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new music touring

we came, we saw…

[Written at about 37,000ft somewhere between Lincoln, NE and Casper, WY] Sunday morning came a bit early for most of us, I would guess. When flying west to east, it’s easy to stay up way later than you intend. It was a pretty late night, with all of us in the quartet coming back to the hotel from our various evening plans and looking to maybe have a drink or two before bed. Greg and I, who are sharing a room, had thought about going in search of the mythical best bagel in New York, but my alarm went off at 7:00 a.m. and I just croaked that I was going to go back to sleep, bagels be damned. So, it was closer to 11:00 a.m. when I greeted the day in an upright fashion. Our two sets were both in the afternoon, the Wilder Shores at around 2:20 and Quartz at around 4:00.

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Third Angle New Music with Matthew and Michael Dickman, perform LJ White’s “Wilder Shores” at the 2015 Bang on a Can Marathon in New York City. Photo: Charles Noble

The venue, the Winter Garden at Brookfield Place, is a huge atrium in the middle of a high-end shopping concourse. It’s just west of the World Trade Center site, directly across from the One World Trade Center “Freedom Tower”.  The performance space is flanked on one side by stores such as Ferragamo and Gucci, on the other a massive food court called Le District, with many Parisian gustatory delights on display. People can walk in and out, or around, the venue as the performances take place, staying for none, some, or all of the marathon.

The first set (introduced by BOAC composer David Lang, who had a residency with 3A a few years back) was LJ White’s Wilder Shores, which featured amplified violin and cello along with two reciters. Ron Blessinger and Marilyn De Oliveira played the string parts, while Portland-based poets (and twin brothers) Matthew and Michael Dickman recited their poetry. It’s a unique piece, with its use of timing markers to keep the instruments and speakers in sync. We were worried that such an intimate piece might fall prey to the massive environment into which its sound would have to navigate to the audience’s ears. But it really worked! The hushed and introspective musings on love, lust, longing, and fear managed to insinuate themselves into the consciousness of the audience, and were a true contrast to the rock-infused, high energy and high volume pieces that came both before and after. New Music Box tweeted that it was still “swooning” from the performance later that afternoon.

In between our first and second sets, we heard six pianos playing chamber music, a brass band with a deep and funky beat, and a performance by the Bang on a Can All-Stars, playing works from their recent Field Recordings album. Then, it was time for us to go on to play Julian Day’s Quartz. There was a bit of nervousness about this particular voyage, and that related to the sound check of the day before. We’d been having problems getting the volume of the accompanying soundtrack to the live instruments correctly balanced, first of all. Second, we’d not been able to hear ourselves or the track in our monitor wedges to our satisfaction. Third, after the first movement was completed, the sound engineer thought the piece was over, and we had no sound to the house for the entirety of the second movement! So we were really flying this performance by the seat of our pants, trusting that the ace crew hired by BOAC would get everything right, or at least right enough, to present the piece in the most effective way. And we, the live performers up on stage, had virtually no way to impact how this all was going to go down.

Third Angle New Music plays Julian Day's "Quartz" at the 2015 Bang on a Can Marathon in New York.
Third Angle New Music plays Julian Day’s “Quartz” at the 2015 Bang on a Can Marathon in New York.

Thankfully, the performance went very well. There were issues with the loss of some of the higher frequencies of the soundtrack due to the boomy nature of the atrium, and it may be that this piece just wasn’t really designed to function as effectively in such a cavernous acoustic. But the audience seemed to really enjoy it, we got a lot of compliments as we made our way from the backstage area. It was a real honor to meet BOAC composer and co-founder Julia Wolfe (winner of the 2015 Pulitzer Prize in Music) backstage before she introduced us. It’s humbling to be in the presence of such focused greatness, and to know that we’d been included on the Marathon thanks to the favorable impressions and carefully built personal and working relationships with the BOAC core artistic team of David Lang, Julia Wolfe, and Todd Reynolds. 3A Artistic Director Ron Blessinger and Executive Director Lisa Volle deserve so much praise for all of their hard work to make this vision come to a reality. In addition, we had nearly 20 board members and supporters who made the trip with us from Portland to New York for this history-making concert, and I know I speak for all of us at 3A when I say that we are so thankful for their confidence and support of our mission to bring great works of new music alive for the people of Portland, Oregon.

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