“Derek Bermel is the quintessential 21st-century musician…staggering eclecticism from a true musical renaissance man.” – GRAMOPHONE MAGAZINE

Grammy-nominated composer and clarinetist Derek Bermel has been widely hailed for his creativity, theatricality, and virtuosity. An "eclectic with wide open ears" (Toronto Star), Bermel is acclaimed for music that is “intricate, witty, clear-spoken, tender, and extraordinarily beautiful [and] covers an amazing amount of ground, from the West African rhythms of Dust Dances to the Bulgarian folk strains of Thracian Echoes, to the shimmering harmonic splendor of Elixir. In the hands of a composer less assured, all that globe-trotting would seem like affectation; Bermel makes it an artistic imperative." (San Francisco Chronicle).

Bermel’s studies of ethnomusicology and orchestration with Andre Hajdu in Jerusalem heralded his immersion in music of the world -- traveling to Bulgaria to study the Thracian folk style; to Dublin, to study uillean pipes; to Ghana, to study the Lobi xylophone; and to Brazil, to learn caxixi – while adding the study of Dutch, Portuguese, French and Italian along the way. Inevitably, Bermel’s engagement with other musical cultures has become part of the fabric and force of his compositional language, in which the human voice and its myriad inflections play a leading role. Bermel’s commissioners have included the Pittsburgh, National, Boston, Saint Louis, New Jersey, and Pacific Symphonies; Los Angeles Philharmonic, Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, WNYC Radio, and eighth blackbird; the Guarneri Quartet, Music from China, Music from Copland House; violinist Midori, Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, electric guitarist Wiek Hijmans, Schoenberg Ensemble/Veenfabriek (Netherlands), Jazz Xchange (U.K.), and Figura (Denmark). Recent and upcoming are works for the St. Paul, River Oaks, and Nadja Salerno Sonnenberg’s New Century Chamber Orchestras, The JACK Quartet, James Ehnes’s Seattle Chamber Music Festival and La Jolla Music Society, The Chautauqua and Columbus Symphonies, and beyond.

Bermel's clarinet playing has been hailed by The New York Times as "brilliant," “rhythmically fluid, rich-hued" and "first-rate." The Boston Globe wrote, "There doesn't seem to be anything that Bermel can't do with the clarinet." As a performer he has worked with a dizzyingly eclectic array of musicians including Paquito D'Rivera, Luciana Souza, Tan Dun and John Adams. In recent seasons he performed as soloist alongside Wynton Marsalis in his own Migration Series, commissioned by the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra and American Composers Orchestra (ACO). ACO had earlier commissioned Bermel’s clarinet concerto Voices for premiere in Carnegie Hall, with the composer as soloist. Bermel has since performed that critically acclaimed work with more than a dozen orchestras, including the BBC Symphony and Los Angeles Philharmonic, and at the Beijing Modern Music Festival. His performance of Voices with the Boston Modern Orchestra Project led to a Grammy nominated recording (2010) for Best Soloist with Orchestra. He has also appeared with the Lexington (KY) and Westchester (NY) Philharmonics, Greensboro (NC) Symphony, and many others, in concerto repertoire ranging widely from Mozart and Copland to Bolcom and Adams. Founding Clarinetist of the acclaimed Music from Copland House ensemble, Bermel’s chamber music appearances also include performances with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center; Borromeo, Pacifica, and JACK string quartets; Festivals including Moab, Fontana, Cape Cod, and Salt Bay; the Cliburn Series at the Modern, Carmel and Albuquerque Chamber Music Series, Garth Newel Center, Seattle Town Hall, and Louisville Chamber Music Society.

Bermel has brought his “staggering eclecticism” (Gramophone Magazine) to an array of collaborations, residencies, and groundbreaking educational roles. His passion for collaboration has led to several film scores, and his work with artists such as playwright Will Eno, installation artist Shimon Attie, choreographer Sheron Wray, poets Wendy S. Walters, Nicole Krauss, Mark Halliday, and Naomi Shihab. His recent collaboration with hip hop legend Yasiin Bey (Mos Def) for the Brooklyn Philharmonic received raves.

Artistic Director of the American Composers Orchestra, Bermel is also Director of Copland House's emerging composers institute Cultivate, served as Composer-in-Residence at the Mannes College of Music, enjoyed a four-year tenure as artist-in-residence at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton, and is Curator of the Gamper Festival of Contemporary Music (Bowdoin International Music Festival). Bermel has become recognized as a dynamic and unconventional curator and creator, in addition to programming the Edward T. Cone series at the IAS, he helped found and shape the ACO’s Jazz Composers Orchestral Institute, and co- curated the ten-day 2011 and 2015 SONiC Festivals in New York, featuring music by over 120 young composers at venues ranging from Carnegie Hall to Joe's Pub.

An innovative educator, Bermel was the Founding Director of the New York Youth Symphony’s Making Score program, an intensive composition seminar exploring composition and orchestration. In addition to his work as Institute Director of CULTIVATE, he also mentors young composers in the ACO’s Underwood Readings, Playing it UNsafe and CoLABoratory programs. He has led master classes and held residencies at Yale University, University of Michigan, Longy School of Music, Peabody Institute, Faculdade de Santa Marcelina, Beijing Central, Shanghai, and New England Conservatories, Columbia University, Juilliard School, Manhattan School of Music, Rhode Island School of Design, Rotterdam Conservatorium, University of Cardiff, USC, Curtis School of Music, University of Chicago, Universita Federal da Bahia, UCLA, Adolf Fredriks Musikklasse, Northwestern University, Aspen School of Music, Bowdoin Festival of Music, Cal Arts, Tanglewood Music Center, and many more.

Bermel’s discography features an all-Bermel orchestral recording (BMOP/sound) which includes his Grammy- nominated clarinet concerto Voices; Soul Garden, a disc of his small ensemble/solo music (New World); and his most recent critically acclaimed disc, Canzonas Americanas, with Alarm Will Sound (Cantaloupe). Forthcoming are discs by the JACK quartet and an orchestral disc with the Albany Symphony.

Among Bermel’s many awards are the Alpert Award in the Arts, Rome Prize, Guggenheim and Fulbright Fellowships, the Trailblazer Award from the American Music Center, and an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; commissions from the Koussevitzky and Fromm Foundations; and residencies at Yaddo, Tanglewood, Aspen, Banff, Bellagio, Copland House, Sacatar, and Civitella Ranieri. Bermel holds B.A. and D.M.A. degrees from Yale University and the University of Michigan. Notable among his composition teachers are William Albright, Louis Andriessen, William Bolcom, Henri Dutilleux, André Hajdu, and Michael Tenzer. His music is published by Peermusic Classical.

Photo: Richard Bowditch

PRESS

SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE "Bermel's music is intricate, witty, clear-spoken, tender and extraordinarily beautiful."

ARTFUSE “Bermel is one of the most dizzyingly active musicians on the scene today... if you’ve already seen the light and know something of the rich variety of (good) new and unusual music being written by younger composers, Bermel’s is a fresh voice well worth hearing.”

WASHINGTON POST “All that freewheeling postmodernism [in A Short History of the Universe for clarinet and string quartet] made for an engaging, extremely enjoyable listen — an intriguing new work from a very 21st-century composer.”

LOS ANGELES TIMES "[Tied Shifts] is exciting original music, and eighth blackbird gave it an exciting and original performance."

NEW YORK TIMES "Derek Bermel, covers a pretty broad stylistic range [in his album Canzonas Americanas] because Mr. Bermel is an imaginative eclectic whose work draws on his studies of ethnic folk styles and his love of jazz and rock."

CHICAGO TRIBUNE "[Derek Bermel's Three Rivers for chamber ensemble] is one sonic knockout I'd love to hear again."

TORONTO STAR "With a background in jazz and rock as well as classical music, the New York-based Bermel is an eclectic with wide-open ears."

SAN ANTONIO EXPRESS-NEWS "a composer who thinks deeply about where music comes from, how it is made and what it is for."

TEMPO (UK) “[Coming Together, for clarinet and cello, is] a piece which is at times (surely intentionally) laugh-out-loud humorous...it is difficult to conceive this as anything other than a 'tour de force' of performance art…”

LOS ANGELES TIMES "The snappy, pop inspired Tag Rag [for orchestra] was good fun, full of merry percussion effects and playing around with a short riff that the composer lifted from an Amsterdam street musician."

SEQUENZA21 “Derek Bermel is one of those musicians with so much talent in so many areas...He writes chamber, symphonic, dance, theater and pop works, and is a terrific clarinetist, pianist and conductor.”

BOSTON GLOBE "Derek Bermel's "Voices," a concerto for clarinet and orchestra, is a crowd-pleaser that is likely to enter the repertory of every orchestra that had a representative in the audience. Part of the appeal lies in the virtuosity and charisma of the composer, who was soloist.”

NEW YORK TIMES “[Bermel’s] Funk Studies [for piano] are propulsive, raw and damnably difficult: imagine Thelonious Monk crossed with Prokofiev.”

MUSIC Review: Celebrating 40 Years of Championing American Composers

By ANTHONY TOMMASINI NOV. 8, 2017

Derek Bermel on clarinet with George Manahan, the music director of the American Composers Orchestra, conducting Leonard Bernstein’s Clarinet Sonata on Tuesday at Lincoln Center’s Rose Hall. Richard Termine for The New York Times In a 1977 talk, Aaron Copland complained that concerts by America’s orchestras were still frustratingly dominated by the “great works of the past.” No American composer was suggesting that these great old works should not be played, Copland explained. “All we want to do is get in on it!” he said. Copland addressed those comments that year to an audience at Alice Tully Hall before the inaugural concert of the American Composers Orchestra. On Tuesday night at Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Frederick P. Rose Hall, a recording of Copland’s remarks was played before the American Composer Orchestra’s 40th Birthday Concert. The gist of his argument, alas, still applies today. The programs of American orchestras have remained overwhelmingly tilted toward works of the past, mostly the distant past. Yes, much has changed for the better. In a program note, the directors of the American Composers Orchestra (A.C.O.) take pride that this essential ensemble has helped define “what it means to be American in 2017,” embracing gender, ethnic, national and stylistic diversity. Tuesday’s varied program offered exhilarating evidence. It began with a feisty, jazzy piece by Francis Thorne, “Fanfare, Fugue and Funk” (1972). Mr. Thorne, the primary founder of the A.C.O., died in March at 94. His piece was conducted by Dennis Russell Davies, another founder of the ensemble. Mr. Davies also ended the evening by leading Duke Ellington’s “Black, Brown and Beige,” one of the American master’s still-overlooked concert works.

The soprano Mikaela Bennet performed a selection of songs by Jerome Kern, Harold Arlen, and Georhe Gershwin with the American Composers Orchestra on Tuesday at Rose Hall. Richard Termine for The New York Times Next year’s 100th birthday of Leonard Bernstein, who died in 1990, was acknowledged with a performance of his Clarinet Sonata (1941-42), the composer’s first published work, which he wrote in his early 20s. It was performed in a 1994 orchestration by Sid Ramin, scored for clarinet, strings and percussion. The excellent clarinetist Derek Bermel brought warm colorings and moody reflectiveness to the solo part, while subtly drawing out all the jazzy touches. There were two recent works by younger women: Paola Prestini and Elizabeth Ogonek, conducted by George Manahan, the orchestra’s dynamic music director. From her opera “Gilgamesh,” Ms. Prestini drew “Prelude and Aria,” which begins with heaving and ominous intensity and evolves into a plaintive vocal monologue, sung meltingly by the countertenor Jakub Jozef Orlinski. I had trouble following the overall structure in Ms. Ogonek’s “Sleep and Unremembrance.” Moment to moment, however, the piece was alive with piercing sonorities and fraught with episodes that erupted in fits and starts, brought out vividly by Mr. Manahan. Nodding to Lincoln Center’s American Songbook project, Mr. Manahan led the radiant, stylish soprano Mikaela Bennett and the orchestra in a selection of songs by Jerome Kern, Harold Arlen and George Gershwin. Ideally, we would have reached the point at which an orchestra dedicated to American composers was no longer needed. But we haven’t. Still, A.C.O. concerts, rather than feeling like exercises in special pleading, typically come across as celebrations, Tuesday’s included. Speaking to the audience, Mr. Davies singled out seven players from the A.C.O. who took part in the ensemble’s inaugural 1977 concert, longtime warriors in the fight for American music, which goes on.

WORLD PREMIERE: DEREK BERMEL’S “DEATH WITH INTERRUPTIONS” Posted on July 15, 2014

About 22 years ago, the composer Derek Bermel was in Ghana, practicing the xylophone. (It’s a long story. Just go with it.)

“I see this woman walking along, carrying a jug of water on her head, and she’s moving her hips, dancing to the music,” he said. “But then I notice that she’s dancing in a different rhythm than I was playing.” Bermel kept playing, confused but smiling. “I thought…why is she doing this dance to another rhythm? And then I realized: My whole way of feeling the rhythm was wrong in that song.”

To Derek Bermel, an award-winning composer and clarinetist who has traveled the world to perform and write music, context is everything. If he hadn’t been in Ghana that day to see a local woman dancing along to his music, he’d never have been able to see beyond his Western view of rhythm. Similarly, if we hadn’t caught up with Bermel in the studios for some context before the world premiere of his latest piece, “Death with Interruptions,” we might not be quite as choked up listening to it now.

On Monday night, at the Seattle Chamber Music Society‘s Summer Festival, “Death with Interruptions” had its premiere. You can be the first to hear it on demand below.

“Death with Interruptions” was commissioned by the Seattle Chamber Music Society and is a piano trio, an established classical form that in Bermel’s hands sounds anything but established. It begins with a simple, plaintive melody and moves through a series of transformations in movement, speed, and texture. Every variation continually returns to the piece’s core, which sounds like a kind of musical heartbeat. “Death with Interruptions” is inspired by Jose Saramago’s novel of the same title, in which death is a living character. “It was an intriguing thought,” he said. “Yes, death is often very dispassionate, but also quite ridiculous and impulsive,” like a human might be.

He began writing the piece just a month after the passing of his father, playwright and theatre critic Albert Bermel. Much like Johannes Brahms in his German Requiem, he was interested in exploring the ways we, the living, cope with death as it strikes us again and again over the years. “We experience death in many, many ways–the deaths of parents, friends, pets, lovers–but life keeps going as death hits,” he said. “So the way we experience death, I realized, is not so much as this one calamity but as a series of pangs we experience. The experience is continually interrupted, and we return to it when we’re in a quieter moment. There’s something about that that’s present in the form of the piece.”

Bermel was never shy about exploring feelings of loss. One of his first compositions was “A Pig,” which he dedicated to the family’s pet guinea pig when it passed away. Between early childhood and adulthood, Bermel pursued music–he played in his high school jazz band and in a rock group simply called The Generic Band–but he also loved science, and his focus shifted between the two for a number of years. “I was interested in a bunch of different things, and I’m grateful for that time I had to figure out who I was as a human being,” he said. “That hopefully comes through in my music.” on Derek Bermel’s Soul Garden…

on Derek Bermel’s Intonations… Music Review: JACK Quartet and Jennifer Koh in the NY Phil Biennial

By ANTHONY TOMMASINI MAY 25, 2016

The New York Philharmonic’s music director, Alan Gilbert, introduced the NY Phil Biennial, his most ambitious project, in the spring of 2014. But, as he admitted to the audience at the 92nd Street Y on Monday, it was at that time an “aspirational” venture. Who knew whether it would return two years later, as its name promised?

So when the JACK Quartet opened the NY Phil Biennial, a three-week, citywide exploration of contemporary music organized by the Philharmonic, it was, Mr. Gilbert said, deeply gratifying to the orchestra and “to me personally.” To kick off this second iteration, the JACK played a 90-minute program of intense new works at the Y’s intimate Buttenwieser Hall.

And on Tuesday at National Sawdust in Williamsburg, the fearless violinist Jennifer Koh presented the first of two programs called “Shared Madness,” offering the premieres of short solo works by 32 composers. Just as Paganini explored 19th-century violin virtuosity in his solo caprices, the composers who wrote these pieces for Ms. Koh explored the “meaning of virtuosity in the 21st century,” as she explained in a program note. On Tuesday, she played 16 of them with tireless passion and stunning brilliance.

The JACK players opened their program with the New York premiere of a 30-minute work by the Berlin-based Canadian composer Marc Sabat, “Euler Lattice Spirals Scenery.” The piece is written in “just intonation,” a tuning that involves so-called pure intervals. Mr. Sabat’s jargon-filled program note wasn’t the most accessible introduction, but his bold, fascinating music drew me in. Whole episodes unfolded in stretches of eerily sustained tones and elemental clusters from which feisty single notes and motifs kept escaping. One long passage had hints of strangely cosmic hymnal music.

The quartet then played the premiere of Derek Bermel’s “Intonations,” an arresting 20-minute work in three movements. “Harmonica,” the first, set the mood: Thematic lines unfold in thick, gnashing chords, but with the jazzy fervor and wailing lyricism of blues. The program ended with two works by Cenk Ergun, “Celare” and “Sonare.” One intense section was all frenzied, fitful music, an evocation of swarming wasps. The JACK Quartet has received such praise for its involvement with new music that it’s easy to take for granted how superbly accomplished these players are, as they demonstrated in this daunting program.

For her “Shared Madness” project, which has its second part on May 31, Ms. Koh has received short works from an impressive roster of composers. On Tuesday, she offered pieces by Sean Shepherd, Andrew Norman, Matthew Aucoin, Kaija Saariaho, Julia Wolfe, John Harbison and others. The only problem with playing so many works together is that, inevitably, pieces for solo violin are going to have aspects in common. Many explore stark contrasts, as ruminative searching lines broke into wild bursts. Many also employed a panoply of scratching sounds and raspy chords.

The pieces that were the most singular naturally stood out, like Mr. Norman’s “Still Life,” a quiet piece exploring isolated notes and precise, hushed gestures; and Julia Wolfe’s “Spinning Jenny,” which was like avant-garde hoedown music. During the ovation, when the eight composers in attendance joined Ms. Koh onstage, she grabbed a beer from Mr. Bermel and chugged it. It was well deserved. July 23, 2015 Lifestyle Concert review: Students, faculty showcase talents side by side at Bowdoin International Music Festival

Composer and clarinetist Derek Bermel held the spotlight Wednesday evening. By ALLAN KOZINN

BRUNSWICK — For the public, concerts are a summer music festival’s obvious drawing cards, but for the festivals and their participants, these performances are only part of the picture. Like several of this country’s most renowned festivals – Marlboro and Aspen come immediately to mind – the Bowdoin International Music Festival, held on the campus of Bowdoin College, is actually an intensive, high-level training institute for young musicians.

This year, 250 young players have come to Bowdoin for six weeks of study with musicians from orchestras, chamber groups and conservatories around the world. The concerts, in which students and faculty perform together as peers, are simply a part of the festival’s educational mission.

The concert offered at the Studzinski Recital Hall on Wednesday evening showed the strength of these collaborations, although in truth, the performances by all-faculty ensembles, in two of the four works, were at a notably higher level. That should not be surprising, and there is no dishonor in it. But the comparison was clearest in the two works that framed the program.

In Mozart’s Flute Quartet in D major (K. 285), which opened the concert, two students – Beomjae Kim, flutist, and Janet Sung, violinist – were joined by the violist Jeffrey Irvine and the cellist Rosemary Elliott from the faculty. It was a lovely reading that warmed as it unfolded. The central Adagio, in which a gracefully operatic flute line is set against pizzicato strings, and the lively Composer and clarinetist Derek Bermel. Courtesy Rondo finale, with its rhythmically tricky flute passages, were beyond reproach. photo/Richard Bowditch

But the first movement, a brisk Allegro, seemed slightly on edge: Kim’s playing was efficient and centered, but also slightly rushed, with nuance sacrificed in favor of drive. You wanted him to let the music breathe, and there were passages where you wished Sung produced a richer, weightier tone (as she proved she could do, in the later movements). The faculty ensemble that closed the concert showed that nuance, drive and a richness of tone are by no means incompatible, and that players needn’t choose among them.

The work at hand was Dvorak’s “Dumky” Trio (Op. 90), a big slice of Romanticism in which lush, slow passages morph into sizzling dances. The players were the violinist Frank Huang, who takes up his new position as the concertmaster of the New York Philharmonic next season; the cellist David Ying, who shares the festival’s artistic direction with his brother Philip (they are both members of the Ying Quartet), and the pianist Elinor Freer, from the faculty of the Eastman School of Music (and David Ying’s wife).

Their reading was remarkably tight but also as supple as you could want, with fluid tempos, shapely individual lines and dialogues that came to life, often unpredictably, as the musicians either matched or offered variations on each other’s phrasing.

Between the Mozart and Dvorak, the composer and clarinetist Derek Bermel held the spotlight in Leonard Bernstein’s Sonata for Clarinet and Piano from 1942 (it was the young Bernstein’s first published score) and a work of his own, the Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, composed for the JACK Quartet in 2013.

Bermel is one of Bowdoin’s success stories. Now a faculty member, he attended the festival as a student 22 years ago, and in his introductory comments, he gave a shout-out to the violinist Lewis Kaplan, who founded the festival in 1964 and directed it until last summer, for consistently championing contemporary music at Bowdoin. (Kaplan was in the audience.) These days, along with his thriving career as a composer, Bermel is the artistic director of the American Composers Orchestra and the director of CULTIVATE, the emerging composers institute at Copland House.

The Bernstein, which Bermel played from memory, has many of the composer’s later hallmarks – bright-edged, theatrical melodies in the clarinet line, a rich textured piano part, and ample rhythmic variety in both – and Bermel, with solid support from the pianist Peter Basquin, gave it a vital, persuasive performance.

The program listing for Bermel’s quintet did not give the work’s original title, “A Short History of the Universe,” and Bermel did not mention the title in his comments before the performance. He noted, however, that he was inspired by the physicist Nima Arkani-Hamed, whose lectures on the nature of gravity he heard at Princeton. And indeed, the piece, with its bent clarinet pitches and sliding string figures, seems to offer a handful of inventive musical depictions of gravity at work.

That, at least, is one way to interpret the work’s ear-catching approach to tonality. It also draws on Bermel’s passion for weaving elements from other cultures into Western forms. At times, the clarinet writing took on characteristics of Asian or Middle Eastern music; elsewhere, its oscillating string lines and kaleidoscopic clarinet figures gave it an otherworldly quality, free of connections to time or place, and entirely Bermel’s own.

Bermel’s evocative performance was supported by colorful playing from the violinist Renee Jolles and the cellist David Requiro, from the faculty, and two students, Emily Brandenberg, violist, and Seo Hee Min, violinist. on Derek Bermel’s A Short History of the Universe… At Wolf Trap, Jack String Quartet shows its modernist mastery

By Stephen Brookes, January 13

When it comes to cutting-edge music, the young virtuosos of the Jack String Quartet don’t shrink from much. They’re renowned for their fearless embrace of even the thorniest new works, and their performance of the complete quartets of Iannis Xenakis a couple of years ago in Baltimore was one of the most ear-changing, tour- de-force chamber music concerts of the year. So when the group arrived at the Barns at Wolf Trap on Friday night (with clarinetist and composer Derek Bermel), it promised to be — to say the least — a provocative event.

The evening opened with one of the great modernist masterpieces of the 20th century, the beautifully austere Quartet No. 2 by Gyorgi Ligeti. Dating from 1968, it’s built almost entirely from textures, delicate fragments of sound and sudden, explosive contrasts — and with few familiar handholds, it’s not an easy work. But the Jack players brought it off with compelling naturalness, as if it were crystallizing out of thin air. It was a subtle performance with a strange and almost otherworldly lyricism.

Derek Bermel’s “A Short History of the Universe” — a clarinet quintet receiving its world premiere — could not have been more different. As artist-in-residence at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, Bermel has been studying gravitational physics and string theory and applying them to music. Uh-oh, you might think; but in fact, “History” proved to be a surprisingly playful work, from the rubbery glissandos of the opening “multiverse” to the songlike “heart of space” (imagine a Schubert-inflected Middle Eastern bluesy dirge) and the jaunty dance and hymn-like close of “twistor scattering,” in which “A Mighty Fortress is Our God” seemed to echo faintly through a slightly demented cosmos. All that freewheeling postmodernism made for an engaging, extremely enjoyable listen — an intriguing new work from a very 21st-century composer.

on Derek Bermel as clarinetist… Arts – Music Review A Broad Sampling of New Classical Works American Composers Orchestra, at Zankel Hall

By ALLAN KOZINN Published: March 25, 2012

It has always been the American Composers Orchestra’s mandate to explore the full range of American classical music, and in its 35 seasons it has done so without a trace of dogmatic ax grinding. Still, the orchestra has often compartmentalized, devoting a program to one or two approaches, and the next to a couple more. That makes sense. If you try to show everything at once, you may end up with the kind of motley program that George Manahan led on Thursday at Zankel Hall.

You could not have asked for greater breadth. An angular, efficiently aphoristic vocal setting by Milton Babbitt represented the severe end of the contemporary American spectrum, and a pop-tinged song cycle by Gabriel Kahane was its polar opposite, a sample of the hybrid style currently in vogue. Tuneful, harmonically accessible concertos by Copland and Michael Daugherty held the middle ground. All but the Copland piece were commissioned by the orchestra, which says a lot about the organization’s ambition and eclecticism.

But all that variety left you feeling that there was not enough of anything in particular. Surely anyone who admired Babbitt’s refined, virtuosic approach to line and harmony would have admired the clarity that the soprano Judith Bettina brought to “From the Psalter” (2002) and been disappointed that this score’s five densely packed minutes were all that Mr. Manahan and company were offering this time.

It was a huge leap from the Babbitt to Mr. Daugherty’s “Trail of Tears” (2010), an attractive flute concerto wrapped in a meditation about the forced 800-mile march of 15,000 Cherokee from Tennessee to Oklahoma in 1838 and 1839, during which 4,000 died. You would expect a wrenching, weighty piece, and Mr. Daugherty’s score is not without drama or color, captured mostly in the percussion writing that underpins the end of the first movement, “where the wind blew free .”

But dark moments are few, and no amount of program-note-driven self-persuasion can make this piece into something other than it is: a light, Neo-Romantic work with a lively dance finale and a pretty, often ornate flute line, which Amy Porter played with graceful poise.

Derek Bermel, though best known as a composer, is also a fine clarinetist (as well as the orchestra’s creative adviser). His contribution here was a rhythmically fluid, rich-hued account of the Copland Clarinet Concerto (1948), written for Benny Goodman, but with fewer concessions to Goodman’s jazz virtuosity than to his classical bona fides.

In a recent essay on his Web site Mr. Kahane argued that composers are, perhaps cynically, calling straightforward pop songs indie classical works. He said that in his own music, which includes both pop and classical compositions, he preferred to keep the distinctions clear, but that his new “Crane Palimpsest” (2012) — a work in which his artful settings of Hart Crane poems are interwoven with his sophisticated pop responses to the Crane texts — is an attempt to see whether the boundaries of pop could be expanded.

If the experiment failed, it was only because Mr. Kahane insisted on categorization. The songs, performed by Mr. Kahane with plaintive directness, are beautifully, often ingeniously, orchestrated. They are popsy but not quite pop, yet not quite classical either.

The American Composers Orchestra presents its annual series of Underwood New Music Readings on June 1, 2 and 3 at the DiMenna Center for Classical Music, 450 West 37th Street, Manhattan; americancomposers.org. NEWMUSICBOX Sounds Heard: Derek Bermel—Canzonas Americanas

By Dan Visconti on May 14, 2013

Canzonas Americanas by Derek Bermel (Cantaloupe)

Performers: Alarm Will Sound

Following a recent release of Derek Bermel’s music for full orchestra (the excellent album Voices on the BMOP Sounds label), this new collection focuses on Bermel’s work for that quintessential contemporary sinfonietta, Alarm Will Sound. Led by artistic director and conductor Alan Pierson, AWS’s one-on-a-part instrumentation has provided a proving ground for a generation of eclectic and beat-friendly composers, to whom Bermel has become something of a (youthful) elder statesman. While Bermel’s music shares many characteristics with that of the 30-something Brooklyn scene, it’s undeniable that his distinct style in many ways harkens back to Copland and Bernstein’s generation and that era’s fascination with American folk and jazz sources. This collection of Bermel’s music provides a helpful point of entry for those curious to know just what has made this composer so consistently stand out: his music’s fusion of quasi-minimalist beat-based sensibilities with a dizzying diversity of popular and/or indigenous sound sources from across the globe.

AWS’s instrumentation would seem to provide ideal expression for Bermel’s musical ideas. While I have always enjoyed his works for standard chamber ensembles and full orchestra, it’s in these compositions for a large confederation of soloists that his knack for utilizing extended techniques and vividly complex textures really comes to the fore. Pierson and AWS turn in performances that throb with crisp intensity when called for, while also displaying sensitivity to the many timbral colors that make Bermel’s music pulse, zing, and shimmer. The title selection, Canzonas Americanas, pairs the ensemble with Brazilian singer Luciana Souza, who conjures up an intimate sound that is the ideal fit for Bermel’s genre-hopping music. Originally commissioned by Gustavo Dudamel and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Canzonas blossoms from its opening solo violin figure into a bustling, Andriessen-esque passage without skipping a beat. Bermel’s facility in fusing the simple lyricism of folk sources to more hard-edged and propulsive textures is one of his music’s most attractive qualities, and he illuminates a vast expanse rarely traversed by composers today—making him an eclectic in the most meaningful sense.

Three Rivers first struck me as being akin to Bernstein’s Prelude, Fugue, and Riffs and other works from the mid-century “Third Stream.” But whereas many of Bernstein’s compositions in this genre seem almost too neatly contained within their assumed jazz-inflected style, Bermel assumes the guise of jazzy gestures in order to go way beyond anything resembling the Paul Whiteman variety of safe (if charming) pops fare. The three rivers of Bermel’s title refer to three streams of music, initially introduced in succession but eventually piling up in a gloriously raucous climax. Wild drum solos and off-kilter wind licks let us know we’re listening to something that sounds a bit like jazz, yet the familiar gestures of jazz have been transformed and transfigured into something entirely Bermel’s, in way that pays homage to the sound of Mingus and Gil Evans while creating something wholly independent of their influence. At his best, Derek Bermel is a composer who is always reaching beyond himself, pushing past stylistic limitations rather than simply confirming them. Three Rivers is one of the album’s best calling cards, and the members of AWS swing with a surprising lightness rarely heard in their heavier rhythmic playing—a capability that I do hope more composers will exploit.

Natural Selection features baritone Timothy Jones in the album’s most significant foray into vocal writing. Utilizing everything from speech to slides to gospel inflections, Bermel’s vocal writing makes use of the full expressive range of the male voice, especially some vulnerable falsetto moments that Jones pulls off perfectly, giving a performance that almost doubles as a dramatic reading in its subtle characterizations. The texts by Wendy S. Walters and Naomi Shihab Nye are nothing if not moody, and Bermel exploits this to maximum effect, with a cinematic or even noir-like sound that has tinges of the grotesqueness of cabaret—all resolving in the beautifully simple final song, “Dog,” with its Native American inflections both tender and unexpected.

Hot Zone begins with an affable and funky riff, inspired by Bermel’s study of the West African gyil—a small marimba-like instrument that Bermel studied in Ghana (and whose at times jarring pitchiness colors the sound of the piece). Meanwhile Continental Divide ventures into an almost spectralist, klangfarben-y territory not elsewhere explored on the album, the piece’s offhand jazzy licks subsumed into ominous crescendi. The oldest work recorded here (1996), it hails from Bermel’s days of study with Louis Andriessen and features abrupt transitions along with a more driving motoric sense. The work is colorful, bracingly dissonant, and quirkily toe- tapping—yet at the same time, I’m glad that Bermel eventually progressed from this approach to a style that is markedly tolerant of lyricism and more delicate gestures. It’s the tension and points of contact between Bermel’s affection for beats and grooves and the simplicity of folk-like song that often make his music so persuasive.

This recording is a sonic safari at its core: our chance to follow Derek Bermel’s contact with other peoples and traditions, and the impact of these lived experiences as they play out in music. As an album that shows a composer always reaching outside of his own culture and experiences for inspiration, it’s remarkable that Bermel’s offerings feel so distinctly personal and homemade. Despite their myriad sources and origins, each work on this disc reveals a composer totally in touch with his own social and artistic goals. It’s the most impressive release of Bermel compositions to date, performed by some of the most committed advocates of the composer’s artistic vision.

I CARE IF YOU LISTEN

Matt Mendez February 26, 2013 Derek Bermel: Canzonas Americanas on Cantaloupe Music

Even as part of a scene where being more-eclectic-than-thou is a fundamental shibboleth and musical “fusion” projects have long since become the PR-ready norm, Derek Bermel’s chameleonesque versatility boggles the mind. After all, who else on earth can boast of – and this is only a sample – composition studies with Louis Andriessen, William Bolcom, and Henri Dutilleux; years of work as a genre-hopping clarinet soloist, with the chops to play concertos by Adams and Corigliano; early and formative immersion into various strains of “ethnic” music in Brazil, Bulgaria, and West Africa; employment in an innovative multimedia pop band, TONK; longstanding links to the hip hop world, with friends in Chuck D and Mos Def; and substantial service as an educator, having among other things founded the New York Youth Symphony’s composition lab for high schoolers? No doubt all this makes Bermel a singularly lively creative presence and a great musical citizen, witty, generous, and resourceful in equal measure. Yet one still can’t help but wonder: what does such wide- ranging experience mean for Bermel’s own compositional practice? Can it all possibly add up to a coherent and engaging musical language? After all, as any fusty old composition professor would rightly note, the danger of absorbing every last shred of sonic detritus floating within earshot is irremediable cultural overload, the loss of the ability to discriminate between any of it and – by extension – the capacity to fashion one’s own musical identity. Well, if Bermel’s latest full-length portrait disc Canzonas Americanas is any evidence, the fusty types out there needn’t have worried: with his objective, almost ethnographic approach to composition thoroughly assimilating the “source materials” variously gathered from his years of musical globetrotting, listeners are in great hands with Bermel.

on Derek Bermel’s Mar de Setembro… Crossing Borders With Allure| American Composers Orchestra Presents ‘Border Vanguards’

By STEVE SMITH APRIL 7, 2014

Making new music approachable without pandering has long been of keen interest to the American Composers Orchestra, especially in the eight years that Derek Bermel has been involved — first as a composer in residence, and now as its artistic director. “Border Vanguards,” presented at Zankel Hall on Friday night, showed how this ensemble has become unusually adept at assembling menus of complementary courses, mixing the savory with the sweet in a manner palatable to almost anyone.

The program, conducted by the music director George Manahan, suited its title in multiple ways, connoting not only the borders among neighboring nations, but also among musical styles. The bill featured pieces by three composers of Latin American heritage: Silvestre Revueltas, active in Mexico until his death in 1940; Marcos Balter, born in Brazil, long based in Chicago and soon to join the faculty at Montclair State University in New Jersey; and Gabriela Lena Frank, the California-born daughter of Lithuanian Jewish and Peruvian-Chinese parents.

Played in succession in the concert’s first half, works by those composers proved that “Latin American” is useless as an indication of style. Revueltas’s 1932 piece “Alcancías” — multiple translations include “piggy banks” and “expansive bullets” — begins with a strident, jolting evocation of carnivalesque clamor, followed with a sultry nocturne and a buoyant folk dance.

Mr. Balter’s “Favela,” heard in its premiere, is more elegant and cerebral, yet no less evocative. Meant to suggest makeshift Brazilian shantytowns and the disparate individual stories contained therein, the piece offers a dreamlike progression of erratic bumps and scrapes, loosely fastened with repeated gently rising glissandos in a manner at times reminiscent of Varèse. “Manchay Tiempo” (“Time of Fear”), a tunefully suspenseful piece ripe with intimations of peril, showed Ms. Frank’s knack for creating lush sounds with limited instrumentation.

The two pieces in the concert’s second half left geography behind and traipsed across stylistic boundaries. Gunther Schuller’s “Contours” (1955-58) is an early example of what came to be called Third Stream music, a fusion of classical modernism with elements of jazz. Atonal, dreamy and fitful, the piece is tautly constructed and gorgeously voiced, with unmistakable bluesy harmonies and swing rhythms subtly deployed in its central Partita section.

In “Mar de Setembro” (“September Sea”), which closed the concert, Mr. Bermel sets five poems by the Portuguese poet Eugénio de Andrade to unambiguously luscious music. A versatile, respectful chameleon, Mr. Bermel weds Impressionism, bossa nova, tango, waltz and more to evocative ends, and expertly deploys two singular instruments: the aquaphone, a water-filled metal pot that whines eerily when its spokes are bowed, and the jazz singer Luciana Souza’s nuanced, wine-rich voice.

As ever with this ensemble, occasional patches of rhythmic imprecision showed just how hard it is for a freelance orchestra to assert absolute command of its disparate, challenging works. But under Mr. Manahan’s detailed, charismatic supervision, everything cohered well enough to make the point and please the palate.

June 1, 2015 5:52 pm New Century Chamber Orchestra, First Congregational Church, Berkeley, USA — review

Allan Ulrich

Every sophisticated, self-respecting musical community needs a chamber orchestra of distinction, and after two decades, San Francisco’s Bay Area can claim the New Century Chamber Orchestra as one of its shining artistic assets. Founded by two string players, the 19-member, all-string band took a giant step when it engaged internationally renowned violinist Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg as music director seven years ago. There was some concern. Salerno-Sonnenberg is an indecently gifted musician, armed with a distinctive technique and temperament. Could she, one wondered, relinquish some of that individuality in service to a group effort?

The answer, if the final concert set of the season is an indication, is a resounding yes. Presiding over a repertoire that spanned two centuries, Salerno-Sonnenberg is wearing her two hats with stunning ease. In a dual assignment in Albert Markov’s arrangement of the Suite Italienne, drawn from Stravinsky’s ballet, Pulcinella, she etched a lively fantasy on these 18th-century tunes, broodingly romantic in the serenata and animated in the gavotte. A bit of scrappy playing aside, the performance profoundly engaged.

So did Murmurations, a West Coast premiere by this season’s composer in residence, Derek Bermel. In this three-movement co-commission, the flights of starlings have become the inspiration for 22 minutes of virtuoso string writing. In Gathering Near Gretna Green, the avian whoosh is punctuated by a concertmaster solo. In Soaring over Algiers, an individual line yields to brilliant contrapuntal writing; and in the final Swarming Rome, spatial elements yield a broader sonority. Whatever its ultimate fate, Murmurations, completed this year, provides challenges for any string ensemble and, as far as one could tell on initial encounter, NCCO covered itself in glory.

For contrast, the ardent Romantic landscape of Schubert’s Death and the Maiden Quartet in Mahler’s orchestral version ended the evening. In some performances, all those additional strings can overpower the lyric impulse through sheer numbers. However, in the concertmaster chair Salerno-Sonnenberg enforced a wide dynamic, jolting tutti attacks and glowing phrasing that went right to the heart of Schubert’s lyric impulse.

MUSIC 366306801 SPCO gives gorgeous flight to Bermel's 'Murmurations' Inspired by the movement of birds, the piece is imaginative and beautifully performed.

By MICHAEL ANTHONY Special to the Star Tribune | JANUARY 23, 2016

Derek Bermel Birds have been a frequent inspiration for composers — actual bird song in the case of Olivier Messiaen. Among others, Ralph Vaughan Williams wrote his “Lark Ascending,” and Jean Sibelius captured the undulating movement of swans flying overhead in the finale of his Symphony No. 5.

Derek Bermel, a 48-year-old composer, conductor and virtuoso clarinetist from New York City, found similar inspiration for his “Murmurations” for strings, a new work that the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra played at the Ordway Concert Hall Friday night. (The Chamber Orchestra and three other ensembles commissioned the work. It was premiered last year in Houston.)

While living in Rome not long ago, Bermel found himself enchanted by the movements of starlings. “Their stunning, geometrical displays of aviation prior to settling down for the night are a humbling sight to behold,” he says in a program note.

The way the birds would glide and dive in formation, flying as a group, then splitting into sections and forming contrapuntal patterns that sometimes pushed in opposite directions seemed, as he thought about it, to parallel the way a string orchestra plays in unison, then breaks into smaller units, sometimes just one instrument, usually the concertmaster — or an especially independent bird — acting apart from the group.

The result, structured in three movements and running about 20 minutes, is clever and imaginative. As for the title, “Murmurations,” don’t sweat it, Bermel told the audience during a preconcert discussion — “I just like the word. It has a musical quality.” For that matter, the listener didn’t need to conjure up bird imagery to enjoy the music, but it was fun to do so, imagining the trills and tremolos as the flapping of wings, or the descending unison passage at the end of the first movement as a group dive.

Bermel, who conducted the piece, writes sensitively for strings. In his second movement, the work’s emotional core, he has the lower strings play an accompaniment while the violins pour forth a long-limbed melody of quite stunning beauty, as if the birds were staging an aerial ballet. Beauty in motion is perhaps what “Murmurations” is all about. Let’s hope that one of these ensembles records the work. The audience Friday night gave it a standing ovation, a rare gesture for a new work.

Just before intermission, the evening’s guest soloist, the young German violinist Veronika Eberle, brought silvery tone and nimble technique to her performance of Mozart’s Violin Concerto No. 4. Concertmaster Steven Copes acted capably as leader. His stand partner, associate concertmaster Ruggero Allifranchini, held that position — vigorously — during the evening’s finale, Haydn’s Symphony No. 85.

Five wind players from the orchestra opened the concert with a lively reading of Gyorgy Ligeti’s Six Bagatelles, a droll set of folk-inspired pieces from the 1950s — what might be called avant-garde cartoon music. We thought of Roadrunner conducting in a tuxedo, then falling backward off the podium.

Reviews New Century Chamber Orchestra Delights, 9/11/14

Lou Fancher on Fri, Sep 12, 2014 New Century Chamber Orchestra: Violinist and Music Director Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, Composer and clarinetist Derek Bermel

Now in its 23rd season, the most surprising aspect of the New Century Chamber Orchestra’s season opener on Thursday night in Berkeley was the way the ensemble continues to surprise.

United as a collaborative, conductorless ensemble under the bow of world-renowned violinist and music director Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg for seven seasons, spark and sizzle came from unexpected directions. Aside from the sheer forcefulness of the 19-member string ensemble’s presentation, percussionists Galen Lemmon and Artie Storch anchored the evening’s repertoire — or shook it into unexpected territory. Guest clarinetist and NCCO’s Feature Composer for the season, Derek Bermel, provided talent and tease in his three compositions. Proving himself capable of playing anything and everything on his instrument, Bermel joined members of the ensemble in his A Short History of the Universe for String Quartet and Clarinet. (The New York City-based artist’s Oct Up for Two String Quartets and Percussion and Silvioudades hinted at good things to come. The West Coast premiere of a new work by Bermel, co-commissioned by NCCO in collaboration with a national consortium of orchestras, closes the 2014-15 season in May 2015.)

Bermel’s diagrammatic Short History suspended time and tested the tension between alternative rhythms. The work’s three movements’ scaled the wall of sound: violins skittering dervish-like, clarinet spritely bouncing or plunging athletically, cello skating marvelously throughout and ending on Salerno-Sonnenberg’s final, trembling note.

Two all-too-short works by Bermel followed, with Oct Up’s tight loops forming circles in which the marvelous percussionists’ polyrhythms pulsed. Meeting like two friends who stumble upon each other and decide to have drinks, Salerno-Sonnenberg and Bermel rendered the sweet and somewhat sorrowful Silvioudades. A ragtime- influenced chôros, Bermel mastered the Brazilian style while jamming with friends in Rio de Janeiro nightclubs.

Between the Bermel compositions, Arvo Pärt’s serene Fratres arrived like an ocean. Calm on the surface, constructed as much with minimalism as it is with the Russian composer’s mastery of harmonic sequences, the ensemble unleashed the work’s quiet power. Deftness and depth — NCCO has both in spades.

After intermission, the triumphant Carmen Suite gave listeners an almost-square classical structure on which to end the evening. Composer Rodion Shchedrin based his score on George Bizet’s opera — skewing it to suit his ballerina wife Maya Plisetskaya and her art form’s metaphor-in-movement language.

Served up with equal measures of sauce and subtlety, the work was like the Sahara Desert: Hot on the surface, surprisingly cool below; vast in scale, but made of parts (13 sections) small enough to be held in hand and allowed to filter; mountainous, but accessible enough to recognize and find satisfying symmetry in the fragmented Habanera bookending the work’s prologue and epilogue. Here too, percussion created thrilling angularity and added acute vitality to the steady maturity of NCCO’s declarative string playing. Geometry rocks in the New Century playbook.

For more information:

derekbermel.com

Publisher Website: http://www.peermusicclassical.com/composer/12392

Booking and media inquiries:

Dworkin & Company Elizabeth Dworkin, [email protected] Allison Weissman, [email protected] 914-244-3803 dworkincompany.com