Communing with the Elders: Kismet, Curation, and Our 20th Concert
From time to time, people ask me how I find the pieces we perform at Extradition. I usually tell them our programming is the result of an ongoing research process, following threads to find contemporary and 20th-century composers of interest, reading up on their work, contacting them (where possible) to establish a dialogue, and then acquiring scores that seem most likely to fit with Extradition’s aesthetic and values.
Sometimes that process includes elements of kismet. For instance, the pieces we’re presenting at two events this coming January: a special “Extradition @ Outset” performance, bringing together two programming arms of the CMG universe, and our 2020 Winter Concert, which has the distinction of being the 20th concert Extradition has staged.
Two summers ago, I took a vacation with my family, renting a cabin at a resort near Sisters, Oregon. I brought along with me a new book I was very excited to read: Brian Olewnick’s Keith Rowe: The Room Extended, a biography of the AMM guitarist who’s influenced several generations of experimental musicians. Reading the book poolside while my children splashed, I learned that in the 1980s Rowe created a graphic score called Pollock #82, using intensively magnified drip and splatter patterns from Jackson Pollock paintings, rendered in B&W and arrayed across nine thin bands on a single large page.
It sounded right up our alley. Through a mutual acquaintance, I was able to get in touch with Rowe, who was kind enough to offer to send me a copy. A few weeks later, a large package arrived in the mail, containing not one score but ten, all for solo players, each dedicated to one of Rowe’s closest collaborators and contemporaries across the first thirty years of his career.
When an eminence grise like Keith Rowe sends you such a gift, you do something with it, and in January we’ll be doing two somethings:
On Wednesday, January 15, a special Extradition @ Outset show will present four different duo realizations of Pollock #82, performed by Matt Carlson & Jonathan Sielaff (electronics + bass clarinet), Juniana Lanning & Matt Hannafin (electronics + percussion), Reed Wallsmith & Caspar Sonnet (alto sax + dobro), and another duo to be announced. While the musicians are interpreting Rowe’s score, visual artists will be interpreting the musicians’ output, creating new works in the moment to bring the thing full-circle: Pollock paintings > Rowe score > musical actualization > new paintings.
Three days later, on Saturday, January 18, those paintings (drawings, etc.) will be displayed at Leaven Community during our Extradition Winter Concert, whose centerpiece will be a large ensemble realization of Pollock #82 performed by Matt Carlson (piano), Loren Chasse (percussion etc), Lee Elderton (clarinet), Matt Hannafin (percussion), Branic Howard (electronics, objects), Catherine Lee (oboe), Collin Oldham (cello), Caspar Sonnet (dobro), and Doug Theriault (guitar/electronics). Our arrangement will create time windows within which each player may perform, keeping the density to a maximum of three performers at most times – an echo of the three-piece format that’s constituted AMM for most of its long existence. A trio of oboe, clarinet, and cello, however, will have free agency: able to enter and exit (together) whenever they choose, weaving in their classical timbre as an echo of Rowe’s use of recorded music in his monumental 2016 solo recording The Room Extended.
The Winter Concert will have three additional works, two of which also came to us via kismet.
In mid-2019, I was trying to track down a decades-old gamelan score by the legendary Fluxus composer Philip Corner. I wrote to his publisher, and when they couldn’t identify the piece (among the dozens Corner has written for gamelan), they forwarded my question to the composer in the small Italian village where he’s lived since the early ‘90s. Now 86 years old, Corner got back to me that same day, identified the piece immediately, and even photocopied his own notated copy of the score for me. We got to chatting over the next couple days, with me describing what Extradition does. At the end he gifted me with a score he’d recently finished, Small Pieces of a Fluxus Reality (2018), essentially challenging us to do something with its extremely abstract content and structure. And when an 86-year-old double-OG of experimental music issues a challenge like that, you just accept. So, on January 18, Loren Chasse (percussion etc), Lee Elderton (reeds), Annie Gilbert (trombone), Matt Hannafin (percussion), Maxx Katz (flute), and Caspar Sonnet (pump organ) will have a go at it.
Some extreme kismet was also responsible for the third of four pieces we’re doing on January 18, Walter De Maria’s Cricket Music (1964). Known principally as a visual artist, De Maria (1935–2013) produced a relatively small body of work that nevertheless established him as one of the greatest artists of his generation. For myself, one of the greatest aesthetic experiences of my life (so far) was a 2008 visit to his Lightning Field, a one-mile by one-kilometer site work located in the remote high desert of New Mexico. Before he created this and other minimalist works, though, De Maria had a different life, hanging around with La Monte Young and drumming with a band called The Primatives, who went on to become the Velvet Underground. Around this time, De Maria made two recordings of minimalist music: Cricket Music (1964) and Ocean Music (1968), both setting his drum patterns against the sounds in the title.
On December 30, 2019, I was drifting to sleep around 1am when I sprung awake and thought, I should check if there are any new Walter De Maria books on Amazon. I did, and found one called Sculpture, Music, and Walter De Maria’s Large Rod Series. They had one copy in stock. I ordered it, it arrived three days later, and when I cracked the binding it opened to page 24, which contained a transcribed score of Cricket Music.
Clearly a sign.
The piece has two components. A drum kit part begins with a two-minute snare roll, then goes into a 6/8 pattern that shifts subtly over the course of seventeen minutes, then in the final three minutes gets more and more sparse, fading one element of the kit at a time. Under this drum pattern, from the 12-minute mark to the end, is a recording of crickets and (near the end) a prop plane flying overhead.
Very minimal, as you’d expect from De Maria. Also pretty hard-hitting, as you’d also expect from De Maria. We’re doing it – or, more specifically, drummer John Niekrasz is doing it. It’s a rarity. It’s high art. It’s very Extradition.
The fourth piece on our January 18 program – Annea Lockwood’s Jitterbug (2007) – has no kismet story behind it, just me getting an email from genius trumpeter Nate Wooley talking about a new work the 80-year-old Lockwood had written for him. Inspired, I spent the rest of the afternoon researching her scores, picking out several that seemed apropos, and ordering them from her publisher.
Among those was Jitterbug, a piece for two or three players, a mixer, and six channels of pre-recorded audio. Per the composer’s description, “The musicians are interpreting photographs of rocks taken for this project by Gwen Deely, as graphic scores; these are intricate in their patterns and color shifts and I found them in a creek bed, up in the Montana Rockies. A pre-recorded surround-sound score draws on insect sounds: aquatic insects which I recorded in the small lakes and backwaters of the Flathead Valley, Montana; and others generously made available to me by Lang Elliott, of the NatureSound Studio. A curious aspect of the underwater recordings, was that these strong sound signals were being created by beetles and other microscopic insects which were always invisible to me, although the water was clear and often shallow. Deep tones from bowed gongs and a piano infiltrate this insect world, providing a strong contrast [played by William Winant, Gustavo Aguilar and Joseph Kubera]. Jitterbug was commissioned by the Merce Cunningham Dance Company in 2006 for the dance eyeSpace.”
For Extradition, the performers will be Sage Elaine Fisher (harp, voice, etc) and Collin Oldham (cello), with audio mix by Branic Howard and Tim Westcott.
Make time for these performances: They’ll be special. I say that about every concert, but that’s because it’s true. Extradition only happens six or seven times a year, but for some of us it’s a constant commitment: researching and selecting compositions, dialoguing with the composers, matching performers to the pieces, workshopping them, and arriving at approaches that fulfill the promise of both the compositions and the series. It doesn’t make us rich, but it’s massively rewarding.
— Matt Hannafin, Extradition Curator & Director