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.

 

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

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