Guest composers György Kurtág and David Lang (l/r). Photos by Judit Kurtág and Andrew Cross

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Blackbird, learn to fly: The eighth blackbird sextet charts its own course in the new music world, with help from Minimum Security Composers Collective

... Saturday at Royce Hall, eighth blackbird arrives in the Southland with a program called "di/verge." Four composers from the New York City-based Minimum Security Composers Collective each were commissioned to write four-movement works based, in some way, on the opening chord of Stravinsky's Violin Concerto. Those movements, once turned in, were then arranged by the ensemble into a mosaic of their devising. As it turns out, they mixed and matched two 35-minute, eight-movement pieces...

The "di/verge" project, performed in New York, Philadelphia and Washington before the tour headed west, is a prime example of eighth blackbird's outside-the-box thinking. The pastiche concept was a natural to suggest to the Minimum Security Composers Collective. The collective -- Dennis DeSantis, Roshanne Etezady, Adam Silverman and Ken Ueno -- former composition students at Yale, wanted to work directly with performers. "It's difficult to be a young composer, and it's difficult to be a composer at all, to create a career from it," Silverman says. "We wanted to find a way to do concerts in an interesting way." Working with eighth blackbird, Silverman says, "has wound up being our dream project."

"When we initially commissioned the collective," Kaplan recalls, "I remember we were obsessed with how we were going to unify the whole thing. In the end, it was the composers who came up with the chord idea." The re-ordering of the works into two collages not only subverted tradition, it allowed for real interaction between players and composers. Duvall happily calls the results "a different animal altogether."

Still, each part is duly identified by title, movement and composer in the program, and the ensemble realizes that many habitual classical listeners will be program-obsessive. "It's almost like they can't detach themselves from how they've been taught to listen," says Duvall. "It's almost like, in their mind, they need to be able to identify them in four-movement chunks by each composer, the way you would hear them at a normal concert."

Still, Duvall feels the program's "real success is when audience members just allow themselves to take in 35 minutes of what becomes an entirely new production. When we mix it all up, each half becomes its own brand-new piece."

Composer Silverman contributed a work called "In Another Man's Skin." He agrees that upending the relationship of the listener to material is part of the project's appeal. "You have to "surrender what's really a very ingrained habit of feeling like you want to know who a composer is, know what the context of a piece is," he says. " 'di/verge' takes that away from you. You really can't tell whose music is being played at a given time. However, the movements themselves are sufficiently distinct that, even if you don't know me, you can probably associate one of my movements with the other three. In a way, it's almost like a composer becomes a theme in a concert."

  -- Josef Woodard, The Los Angeles Times, April 6, 2003

Six Oberlin graduates, currently resident at two fortunate Chicago universities, play new music, mostly brand-new stuff that willing composers old and young have created for this most appealing group... For its concert at UCLA's Schoenberg Hall, the blackbirds put together "Di/Verge," a set of commissioned works by four members of New York's Minimum Security Composers Collective, ballsy and smart composers in their early 30s (as are the 'birds). Each composer — Dennis DeSantis, Roshanne Etezady, Adam Silverman and Ken Ueno — had come up with a four-movement suite; the 16 movements were then shuffled and performed as two continuous sets of eight. The players had memorized their music, and this gave them the chance to wander around the stage in an easygoing choreography. The music, too, could be counted as easygoing: small, angular conceits, sometimes breaking down into a flowing melodic line, mostly acrobatic — some jagged Hindemith here, a harmony that Ravel might recognize. It all came together as an evening of pure pleasure — modest, immensely likable, and, in its own way, original and enterprising.

  -- Alan Rich, LA Weekly, April 25 - May 1

Eighth Blackbird cuts and pastes in a rearranged tour-de-force

Eighth Blackbird, the young instrumental sextet in residence at both the University of Chicago and Northwestern University, has plenty of new tricks up its sleeve, the most enticing (and possibly significant) of which may be its collaboration with the Minimum Security Composers Collective.

Like Eighth Blackbird, the collective's members Dennis DeSantis, Roshanne Etezady, Adam Silverman and Ken Ueno are in their late 20s, have collected degrees from leading conservatories (Yale, among others) and studied with some of the same mentors. While children of modernism and all that came after it, they're musically eclectic and receptive to fresh currents from popular culture.

The music of each has its own personality: Ueno, for example, is a deejay fond of electronic sampling; Silverman writes in a sweet, lushly lyrical style that brings to mind Faure and the Beatles. So how do they compose as a committee? Most recently, by coming up with a four-movement piece each that can be a standalone, but Eighth Blackbird, after consulting with them, has combined and reordered the movements in a way it wants.

As befits the age of TiVo, this joint effort is a cut-and-paste job. The juxtaposition (two movements from Etezady's "Damaged Goods" follow one from DeSantis' "Powerless" and are performed in reverse order) is supposed to achieve a logic of its own by echoing motifs, mixing moods and maintaining instrumental continuity. "Di/verge" 16 movements totaling nearly 80 minutes was unveiled by Eighth Blackbird in the University of Chicago's Mandel Hall Sunday evening.

It opened with a Stravinsky-esque jaunt that is the first movement from "Powerless," distinctive for the interplay between raucous percussive chords and gentle winds-and-violin utterances. The casually dressed musicians, as they would do throughout much of the performance, moved around the stage to form transient duos, trios and such (though percussionist Matthew Duvall and pianist Lisa Kaplan pretty much stayed put). A movement from "Damaged Goods," alternately melodious and brash, followed and, in turn, segued into another movement from "Powerless" and so forth.

The overriding impression of the first half six movements in all was unrelenting manic energy tempered by lulling interludes, a contrast reinforced by the shrill, demented industrial sounds from Ueno's "Pharmakon," which suddenly gave way to a sugarcoated cover of the Beatles' "Blackbird" from Silverman's "In Another Man's Skin."

The second half contained more variety in tone and just as many imaginative touches. It even served up humor by having some of the players walk ever closer to the edge of the stage as they tried to crank up the music. The non-musical comic bits between the movements from "Pharmakon," however, fell flat. Among the highlights were long seductive solos on marimba and piano. Through all this, it was easy to tell music from "Pharmakon" and "In Another Man's Skin" from the rest, not that that would be a fruitful exercise.

What was important was that Eighth Blackbird, whose other members are Molly Alicia Barth (flutes), Michael Maccaferri (clarinets), Matthew Albert (violin) and Nicholas Photinos (cello) really rocked. They delivered the sort of tour-de-force that sent one home with a big smile.

   -- Ted Shen, The Chicago Tribune, February 17, 2003

Expanding Boundaries, Physical and Artistic

At first there was something a little self-conscious about the moment when the flute player and violinist began walking around the stage. This was, after all, a chamber concert at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and in performance classical musicians tend to stay put. But Eighth Blackbird, a group of six young instrumentalists specializing in contemporary music, deliberately set out to explore the boundaries of a conventional recital on Friday night. And within a few minutes their roaming the stage seemed as natural as splitting the movements of four distinct pieces of music and combining them in continuous washes of sound.

You'd say the group jammed, especially in Roshanne Etezady's "Eleventh Hour" (actually the second movement of her piece "Damaged Goods"), which closed the concert with frenetic energy. Except "jammed" doesn't quite cover it: for all of its experimentation, Eighth Blackbird retained a sense of the traditional proprieties. Its name comes from the Wallace Stevens poem "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," the verse about "noble accents/and lucid, inescapable rhythms," and the reference is telling: the ensemble's funkiness is firmly inscribed within intellectual, high-culture parameters. These players aren't rebels in the downtown spirit of Bang on a Can. Rather than breaking down the barriers between classical and pop, they seemed to be folding in pop influences to help expand the definition and scope of classical music - on classical music's terms.

The Stevens poem also addresses questions of perception that were a central issue of Friday's concert: how is our understanding of a piece of music affected by the way we look at it? Four young composers who style themselves the Minimum Security Composers Collective wrote autonomous, four-movement pieces, generally thoughtful and lively, from Adam Silverman's "In Another Man's Skin," a lyrical, romantic, almost conservative exegesis on the Beatles' "Blackbird," to Ken Ueno's "Pharmakon," with three very brief "pre-movements" leading up to a longer main event.

On Friday the boundaries of those pieces and the composers' intentions were deliberately ignored. The result was a kind of performance piece, an engaging experience that ended up reaffirming the traditional definitions it seemed to be trying to challenge.

   -- Anne Midgette, The New York Times, February 3, 2003

Eighth Blackbird: Action Music

Try this at home: Take four of your favorite albums of chamber music, put them all in your CD player and hit the random shuffle button. You'll have approximated the effect of Wednesday night's performance at the Kennedy Center's Terrace Theater by the renegade chamber ensemble Eighth Blackbird. This innovative sextet commissioned four composers to create what amounts to one communal work: "di/verge."

The composers, Dennis DeSantis, Roshanne Etezady, Adam B. Silverman and Ken Ueno, who make up the Minimum Security Composers Collective, based their four-movement works on a single motif, the opening chords of Stravinsky's Violin Concerto. The performers arranged sections of all the works in an order of their own devising, creating a sort of meta-composition by committee. Eighth Blackbird took the concept one step further by marrying the musical effect with choreography.

Unlike most chamber music performers, the group often plays from memory, which not only makes the stage action possible but also contributes to its stellar ensemble playing. Violinist Matthew Albert, flutist Molly Alicia Barth and clarinetist Michael J. Maccaferri made it sound effortless to advance to the edge of the stage while navigating Etezady's intense "Damaged Goods."

Nicholas Photinos got a few good licks in while crossing the stage with his cello, pianist Lisa Kaplan proved she could play just as fluidly standing up as sitting down, and percussionist Matthew L. Duvall shone in his comic abilities as well as his spectacular mallet technique in DeSantis's "Powerless."
Performances of contemporary music are generally not easy for either audience or performer, but by infusing them with pop music and theatrical practices, Eighth Blackbird rises to the challenge every time.

   -- Gail Wein, The Washington Post, January 31, 2003

NOW THIS IS INTERESTING: Eighth Blackbird, a contemporary music ensemble based in New York, has commissioned a collaborative 16-movement work from four composers -- Dennis DeSantis, Adam Silverman, Ken Ueno and Roshanne Etezady. Titled di/verge, the piece will receive its Washington premiere Wednesday night at the Kennedy Center Terrace Theater as part of the Fortas Chamber Music Series. Each of the composers wrote four movements of the evening-length work... Sounds lively -- and worth investigation.

   -- Tim Page, The Washington Post, January 26, 2003

Di/verge pushes in varied directions from this single idea, resulting in an experience that lands on the other side of chamber music. It is to be seen as well as heard: one intimate, essential journey to be shared by performers and audience.The program began with a sneak preview of four works from an intended full-evening suite of pieces now being written for Eighth Blackbird by a posse of young composers called the Minimum Security Composers Collective. The most surprising work was Adam Silverman’s “In Another Man’s Skin,” gurgling washes of sweet tonality, slightly out of kilter, slightly tongue-in-cheek. The most compelling was Dennis DeSantis’ “Powerless,” helter-skelter riffs and runs in a compositional voice the draws from rock, 12-tone music, Copland and Messaien in a most authentic way.

   -- From http://www.slee.buffalo.edu/september-02.htm

All four of the pieces[on Eighth Blackbird’s concert] were either commissioned by or for the ensemble and showed the high degree of collaborative interchange that exists between Eighth Blackbird and its chosen composers. Indeed, with such a piece as "Minimum Security Trailer" (2000) it was hard to tell precisely where the creative impulse left off and the re-creative impulse began. A sampling of a larger work by the Minimum Security Composers Collective (Dennis DeSantis, Roshanne Etezady, Adam Silverman and Ken Ueno), the… pieces ranged from funky post-minimalist twitches, to a kind of easy-listening deconstruction of the Beatles' "Blackbird," to angry flurries of 16th-notes. The ensemble, as is its wont, played them from memory and made one eager to hear the entire 16-movement piece when it's ready next season.

   -- John von Rhein Chicago Tribune, Published January 21, 2002

The program began with a sneak preview of four works from an intended full-evening suite of pieces now being written for Eighth Blackbird by a posse of young composers called the Minimum Security Composers Collective. The most surprising work was Adam Silverman's "In Another Man's Skin," gurgling washes of sweet tonality, slightly out of kilter, slightly tongue in cheek. The most compelling was Dennis DeSantis's "Powerless," helter-skelter riffs and runs in a compositional voice that draws from rock, 12-tone music, Copland and Messiaen in a most authentic way.

   -- Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times, March 11, 2002

Minimum Security is a group of composers who gang up to get performing groups to commission works from them, similar to the bicoastal Common Sense collective. It's an inspired strategy, economically feasible and designed to create new repertoires. This time Minimum Security wrote pieces for a duo called Odd Appetite, consisting of Ha-Yang Kim on cello and Nathan Davis on percussion. The latter are expert virtuoso players—almost too good, with that Uptown air that these polished gestures are ones they've flung off thousands of times before... These Minimum Security guys are expert, well-trained musicians.

   -- Kyle Gann, The Village Voice, October 10, 2001 (view entire review)

Four pieces by members of the Minimum Security Composers Collective, all commissioned by this duo and written last year, provided the cornerstone here. Smelting Solid Gold, by Adam B. Silverman, shreds a bucketful of James Brown tunes and reassembles them John Zorn fashion into an irreverent, humorous, enjoyable pastiche. It's a hoot, more fun than a bathtub full of otters. Dennis DeSantis's +8 performs similar operations upon figures rooted in techno-style dance mixed with a dash of jazz… it's a solid entity in its own right, raw and obsessive in speech, just the right length, and never boring.

[In] WATT, by Ken Ueno… jazz, rock, and funk appear in more internalized fashion than in the preceding entries. Much of the piece concerns itself with wildly energetic, intense gestures (perfumed with hints of Lee Hyla's oeuvre) that somehow manage to up the ante as they unfold, becoming a riveting game of "can you top this."… Roshanne Etezady's Nothing if Not, while the composition most likely to appear on a traditional contemporary ensemble concert, does not have a whiff of dryness about it. Cast in a dissonant harmonic language, it proves colorful, contemplative, translucent at times to the point of fragility -- and good to hear.

   -- David Cleary, 21st Century Music, February 11, 2001

The compositions, some of which come from a loose group that call themselves The Minimum Security Composers Collective, often combine a rich variety of elements unusual to classical music, including smatterings of avant-garde jazz, rock, and funk.

   -- David Wildman, The Boston Globe, February 11, 2001

[The Yesaroun’ Duo’s] Brookline performance will consist of commissioned pieces by the Minimum Security Composers Collective, a group of four composers who met at Yale.

"They would team up and do projects all together, and they’ll team up with an ensemble like us, " says Solomon. " The ensemble will commission all four of them, all four would write a piece and then the ensemble provides two concerts and then they book two concerts…

Some of the works at the upcoming concert include the rock-based +8, a solo bass clarinet piece, Tsmindao Ghmerto, a solo drum piece called Le Corps a Corps, a duet for percussion and alto sax, Nothing if Not, another for percussion and baritone sax, WATT, and a special piece, arranged by and featuring Solomon’s father, Cantor Robbie Solomon, Hashkivenu, for sax, marimba and cantor.”
   -- Ed Symkus, Town Online, February 12, 2001