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“With a background in jazz and rock as well as classical music, the New York-based Bermel is an eclectic with wide-open ears.” Toronto Star DEREK BERMEL List of Works INTRODUCTION band Peace by Piece. He has studied the Lobi gyil xylophone in Ghana with master player For Derek Bermel, the human voice – or, more Ngmen Baaru, and clarinet in Bulgaria with generally, language and the yearning to Nikola Iliev, a legendary virtuoso in the communicate – is the doorway to composition. Thracian tradition. On the classical side, his His music is filled with vocal inflection. mentors include Henri Dutilleux and Louis Choruses of wah-wahing trombones are Andriessen, as well as Andre Hajdu (who everywhere and it’s easy to hear the gospel and helped fuel his interest in Jewish and Arabic folk soul influences in the works of this very singular music) and William Bolcom (with whom he composer, surely the only one on the shares a love of jazz). If that isn't enough, contemporary scene who has spent time Bermel the composer has a parallel career as a transcribing Stevie Wonder’s crazily melismatic clarinet recitalist and soloist. His many vocal on “Village Ghetto Land.” performances of his clarinet concerto Voices But as much as Bermel’s music mimics the include appearances with the Los Angeles voice, at times in wildly humorous ways, he also Philharmonic conducted by John Adams, with goes beyond that to communicate in a much the BBC Symphony Orchestra, and at the Beijing broader sense. Drawing on the most unlikely Modern Music Festival. source materials – the sighs and moans of jazz or Turning Variations for piano and orchestra, soul, or the ornamental inflections that pepper composed in 2006 and dedicated to Dutilleux Bulgarian folk songs – he lifts them up, turns and pianist Christopher Taylor, provides an and inspects them, answers them from a ideal introduction to Bermel’s world. He begins distance, varies them, and builds up thickening with a simple hymn-like tune (Randy Newman textures, line upon line, echoing and should set words to it), which becomes the transforming all of it, before reducing the storm subject of a set of variations and the springboard to a spare, iridescent haze. And there’s another for all sorts of orchestral imaginings. Asian thing: unlike many contemporary composers, gongs enter the landscape, then vanish, as do Bermel recognizes a good tune and knows how traces of gospel, and a Gottschalk-like rag. to write one. Sound fields stretch and deflate or rub against Born in 1967 and raised in Manhattan and each other, while Bermel plays with hazy firefly nearby New Rochelle, Bermel, who now lives in effects or introduces an über-Romantic (and Brooklyn, has assimilated a range of influences, entirely diatonic) outburst or turns the orchestra from Monk to Messiaen; from Dolphy to into a giant pentatonic xylophone, of the sort he Debussy; from the Beatles to Bartók; and from studied in a village in northwest Ghana. Richard Rodgers to the rapper Rakim. He has Inspired by a lifetime of unorthodox listening served as artistic director of the Dutch- and study (at least for a “classical” composer), American arts group TONK as well as singer- he is, in this piece and many others, able to find keyboard player in the New York-based rock points of intersection among musical traditions and influences, reconciling them through his own voice, creating music that is at once CONTENTS challenging and accessible. Let’s focus on that voice, literally. I attended Introduction 2 a concert of Bermel’s music by San Francisco’s Adorno Ensemble that took an interesting turn. Chronology 4 During a Q&A session with the audience, Bermel sat down at a piano and, in a soft List of works: falsetto, sang the gorgeous melody that runs Stage Works 6 through Soul Garden, his gospel-influenced Orchestral 6 work for solo viola and string quintet, Large Ensemble 7 composed in 2000 on a commission from the Chamber Ensemble 8 Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. In Instrumental 9 that falsetto rendering lies a key to Bermel’s Choral 10 music: he has internalized his source material, Vocal 11 understands it on a basic level as song. In Soul Symphonic Wind Band 12 Garden, that melody, ringing with Gershwin and played by the viola, is answered by a riffing Contacts 12 2 cello: gospel counterpoint. And then the sounds grow elastic, melting into the glossolalia of a black church on Sunday morning, the strings ranging through quarter-toned vocal effects via the composer’s precise and varied use of glissandi. There are flashes of Romanticism here, too, and the music travels to some far-out abstracted places, but it keeps coming home to the church, with a pleasure-filled sashay. In Slides, Bermel strips back his interest in African-American vocal expression to rudiments. Commissioned by the New Jersey Symphony, which premiered the 16-minute piece in 2003, it is an orchestral working out of his fascination with vocal gestures – the swoop, themes. The “lugubrious funk” that opens the the glide, the groan, the jazz singer’s “fall off” piece – more “talking” instruments, played in from a melodic phrase. subterranean registers – saunters about like a “Resignation to Alarm”, the first movement, drunken dinosaur, then gets pitted against creates conversation and ever denser whirling, mechanical outbursts of piccolo and argumentation, often hilariously, between the vibraphone. Improvisational interludes open instruments and sections. “Bridge of Sighs”, the up the textures in a loft-jazzy way, and, bit by second movement, isolates several of those bit, through systematic accretion, Bermel builds Sarah Vaughan-like melismas, set like jewels in a daffy-yet-serious sound world that, for me, the muted, midnight-jazz mood created here. tips its hat to composer and reed player Bermel writes that “Saw/See”, the third Anthony Braxton, one of Dolphy’s heirs. movement, is based on the flow of rap lyrics. I Another sort of idiomatic authority flows hear the virtuoso metric manipulations of a big through Migration Series for jazz ensemble and band, filtered through the vocalized avant- orchestra, commissioned for the American angularity of Eric Dolphy. Composers Orchestra and the Jazz at Lincoln Voices, a concerto for clarinet and orchestra Center Orchestra through a Music Alive (composed in 1997), begins in similar territory: residency grant and premiered at Lincoln “Id” references the improvised “conversations” Center in 2006. Inspired by Jacob Lawrence’s set that Dolphy recorded with bassist Charles of 60 paintings about the Great Migration of Mingus in the early ‘60s. With this foundation, African-Americans from rural south to urban Bermel conjures a world from sliding pitches – a north, it unfolds in five movements with three street-corner conversation with voice-like connecting interludes and is dedicated to squawks, murmurs, shouts, growls and trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, leader of the Jazz at guffaws. It segues to “She Moved through the Lincoln Center Orchestra and a soloist at the Fair”, inspired by the traditional Irish song of premiere. that name, and here we enter a gentler world, This deeply evocative work opens with a lyrical and softly ululating, like a set of uilleann four-note ostinato, over which a trumpet sings a pipes (yet another instrument which Bermel has wistful song. We soon encounter those wah- studied). Finally, there is “Jamm on Toast”, wahing trombones, the movement of a train, which finds the drummer’s ride cymbal leading gathering steam amid call-and-response the orchestra through a funk jam-out. The score conversations, and then a memorable gospel asks the musicians to play “Phat and juicy”, ballad, sweetened by strings to recall the which must be a first in the classical repertory. sunshine-soul songs on old Marvin Gaye and While Voices evokes the spirit of Archie Shepp LPs. There are jubilant clashing improvisation, Three Rivers (commissioned by voices; warm echoes of Mingus and Ellington; WNYC Radio and composed in 2001) integrates stretched out tempos, reminiscent of dub or hip- Bermel’s vernacular compositional talents with hop; and mad bebop figures alternating with actual improvisation. Three rhythmic streams quiet, gleaming memories of the south as the operate, at times flowing separately, at other migration nears its end. times concurrently. The playful, jazzy toying During one of the interludes Bermel even with pulse is coupled with Bermel’s layering of throws in some Thracian breakouts for the clarinet. Then again, his Thracian Echoes, a 20- 3 minute orchestral work from 2002, includes CHRONOLOGY “talking” strings more commonly found in his jazz-inspired works. His language echoes from 1967 work to work, in other words; the landscape Born in New York City, USA. Raised in Manhattan and New changes, but that quality of the human voice, Rochelle swooping and sighing, remains. 1985-95 In Thracian Echoes, Bermel seizes on the way Studies at Yale University with Michael Tenzer, and at University in which Thracian folk music often comments of Michigan with William Bolcom and William Albright upon itself; there are repeating elements in 1991 songs, tails on the ends of phrases, bits of Awarded a four-year Javits Fellowship from US Dept. of Education melody that seem to look back at what came 1993 before. The work monumentalizes this William Albright premieres Two Songs from Nandom for organ phenomenon, so that various types of "echoes" at the American Guild of Organists National Convention emerge through counterpoint and harmony. 1994 There is a duality in the piece, too, as it captures Dust Dances for orchestra, premiered by Norwalk SO as winner of the near-manic quality of Bulgarian dance music the Quinto Maganini Prize “Making Score” programme for young composers.