Rain For Days / Dream Exploration

 

Recorded during a live-streamed performance for Trinity Alps Chamber Music Festival
Rain for Days: music by Owen Weaver
Dream Exploration: film by Mélissa Smith
Technical support by Wrap

Same Face! by Florent Ghys

Same Face! by Florent Ghys is a five movement work for drums, glockenspiel, electronics and video. The piece was created at Avaloch Farm and Princeton University and premiered on Princeton's Sound Kitchen series in 2016.

The Third Ascension by Glenn Branca

 

The Third Ascension by Glenn Branca was recorded live over three concerts in two nights at the Kitchen in NYC, 2016. 

Released October 4, 2019 

Guitars: Arad Evans, Reg Bloor, Brendan Randall-Myers, Luke Schwartz, Bass: Greg McMullen, Drums: Owen Weaver, Conductor: Glenn Branca

California Love

This week I'm in LA for a recital on the Outpost Concert Series Wednesday, 8pm at University of California Riverside and a visit to the CalArts percussion department. Sprawl, smog, tacos. I am seriously feeling the California Love.

Composer Christopher Cerrone made a big impression on the Los Angeles area with last fall's performances of his Pulitzer Prize nomination-nabbing creation Invisible Cities. What, you don't know about Invisible Cities? The large scale opera performed in LA's Union Station? The one where the audience wore headphones that piped in the orchestral score while the singers and dancers took over the terminal like some kind of glorious, high art flash mob? Yes, that Invisible Cities. I'd go into greater detail but instead you should just watch the opera's official trailer:

Wow, right? And guess what, Invisible Cities is now an album you can own! (If we can't plug our friends' astonishing projects what do we have left in this world?) As you might imagine, audiences and critics gave due praise to the whole thing.

On the heels of Chris's SoCal exploits I'm particularly excited to bring more of his sublime music to the area in the form of Memory Palace for solo percussion and electronics, a piece I commissioned in 2012. I've gone on about it here before but I will say that it's always a treat to share it with audiences as we explore the thick-and-thin marriage of music and memory together.

Here's a teaser from a live performance at Le Poisson Rouge:

Oh, but that's not all.

I'm also thrilled to play a piece I co-commissioned in 2011 from Ian Dicke while we were classmates (and bandmates) at the University of Texas. Eight oh Eight is a joyride back in time to when the now revered 808 drum machine was king. I guess it's still king, and may the sun never set on its rule. With a microphone, a modest battery of percussion instruments, and Ian's exceedingly deft MaxMSP software patch I'll build and deconstruct loop upon loop of next-level beats and scrambled sounds. Through it all the iconic sounds of the 808 prevail, although often twisted, layered, and stretched. "Drum machines have no soul," the bumper sticker reads. It behooves me to agree, but they sure do sound cool.

Speaking of the 80's, I will also play a solo for maracas! And the triangle! "Wait, that's a thing?" you ask. Yes. It's a thing. A wonderful thing.

Temazcal (1984) for solo maracas and electronics by Javier Alvarez is an old friend of mine. A frenetic, obsessive, dark-yet-folkloric friend. My handmade Venezuelan Joropo maracas and I have been through a lot the last five years but they've never let me down, despite the fact that I routinely throttle them in public.

Silver Streetcar for the Orchestra (1988) by Alvin Lucier will show you an expanse of sound contained within a metal rod, bent twice. The triangle occupies a low rung on the ladder of musical instruments but because of this underdog status, its strong geometric shape, and my comprehension of its true sonic power it has become one of my very favorites.

In addition to my recital on the Outpost Series I'm paying a visit to the CalArts percussion studio on Tuesday at 2pm to perform Temazcal and Memory Palace and discuss music, life, and all things elctroacoustic performance practices. CalArts is a storied place, a bastion of musical experimentation, technology, and forward thinking. The opportunity to do a show-and-tell there is a dream for me and I can't wait to meet everyone and snoop around.

Gimme Shelter

If you've listened to any rock n roll music in the last four decades odds are you're at least passing familiar with Gimme Shelter by the Rolling Stones. Written in 1969, the song simmers with a sense of unrest, capturing the turbulent times. It's dark. It's foreboding. It's really good. And according to many, including Rolling Stone magazine, it's the band's best song:

"That's a kind of end-of-the-world song, really. It's apocalypse; the whole record's like that," Jagger told Rolling Stone in 1995, describing "Gimme Shelter." Like nothing else in rock & roll, the song embodies the physical experience of living through a tumultuous historical moment. It's the Stones' perfect storm: the ultimate Sixties eulogy and rock's greatest bad-trip anthem, with the gathering power of soul music and a chaotic drive to beat any punk rock. [Owen's note: not so sure about the punk rock thing, RS]

And wouldn't you know, it's also the inspiration behind a brand new work by composer Ravi Kittappa. Ravi and I have been good friends since we hit it off at the 2010 Bang on a Can Summer Festival and it didn't take me long to learn that he is a walking encyclopedia of rock history, with emphasis on the British Invasion. Even British bands that didn't so much invade. So it's no surprise that despite training at Columbia University with notable spectralist composer Tristan Murail and his penchant for infusing compositions with Indian Carnatic elements (be it via droning sruti boxes or electronic samples) that this is the second piece of his I've played that is a ripping good deconstruction of a song by a powerhouse British rock band. (The first was a crazed solo percussion/voice meltdown of War Pigs by Black Sabbath that requires its own due here one of these days...)

For his new piece Shelter, Ravi has created an open-ended composition--the target ballpark for the premiere is 15-20 minutes--from the first 42 seconds of the song. That's just the intro! Go ahead, give it a listen at this Youtube vid chock-full of appropriately 1960's iconography.

By the time Charlie Watts kicks in the drums we're Done Dundee, and that's what makes this piece work so well. Ever heard of doing more with less? Without giving too much away, Shelter is an ingeniously simple construction that interminably stretches the notes and rhythms laid down by the 'Stones with an improvisatory flair that allows the musicians to breathe and shape the time, gradually gaining steam all the while. And in this case, the musicians are the combined ensembles of interstellar Brooklyn percussion trio TIGUE and my beloved trio Concert Black. Although I'm sorely biased, it's an absolutely ideal assemblage of players for this project, given everyone's range of talents in executing notated music, writing it themselves, and improvising [read: jamming, man]. Sweet band, Ravi! Har.

And you can hear us give it a spin this very weekend! The world premiere is happening on Saturday, 9/27 at the Dimenna Center for Classical Music alongside two incredible pieces by Robert Honstein. Plus it's the season opener for Permutations NYC. In fact, it's the start of a beautiful new special friendship between TIGUE and Concert Black that will see coast to coast performances of Shelter and a split album of Honstein jams. As always, further bulletins as events warrant.

In the meantime, keep this close to your heart:

8pm sharp | Saturday, September 27, 2014

The DiMenna Center | Benzaquen Hall

450 W. 37th St. New York, NY 10018 

Tickets at the door $15 // $10 for students

......

Remember, Remember

To hop back on the Word Writing Wagon I wanted to tip my hat to a great blog post by Adam Sliwinski of SO Percussion on a topic that's been on my mind a lot lately: memorizing music. Committing music to memory has been big for me lately, so his writing on the subject was especially timely. I urge you to read Adam's blog about it, and then stick around for a couple anecdotes.


I used to memorize music all the time. I think it was necessary since I wasn't very good at reading notes on a page so I defaulted to muscle memory and rote learning. Somewhere along the way I stopped memorizing music. Maybe as I improved at reading music I relied more on that skill, or maybe I was taking on too much music at one time to store in my brain. In any case, this Summer (which is now actually Fall) has seen a personal boom of memorizing music. And the funny thing is it was by accident. Well, not entirely, but I'll explain. I had a couple big projects to work on. The first was learning Timber, Michael Gordon's hour-long work for amplified simantras (in this case, that's a fancy word for 2x4's). I had joined the percussion sextet Mantra and performing Timber is a large part of what they (we) do. The second was preparing music written for Concert Black by Robert Honstein for an Email Songs recording session.

With Timber I was well aware that Mantra performs the piece from memory. Daunting. However, early in the rehearsal process the guys made it clear that no one actually expected me to memorize an hour of complex polyrhythmic music for my first performance. Boy was I relieved. But, the music was so dang hard I wound up learning it better than I had anticipated in order to play it at all. With nasty rhythms played in unison by six people there is no room for inaccuracy—the music had to be learned cold. In fact, at rehearsal the night before my first performance of Timber I realized that I didn't need to look at the score or my cheat sheet after all*. I could play it from memory simply because I knew it well enough. Believe me, I was the most surprised of all.

With Robert's Email Songs, memorization again came into play as a byproduct of learning something so thoroughly that it couldn't help but work it's way into my brain. The percussion part is devilishly tricky, with 20 instruments doubled or in off-kilter counterpoint with a glockenspiel. This cluttered array of small objects (small targets) makes the piece nearly impossible to read anyway, so making certain one is actually hitting the correct bottle/bell/etc. takes the slow, methodical process that memorization naturally follows. For now, the music is still a work in memorizing progress, but I'm continually surprised by the large swathes I can play without the score.

       

Instrument key for one of Robert Honstein’s Email Songs

The difficulty of reading complex multiple percussion music favors and promotes memorization, a phenomenon discussed in Steven Schick's book (mentioned here before), The Percussionist's Art:

In trying to understand the practical side of learning and memorizing music, I have drawn widely on personal experience. For the past thirty years I have made a practice of learning all solo works from memory. My process involves memorizing as the very first step in the learning process. I never play a piece from the score and then gradually concert it to memory. I never sight-read ahead to see what things will sound like (in very complex music by Xenakis, Ferneyhough, and James Dillon, for example, sight-reading is not an option anyway).  

Duh, just as I've always known, he memorizes everything because of this simple truth and here I am, finally getting around to it. Better late to the party than never, I suppose. It's just funny that for years I thought I didn't have the time to memorize music, but if you take away that safety net of a music stand you might be surprised at what you can RECALL.

*ok, I had a tiny slip of paper with a couple of extra tricky rhythms notated, but that's it!

Teaching Dogs to Drive

Fun news:  we’re making Memory Palace into an album!  Chris and I have had a couple wonderful recording sessions at Oktaven Audio in the heart of Downtown Yonkers with resident Pro Tour level Wizard of Recorded Sound, Ryan Streber.  Updates on its release will eventually follow, but first…

It was Calvin (Bill Watterson’s Calvin) who said, "The problem with being avant-garde is knowing who's putting on who."  

We composers and performers of new classical music tend to put outrageous demands on ourselves, and others. We are willing to do almost anything for the sake of our art and we often take ourselves too seriously in the process (show of hands, nerd friends, if you’ve done it or seen it happen).  At the end of our last session I had a moment of clarity followed by self-doubt and then reassurance.  Perspective:  it’s a powerful weapon in the arsenal of Self Awareness, or Not Being a Tool.

Take after take after take I was blowing into carefully water-tuned beer bottles, trying to achieve something resembling “cantabile” with smooth switches from bottle to bottle, note to note. 

“Wait, I gotta do that again,” I would say, “I cheated the end of the phrase.  Need to breathe low...support from the diaphragm”  

Suddenly I got (unsurprisingly) light headed, like I might float away or pass out.  I held out my arms, said I needed a moment. I took off my headphones, leaned back on my stool and waited for the unbearable lightness to dispel.   I saw a table covered with beer bottles that contained no beer, and several very expensive microphones floating before me in space.  I felt ridiculous.

I peered into the booth at Ryan, asking, “Do you ever open your eyes and wonder ‘what on Earth am I doing?’“

He laughed and said it reminded him of a video he had seen where, in New Zealand, people were training dogs to drive cars.  He imagined of all the time and money that had been invested in the machine shop building custom dog-sized autos, weeks upon weeks of training and, in the end, for what? So that dogs could drive cars.

I found that video and yes, it’s totally absurd (and cute).

[Edit: turns out the driving dog operation is a marketing campaign advocating the adoption of rescued dogs. That's a good thing! But still completely bonkers.]

Ladies and Gentlemen, soapbox time:

Find comfort where you can, folks.  Art is hard, weird, sometimes awkward, and the world at large wants you to feel like it’s a useless endeavor. I may have engaged in an objectively silly activity, but I know full well it was in the service of making really, really pretty music that I will no doubt share with you when the time comes.  Perspective: I know we’re not saving lives here, but if we don’t go out on a limb to make the Nice Things, who will?