Publications: PMP Magazine: Feature Articles

A World of Music in the City of New York: Blackbirds and Barbers on PMP’s Fourth Professional Development Trip

Bob Hurwitz, President of Nonesuch Records: Rather than doing things I thought I should do because I thought they were important, I thought instead I’d just do things that I really loved. Because, if I failed…based on things I did because I thought I should do them, that would be one thing. But if I failed because I did the things I loved then I couldn’t feel that bad…I think, in terms of a guide, you could probably find more in Darwin than you could in any kind of Record Company A-B-C, which is to say, we were living in an age of dinosaurs, and we were these small little mammals running around, and we just learned how to adapt our behavior in…treating every new challenge in as fresh a way as possible, and deal with our intuition, and never be seduced into trying to get too big too fast. And managed our costs and tried to balance art and commerce together, and, by the way, got really lucky. Paola Balsamo Prestini, Co-founder of VisionIntoArt: (On finding appropriate performance spaces) For us, venue is really wherever we can get into…We’ve done crazy things…It’s really about our following, which is mostly through these different artists that come together and have their own strong followings, and so form this collective audience base. But for us, the conditions have actually been the most exciting part, you know – performing in the basement of a church, there’s nowhere to project, so you wind up projecting on a table, and that gives you a really cool projection surface. These things are exciting, and part of creating multimedia is dealing with conditions. Some of the most fascinating results have come from those conditions. Harold Meltzer, Artistic Director of Sequitur: We’ve done every kind of music that I can think of doing…I couldn’t program something I dislike, but I work very hard to like things that are as far away from what I do as possible, and there are times that something doesn’t have an emotional meaning to me but I can tell is really good and is emotionally resonant for other people, and I have no problem programming that. One touchstone: before we started, one of my co-founders was cousins with Robert Beaser…So we went to see him, and he said, "Don’t program to make yourself look good…If you’re going to be the composer that you want to be, you can’t be afraid, as a programmer, of where your music is going to fit in, and you’ve got to put the best stuff that you can on a program, and that will have the benefit, also, of challenging you as a composer."

PMP continued its tradition of sponsoring an annual professional development trip to New York City this March, bringing twenty-seven Philadelphia-area music presenters and performers, in addition to PMP and Pew staff, to the city for a long weekend of concerts and panel discussions. The trip, spanning four days of new music, jazz, world music, and musical theater performances, offered the participants an artistically- and professionally-inspiring context for discussion.

On the evening of Wednesday, March 10th, the trip began with a performance at Carnegie Hall by the American Composers Orchestra entitled Fanfares and Fire, conducted by Steven Sloane. The program included Ned Rorem’s Lions (A Dream), Daron Hagen’s Fire Music, and Nicholas Maw’s The World in the Evening, the latter two pieces enjoying their New York premieres. However, in many ways, the central work of the evening was the world premiere of David Schober’s Split Horizon, a concerto for sextet and orchestra. The piece was commissioned by the Fromm Music Foundation and featured the prodigious talents of new music ensemble eighth blackbird. The crisp performance of this emergent group was highlighted by its decision to play from memory.

Thursday morning, representatives from music service organizations and advocacy groups Meet the Composer and Arts International gave presentations on the variety of grant support their organizations offer. PMP then held a Meet the Artists panel discussion, allowing some of the musicians participating in the weekend’s performances to express their own insights into what might be seen, and, more importantly, heard in their concerts. The panelists included Mr. Sloane, eighth blackbird’s pianist, Lisa Kaplan, and "Doctor" Lonnie Smith, a jazz organist who performed at the Iridium Jazz Club later that night. The panel was moderated by John Schaeffer, host of WNYC’s popular new music show New Sounds. The panelists addressed how they came to their individual performance idioms and shared their diverse perspectives on improvisation in both classical music and jazz. Lonnie Smith later noted the need for a retirement home for jazz musicians, which Kaplan and Sloane said they wanted to join.

The Jazz Organ Summit at the Iridium was a hit, and, according to many, far too short. It involved the collaboration of Dr. Smith, Jimmy McGriff, and Philadelphia-native Joey DeFrancesco on Hammond B3 organs, as well as veteran tenor saxophonist Houston Person, the soulful guitarist Melvin Sparks, and the ever-versatile drummer Joe Farnsworth. Mr. de Francesco, the youngster compared to Dr. Smith and Mr. McGriff, described the honor of performing with artists he used to listen to on records as a child. The three first played individually and then as an ensemble, building toward a climactic wash of organ sound highlighted by DeFrancesco’s technical virtuosity, McGriff’s masterful restraint, and Dr. Smith’s brilliantly constructed solos.

Friday morning began with a roundtable discussion intended to address "challenges and opportunities" specific to Philadelphia’s music community. Artists and presenters vocalized concerns regarding the limited opportunities for folk and world musicians to perform in the city, and the tricky business of building audiences for new music. The morning’s events continued with a panel entitled Connections Across Cultures, again moderated by Mr. Schaeffer. The panelists included Robert Browning, Director of the World Music Institute, and Bob Hurwitz, President of Nonesuch Records. Schaeffer posed questions to Mr. Browning and Mr. Hurwitz on the logistical difficulties of bringing international artists into the United States, especially in the post 9/11 political climate. Browning addressed both the successes and difficulties with which American audiences receive the music he presents, from traditional Russian music to Afro-Peruvian fusion. Hurwitz mused on love and luck in the record industry, and reminded the audience how an artist’s talent can break down barriers of audience and genre.

The trip participants attended a concert presented by Mr. Browning’s World Music Institute that evening. The concert, called Fiesta Mexicana: Masters of Mexican Music, took place at Town Hall and featured four different styles of Mexican music and dance. José Gutiérrez Y Los Hermanos Ochoa performed in the Veracruz Trio Jarocho style, and the entertainment continued with Domingo "Mingo" Saldivar, nicknamed "The Dancing Cowboy," who lived up to his name while singing and playing the accordion with his Conjunto Tejano band. The Marimba Chiapas performed third, concentrating on traditional sones, both waltzes and up-tempo pieces, spiced with Spanish sesquilatera syncopation. The program culminated with the Mariachi Los Camperos de Nati Cano, who displayed their mastery of the breadth of the mariachi repertoire, from classic sones, rancheras, and regional folk rhythms, to pieces marked by the harmonically and rhythmically rich contemporary sound.

Saturday, March 13th, the final day of the trip, the morning panel discussion centered on Creating, Programming, and Presenting Interdisciplinary Work, and was moderated by Frank Oteri, Composer and Editor of the American Music Center’s web magazine, NewMusicBox. Speaking on the panel were Harold Meltzer, Composer and Artistic Director of Sequitur, Paola Balsamo Prestini, Composer and Co-founder/Director of VisionIntoArt, and Steven Vitiello, Composer and Archivist at The Kitchen. Both Sequitur and VisionIntoArt create multidisciplinary programs that fuse new music with theater, opera, dance, and spoken word poetry. The Kitchen is a presenting organization committed to supporting the performance of vital and pioneering artists. Beyond his "day job," as he joked, Vitiello also works as a sound artist and has collaborated extensively on interdisciplinary installations with visual artists, both in the United States and in Europe. This group spoke on the challenges inherent to interdisciplinary programming, from clarifying priorities of theme and content, to overcoming technical restrictions in traditional venues, to coaxing musicians beyond their disciplinary comfort zones. Much of the discussion focused on intersections of artistic and curatorial work. They spoke positively on the reception of experimental programming, and the excitement of convening diverse audiences, which members of PMP’s group affirmed with anecdotes from their own performing and presenting experience.

Before returning to Philadelphia that afternoon, the group attended a matinee performance of Steven Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd at the New York City Opera. Sweeney Todd tells the story of "the demon barber of Fleet Street," who survives imprisonment, exile and shipwreck and returns to his native London, evoked as sordid and corrupt, to avenge the death of his wife. The City Opera presented Hal Prince’s seamless production of the famously macabre musical, with Timothy Nolan in the title role stalking woodenly around the 19th century city and shifting to a trembling rage as he took his razor in hand.

PMP sponsors professional development trips in order to foster ties amongst the Philadelphia music community, as well as to expose trip participants to external programming philosophies. This is the fourth year PMP coordinated such a field trip. Attendees of last year’s professional development trip enjoyed performances by the Kitchen House Blend, with guest artists/composers Tiyé Giraud, Evan Ziporyn, and Roy Campbell; the Geri Allen Trio, featuring Buster Williams and Billy Hart; and the Metropolitan Opera’s production of William Bolcom’s A View From The Bridge.