The Racer Sessions

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NOW meets the PAST, plus CONDUCTION

For this evening I am planning to combine live players, performing simultaneously with recorded players! My colleagues Kenny Mandell and Kate Olson will be joining me as we revisit a recording by VOICES, one of Kenny’s past projects. Over two decades past, VOICES sounds like it could have been played at Racer last week! We will blur the gap between the past and the present as we apply our 21st century sensibilities to this visit from spirits of the past.

After this, we will ask players in the various areas of the audience to get their horns out and play from their seats, as part of a conduction that will follow our Present / Past  piece. As a transition from the curated presentation to the free session, we will blur the Performer / Audience gap with this conduction. 

So come ready to listen, and then join in with the curator and jam, as always, after the presentation. 

I may have a list, as I did last time, calling random groups from it up to play so that everyone who wants to, can sign up and be guaranteed his or her chance to play. This worked great last time. It combined folks who perhaps have not improvised together before, allowed all who hoped to play, to get to play, AND there was still time left over for the free-for-allers to come up on their own and play after that.

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Racer Sessions is turning TWO, and to celebrate, we’re hosting THREE days of live music at Cafe Racer, featuring Table & Chairs artists and groups, some of whom originally premiered their music for Racer Sessions curations. A complete schedule of performers is listed at the bottom of this post.

Read more about the history of Racer Sessions and the new T&C releases being debuted at: http://www.tableandchairsmusic.com/2012/01/racer-sessions-festival.

Curating the NINETY-NINTH session on SUNDAY, JANUARY 15th is Neil Welch, who also happened to curate our first ever session. Here is, in his own words, what you will hear on Sunday…

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Light Cut the Darkness

• Daniel Rossi, conductor
• Neil Welch, tenor saxophone
• Ivan Arteaga, alto saxophone
• Greg Sinibaldi, bass clarinet
• Vincent LaBelle, trombone
• David Balatero, cello
• Natalie Hall, cello

In June of 2010 six astronauts from Russia, Europe and China voluntarily locked themselves inside a mock spaceship to simulate a journey to Mars.  Called Mars500 and commissioned by the European Space Agency, the project lasted 520 days and included a simulated take-off, landing and Mars walk.  The astronauts took daily urine and blood samples, maintained a rationed diet and accomplished over 100 experiments. Communication with planet Earth followed a 20-minute time lag, and mission control pre- planed power outages and system glitches for the crew to solve.  On November 4th, 2011 the Mars500 mission successfully came to an end.  Bold accomplishments are preceded by small, less electrifying ones.

Light Cut the Darkness is my second large ensemble piece composed for the Sleeper Ensemble.  In Sleeper I was inspired by a narrative concerning the War in Iraq, and the Mars500 project provided the inspiration to compose this new piece.  In most of my small and large ensemble work I leave much open in the way of artistic interpretation and even the written material itself.  With this new piece I challenged myself to compose with specific goals in mind, to write a piece intended to be performed as it’s written on the page, and to leave little up to abstraction.  To do this I composed with my musicians in mind.  With Ivan, Greg, Vincent, David and Natalie I’m in good company.  

In much of what I compose as a solo player or in groups of varying size, I allow myself to be inspired by my environment.  Often the places my mind wanders and mistakes I make along the way prove to be the most fruitful moments in my music.  I imagine the crew members own internal, psychological journey during this mock mission spanned the gamut from rapture to sorrow.   I wanted to absorb myself in the story of the Mars500 mission.  To compose Light Cut the Darkness, August 2011  I cleared six days from my schedule and told everyone in my life I was going on vacation.  I composed in the same room, with the same lighting and the same instruments at my disposal, and worked from 6am to 6pm.  With a set duration of time and consistent working conditions I found that I became more productive, and the composition evolved as it saw fit.

The music in Light Cut the Darkness is uncharacteristic for me.  There are recurring diatonic themes and almost an equal balance of rhythmic counterpoint and parallel rhythmic movement in the voices.  My harmonic choices seemed to follow suite in this.  Often times a rhythmic counterpoint will repeat steadily, but the harmony changes dramatically in the voices.  Other times single harmonic ideas will be transposed into different keys over parallel rhythms.  I chose to use recurring melodic themes at various points throughout the piece.  These primary themes are stated directly as in a traditional melody, or at other times may be used as a counter melody to new material but muted in a lower octave or by using different instruments.  These themes often appear in more subtle places.  For example, a theme could be slowed down dramatically while an earlier theme is played atop it in a  much faster tempo.  The improvised portions of the piece are written with pitch motives in mind, and the written sections preceding them are often dovetailed by the composed section to come after.  These motives are given as a notated framework, then individually transposed and executed at will to create a collective group improvisation.

As I’ve become more accustomed to the unique instrumentation of this ensemble, I’ve also become more aware of its possibilities as an orchestrator.  I used the amazing dynamic and octave range of the cello as a primary melodic voice and to fill a more gentle low end in the ensemble.  For example, I used cello as the bottom most note in the opening voicing of the piece.  This forced us to balance our sound around this instrument and to play quieter and lighter despite the openness of the chord.  When this same bit of material returns at a different point in the piece, the bass clarinet now take the bottom most pitch.  This immediately changes our perception of how the chord could be played.  

Only in hind-site did I really see a primary musical influence at work on this piece.  A recurring source for me is my never-ending fascination with Ornette Coleman’s album American Skies.  In the final piece, ”Sunday in America” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_melDEf3XGM I’m amazed by his use of stacked perfect fifths.  He transposes the same voicings in different instruments, then shifts these voicings in a seemingly endless combination of directions.  The melodic material seems almost trumped by the density of the harmony around it, yet the voicings are so suspended that the ensemble as a whole sounds like a vertical tower of sound.  The articulation is very light, and the overall dynamic level is mute, but the orchestration makes the ensemble seem like they’re playing extremely heavy-handed.  

A very special thank you to Ivan, Greg, Vincent, David and Natalie for working so hard on this piece with me to bring it to you this week!  Now we start our 3rd year at the Racer Sessions!

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Festival Schedule:

FRIDAY, JANUARY 13th, 2012, 9:00 PM - $5-15 suggested donation

• Brandon Lucia – Drummer and computer wizard Brandon Lucia will perform a piece written for his music-generating program, the Chango.
• Smallface – Keyboardist Aaron Otheim and cellist David Balatero blur the lines between the electronic and the acoustic; the composed and the improvised; the light and the dark.
• Bad Luck – Chris Icasiano.  Neil Welch.  Drums.  Saxophone.  Evil.
• After-party: Garrett Sand curates the VHS sessions at Die Alone. Join us after the show for a selection of his favorite films.

SATURDAY, JANUARY 14th, 9:00 PM – WA, Cross the Center CD Release Show – $5-15 suggested donation

• Chemical Clock – Cameron Sharif, Ray Larsen, Mark Hunter, Evan Woodle.  “Fierce, abrasive, angular and breathtakingly precise…”—The Seattle Times
• WA – Simon Henneman.  Gregg Keplinger.  ‘nuff said.
• Burn List – Greg Sinibaldi, Cuong Vu, Aaron Otheim, Chris Icasiano.  The veterans meet the young blood.

SUNDAY, JANUARY 15th, 8:00 PM - No cover charge

Neil Welch curates the Racer Session with a new piece written for his Sleeper Ensemble.

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If only the sun burned with a million flames the tiger we tamed and brought back to life, sitting on the edge of the bed first hand, the pale morning sun creeps up his cheek, the alarm clock empty wine glasses, behind the curtain - the rivers of lead and blood melt the stony hearts who sit in the garden’s square wearing black suits and bearing roses, the poses of our neighbors mourning loves ones past, a snake in an hour glass, licking the sand betwixt.  Unfixed like paper airplanes raucous laughs and cackles, the hour grew late and in sunk the leather coach and baggy eyes and rye water.  A moth in a puddle- thorax in a lake dead and floating in the center of a rainbow’s reflection on the runway, heavy baggage up the steps and closed, all beneath a boy’s magnified glass.  A moldy bench and crusty leaves, the nametag rusty orange in memory of… cages on the pond lend hands to swans and some fowl, making friends the earthworms churn the dirt and make wine in an underground city.  Scabs and paperclips and spines and a white light and retinal fusion a thousand inks in the eye of a storm that dabbed the land with green and purple floods. Brick buildings became jungle gym skyscrapers while the rest of us held on dangling in the clouds and when we fell it was into pillows.  Landline telephones ringing feet below the soil in coffins by the hundreds, ringing loudly and desperately while the receiver conducts in white silence. Metallic sheets of statue heads pile up in the roundabout and wrinkle the steel of unsuspecting cars splinters in the glass disperse like spiders.  Ferris wheel covered in mustard caused the lamentable cause that the band played on to, to his baton his mustache sweat and brow playing on under helium voices, televisions and paper cups, warming up with scales in a congregation of sisters.  Blue eggs in baskets at the end of checkered carpet hallways processional tarps on the grounds, while playing on and on to a rosemary theme in Eb the sun bore a hole in the blacktop and fire ants lapped up ice cream and brought it before the ruler.  

***

I wrote the above poem after I went for a walk.  I frequently go on walks by myself.  During the summer, I like setting out for an urban hike in the hours before sunset – generally 7-9pm or so.  Sometimes I’ll go for longer: 5 or 6pm to 9pm.   I often start out with no destination in mind and don’t give very much thought to each turn I take.   I’m always interested where I wind up when the sun sets.  The sun sets and I’ll find a spot to sit.  I’ll sit there for a bit, and then find a bus home after night has rolled in.  In the winter, my walks are different.  Because it gets dark so early, these are in what feels like the dead of night.  I don’t enjoy walking through crowded urban areas during these walks as much as I do quaint suburban ones, where it’s still and quiet and every noise from each house, animal or tree stands out at me.  My neighborhood is quiet and lined with trees.  At night it’s still and no one is outside.  The 20 X 10 block plot of land called Maple Leaf is something of a labyrinthine campsite to me.  There aren’t really sidewalks, and roads are wide and have dirt or gravel shoulders.  But the houses are still more or less on a grid.  When I walk around Maple Leaf at night, I always try to imagine it without the houses – how dense the forest would be, and how terrifying it would be to find myself alone in this forest, in the cold.  It is a formidable feeling. 

If I walk for much longer than an hour, my body and mind seem to warm up and become engaged on some level.  I start to hear an internal dialogue particularly loudly – just the natural flow of thoughts that enter my mind.  I’ve found that without distraction, this dialogue really comes to the forefront of my consciousness.  At the same time the consistent rhythm of walking gives me a sort of relative stillness, and I feel like I’m no longer in motion.  On these walks I’m often fascinated with how my internal thoughts are interrupted by the slightest of noises that I hear from the environment around me, and how these sensory inputs affect my thoughts and my rhythm of walking.  In the past walking around and trying to be attuned to my environment has lent itself nicely to creative ideas.

I will present a piece of solo keyboard music, which like the poem above, has been influenced by the sensation of long, silent walks. 

For the jam, I would be really happy to hear some soloists share their own inner dialogue.  The improvisations don’t have to be influenced by walking in any way, but if they are influenced by your interactions with the environment around you, then that is a definite plus.  When, or if, there are no more people who would like to improvise solo pieces, we can continue with group improvisations as usual. 

Thanks and I hope to see you there!

Past sessions:

• May 9th, 2010
• November 7th, 2010
• May 22nd, 2011

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Hi Racers - tonight I’m working with transportation, cycles, and pitch layers. Here’s some background:

I was 10 or 11 when my father (a piano tuner) taught me how to hear beats when he was tuning, and how the lowest strings on a spinet lacked a fundamental (they’re too short to create one!), but they project the sense of a fundamental through the presence of certain parts of the harmonic series. I wasn’t much older when my brother showed me how to tune a violin using difference tones. When I was 12, my violin teacher taught me a tone-production technique that she learned - it involved deeply overdriven vertical string movement combined with slow lateral string movement. The product was an intense sound that often generated some unusual resultant pitches. 

So these became some of the prominent features of my lexicon. My concern with pitch, the qualities of a sound, the desire to experience a more perceptual part of hearing (not the actual sound), along with the “happy accidents”, or emergent qualities, of cycles of sound. 

I should probably also tell you that I struggle with my instrument a lot - the violin. It is small, and there is a very high and annoying string that I have never been comfortable with, that I’m always trying to figure out how to use properly. (The “E” string.)  

So, transportation: seeking a transportative experience. (Ecstasis is a part of this - to stand outside oneself, it’s definitely transportative) cycles & pitch layers: hopefully the means to said transportation! Specifically, I’m working perceptions generated by pitch manipulations. 

Samples:

Penderecki - Polymorphia for 44 strings - cycles and pitch layers. did this guy write the book or what? There is an eternity in this piece, and it teaches me to listen all over again at each hearing. A phenomenal experience as a live performance.

Istrian singing (women) - emergent ecstatic qualities don’t get any clearer than when you hear this stuff live.

Messaien - Louange a l’Immortalite de Jesus - the internal sound of the string is really intense, the interplay between the ringing of the piano chords and the amplitude shifts of the violin pitch (vibrato) is interesting to me.

Performers:

I’ll be in good company with Tom Swafford and Byron Au Yong. They will help me to work through some compositions that I have prepared for Racer.