What Is "The NEW New Virtuosity"?

by Judd GreensteinThe indie classical scene, in New York and beyond, has a handful of what we might call "values" that underpin it, put there by no one but nevertheless constitutive of the scene's character. One is the value of Community; artists in our scene are genuinely supportive of each other, and interested in and open to new ideas and ways of working. The pinball-like quality of interactions in New York, where different artists collaborate with and feed off of one another, is critical to the open nature of the scene and the broad-minded approach to music-making that is inherent in its participants. Closed-minded people who have no interest in working with others are generally not part of the scene - it's a self-selecting process! Another value is History, the idea that we are connected, as musicians, to the figures that have come before, and that while we may all have different key musicians from the past who we count as our personal heroes, the cumulative force of history and body of historical work is something to be celebrated and studied, in many forms, different for each and every person. Community and History provide the context for all the work that we do, both as composers and as performers, as well as for me, Bill, and Sarah, as the directors of the label.A third value that underpins our scene, but which is less-frequently discussed, is Virtuosity. New Amsterdam artists do not fit the stereotype of "the virtuoso"; Lang Lang does not appear on our albums, nor are we sending our people into battle for Guitar God supremacy with the Steve Vais of the world - although (as I'll discuss shortly) we have some incredible guitarists and pianists and, yes, violists on our roster. Despite avoiding these obvious categories, there's no doubt that the performers of New Amsterdam Records are virtuosos, in various, often idiosyncratic ways. This Interval concert is, in part, an effort to help to define that term for our community.I'll begin working toward a definition by talking about the name of the concert: The NEW New Virtuosity. This is, self-evidently, a cumbersome and awkward title. Doesn't New Amsterdam purport to be an organization that has kept up with current approaches to marketing and style, and don't I therefore know that many people will find the name to be at best a mouthful, and at worst a pedantic mess? Yes, and yes! It pains me to think that we would be anything but stylish in our nomenclature. But "virtuosity" is too broad a term for us to claim ownership, and simply using the naked word itself would imply a potential overreach: "this is what virtuosity looks like today" is not my claim. There are many ways to be a virtuoso in 2008; some of those ways apply to our community, and those are the ones we're seeking. I do think that the New Amsterdam version of virtuosity is a new one; certainly, we're not talking about the same kind of virtuosity that is reflected in the works of, say, Paganini and Liszt, or Vivaldi and Frescobaldi, or even Ravel and Prokofiev. There are similarities - virtuosity has always been about surpassing the imagined limits of performance, and this is the thread that binds our artists to those from the past. As I said, History is an always-present concern for us, so those threads are more than welcome; they are celebrated. But this concert is also a reflection of a different approach to the term - a New Virtuosity.It is History, then, that demands this level of specificity, distinguishing the present approaches from those that came before, while nodding in the direction of those precursors. And History proves to be even more demanding, as it turns out that the name "The New Virtosity" has been used in at least two prior eras, to describe what was happening in those times. The first appearance, the one that birthed the name, was in the 1960s, with the performers who took it upon themselves to learn new ("extended") techniques on their instruments and their voices, and who, in so doing, allowed an entire generation of composers to redefine the musical landscape in their notated pieces. The name came back in the 1980s, surfacing in a much more haphazard fashion, and centered mainly around the Downtown scene that further expanded the sonic palette; this generation largely distinguished itself from the prior one through the use of electronics, but also (quite significantly) in the rise of composer-performers who created their own, idiosyncratic languages for both composition and performance.This Interval concert, and the New Amsterdam style of Virtuosity more generally, encompasses both of those "New Virtuosity" traditions. Nadia Sirota is a violist who can, quite literally, "play anything"; from a purely technical standpoint, she is one of those rare musicians who sets the standard for possibility in what she can or cannot do. Part of that standard-setting comes from a simple willingness to make the effort, to never reject what is asked before seeing if it can be done, and putting in significant effort to make it so. Nadia is not a composer herself, but she reaches out and challenges her composer friends to broaden the repertoire for her instrument, both in the sense of writing new viola pieces, and in the sense of having those pieces bring something truly new to the table. I'll look forward to reading Nadia's discussion of the pieces themselves in her blog entry, but suffice it to say for now: I believe that Nico, Marcos and I have risen to that challenge. In my case, I have offered Escape to quite a few violists who have eagerly asked to see the score, having heard Nadia's live performances, but no one has yet stepped up to the challenge besides Nadia herself. I say that not to criticize those violists (at all!) but merely to let the anecdote suggest the difficulty of the work.Nadia therefore represents, in her own way, a continuation of the earlier, 1960s thread of "New Virtuosity": she is a non-composing performer who broadens the possibilities of her instrument through collaboration with composers. Andrew McKenna Lee, on the other hand, is equally skilled as a guitarist and a composer; in both these capacities, his work is a reflection of his varied and passionate influences, most notably Baroque music and Classic Rock. Andrew's virtuosity comes through as a guitarist in his own music (though his performances of Bach are stunning in their own right) - the pieces he writes are specially and specifically crafted for Andrew, The Instrument, and he makes them feel less like written compositions than like free improvisations that somehow yield works with immaculate form and multi-layered detail across their span. Andrew has developed his own technique on the acoustic and electric guitars, broadening the possibilities of the instruments through composing for them. In that sense, he represents a continuation of the later thread of "New Virtuosity".In the ways I've discussed, Nadia and Andrew are connected to earlier conceptions of "New Virtuosity", Andrew through writing compositions for himself to play, and Nadia through her close collaborations with peer composers. But this is not the end of the story. Both Nadia and Andrew, and the many other virtuosic performers in the New Amsterdam community and beyond, reflect a genuinely new development in our generation of classically-trained musicians. As with earlier generations, our technical training, as composers and performers, has continued to be heavily weighted toward the music of the past. What has changed, I believe, is the relationship between classical and non-classical musics, and the internalized relationship that performers must have with the wider world of music in our time. Put in another way, Virtuosity in the early 21st century is not only about the expansion of technique in the realm of the Classical, but is also about the ability of performers to negotiate the contemporary sound of a polyglot world, reflected in the compositions of younger composers working today.To understand this Virtuosity, it's necessary to understand the context for contemporary composition and performance. To pick an example for examination, much has been of the iPod, and specifically, its "Shuffle" feature, wherein one can allow the random impulses of the machine to move, scattershot, around one's musical collection. While cultural critics continue to be fascinated by the boundary-breaking mythology of the Shuffle function, seeing it as a revolutionary Tool of Progress that liberates music from genre, those of us who actually make music in the world recognize that the "liberation" they reference was itself a precursor to the technological innovation, not a result of it. In other words, young people like using Shuffle because they already reject rigid genre distinctions, not the other way around. In the indie classical scene, genre is still a presence, but only in terms of its practical implications - will a piece be amplified? Will it be played in a club, or in a concert hall? What kind of musician is needed to pull off a performance of a given work - do they have to be able to read music, for example? And are these "works", at all, or is the creative process more collaborative, as in a traditional rock band format, among countless others? These are very real questions that imply genre, but the genre distinctions themselves are not the defining and controlling influence that they were in earlier eras.For younger composers working in this environment, ours is not an era of "influence upon" but, rather, is one of "incorporation into"; the chocolate chips, as it were, have been melted into the cookie batter. Unless we want them to still be chips - in which case, it's a deliberate choice to leave them there! What this implies, for performers working in our community, is that their Virtuosity needs to extend to the realm of musical awareness and understanding. They must be flexible and adaptable enough to understand the "feel" of a given passage that finds its roots in one of any number of other musics - much like a classical piano virtuoso must know what "dolce" means in Chopin, versus what it means in Brahms, and so on. If those distinctions, between composers from a similar era, represent an X axis of interpretive depth, and if the distinctions between different eras of composition - Baroque, Classical, Romantic, and so on - represent the Y axis, then today's Virtuosos must also understand the Z axis, wherein the boundaries across genre and geography are similarly transcended. For Andrew, this process happens seamlessly, as he is a composer who has digested his influences and incorporated them into his own unique and powerful voice. For Nadia, the process of learning new styles and approaches happens through her introduction to new compositional voices; she is like a sponge for styles that are new to her, and has the ability to quickly and seamlessly reproduce those new concepts to which she is introduced. In these ways, Nadia and Andrew represent a New, New Virtuosity, an extension of what has come before, and a reflection of the musical moment in which we live.