If you missed Talea Gala 2012, you can catch a glimpse of the festivities here!

Matthias Pintscher, Gala 2012 Guest of Honor

Thomas Stelzer, Talea Board Member

Talea Conductor James Baker talks about Fausto Romitelli

Bon appétit!

Victor Adan's Tractus

Come hear Talea play Grisey’s Talea this Friday April 20th at the DiMenna Center! Talea friend and wonderful music journalist, Bruce Hodges, shares his insight on listening to this spectral masterpiece and Talea’s namesake.


In Latin, “talea” means “cutting,” and in Gérard Grisey’s Talea, an initial idea is gradually excised—elements removed and others taking their place. In two parts played without pause, the work is intended to—in the composer’s words—“express two aspects or, more precisely, two auditory angles of a single phenomenon.” But his concise description feels inadequate to describe the experience of hearing the score.


Talea’s power comes from its examination and illumination of an overtone cycle, a phenomenon integral to Grisey’s output (and spectral music in general). Somehow when one hears the ensemble (flute, clarinet, violin, cello and piano) illuminating Grisey’s argument, it feels like being exposed to one of life’s basic building blocks—like grasping at DNA and holding it in your hands.


The five players alternate between moments of great ferocity (especially in the piano), and those of eerie quietude—at times almost as if everything has been shut down completely; at others, sounds emerge like soft groans from the earth itself. The timbres float, hover, barge into your brain, recede, reform themselves, take you hostage. As the scurrying of the first part calms down in the second, the waters reform, interrupted by various phenomena, until a kind of miraculous climax occurs near the end. Bit by bit, the violinist states the overtone scale with a thrilling baldness—as if everything previously had been building toward this moment—before the violinist repeats the scale again, and this time the sequence is abruptly cut off.


-Bruce Hodges

As we gear up for a week of recording Fausto Romitelli’s music at EMPAC, get to know Fausto through some beautiful tributes written by his friends and family. We were fortunate to have gathered these for a concert back in April 2010, and happy to share them again here with our e-fans!

Riccardo Nova: Composer Colleague
“It is difficult to speak/write briefly about Fausto; his personality had so many qualities. His very special way of laughing is the first thing that comes to my mind whenever I think of him – it was contagious, and the last time I heard him laughing was few day before his death: I called him from a public telephone somewhere in India. He was in the hospital attached to an oxygen mask. He could hear the heavy noise of the Indian traffic in the background and he made some ironic comments related to the “nice cacophony” … he could not breathe so well, but still managed to laugh. This was my last conversation with him … after a few days, he was gone.
In the late nineties Fausto and I shared a small flat in Liege; we were both working at the CRFMW. At that time Fausto was composing Bad Trip Lesson 1 (at the CRFMW he was realizing the electronic tape) … we were in the studio from morning till very late at night, and usually, in the morning, I was the first to wake up and make the coffee. Everyday when the coffee was ready, I would try to get him out of bed and he responded with the same sentence, “Please do not disturb me, I am working. Let me work a bit more….” I do not know if this was true or not, but whenever I hear his music, and specifically Bad Trip 1, I always recall those moments, for it is likely that his mind was in this “in-between reality”, where dreams and consciousness are merged together and where the mind is not yet totally in contact with the solidity of actual reality. . . I never forced him to wake up faster and every morning he drank his coffee cold. . .”


Giovanni Verrando: Composer Colleague
“Listening to Fausto’s music explains the kind of person he was: bold, cultured, and with a strong imagination. He was an extraordinary reader, thinking it was valuable for a contemporary composer to know in detail the good and bad habits of his time, and taking risks by showing those habits in his own scores. For us, his works such as Professor Bad Trip or An Index of Metals are flags, road signs that show us in which direction we have to carry on with our music.”


Marco Mazzolini: Publishing Representative, Ricordi Milan
“Fausto liked cycling at night in his village of Gorizia. Gorizia is a border town and at night it is completely deserted – when you walk, you hear only the sound of your footsteps. Fausto would pedal fast on empty streets in the faint light of the streetlamps, and was regularly stopped by the police, asking him for his documents every time.
We were friends and we talked amongst ourselves as two friends do. We worked together and joked together. Writing took up all his life and his way of being; there was the same hypersensitivity and visionary soul in his music — the same intelligence, the same irony, the same playful torment. “It is not required that one lives up to eighty,” he said, lying in his hospital bed. His thinking was lively and open, but filled with a strange urgency and full of loneliness. I feel like smiling when I think of Fausto riding the bike, pedaling fast at night through the deserted streets of Gorizia.”


Mauro Lanza: IRCAM colleague
“The very first time I met Fausto was a long time ago in Venice, after a concert. I clearly remember him – an Italian composer between Italian composers – freezing the audience when he provocatively stated his profound dislike for “all that Italian contemporary music”. It was not so much a judgment as the attitude of a child dropping a stink bomb and waiting for reactions to happen.
Our second encounter was at IRCAM. I was a student who had just arrived, attending his first “Espace de Projection” concert ever. There I heard Fausto’s music for the first time: the first chapter of his “Professor Bad Trip” trilogy. This piece deeply impressed me, not only because of the appealing mix of sonorities, echoing spectral music and progressive rock, but especially because of its form.
Unlike many “second generation” spectral composers, Fausto was not trying to get rid of continuity and slowness; he was raising them to the nth power. With him, repetition becomes hypnotic and ritual, inharmonic spectra become a metaphor of un-human, “processes” spreading illness, and the order-chaos polarity, typical of early spectral works, is now a one-way travel towards entropy.
To a certain extent his music was often impersonal, like a natural phenomenon. Fausto was an unmerciful god creating his miniature world, infecting his lab colony with a deadly virus and waiting for things to happen.
I remember having been compulsively listening to “Professor Bad Trip” for months before receiving the shocking news of Fausto’s death. The energy, vision and straightforwardness of his work have deeply influenced me as well as a whole generation of young composers.”


Valentina Romitelli: Sister
“I have never provided a comment on Fausto and his music, as I inevitably focus on the person, the man, the brother, and forget about the composer, which is probably what audiences care most about. Yet, the passionate request by the Talea Ensemble and the sincere enthusiasm of its members convinced me to write a few words about Fausto Romitelli.
The first qualities I would mention are his continuous research, curiosity, need to read and listen to ‘everything’, look ‘beyond’, seeking something new, and then the need to develop, polish, review everything in a restless effort to reach something. I do not know what it was, but he was never fully satisfied. Yet it happened a few times that after a first execution by a good ensemble he enjoyed his music and appeared even happy about the final outcome of his efforts, and, in the end, happy if people appreciated his music.
He was a contrarian, often remaining distant from trends and vogues, and, as a young composer, he got quite angry when someone suggested his music was influenced by his teacher. After a few years, his music had gone very far away, pushed by his research and driven by his strong will to move up, to look ahead. Even in his personal life he was never really still: he used to read many books at the same time, to change his mind again and again…. A friend of his once commented, ‘He was never happy, never satisfied: he wanted to be in his hometown when he was in Milan, wanted to be in Milan when he was in Paris, and to be in Paris when he was back home… in short he was happy only on the train.’
The last aspect of his complex personality I would mention here is his light approach to life: maybe that was also a way of balancing his strong commitment for music — which used to absorb a huge amount of concentration and energy — or a (positive) side-effect of his disease and a way to live with it. In any case his style of blending lightness with complexity and ‘culture’ is definitely part of his heritage, and his music reflects this.”

We are excited to premiere a brand new work by Hans Thomalla. Come hear Capriccio on March 9th! Read what Talea’s Artistic Director, Anthony Cheung, and Hans had to say about it recently.


AC: Many of your works reference historical genres pieces of the past, particularly the early 19th Century. Titles such as “Character pieces,” “Musical moments,” “Album-leaf,” and now with this new piece, “Capriccio,” are but a few examples. What is your relationship to these types of genres? Why do you reference them and what is specifically attractive to you about the early Romantics?


HT: Just as much as it means creating acoustic realities, composing for me means to find out about the musical reality that surrounds me, about the numerous fragments from musical languages that over the years have accumulated into something like a “vocabulary”. Romantic musical gestures, expressions, and forms are a major part of that layering of references (not least because of their dominant presence in the classical music industry, and – at least during the time I grew up – in music for film and television, which because of its connection to concrete narratives so much coins our concepts of what musical figures “say”). My relationship to these materials is one of alienation – it is not “my” musical language – and at the same time one of intense attraction and curiosity. The referential figures are almost always eventually destroyed in my music, though: their dissection into their acoustic elements makes place for a different acoustic reality.


AC: Could you tell us about “Capriccio,” and how it fits into your output as a whole?


HT: I don’t really think about my music as a “whole”. Each of the pieces lives its own life, I hope. There are some traces to other recent works, though: the interest in melody, although one that is not predefined by scales and cadential gravitation, but by sudden linear relations between different materials; the transformation from traditional harmonies into multiphonics and vice versa. “Capriccio” is the attempt to follow the path of a melody that starts out as a rather rigid declination of scales (the concept of a technical virtuosity that has been so much part of the genre “Capriccio”), and that increasingly carries along structural “dirt” – multiphonics, driftwood of major and minor chords, spectral blossoming in the strings, all kinds of acoustic filters; and then eventually follows its own constantly re-charted navigation. “Capriccio” is also a genre of lightness, and I was curious to investigate a sound-world that is literally agravic, where all sounds are more and more airy, flautando, lifting the bow from the string and the mouth from the read, to create sounds that have almost lifted themselves up from any acoustic grounds.


AC: Tell us about “Fremd,” your recent opera that was premiered last year at the Stuttgart Opera.


HT: “Fremd” was a quite exhausting and intensive project – the second run of performances is actually going on at the very moment in Stuttgart, and I plan to see one of the last shows and participate in a discussion with the audience. It is the story of Medea and the Argonauts, which I read as an encounter of strange worlds (fremd means strange in German). It was the attempt to “tell a story” on the stage, without giving up one of the most exciting aspects of contemporary music: its liberation from any kind of system of reference, its insistence to be heard as sound just as much as sign. The struggle between Medea and the rationalistic Greeks is partially just that: the struggle of Medea’s concept of sound (and with that of nature in general) that is essentially “free”, and that of the Argonauts trying to rationalize acoustic experience and expression. It’s a “big” piece – large orchestra (partially placed around the audience), choir, soloists and live electronics. I wrote stage music already as a high school student, and later in college I wrote music for the Frankfurt Theater. After my undergraduate studies I worked at the Stuttgart opera company from 1999-2002 as a dramaturge – so I think that it is a field to which I was always attracted (and the success of “fremd” made me start thinking about the next opera-project already).


AC: You write that in order for contemporary music to be meaningful, it must examine the historical and rhetorical necessities of sounds and their specific uses, instead of relying on a repertoire of known gestures. Is it possible to create in a language without these references, and is that a conscious goal of yours at all times?


HT: I don’t think it’s possible to write music without any of these references, but I am interested in music that truly examines them to the core, transforms them, dissects them, and sometimes violently destroys them. I think there is nothing as boring in New Music as musical language, that in every moment is on stable ground. Whatever that ground is (neo-romantic expressive stereotypes; the never ending repertoire of minimalist- or film-music-idioms; any kind of post-serial “academic” syntax) – music that does not at times shake its own foundations, that actively deconstructs the so comfortably inherited language, eventually becomes meaningless, I think.

Photo by Mikael Libert

We are excited to have the fabulous Donatienne Michel-Dansac joining us from Paris very soon.  Come hear her sing Bernhard Lang’s DW 16: Songbook 1 as a part of the Austrian Cultural Forum’s 10th Anniversary Series at the Bohemian National Hall on February 17th. Get to know her here first!

 
You joined a chorus at your Conservatory when you were 11, but had you always been drawn to singing or was that a new phenomenon for you?
I joined a children’s choir in the opera house of the town where I lived when I was 11.  The theater was my second home; I spent so much time in it!  It was not singing which was new at that time, but singing in choir: I adored it. My very first experience onstage was singing in the choir in “Carmen” and I have been addicted since…

At what point did your fascination begin with contemporary literature?  Was there a certain piece that got you hooked?

My mother used to listen to a lot of music at home- mostly classical and jazz.  Then in the 70′s and 80′s, there was a big contemporary music festival in Royan, France. My mother took the car and we went there to listen to lots of creations.  It was more than three hours by car to go there which at that age seemed like an eternity!! I remember going to a recital of Cathy Berberian when I was nine years old. It was amazing. I’ve always listened to music at home but also going to a lot of concerts. On average, I think I went more than six times per month to the concert or opera since I was six years old. My very first experience as a singer which made me fall in love with contemporary music was meeting Pierre Boulez: I was 22 and it was for “Laboryntus 2″ by Berio, in Paris. Looking at such a big conductor, so calm, so easy, so smily, who conducted this music.  It was a new experience for me, but I deeply wanted to interpret it.  Since this experience, I always think about my time with Boulez when I work on any new piece. “Laborynthus 2″ hooked me, but it was also meeting Pierre Boulez.

What has been the strangest requirement from a composer/piece of music that you have had to meet?

In dealing with complex new music, I’m sure that with work, patience and intelligence, we can do lots of things!!  The strangest request of a composer that I ever had was that he asked me to copy my voice which had been transformed by a computer… I just didn’t understand why because it was done (and very well!…) by the machine. I’m not a machine, so I didn’t do it, but it was very hard to explain because the composer didn’t understand that I was not a machine.  His requirement was not strange, it was just ridiculous. No more to say…I work with great composers who are great human beings who write very difficult things but although it’s a lot of work, it always teaches me something about the possibilities of my voice.

What is your process as you are getting to know a work?

When I first get to know a work, I always work first in my mind.  Just in my mind, no humming, no mimics, just in the head. To hear inside, to simply read also, to be closer and closer to the score and its own style.  This process can take months for certain pieces (for example some “récitations” by Aperghis took me 9 months of this type of work, for finally 4 minutes of music… haha!)  But the reward is that when you work so hard with your mind and intelligence, as soon as it’s time to sing (because the deadline of the concert arrives) more than 80% of the work is done. It always is astonishing to me but it’s real.

What is most interesting for you about singing DW16?

Receiving a score is always a present!! Everything is interesting in this score: the difficulties are very interesting because you have to look for solutions and I think I’m born to always look for solutions (even if I don’t find them which can also be very interesting…). In regards to DW16 Songbook I, I like the principle of Chamber Music, to work on a score entirely, understanding all of the instruments, what they do, where they are, where I am suppose to be inside their line etc… I like the repetitions of texts because you’re obligated to always say the same thing but never the same way… It’s a score where everything is written, I just have to do what is written. And last but not the least, there is a lot of humor in this piece.

Charlotte Hellekant & Barbara Hannigan in Matsukaze, Photo: Bernd Uhlig/LaMonnale/De Munt via Bloomberg

Read what Hannah Duebgen, librettist from Toshio Hosokawa’s Matsukaze, says about Hosokawa’s connection to nature and then come hear his Landscape No. 1 on January 22nd!

“When I first met Toshio Hosokawa, two things about him struck me immediately: On the one hand his life in two cultures, the Japanese and the Western world, and, along with it, his very modern lifestyle: long distance flights, jet lags and the constant swapping between languages are part of his professional routine, while I also sensed in him a deep affection for nature in general and the Japanese landscape in particular.

Whoever has had the chance to be shown around Japan by him, has seen the joy and devotion with which Toshio points at a wild waterfall, a flower about to blossom or the stone bed in a Japanese garden, begins to understand where the source of his energy and inspiration lies. For Toshio, his profound attachment to nature goes far beyond a mere appreciation of its soothing beauty and recreational value, and is instead fueled by the Buddhist belief that we human beings are all part of a greater whole, a unity that becomes sentient in the nature surrounding us. Just as every breath we take unites us with the air around us, brings oxygen into our bodies which also ensures the life of plants and animals, we thus become, each time we take a breath, part of that greater entity called nature, or even the universe.

This idea of breath as a passageway linking human beings to nature resonates strongly in Toshio’s musical aesthetics. Many of his compositions begin with an ascending sound, rising – like a breath – slowly out of silence into being, then reaching a peak point before returning into silence again. During that process, silence can make itself felt as that which tacitly surrounds us and is gradually inhaled by the rising sound, a sound which gains momentum as it incorporates more and more silence… When talking about his music, Toshio likes to compare the breathing gestures in his works to a calligraphic line that equally arises out of nothing – the blank page – into something, a black brushstroke, before returning into nothing again.

It is in this sense that most of his works are horizontally conceived and bear a natural, organic flow. They play with classical Western modes of musical progression like contrast, counterpoint or harmonic modulations, and yet never lose those underlying breathing gestures which make Toshio’s music unique. Many of his pieces carry names referring to nature, ‘Landscape I, II, III’ being among the most obvious examples, other works allude to the process of ‘Blossoming’ or ‘Dawn’, and even ‘Matsukaze’ the Japanese title of the opera for which I wrote the libretto, refers to a natural phenomenon: matsu-kaze, which in Japanese can mean ‘wind in the pines’ as well as ‘pining wind’.

In all of his works, Toshio remains a wanderer through cultures, combining traditional Western instruments with his particular, Eastern musical aesthetics. And it may well be that combination which fascinates many listeners – Eastern and Western – in Toshio’s work: His use of music as a way of bringing us back to that which unites us all.”

Hannah Duebgen,
January 2012

In preparation for Saturday’s Inharmonic/ (X)enharmonic concert at Merkin, Rane Moore tells us about mastering Enno Poppe’s clarinet concerto, Holz.

Listen Here: Enno Poppe: Holz (excerpt)

Klangforum Wien, Stefan Asbury (conductor)

“I’ve spent the last month or so engrossed in the music of Enno Poppe. His clarinet concerto Holz, was written for one of my heroes, clarinetist Ernesto Molinari. I had a transformative musical experience with him at Darmstadt and hope to run into him again when Talea plays there next summer. I have definitely been trying to channel his virtuosity, artistry and charisma in my preparation.

This clarinet part poses several practical challenges. It is a wild and virtuosic score with frenetic registral jumping and endurance demands, but in sitting down with it my initial task was simply figuring when to play each note. I remember hearing Brian Ferneyhough describe a section in his piece “Terrain” as looking through a window on a highway with lanes of traffic moving at different speeds. While Poppe’s music and rhythmic sensibility differ from Ferneyhough’s, this image loosely sums up the complicated, unstable rhythmic organization of “Holz.” Not only are instruments moving at varying speeds, but within my own part small repeated gestures stretch and push. It’s a compelling abstract idea and tricky to realize!

Luckily practicing this and each of the microtonal pieces for Talea’s Dec 17th concert appeals to my obsessive tendencies. In this piece Poppe employs quarter and eighth tones and while I’ve played plenty of music with various tuning schemes it is always rewarding to discover new tricks to achieve them more easily and accurately. It is a bizarre feeling after an afternoon finessing eighth tones when a half step seems so wide you could drive a truck through it. I love the idea that honing in on micro-details (pitch, rhythm, etc.) explodes open textural, harmonic, and expressive possibilities.

These details, among many others, help Poppe create a striking variety of complex and imaginative sound worlds. My solo line, at times sinewy and at other times explosive, weaves through the ensemble playing ethereal, mechanical, humorous, grotesque, and gorgeous music.”

-Rane Moore

Come hear Rane shred Holz this Saturday, December 17th, at Merkin Concert Hall at 8 PM!

John Zorn Composer Portrait Video Preview

We are psyched to premiere  John Zorn’s Bateau Ivre (2011) on Friday December 9th at Miller Theatre.  Join us and a great collection of all-stars including Fred Sherry, Jennifer Koh, Stephen Gosling, and many more.

Bateau Ivre (2011) has been made possible by the Chamber Music America Classical Commissioning Program, with generous funding provided by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Chamber Music America Endowment Fund.

Read what long-time collaborator Willie Winant has to say about working with John Zorn.

I’ve known John for almost 25 years, he is probably the most creative and imaginative composer I’ve ever known or worked with (and I’ve worked with a lot)! Henry Cowell had said that a composer of today should be able to write music convincingly in more than just one genre (or style), and John does this in spades, not only convincingly but with imagination and total creativity! It’s been a real honor to know, and have the opportunity to work with him.

-Willie Winant

Photo by Wang Lu

Last night, Alex and I rehearsed Stockhausen’s Kontakte for the first time since our performance of it at the Spark festival in Minneapolis last fall. The concert on Friday at the German Consulate New York will be our third outing with the work, a milestone of electroacoustic music which remains mesmerizing a half century after it was written. So much of the learning curve with Kontakte is about memorizing and internalizing the tape part; as each event unfolds in fixed, pre-determined time, we interact with the broad strokes of the tape and its minute, moment-to-moment details, not to mention the other live performer. The rather elegant and ingenious graphic notation that Stockhausen devised to represent his electronics greatly aid the performer’s understanding and memory of the part, and two types of notation – prescriptive for the performer and descriptive for the tape – are thus employed simultaneously. Parallel interactions exist in real-time: those of the performer/tape and the performer/performer. The challenge in relearning the work has been to master both of these dialogues, which require different modes of processing information (perhaps even different parts of the brain!). Sam Pluta will be on hand with the tremendous task of balancing the tape and live parts seamlessly, and also giving us a few essential cues. But for most of the time, it’s up to us to feel what 10.4 seconds of near-silence followed by a huge outburst really sounds and feels like. Our internal clocks have to be running smoothly, because mistake 10.4 for 10.7 and you’ve missed the boat forever.

Another amazing thing about performing this piece, from my point of view, is the vast array of percussion that I get to play. We spent the first hour just getting all the auxiliary instruments set up and working. From indian bells to cymbals to cowbells, woodblocks, and gongs, the pianist for Kontakte has an elaborate setup that extends far beyond just playing on the keys of the piano. It’s a challenge that is incredibly satisfying, as I get to step into the shoes of a percussionist for much of the piece and augment the typical sonorities of the piano.

-Anthony Cheung
Artistic Director, Talea Ensemble

Welcome to the Talea Ensemble’s newly revamped website! With this digital makeover we are pleased to announce the 2011-12 season and several new features of the site itself: updated audio/video clips as well as the beginning of a regular blog series that will feature the contributions of performers, composers, and audiences.

2011-12 marks Talea’s fifth full season, and continues the innovative and unpredictable thematic programming which we strive to present. Bringing forward new works for the first time is the most exciting aspect of what we do, and a number of commissioned works will receive their premieres this season, from emerging composers to internationally established figures. There will be classics of experimental music mixed with more recent works that illuminate them in new contexts. A major event in December is a concert of microtonal music, with a conference at Columbia University earlier in the day. We also continue our commitment to the music of the late Fausto Romitelli. After having introduced much of his music to the US for the first time, we will be recording a disc of his music, presenting a portrait concert, and taking his music on tour.

Talea also continues its commitment to working with student composers, many of whom are already heavily involved in the professional worlds of new music; we will be in residence at four universities this season. And we continue our ongoing relationship with the arts-driven Roger Smith Hotel in midtown Manhattan, presenting a series of concerts integrating traditional repertoire with the new through thematic links and informal concert discussions. These continue to be some of the most enjoyable and rewarding ways for us to reach out to audiences, many of whom are regular attendees.

We look forward to seeing you this season!

-Anthony Cheung
Artistic Director, Talea Ensemble