Warhol Dervish plays Missy Mazzoli & Nico Muhly
Warhol Dervish is playing at Sala Rossa on December 18 at 9:00, and the Youjsh will also be doing a set. We are playing NYC-based composer, Nico Muhly’s music as well as string music by another amazing New York composer, Missy Mazzoli. The program is not completely set in stone yet, but should include most of the following works:
By Missy Mazzoli:
“Dissolve O My Heart” for violin
“A Thousand Tongues” for cello and electronics
“Lies You Can Believe In” for string trio
“Harp and Alter” for string quartet and electronics (pending permission by the Kronos Quartet)
By Nico Muhly:
“Diacritical Marks” for string quartet
“Stride” for string quartet
“Keep in Touch” for viola and tape
“Honest Music” for violin and tape
John Corban and I are both prodigious youtube watchers, always sending each other videos we find interesting. We have a similar aesthetic, and one violinist we both respect a lot is a Finnish musician named Pekka Kuusisto, who has been championing Muhly’s music for a while now. I actually know Pekka a bit, having participated in the Prussia Cove Open Chamber Music course in Sussex, England a number of years ago, and we both went to Indiana University. Anyway, I discovered a piece that Pekka wrote a few years back for the NY-based violist Nadia Sirota called Keep in Touch, and what is interesting about that piece is that it juxtaposes the baroque form of the chaconne, with an interesting post modern twist…namely that the pre-recorded tape part features the voice of Antony Hegarty the “bluesily androgynous vocalist” of the band Antony and the Johnsons. I felt upon hearing this music for the first time, that Muhly had hit upon a sort of Y-generation composer’s holy grail, writing music that is equally informed by the greater (ie: non academic) popular culture, and simultaneously influencing it with his work collaborating with artists like Bjork, Jonsi from Sigur Ros, Beth Orton, Antony, etc, to the point that when the King of Limbs (the new Radiohead album) was released, I actually heard people saying that it sounded like Muhly.
Digging a little deeper, I discovered that this hadn’t come out of nowhere. Muhly was mentored by Philip Glass, and there is a connection between the do-it-yourself popular culture ethos of the minimalists coming from New York a generation ago and the current scene. Besides that, Muhly is a founding member of an Iceland-based record label/collective called Bedroom Community (http://bedroomcommunity.net/about/), which has a really interesting cross-pollination of popular and art music.
There is also the Ecstatic Music Festival, in NYC, a festival founded and curated by the composer Judd Greenstein, which brings together more than 150 composers, songwriters and performers re-defining contemporary music for collaborations exploring the fertile terrain between classical and popular music”. Greenstein is also a co-director of New Amsterdam Records (http://www.newamsterdamrecords.com/?page_id=4), and the NOW Ensemble, which share a similar mandate to the other organizations I mentioned.
All this points to a flowering of a new wave of composers and performers, mostly Brooklyn based, who are playing in bands, writing and performing music with each other, connecting genres and creating new ones in the process, and doing it all using the new social media and general cultural real-world savvy that was unusual from music grads a decade ago. For instance, the other composer on our program, Missy Mazzoli (http://www.missymazzoli.com/), has her own new music “band” called Victoire, which is “an all-star, all female quintet she founded in 2008, dedicated exclusively to playing her compositions”.
Warhol Dervish started around the same time, around 2007, with somewhat similar aspirations, here in Montreal, not knowing that this cultural flowering was taking place elsewhere as well. We consider ourselves to be post-modern musicians, meaning that we have assimilated many musical languages and genres, and have created a style of playing, by both conscious and unconscious processes which brings a wholeness to a fragmented musical landscape.
I personally earn the majority of my income playing baroque music in groups such as Ensemble Caprice (http://www.ensemblecaprice.com), Theatre of Early Music with Dan Taylor (http://www.theatreofearlymusic.com), as well as contemporary music in Bradyworks (http://www.timbrady.ca/Bradyworks.html), SMCQ (http://www.smcq.qc.ca/smcq/en/), and formerly in the KORE Ensemble, but also step out and work, along with John and JC, with musicians like Patrick Watson and Socalled (both of who are as important to the musical fabric of Montreal as anyone!). John does it all, subs with the OSM, plays in a number of bands, does some historical performance, and plays a lot of new music with groups like the SMCQ as well. JC (Jean Christophe Lizotte, our cellist) also works with bands, and is currently on a two year world tour with the modern dance company, La La La Human Steps. We all perform together in a group founded by the wonderful Toronto-based violist, Carol Gimbel, called Music in the Barns (http://www.musicinthebarns.com/the_ensemble), which performs chamber music as the resident ensemble in Toronto’s Artscape Wychwood Barns (http://www.torontoartscape.on.ca/places-spaces/artscape-wychwood-barns), an amazing 60 000 square foot arts and culture community center in Toronto’s St. Clair and Christie neighborhood, and we all have deep roots at the Banff Centre for the Arts. We all participate in concerts with Portmanto as well, another exciting ensemble that has arisen here in Montreal to address the intersection of contemporary, classical, and popular musical culture.
So you see, I feel that we have been leading a somewhat parallel experience here, though being in Canada it happens slower and more off the radar than in New York (which is not necessarily a bad thing). I feel a kinship to our American friends and colleagues, and want that they be discovered by more people here, and that some of their musical experiments get heard by the wider new music establishment here in Montreal. Our grant system favors younger composers who are still very influenced by academia, which is a blessing in it’s support for young composers, but a curse because it stifles the true conversation with the culture that surrounds us, which is critical to producing work of lasting value, or a career outside of academia that is in any way sustainable.
Mostly, I just think that I think that Missy Mazzoli and Nico Muhly are composers who are doing very exciting work right now, and it is my desire to share it with my community of composers and performers here in Montreal. Then I’d like to go to NY and show them what we are doing too. We are doing different things, but it comes from the same place, and it’s a direction that really gives me hope for the future of our profession.
