The New England Conservatory New Music Vocal Chamber Ensemble, a group of young singers dedicated to performing works written by composers at NEC, gave a gorgeous premiere performance on April 6 of selections from my three-movement Walt Whitman setting I Dream’d in a Dream for SATB. This was the first performance by the sixteen-piece ensemble, and hopefully not the last time that we will collaborate!
Click the titles of the movements to hear mp3s of this performance:
Newly completed three-movement cycle for SATB choir or vocal ensemble, I Dream’d in a Dream, is a setting of selections from Walt Whitman’s poetic masterpiece Leaves of Grass (1855). The first and third movements of the set will be premiered this Wednesday at New England Conservatory in Boston, MA. This will also be the first performance by an ensemble of young singers dedicated to the realization of newly-composed music: the NEC New Music Vocal Chamber Ensemble.
I am far from the first composer to set Whitman to music, and for good reason. His works have a directness and a universality that refuse to show their age, and speak to the reader (or listener) with a kind of emotional clarity and honesty that is, in my opinion, irresistibly appealing. The gentle wit and undying idealism that shine through the verses of Leaves of Grass allow the bold, declamatory quality of Whitman’s voice to ring true.
Although I previously set a poem from Leaves as an art song for baritone and piano (Laws for Creations), I’ve been wanting to write a choral piece with texts from Whitman for years, and until now had never quite managed to realize my vision of what this poetry should sound and feel like in a choral setting. It seems this creative impulse had, like many, a necessary gestation period. When I sat down to compose music last February for these particular poems, it clicked. The piece (about 11 minutes in duration) was begun and completed in less than two weeks.
I chose to set three poems on distinct but complementary topics: the title piece, I Dream’d in a Dream, is a vision of peace (“I saw a city invincible to the attacks of the whole of the rest of the earth; / I dream’d that was the new City of Friends; / Nothing was greater there than the quality of robust love“); Think of the Soul, a list of incitations to contemplation that cover the gamut of earthly and spiritual experience (“Think of the soul… think of loving and being loved… think of the time when you were not yet born…“) and resolve with a humanist affirmation (“The creation is womanhood… / Have I not told how the universe has nothing better than the best womanhood?“); and Among the Multitude, a love song to the “one” who finds a kindred spirit amongst the crowds of people (“Some are baffled–but that one is not–that one knows me.”)
These poems possess a unique combination of qualities–reflective, declamatory, muscular–which I attempted to reflect in my setting. However, this poetry is broad enough for each reader to understand in an entirely personal way. And although my piece comes from my own subjective interpretation, I also hope that listeners of my music will be able to see themselves and their own experience reflected in it.
If you’re in town, come check out the premiere of the first and third movements of I Dream’d in a Dream performed by the New Music Vocal Chamber Ensemble on Wednesday, April 6th, at 8:00pm in Brown Hall at New England Conservatory (290 Huntington Avenue, Boston, MA, 02115). The piece will be featured on a brief program of works by composers studying at NEC, including pieces for soprano and piano, jazz ensemble, and euphonium quartet. The concert is free and open to the public.
Boston Composers Collective, L-R, back: Joseph Colombo, Andrew Watts, Marco Scorsolini, Craig Davis Pinson, Karien de Waal, front: Katherine Balch, Nell, Julie Hill
The inaugural concert by the Boston Composers Collective (March 1, 2011) was a lovely evening of music by talented emerging composers and performers. The concert brought together students from local schools (New England Conservatory, Boston Conservatory, and Berklee) in a collaborative context beyond the conservatory.
The concert was held at Anderson Auditorium and Grossman Gallery at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, which was hosting an exhibit of work by SMFA students. This was an effective space for the program of intimate chamber music ranging from duets to sextet.
Lisa Husseini and Andrew Thompson performing "Duet"
Lisa Husseini, flute, and Andrew Thompson, bassoon, both graduate students at NEC, did a great job with my piece Duet. (Mp3s of this performance coming soon – in the meantime you can listen to a past performance here.)
Special thanks to Boston Composers Collective founders Julie Hill and Katherine Balch for their organizational efforts, and for selecting my piece for inclusion.
This Tuesday, March 1, 2011, my work for flute and bassoon, Duet, will be performed at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts on the first concert given by the Boston Composers Collective. My piece was selected for inclusion by student composers from Berklee College of Music, Boston Conservatory, and New England Conservatory. The BCC is a “society of young composers, whose aim is to expose the public to new music in innovative ways, presenting music in conjunction with other artistic media, fostering collaboration and performance opportunities between student composers and other young artists in the Boston area.” The performance will accompany an exhibition of visual art by SMFA students.
The concert is free and open to the public. It takes place March 1, 6:00pm, at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Auditorium, 230 The Fenway, Boston, MA, 02115.
Duet (listen here) is all about counterpoint, syncopated rhythms, and economy of material. I sought to weave a texture between these two opposing yet complementary voices that is conversational and playful, and to create dynamic and virtuosic roles for both instruments. It was performed last year at New England Conservatory on Tuesday Night New Music, and will be performed on Tuesday by Linda Husseini, flute, and Andrew Thompson, bassoon.
I visited the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum for the second time in 2010, while I was in New Mexico shooting footage for a multimedia video piece relating to O’Keeffe’s New Mexico paintings. While filming the locations that formed the basis for many of her paintings, I sought to gain some insight into the sources of her inspiration. O’Keeffe paintings are somehow very musical in character, and I’ve wondered how, if at all, music had influenced her (even if indirectly). I knew that she had some personal interest in music, as is obvious from the titles of paintings such as Music, Pink and Blue No. 2, or Blue and Green Music. O’Keeffe herself had played the violin at an earlier point in life, and she considered singing to be “the most perfect means of expression”.
While in Santa Fe I met with museum curator and prominent O’Keeffe scholar Barbara Buhler Lynes, who was kind enough to point me towards some leads for research. I described the video project to her, and how my work is propelled by a musical response to O’Keeffe’s paintings ”“ the musical texture, timbre, and harmony that I imagine as the musical environment in which her visual world would exist.
Georgia O'Keeffe, Music, Pink and Blue No. 2 (1918)
Ms. Lynes directed me to the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center Library, where I read an essay on O’Keeffe and music by a former curator for the museum, Heather Hole, which was written for a program by the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival. The library also had a complete log of the LPs that were found in O’Keeffe’s possession after she passed away in 1986. This essay, the list of musical recordings, and my later tour of O’Keeffe’s home in Abiquiu, helped to illuminate the role that music played in her life.
Ms. Lynes explained that O’Keeffe was influenced by the concept of synesthesia ”“ the experience of “crossed senses”, i.e. hearing images or seeing sounds ”“ as it had been explored by European modernists such as Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944). These artists sought to find the equivalents of music in color and imagery, and to find a universal language in art that transcends the specificity of language or direct representation.
According to Heather Hole, O’Keeffe had been influenced by one of her teachers at Teachers College of Columbia University, Alon Bement, who had played music in his classroom and directed the students to “draw what they hear”. From early in her career, O’Keeffe appreciated the abstract quality of music because it seemed somehow essentialized or pure, and freed from the superficial details of representational art.
O'Keeffe's Abiquiu home
Once she had permanently settled in New Mexico in the late ’40s, O’Keeffe had a high-quality McIntosh stereo system installed in a peaceful and spacious room in her Abiquiu home. There she would lay in her favorite lounge chair, gazing beyond a wall-sized window at an elegantly framed salt cedar tree, and absorb recordings with full attention. She supported the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival early on in its existence (during the latter decade or so of her life), and invited musicians to perform for her in her home, where she would listen to them, often with eyes closed. In Hole’s article, one of the musicians related how she would listen with a striking intensity of focus.
Her large library of LPs included primarily classical music. Interestingly, O’Keeffe didn’t seem to listen to very much music by then-contemporary composers. Perusing the catalog, I spotted just one or two records each of Stravinsky, Hindemith, Gershwin, and Ives, as well as an Edith Piaf album and some odds and ends.
Although she was friends with Aaron Copland, and owned a record that he conducted, she didn’t seem to be a fan of his music ”“ despite the fact that today’s listener would likely consider her landscape paintings “Coplandesque” in their evocation of American pastoral sensibility, or a classically American earthiness and simplicity of language.
Above all, O’Keeffe collected music of the 18th and 19th centuries ”“ Beethoven, Schumann, Haydn, Bach, etc, and surprisingly to me, a quantity of Monteverdi madrigals, sacred music and operas (including multiple recordings of the opera “The Coronation of Poppea”) ”“ which were relatively obscure at the time she was listening ”“ as well as Verdi and Wagner operas.
Although O’Keeffe is associated with the Modernist and Abstract movements in visual art, it seems natural that her musical tastes reflected the lush, lyrical, conventionally emotive quality of earlier music, rather than the harmonic and rhythmic explorations of the early-mid 20th century. The shapes in her paintings are rounded and flowing, the colors rich, and her paintings are often strikingly passionate and direct in their emotive quality ”“ yet always balanced, elegant, and poignant in simplicity, like a Classical sonata or Romantic Lied.
I’ve been aware of Georgia O’Keeffe for as long as I can remember thanks to my parents, who hung a poster of Music, Pink and Blue No. 2 in my childhood home. But her artwork first grabbed me in 2004, when I saw an exhibit of her paintings at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe. I was captivated by the elegant undulating forms in her paintings, and was especially intrigued by her surreal images of magnified animal bones and flowers looming over skies and distant landscapes.
Georgia O'Keeffe, From the Faraway, Nearby (1938)
A few years later I found myself mining visual art as a source of inspiration in my music, and exploring the idea of creating musical works that acted as an equivalent or a translation of visual experiences. I began imagining a musical language or aesthetic that would relate to O’Keeffe’s visual world.
My first O’Keeffe-inspired piece was an orchestral tone poem, written in 2009. Since this initial work, I’ve composed two more pieces in the search to create a musical equivalent to my experience of her artwork (To Create One’s Own World and Into nowhere), the latest of which developed into a video project fusing my musical and visual interpretations of O’Keeffe’s New Mexico paintings.
I’ve taken a cue in my works from O’Keeffe’s idea of “The Faraway Nearby” (from the title of a painting, above). I feel that this phrase refers to a certain quality, which is captured in her juxtapositions of delicate, emotionally evocative objects (flower blossoms, animal skulls and bones, twisting tree branches) with landscapes of monumental, seemingly infinite, scope.
For me, the idea of “The Faraway Nearby” is the feeling that an object, place, artwork, or experience that is vast (epic?) can also be deeply intimate, and understood in a personal way that transcends explanation. Master symphonists have been noted for their ability to evoke an epic-yet-personal quality (Beethoven and Mahler come to mind).
I feel that this quality relates to the virtually universal human response to nature or landscape as spiritual, powerful, and mysteriously significant. O’Keeffe clearly experienced this response more poignantly than most. She wrote that she wanted to explore through her art “the unexplainable thing in nature that makes me feel the world is big far beyond my understanding ”“ to understand maybe by trying to put it into form. To find the feeling of infinity on the horizon line or just over the next hill.”
** UPDATE: The Faraway Nearby is now available for viewing online!! Please visit thefaraway.org **
The premiere at Tuesday Night New Music
The Faraway Nearby: Georgia O’Keeffe and the New Mexico Landscape has just received a very successful premiere screening with musical performance at New England Conservatory on the Tuesday Night New Music on a Wednesday concert on November 10. The piece was performed by a group of NEC students: Lisa Husseini (flute), Christopher Mothersole (clarinet), Wesley Chu (piano), Samantha Bennett (violin), and Marza Wilks (cello).
The ensemble performed in front of a video projection, listening to a click track on headphones. I programmed the click to match the tempo of the mock-up MIDI track which the video was edited to, so the music in the performance was timed precisely to every cut in the video.
Although we’d rehearsed the music extensively beforehand, this was actually the first time that I’d heard/seen a performance of the music together with the video.
Nell with the ensemble
I was excited to discover that being to able to hear and see the musicians really lent a live energy to the video. This gave it the feeling of a true multimedia performance, not just a film screening. I hope to be able to organize repeat performances of this piece with live performers.
Today we went into the studio to record the score that will appear on the online version of the video and future screenings at venues that aren’t able to accomodate a live ensemble. The group knows the piece very well by now, so there was little need for rehearsal or fine-tuning in the studio, and things went very smoothly.
Now it’s left to choose the best take, to mix and master the score, and to adjust the video as needed so that the music and imagery is perfectly in synch.
In the studio
Over the coming months I will be approaching galleries and museums, film festivals, and music ensembles with the aim of securing further screenings and performances outside of NEC. If you know of a venue, festival or ensemble that might be interested in this piece (10 minutes duration), either as a video with recorded music or with a live ensemble, please contact me at nell@nellshawcohen.com
** UPDATE: The Faraway Nearby is now available for viewing online!! Please visit thefaraway.org **
The premiere screening of The Faraway Nearby will take place on Wednesday, November 10th, 2010, as part of the Tuesday Night New Music concert series at New England Conservatory. The performance will take place at 8:00pm in Brown Hall (290 Huntington Avenue, Boston, MA, 02115). Admission is free and open to the public.
The video will be projected and accompanied by a live ensemble of excellent NEC performers (flute, clarinet, piano, violin, and cello). The ensemble will be going into the studio the following weekend to record the score. The video will be available for viewing online no later than January 2010.
Animation from "The Faraway Nearby" inspired by the painting "Deer's Skull with Pedernal"
My Georgia O’Keeffe / New Mexico video project “The Faraway Nearby” is now well into the editing phase. Using a MIDI mock-up track for the score, I’ve been assembling the footage from New Mexico – five hours in total, from which I’ve extracted 220+ individual video clips, to be turned into an eight-or-so-minute video… yikes! I’m also incorporating a few illuminating quotations from O’Keeffe, and enhancing the video with brief animated segments.
I’ve utilized a rotoscoping animation technique – which involves hand-drawing digital animation over a video reference – to briefly depict O’Keeffe herself as a character in the video. More extensively, I’ve been animating still photos to build compositions inspired by the visuals in her paintings (particularly the signature animal skulls and flowers).
I’m using the Adobe Creative Suite 5 Production Premium software bundle to achieve these effects: Premiere for the heavy lifting of video editing and putting together all of the elements; After Effects for animating still images and text; Flash for drawn animation; and Photoshop for the preparation of the images used in the animations. I’m still learning all of this new software and experimenting with different ideas and techniques, but I’m excited about the way the video is shaping up.
Quotation from Georgia O'Keeffe in "The Faraway Nearby"
The trickiest aspect of editing this project is probably the pacing. This is a non-narrative music video packed with a variety of quickly-changing visuals, so the challenge for me now is to find the balance of how long to dwell on a particular image or series of related images, while maintaining enough consistency to be satisfying and, at the same time, the sense of movement which is key to the tone or mood that I’m striving to evoke. But ultimately, everything relies on the pacing of the music.
Since I began researching locations to film in New Mexico for my Georgia O’Keeffe video project, I’ve been both excited and a little nervous about the Black Place. Georgia O’Keeffe’s series of paintings on this subject (e.g. Black Place II and Grey Hills) are among my favorite works of hers. While composing O’Keeffe-inspired music (see this post for info), I often felt most drawn to relate my music to the Black Place paintings. I’m fascinated by the sense of infinite movement in her vision of these enigmatic hills.
The Black Place
I was nervous about filming because the location is relatively remote and seemed like it would be difficult to find. Add to that the fact that it’s supposedly “oven-like” in the summer (the grey-black dirt absorbs and multiplies the sun’s heat), and we were experiencing an uncharacteristic heat wave in the southwest.
But thanks to this website (and thanks to Barbara Buhler Lynes, curator of the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, for directing me to that website), we were able to navigate through surprisingly verdant mountains, valleys and ranches to the exact place where O’Keeffe painted (about a 1 1/2 hour drive from Abiquiu). We made an effort to arrive late in the afternoon, when the day’s heat was on the wane.
O'Keeffe said the Black Place was like "a mile of elephants".
It turns out that the Black Place is located directly on a four-lane highway (which it definitely was not when O’Keeffe painted it in the ’30s and ’40s!). This was both convenient and problematic: convenient because we didn’t need to hike the tripod and camera very far from the car, but problematic because it was difficult to get off of the road at the best spots for filming (not to mention the power lines and fences ”“ and small oil pumps! ”“ that stood in between my camera and the hills).
Despite small setbacks, I think this may turn out to be the best footage of this trip ”“ and, poetically enough, the last footage. The “real” Black Place was fascinating and, more than any other location we had visited, it felt for me like walking into an O’Keeffe painting. While looking through the viewfinder of the camera at those smooth, undulating mounds of painted-looking grey-pink-white-black, I felt like I was seeing some of what she had seen.
O’Keeffe said that she traveled around the world and had never found a place that was better than where she lived. This project has taken me to those places that she considered great, and it has given me a new depth of understanding of her experience and where her visionary artwork came from. After a week of travel and filming, the footage is in the can ”“ five hours in total (eek) ”“ and now, the most time-consuming part of the project lies ahead: editing!
