OK, so my compositional career basically began in Sulzberger Parlor, the venerable Barnard College meeting room that is also one of the main musical performance spaces on campus because of the presence of a reasonably nice piano, in about 1997. The last time I had a concert there was in December 2001, in an epic airing of three of my Notes from the Subway.

Tomorrow, Nissim Schaul’s music returns to Sulzberger Parlor, as part of a Worldmuse concert, being sung by people who mostly were in middle school in 2001. (Or were they in elementary school? Oh my god?!). I’m trying not to be too reflective about it, and somewhat fortunate that I can’t be there, since I won’t be hit over the head with my lost youth or something.

However, you should go, because the program is incredible. There’ll be the world premiere of possibly the entirety of Rising, or at least the New York premiere of the first section. There’ll also be premieres of pieces by Joseph Rubinstein and Ursula Kwong-Brown, Indonesian, Indian, and Philippine dancing, and “an improvised soundscape by composers Jeff Yang and Sarah Wald.” I don’t know what the last part means exactly, but that makes me even more upset that I’m going to miss it.

I got back from my sojourn in Grožnjan, Croatia on Wednesday, and I don’t know where to start my post about the place. I guess the logical place to start would be with my experiences with the piece that I wrote for the International Vocal Arts Workshop, since that’s what brought me there in the first place – but maybe I’ll try to talk about the setting a little bit first. Grožnjan is a hill town in Istria that seems to have been walled by the 12^th century, and which was part of the Venetian empire from the 1400s until the Napoleonic Wars, when it passed into Austrian hands. It’s full of mostly unpainted stone buildings and dark wooden doors and tiled roofs separated by narrow cobbled streets and small piazzas with flowers and vines bursting from the surrounding windows, balconies, and roofs. It interests me that the church and old municipal buildings are at the top of the village and not in the middle. The village commands an incredible view of the verdant (I don’t like that word, but I can’t think of a better description) valley beneath, and in the not-so-distance, the Adriatic Sea. The area is abundant with olive trees and grapes vines, and most other types of tasty vegetation. And truffles, they say, though I only saw them as part of dinner. (Sometimes it pays to be vegetarian: the meat eaters got polenta with a meaty stew, we got a truffle-cream sauce on our cornmeal.) They have managed to keep almost all signs of modernity, besides electric lines and a public phone, out of sight, so once you leave the parking lot on the outskirts, you can try to forget when you live. Surveying the view outside the dorm window, I got to thinking pretty quickly about how muchlittle the scene has changed in the past 800 years.

This was the backdrop for the street theater performance that I wrote Rising for. To recap, Rising is in a quasi-Gregorian chant style but using texts related to the Sanctus in Hebrew, Old Church Slavonic, and Arabic. The piece was written as an experiment, both in notation and in sound. The idea of the piece was to have three completely independent vocal lines singing in separate modes, each with a different final,* all surrounding a D-natural drone. But instead of creating total chaos, I wanted to have a few points where the lines sort of lined up – not in pitch, but in character. I composed each part separately, but planned the piece out by dividing it into larger “melismatic” sections and shorter “recitative” sections.** That way, there would be breaks in the texture when the recits connected. The tension of the interlocking lines would give way to brief moments of repose when not quite so much would happen. (more…)

Isn’t that cool? I get to go to beautiful Croatian Istria, and it’s a business trip. I’d say that of the places I’ve gotten to travel as a composer, it’s the top so far - Berlin and NYC aren’t bad, but Berlin’s a little cold in winter, and New York is familiar; it doesn’t so much feel like a vacation. Croatia’s sure way better than the Hague.

Anyway, the point of all this is to announce the impending premiere (and seconde) of Rising, the tentative title for the piece I referred to back here and here. The piece is a gloss on the Sanctus in Hebrew, Old Church Slavonic, and Arabic, sung in a quasi-Gregorian chant style, accompanied by an active drone, just about any instrument will do. The premiere is planned for June 20, as part of a street performance festival in Groznjan, and it we’re also planning to perform it on June 23 in Izola - still Istria, but across the border in Slovenia. The project was commissioned and abetted by Jane McMahan, who runs her International Vocal Arts Workshop in Groznjan. I’m particularly excited that this piece is being presented outside of the confines of the concert hall, and will reach an audience of locals and random, unsuspecting vacationers.

I’m glad that other bloggers have also been a bit uninspired recently. Myself, I’ve been to plenty of things that should have stimulated me to write something - Rossini (go Mr. Continuo Player for the inspired Pink Panther Theme when Basilio enters), student concerts, mostly excellent piano music at the Bouffes du Nord, Pascal Dusapin’s attractive new opera (though it was more of a staged monologue), Medea, Pascal Dusapin’s not-quite-right sound installation with Richard Serra’s sort of overwhelming sculpture at the Grand Palais (why do neither Serra nor Dusapin have websites???), but nothing was quite worth writing about. I even went to see J Mascis playing drums for some band called Witch, but, well, they were terrible. You get what you pay for at the Fleche d’or, which is to say, nothing, right?* (more…)

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