experience of performing contemporary music

back to their performances of the standard repertoire. To hear and play Beethoven and Brahms through the ears of another century can be wild!”

According to Reichert, Philadelphia has proven to be fertile ground for Network’s growth and development. “It’s a great place to begin an arts organization for many rea-sons, from relatively low rent to access to fabulous musicians and great musical insti-tutions. There’s also a growing awareness of the arts in this city, finally, and the impor-tance of it and how it impacts us nationally and internationally and our image abroad.” Reichert says that Network’s audiences have grown steadily year by year, and she’s excited by the challenge of perpetuating that growth. This fall, join Network for New Music for performances of music by Michael Hersch, John Harbison, Sebastian Currier, Bernard Rands, and many others. Also, this spring Network will premiere works by Curt Ca-cioppo, Zhou Long and Richard Festinger, as well as collaborate with Group Motion Multi Media Dance Theatre in performances of George Crumb’s Quest and a new work by David Ludwig.

Spotlight: Network for New Music

Begun by composers for composers, The Network for New Music was founded in 1984 by pianist Dr. Linda Reichert and electro-acoustic musician and composer Joseph Waters.

PMP 52

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The University of the Arts Philadelphia Music Project320 South Broad Street Philadelphia, PA 19102

THE PHILADELPHIA MUSIC PROJECT, a program of the Philadelphia Center for Arts and

Heritage, is funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts and Administered by The University of the Arts.

THE PEW CHARITABLE TRUSTS serves the public interest by providing information, advancing

policy solutions and supporting civic life. The Trusts will invest $248 million in fiscal year 2007 to

provide organizations and citizens with fact-based research and practical solutions for challenging

issues. www.pewtrusts.org

THE UNIVERSITY OF THE ARTS is the nation’s first and only university dedicated to the visual,

performing, and communication arts. Its 2,000 students are enrolled in undergraduate and graduate

programs on its campus in the heart of Philadelphia’s Avenue of the Arts. Its history as a leader in

educating creative individuals spans more than 125 years. www.uarts.edu