She told me that she would soon be leaving their Arkansas home and was planning to begin archiving Hovda’s studio in New York City and that a series of CD releases was planned.

Having spent several years calling on and attempting to assist the heirs of composers who died of AIDS, I knew that Wager’s intentions were good, but the task ahead of her was enormous.  The emotional burden of losing a loved one prematurely can make the work of addressing their artistic legacy feel insurmountable.  My more recent career direction as a real estate agent also continues to regularly bring me face to face with how difficult it can be to deal with years and years of belongings, whether your own or someone else’s. We all have so much stuff!

Well, cheers to Wager and Philip Blackburn of Innova Recordings who have produced a definitive and seemingly complete tribute to Hovda and her music.   “The Eleanor Hovda Collection” is an elegant four-CD set that brings together:

• 26 pieces of music, including many archival recordings but also recordings that were previously released on multi-composer collections from a variety of other labels;
• various short essays by the composer on the music at hand plus remembrances by her closest colleagues, including Wager, oboist Libby Van Cleve, guitarist Jack Vees, choreographer Nancy Meehan, and flutist and conductor David Gilbert;
• some fun archival photos;
• and, most amazingly, pdf versions of most of the scores.

The collection seems like a definite summation of Hovda’s career, but in her biographical essay Wager says that Hovda was very prolific and that the CDs represent only a fraction of her compositions.  Nevertheless, there’s more than enough here to savor and assure that Hovda’s legacy endures.

Previously on My Big Gay Ears:

The Death of Eleanor Hovda

Here’s the full rundown of events:

FOCUS! FESTIVAL 2012

SOUNDS RE-IMAGINED: JOHN CAGE AT 100

Friday, January 27, 8 PM, Peter Jay Sharp Theater (Juilliard, 155 West 65^th Street)

Lara Secord-Haid, soprano

Davone Tines, bass-baritone

59 ½” For a String Player (1953)

Nocturne for Violin and Piano (1947)

Living Room Music (1940)

In a Landscape (1948)

Theater Piece (1960)

Postcard from Heaven (1982)

Imaginary Landscape No. 4 (March No. 2) (1951)

The Südwest Juilliard Radio Orchestra, Joel Sachs, founding conductor

Aria 2 and 2B, from Song Books Vol. 1 (1970) with Solos from Concert for Piano and Orchestra (1958)

Monday, January 30, 8 PM, Peter Jay Sharp Theater

Juilliard Percussion Ensemble

Daniel Druckman, director

Benjamin Sheen, organ

“Launching the Percussion Revolution”

Henry Cowell – Ostinato Pianissimo (1934)

John Cage – Three² (1991)

John Cage – Third Construction (1941)

John Cage – Credo In Us (1942)

Lou Harrison – Concerto for Organ with Percussion Orchestra (1973)

Tuesday, January 31, 7 PM, Peter Jay Sharp Theater

Pre-Concert Panel with Pia Gilbert, Joan La Barbara, Laura Kuhn, and Margaret Leng Tan

Joel Sachs, moderator

Tuesday, January 31, 8 PM, Peter Jay Sharp Theater

Music for Wind Instruments (1938)

ear for EAR (1983)

Music Walk (1958)

“44 Harmonies” from Apartment House 1776 (1976)

Arr. string quartet by Irvine Arditti

27’10.554” For a Percussionist (1956) with excerpts from 45’ for a Speaker (1954)

Wednesday, February 1, 8 PM, Paul Hall (Juilliard, 155 West 65^th Street)

The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs (1942)

Nowth Upon Nacht (1984)

But What About the Noise of Crumpling Paper… (1985)

The JPC Ensemble

String Quartet in Four Parts (1950)

Eight Whiskus (1985)

Some of “The Harmony of Maine” (1978)

Sonatas and Interludes, Part III (1946-48)

Thursday, February 2, 8 PM, Paul Hall

Five Songs for Contralto (1938)

Six Melodies for Violin and Keyboard (1950)

Imaginary Landscape No. 1 (1939)

Etudes Boreales, Nos. I and III (1978)

Sonnekus² (1985) with Satie Cabaret Songs

Child of Tree (1975)

The Perilous Night (1944)

Friday, February 3, 8 PM, Alice Tully Hall (Broadway and 65^th Street)

New Juilliard Ensemble

Joel Sachs, director and conductor

Katya Gruzglina, soprano

Lilla Heinrich Szász, soprano

Nathaniel La Nasa, prepared piano

Allegra Chapman, piano

Fourteen (1990) with Litany for the Whale (1980)

The Seasons (1947)

Concerto for Prepared Piano and Chamber Orchestra (1950-51)

Excerpts from Sixteen Dances (1950-51)

Concert for Piano and Orchestra (1957-58) with Aria (1958)

Photo:  John Cage by Rhoda Nathans, Courtesy of the John Cage Trust

Previously on My Big Gay Ears:

John Cage on sound and silence

Cage’s 4’33″ Returns to The Maverick

When a composer and soloist, conductor and orchestra are all at the top of their game, the only result is that audiences rise to their feet. That’s just what happened during Saturday night’s concert of the Albany Symphony Orchestra at the Troy Savings Bank Music Hall.

An immediate standing ovation and five solid minutes of applause followed the performance of John Corigliano’s “Conjurer” a concerto for percussionist Evelyn Glennie led by David Alan Miller.

With his typical flair for drama, Corigliano gave a particular mood to each of the three movements and restricted the soloist to three families of percussion instruments — wood, metal and skins. Nevertheless, the wide apron of the stage was crammed full of hardware (as well as two dozen microphones for a recording).  A natural showman, Glennie made the most of it.

But Corigliano’s objective was to write music, not make choreography and he succeeded beautifully.  For most of the 35-minute piece, the orchestra is just strings.  In the opening, they had a slippery sense of pitch in contrast to the hard, defined sounds of marimba and wood blocks.

The strings cast an angelic aura around the haunting and elusive melody of the second movement, which recalled both Bernstein and Barber (no better Americans to steal from).  During the theme’s final iteration, as Glenie was both striking and bowing the vibraphone, the succession of up and down motions resembled the interaction of a sewing machine’s needle and bobbin.

The finale was all drums, though not as loud as expected or feared, and even somehow felt personal to the soloist.  That was one of the composer’s objectives, to keep the piece closer to the tradition of violin concertos than one more long episode of anonymous banging.

Corigliano — a remarkably youthful 73-year old — will be back for a full week in May, when Miller and the ASO will perform another work by him to complete a disc for Naxos.

Having a debut after something by Corigliano seems as unenviable as taking the podium after Bill Clinton.  But after intermission came the premiere of “Travel Lightly,” by Juilliard student Conrad Winslow. It was a scenic, boisterous and bumpy ride with little sense of having a preset itinerary.

Mozart’s Symphony No. 38 “Prague” ended the night. Usually after the ASO has spent most of the night immersed in new works, the classics arrive with unusual heft and vigor. But this time there was accuracy and flair as well.

Originally appeared in the Times Union.

Previously on MyBigGayEars:

John Corigliano: searching for a tune

A true American original, Harrison was a composer of great lyric gifts and a maverick who espoused “world music” before we called it that. He was also an ardent environmentalist and pacifist, a poet and Esperanto scholar, an accomplished calligrapher and painter, and an out, gay man in a time when that was not an easy thing to be.

This “mini-festival” was amazingly well attended — it was a great antidote to the commonly heard refrain “classical music/contemporary music is a dying art form which audiences no longer support.” If a series like this can prosper in DC, not always known for embracing new and different things, it’s a good sign!

The first program featured a preview screening of a new documentary by filmmaker and Harrison friend and collaborator Eva Soltes. The film “Lou Harrison: A World of Music” is informative and entertaining, and features interviews with Harrison, Merce Cunningham, and Dennis Russell Davies, among others. It also captures some very touching moments shared between Harrison and his lover Bill Colvig. It’s difficult to portray a life in 90 minutes, but I left this screening with a very strong sense of the man and the life he led. The documentary is not yet commercially available, but plans are in the works to release it on DVD.

The second event, a look at the influence of Indonesian gamelan music on Harrison’s work, featured fine performances by the Wesleyan University Gamelan Ensemble playing the instruments housed at the Indonesian Embassy. Unfortunately, the keynote address delivered by composer and Harrison scholar Bill Alves, plagued by audio troubles throughout, presented a chronological biography of Lou Harrison instead of focusing on the evening’s stated theme: the relationship between Harrison and gamelan. (The next night, Alves was much more comfortable and informative delivering extemporaneous remarks during stage changes at the concert.)

The concluding night’s concert was divided into two parts. The first half featured the Wesleyan gamelan players again, led by their music director Sumarsam, in two Harrison works combining traditional gamelan forces with non-Indonesian instruments. Pianist Lisa Moore gave a sturdy rendition of the first movement of the “Concerto for Piano & Javanese Gamelan,” a very non-Western concerto in which the piano, tuned to the gamelan’s tuning, participates more as a member of the ensemble than a stand-alone soloist. “Burbaran Robert” for trumpet and gamelan gave piccolo trumpet soloist Chris Gekker a chance to walk to various positions throughout the auditorium, playing Baroque-inflected figures from different locations. I found the theatrical effect of the lone trumpeter playing throughout the hall strangely touching: at the end, he simply walked down the aisle and disappeared.

For the second half, Angel Gil-Ordóñez led the Post-Classical Ensemble in two more substantial works. The first of these was the highlight of the evening: the monumental 1985 “Piano Concerto,” played with great intensity and beauty by pianist Benjamin Pasternack. Although this concerto was recorded in 1988 by Keith Jarrett (who commissioned it), live performances of it are rare. That’s a shame, because there’s a lot to like here. Memories of Brahms, Schumann, and even Beethoven work their way into the Eastern-influenced material in a truly original way. Pasternack brought a fresh interpretation to the piece (including an improvised cadenza in the first movement), and I also was able to hear things from the orchestra that I’ve never heard on the Jarrett recording. The virtuostic second movement “Stampede” is not to be believed: a crashing athletic game of chase between a drummer and the pianist, who needs the help of a felt-covered wooden “octave bar” to facilitate the incredibly fast cluster playing Harrison calls for. After the gorgeous time-suspending slow movement, the perpetual-motion finale was given an appropriately relaxed reading, quietly spinning itself out of existence.

The concert concluded with the “Four Strict Songs.” This 1955 work is based on four poems by Harrison himself, modeled after Navajo nature-praise songs, each set to a different five-tone scale (part of the “strictness” of the title), but achieving surprising variety as a set. They were given a fine performance by The George Washington University Chamber Singers.

The works of Harrison should be heard more often. They’re audience-friendly without ever being simplistic, they feel relevantly modern in a way that a lot of the music of the 20th century doesn’t, and they’re well written. If the audience for this festival was any indication, the interest is there, waiting to be satisfied.

Scott Pender is a Washington, DC-based composer.

Previously on My Big Gay Ears:

Harrison documentary debuts at National Gallery on February 26

CD Review: Lou Harrison, Scenes from Cavafy

Remembering Lou Harrison’s gentle queer spirit

The filmmaker, music producer and dancer Eva Soltes has been at work on a documentary about the late Lou Harrison for at least a decade (and it probably feels even longer to her).  The long awaited debut of “Lou Harrison: A World of Music” has finally been announced for Saturday, February 26 at the

The premiere of “A World of Music” will take place the same week as two all-Harrison concerts, also in Washington:

All-Harrison gamelan concert  by the Wesleyan University Gamelan, the Wesleyan Ensemble Singers, the Wesleyan University Orchestra
Friday, March 4 at the Indonesian Embassy.

The Post Classical Ensemble plays Harrison’s Piano Concerto and Strict Songs
Saturday, March 5 at the Liesner Auditorium.

Besides toiling at footage of Lou and his late partner Bill Colvig, Soltes also cares for the Harrison House. During his late years Lou envisioned a second home in the Joshua Tree desert of southern California.  It was constructed using straw bales and stucco just one year before he died.  Soltes has turned it into an artists retreat with occasional concerts offered for the public.

Snippets of the new film, including interviews with conductors Michael Tilson Thomas and Dennis Russell Davies are available at HarrisonDocumentary.com.

Previously on MyBigGayEars:

CD Review: Lou Harrison, Scenes from Cavafy

Remembering Lou Harrison’s gentle queer spirit

Lou Harrison
Scenes from Cavafy: Music for Gamelan (New World)

I was lucky enough to spend some time with Lou Harrison in the year or two leading up to the premiere of “Rhythms with Silver,” the score he wrote for Mark Morris. Two of the gayest artists I’ve ever known, they had a natural affinity. Though he’s one of the most musically smart and sensitive choreographers out there, Morris seldom commissions new scores and so it was an especially great thing that he got Lou to write something for his company. While the commission and the premiere were in the offing, I remember Lou saying more than once, and with a typical laughing tone, something like:  “Well, he needs me to write something new since he’s already set everything of mine.” That was a huge exaggeration, of course, but spoke to Lou’s pride in the dedication and appreciation Mark showed for his music.

All this came to mind when I saw this new recording of some of Lou’s gamelan works. My first thought was, “Hasn’t everything of his already been recorded?” I must have at least 15 full-length discs of his music in my collection. But apparently – and luckily – there’s still plenty of material to be plumed.

This is a beautiful instrumental recording. The performances by Gamelan Pacifica are radiant and precise. And for those that care to learn more about or can understand a rather detailed discussion of the inner working of gamelan music, as well as Lou’s east-meets-west take on it, there are lengthy program notes by Leta E. Miller, Harrison’s biographer.

But two of the three pieces on the disc include extensive vocal material and from that perspective the performances are mediocre. “Scenes from Cavafy,” the first of the three pieces on the disc, features tenor John Duykers (the original Chairman Mao in “Nixon in China”). From the sound of this disc, he’s more of a baritone lately as he has consistent trouble hitting the high nights with any clarity and accuracy. The men of the Gamelan Pacifica Chorus (directed by Jessika Kenny) have the same strained reach for the note at the peak of every arched line. Maybe, MAYBE, there’s some alternative tuning system involved here that I’m not catching but I doubt it.

The alternative tunings are obvious and consistent in every register in the Concerto for Piano with Javanese Gamelan. The piano was completely re-tuned to match the percussion instruments and is played by Adrienne Varner.

In the final selection, “A Soedjatmoko Set” (1989), the vocal soloist is Jessika Kenney and she does a better job than Duykers with pitch though like Duykers she just doesn’t display a very strong or attractive tone.  Also in this piece the men and women of the Gamelan Pacifica Chorus, some of whom are also members of the instrumental ensemble, sound like a middling church chorus, earnest but ragged. The big lush resonant character of the metallic gamelan instruments makes all these vocal problems especially apparent and annoying.

Nevertheless I’m glad to have this disc because Lou writes unfailingly beautiful music and I try to be a Harrison completist. It’s also worth noting that there’s a touch of overt gay eroticism in one of the pieces. The “Scenes from Cavafy” has Lou’s own translations of the Greek poet and the central movement goes like this:

At the table next,
he sees all youth of twenty-two
in the man before him.
Remembered or forgot, drunk or not,
the poet sees the lines of the limbs
of a lad he loved.

The poet remembers the two of them
in the empty tavern,
in the empty tavern almost unlit and much past midnight,
in their light clothing,
in the soft summer heat,
in their great intensity.

He remember the hasty flesh,
the pressured flesh,
revealed that summer night,
and that sight and sense
savored in older years
and in hs very lines of verse.

Previously on My Big Gay Ears:

Remembering Lou Harrison’s gentle queer spirit

At least that’s the impression given by the subtitle to a 2008 piece.

But the work’s name – “Kidnapping Water: Bottle Operas” – is actually deceptive. Rather than mass-produced take-home music, the piece is more about making audiences go the distance.

Like a musical Christo and Jeanne-Claude, the 39-year old Seattle-based composer created a series of 64 musical miniatures, each for a singer and a percussionist.  They’re mean to each be performed in a different body or pool of water.  It’s never actually been done in one continuous trek, but was debuted in eight installments, taking place in lakes, ponds and streams of the Pacific Northwest during the 2008 Bumbershoot Festival of the Arts. A concert version of excerpts is coming up on May 1 at Seattle’s Town Hall.

Raised on musical theatre and action flicks, I became interested in drama and martial arts. Classical music, avant-garde techniques and sacred ceremonies also inform my mix of lyrical melodies with surprising twists. Living in the Pacific Northwest, where the mountains, trees and water remain powerful, further inspires my approach to writing.

With his current theatrical work in process, Au Yong goes from the expansive outdoors to everyone’s worst nightmare of confinement. “Stuck Elevator” is based on the true story of a Chinese food delivery man in New York City who got trapped in an elevator – for three days!  The piece has been accepted for the Yale Institute for Music Theatre in June, which will culminate in two public performances, June 25-26.

As the son of Chinese immigrants in America, I search for ways music connects people with the places they call home. I listen to stories and sounds to find meaning in a world filled with beauty and terror…

Interested in the interplay between nature, architecture, sound, noise, chaos, and repetition, I find musical gestures in everyday actions. These gestures form the basis of ceremonial works created to honor the ritual of people who gather to listen.