INTERVAL 6.1 Blog 3/3

lucas1

This is the third of three blog entries by curator Owen Weaver leading up to the 10/26 MATA Interval Series concert at the Actors Fund Arts Center.Owen Weaver:This is a place where I will discuss the music and artistic collaborations in the works for this show. Special thanks to MATA and Issue Project Room for making the magic happen!Episode III: Memory Palace by Christopher Cerrone.Memory Palace is a five-movement solo work for percussion and electronics. Inspired by ancient memorization techniques of monks, it also contains references to specific times and places in Chris’ life. Specifically, the movements are titled Harriman, Power Lines, Foxhurst, L. I. E. (Long Island Expressway, of course) and Claremont. The piece also evokes one of my favorite aspects of music, its ability to trigger long forgotten memories and emotions. Simply drop the needle on a old familiar song and you suddenly remember--for better or for worse--exactly how you felt at that time in your life. In my opinion It’s the closest thing to time travel. The slowly unfolding yet short movements chained together in Memory Palace have a knack for providing a wellspring of memories whether you lived on Claremont or not. All you have do is let your mind wander to your own life and times...While we were in preview mode before the last June’s premiere at The Stone, we showed off the first two movements at Fast Forward Austin and the Hartford New Music Festival. Below is an excerpt of a previous blog post I wrote back then. It picks up after I described how hearing a recent string of performances of Chris’ music moved me to approach him for a new piece:|| The haunting, reflective, lyrical qualities of these works stuck with me and I began to think of them as qualities lacking in percussion music, known more for its bombast than coloristic subtlety. I was keen to hear how Chris would treat a percussive medium, and the process has been one of continual discovery. However, I wasn't much help."No big instruments," I said. "No marimbas.""How about vibraphone?""Nope.""Dude, you are killing me."When commissioning composers I tend to get obsessed with keeping things small and "tour-able". This runs the risk of inhibiting the sonic scope of a piece, but Chris picked up that creative gauntlet and got crafty. No marimba? No big deal. Instead, he prescribed that I cut and sand seven boards, fine-tuning them to specific pitches. In our recent test run of two movements at Fast Forward Austin we close mic'd the planks, added reverb, and the electronic component of the piece did the rest. The result? Humming drones from the boards, with the amplification and electronics acting as the resonators of our "marimba". Other melodic instrument workaround experiments have included tuning metal pipes, plucking pianos, autoharps and zithers, tuning glass bowls with water, and some surprises I'd like to keep under my hat just yet. ||Now, with a few performances under our belts, things have changed but the piece’s malleability is exciting. Chris and I both strive to improve the piece and the performance every time out, and its duration and depth allow for this. There’s a lot of music to negotiate and renegotiate!And, it’s another reason why I prefer play brand new music written just for me (and some friends): you get to mess with it as long as you see fit. Try suggesting alterations to the voicing or notation in your Haydn string quartet and see how far that gets you.Here’s those first two parts, recorded live at the Color Field Festival. The first is for acoustic guitar, cricket field recording, and drones. The second features tuned wooden planks and more drones.http://youtu.be/GIaEduw8XygBelow is what Chris had to say about our collaboration via the Hartford New Music Festival...|| “Last summer Owen Weaver called me and asked me for a long percussion piece. Like, TV-episode-long. That scared me, because long solo instrumental pieces are generally not my favorite thing to watch, let alone write. I mean, I can’t think of an experience—maybe a few Beethoven Piano Sonatas excluded—where I really have been captivated by a single performer playing a solo piece for that long. On top of that, a lot of my music has focused on the subtle interplay of musicians. So to write a solo piece would undermine much of what I’d be working on. And not only that: Owen was extremely interested in playing the piece around and touring it in a car. Which meant, in short, that I couldn’t compose a piece for the percussion instruments I usually default to: Vibraphone, Bass Drum, Tam-tam, Etc. It had to be light and portable.Those were the minuses. So there was some big pluses too. Owen is an awesome percussionist. He’s extremely technically gifted, but having gone to a bunch of good music schools, I have to confess that wasn’t what impressed me. What drew me in much more was the idea that he was basically completely willing to go out on a limb to do anything he could to make the project work. He got 9 other awesome percussionists to join a consortium. He was really happy to have electronics integrated into the piece. And he has been so game to do whatever else is necessary to make the piece happen—including spending a weekend cutting up wooden pieces, shaving metal pipes, and even searching for a zither—that the project has become a real joy and a great challenge.Another thing that led me in a direction that I thought meaningful is that Owen had mentioned he’d really liked the short album ‘Five Days’ that Pink Pamphlet Records had released in 2010. Five Days is an album of short ambient works that I had created while a grad student at Yale. It’s a series of one-takes that I had written quick quickly while there. The idea of creating an EP of music for Owen, 5 semi-self contained pieces further reduced my anxiety about creating a grand, long 25 minute piece.” ||The upcoming MATA Interval performance of Memory Palace is very special. For this Chris enlisted the aid of a photographer Lucas Foglia who selected five photographs, each paired with one movement of the piece. If you come to the show you will find five iPads with headphones in the lobby. Each one will contain one of Lucas’ photos along with an audio file of Chris’ music--electronics only--from one of the five movements. Make sense? Think of it like a wine and cheese pairing except with a still image and sound. The idea is that you, the audience, can take in the exhibition before or after the performance and meditate on what memories stir inside that busy head of yours. Take some time to dwell. Then you can take them into the concert, or home with you after. Or you can, as they say, leave it on the court.I’ll leave you with one of the Lucas’ beautiful images but won’t reveal its musical counterpart. You’ll have to come see for yourself.www.lucasfoglia.com