May 2012Composing While Living

April Fool’s Day 2012 was no joke for me: it was a serious time to relax, my first respite after two premieres and symphonic tours in the preceding months.  The night before, I’d returned to California from the New York premiere of “Mass Transmission,” with all the insanity that comes with an orchestral tour.  And just a month earlier, I’d been touring with the Chicago Symphony for the premiere of “Alternative Energy.” By the time the first of April dawned — marking the end of my crazy period — I was ready to get back to writing music.

So how does a composer stay focused on what counts most — composing — amidst the endless ‘non-composing’ demands of a career?  This is something encountered by everyone in any line of work: there’s always that ever-expanding list that draws energy from the main focus.

For me, the category of ‘non-composing’ includes performing, curating, and administration.  Performing can range from playing live electronica with orchestras to DJing in clubs; curating extends from programming new-music at the Chicago Symphony to designing classical/club Mercury Soul events; and administration is just about anything involving that cursed digital-age sprite, email.  There’s a lot of that, especially related to the managing of my catalogue of music (even when primarily handled by a music distributor).

I consider these non-composing activities essential to my compositional life, but there’s no getting around the creation of new work.  That’s the most important thing, and I make sure it receives at least half of my time.  My methods are evolving with my life, but a few tricks continue to help me compose:

• Write first. The morning dawns, and my creativity enters prime time.  That’s when my mind is the freshest, when the California heat hasn’t yet dissipated the morning coolness (and with it, my motivation), and when the caffeine trajectory is on its way up.  Some people do the reverse of this, such as my CSO colleague Anna Clyne: she writes all night long.  Either way, one needs to reserve one’s magic time for writing.

• Resist digital life. My friend and collaborator Anne Patterson, a director/designer who works with me on Mercury Soul, told me that she resists the urge to check email first thing in the morning — and paints instead.  That’s a great plan if you’re a monk, but not so easy for the rest of us — especially those of us out West, where the world wakes up three hours later than New York (where my management and my music distributor need answers before lunchtime).  But that advice ranks as some of the best I’ve ever received.  Email, Twitter, and Facebook are sirens of the digital age: one hears their call, opens a web browser for a quickie, and suddenly gets pulled into the vortex.  So, strap yourself to the mast!

• If possible, leave home. Having a detached studio cottage is one of the great joys in my life.  Perhaps it relates to some man-cave urge to wall oneself off, survivalist style, with weapons and food (in my case, electronic instruments and liquor).  My daily commute, but a few steps through the backyard, nonetheless gives me the sensation of ‘going to work,’ and there is valuable productivity resulting from that.  Even city-folk can have a separate space, since studio-offices can be found at a reasonable expense.  My friend Lorraine Sanders has enough square footage in her two-bedroom condo to hole-up in a corner with a laptop (she’s a writer), but she chooses to go to the San Francisco Writers Grotto because it is ultimately more productive.

• Schedule like a German. We may be artists, but we need to run our creative lives like a gulag — or deadlines get missed.  I carefully arrange my composing schedule so that I overlap projects as little as possible.  Ideally, that means reserving the mornings for composing the latest piece, while leaving the afternoons for orchestrating another piece in its final stages.

• Lean to say No. It’s hard but necessary.  Creating engaging new work takes time, but we all get tempted to accept every project (this includes non-composing activities).   Artists need work more than most everyone else, since we are not exactly receiving government stimulus funds. But for my sanity, and the quality of my work, I try to differentiate between a ‘hefty but reasonable’ amount of work and an ‘insane life-killing’ number of projects.

As life changes, so do the best-laid plans — and with two young children and composer-in-residency in Chicago, I constantly adapt.  For example, I tried composing on the road. That, however, didn’t work so well, so for now my composing and family demands neatly overlap (for both, I need to be home a reasonable amount).  In a few years I may have a different list of composing guidelines, but for right now these are the ones I follow.  Now get back to work!

Apr 2012March Madness

What makes a maverick?

This question was posed to me so many times over the past month, a whirlwind of music-making that stretched from San Francisco to Michigan to Miami to New York.  As one of the two composers commissioned to write new pieces for the San Francisco Symphony Mavericks Festival, I couldn’t simply wave away the question — even though, to be sure, I’d always rather discuss the music itself rather than the label attached to it.

And to be sure, “Mass Transmission” is not a wild-eyed, Left Coast freakshow of a piece.  It’s not a blizzard of notes (à la “Alternative Energy”), nor a variegated exploration of surreal landscapes (à la “The B-Sides”). The piece is spare, lyrical, and direct: the true story of a mother and daughter communicating over long-distance radio transmissions in 1922.

Scored for chorus, organ, and electronica, the piece has no wall of orchestral figuration to hide behind.  While the choral writing is layered and harmonically elusive at times, it provides singable lines and warm harmonies.  So those looking for their hair to be set afire by the most-notes-per-square-minute encountered something quite different.

What “Mass Transmission” does attempt to do, however, is find new ways to tell a hauntingly beautiful story about human warmth processed through cold technology.  The text is an obscure publication by the Dutch government about the world’s first long-distance transmission facility.  Built in the 1920’s, it connected the motherland with its colony in the Java (where Dutch children were sent to work as pages while their parents remained back home).  Parents were allowed a few minutes every month to hear the speak with their children over these transmissions.

That dramatic juxtaposition required some musical ones: superimposing, for example, the toccata-esque organ music of the Dutch Telegraph Office with ethereal, emotional choral writing.  Paul Jacobs, celebrated as one of the greatest living organists, went into overdrive in these mechanistic passages, providing a mad-scientist virtuosity over which the chorus wove heartfelt lines.

These two worlds are seen through a haze of short-wave radio static, a sonic version of a theatrical scrim.  (Old radio sounds are eerie and alluring — like electronic purring — and much richer than the white-noise on today’s FM radio dial.)  This electronic soundworld morphs into the completely different texures of Javanese gamelan in the middle of the piece, which is a setting of the diary of a Dutch girl about her childhood in the jungle.  Out of tune gongs, light drumming, and jungle noises mingle while the organ lays low.  The final movement returns to the Telegraph Office, where the mother remarks how much this strange experience has changed her.

The piece came off beautifully, and the rest of the Maverick Festival showcased the wide variety of new thinking coming from American musical minds:

Edgar Varèse’s “Ameriques” still sounds as if its ink were wet — so fresh and exuberant, it does just about everything a piece of orchestral music could possibly do.  The SFS took 14 percussionists on the road for that piece alone.

John Adams’ “Absolute Jest,” which required a ‘solo string quartet’ to be stuffed into that burgeoning tour-bus, is a psychedelic trip through Beethoven fragments.  It’s like speeding through a complicated freeway merge and almost colliding with a vanload of madmen.

David Del Tredici’s “Syzegy” is my favorite post-serialist music, a complete showpiece for soprano and ensemble that pushes the extremes of every instrument involved.

Lou Harrison’s “Organ Concerto” brilliantly combines two disparate sonic worlds — a pipe organ and a battery of strange percussion — in a way that sounds absolutely organic.

John Cage’s “Songbook” — well, that piece may just be too ‘mavericky’ for me, but it was a huge, courageous endeavor to bring on the road.  Devoting an entire half of a symphonic concert to a piece of performance art ­was a maverick move in itself.  It’s cool to open a Carnegie Hall concert with, well, a wild-eyed West Coast freakshow.

Thanks to the SFS for including me in this exceptional festival; to Maestro Donato Cabrera for bringing “Mass Transmission” to life; and to three wonderful choruses which devoted so much time to a new and challenging work.

Mar 2012Mass Transmission & Mavericks

Ever seen a sandcrab scurry from one hole to another?  That’s me right now!

Most of my year is spent in my cottage studio, where I roam unshaven in pajamas while laboring on new compositions.  When the premieres occur, I emerge blinking from my hole, the bright light of the real world hitting both me and the piece.

As it happens, the current period has lots of bright light: last month was the Chicago Symphony premiere of Alternative Energy, this month is the San Francisco Symphony premiere of Mass Transmission. It is being showcased on the Mavericks Festival in San Francisco and taken on tour to New York and Ann Arbor.

Blink, blink!

Mass Transmission tells the true story of a distantly-separated family communicating over the earliest radio transmissions.  It is a kind of 1920’s-era Skype: on one end of the line is a Dutch girl sent to be a page in the colonial government of the East Indies — and on the other end of the line is her mother, thousands of miles away in the Dutch Telegraph Office.  Scored for chorus, organ, and electronica, the piece intimately examines the warmth of human emotions pulsing through a mechanistic medium.

Two obscure texts are set to music.  I came across an old, anonymous publication by the Dutch government that compiled recollections and transcripts of these communications.  This gives us the mother’s perspective and forms the outer movements.  The central movement gives us the daughter’s perspective of jungle-life in Java, drawn from recollections by Elizabeth van Kampen about her early years there.

The chorus sing these texts, comprising the ‘animal warmth’ of the piece, while the electronics give us a ‘musical scrim’ of static and short-wave radio sounds.  The organ connects the two: sometimes it supports the chorus, sometimes it plays the toccata-like music of the Dutch Telegraph Office.

The biggest challenge: creating something original, moving, and provocative within the confines of a chorus.  I love choral music — my introduction to classical music came through the choir of St. Christopher’s School in Virginia — but the medium poses significant challenges.  Unlike instrumentalists, singers produce their pitches themselves, so a composer cannot simply hurl any succession of notes at them.

The biggest buzz: writing for superstar organist Paul Jacobs. The organ is, after all, the world’s oldest synthesizer, the only instrument capable of blasting-out an orchestra.  Paul’s participation in this piece highly informed the composition of it.  Think: hair-on-fire toccata evoking the mechanistic world of the telegraph. 

And yes, writing for the San Francisco Symphony Chorus was a zinging buzz too.  Chorus master Ragnar Bohlin, after all, was the person who made this piece happen: when he heard the SF Symphony premiere The B-Sides and Chanticleer premiere Sirens in the spring of 2009, he immediately suggested we take a piece to Michael Tilson Thomas.  It is the third piece I have written with Michael in mind — after The B-Sides and Mothership — and it was a joy to compose, perhaps my most personal piece.

Mass Transmission is dedicated to my wife Jamie and my son Toliver, who are always at ‘the other end of the line’ when I ring them up from various cities. The piece happens March 15-17 in San Francisco, March 22 in Ann Arbor, and March 29 in New York. Please come if you can!

Feb 2012Alternative Energy

And we have liftoff.

After a full year of composing, editing, proofing, and — yes, mixing at Skywalker Studios (more on that in a bit) — I finally reach the premiere of Alternative Energy this month.  Maestro Riccardo Muti and the Chicago Symphony give the work’s first performances at Symphony Center in Chicago (Feb 2-4 & 7) before taking it to California (Feb 14 in SF, Feb 17 in Orange County, Feb 18 in San Diego).

I decided to go big.

Alternative Energy is an ‘energy symphony’ spanning four movements and hundreds of years.  Beginning in a rustic Midwestern junkyard in the late 19^th Century, the piece travels through ever greater and more powerful forces of energy — a present-day particle collider, a futuristic Chinese nuclear plant — until it reaches a future Icelandic rainforest, where humanity’s last inhabitants seek a return to a simpler way of life.

These worlds are conjured by a variety of symphonic effects.  A blues fiddle accompanied by car parts dominates the ‘old-time’ first movement (the principle percussion, Cynthia Yeh, plays a ‘car part drumset’ assembled from scraps collected at a junkyard).  Actual recordings of Chicago’s FermiLab particle accelerator appear in highly dramatic form in the present-day movement (think: massive machines waking up all around you).  Surreal and trippy microtonal sonorities take us to the edge of a future industrial wasteland in China’s Xinjiang Provience.  And gently out-of-town, gamelan-sounding figuration, complimented by surround-sound jungle recordings and future birdsong, brings us to the far-off rainforest where the piece ends.

Like the tone poems of Berlioz or Liszt — though very different in sound — this piece uses an idée fixe, or melody, to link everything together.  This tune is heard on the fiddle, which conjures a figure like Henry Ford working in his junkyard, and is accompanied by a ‘phantom orchestra’ that trails the fiddler like ghosts.  The accelerando cranking of a car motor becomes a special motif in the piece, a kind of rhythmic embodiment of ever-more-powerful energy.  Indeed, this crank motif explodes in the electronics in the second movement, where we arrive at present-day Chicago.

In order to recreate the sound of a particle accelerator booting up, I travelled up to FermiLab (an enormous facility north of the city) and wandered around making recordings of the machinery involved in splitting atoms.  Huge power surges, epic hydraulic releases, alien-sounding high frequencies, you name it. Then I manipulated those sounds in my studio back in California, ultimately visiting Skywalker Studios to properly mix these sounds in a surround-sound environment.  Gary Rydstrom, a famed sound designer who works with folks like George Lucas and Stephen Spielberg, provided invaluable help in recreating the effect of the accelerator ‘waking up.’  Hip-hop beats, jazzy brass interjections, and joyous voltage blasts bring the movement to a clangorous finish.

Zoom a hundred years into a dark future of the Xinjiang Province.  On an eerie wasteland, a lone flute sings a tragically distorted version of the idée fixe, dreaming of a forgotten natural world.  But a powerful industrial energy simmers to the surface, and over the ensuing hardcore techno, wild orchestral splashes drive us to a catastrophic meltdown.  As the smoke clears, we find ourselves even further into the future: an Icelandic rainforest on a hotter planet.  Gentle, out-of-tune pizzicato accompany our fiddler, who returns over a woody percussion ensemble to make a quiet plea for simpler times.

Quite a lot of ground to cover — I’ll give you that.

But it can be done.  Symphonies can have both sonic inventiveness and narrative imagination — as long as the music drives the enterprise.  A mere glance at the movement titles should be enough to set the stage, and then it’s all about the orchestra.  Even the electronic component — the newest element of the piece — is at the service of the orchestra, of which it is just another section.

Whether this piece pulls it off is yet to be seen.  If you want to find out, please come!  Here’s the info.

Jan 2012Lots of music (& an orangutan)

It’s the last day of 2011.  My wife and son are napping peacefully.  I am shuffling about downstairs, wistfully remembering former New Years Eve parties that, through the prism of parenthood, seem as distant as hobbits and dragons.

Yes, life has changed over the past year.

Amidst a happy storm of composing new works, performing old ones, curating, and DJing, I have added ‘7am toddler body-slamming’ to my activities.  (Toliver greatly enjoys challenging me to wrestle, often just before I’ve had my first sip of caffeine.)  Having a baby graduate into toddlerhoold is certainly my biggest change of 2011, probably on the level of having an orangutan thrown through your living room window, but several significant musical events came to pass as well.

Alternative Energy was written.  This ‘energy symphony’ spans four movements and hundreds of years, beginning in an 1896 Midwestern junkyard and traveling through greater and ever more powerful forces of energy — a present-day particle collider, a futuristic Chinese nuclear plant — until it reaches a future Icelandic rainforest, where humanity’s last inhabitants seek a return to a simpler life.  While the Chicago Symphony has played several of my works on seasons past, Alternative Energy is the first written expressly for this orchestra and Maestro Riccardo Muti as part of my composer-in-residency.  Its composition occupied me for much of 2011, and I found my approach to integrating electronics into the orchestra evolving and, perhaps, maturing.  The sounds coming from the speakers are as carefully crafted as the sonorities in the orchestra, and the influences reach far beyond techno.  If you find yourself in Chicago or California in February, please come take a listen to my biggest piece to date.

Also in 2011: Mass Transmission was written.  This third piece for Michael Tilson Thomas uses not an orchestra but a chorus, supported by organ (the hands and feet of the amazing Paul Jacobs) and electronics.  An intriguing bit of early radio history brought about this work, which tells the story of far-separated parents and children speaking over the first wireless radio transmissions.  Actual transcripts and recollections of the 1920’s communications between Holland and Java are set to music in an eerie and intimate twenty-minute work.  Having this piece commissioned as part of the SF Symphony Mavericks Festival was a great honor, and it is especially exciting bringing the piece on tour with the SFS to New York and Michigan after the March premiere in California.

There was the premiere of Mothership by the YouTube Symphony at the Sydney Opera House.  While Mothership is not as grand in scope as other symphonic works of mine, it satisfied a long-elusive goal: writing a gripping opener.  Works like The B-Sides and Liquid Interface grapple with large concepts over long time spans, but I was overdue to write that 9-minute barn-burner.  In the process, I learned (again) that the simplest thing is the hardest thing.  Much credit goes to Maestro Michael Tilson Thomas, who leaned on me to create something both challenging and immediately engaging.

I also learned that high production values are not antithetical to the artform.  The YouTube Symphony was probably the most elaborately produced classical event ever, and certainly the one seen by the most eyes.  The field of classical music, replete with century-old instruments and innovations based around natural acoustics, has an understandable mistrust of this kind of Hollywood-style showbiz. But the digital age offers powerful tools to us as creators and communicators.  Using YouTube to corral a stunning group of musicians from around the globe, bringing that orchestra to life with imaginative lighting and projections, then webcasting it live to millions of people — that was just plain cool as hell.

So yes, production became a major part of my life in 2011.  Not just with YouTube, but also with Mercury Soul (my classical/club project) and with MusicNOW (the Chicago Symphony’s new-music series).

Mercury Soul expanded beyond San Francisco clubs in 2011, with shows at Miami’s New World Symphony (in the magnificent Frank Gehry concert hall) and at a massive warehouse with musicians of the Chicago Symphony.  The project reimagines the concert experience through the lens of large-scale club events, dropping in short sets of classical music into an evening of DJing and surreal stagecraft.  Much like a wedding, the event seems fun and spontaneous to those freely roaming around, dancing, and having drinks; to those running it, it’s a NASA space shuttle launch, with musicians appearing around the space at precise moments, techno morphing into Bela Bartòk, and specially composed electro-acoustic interludes guiding the audience from one musical world to the next.  Production can a wonderful tool as long as it serves a musically substantive and compelling idea, and that’s something that Maestro Benjamin Shwartz and director Anne Patterson and I will continue to emphasize when planning Mercury Soul’s 2012 shows (Jan 20 & March 23).

And the CSO’s MusicNOW series really blossomed into the immersive, theatrical new-music experience that Anna Clyne and I have been dreaming about.  When challenged with a beautiful but cavernous 1,500 person space to present contemporary music, we looked up — at the lighting rig and projection screens.  If you were to visit a MusicNOW concert in March or May 2012, you’d find cinematic program notes, stunning Chicago Symphony musicians performing exciting new works from all manner of styles, and thousand-person crowds tumbling into the lobby to catch DJ Striz of ‘ill measures’ for the post-party.  We are fortunate to have the full support of Muti and the Chicago Symphony in creating an warm, inviting, and yes trippy vibe at the Harris Theater.

It’s still 2011.  The orangutan and his mother are still napping.  But not for long on both fronts: soon, a Violin Concerto will emerge from a little cage, soon a song cycle for Phoenix will get to my desk — and yes, soon I will launch across the room with a 2-year-old clinging to my neck, a minefield of perfectly folded laundry dotting the king-sized landscape we are about to destroy (“Come on, guys, not in the clothes!”).  But before all that, let’s just take a moment to reflect on the passing of another year of life, love, and art, with all their ups and downs.

To all those great adventurers from 2011 who, in their own quiet ways, often made the best moments possible.

Dec 2011The B-Sides & the (new) Detroit Symphony

Attention, American orchestras: look to Detroit for a way forward.

Wait a minute — the Detroit Symphony?  The storied orchestra that collapsed in an acrimonious labor dispute last year, forcing the cancellation of its season?  Yes.  Because it’s possible to rise from the ashes with a much stronger foundation.

Plus, they play like rock stars.

A bit of history: the strike that brought this great orchestra to its knees was a result of the same problems that have plagued the city for decades: a faltering car industry and a shrinking population.  With less philanthropic support and dwindling attendance, and the recession adding a few extra kicks, the orchestra’s balance sheet doubled over.  In the face of significantly lower salaries and benefits, the musicians decided to trade Orchestra Hall for the picket line.  Compelling arguments could be found on both sides of that picket line; but meanwhile, to the sadness of just about everyone in American music, an amazing orchestra was playing rests.  For six months.

Fast forward to last weekend.  To a packed hall three nights in a row, the great Leonard Slatkin conducted a program of Schubert, Rachmaninhoff, and Bates (that’s me), with a live webcast and, to boot, a live recording.  Let’s boil that down: big crowds on Thanksgiving weekend, a digital leap unmatched by any orchestra, and a new recording in the pipeline.  How did this happen?

Answer: creative thinking by all involved — and a willingness to change.

Admit it: change is not easy.  Even nomadic hippies who pass through Berkeley and sleep somewhere different every night have their little rituals, such as smoking pot upon first awaking.  But sometimes we are given the disguised opportunity to change or die — and that’s when we have the rare chance to change the game.

Detroit’s new contract has several of these game-changers, but let’s focus on the big one: media.  Not everyone outside of classical music understands why the recording and dissemination of orchestral performances is so highly regulated, so let me summarize it for you: No.  Just about any question one might ask relating to a recording can be answered with that not-so-magic word: you can’t copy it onto your computer, you can’t mail it to another conductor, and God help you if you play it on the radio.  Webcast?  Very funny.

Being forced into a change-or-die scenario, Detroit was able to rethink this policy.   Suddenly they are webcasting every other concert.  People from around the globe can hear a slew of superb concerts for free.  “DSO Live” educates the public, increases awareness of classical music, and encourages Detroiters to scurry to Orchestra Hall.  (No one is going to pass up the glorious acoustics of a live orchestra because they saw it online — that’s where the symphony keeps an edge in the Digital Age).  And releasing live concert recordings on CD and iTunes has become far more reasonable under the new agreement.

So there I am, about to perform the electronics on Saturday night, and backstage there’s the bustle of an evening newscast.  Cameras!  Teleprompters!  Offstage interviews!  Makeup!  (No, I’m not J Edgar Hoover.  I just have a lot of greasy face-shine that needs help.) Knowing that, say, Japanese insomniacs might be watching is a real adrenaline ante-up.  My friends in Chicago and SF can tune-in; my toddler can see what daddy is doing with “the animal orchestra.” (He still calls it that, thanks to a certain children’s book — and anyway, I’m actually starting to believe that the Yak beats the drum).

But the showbiz aside — how was the concert?

Incredible.  The band plays with such cohesion and power.  The fact that the musicians embraced the piece meant a ton to me — and certainly made for great performances.  On top of it, there’s an American treasure named Leonard Slatkin piloting this ship.  He’s been educating me since high school, when his recordings with St. Louis brought the American symphonic tradition into my life.  Leonard took a chance commissioning my first big orchestral piece, Liquid Interface, and that resulted in wonderful performances together from the Kennedy Center to Carnegie Hall.  He understands my music in a very deep way, and he doesn’t flinch in the face of the industrial techno beats of the finale of The B-Sides, “Warehouse Medicine.”

That finale, after all, is an homage to the Detroit warehouse parties where techno was born.  Performing The B-Sides in Detroit felt like a special homecoming — to a place I’d only visited aurally, in countless techno albums.  Seeing and hearing this historic orchestra back in the game really gives me hope about the future of symphonic music in this country.  It’s time you made your pilgrimage too.

Nov 2011Video Killed the Program Book

Your mission: program the best new music from wherever, to be played by Chicago Symphony musicians, in the Harris Theater — a 1500-person capacity theater with lots of high-tech stagecraft.  The concert series: MusicNOW.  Opening date of the 2011-12 season: October 17.

First thought: that’s a lot of ears to bring to anywhere, let alone a contemporary concert music.

Second thought: Chicago Symphony players.  Nice…

Third thought: stagecraft?  Hm….

One thinks of the Chicago Symphony and names like Solti and Abado and, these days, Muti come to mind.  Not exactly an ‘open mic’ situation.  The guilded Symphony Center resembles an Italian opera house in both acoustic and décor, and the CSO has rivaled any of the great orchestras.

But the CSO has lived a sleek existence outside the walls of Symphony Center for almost two decades.  It’s called MusicNOW.

When I first talked with Anna Clyne, my co-conspirator in the resident composer post, we both agreed to take the series in the direction of immersive concert experiences with omnivorous stylistic appetites.  A violin concerto by Finnish master Kaija Saariaho, a new commission by electronica duo Mouse on Mars, a visit by African instrument builder Victor Gama.  Rigorous pieces of the French IRCAM school to mystical, almost ambient works by Marcos Balter.  All brought to life with fluid and inviting stagecraft.

That’s where the program book comes in — or, more accurately, bows out.

Many classical listeners cherish their program books.  The content, however, need not be limited by the medium.  Think about lighting.  A printed program book requires relatively bright house lights, and there’s an opportunity cost when one bypasses the magic of music in near-darkness.  Imagine isolated pools of light presenting various ensembles for the evening, linked by cinematic program notes.

Enter Phillip Huscher.

His office looks as you’d imagine the CSO program annotator’s office would: papers, books, scores, CD liner notes everywhere.  When presented with the idea of ‘digital program notes,’ he was surprisingly game.  Paired-down program notes, projected in between pieces — with short video interviews with composers — that seemed an interesting challenge to Phillip.  Soon Anna and Phillip and I are sending scripts back and forth to Hillary Leben, the visual designer behind the CSO Beyond the Score multi-media shows.  More meetings than you’d ever imagine.

In the end, what’s most important is the music.  And we had great performances of excellent works by Corigliano to Dennehy, in a season that will feature works by Aaron Kernis, Evan Zipporan, Lee Hyla, and many more.  But often overlooked is the concert experience, and it’s especially important in a genre as challenging as contemporary music.  Communication and information, brought to life with the tools of our Information Age: forget the professor.  Let’s call the lighting guy, Todd, and ask him about gobo-lights on the solo fiddle player who opens the show.

Come visit us next month, when Hubbard Street Dance presents new choreography to Julia Wolfe, or the rest of the season (info).

And bring a flashlight.