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Alarm Will Sound. Photograph by Carl Socolow.
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On Wednesday, March 20, the New York-based new-music group Alarm Will Sound performs Minimalist composer Steve Reich's newest work, "Radio Rewrite," at the Sheldon Concert Hall. This is just 15 days after its premiere by the London Sinfonietta at the Royal Festival Hall, and four days after the first U.S. performance at Stanford University. Which is a big deal; the piece made international news (here's a roundup of reviews from the British press). Thanks to people like David Robertson, St. Louis is adjusting its cultural expectations upwards—the world premiere of John Adams' Doctor Atomic Symphony happened at Powell, after all—but we people of flyover country are accustomed to seeing symphonies and plays years after they debut, not weeks or even days later.
And it is partly thanks to Alarm Will Sound—who co-commissioned the piece with the London Sinfonietta—that we're able to hear Reich's new 18-minute chamber piece, inspired by Radiohead's "Everything in its Right Place" and "Jigsaw Falling Into Place," a few weeks after is premiere. This show's the second installment of the ensemble's "St. Louis Season," which kicked off last October during the American Arts Experience with a new-music sampler, including work by John Adams, Aphex Twin, Stefan Freund, Yotam Haber, Charles Wuorinen, John Cage and Conlon Nancarrow. In April, the season wraps up with the ensemble's spectacular music-theater-history-multimedia hybrid, 1969.
'We're trying to develop a long-term vision for ourselves in St. Louis," says AWS's Managing Director, Gavin Chuck. "Everything I've heard tells me that there is something to be tapped there. Not even specifically with new music, but there's an energy there that we can tap, and add to. The same drive that pushed us [to found Alarm Will Sound] in 2000, to say, a group like this does not exist in this country so we're going to do it, is similar to what we are saying now. Something like us does not exist in St. Louis, so we are going to do it. That's really in our DNA, to see those risks as opportunities, and to jump on them. So, we're really excited about the opportunities in St. Louis."
How did a new-music ensemble tagged as "one of the most vital and original ensembles on the American Music scene" by The New York Times find its way to St. Louis? Well, Alarm Will Sound has been the resident ensemble for the Mizzou New Music Festival since 2010 (its cellist, Stefan Freund, is a music professor at Mizzou) and it is an integral part of the Mizzou New Music Initiative. MNMI exists thanks to Jeanne Sinquefield and the Sinquefield Charitable Foundation. Not only does Sinquefield provide financial support, but vision: her goal is to make Missouri a center for composers and new music. So Alarm Will Sound's St. Louis Season," sponsored by the Sinquefield Charitable Trust, is the first step towards expanding new music in Missouri. (By the by, see our May issue for more on MNMI.)
The story of "Radio Rewrite," actually begins the year after AWS's first summer in Columbia, at the 2011 Sacrum Profanum Festival in Kraków. They were celebrating Minimalism that year, and by extension, Steve Reich. The programming included several of his works, including 1987's "Electric Counterpoint," which was performed by Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood. Reich, who spoke to us as he was packing for London, explained to us why he was so impressed with Greenwood.
"Many, many people around the world have played Electric Counterpoint, because it’s so easy to play," he says, explaining you can rent Pat Metheny's original recording and play along with it. Or, if you are feeling more ambitious, you can make your own tape, which is what Greenwood did. "There are about 10 pre-recorded voices, including electric bass. It's a lot of work, but you can do it in a few days. Then, you've got your band in your pocket," Reich says. "He bothered to take the time to make his own backing tracks. Which means he was in the studio for a couple of days, really working at it. So I was pleased, because that means he was taking it seriously. And when he performed it at Kraków, at the festival, it was really beautiful. It was a really warm, well-executed performance."
That meeting between Greenwood and Reich, wrote artistic director Filip Berkowicz, was unprecedented, and represented "a deepening of the commitment that has driven the festival for years now—the blurring of the boundary between classical and popular music. Sacrum Profanum is now becoming a place where artists representing pop culture reach out to the 'classics.' And that is only the beginning. And what, you ask, will be the finale? You’ll fall out of your seats."
Incidentally, Alarm Will Sound was at Sacrum Profanum's 2011 festival as well; they performed new works by young Polish composers, though it was appropriate they were there, even if they were not playing Reich's music.
"Reich is a deep part of Alarm Will Sound, and very much part of the beginning of the group," says Conductor and Artistic Director, Alan Pierson. Pierson, Chuck, and the rest of the band met at Eastman School of Music in the late 1990s, and helped found Ossia, a student-run new-music ensemble that's still in existence. "Minimalism was just completely absent from the conservatory world then," Pierson says. "Reich’s music was just not being played at all. Nor was anything like it...And so that wasn't the whole purpose of Ossia, but part of what inspired us to do this was we wanted to hear some of this music, and to be able to play some of this music."
In 1999, Reich came to Eastman, and Ossia performed his Tehillim for him.
"That really started sowing the seeds of Alarm Will Sound," Pierson says. "One of the things that Reich said to us then, was that America didn’t have a group like that. That every major European country had a group of 15 or 20 players, this kind of small, poor-man’s orchestra, with one of everything. That was so big in Europe, and was really important to the New Music world in Europe, and America didn’t have one. And that message really stuck."
Reich, for his part, mutually admires Alarm Will Sound, and explained why it is so important to him as a composer that they exist: “Because I don’t write for orchestra, I don’t need 18 first violins,” he says. “I need maybe three, because it gets too thick, and you can’t hear the detail. So for me, the orchestra is bad orchestration. So I work with large ensembles, of which Alarm Will Sound is an outstanding member.”
"Radio Rewrite," is scored for what Reich calls "non-rock instruments"—flute, clarinet, two vibes, two pianos, string quartet and electric bass—and has five movements, alternating between fast and slow. "The fast sections are all taken from 'Jigsaw,' and the two slow sections are taken from 'Everything in Its Right Place,'" he explains. "Which is sort of a slow, brooding contemplative piece. And so that’s the rough of it," he says. It's also important to know that the "rewrite," in the title is very literal; it's anything but a remix. "When I have to write a new piece, the first thing I ask is, who’s playing? What’s the instrumentation?" Reich says. "Often, the instrumentation is the inspiration. In this case, what interested me were the Radiohead tunes as source material, or as part of the source material." In his composers' notes, he explains that the piece is his contribution to a genre that includes Renaissance musicians rewriting the setting of the Mass based on the melody of the folk song "L'homme Armé"; Brahms rewriting Haydn's Variation on a Theme; and Stravinsky rewriting Pergolesi for his ballet Pulcinella. Or even Reich himself referencing Pérotin the Great for Proverb, or Sondheim for Finishing the Hat—Two Pianos.
Though Reich's new piece is generating a lot of buzz, we should note that other pieces on Wednesday's program are quite new and exciting, too; St. Louis gets an early listen of five scenes from Irish composer Donnacha Dennehy's opera-in-progress, The Hunger, sung by guest soprano, Rachel Calloway.
"It's based on the story of the Irish potato famine," Pierson says. "He's been creating it for [soprano] Dawn Upshaw and Alarm Will Sound. It's been coming in stages, so we did the beginning of it this past summer at Mizzou, in Columbia. Eventually, it's to become a whole evening-length work, which we'd like to premiere in St. Louis."
Chuck says that according to what Dennehy has told him, very few Irish musicians have written about the famine, because it was just too terrible to remember. Much of the text is based on the memoirs of an American missionary, Asenath Nicholson.
"She was working in New York at the time of the famine, and noticed that the poorest and most destitute people coming into New York were the Irish, and she wondered why. And so she did the reverse journey," he says. "Probably the biggest part of the opera is this character, in her own words."
The ensemble will also play one of the older parts of its repertoire, Aphex Twin's "Meltphace 6," arranged by Payton MacDonald.
"The Aphex Twin project was an early, and really seminal, project for us," Pierson says. "It was one of our first hits. Back in 2003 and 2004, we took a bunch of our favorite tracks from Aphex Twin and figured out how to realize them for our own instruments. It was really inspiring project for us, in that it was music we were really excited about, and it’s incredibly complex, rich and interesting music—figuring out how to make it work on acoustic instruments was an inspiring challenge. It’s been like seven or eight years now since we’ve done that album, and it continues to be some of our more popular stuff."
The other new piece on the docket is "Journeyman," composed by John Orfe, the ensemble's pianist.
"We started working with him on it this summer," Pierson says, "and this is going to be the first performance of it. So it’s a short five-minute piece, short but very energetic." He adds that the fact that several of Alarm Will Sound's members write, rather than just play, music, and that is core to what they do.
"In the 19th century, all composers were performers," Chuck adds. "And then, it just stopped being the case. It’s above my pay grade to know why that happened, but I know that it’s a really remarkable thing about our group. And maybe it’s more true of our generation now, but certainly in Alarm Will Sound, we’ve got six or seven composers who also perform as part of the group. I think composer-performers bring a different attitude towards to playing contemporary music, because they are creative in and of themselves. One of the dangers in our field of classical music is this almost religious reverence to the notes that performers get trained into having. Composers know that notes try to capture something else. And so I think composer-performers understand what’s behind the notes more, and treat it with a different kind of respect—not a religious reverence, but like a more penetrating insight. Let me not just look at the notes themselves, but ask what’s behind the notes?"
Wednesday's concert happens at The Sheldon Concert Hall, 3648 Washington, at 8 p.m. Tickets are $20 for the orchestra, $15 for the balcony, and $10 for students. More info here. If you miss that performance, note that Alarm Will Sound appears at the Touhill Center for the Performing Arts on April 26 to perform 1969. Tickets are $25; more info here. You can see an excerpt from the show here.
