Publications: PMP Magazine: Feature Articles

 

Group Visits Tanglewood Music Center’s Festival of Contemporary Music

Elliott Sharp – On Technology and Composing The audience watching someone just doing a computer, just hearing a tape music concert or someone playing a laptop is a completely different vibe, you know? I mean it’s more, for me, in the realm of installation, which is completely valid, but if you’re going to be live, you might as well be live. You want someone up there sweating, you know? Because the audience can smell it, and the performer can smell the audience… that’s just an important part of the concert experience. I’d say my main writing work now is with these algorithmic pieces that are instruction sets and sets of composed materials… they’re mostly based on kinds of biological metaphors and network systems, like cellular automata or computer games that create artificial life. It’s about creating an organism that has some purpose. And that purpose is usually to groove, you know, and to mutate itself and to create little structures that are always related somehow to the core material…and you always recognize the life form from its source but at the same time, every manifestation of it is completely different. It’s different than improvisation, but it uses improvisatory tools.

The intention of the Philadelphia Music Project, to foster adventurous programming among music organizations in the Philadelphia area, has frequently led it to explore ways of encouraging the work of living composers. In August, PMP’s search for new music took it and a small group of representatives of new music organizations to the Tanglewood Music Center in rural Massachusetts for five days of concerts, meetings with artists, and discussion on the position of contemporary music in Philadelphia.

The summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Tanglewood Music Center hosts an astounding array of programming on its extensive, wooded grounds. PMP joined its 2004 Festival of Contemporary Music, under the direction of Robert Spano, music director of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, and attended concerts by the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Meridian Arts Ensemble, New Fromm Players and Tanglewood Music Center Fellows with guest artists Dawn Upshaw, Lucy Shelton and André Watts. As Allan Kozzinn noted in the New York Times, the wide-ranging festival "touched on virtually every stylistic current in modern composition."

Composers represented in the festival included Samuel Barber, Luciano Berio, Elliott Carter, Michael Gandolfi, Elliott Gyger, Jonathan Harvey, Magnus Lindberg, Bernard Rands, Kaija Saariaho, Esa-Pekka Salonen, David Sanford, Elliott Sharp, Alvin Singleton, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Amy Williams, and Frank Zappa, many of whom were in attendance. Programs included a Composition Film Project that paired Tanglewood student composers with filmmakers to co-create works that balanced their visual and aural elements.

PMP held four roundtable discussions in which the group was joined by composers Elliot Sharp, Elliott Gyger, Michael Gandolfi; performing artists Daniel Grabois of the Meridian Arts Ensemble, soprano Lucy Shelton; and administrators Ellen Highstein, Director of Tanglewood Music Center and Anthony Fogg, Artistic Administrator of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. The discussions addressed topics from new compositional modes to the challenges faced by modern chamber music groups in touring to Tanglewood’s history and aspirations. During downtime at the festival, the group attended Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard at the Williamstown Theatre Festival and visited Mass Moca (Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art), where it was given special tours by the Laura Henron, head curator, and Jonathan Secor, Director of Performing Arts.

The excursion to Tanglewood provided its participants with an invigorating community of contemporary musicians and music lovers, and, perhaps more importantly, a forum for exploring questions about new music’s rise in the consciousness of local, national, and international audiences. Professional development opportunities such as this trip enable members of Philadelphia’s music scene to renew their imaginations and rededicate their efforts toward further invigorating the artistic offerings in the region and beyond.