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When the husband-and- Some—but not all—of the composers came to Repertoire wife team of Michael their assignments well versed in the duo’s instru- Refreshers Newman and Laura Oltman mentation. Bogdanovic is an accomplished guitarist first formed their guitar in his own right; Moravec played guitar as a kid; duo, they knew they could Sierra is an experienced guitar composer, with a long choose from a repertoire list of compositions that use the instrument. But for stretching back to the others, the Newman & Oltman commission became Renaissance. “But there an exploration of new territory. Thomas bought a hadn’t been quite as much happening with contem- guitar and gave herself a crash course; she presented porary music,” says Newman. “That’s where we thought her piece Memory: SWELLS with most of the finger- we could make our best mark.” ings already worked out. “She has her own sound In the three decades since, the Newman & Oltman universe and she wanted her own fingerings,” says Duo has added to the two-guitar repertoire with a Oltman. series of commissions from leading lights in con- Liebermann wrote his Nocturne Fantasy without temporary music, including Paul Moravec, Augusta guidance; then he presented it to the duo and asked, Read Thomas, Lowell Liebermann, Roberto Sierra “What works?” The couple worked with him to and Dušan Bogdanovic. figure out chord voicings and how the music should be apportioned between two instruments. “Lowell doesn’t know jack about fingering,” Oltman says, “but he knows about music!” New music, of course, represents only a portion of Newman and Oltman’s repertory, which ranges from Monteverdi to Albéniz to Piazzolla. Tran- scriptions figure prominently in the mix, since, as Oltman puts it, “The guitar does not have a ton of repertoire by very famous composers—and that’s a fact.” But the duo has definite ideas about what kinds of music are appropriate for guitar tran- scription: a proposed Pictures at an Exhibition got an unequivocal thumbs-down. “The guitar’s really intimate,” Oltman explains. Newman and Oltman run two important annual projects: In May, the Raritan Music Festival brings chamber concerts and outreach to western New Jersey. And in July, the five-day New York Guitar Seminar, brings students of all ages into the city’s Mannes College to work with an elite group of guitarists. In the midst of all this professional activity, the two guitarists have also sustained a long-running marriage. The trick? “We keep our professional fighting and our personal fighting very separate,” says Newman. “If you have to make your living out of this, you have to make it work,” says Oltman. “This is all we know how to do, really—we don’t have a lot of other skills!” www.guitarduo.com Michael Newman and Laura Oltman

20 july/august 2010 Hometown Many ensembles The grade-school and high-school quartets of make touring the ACMS work each Saturday, September through Heroes backbone of their April, in coaching sessions with one of the Artaria’s professional lives. But members. Sometimes visiting luminaries pitch the Artaria String in; this past year featured masterclasses with the Quartet has taken a different tack: the ensemble Takács and St. Lawrence Quartets. But the week- has made itself a force for chamber music right in, week-out work consists of introducing young in its hometown of St. Paul, Minnesota. The players to the string quartet repertoire and the emphasis is partly the result of circumstances: process of playing chamber music. all four of its members are parents of school-age “For some of the young ones, it’s their first children, a situation that makes touring difficult time in any kind of ensemble,” says Laura Sewell, at best. The quartet makes local appearances the quartet’s cellist. “They have no idea of how to throughout the year, including a four-concert cue—they have to learn to answer the question series in St. Paul’s Sundin Hall at Hamline ‘How are we going to start together?’ Then they University. Nonetheless, in celebration of its learn that everyone is responsible for keeping 25th anniversary, the ensemble will undertake an their own rhythm going. That’s hard for some ambitious foreign tour in 2011. kids: they’re so influenced by what they hear The quartet is as committed to education as to around them that they can’t keep counting for performance. Early in its history, it became one themselves. I’ve done it for so long—but of of the first ensembles to get a Rural Residency course it’s hard! You really have to learn that. grant from the NEA. It was a nine-month posting “You learn how to be tactful, how to work things in Tipton, Georgia. “And let me tell you, it out,” Sewell continues. “And it’s not instantly was rural!” says Ray Shows, the group’s first gratifying—you really have to work hard. I think violinist. “We met people who had never seen chamber music is a lesson for life.” a violin!” The residency took the quartet to www.artariastringquartet.com public libraries, state parks, factories and halfway houses all over the state of Georgia; the musicians even jammed with local country bands. Nearly two decades later, the quartet’s educa- tional bent continues. It runs the Artaria Chamber Music School (ACMS), a weekly coaching program for young string quartets, and Stringwood, an annual chamber-music summer camp that mixes rehearsals and coaching with outdoor activities and explorations of the ecosystem of southeastern Minnesota. Capping it all off: the Saint Paul String Quartet Competition, attracting young ensembles from all over the country. The Artaria String Quartet, L to R: Nancy Oliveros, Ray Shows, Laura Sewell, Annalee Wolf

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Perhaps the reason Dawson’s A Manual for the Modern Drummer New York music education is became his bible. “It was good guerrilla war- School so important to fare training,” he says. Bobby Sanabria is His prowess got him a scholarship to Days that he started out as Boston’s Berklee School of Music. As early as an autodidact. As a freshman year, he got an offer to tour with teenager growing up in the Bronx of the Al Di Meola’s band. But (to the amazement 1970s, the jazz drummer and composer had of his classmates), he turned it down in order no money for lessons, and his high school to keep studying. “I was always a good Afro- Cuban percussionist,” he says. “But because I finished school, I became an accomplished jazz drummer.” More than three decades later, Sanabria is still a resident of his native borough. He recently became an inductee in the Bronx Walk of Fame, with a street sign just blocks from Cardinal Hayes High School, his alma mater. As a per- former, his career is thriving—he’s a multiple Grammy nominee, and has been named Percussionist of the Year by DRUM! magazine. Teaching is a key part of his profes- sional identity. “Teaching is a noble, honorable and—unfortunately in jazz— disenfranchised profession,” he says. “Every time I read about a young up- Bobby and-coming musician, I think ‘If this Sanabria had only a minimal music program. But he guy’s so hot, I’d like to know who the hell had a bountiful musical upbringing, none- taught him!” He’s a professor at The New theless. The family radio brought an amazing School for Jazz and Contemporary Music multicultural mix of sounds into his family’s and leads the Afro-Cuban Jazz Orchestra at home: soul music and salsa; Ellington, Basie Manhattan School for Music. and Sinatra; Edgar Winter and Miles Davis; Sanabria also visits local public schools with Spanish-language talk radio—even Spanish his band. “My whole thing is to get young toreador music. It was the era of the Vietnam people involved not only as students, but as War, black consciousness, and the Puerto fans,” he says. “We have plenty of jazz stu- Rican nationalist group the Young Lords. dents—we don’t have to worry about the next “Even though the city was bankrupt and the generation. But want about the kids who are South Bronx was burning,” Sanabria says, not studying jazz? I want them to become “with all this crazy chaos it was a rich cultural fans of the music. environment.” “Jazz is our national music,” says Sanabria. It may not have been a formal education, “It represents our truth, our ethos. My dream but Sanabria was a good learner. He would is to make it part of the curriculum of every accost street musicians and ask them to show classroom. It’s American’s most precious art him how they played. He formed a band form.” www.bobbysanabria.com with a schoolmate who played trumpet. Alan

22 july/august 2010 Chamber music is important business at the Yale School of Getting to Music. All of its students, whether composers, soloists or orchestral Carnegie musicians, are required to take chamber music every semester. And each full-time faculty member has to coach two student ensembles. “The greatest pleasure of my day is when I have a group to coach,” says Robert Blocker, a pianist and the school’s dean. When Blocker talks about chamber music at Yale, he cites the views of a high-school class- mate, software entrepreneur G. Larry Wilson. “He likes to hire musicians as middle managers— especially if they play chamber music,” Blocker says. “They have discipline. They can work independently or as a team. They have initiative. They look for solutions that are outside the box and aren’t content to say to say, ‘If we just play this louder, it will be better.’ These are life skills.” You could see this philosophy in action at a recent Zankel Hall concert, a tribute to Yale’s Oral History of American Music project and its guiding light, archivist Vivian Perlis. As part of the program’s John Cage segment, four young musicians from the Yale Percussion Group played the composer’s 1941 “Third Construction.” The performance combined youthful energy and adult mastery. The playing had the kind of precision that can only come from painstaking, arduous rehearsal, yet it remained constantly fresh and surprising, with the spontaneity of improvisation. It was chamber music at its best. The concert was part of Yale in New York, a three-season-old series featuring students and faculty, and bringing the best of the school’s music-making to Carnegie Hall. The series gives Yale a high-profile presence in one of the world’s music capitals. The programming is designed to celebrate elements of the school itself. Krzysztof Penderecki, a faculty member in the 1970s, returned to conduct a concert of his works with the school’s Philharmonia Orchestra. A tribute to Benny Goodman, featuring repertory written for the leg- endary clarinetist, drew attention to the Goodman materials in the Yale’s Irving S. Gilmore Music Library. A song program celebrated a notable Yale alumnus: Charles Ives. Most significantly, Yale in New York offers students a chance to test their mettle—a taste of the big leagues. “There’s a tremendous amount of [musical] activity in New Haven, but the real world stage is in New York,” says clarinetist David Shifrin, the series’ artistic director. “There are no excuses, no looking at it as a student activity. They’re Kazuhide Isomura, of in the same places with the same audiences and the same critics as all the great musicians of the Tokyo the world.” String Quartet, The New York series would not be possible without the anonymous $100 million gift that coaches a the school received in 2005. The donation has had many benefits, but its most dramatic effect student has been to allow Yale to offer free tuition to the music school’s entire student body. “To have quartet at Yale a grant like that allows you to compete differently for any student you want to have for your institution,” says Blocker. “And it helps to recruit really first-rate faculty: when you’re recruiting a faculty member, they want to know, ‘Will I have scholarship money to get great students?’” The gift has had a psychological effect, as well. “One of the main things that’s so gratifying for faculty, students and staff to know is that somebody cares about music this much,” says Blocker. “Isn’t that remarkably wonderful?” music.yale.edu

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A When your music- and an open mind. To illustrate his point, he making falls outside tells a story from an after-concert Q&A in Bolt standard genres, you the Midwest. “One person stood up and said have to try that much ‘I’m a classical purist, yet I love chamber blues. from the harder to make your- How do you explain that?’” Siegel relates. “I self heard. That’s the said ‘You’re not a classical purist. That’s not an Blue situation that Corky artistic statement; it’s a sociopolitical statement.’” Siegel finds himself in The Chamber Blues concert, Siegel says, with his Chamber had encouraged that listener to abandon her Blues ensemble, featuring Siegel, on blues preexisting understanding of her own musical harmonica, with a pianist, a string quartet taste. “When you’re confronted with the beauty and an East Indian percussionist. The group of art,” he says, “there is no purism.” serves up a musical menu that you won’t find www.chamberblues.com elsewhere—Siegel’s own compositions in “chamber blues” style—as he puts it, “a com- positional approach that juxtaposes blues and classical style in a chamber music setting.” The roots of Siegel’s classical/blues mix date back to the sixties. Those were the days of the Siegel-Schwall band, featuring Siegel and guitarist Jim Schwall. “We were playing in this club on the North Side [of Chicago], and this Japanese fellow used to come in night after night,” Siegel recalls. “One night he comes up to me and says ‘Corky, I’d like your band to jam with my band.’” The “Japanese fellow,” it turned out, was Seiji Ozawa and his “band” was the Chicago Symphony. The invitation resulted in a groundbreaking collaboration on William Russo’s Three Pieces for Blues Band and Symphony Orchestra; later, a Chamber Jazz: Back row, L to R, Aurelien Pederzoli, recording of the work became one of Deutsche violin; Jill Kaeding, cello; Doyle Armbrust, viola. Grammophon’s best-selling albums ever. Front row: Corky Siegel, harmonica, piano, vocals, compositions; Chihsuan Yang, violin; Frank Donaldson, “I’m composing what in my mind is tablas and world percussion classical-flavored music,” says Siegel. The problem, though, can be getting presenters to understand it as he does. “There’s a resis- tance in communication for people who have no idea what it is,” he says. “Once they expe- rience it, though, it’s a whole different thing.” He cites the Aspen Music Festival as a venue that was initially resistant to Chamber Blues, but has now brought the ensemble back for return engagements. As Siegel sees it, all that audience mem- bers—and presenters—need is a pair of ears

24 july/august 2010 It was a Chamber of Commerce moment. Bassoonist Jim Berkenstock Shoulder and his wife, Jean, a flutist—principals in the Lyric Opera and the Seasons Chicago Philharmonic orchestras—were building a summer home on Wisconsin’s Door Peninsula. A local businessman, a partner of the contractor, wondered aloud whether the couple might want to do something musically in the way of promoting Door County. The Peninsula Music Festival and Birch Creek Performance Center were already cultural fixtures in the area during the summer. “But this fellow,” recalls Jim Berkenstock, “was interested in what he called the ‘shoulder seasons’—before and after the period between July 4th and Labor Day.” Chamber music was the answer. Jean and Jim and eight colleagues formed a strings-and- winds ensemble and in June 1991 made their rural debut with a handful of concerts in two private homes and in the Hardy Gallery, a small shed at the end of a dock. Nineteen years after this modest beginning, the series now known as Midsummer’s Music Festival is a greatly expanded operation—partly, says Jim Berkenstock, because of the penin- sula’s changing demographic. Door County became a place to retire to. Snowbirds who were seasonal residents began to stay longer, often from mid-May to mid-October. And the rise of the Internet enabled some residents to hold down year-round jobs far from the big cities. Celebrating its 20th season this year, Midsummer’s Music will present some two dozen concerts. Its expanded forces include (besides the Berkenstocks) David Perry and Sally Chisholm of the Pro Arte Quartet; John Fairfield, horn; Isabella Lippi and Stephanie Preucil, violins; violist Allyson Fleck; Elizandro Garcia-Montoya, clarinet; pianists Bill Koehler and William Billingham; cellists Walter Preucil and Paula Kosower; bassist Jason Heath; and oboist Tim Sawyier. (Koehler and Walter Preucil are founding members.) The festival’s programming philosophy is straightforward. “We try to be the opposite of stuffy,” says Berkenstock. “Every piece is for a different combination of instruments, with a constant change of sonorities, tempos, and textures.” In addition to the 18th- to early 20th- century canon and a smattering of more modern pieces, the ensemble typically performs some obscure discoveries, such as a string octet by Ferdinand Thieriot, a friend of Brahms, and has featured (and recorded) women composers Amy Beach, Louise Farrenc, and Elfrida Andrée. The peripatetic ensemble performs in an array of chamber-music-friendly spaces around Door County, from restaurants and galleries to churches. And each partner venue adds its own constitu- ency to the festival’s potential audience. Strong support from county residents resulted in an endowment campaign that has imparted institu- tional stability. But what really keeps Jim and Jean Berkenstock going is the response to the music. “After concerts, people come up to us and say things like, ‘I never realized how much I would come to love chamber music.’ Or even, ‘This has changed my life.’” www.midsummersmusic.com At “The Clearing” at Ellison Bay:J. Berkenstock, bassoon; John Fairfield, horn; Jean Berkenstock, flute; Elizandro Garcia-Montoya, clarinet; W. Koehler, piano; W. Preucil (turning pages)

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Caroline (Carrie) Blanding, most recently the director of operations and marketing for the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, has been named the organization’s executive director. Blanding succeeds Christopher Honett, who led the ensemble from July 2009 to March 2010, and Adam Frey, the group’s leader for the previous 18 years. Pianist/composer Jason Moran, leader of Bandwagon, will join the jazz faculty of the New England Conservatory in September. The Harlem Quartet (Ilmar Gavilán, Melissa White, violins; In Memoriam Juan-Miguel Hernandez, viola; Desmond Neysmith, cello), a Francisco Aguabella, percussionist Sphinx ensemble, has been named the next ensemble in New John Bunch, pianist; Woody Herman England Conservatory’s Professional String Quartet Training Orchestra, Benny Goodman band, Program, directed by cellist Paul Katz. New York Swing Jaime Laredo, violinist of the Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Lena Horne, singer, dancer, actress, Trio, has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and civil rights activist

SEGUES Sciences. Hank Jones, pianist, bandleader, composer The International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) received Benjamin Lees, composer the American Music Center’s Trailblazer Award for 2010. Gene Lees, critic, historian; lyricist, Saxophonist/composer Fred Ho and the Society for New Music ; former editor, (led by Neva Pilgrim) were among those awarded the AMC’s Jazzletter Down Beat Rob McConnell, valve trombonist; Letters of Distinction. leader, Boss Brass North Carolina’s Western Piedmont Symphony has selected Ruth McGinniss, violinist, Acoustic the Kontras Quartet as its next Hickory Metro Resident Quartet. Trio; author, Breathing Freely, All four members of the quartet (violinist Dmitri Pogorelov, of Celebrating the Imperfect Life Russia; violinist Francois Henkins, of South Africa; violist Ai Yvonne Loriod-Messiaen, pianist Ishida, of Japan; and cellist Jean Hatmaker, from iIlinois) per- (see pg 104) formed with the Civic Orchestra of Chicago. Carlos Piantini, violinist, New York Philharmonic Yellow Barn Music School & Festival has appointed Catherine David Randolph, choral conductor Stephan as managing director. Stephan, who holds an artist Alan Rich, critic; diploma in cello performance from Brandeis University, served New York Times, magazine, as executive director of the Boston Modern Orchestra Project. New York Herald; New York Newsweek, California magazine, LA Weekly, Bloomberg News Giulietta Simionato, mezzo-soprano; La Scala Arthur Winograd, founding cellist, Juilliard String Quartet; conductor, Birmingham Symphony, Hartford Symphony Orchestra Mike Zwerin, trombonist, critic; Village Voice, International Herald Tribune, Bloomberg News; author, Close Enough for Jazz, The Parisian Jazz Chronicle

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