|
Guerrilla Group by
Andrew Bartlett Where does a Seattle new-music ensemble play? Anywhere it wants. In its three years of existence, Seattle’s Ensemble Sospeso has made immediate and lasting impressions. Its striking posters have stood out on walls of theatrical flyers, and its concerts—which have occurred roughly three times a year since 1995—have impressed attendees with a wide variety of new music consummately performed. This week, the group embarks on its most ambitious project yet: two evenings of contemporary post-classical music, one March 14 at On the Boards, and the next in New York, at Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall. The kicker is, Ensemble Sospeso is completely self-funded, the product, says co-director Kirk Noreen, of commitment to “music we like—music we find artful and meaningful.” Yet the group—which can include a few as one or as many as 18 musicians, depending on the composition—serves another function. “Part of the reason for the group,” says Noreen in the North Seattle apartment from which he and co-director Joshua Cody guide the ensemble, “is to get our pieces played, and for the excitement of producing concerts. But the other part of it is to share music that we think is really great, music that’s contemporary in the sense that, in a profound way, it speaks about the times we’re in.” The music Noreen is referring to falls squarely in the avant-garde circles of “new music,” the stuff mostly of post-World War II artistic culture. Considering their ages—Noreen is 27, and Cody 26—the erudition of their programs and the skillfulness of the group’s performances are noteworthy. So too is their drive. “We’re just starting out,” say Cody, a former trombonist who confesses that when he first heard new-music scion György Ligeti, he was repelled: “I didn’t like that kind of music because, like a lot of people I thought it was too dissonant. But… I just realized: Here’s what a composer for our times would sound like-where the history of music is speaking through his music, synthesized. I thought, 'This is our Beethoven.'” Noreen and Cody have both set aside the lucrative world of performing to direct the ensemble, so their main gigs now are composing for the group, selecting other composers’ works, and handling performance logistics. The pair met while studying music at Northwestern University in the early 1990s. Noreen, a Seattle native, describes his career trajectory—from tuba and double bass player to composer and director—as a search for intimacy with music. “I’d been in music pretty much all of my life, playing in youth orchestras and things like that. But I slowly got more disenchanted with performance. I was never like a really good performer, and I knew I wanted to do something in music at a much more intimate level than performing. When I took a couple of composition classes, around my second year of college, I felt this was the avenue to be intimately involved in creating music. And I got involved with a handful of postdoctoral students in their thirties who were excited about new music, excited about composition. It was a way of life for them to be an artist through music, and that was essentially what I was striving for.” Cody echoes Noreen, although from an other angle. “I played some jazz on trombone, but music never had anything to do with performing for me. I got into Northwestern’s film school, but it was too pre-professional for me. So I got into music school… not really to follow trombone performance but to get into composition. In the transition from performance to composition, I thought I’d be able learn something that, compared to film, for example, had a much longer history. And I thought maybe there were things I could learn on a purely formal plane and then apply to whatever else I wanted to do—movies or whatever. And after being introduced to Ligeti, the I got the bug.” Now both Northwestern grads and veterans of far-flung locales (Noreen returned to Seattle from New York after a year and a half there in order to find “thinking time” to compose; Cody has only recently relocated permanently from Paris to Seattle after three years overseas), the duo is feverishly readying the ensemble for its upcoming concerts. Noreen notes that he an Cody spend a fair amount of time pounding the pavement. I feel like the guys that make those indie films—they rack up credit-card debts and get friends to act in their films. There’s certainly a bit of a guerrilla attitude to the ensemble. We’re composers, and people aren’t breaking down our doors to play our music. So we’ve got to take the initiative.” As for the musicians on the ensemble’s upcoming program, they’re not really equivalent to the often amateur-level friends that indie filmmakers recruit for their movies. The two composers’ friends also happen to be topnotch performers, capable of handling the complexities of Noreen’s Oh Shining, based on the visual artist Cy Twombly, or the vamping, fast-moving cadences of the soaring Tombeau Personnel…, a 1957 poem by Jean-Paul de Dadelsen set to music. And oboist Adam Shapiro is clearly expert at tackling the phenomenal Luciano Berio’s 1959 Sequenza VII for solo oboe. Noreen and Cody are particularly proud to feature English composer Sir Harrison Birtwistle’s stirring, subtly rambunctious Tragœdia. Birtwistle is lesser known in the US than even Berio, and his music mixes it up on such a dramatic level that is has been compared to the ritualism of ancient Greek drama. Above all, the two composer/directors are excited because, as Noreen notes, “We’re babies practically, in this music world.” Never mind the baby steps, though; Ensemble Sospeso is leaving its mark. |