The Fifth Floor Collective

Interview with Natalie Calma of Balletik Duo

patrickgreenemusic — Wed, 22 May 2013 19:11:33 +0000

Balletik Duo: Laurel Black, marimba (L) and Natalie Calma, violin (R)

The Fifth Floor Collective recently spoke with Natalie Calma, violinist in the Boston new-music group Balletik Duo. Come hear Balletik at the third concert of our third season, “Mitosis,” on June 4th at the Davis Square Theater in Somerville!

FFC: You’ve spoken in the past about a desire to merge music and movement onstage. Tell us a little about where that comes from, and what you aim for.

NC: Balletik’s idea of music and movement started during our rehearsals when we noticed that we moved together a lot and our movements were often in sync. We used our movements to guide us through the music (mostly because the rhythms were so difficult for me) but then as we started to perform, we got a lot of feedback from people telling us that we moved very well together. The most definitive moment of Balletik and movement was after we had won the Honor’s Chamber Competition at The Boston Conservatory. One of the judges came up to me and said “You guys move so beautifully together. It is almost “balletic” if that is even a word.” Our aim is for people to listen with their ears and with their eyes. Sometimes, people want to relax and just hear the music; but we want them to be so engaged that the music cannot be without the movement.

FFC: What appeals to you about the violin/marimba format?

NC: What I love the most about it is how people often react to such an ensemble. Often I get reactions such as, “Really?” “That?” It turns out that this instrumentation is not as uncommon as some people think; Marimolin (I consider them to be the pioneers of violin-marimba music) inspired a really big part of the marimba repertoire; but I guess that if you are not in the contemporary marimba scene, you probably don’t know that.

FFC: You’ve seemed to gravitate towards working with living composers. What’s your favorite aspect of working with new music?

NC: I can make it mine. I often find myself thinking that no one has ever played this music before, and I get to do what I want with it within the parameters given by the composer. I also really like that there are no recordings of these works (if I’m performing the premiere) and I cannot be influenced by someone else’s interpretation of the music. It is a very private and intimate work, and I love it.

FFC: Tell us a bit about how you got started. Whose idea was it? What’s the first piece you played together?

NC: We got started in a very bizarre way. Laurel and I were both students at The Boston Conservatory, she was finishing her masters and I was a senior that year. I had decided that I did not want to do any more standard chamber music and wanted to give the world music program a chance; but when the chamber music assignments were given I was not in the world music class but instead I was signed up to play with Laurel Black. I didn’t know who Laurel was at the time, so I was very disappointed that I was not in the world music ensemble. We met the next day at the library to figure out what we were going to play, and she seemed like a really nice girl and the music we were looking at was really cool so my feelings towards it were changing. When we met for our first rehearsal I fell in love with the idea of a violin-marimba duo. The first piece we worked on was Gunther Schuller’s Phantasmata.

FFC: How would you describe the new-music scene in Boston?

NC: There is so much going on all the time with new music and there is a great amount of composers and performers that are always so happy to join new music concert series or just performances of new music in general. Also, music schools are starting to become more supportive of the movement and are giving wonderful opportunities to students all around the city.

FFC: What are your hopes for the FFC/Balletik Duo/Transient Canvas concert on June 4th?

NC: I hope that people love the music and start to have a deeper appreciation for the marimba. Laurel, Matt and Amy are such amazing players, and I’m very excited to have the opportunity to collaborate with them. Also, I hope people will realize the massive amount of work that goes into putting this concert together, from learning the repertoire to transporting marimba equipment to and from our rehearsal and concert venues. I also hope that people will be curious about our ensembles and would like to collaborate with us in the future. Laurel and I are always looking for new composers to work with!

FFC: What do you hope people say when they hear “Balletik Duo?”

NC: I just want a very simple and honest “Wow, that was awesome.”

Program Note: Eventually, everything connects

patrickgreenemusic — Fri, 17 May 2013 15:13:35 +0000

Eventually, everything connects was written by Collective member Patrick Greene for Transient Canvas and Balletik Duo. Come hear the premiere of it at the final concert of our third season, Mitosis, on June 4 at the Davis Square Theater in Somerville!

*Please note: Eventually, everything connects is an expansion of Charles & Ray*

A couple of years ago, my wife and I brought home a chair. It was canary yellow, all spindles and curves, a fiberglass profusion perched on steel-and-maple rockers. It looked like the way laughter feels. It was born sometime around 1950, in Zeeland, Michigan, at the Herman Miller factory. It was designed by team of young, wide-eyed designers in Venice, Los Angeles, in a little building that was once an automobile garage, but which was now a crazy, wild thing, filled with circus paraphernalia and toy-train sets and music and sheets of plywood bent into shapes that, five years earlier, could only have existed in dreams, or maybe on paper.

The leaders of the team were a husband and wife, and their names were Charles and Ray Eames.

They’d met and fallen in love about a decade earlier when both were students at the Cranbrook Academy of Art. They were an unlikely pairing—for one thing, Charles was married at the time—but they completed each other. He was studying to become an architect, she was training as an Abstract Expressionist painter; he was charismatic and brimming with loudly-voiced curiosity, she preferred to quietly observe, taking in the world and missing none of it. But she brought color and texture to his modernist aesthetic, and he created new canvases for her work in wild shapes and of novel materials, canvases which, given the affluence of post-WWII America, became parts of daily life in homes across the country.

Eventually, everything connects is an expansion of an earlier piece I wrote for Transient Canvas titled Charles & Ray. In Eventually everything connects, I’ve added a finale to the two movements of Charles & Ray that synthesizes the harmonic and rhythmic material of that earlier piece with a new movement for Transient Canvas and Balletik Duo to perform in tandem. The title, fittingly, is excerpted from one of Charles Eames’ most oft-quoted sayings: “Eventually everything connects – people, ideas, objects. The quality of the connections is the key to quality per se.”

The first movement, “St. Louis,” is named for Charles’ birthplace, and attempts to capture his aesthetic essence in sound. Little bits of sonic data—stacked fourths, a rising major-third melodic fragment, a polyrhythmic snippet—are combined and modified throughout. To Charles, good design evolved from the unique properties of the materials of its construction. The materials in “St. Louis” are always individually identifiable, but new forms emerge from their combining.

The second movement, ”Sacramento,” (named, as you might imagine, for Ray’s place of birth) is quite different. The extensive use of microtonally-inflected pitch material lends a sense of otherworldliness, as do the clarinet’s plaintive multiphonics. Ray’s work was characterized by her incredible sense of color, and the music of the second movement attempts to coax out chromatic gradations of its own: not just of the timbres of these two instruments, but within the space and time of the music itself.

The third movement, “Pacific Palisades,” is titled after the neighborhood in Los Angeles in which Charles and Ray decided to build their groundbreaking home. The Eames House, originally known as Case Study House No. 8, is a true masterpiece—it’s as wild as it is austere, as cluttered as it is modern, and as colorful as it is neutral. They managed to build it in a matter of weeks, using prefabricated, off-the-shelf components from industrial catalogs. The Eames House is a perfect union of these two creative minds, and “Pacific Palisades” seeks much the same effect: the quartal, rhythmic material from “St. Louis” is combined with the chromatic, looser music of “Sacramento.”

I’ll end with a little story. The original prototype of that canary-yellow rocking chair in our living room was, according to legend, a surprise gift to a new mother on the Eames’ staff. They wanted her to be able to rock her newborn to sleep in comfort, security, and modernity. It then evolved into something of a tradition in the Eames Office, and many Office-affiliated parents were given RARs when they brought new life into the world.

My wife and I are expecting our first child this August. This chair—our chair, born in that factory on the shores of Lake Michigan, designed in that garage at the top of a hill overlooking the Pacific, this physical artifact of the unique love between these two people I’ll never meet, who died years before I knew what a chair even was, this object that made its way, over six decades, to a store in Boston where you can dip your feet into the Atlantic from the parking lot—will be the first chair in which we rock our baby to sleep. I hope that a century from now, when we’re gone, some young couple will wander into a design-history store, see a little yellow chair that reminds them of laughter, and decide to bring it home. I hope their children, whom they’ve rocked to sleep on that very chair, will wonder where it came from, who designed it, if it was a relic of the past or something sent to earth from the future.

And I hope they decide to write some music about it.

-Patrick Greene

Winner Announcement! 2013 Call for Scores

patrickgreenemusic — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 18:15:52 +0000

The Fifth Floor Collective is very happy to officially announce that the winner of the 2013 Call for Scores is composer Michael Boyd with his wonderfully innovative Bob’s Party. The panel of judges included FFC members Andrew Paul Jackson and Patrick Greene, along with Transient Canvas (Matt Sharrock and Amy Advocat) and Balletik Duo (Natalie Calma and Laurel Black).

We were lucky to have an exceptionally diverse, rich field of entrants, and this decision was one that we spent many hours coming to. We had a great international turnout this year, with pieces (of uniformly high quality) coming in from Brazil, Canada, Italy, Mexico, and the Netherlands. We also had the pleasure of reading a wealth of material from throughout the United States (Alabama, California, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, North Carolina, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Washington).

We feel confident that you’ll love Boyd’s Bob’s Party as much as we do, and that you’ll enjoy hearing Transient Canvas and Balletik Duo play the hell out of it at the final concert of our third season (June 4, 2013, at the Davis Square Theater in Somerville, MA).

We’ll hopefully be able to program some more of the music from this Call next season. Some of you might be hearing from us shortly!

Thank you, though, to everyone who entered. We had a wonderful time going through the scores, and can’t wait to do it all over again next year.

Program Note: Aphorism 9, by Andrew Paul Jackson

patrickgreenemusic — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 16:39:45 +0000

Note: Andrew Paul Jackson’s Aphorism 9 will be performed by Transient Canvas at the second concert of our third season. The concert is coming up fast, so mark your calendar! March 15, 2013, at 8pm, at the Lily Pad Gallery in Cambridge, MA (right in the middle of Inman Square).

The Aphorisms series is a collection of short pieces for unique duet combinations that are each paired with an aphorism from Friedrich Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil.

Aphorism 9 is an abstract rumination on Nietzsche’s aphorism, “The voice of disappointment: ‘I listened for an echo and heard nothing but applause—’” in two distinct movements. The first is exclusively concerned with the first half of the aphorism, I listened for an echo. This sentiment is represented musically through a simple dialogue that grows in complexity, moving from overlapping statements to an echo that increasingly becomes more independent from its originator. The image I kept in mind was that of exploring a cave, something I did a great deal as a kid.

The second movement represents the last half of the aphorism, and heard nothing but applause. In this movement, I represented the applause the way we’ve come to know it in a concert setting, as bookends to each performance. Likewise, the musical opening and closing of the movement are energetic and rhythmically propulsive. The more elegiac middle section is a very succinct rephrasing of the echo we were listening for in the first movement, this time wholly unfulfilled. The fact that the musical applause that opens and closes the movement are identical is indicative of the fact that the statement presented in the middle section has been completely misunderstood. In this way, the search for an “other”, which Nietzsche represented in a metaphorical echo, is unfulfilled but, as a conciliation perhaps, warmly received just the same.

Interview with Matt Sharrock of Transient Canvas

patrickgreenemusic — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 21:42:47 +0000

Transient Canvas, the new-music duo founded in 2011 by Matt Sharrock (marimba) and Amy Advocat (clarinet), will be the featured performers at our upcoming concert in Cambridge (March 15, 8pm, the Lily Pad Gallery).

FFC: How did Transient Canvas come about?

MS: Amy and I met while working as telemarketers for the Handel & Haydn Society in the summer of 2011. I had just finished my MM in marimba at The Boston Conservatory, and I was in that scary phase in any young musician’s life when they finish their schooling and try to figure out what they want to do with their lives. As a marimbist, I have always been drawn to chamber music more than solo repertoire, and I wanted more than anything to find another musician with whom I really clicked. I had heard Amy earlier that year as part of the New Gallery Concert Series, and I absolutely fell in love with her playing. When we were working at H&H together, I really wanted to ask her to read some duets together. I was very shy about it, but eventually I mustered up the courage to give her some recordings and scores to peruse at some point. I was sure nothing would come of it, but much to my surprise she seemed very excited about the idea.

We eventually read Barbara White’s Small World and Shawn Michalek’s Miniatures for Clarinet and Marimba together, and everything just clicked. I don’t think I had ever been part of a rehearsal that was so easy and natural. Without having to discuss much, we just played together. We had such a great time that we decided to make our duo official. So, we spent the rest of the year putting together a concert, finding a name (which took quite a bit of time, actually), and commissioning pieces from Osnat Nezter, Kyle Pyke, and Andy Vores, whose piece Fabrication 10: Itch we eventually recorded and is now available on his CD One Head. With the generous assistance of Mischa Salkind-Pearl and the Equilibrium Concert Series, we put on our first concert, Lucid, on April 18th, 2012 at the Davis Square Theatre in Somerville. We’ve been going strong ever since.

FFC: In just two years, Transient Canvas has commissioned and premiered more than a dozen new works. What do you find most appealing about working with living composers?

MS: I really like the collaborative element of working with living composers. Every composer has their own views of the purpose of music in today’s society, and every composer has their own unique set of values when it comes to the construction of music. I find this insight into the creative process very fascinating, and I know that I grow so much as a musician with every new composer I am able to collaborate with.

FFC: Clarinet and marimba is quite an interesting pairing. As more music is written for you, do you see any patterns emerging? Do composers tend to gravitate toward certain things, or has each piece been utterly unique?

MS: This is a hard question. I don’t think that we’ve commissioned enough pieces yet to really discern trends or patterns. I have been happy to find that most of our pieces take advantage of how well a bass clarinet blends with the timbre of a 5-octave marimba. However, so far we’ve been lucky in that every piece we’ve commissioned reflects the composer’s own unique voice.

FFC: What—or who—convinced you to focus on the marimba as a primary instrument?

MS: I came to music very late in life. I didn’t actually have any sort of instruction on percussion instrumetns until I was 18 years old and a freshman in college. However, I knew how to play the piano as a kid and taught myself to play mallet percussion instruments so that I could join my friends in high school band. My favorite instrument to play was always the marimba. As I continued on in my percussion education, I always felt the most at home behind a marimba; it was the instrument that I felt most accurately conveyed my musical voice. It definitely has its flaws, and most of the music composed for it is absolutely terrible, but I still love it and hope that I can help add some really great pieces to our repertoire. My greatest inspiration has been my teacher, Nancy Zeltsman, who has spent her career creating a place for the marimba in the art music world as a legitimate instrument that can stand on its own. That being said, I live by the adage “Jack of all trades, master of one,” and continue to perform as a percussionist, with my marimba playing informing my percussion playing, and vice versa.

FFC: Why do you think it’s important to support the composing and performing of contemporary art music?

MS:In order for music to be a socially relevant art form, we need to continuously create new music that is a reflection of and commentary on our modern world. “Classical music” is a wonderful and powerful art form. The music of Bach, Beethoven, Malher, etc. will always illicit deep and real emotional and intellectual responses. However, we must remember that all of these composers were once “contemporary” and “avant-garde.” Music can express that which words and images never can, and we cannot become complacent and stagnant.

Enter the 2013 Call for Scores!

patrickgreenemusic — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 20:01:07 +0000

See details below. If you’ve got any questions, please shoot us an email: fifthfloorcollective@gmail.com.

Good luck!

Check out the awesome poster for our next concert!

patrickgreenemusic — Thu, 14 Feb 2013 20:45:11 +0000

The Collective is very fortunate that Kyle Thomas Hemingway is a) one of our dearest friends and b) one of our closest collaborators. His remarkable eye for form and color has really helped evolve our visual identity over the past couple of years, and his latest poster designs for our third season are no exception. Check out the poster for Season 3, Concert 2 below.

More on this concert will be coming over the next few weeks, so stay tuned! It’s going to be a great one.

Interview with Ben Runyan, Season 3 Featured Composer

patrickgreenemusic — Fri, 14 Dec 2012 16:54:36 +0000

FFC: How did you get started in electronic music?

BR: I first got started listening to artists like Matthew Dear, Cepia, Kiln, Outputmessage from this label out of Ann Arbor, MI called “Ghostly International”. I’m not sure who showed me the music but I remember listening to their podcasts and being blown away by this sound. It was sound I had always heard in my head… But people were actually making this music!

Here is a great example: Outputmessage – Sommeil | http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=veIMDC4yddg

This is an artist I ultimately had the pleasure of collaborating with!!

I first bought “FL Studio” aka Fruity Loops and began playing around with loops and writing little ditties here and there. Nothing super serious. This was in 2005-2006. I wasn’t classically trained in any way and this made the experimentation process very long, but worthwhile. It wasn’t until I got to Temple University for my sophomore year of college that I began to really excel. I took a music technology course studying under a gentlemen named Paul Geissenger, aka DJ Starkey. He now does dubstep/drum and bass/electronica stuff for another influential label “Ninja Tune”. He was very inspiring and helpful in showing me a new piece of software that kicked off the creative process for me. Then: Ableton Live. This has become the centerpiece of my creativity and how I channel what I hear in my head, to what comes out of the speakers. I wrote my first two records between 2007-2009 and these were highly experimental. “Light Turned On” and “This I Will Remember” were experimental electronic records that used found sounds and bleeps and bloops to talk about love, monotony and the hum drum of my life at Temple University. They were exciting for me to create as I began to feel like I was coming into my own as an artist. I think this was the first time I actually considered myself a “musician”.

FFC: Who were your first influences?

BR: Like I mentioned above, the Ghostly roster was a huge influence. Also artists like Apparat, Trentemoller, BT, Talking Heads, Joy Division, Depeche Mode, Alphaville, Gary Numan, Aphex Twin, Above and Beyond, Armin Van Buueren. The genres of the artists of which I was influenced ran the gammit but one thing tied them together. Their experimentation with electronic music. There was something about the sound of a synth that really spoke to me.

FFC: Tell us a little about City Rain.

BR: The concept and idea of City Rain has really really evolved. What started out as PURELY experimental electronica has morphed into full on electronic pop. The background and soul of the music is still very experimental, but I must admit the early experimentation had a great deal to do with my lack of understanding of songwriting. As I became better at this, so did too my tendency for the dramatic. City Rain has become a truly autobiographical and cathartic force in my life. It is my calling card, my soul, my everything. It, at my best, is what I have to offer this world and something I am immensely proud of. The greatest thing about it is that it was something I discovered only after my teens. Something that has been sitting inside of me waiting to come out. It has given me an immense sense of pride and belonging and I am excited to see where it could take me.

FFC: What’s the impetus for your piece?

BR: As with any piece I write, this one is aimed that explaining the human condition. No more, no less. It is instrumental, much like my early work and It has movements instead of sections. Very excited to share this!

FFC: Where do you think electronic music is headed?

BR: Not being a big fan of dubstep as it is now, I hope it isn’t headed to far in that direction, and I don’t think it is. For everything I dislike about it, I appreciate the experimentation it has influenced with the usage of synthesizers. I think with any genre or fad, electronic will always be at its best in the underground. In the warehouses, in the art galleries, in the sweaty clubs in Bushwick, in Ann Arbor, in the desert in Burning Man. I welcome its movement into the mainstream, but the influence will always come from those who where there, there to see the rise. I feel lucky in this truly hipster statement to say: I was there.

Third Season Announcement!

patrickgreenemusic — Mon, 08 Oct 2012 11:14:12 +0000

The Fifth Floor Collective is proud to announce our third concert season!

Plugged In – January 11th at 7pm at The Lily Pad | A concert of electronic works by FFC members Greene and Jackson, as well as special guest composer/collaborator Ben Runyan and more.

Transient Canvas – March 15th at 8pm at The Lily Pad | FFC is happy to host artists-in-residence, Transient Canvas in a concert of works by Barish, Greene, Murphree, Jackson, and Ziporyn

Mitosis – June 4th at 7pm at The Davis Square Theater | The final concert of the season brings Transient Canvas together with The Balletik Duo for an evening of new music by Greene, Jackson, a selection from our annual call for scores, and more.

Season 2 Wrap-up

patrickgreenemusic — Thu, 24 May 2012 17:27:18 +0000

On behalf of everyone in The Fifth Floor Collective, I would like to thank everyone who was involved in our second season! It was a pleasure to host so many composers from outside our membership: John Aylward, Marcos Balter, Matthew Barnson, Dominick DiOrio, Arturo Fernandez, and Steven Snethkamp. Sincerest gratitude to all of the players that brought such artistry to the execution of each piece we featured. Special thanks especially to Matt Sharrock, who was unbelievably integral to the rehearsal and presentation of this season. And thanks to any and everyone who took the time to attend our concerts. It truly was a phenomenal season and we will see you all in the Fall.

Yours from the Fifth Floor,

Andrew Paul Jackson

Artistic Director, The Fifth Floor Collective