A Revolution Won: The Verdict is in!
August 2nd, 2010 | Author: meade
With rave reviews across the board, the Varèse (R)evolution was a consummate success. Playing to a sold-out Alice Tully Hall, ICE’s performance of Edgard Varèse’s chamber works was among the most spectacular concerts of classical music in recent New York memory.
Hear what the critics had to say:
“Steven Schick led the virtuosic International Contemporary Ensemble and So Percussion group with equal parts scholarship and vigour…It was bracing, illuminating, reassuring . . . (★★★★★)”
-Martin Bernheimer, The Financial Times
full article: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/6214e0a4-9411-11df-a3fe-00144feab49a.html
“Despite the challenges—crazy meter changes and rhythmic knots, delicate sonorities and blistering fanfares—it all appears to be child’s play in the hands of the young musicians who comprise ICE, dedicated to new music performance…. Their execution is little short of breathtaking.”
– Stuart Isacoff, The Wall Street Journal
full article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/NA_WSJ_PUB:SB10001424052748704288204575363533095781968.html
“the International Contemporary Ensemble’s vigorous account of the pounding, brass-heavy “Hyperprism” (1923) reveled in Varèse’s thick clouds of sound…The performances were consistently polished and solid”
-Allan Kozin, The New York Times
full article: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/22/arts/music/22varese.html
It would be impossible to say too many good things about ICE’s approach to this concert…”
-Carleton Wilkinson, The Asbury Park Press
full article: http://www.app.com/article/20100722/ENT/100722070/Lincoln-Center-Festival-s-complete-works-of-Edgard-Varese-
Varèse, Charlie Parker, and the New York Improv Sessions
July 19th, 2010 | Author: meade
Throughout his career, Charlie Parker publicly acknowledged his admiration for Varese, who was his Greenwich Village neighbor. “I had the pleasure of meeting Edgar Varese,” he once said on Boston radio, “The French composer. He was very nice to me. He’s willing to teach me. He wants to compose something for me.” Of these encounters, Varese remarked, “He stopped by my place a number of times. He was like a child, with the shrewdness of a child. He possessed a tremendous enthusiasm. He’d come in and exclaim, ‘take me in as you would a baby and teach me music. I only write one voice. I want to have structure. I want to write orchestral scores.’ I promised myself I would try to find some time to show him some of the things he wanted to know.” Unfortunately, while the two musicians met informally several times, Varese left for Paris to compose Deserts shortly after they met, and when he returned in the Spring of 1955, Parker was two months dead from a heroin overdose.
One of Varèse's rigid improvisation diagrams, given to the musicians in his "jam sessions."
But this did not extinguish Varese’s fascination with the thriving New York jazz world, which he was immersed in prior to the composition of Poème Électronique. In 1957, before his departure for Europe to continue work on Poeme, Varese worked closely with some of the leading Jazz musicians in New York in a series of jam sessions organized by composer Earl Brown and saxophonist/producer Teo Macero. Among the musicians in these sessions were Art Farmer, trumpet; Teo Macero, tenor saxophone; Hal McKusick, clarinet and alto saxophone; Hall Overton, piano; Frank Rehak, trombone; Ed Shaughnessy, drums; and Charlie Mingus, Bass. The attendees of these events extended beyond the jazz musicians to the likes of John Cage and
other friends of Earle Brown and Varèse.
An excerpt from Varèse's score for Poème électronique. Click for large image.
Varèse exposed these musicians to new possibilities in improvisation, structure, and sound (it is worth noting that these sessions occurred two years prior to the release of Ornette Coleman’s Free Jazz), and in turn the Jazz musicians provided Varèse with their own new, intriguing sound world. When Varèse left for Europe to finish work on Poème, he brought with him several albums that were given to him by participants in these sessions. He would ultimately use recordings of the sessions as sound material in Poème Électronique.
The recordings above are taken from these jam sessions. Listen between the gaps and you can hear Varèse talking with such Jazz legends as Charles Mingus, Art Farmer, and Teo Macero. The score excerpts to the left show how strikingly similar Varèse’s conceptions of these improvisations were to Poème électronique.
This post was largely derived and abridged from Oliva Mattis, “From Bebop to Poo-wip: Jazz Influences in Varèse’s Poème Électronique.” Edgard Varèse Composer, Sound Sculptor, Visionary. Woodbridge (GB): Boydell, 2006.
Ms. Mattis’ article and the book as a whole are an unmatched resource for anything and everything Varèse.
Revisiting A Revolution
July 18th, 2010 | Author: robby
“There is a section in ‘Intégrales,’” says Ms. Chase, “where two piccolos play as loudly as possible on their lowest note, at the same time that two E-Flat clarinets play up in the high register. You say, ‘What the heck was he thinking?’ You won’t find it anywhere else in the literature. But it turns out to sound phenomenal.”
“…In the midst of the musical balancing act, a truck horn invades from the street below, sounding a persistent concert D. “If Varèse were here, he would have recorded that truck,” notes Mr. Schick of a composer who used every conceivable sound source, including sirens and theremins. “The message of it all is, ‘hang your preconceptions at the door.’”
Read more in Stuart Isacoff’s preview of Varèse: (R)evolution in the Wall Street Journal.
Varèse Gets Intimate Over the Radio
July 18th, 2010 | Author: robby
So sayeth blogger James Sims. Read his summation of our July 7 preview performance & broadcast from the Yamaha Piano Salon on the Summer at Lincoln Center blog.
Edgard approaches!
July 17th, 2010 | Author: meade
The revolution commences Monday at 8 PM in Alice Tully Hall.
ICE with Steven Schick and So Percussion rehearsing at Lincoln Center
“My Introduction to Varèse (Shortly After Removing the Training Wheels from My Bike)”
July 17th, 2010 | Author: robby
I think my brother brought home a copy of The Works of Edgard Varèse back in the summer of 1969. I didn’t know what to make of it at first. My brother was always interested in challenging music, and this particular record was pretty interesting indeed. I was seven years old.
My brother Mark and I grew up listening to Bach and Beethoven, Mozart and Mussorgsky. There was always a lot of classical music playing in our house but Mark seemed to outgrow all that quickly. Soon he was studying composition and wanted to become a composer himself. By the time I was entering middle school he was off looking for recordings of Charles Ives and Harry Partch. Five years his junior, I thought everybody was listening to what my grown-up brother had on his record player.
The Beatles’ White Album? The Rolling Stones Beggars Banquet? Nope.
I loved the Varèse album. And what a great cover: A crazy-looking old man with crazy-looking neon lights swooshing around his head. To my pre-teenage mind, the music was as wonderfully weird and scary as the photo. Dissonant, for sure, but also lyrical and fun and strangely familiar. I guess so many repeated listenings made it an appropriate soundtrack to my childhood, so each time I heard it, I was brought back to some magical yet familiar world. Unknown and puzzling, yet always looking toward to the future.
The album did become quite an actual playlist for my childhood. For regular neighborhood puppet shows we’d put on Varèse’s “Ionization”. For tape-recorded plays and parodies of current television shows? “Density 21.5” and “Octandre”.
And as a highlight each summer, kids in the neighborhood would put on scary costumes, rearrange the boxes in our basement and have people take a tour of our “Spook House”.
The soundtrack for this summertime spectacle? Varèse’s “Poeme Electronic”.
Who says Varèse is difficult? Child’s play.
One additional note: ICE’s recent performance of “Ameriques” for eight-handed piano took me back to the past in a fresh way. Those themes and phrases were so familar, yet surprisingly brand new. Like listening to a fresh pressing of an oft-played LP….crisp, clear, exciting. I hadn’t heard the original in perhaps 20 years, but ICE’s performance made everything which was at one time both futuristic and old…surprisingly new and familiar. A great performance and a great evening.
—S. Ann Alburger
An Aural Diagram of Varèse: (R)evolution by Steven Schick
July 14th, 2010 | Author: meade
The work of a true master. Steven Schick will be conducting ICE on Monday’s concert at the Rose Theater.
“An Intrepid Group Surveys an Idiosyncratic Composer”
July 9th, 2010 | Author: robby
Steve Smith on ICE’s Q2 broadcast on Wednesday, July 7:
“For the International Contemporary Ensemble, an intrepid and adventurous new-music group based in Brooklyn and Chicago, presenting brash sounds and fresh discoveries is all in a day’s work, though stellar musicianship and infectious enthusiasm prevent any whiff of routine from tainting its labors. On Wednesday evening those qualities made its members ideal emissaries for Edgard Varèse, a maverick composer whose works will be featured during two concerts in this year’s Lincoln Center Festival…”
Read more at NYTimes.com.
Conductor’s note from Steven Schick
July 8th, 2010 | Author: meade
I started my first visit to New York City, on what I now believe was the third happiest day of my adult life, by walking from my friends’ place on the Upper West Side down the length of Manhattan to see Edgard Varèse’s Sullivan Street apartment. It was a walk through layers of captivating and dazzling urban noise: the metal-on-metal sounds of construction, the wailing of sirens, a spectral whine of tires on distant bridges, and, amazingly, moments of near silence. With each step came the growing realization that I already knew these sounds from studying, performing, and falling deeply in love with Varèse’s 1931 masterpiece for percussion, Ionisation. These noises were Varèse’s noises, I thought. And this was his city. Now after 35 years of performing the music of Edgard Varèse and a hundred-plus visits to New York, I am honored to work with the extraordinary musicians of ICE to examine the legacy of one the most protean musical imaginations the world has ever known.
Steven Schick conducting ICE in 2009
The music of Varèse is a palimpsest inscribed in sound, an over-written parchment on which traces of the old are still visible and mixed with the new. The embedded geologies of his music carry us into the past, to a pre-lingual state and a music on the verge of utterance. Listen to the small noises of the percussion – the moaning of the “lion’s roar” or the vocalise of the guiro – and hear the building blocks of human speech. On the other extreme of scale, listen as terrifying wind and brass explosions parse the apocalyptic poetry of the birth of the cosmos (as Varèse himself implies in his choice of an epigraph by Paracelsus for the orchestral work Arcana). But even as Varèse connects us to a primordial past, he also looks to the future. And indeed a central aspect of a palimpsest is not just its indebtedness to the past, but the concurrent obligation to make a new imprint, to add another stratum to the overlay. In this music we also see Varèse the visionary. In 1934 (!) he combined acoustic and electric instruments by including two theremins in his Ecuatorial. (Note that after Léon Theremin and his instruments disappeared into the maw of the Soviet Gulag, Varèse rescored Ecuatorial for ondes martenot. Tonight we will present the work with its original sounds using two theremin cellos.) We find Varèse the futurist in the multi-channel sensory experience of Poème électronique and Etude pour espace, and in the raucous proto-punk outbursts of his brief and alluring Dance for Burgess. Varèse was like a rifle loaded with the future, taking aim at the banalities of his day with volleys of taught dissonance in Intégrales and the geometric extrusions of one of the masterpieces of any historical period, Déserts.
Ultimately though Varèse’s music is all about sound – beguiling, earsplitting, incantatory, whispered, life-affirming sound. Sound, the material point of connection to an immaterial world; at the same time a composer’s practical acoustical reality and organic matter with dreams of its own. So on this trip to New York I will walk, as I always do, and listen, as Varèse did, to the living sonic tissue of the city he adopted. And I will be dazzled, again, by the sounds of the city and by this music that was born here. But as the tide of daily noise rises ever higher, the most astonishing thing about Varèse’s music, as Henry Miller noted in his prescient essay “With Edgar Varèse in the Gobi Desert,” is that “after you listen to it you are silenced.”
-Steven Schick
