beth wiemann

after driving over the White and Green Mountains several times:

:

My husband went a little crazy with the electronics sales this past year, and we now have a bunch of slightly different handheld video/audio recorders. Voila:

If you want to keep score, that’s a Zoom H4n, a Tascam PCM/HD, a Sony PCM/M10, and a Zoom Q2HD. They are arrayed on the mantle of the family house in Vermont, having just been used to record a new solo bass clarinet piece of mine. I tried to make the levels relatively similar, though doing this just using the visual meters wasn’t all that accurate.

Even before activating any of the plugins that come with these handhelds, the results were distinct. All of them recorded well, though. The sound on the Q2HD was very hot, and it picked up a lot of noise that I would rather not have documented – it was also a bright sound. The Tascam levels were the lowest of the bunch, but the sound was warmer as well. Out of the available files, I chose to upload the one from the H4n, and added a small bit of reverb.

The new piece takes off from some pieces by Scott Miller and Martin Gendelman that I’ve performed over the past year, both of which included multiphonic sounds. This is the first time I’ve really used them in my own work, and they are still not 100% reliable for me as a clarinetist – some work better than others. And many are so soft that traffic sounds from outside the house cover them up – hence the trial recordings in Vermont, far away from traffic, where you only have the birds to worry about. But I can live with the bird sounds for now.

 

(I think the H4n didn’t pick them up anyway. Key clicks yes, bird sounds no.)

ˈvenˌyo͞o/

noun

plural noun: venues

1. the place where something happens, especially an organized event such as a concert, conference, or sports event.”the river could soon be the venue for a powerboat world championship event”

LAW 
the county or district within which a criminal or civil case must be heard.

 

I know everyone mainly listens to music via headphones now, (or in my case, via my car’s speakers), but we still acknowledge that most music was/is intended to be heard in a space built for listening. Maybe not exclusively for music listening, but listening. This past “spring,” I’ve had the chance to play and listen in a pretty wide variety of spaces, and most of them didn’t get too much in the way of the music involved, which was heartening. But the fact that these spaces included two very different chapels AND two somewhat different cement-box buildings in two months tells a lot about where we play music for people.

During this year’s SEAMUS conference in Connecticut, I performed Scott Miller’s piece “Contents May Differ” for amplified bass clarinet and fixed media electronics – in a space that certainly was not built for such a piece. The old campus chapel did contribute a lot to the work, though, since the resonance of the building heightened the resonance of the multiphonics in bass clarinet part as well of the rumbling bass sounds (adapted from the same multiphonic resonances) in the electronic part. In fact, any more resonance and there might have been some real trouble – maybe some chapel fixtures shaking and the like.

Of course, there was a lot to look at while you were listening to the concert in this venue as well – not an insignificant part of the experience.

The other main hall for the conference was in a huge monolithic building – when I asked for directions to the space, people told me to “walk down the hill until you get to the Brutalist architecture”. Lots of cement, lots of grey, lots of mainly hard surfaces, and the performers seemed to be at least the length of a football field from the audience. The sound, which of course at this conference was mainly electronic, wasn’t really adversely affected acoustically, but it was hard to concentrate on the pieces in the space that was nothing so much as a stone cube. I’m happy that Scott’s piece was scheduled for the less minimalist church space, even with the smaller audience seating available there – even depressing pieces were more fun in the chapel.

Last week I experienced another cement box, though smaller, at a show by Gabriel Kahane and Rob Moose in my old hometown. I remember playing there myself in high school – it was sort of an intimate brutalist hall, again with grey concrete and a stage that seemed far away for the size of the room. It has been recalibrated, though, or so a local musician told me. Apparently Steve Reich has played there and described the room as an acoustic nightmare, so adjustments were made in response. The last time I played there was 5 years ago, when it was still in process, playing a bunch of multimedia pieces. Here’s a photo of John Sampen doing similarly last year in the venue. There’s more cloth now in addition to the cement and wood panels.

All told, even with the adjustments, it was not my favorite place to here Gabriel Kahane’s songs. The amplification necessary for the guitars and electronic sound processing was reinforced by the hall echo, and got in the way of the lyrics some of the time. The best sound balance happened when the singers faced the audience directly – but that may have been partly psychological, since then the listeners can read the performers’ faces better and get the sense of the text from more than just hearing the words.

 

The next time I actually performed after SEAMUS was part of an event for donors at the Ragdale Foundation. There. I just performed in my studio, which had high ceilings and good sight lines, but not much space for the listeners. I did two slightly different open studios that day – one in the afternoon for the other residents, and one at night for both residents and donors. Those who came to both were surprised at the difference in the sound between the performances. I explained that many people believe (for a variety of reasons, including lowered heat, lowered use of electricity, less activity in the general environment) that music sounds better after the sun goes down, and many of the residents hadn’t ever thought of that. I suppose that the more we all use headphones the less we think about sound in the actual air.

 

I was back in a chapel at the end of April, when some of my songs were done in Portland at the Back Cove Festival. This festival usually takes place in rooms at the Portland Conservatory, which have a basic auditorium feel. However, this year featured a bunch of organ music, so the large church next door was used. I think the audience had a better time at this venue than in the previous years’ auditorium, but the performers had a bit less fun. They had to worry about sight lines more, fitting around the altar steps, and most importantly, hearing each other through the pretty substantial echo. The audience had a lot to look at, though, and depending on where you were sitting/which ensemble was playing, you could hear fairly well. And when the organ kicked in, it was obviously worth it. If scheduled there again, I would think carefully about what kind of piece to bring to the Festival – probably something like organ music.

 

Trying out a new toy.

Even with all of the drama of this ongoing season (the Polar vortex! Thundersnow! Treated salt shortages! The Vortex again!) there have been some unexpected pleasures. Last week, I had the chance to play a piece that I hadn’t performed since December 1997 – Post hoc, ergo propter hoc, by Robert Ceely.  It’s a piece that was composed for me to play on my (then) new bass clarinet with-extension-down-to-low-C in 1989, and one that I played a lot in the late 80s around Boston on various new music concerts. Revisiting it for a concert arranged by Jason Belcher of solo works from the American Composers Alliance catalog, I discovered that a few things were really familiar, but a few phrases seemed quite different. So, I had to go back and rethink the piece some before putting the whole thing together again. It’s my favorite of Ceely’s pieces, and I think it holds up well lo these many years later. Even though you can tell that the score was notated with Professional Composer software.

Visiting the Ceelys in Boston before the New York concert, I brought along my bass and played the piece for Bob, showing off my iPad-footpedal combo for the page turns and all. (off topic – I was able to sort of help another performer with his iPad-ForScore deal in New Jersey earlier this month, when Blair McMillan played some of Davy’s etudes. Really, AirTurn manufacturers, everyone would be happier if they could tell when the footpedal was completed charged…)

When Ceely told me that I should play the piece “like a solo” I had to stop for a minute (I mean, it is a solo, what??) before I realized that he meant like a jazz solo. Which made sense, as a lot of the phrasing is focused on varied repetition, with a lot of syncopation built into the short fragments. In today’s bass clarinet rep, it probably comes across as conservative, since there’s not even one multiphonic or slap tongue to be heard. But it’s still sharp.

Ceely wanted to talk about other concerts around town, and movies that he should see, things that he could get to around town given his doctor’s permission. He still called me “Wieperson,” as he has done since 1984, and talked about eventually writing his autobiography Stairs of Sand. He wasn’t able to travel to NYC, but he did talk a bunch of people into attending in his stead, and many people came up to me afterwards saying how much they enjoyed the piece. And these were people that had to walk through sidewalks of slush and ice just to get to the venue, so that’s saying something.

I should have known that after writing a clarinet duo last month, I would wind up not writing for my own instrument for a while. It was great to compose a piece for the AdZel Duo, and play through all of the music myself (granted, to really hear the piece I had to overdub myself, but still.) Even when I compose for other instruments, I often play through single lines on the clarinet or bass clarinet, because it’s the closest I can really come to singing through the melodies. So, writing the duo felt very efficient in addition to being fun.

After that draft was done, the Vermont Symphony sent word on the exact instrumentation of the piece for the Made in Vermont tour next fall: flute, 2 oboes, 2 bassoons, 2 horns and strings.

Notice: no clarinet.

Hmmm.

OK, not the end of the world, but I had already composed a draft of three quarters of the piece with a “provisional orchestration” with single woodwinds. Including clarinet. Which of course had several solos. Probably most of the solos, come to think of it. And now, I was given an early-Haydn-style orchestra, without the instrument that is my home base. So, time to rethink.

Not that I am unbiased, but the clarinet does have some real advantages in an orchestral woodwind choir. It has a range that covers a lot of ground, and the dynamics aren’t so closely aligned with extremes in range. Its timbre doesn’t change as much with register changes – and while that can make it seem bland in comparison to the other winds, it’s very useful when filling out harmonies. Without it, the different voicings in the wind choir are much sharper, and what would normally be the middle register of the choir is now really low for some of the instruments and fairly high for others. Having the horns in there helps, having a round sound in that middle register, but those instruments don’t change registers without drawing attention to themselves – they immediately become soloists when they have large leaps in a line.

Ultimately, I bulked up the horn writing within all of the harmonies, and dovetailed all of the wind parts with overlapping segments. Which means that now, almost none of the original melodies appear in just one instrument; everyone is sharing the tunes all the time, with very few real solos. This has made the wind writing more conversational, and the colors change a lot more from bar to bar, which will make for happier players overall. It’s also arguably more like Haydn, and given that the piece will share a program with a Haydn symphony,  “when in Esterházy…” is probably the best plan.

Now, on to making piano reductions for the first three scenes of the opera I’m working on with Jennifer Moxley. So, still no clarinet, and now I have to take what are really woodwind lines and give them to an instrument that can’t swell on single notes.

Hmmm.

 So, after 5 weeks in Ireland, during which time I was assured that the weather was well-above-average, I can vouch for the famous grey skies and the bright greens of the countryside, as well as the pelting rain and personal cheeriness of Dublin. I spent most of my time at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, meeting a few foreign-types like myself (from USA, Canada, Spain and Andorra) along with many Irish artists, from both Northern Ireland and “the Republic.” Happily, I got a bunch of music written, including a full scene of the opera, which Jennifer and I are now calling Until the War is Over. More on that later.

Being on an old estate (Annaghmakerrig) in one of the border counties of the Republic, there’s a lot of recent complicated history surrounding the Centre. Some of its funding in the recent past has come directly from reconciliation projects, and its one of the few things supported by both Irish Arts Councils. My sense was that the artists from various parts of Ireland 1) always knew many of the same people, given that the Irish arts scene is that of a smallish country, and 2) were circumspect about discussing anything political until the social lay of the land was clear. Since many of the artists stayed about a week, and the social scene therefore changed every week, the level of talk about the old “Troubles” or anything like that was completely different from week to week, depending on the people around.  One week, there’d be a bunch of artists from Belfast, another, a few from Galway. There were also some that, while Irish natives, were working in London, Edinburgh or Cardiff, especially given the still-bad economic scene throughout Ireland.

So, I got various perspectives on the whole scene, some optimistic and some not. Many books and films were recommended, which I’ve started to go through, bit by bit. One book was handed to me in a second-hand store by one of the artists – it was only 2 euros, so I went ahead and got it. Turned out it had been a bestseller back in the day, Are You Somebody by Nuala O’Faolain. Every one of the female artists at the Centre had read it years ago, and I have to say it’s a pretty good read, though a bit depressing as well – a combination of autobiography (starting from the 1950’s) with reporting from the 70’s-80’s. I think the Irish artists also got a kick out of my attempts to say the author’s name, which I still have not quite mastered.

After my month in Monaghan Co, I went to Dublin and met Davy to be a tourist for a few days. The Irish do not fool around with their historical memorials – note the huge notice of the hundred-year anniversary of the 1913 Lockout seen next to the Customs House:

We also saw a full plate of Georgian architecture (which made the point about how bad the 1800’s must have been in Dublin, since there are really no significant buildings from that era at all – the town goes from early 1700’s straight to modern architecture). The number of places devoted to the many famous Irish writers was impressive, though not surprising – I’d arrived on the weekend when Seamus Heaney died, and noted that the Irish Times had this on the front page of the paper for 5 days in a row (my friend Pat noticed proudly that it even made the front page of the NYTimes). Many of the artists at the Centre had known Heaney personally, and several went to one of the big memorial services in Belfast. There was even some consternation that Heaney did not receive a state funeral, but it certainly seemed like a national event from my perspective, official or not.

Now, I have some work to do around home, both in Maine and in Maynard, before heading out to another residency later this month. Looking forward to hearing some of the UMaine students perform bits of the opera next month – they’re working on a few numbers from Scene 1, in which H.D. and D.H. Lawrence talk about poetry. Jennifer will be talking with them about the people they are playing, and I know that both of us will appreciate hearing the numbers done live. Back to work on the whole opera soon.

 So, it’s  the last day of August. Cloudy and humid, and all of my bags are packed for a month in Ireland. Which I imagine will be greener than our regular lawn is – will report on that later.

Davy started teaching already this week, and has made (probably) one of the last brie-and tomato sandwiches of the year – although he did restock the tomato section of the fridge today at the Farmer’s market.

He was suckered into buying a tomato-specific kitchen aid earlier this week at Stop-and-Shop, a storage unit which I had deemed cute but-not-for-purchase. He overruled this decision, and has been able to use the device  with our regular tomatoes until today.

See below:

   and then,

Farmer’s market tomatoes are indeed larger than the supermarket ideal.