Best of OCCO: Echoes & Encores

Composers of contemporary classical music gravitate toward musicians that are receptive to new repertory. Often, the musicians most receptive to newly composed works are those who play instruments that don’t themselves have big catalogues of canonic pieces dating back hundreds of years. For example, one of the most beautifully intimate and expansive sounds that Western European culture generated is that of the string quartet. But living composers looking to shop around their recent compositions for string quartet have to ask for wiggle room amongst a long list of formidable masterworks that string quartet ensembles have rightfully adopted as standard repertory.

Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven all extensively explored the string quartet’s expressive possibilities. The Romantics, Nationalists and Impressionists that followed in the 19th century found new sonic riches there. In the 20th century, the Hungarian composer Bela Bartok and the Russian composer Dimitri Shostakovich each built their own catalogues of demanding, ground-breaking works that expanded the boundaries of performance techniques and pushed for a reconsideration of what the musical conversation between the players themselves and between the music and listener could be like.

Other instruments do not have the same depth of historical repertory, either because they didn’t attract the attention of big name composers or because those instruments are simply newer. The saxophone was invented in 1840. Percussion instruments, generally speaking, have been in existence pre-historically, but when considering the percussion family as a potentially virtuosic participant in the classical tradition, it’s a 20th century phenomenon. Similarly, precursors to the classical guitar emerged roughly 5,000 years ago, but the modern classical guitar didn’t emerge into broad popularity until the 19th century, during which masterworks for the instrument emerged, but at nowhere near the rate or scope of traditional ensembles like the string quartet.

That is good news for composers. Musicians of these instruments are hungry for serious repertory, and some of them go out of their way to midwife new repertory into being by actively commissioning living composers to write for them. They get the added thrill of having input into the creative process and being able to provide feedback.

Robert Phillips is one such musician. A guitarist based in Lakeland, he is an instructor at the Harrison School for the Arts and on the faculty of Southeastern University. He grew up on Long Island, and earned his Bachelor’s degree not far from home, at Hofstra University. He got his first real taste of contemporary music studying with David Starobin while earning his Master’s degree at Brooklyn College. Starobin owns Bridge Records, a label that specializes in contemporary classical music, and Starobin himself has been the catalyst for a multitude of commissions from a who’s who list of late 20th century composers from George Crumb to Elliot Carter to Gunther Schuller.

According to Phillips, “If you’re not playing new music, you’re just allowing the art to die out. A Beethoven string quartet has passed the test of time, which new music can’t. When Beethoven wrote a string quartet, it was a new piece at that time. If you don’t take a chance on new music, we won’t have new masterpieces. And it’s gotten easier as a performer to program new music, because new music has gotten more audience-friendly compared to twenty five or thirty years ago. We’re now in a period where composers are really re-engaging their audience and really saying something that listeners can identify with and understand.”

After graduating with his Master’s degree in guitar performance, Phillips worked the freelancer’s grind in New York for many years, giving guitar lessons and performing. But by the late 1980s and early 1990s, Long Island’s economy suffered several blows, including Grumman Aerospace corporation laying off 9,000 workers at once, adding them to a pool of unemployed professionals now totalling 90,000 people. As so often happens, music becomes an understandably unaffordable luxury when a family’s choices come down to guitar lessons versus dinner, or a business must choose between having live music or paying their waitstaff. Phillips threw in the towel and headed to Tampa before relocating to Lakeland shortly thereafter. He eventually made the decision to get his doctorate in classical guitar performance from the University of Miami, which entailed commuting weekly for a few years between Lakeland and Miami.

The genesis of Phillips’ commissioning project grew from an inability to choose just one of his favorite local composers to write a new piece for him when he got itchy for one. He’d worked with Troy Gifford before. Gifford is a talented guitarist and composer and is the Chair of the Music Department at Valencia College. Rex Willis, another guitarist and composer at the State College of Florida in Sarasota, was another potential candidate. As guitarist-composers, both Gifford and Willis have accessible compositional styles that are heavily influenced by Spanish dance music. The legendary Argentinian guitarist and composer Jorge Morel, whose performing and recording career exploded in New York in the 1960s, is now based in Orlando.

It dawned on Phillips that he didn’t need to choose just one composer — he could think big and commission a whole concert’s worth, a whole CD’s worth of pieces at once, from multiple composers. He cast a wider net by being open to the idea of working with non-guitarist composers. Phillips began a search for composers with some criteria in mind: they had to have an accessible musical voice; they had to be open to composing a piece based on dance rhythms; and they had to be local enough to make collaboration simple. He found his composers and set tentative agreements. He launched a kickstarter campaign to help fund the process that garnered support from over 60 people.

Rex Willis composed Rondo Diabolico, a 5-minute fun and quirky rondo (a recurring theme followed by episodic digressions) with a tango feel to it. Howard Buss of Lakeland wrote Dances and Interludes, an 8-minute journey through dances forms where a Cuban songo, a bossa nova, and a flamenco rumba are connected by interstitial musical material. Orlando’s Benoit Glazer composed TanVal, a light, sophisticated Jazz-inflected conversation between a tango and a waltz, but in 5/4 time. Troy Gifford contributed a neo-romantic waltz called Valsera. Jorge Morel wrote Preludio y Danzas. That work starts with a short prelude that leads to a fast Latin American dance, then a brisk interlude followed by a sesquialtera rhythm (where a duple and triple feel get overlaid simultaneously), and finally finishes with a flourish. My own contribution, Samba Variations, takes a standard Brazilian samba and treats it like fashion show where we get to see the same samba riff in many different costumes. Phillips plans to compose his own contribution to the set, which he has come to think of as Orange Blossom Dances.

The first performances will take place in Madrid this summer in multiple venues, including the Ateneo Científico, Literario y Artístico de Madrid, the National Archeological Museum, the American Museum, the Nicolás Salmerón Cultural Center, and the Villa de Barajas Cultural Center. American performances are anticipated to occur in Sarasota, Oklahoma City, Orlando and Lakeland. Phillips plans to record it and release it on MS Records, an independent label that specializes in classical music that has a fairly extensive catalogue of contemporary works.

For more information, go to http://www.robert-phillips.com/.

Composers Sharon Omens and Bethany Yucuis Borden appeared on my WPRK radio show, Zero Crossings on February 27, to discuss their March 7 concert event, Celebrating Women Who Compose, which took place at the Blue Bamboo Center For The Arts in Winter Park. A reprise of the concert was given on March 17 at Christ Church Unity. Presented by the Central Florida Composers Forum to mark Women’s History Month, the music was written entirely by women composers, most of whom live and work locally. Our conversation ranged from the Holocaust to virtual reality to the changing experience of women composers in a discipline with a sexist history. What follows is an excerpt from an hour-long conversation.

Charlie Griffin: Sharon, tell me about the concert.

Sharon Omens: I’m very excited about it. It’s basically a celebration of women composers. There are four composers who are local and other women composers from the past and present.

I have two pieces on the program. One is called “Whimsical Rhapsody,” for violin and piano. I will be playing the piano with a UCF violin student, Jordan Bicasan. And David Suarez is going to be playing a piece of mine for solo flute. It’s a piece I wrote for my dad, who died two years ago. It’s called “Redemption.” He was a survivor of the Holocaust, and he survived a lot of horrific events. He became a successful businessman and overcame a lot of adversity. I wanted to honor him with this piece. It has a mix of tonal music, but parts of it are very dissonant and intense, because he was an intense individual. It takes you on a journey of his life.

CG: What was that like, growing up with a father who had that experience as part of his psyche?

SO: He was a tough cookie. It was not easy. He was fearful and he was mistrustful. Rightfully so. He was a difficult man to get along with. There were times when he was very passionate and charismatic and present, and there were times when he was very difficult to be with and he would push people out of his life because he couldn’t deal with being close to people. As I got older, I made up my mind to make peace with him. Before he died, I spent quite a bit of time with him and just let him know all the things I was grateful for. We were able to make peace. We sang together the week before he died. I held his hand and we sang Jewish songs together and we both cried. It was a kind of a bond that we had—music. So, I felt very strongly that I wanted to honor him musically.

CG: How was music the nature of your bond?

SO: My father was very musical. He had a beautiful, operatic voice. He never trained it, but he loved to sing, and we used to harmonize. He had a beautiful voice and he was passionate about opera. He listened to La Boheme and Madame Butterfly all the time, and that was when he was able to let all his emotions out. He would sit on the couch with a big towel and cry. Music enabled him to access his emotions. It’s kind of why I got into music therapy as a career. I worked with the developmentally disabled for a while. Primarily, I took an interest in the elderly, and got involved with working with Alzheimer’s patients. Music was a way that they could come out of their shell. It would reconnect them to their childhoods or help them focus.

CG: What was the location where your father experienced the Holocaust?

SO: He has quite a story. He grew up in Warsaw, Poland. He grew up in the ghetto. There was a lot of anti-Semitism, and in 1939 when it really started getting bad, he escaped with his father in an illegal ship. After two months on a ship, they arrived in Palestine, and they got shot at and they had to swim to shore. About three months later, he got a letter from Warsaw that his family had been killed. His mother, his brother, his sister, and a hundred of his relatives. He had a huge family, and they were part of the Warsaw Resistance. A lot of them were hiding in cellars and died of typhoid. It tore my father apart.

CG: He had survivor’s guilt.

SO: Absolutely. In order to honor his family, he had to make something of his life. He was like a bull. So, I admired him, and yet he was so difficult at the same time.

CG: You’re the one left struggling to give him a pass on that stuff, right? You have to have the empathy and the compassion that recognizes what he went through, but that has to be hard, too. I can see that.

SO: My other two sisters, they just burned out. He actually died without saying goodbye to them. They just disowned each other. There was no forgiveness there.

CG: Have you been to Warsaw?

SO: I’ve never been to Warsaw. I’ve been to Israel. I went to high school there.

CG: I happened to be in Warsaw during the 60th anniversary of the Warsaw Uprising. There was a really powerful set of events and commemorations that were happening at the time. I don’t know if you know this—and this sounds a lot like your father’s stubbornness—but the Poles were determined to rebuild and restore Warsaw brick-by-brick by brick to its pre-war condition so that they effectively undid the damage done by the Nazis, and they were pretty close in 2004. I remember going to the museum there and looking at wartime maps of troop maneuvers, and you could easily see just how impossible their situation was. While I was there, there was this palpable Polish pride in having been resistant the entire time. And nearby, you look at Prague, it was completely untouched because they chose to not resist the Nazis at all. I got to have a conversation with a local, elderly Polish man who was there during the uprising. We were in a main square in the city, and I still get moved by retelling it. He pointed to a building across the street and said, “I watched a Canadian relief supply plane get shot down and explode right there.”

SO: My father actually wrote a book about the Warsaw ghetto and it’s fascinating.

CG: Bethany, how did you get involved with the concert?

Bethany Borden: I met Sharon through the Central Florida Composers Forum a few months ago. When I first joined the Central Florida Composers Forum, I realized very quickly how many different ways you can approach and compose music, and what a variety of talents and skills we have within that group. Sharon and I started working together to plan for this concert, and it’s really worked out because not only have we been working on this event, but we’ve managed to start making music together. We’ve collaborated on a spoken word and piano piece that we’ll do on both concerts, a recitation of a Maya Angelou poem called “Phenomenal Woman.” I got a degree in Music Education from UCF. I was a voice major who also played trumpet in the marching band and other ensembles. I taught music in OCPS for ten years. But in 2013-14, my husband and his friend created a game studio called Outhouse Games. We started with mobile games, and I wrote a piano piece for our first game, Stacker. And that reignited a spark in me that enjoyed creating music. I quit teaching in 2014 to start composing full time. For the concert, I’m presenting a percussion ensemble piece for a virtual reality game, and will include video from the game. I’m using vibraphone, marimba, glockenspiel, and tubular bells. I wanted to take my fundamental background with live instruments and bring that music and style to video games.

CG: Tell me more about Outhouse Games.

BB: Our first three games were mobile games, and what money we made really came from advertising, but the market got really saturated, so now we’re working with virtual reality. We’re working on a VR game, called Ancient Remains, that’s set in ancient Egypt. We have a team of five right now. We have two artists, a programmer, and my husband integrates audio and I write the music. The game is coming out very soon.

CG: A New York Times article from today said that “the popularity of Sony’s Playstation VR surprised even the company. Executives at Sony were cautious about the VR headsets, but after four months of robust sales, the skeptics are converting.” So, it looks like VR is really on the rise. I’m surprised it wasn’t developed faster than it was.

BB: There were some kinks to work out with things like the frame rate. People used to sometimes feel seasick, like when you move quickly, your eyes need to catch up with your brain or vice versa. That’s been eliminated. What we do is we teleport. You press a button and it shows an arc to where you’re going to go, and when you release the button you’re there. The technology has come a very long way in the last three to four years.

CG: Who else is involved with your concert?

SO: Composer and pianist Eric Brook is going to play a piece by Clara Schumann called “Praludium II.” Chan Ji Kim, who is a professor at the Eastern Florida State College, will present selections from a collection of short pieces based on children’s nighttime stories and lullabies, performed by soprano Sarah Cheatham. Soprano and pianist Julie Bateman will perform “Between Worlds” by Anne Marie Davis and “Winter’s Tear” by Jeannie Cotter. Local composer and pianist Rebekah Todia will present two songs: “She Walks In Beauty,” to a poem by Lord Byron, and “The Solitary,” to a poem by Madison J. Cawein. It’s a great program and we’re really proud of it.

For more information, please visit:
http://www.sharonomens.com/
http://www.chanjikim.com/chanjikim.html
http://cfcomposers.org/

Alexandra Love Sarton and DiViNCi have long, overlapping musical histories here in Orlando. They both co-founded the hip-hop quartet Solillaquists of Sound, and more recently formed a duo working under the band name Chakra Khan. They appeared on my WPRK radio show, Zero Crossings, on February 6th, to discuss their upcoming album release, The Cope Aesthetic. What follows is an excerpt from a two-hour conversation.

DiViNCi: Basically, I play drum machines live. An MPC is a MIDI Production Center [MIDI stands for Musical Instrument Digital Interface—the code protocol used to translate musical information from electronic instruments to computers]. I’ve been called a finger drummer or a controllerist. It’s got a lot of names because it’s a newer art.

It’s a series of pads into which you can load audio samples of any kind, with the additional capacity to run those samples through filters and reverbs, or otherwise process the samples in real time with all sorts of effects on them. And you can layer them, loop them, and create entire songs this way.

DiViNCi: Right, right. I can assign any sound I want to any pad. I can add in drum machines and guitar effects pedals too. It’s like a science experiment on stage. The same thing that I use to create all the music in the studio is the same thing that I bring on stage.

You’re self-taught. When it comes to music, there are only so many formal learning pathways, and they’re very traditional. There are only so many mechanisms available to a curious, creative mind interested in new technologies. The existing mold doesn’t fit everybody. I’m really fascinated by the trajectory that you wind up taking, where you have the passion, you have the desire, and you have a developing skill set, but there’s nobody there to guide your thinking.

DiViNCi: Which is a benefit, I think, because there are new molds to be made. I’m giving a talk at Full Sail University this month, for their Hall of Fame Week, about all the different careers that exist now because of all these different molds. I attribute my secure place in the industry to my unconventional musical upbringing.

In the beginning it can look like a completely foreign, scary territory, and at some point you turn around to look back and discover that you’ve carved something out for yourself.

DiViNCi: Luckily, I started when I was a kid. My ignorance was also a part of my musical upbringing. Because I was driven just purely by passion, with no working knowledge, it brought me to a place where I found my own voice. I grew up in a small town called Womelsdorf, in rural Pennsylvania. My mother was a caterer and a waitress. My father was in the National Guard and Army Reserves. Martial arts was the first thing I got passionate about, and it colors how I look at everything else I know. I pull a lot of things from my martial arts training into my music. I studied a few different martial arts. A lot of Okinawan Kempo. My father is Filipino, and the thing that stuck with me the most was Filipino martial arts, like stuff you’d see in The Bourne Identity. The Holy Grail of martial arts, as taught to me by my father, is the experience of being in flow. When you get a technique down well, you practice it so long it becomes reflexive. You don’t have to think about it. The greatest part of music to me is performing. And that’s where I found the greatest example of the flow in my art, where I don’t think, and things just happen spontaneously. I’m taken care of by something greater. I let the music come through me rather than try to control it.

Is it safe to say that there’s a certain physicality to how you approach the MPC, then? You build up a muscle memory around patterns?

DiViNCi: Right, right, right. It’s definitely all about physicality because the thing that stops flow is when you get in your head. And one of the easiest ways to get out of your head is to get into your body. And I find that both in martial arts and in music. When I’m sitting still and creating music in the studio, the sedentary nature of being at a computer lends itself to getting trapped in my head a lot more, and not really trusting that I don’t need to be in total control to create something that I like. I get to trust a bigger part of myself when I’m performing, because I’m actually trusting my body. It’s one of the reasons why I move so much on stage.

In order to be in that flow, there still must be a preparation phase as well. When you’re at the beginning of building up what will become your track, you must collect in your imagination a palette of sample options, timbres, and textures, and a sense of how they’re going to layer, work together, or contrast before you ever get to the live performance. What is that process like for you?

DiViNCi: It’s a different form of flow, I think. There’s much more of a dance between learning and practicing and playing around and experimenting. I have a ton of options these days. I get the question a lot, “How do you know when something’s done; how do you know when you’ve got the right sound?” For me, there’s a very physical reaction. Sometimes, if a song’s not done, like it’s 98% done, and I feel the 2% is missing, I’ll start to dislike the song. It annoys me. I keep working at it, that little 2%. And then I love it, when I find it.

How did Solillaquists of Sound, and more recently Chakra Khan, get formed?

DiViNCi: I came down here to study in Full Sail University’s Recording Arts degree program in 2000. Towards the end of my time at Full Sail, I was introduced to MC Swamburger, who knew Alexandra Love Sarton from Chicago. We started working together. He brought down Alex. Alex and I knocked an album out in a week. And we all hit it off. We formed Solillaquists of Sound along with my wife, Tonya Combs. We’ve all been living together since, for the last 15 years.

CG: (To Alex) How did you and MC Swamburger come together?

ALS: I went to Columbia College in Chicago to study film directing and editing. I met Swam there and we became good friends, and he heard me singing one day. He said, “Wait, why are you going to school for film? You should be singing.” I hadn’t really thought about it before. But he and I started making music before he moved back to Orlando because his parents were here. After he met DiViNCi and Tonya, they all came up to visit me in Chicago. They came on a Sunday, and by Wednesday I’d given away all my stuff to move down here. I hadn’t planned on doing music, but when he said it, it felt right.

CG: And you all live in a house together?

ALS: Yes, we live in a house together, which is great, because it’s a big enough house where we all have our own space, but then we can make music constantly. So it has been like a non-stop factory of creativity for over a decade.

CG: Here’s what I’ve picked up about you from knowing you at Sak Comedy Lab, but even more from your presence on Facebook: You seem devoted to creativity in every form that you can muster. You sell mandala and other types of coloring books; you have several musical groups that you belong to; you are very philosophical on Facebook and spiritually generous about it. The language of self-help is common on Facebook. But you have a higher signal-to-noise ratio than most. I wonder what kind of stuff you’ve studied to arrive at the things that you’ve said.

ALS: For me, it’s weird to talk about these things because it’s so easy to fall into cliché, and I’m hyper-aware of that possibility. I share authentically, and the BS factor is way down, or non-existent, because I don’t live in that place. I try to just use my own experience and the things I’ve learned from it. Moving from Chicago to Orlando and starting over, trying to be an entrepreneur, building something up in the music industry, going on tour in the country and then the world—there are a lot of lessons in all that.

CG: What stood out for you on tour?

ALS: A recent performance with Solillaquists was a festival on an island off the coast of Madagascar. France has an unlimited amount of creative, beautifully put together festivals. But I most love performing in natural, outdoor spaces.

CG: You just opened for Lauryn Hill. How did that come to pass?

ALS: DiViNCi’s been working with her for the past five years, so we got know her and her crew.

CG: What about your musical background? I imagine you’re doing the bulk, if not all, of the composing for the women’s vocal group you lead, Beautiful Chorus. Are you writing some of these songs for Chakra Khan too?

ALS: I played the violin for nine years. I grew up playing in an orchestra. I sometimes will write lyrics and a melody and give them to DiViNCi, or sometimes he will give me just a drum track, and I’ll create a symphony of voices over that. I write all the Beautiful Chorus stuff. We do full rhythmic songs; we do a cappella hymns; we do wordless waves of harmony with music; and we do mantras, which are, for lack of a better term, positive affirmations repeated in harmony.

CG: What’s the story with the newest Chakra Khan release, The Cope Aesthetic?

ALS: We’re releasing the album song by song. We’re releasing one on Valentine’s Day. And then a song every few weeks from there for two or three months, and then we’ll release it as an album and have a party.

DiViNCi: We just want people to follow the process, follow the website, and have an extended experience of the release instead of dropping it all at once. With all the projects we do, we want to include people in the process as much as possible.

ALS: I’ll be making music videos for many of the songs. And artwork for the album. For the cover, we’re going to work with geometry. It’s about looking at our lives like, this plus this is creating this reality for me, so if I can change one of the two variables involved, then my trajectory is different. What it equals can change. The Cope Aesthetic is like looking at things differently, which to me always feels like geometry. Ever since growing up, I felt like there was an equation to life that we could implement that would help make it easier. And I feel like my life experience has been about uncovering what that means for myself.

Follow the release of The Cope Aesthetic at https://www.chkrkhn.com/